The Man Who Was Thursday (Penguin ed)

by G. K. Chesterton

  7. the Underground Railway: the Metropolitan Railway, which inaugurated the London Underground, opened in 1863. Turnham Green station, on the line from Richmond to the City, was built by the London and South Western Railway Company in 1869. The Metropolitan District Railway, known as the District, which ran its trains on this line from 1877, constructed an additional line from Turnham Green to Ealing in 1879.

  8. Bradshaw: the compendious train timetable published by the printer George Bradshaw (1801–53). It has served as an important plot device in English detective and adventure fiction. In The Riddle of the Sands (1903), by Erskine Childers (1870–1922), the narrator provides this parenthetical description: ‘an extraordinary book, Bradshaw, turned to from habit, even when least wanted, as men fondle guns and rods in the close season.’

  9. no man born of woman: see the Second Apparition’s speech in Macbeth 4.1: ‘Be bloody, bold, and resolute: laugh to scorn / The power of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth.’ (It transpires of course that Macduff, who finally kills Macbeth, ‘was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d.’)

  10. flâneur: from the French verb flâner, meaning to stroll, this refers to someone who transforms strolling in the metropolis into an almost full-time occupation. Although the flâneur was a fairly common Parisian archetype in the first half of the nineteenth century, his most celebrated appearance is probably in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), by Charles Baudelaire (1821–67): ‘For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.’

  11. Colney Hatch: the Colney Hatch Pauper Lunatic Asylum, close to London, which opened in 1851.

  2

  The Secret of Gabriel Syme

  1. crême de menthe: a syrupy mint liqueur, either green or colourless.

  2. a kind of screw: if in the previous sentence Gregory had used this term in the ordinary sense of a cylindrical mechanical appliance, Syme sardonically repeats it in order to signify a means of coercion (‘the screws’ or ‘the screw’, derived from ‘thumbscrew’, indicated an instrument of torture).

  3. Mr Joseph Chamberlain: Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) was the Liberal MP who led the Unionists in the later 1880s and so played a decisive part in opposing Home Rule. As Secretary for the Colonies under the Conservatives between 1895 and 1903, he was largely responsible for prosecuting the Boer War. He resigned from this government in order to campaign for tariff reform, an issue that split the Conservatives and led, in 1906, to a Liberal landslide.

  4. New Anarchists: the late nineteenth century, when this novel is set, is the period in which the anarchist movement was most dramatically defined by ‘propaganda of the deed’, a form of direct action that, in spite of the impression created in the popular press, did not necessarily entail individual acts of violence. In ‘The Spirit of Revolt’ (1880), for example, the celebrated Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), who was to spend much of his exile in England, argued as follows: ‘When a revolutionary situation arises in a country, before the spirit of revolt is sufficiently awakened in the masses to express itself in violent demonstrations in the streets, or by rebellions and uprisings, it is through actions that minorities succeed in awakening that feeling of independence and that spirit of audacity without which no revolution can come to a head.’ Kropotkin’s opposition to spectacular acts of violence did not however prevent others from using his insistence that ‘one such act may, in a few days, make more propaganda than thousands of pamphlets’ to justify terroristic attacks. For anarchists performed a number of such acts of violence in the 1890s and 1900s: in 1893, the Chamber of Deputies in Paris was bombed; in 1894, there was an unsuccessful bomb attack on the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in London, an episode that famously formed the basis for The Secret Agent (1907) by Joseph Conrad (1857–1924); also in 1894, the French president was assassinated; in 1897, the Spanish prime minister was assassinated; in 1900, the King of Italy was assassinated; in 1906, there was a failed attempt to bomb the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII (in ‘The Folly of Anarchists’, printed in the Illustrated London News, Chesterton opined that ‘the attempt at Madrid is too atrocious to be taken seriously’); and, finally, in February 1908, the month in which The Man Who Was Thursday was published, the King of Portugal and his son were assassinated.

  5. Nietzsche: in an attack on so-called ‘levellers’ in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) argued: ‘We believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter’s art and devilry of every kind – that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite.’

  6. the Central Anarchist Council: the acronym CAC irresistibly evokes the Greek word kakos, meaning ‘bad’ or ‘evil’. The word ‘cacotopia’, originally coined in 1818 by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), had been used in 1868 by John Stuart Mill (1806–73) during a parliamentary debate about Ireland: the Conservatives, he insisted, were not ‘Utopians’ in their policy-making, but ‘dystopians, or cacotopians’.

  7. Bloody Sunday: this alludes to a demonstration in Trafalgar Square on Sunday 13 November 1887, organised by anarchists, radicals, socialists and Irish nationalists in response to a ban against open-air meetings there. The demonstration, consisting of about ten thousand people, was brutally suppressed by policemen and soldiers, who severely injured several hundred working-class demonstrators. In consequence, this event played an important part in the mythology of class conflict in late nineteenth-century England. William Morris (1834–96), who attended the demonstration, used the events of Bloody Sunday as the basis for his portrait of socialist revolution in News from Nowhere (1891).

