6. Stultsian: clothes made by high-class London tailors Stultz, Binnie & Son of 10 Clifford Street. Stultz clothes were the height of upper-class fashion during the Regency (1811–20), but were less fashionable by the time Braddon was writing.
7. the unities of time and space: conventions of drama as set down by ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) in the Poetics. The unity of time is that all the events in a play should occur within a short time frame (i.e., that the plot’s time span should be a matter of hours, not years). The unity of place decrees that all action should take place within a single location. The unity of action decrees that all action should directly further the development and resolution of the work’s central theme.
8. Aristotle’s ethics: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (c. 350 B.C.).
9. “Zaire, vous pleurez!”: “Zaire, you cry!” is a line from Voltaire’s tragedy Zaire (1732).
10. “Qu’il mourut!”: literally, “that he died!” from the classical tragedy Horace (1639), by French playwright Pierre Corneille (1606–84): “Que vouliez-vous qu’il fît contre trois—Qu’il mourût?”
11. blue fire: a blue light used on stage to produce weird effects. It was often used in sensational melodramas.
12. Corneille: Pierre Corneille (1606–84), French playwright, known as the father of French comedy and tragedy.
CHAPTER THE LAST. FAREWELL TO ENGLAND
1. Jack-in-the-green: this folk figure dates back to Pagan times. In a fertility ritual, performed on May Day, Jack-in-the-Green, a man dressed in a frame of greenery, was led in procession around the village. This ritual was revived in Victorian times as part of May Day celebrations.
2. George Barnwell: The London Merchant, or The History of George Barnwell is a morality play by George Lillo (1693–1739), first performed in 1731. It tells of a young apprentice’s downfall as a result of his love for a beautiful, but wicked, courtesan, who incites him to kill his rich uncle for his money. It is based on a sixteenth-century ballad that begins:
All youths of fair England
That dwell both far and near,
Regard my story that I tell,
And to my song give ear.
A London lad I was,
A merchant’s prentice bound;
My name is George Barnwell, that did spend
My master many pound.
Take heed of harlots then,
And their enticing trains,
For by that means I have been brought
To hang alive in chains.
The ballad goes on to tell how Barnwell carried out the murder:
Sudden with a wood,
He struck his uncle down,
And beat his brains out of his head;
So sore he crack’d his crown.
The seizing fourscore pound,
To London straight he hied,
And unto Sarah Millwood all
The cruel fact descried.
The ballad ends with Barnwell and Millwood being hanged for murder. Braddon was part of a theater company that performed a play entitled George Barnwell at Brighton Theatre Royal in February 1858. The author is not known. (For details, see Carnell, p. 332.)
3. parliamentary train: one of the trains that, by Act of Parliament, the railway companies had to provide for the benefit of third-class passengers, who traveled for a reduced fare.
4. declensions … ablative: terms used in the teaching of Latin grammar.
5. dropsical: suffering from edema, or dropsy, an accumulation of fluid within body tissues or serous cavities that causes excessive swelling.
6. East India Company: A shameless exercise in commercial imperialism, the British East India Company was set up by Royal Charter in 1600 to ensure a British trading monopoly in Asia and the Pacific. Despite competition from the French and Dutch, it traded successfully for over two hundred years, providing Britain with a range of goods such as pepper and other spices, silk, cotton, indigo, and sugar. Its monopoly was broken in 1813, and its powers handed over to the British Crown in 1858 following the First Indian War of Independence (the “Indian Mutiny”). It ceased to exist as a legal entity in 1873.
7. Sikh campaign: The first Anglo-Sikh War, 1845–46, ended with the Treaty of Lahore, under which the Sikhs ceded large amounts of territory to Britain. When the Sikh Wars broke out again, in 1848–49, the Sikh forces were defeated and Britain took over the Punjab. The Sikhs’ child ruler, eleven-year-old Maharajah Duleep Singh, was forced to surrender his kingdom, his sovereignty, and the Koh-I-Noor diamond to the British in return for a pension.
8. soi-disant: self-styled.
9. Madame du Barry: Jeanne Bécu, comtesse du Barry (1743–93), mistress of King Louis XV of France. She left the court in 1774, when Louis XV died. In 1793, she was arrested for treason and guillotined during the “Reign of Terror.”
10. Choiseul: Étienne-François, duc de Choiseul (1719–85), French statesman and diplomat who negotiated the marriage of Austrian noblewoman Marie Antoinette with the future Louis XVI. Madame du Barry’s influence led to his exile from court in 1770.
11. D’Aiguillon: Emmanuel-Armand de Wignerod du Plessis de Richelieu, Duc d’Aiguillon (1720–82), French statesman heavily involved in court intrigues.
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