3 (p. 296). I cannot touch pitch and not be defiled: Ecclesiasticus 13:1.
CHAPTER 28
1 (p. 301). hedged by so strong a divinity… no more than peep at what it would: cf. Hamlet IV, v, 123–4:
There’s such divinity doth hedge a king
That treason can but peep to what it would.
2 (p. 302). Sir Raffle Buffle: there is a tradition that this character is based on Trollope’s erstwhile Civil Service chief, William Leader Maberly. In An Autobiograpy, Trollope was anxious to dispel it, but certain similarities in the behaviour of the two characters keep the identification alive (see, for instance, R. H. Super in The Chronicler of Barsetshire, p. 161). The assumption that Sir Raffle Buffle is Maberly must be squared with a very thinly veiled reference to Maberly in propria persona on page 394 (see Chapter 36, note 4).
3 (p. 304). Lord Eldon: John Scott, 1st Earl of Eldon (1751–1838) and Lord Chancellor, who, according to the DNB, claimed ‘that a lawyer should live like a hermit and work like a horse. He therefore withdrew from general society, and devoted his days and nights to professional study with such assiduity as for a time seriously to impair his health.’
4 (p. 304). the be-all and the end-all here: Macbeth, I, vii, 5.
5 (p. 305). the Daily Jupiter: a very influential daily newspaper in Trollope’s Barsetshire novels. In The Warden and Barchester Towers, where it is most prominent, it is an obvious cipher for The Times, but in this novel, as Kincaid points out, The Times is also mentioned under its proper name (see p. 497).
6 (p. 305). promotion solely on the score of merit. This was one of the chief recommendations of the Northcote–Trevelyan Report on the Civil Service (1853), and by the early 60s had been widely implemented. Trollope was a staunch opponent of what he calls in An Autobiography (Chapter 3) ‘the damnable system of promotion by so-called merit’, preferring the older system of promotion by seniority. This he felt generated less envy and bitterness, and was kinder to a man’s family and dependants. Trollope’s views on this subject are presented in concentrated from in a letter to his brother-in-law (and Post Office superior) John Tilley of 24 May 1863 (see Hall, I, pp. 216–18).
7 (p. 308). Lord Brock: Lord Brock is generally accepted to have many of the characteristics of Lord Palmerston, who returned to power in 1859, and remained Prime Minister until his death in office in 1865. For a discussion of this identification, see John Halperin, Trollope and Politics (Macmillan, 1977), pp. 79–80.
8 (p. 309). the Seven Dials and Bloomsbury: As Philip Collins has recently pointed out (Trollopiana, No.3), this is Sketches by Boz territory, and still in the 1860s a ‘slummy criminal area.’ Bloomsbury was in the 1860s distinctly unfashionable, though cheap. Lord De Guest advises Johnny Eames to take a house there in Chapter 46, and in The Claverings, Chapter 7, Collins proceeds: ‘Harry Clavering, visiting Lady Ongar in her up-marker lodging in Bolton Street, off Piccadilly, blushes to name “so unfashionable a locality” as Bloomsbury Square, where, he has to confess, he is lodging.’
CHAPTER 29
1 (p. 313). Egyptia conjux: A form of coniunx Aegyptia from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, xv, 826; a pejorative reference to Cleopatra as mistress of Mark Antony.
2 (p. 314). Mrs Todgers: a reference to Mrs Todgers’s Commercial Boarding-house in Dicken’s Martin Chuzzlewit, to which the Pecksniff family resort when in London. It is a fantastically recondite building near the Monument, and gravy is one of its proprietor’s chief anxieties in domestic economy; ‘The gravy alone, is enough to add twenty years to one’s age, I do assure you.’ (Chapter 9).
3 (p. 318). an artist’s model for a Judith: Judith was the beautiful (but devious) slayer of the infidel Holofernes in the apocryphal book of Judith.
CHAPTER 30
1 (p. 327). torn her ewe-lamb: see Nathan’s parable (a Samuel 12: 1–4). The rich man, who has ‘exceeding many flocks and herds’ takes the ‘one little ewe-lamb’ of the poor man to give to a visitor in preference to any of his own.
CHAPTER 31
1 (p. 342). dies non: Short for dies non juridicus, a holiday, or literally a day on which courts may not convene nor any legal business be conducted.