  3

  The Man Who Was Thursday

  1. Mr Tim Healy: Tim Healy (1855–1931), the Irish barrister and anti-Parnellite politician, a small, bespectacled, bearded man with a reputation for scurrilous debate, was MP for North Louth from 1892 to 1910. In Heretics (1905), Chesterton describes him as ‘the most serious intellect in the present House of Commons’.

  2. Sabbatarian: either, generally, a Christian ‘whose opinion and practice with regard to Sunday observance are unusually strict’; or, specifically, ‘a member of a Christian sect founded towards the close of the sixteenth century, the members of which maintained that the Sabbath should be observed on the seventh and not on the first day of the week’ (OED).

  3. Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday and the Sporting Times: Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday, a weekly comic paper, priced at a penny and published from 1884 to 1923, was popular both among the working classes and some bohemian sections of the middle classes (William Morris was, for example, a keen reader); the Sporting Times, published weekly between 1865 and 1932, purveyed social gossip as well as news about horse racing.

  4. Catacombs: in Chesterton’s short story ‘The Nightmare’, probably written in 1907, though published posthumously in The Coloured Lands (1938), the narrator wakes up to discover that London is ruled by Nietzschean pessimists and that, in consequence, Christians have secreted themselves in the Underground, like those who sought refuge from the persecution of the Romans in the catacombs.

  5. the shopwalker: either someone who supervises customers in a particular department of a shop; or ‘an attendant who directs customers to that part of the premises where the goods they wish to inspect or purchase are to be found’ (OED).

  4

  The Tale of a Detective

  1. a Chinese Invasion: this recalls anxieties in Europe at the time of the so-called Boxer Rebellion, an anti-imperialist struggle that took place in China from 1898 to 1901. The Yellow Danger (1898), by M. P. Shiel (1865–1947), a fantastical novel depicting Chinese domination of the globe, was especially popular in England during the uprising.

  2. a stream of literal fire: compare the �
�boiling red water’ of the rivers in the seventh circle of Hell in Canto XIV of Dante’s Inferno.

  3. Bulwer Lytton: Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer Lytton (1803–73), one of the most prolific and popular novelists of the nineteenth century, was the author of Night and Morning (1841) and Zanoni (1842), among many other more or less sensational fictions.

  4. the Board Schools: these secular elementary schools, controlled by local elected boards, were instituted in areas of ‘educational destitution’ in England and Wales as a result of the Education Act of 1870.

  5. Harrow: founded in 1572, Harrow is a public school (that is, an independent, fee-paying school) located at the north-west edge of London.

  6. pot-houses: taverns or public houses, in which ale was served in pots.

  7. triolet: from the French meaning ‘little three’, this refers to a verse form consisting of eight lines and two rhymes, in which the first line is repeated as the fourth and seventh, and the second as the eighth line. In the late nineteenth century it was associated with Austin Dobson (1840–1921), W. E. Henley (1849–1903) and Robert Bridges (1844–1930) in particular.

  8. that disastrous twilight which Milton spoke of as shed by the sun in eclipse: see John Milton (1608–74), Paradise Lost Book I, lines 594-9: ‘… as when the sun new risen / Looks through the horizontal misty air / Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon / In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds / On half the nations, and with fear of change / Perplexes monarchs.’ In the early 1890s, Chesterton was a leading member of a school debating society, the Junior Debating Club (‘JDC’), and published a discussion of Paradise Lost in its undated magazine, The Debater: ‘Milton’s intellect could get as high as the Devil’s, but no higher’, was his judgement.

  9. stirrup-cup: ‘a cup of wine or other drink handed to a man when already on horseback setting out for a journey; a parting glass’ (OED).

  10. some Egyptian Palace: in 1878, the ancient Egyptian obelisk popularly called Cleopatra’s Needle, which had been transplanted from Alexandria, was erected on the Victoria Embankment beside the Thames.

  5

  The Feast of Fear

  1. Leicester Square: More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885), by Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife Fanny van de Grift Stevenson (1840–1914), begins with an encounter ‘on the broad northern pavement of Leicester Square’. In ‘Zero’s Tale of the Explosive Bomb’, a chapter in the same volume, the arch-anarchist villain Zero describes one of his diabolical attempts to cause destruction in London: ‘Our objective was the effigy of Shakespeare in Leicester Square: a spot, I think, admirably chosen; not only for the sake of the dramatist, still very foolishly claimed as a glory by the English race, in spite of his disgusting political opinions; but from the fact that the seats in the immediate neighbourhood are often thronged by children, errand-boys, unfortunate young ladies of the poorer class and infirm old men – all classes making a direct appeal to public pity, and therefore suitable with our designs.’

  2. the Alhambra: a theatre and music-hall with a number of Moorish architectural features first built in 1854 on the east side of Leicester Square. The decadent poet Arthur Symons (1865–1945) had celebrated its charms in ‘At the Alhambra: Impressions and Sensations’ (1896).

