The Blithedale Romance
Page 28
65 (p. 118) The Puritan minister John Eliot (1604-90) came to Massachusetts in 1631, assumed a pastorate at Roxbury, and began to propagate the gospel among Indians and slaves. He translated the Bible and a catechism into the Indian tongue and, by 1651, founded the first community of Praying Indians. He came to be known as John the Evangelist, Apostle to the Indians.
66 (p. 132) In the nineteenth century, the banking and financial center of Boston.
67 (p. 136) In Greek mythology, the Titans were giant deities, sons and daughters of Uranus and Gaea; they were deposed by the Olympian gods led by Zeus.
68 (p. 136) See Judges 16:1-3, in which the Philistines seek to entrap Samson in the city of Gaza by locking the gates; but Samson simply lifts the gates and carries them off.
69 (p. 137) The sultriest part of the summer, supposed to coincide with the heliacal rising of one of the Dog Stars, generally in July and August.
70 (p. 138) Newport, Rhode Island, and Saratoga, New York, were (and are) popular summer resorts for the wealthy.
71 (p. 138) The custom of Fast Day goes back to seventeenth-century Puritan New England, when one day was annually set aside for fasting, prayer, and repentance; after the Revolutionary War, many New England states retained the custom as a legal holiday.
72 (p. 139) The Trojan princess gifted by Apollo with prophecy but cursed never to be believed.
73 (p. 139) Disturbed.
74 (p. 140) Archaic plural for “shoes.”
75 (p. 140) A common expression for “madhouse,” derived from St. Mary of Bethlehem, a hospital for the insane in London.
76 (p. 141) A quarterly of literature and social commentary, largely reflecting the views of conservative New England intellectuals
77 (p. 141) The intellectual circles associated with Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
78 (p. 141) Fashionable resorts.
79 (p. 142) In Greek mythology, the dark, shapeless mass that existed before the creation of the Universe.
80 (p. 143) Oracular, after Orpheus, the celebrated Thracian poet and musician of Greek mythology who founded a mystery religion.
81 (p. 146) Originally a mixture of wine and cream, but here meaning a sweet dessert.
82 (p. 147) A three-dimensional miniature scene.
83 (p. 147) Bookseller.
84 (p. 148) In the nineteenth century, Malta, an island in the Mediterranean, and Madeira, a group of islands off Africa, were known for their production of wine.
85 (p. 150) A drink made with sherry, lemon juice, sugar, and cracked ice.
86 (p. 158) Cowardice.
87 (p. 161) An oil lamp designed to avoid the shadow cast upon the table by an ordinary lamp.
88 (p. 171) A firm hold.
89 (p. 174) Smoking of pipes and cigars.
90 (p. 175) This sentence, through the end of the paragraph, was crossed out in the manuscript and did not appear in earlier editions of the novel. Attributing the cut to Sophia Hawthorne’s disapproval of alcohol, the editors of the Centenary Edition restored the passage in full.
91 (p. 175) A toper is a hard or chronic drinker.
92 (p. 176) The first photographic process was named after its inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1789-1851). The daguerreotype, or final print, resulted from exposing a plate brushed with silver, nitric acid, and iodine to the sunlight for several minutes and then developing and fixing the resultant image on the plate.
93 (p. 176) Brief loss of consciousness.
94 (p. 179) On p. 82, Coverdale had described Moodie wearing “the patch on his left eye.”
95 (p. 181) Gutter rat, derived from “canel,” an archaic term for channel or drainage gutter.
96 (p. 182) The name may have been suggested by the historical Henry Fauntleroy (1785-1824), a wealthy London banker prosecuted and hanged for forgery. The case was widely reported in both England and the United States; several stories appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine, to which Hawthorne subscribed.
97 (p. 184) A formal reception of visitors held on rising from bed, usually conducted by royal or other powerful personages.
98 (p. 188) That is, from Tartarus, the sunless abyss below Hades (the Greek underworld), to the sphere of Venus in the Ptolemaic cosmos.
99 (p. 196) Magician.
100 (p. 196) Joseph Smith (1805-44), who founded the first Mormon church in 1830.
101 (p. 205) Paul Dudley (1675-1751), a judge and legislator in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for almost fifty years and a considerable landholder in Norfolk County, Massachusetts. New England farms were traditionally “fenced” by low walls of tightly fitted stones.
102 (p. 209) The enchanter and his bewitched followers (humans with the heads of beasts) in John Milton’s Comus: A Masque (1634).
103 (p. 209) A popular figure in nineteenth-century minstrel shows, “Jim Crow” was a stereotyped dancing black man portrayed by whites in blackface.
104 (p. 209) The Shakers were an American communitarian religious sect, so named from the body movements that formed part of their ceremony.
105 (p. 209) Refers to Edmund Spenser’s allegorical epic poem, The Faerie Queene (1590).
106 (p. 209) Supporters of Charles I of England against a Parliament controlled by the Puritans (1642-49). In comparison to the sober Puritans from the middle classes, the Cavaliers affected the habits of the landed and titled gentry.
107 (p. 210) Not to be confused with the Revolutionary War heroine Molly Pitcher, this is a famous fortune-teller and clairvoyant of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; she lived at High Rock in Lynn, Massachusetts, and until her death in 1813, she practiced her arts throughout the state.
108 (p. 210) Both terms mean servers of drinks.
109 (p. 210) In Robert Burns’s poem “Tam O’Shanter” (1791), the drunken Tam encounters the Devil in the shape of a shaggy dog playing the bagpipes.
110 (p. 211) The hunter who angered the virgin goddess Artemis (or Diana) when he watched her bathe; in revenge, she changed him into a stag, whereupon he was devoured by his own hounds.
111 (p. 211) Unreal creatures of the imagination.
112 (p. 213) A kind of sunbonnet that folds back.
113 (p. 226) The folklore name for Chevalier Raoul, whose seventh wife found the murdered bodies of the other six in a forbidden room.
114 (p. 232) Catfish.
115 (p. 237) That is, attiring women, those who dress the body for burial.
116 (p. 243) John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) was a popular allegory of the soul’s progress toward salvation.
117 (p. 246) The influential literary critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1815-57) compiled The Poets and Poetry of America in 1842.
118 (p. 246) Lajos Kossuth (1802-94) was a leader in the 1848 Hungarian revolution against Austrian rule and, in 1849, he served briefly as president of the newly proclaimed Hungarian republic. In 1851, as Hawthorne was just beginning The Blithedale Romance, Kossuth visited Boston, where the entire Hawthorne family heard him speak.
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