2 (p. 344). Trollope had trouble determining Lily’s response to Mrs Boyce’s ‘one word’ about Crosbie’s having jilted her. In place of ‘I need hardly say… otherwise than tenderly’, he originally wrote:
‘I know Mrs Boyce in a very good woman,’ said Lily as she walked home. ‘But I find it quite impossible to like her. There are people that one is obliged to take upon position and not upon lay merits that one discovers oneself.’
Source: Andrew Wright in ‘Trollope Revises Trollope’, p. 119.
CHAPTER 32
1 (p. 345). The show of fat beasts in London: with the coming of the railways rapid and efficient transport of cattle made large cattle shows more practical and popular. At this time the largest London fatstock shows were held under the auspices of the Smithfield Cattle and Sheep Society.
2 (p. 347). negus: a drink made of wine, hot water, sugar and spices.
3 (p. 349). arrowroot: a medicinal food made from a starch prepared from the rootstock of the Maranta plant (M. arundinacea).
4 (p. 350). senna and salts: a purgative, made from the dried leaflets of the senna plant.
5 (p. 350). It wasn’t right to hang men for stealing sheep: Sheep-stealing remained a capital offence until 1832.
6 (p. 351). as far apart as Dives and Lazarus: a reference to the parable of the rich man (dives in Latin for ‘rich’) and Lazarus the beggar (Luke 16: 19–31), between whom, after death, ‘there is a great gulf fixed’.
CHAPTER 33
1 (p. 356). the door is tiled: protected from intrusion.
2 (p. 356). By what mirth should the beards be made to wag…?: see Chapter 15, note 1.
3 (p. 358). like Charles the Fifth: in 1555 the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, abdicated in favour of his son, who became Philip II of Spain.
4 (p. 363). retricked our beams: a common Trollopian misquotation of Milton’s Lycidas, II, 168–71.
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:…
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Prometheus Bound refers to the sun dispensing with ‘retrickt beams the morning-frosts’ (1. 28). It is not clear whether Trollope refers to Browning’s borrowing, or whether ‘retricked’ represents a misquotation of conventional currency in the mid-Victorian period. Lycidas was one of Trollope’s favourite poems (see An Autobiography, Chapter 3), and he set his nieces to learn it by heart (Stebbins, p. 232).
5 (p. 365). Ah! that’s the ’20: a celebrated vintage, referred to in other Trollope novels. See The Last Chronicle of Barset, Chapter 22; The Claverings, Chapter 19.
6 (p. 365). they think nothing of keeping you till five: normal Victorian office-hours in the Civil Service were 10 a.m. until 4 p.m., though Trollope himself (and, it seems, Johnny Eames) often failed to show up until lunchtime.
CHAPTER 34
1 (p. 371). Mr Smith’s book-stall: W. H. Smith and Son were at the height of their powers in the 1850s and 60s. In 1848 the firm had introduced railway bookselling, and in 1858 established a monopoly of all station-bookstalls and their wares. Novels were published in buttercup-yellow boards, with a picture from the story on the front cover, at around six shillings per volume. Trollope’s own novels first appeared as ‘yellow-backs’ in 1866.
CHAPTER 35
1 (p. 376). Vae Victis: ‘woe to the conquered’, the proverbial remark made by the chieftain of the Gauls after the defeat of the Romans at the battle of Allia, probably in 387 BC. The source is in Livy, v, 48.9. This is a favourite Trollopian tag, and is also used as title for Chapter 1 of The Bertrams.
2 (p. 387). One of my ancestors came over with William the Conqueror: James Pope Hennessy (p. 29) relates the following Trollope family
tradition, which may have been adapted to form the substance of Crosbie’s satirical tale:
There lingered in the family, who were proud of their descent, a mythical story that the first. Trollope had come over with William the Conqueror, had originally been named Tallyhosier, but on killing three wolves while hunting with the king in New Forest had been ordered by his royal master to change his name to ‘Troisloups’.
Trollope repeated the anecdote at Harrow School, and was teased unmercifully as a result.
CHAPTER 36
1 (p. 389). ‘See, the Conquering Hero Comes’: from the text of Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus (1746). The words were supplied by Dr Thomas Morell (1703–84).
2 (p. 391). show the white feather: a mark of cowardice. A reference to white plumage in the tail-feathers of a gamecock, supposed to denote a poor fighter.
3 (p. 394). ‘majesty which doth hedge a king’: See Chapter 28, note 1. This time Trollope paraphrases the lines from Hamlet very loosely.