  3. the mask of Memnon in the British Museum: this probably refers to the colossal bust of Rameses II, the remaining fragment of a vast granite sculpture built in about 1250 BCE, which was excavated from the mortuary temple of Rameses at Thebes by Giovanni Belzoni (1778–1824) in 1816. This monumental head, which had arrived in London in 1818, was bought by the British Museum in 1821, when it came to be called the ‘Younger Memnon’. The prospect of its imminent appearance is thought to have inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) to compose ‘Ozymandias’ (1818).

  4. diablerie: ‘business belonging to or connected with the devil, or in which the devil is employed or has a hand; dealings with the devil; sorcery or conjuring in which the devil is supposed to assist; wild recklessness, devilry’ (OED). In his Autobiography, Chesterton described the decadent culture of the fin de siècle as ‘that world of diabolism’. Note incidentally that he regarded the ‘grotesque’ as a significant aesthetic and even ‘philosophical’ category; so in Robert Browning (1903), for instance, he argues positively that ‘to present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself’.

  5. cicerone: ‘a guide who shows and explains the antiquities or curiosities of a place to strangers’ (OED). Cicero was Dante’s guide in Inferno.

  6. the darker poems of Byron and Poe: see, for example, ‘Lara’ (1814) by George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824): ‘’Twas midnight – all was slumber; the lone light / Dimm’d in the lamp, as loth to break the night’; and ‘The Raven’ (1845) by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49): ‘And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming / And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadows on the floor; / And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor / Shall be lifted – nevermore!’

  6

  The Exposure

  1. the super-man: in George Bernard Shaw (1909), Chesterton complained that Nietzsche had ‘succeeded in putting into [Shaw’s] head a new superstition, which bids fair to be the chief superstition of the dark ages which are possibly in front of us – I mean the superstition of what is called the Superman’.

  2. Strasbourg pie: Strasbourg or Strasburg pie is a pâté made with fatty goose livers. In Vanity Fair (1848), by W. M. Thackeray (1811–63), for example, it is reported that, as a young man in the diplomatic service at Pumpernickel, Pitt Crawley used to bring home ‘dispatches, consisting of Strasburg pie, to the Foreign Minister of the day’.

  3. ‘Païens ont tort et Chrétiens ont droit’: literally, ‘the Pagans are wrong and the Christians are right’ (it should read: ‘Paien unt tort e Chestïens unt dreit’). In Chesterton’s introduction to a translation of ‘The Song of Roland’ by Charles Scott Moncrieff (1889–1930), published in 1919, he asserts that ‘the value of the tale was that it hinted that there is a heart in history, even remote history’. This essay concludes: ‘The poem ends, as it were, with a vision and vista of wars against the barbarians; and the vision is true. For that war is never ended, which defends the sanity of the world against all the stark anarchies and rending negations which rage against it for ever. That war is never finished in this world; and the grass has hardly grown on the graves of our own friends who fell in it.’

  7

  The Unaccountable Conduct of Professor De Worms

  1. de trop: too much, superfluous.

  2. Timbuctoo: the name of an ancient city on the edge of the Sahara in West Africa which, since the mid-nineteenth century, has been proverbial for an almost unimaginably distant place.

  3. splash-board: ‘a board fixed over or beside a wheel to intercept splashings’ (OED). Here it refers to the open platform at the back of the bus.

  4. the great orb and the cross: these symbols ornament the top of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. They are of considerable symbolic importance to The Ball and the Cross, first published in serial form from 1905 to 1906, though it remained uncompleted until it appeared in book form in 1910. In his Autobiography, Chesterton summarized it as a novel ‘about two men perpetually prevented by the police from fighting a duel about the collision of blasphemy and worship’. In its opening scene, Professor Lucifer and the monk called Michael hurtle past the dome of St Paul’s in the former’s ‘flying ship’: ‘A plain of sad-coloured cloud lay along the level of the top of the Cathedral dome, so that the ball and the cross looked like a buoy riding on a leaden sea.’ ‘What could possibly express your philosophy and my philosophy better than the shape of that cross and the shape of this ball?’ Lucifer goes on to ask; ‘This globe is reasonable; that cross is unreasonable. It is a four-legged animal, with one leg longer than the others. The globe is inevitable. The cross is
arbitrary. Above all the globe is at unity with itself; the cross is primarily and above all things at enmity with itself.’ Compare too ‘The Nightmare’ (see Chapter 3, note 4), in which the narrator, rushing up from the safety of the Underground, finds himself standing before St Paul’s Cathedral, which is ‘like the lost temple of some empty planet’.

  8

  The Professor Explains

  1. If heaven were his throne and the earth his footstool: see Isaiah 66: 1: ‘Thus saith the Lord, the heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? And where is the place of my rest?’; and Acts 7: 49: ‘Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest?’

  2. Tower of Babel: in Genesis 11: 1-9, the people of the earth, who are ‘of one language, and of one speech’, build a tower ‘whose top may reach unto heaven’, though they do so in the name of humanity rather than God. On seeing the tower, God announces that, as a result, ‘nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do’, and he therefore ‘confound[s] their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech’, and scatters them abroad: ‘Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.’