4 (p. 394). a certain fine old gentleman: Probably Colonel William Leader Maberly, who became Secretary to the Post Office in 1836, the year after Trollope entered the service, and remained in office until 1854. Maberly combined his Civil Service duties with both a political and a military career, and was a well-known figure in society. Trollope and Maberly rarely saw eye to eye: ‘I think,’ he wrote, ‘that a man with better judgement would not have formed so low an opinion of me as he did.’ See An Autobiography, Chapter 3.
5 (p. 398). No one thinks of defending himself to a newspaper except an ass: see Archdeacon Grantly’s diatribe on this point in The Warden, Chapter 7.
CHAPTER 38
1 (p. 409). scarlatina: i.e. scarlet fever.
2 (p. 413). Lady-day: 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation of the Virgin, one of the quarter-days of the business year, and like Michaelmas (29 September) traditionally a date set for the expiration of contracts and tenancy agreements. Until 1752 the feast marked the beginning of the new year.
3 (p. 413). let us go at once… We need not stand much upon the order of our going: cf. Macbeth, III, iv, 119–20.
CHAPTER 39
1 (p. 428). been straw: the dried stems of the bean plant.
CHAPTER 40
1 (p. 435). appanages: customary endowments, in this case wedding-clothes.
2 (p. 435). Portman Square: R. H. Super points out that Portman Square, which the fashionable De Courcys prefer so much to suburban St John’s Wood, is ‘in the part of the town where Trollope spent most of his London years’ (The Chronicler of Barsetshire, p. 161). It was laid out 1761–84 for the ground landlord Henry William Portman.
3 (p. 436). We know how vile… Baker Street… Fitzroy Square: see Chapter 6, note 2.
4 (p. 436). The house in Princess Royal Crescent was certainly not substantial: in Castle Richmond (1860) Trollope’s long-established family lawyer, Mr Prendergast, illustrates even more graphically the price to be paid for a fashionable address. He was ‘one of those old-fashioned people who think a spacious substantial house in Bloomsbury Square, at a rent of a hundred and twenty pounds a year, is better worth having than a narrow, lath-and-plaster, ill-built tenement at nearly double the price out westward of the Parks’ (Castle Richmond, Chapter 35). For Bloomsbury see Chapter 28, note 8.
5 (p. 436). made like a cherub, in this respect, that it had no rear belonging to it: either because the biblical cherub is depicted with the body of an animal, or because, in painting, a cherub motif is merely defined as ‘a child’s head with a pair of wings.’
6 (p. 437). Her geographical knowledge of Pimlico had not been perfect: the Pimlico edge of Belgravia appeals to the professional and rising Crosbie, but not to the fashionable De Courcys. Thomas Cubitt obtained leave from the Grosvenor Estate to build here as he had done in Belgravia, though in a less grand way and for less fashionable people, hence the keenness of Lady Alexandrina’s well-wisher to point out that in the best circles the limits of Belgravia are drawn at Eccleston Square. Princess Royal Crescent, Bayswater, is acceptable because ‘from one end of the crescent a corner of Hyde Park could be seen’ (p. 436). The more austerely traditional Mr Longestaffe in The Way We Live Now (1875), however, looks down on even the De Courcy relish for ‘Eaton Square, or a street leading out of Eaton Square’: ‘When Lady Pomona, instigated by some friend of high rank but questionable taste, had once suggested a change to Eaton Square, Mr Longestaffe had at once snubbed [her]’ (The Way We Live Now, Chapter 13).
7 (p. 442). Palissy ware: real Palissy were is named after the famous French potter Bernard Palissy (1510–89), who enjoyed court patronage and became famous for his richly coloured ware, ornamented with embossments of snakes, fishes, lizards, frogs or leaves, cast from the life. For other factitious iron artefacts in Trollope’s fiction, see the furniture peddled by the commercial traveller Kantwise in Orley Farm.
8 (p. 445). brown holland: plain unbleached linen fabric heavily sized for use as a hard-wearing covering.
9 (p. 447). maternal devotion… of the pelican: the popular fallacy that the pelican pecked its own breast to draw blood to feed its young arose from the fact that the parent bird transfers macerated food from the large bag under its bill to feed them.
10 (p. 448). de trop: i.e. one too many.
CHAPTER 42
1 (p. 462). have the heroine really a heroine… from the window: Bell’s references are presumably to Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818), where Jeanie Deans walks from Edinburgh to London to intercede for her condemned sister, and makes considerable acquaintance with Edinburgh low-life; and to Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847), Chapter 33, where Amelia Sedley nurses the wounded Ensign Stubble within earshot of the cannonading of Waterloo.
CHAPTER 43
1 (p. 469). entailed… unentailed: For ‘entail’ see Chapter 1, note 1; the duke is free to do what he likes with his unentailed property.
2 (p. 471). to grease the horses’ teeth: greasing a horse’s teeth will prevent it from eating. Compare the swindling ostler who butters his hay in King Lear, II, iv, 125.
3 (p. 474). Carlton Gardens: John Nash’s eastward continuation of Carlton House Terrace, off Waterloo Place. Built 1830–33.
4 (p. 474). ad valorem: in proportion to its value.
5 (p. 475). ignis fatuus: literally, ‘foolish fire’. A light that sometimes appears in the night, usually over marshy ground and that is often attributable to the combustion of marsh gas. Metaphorically, a false or deceptive goal.
6 (p. 475). the Albany: converted from the Duke of York’s house in 1802 to form ‘residential chambers for bachelor gentlemen’. There are sixty-nine sets of chambers, adjoining Burlington House, Piccadilly. Famous residents have included Byron, Macaulay and a number of celebrated politicians, notably Broughham, Palmerston, Canning and Gladstone.
7 (p. 475). Amaryllis in the shade: Amaryllis is the name given to a shepherdess in Virgil’s Eclogues, who borrowed it in turn from Theocritus. Trollope’s reference is to Milton’s Lycidas (see Chapter 33, note 4), 11, 67–9:
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair?
CHAPTER 44
1 (p. 484). whatever is, is right: the concluding lines of Book I of Pope’s An Essay on Man (1733), a poem frequently quoted by Trollope:
And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, ‘Whatever IS, in a RIGHT.’
2 (p. 485). Paul and Virginia: a pastoral romance by Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814), which first appeared in his Études de la Nature in 1788, and achieved great popularity.
3 (p. 487). the king was such a bad man as that: the first volume of Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837) – ‘The Bastille’ – opens with a description of Louis XV’s last days and an assessment of his reign, which Carlyle dismisses as ‘a hollow phantasmagory’ and as sensual self-gratifying ‘Mumbo-Jumbo’.
CHAPTE
R 45
1 (p. 488). St James’s church: built by Sir Christopher Wren between 1676 and 1684. In the eighteenth century, St James’s Piccadilly was the most fashionable church in London. By the mid-1860s the church was less coveted for weddings, though the explorer Sir Samuel Baker achieved notoriety there in 1865 when he married a Hungarian slave-girl whom he had bought in a Turkish bazaar.
2 (p. 490). Darby and Joan: the type of loving, old-fashioned virtuous couples. The names belong to a ballad written by Henry Woodfall, first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1735. The characters are said to be John Darby, of Batholomew Close, who died in 1730, and his wife Joan, who was said to be ‘as chaste as a picture cut in alabaster’.
3 (p. 492). Miss Gresham: this is Augusta Gresham, in Dr Thorne keen to marry Mr Gazebee. See Chapter 17, note 1.
4 (p. 497). the netting over her husband’s head: i.e. the railway-carriage luggage rack.
CHAPTER 46
1 (p. 504). I should live somewhere near Bloomsbury Square at first: Chapter 40, note 4. ‘Next to nothing’ means a rental of around one hundred and twenty pounds a year.
2 (p. 506). out on the farther side of Islington: quite beyond the circles of the fashionable world. In The Three Clerks (1858) Gertrude Tudor teases the Honourable Mrs Valentine Scott by threatening to live there. ‘“Islington!” said the Honourable Mrs Val, nearly fainting’ (The Three Clerks, Chapter 35).
3 (p. 507). Love should still be lord of all: facetious reference to Scott, Lay of the Last Minstrel, VI, xi, 4, in turn echoing Virgil’s ‘Omnia vincit Amor’ (Eclogues, x, 69).
4 (p. 508). Somerset House: Chapter 2, note 4. Among 2 ‘nest’ of other departments, Admiralty offices were to be found there.
5 (p. 511). staying late: see Chapter 33, note 6.
CHAPTER 47
1(p. 516). pulling the devil by the tail: to struggle constantly against adversity.
The Small House at Allington Page 81
