The Small House at Allington
Page 82
2 (p. 519). Lord Derby: Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby (1799–1869). At this stage he was leader of the Conservative Party, and had served as Prime Minister in 1852 and again in 1858–9; later he served a third term (1866–8) when Gladstone’s Government fell trying to pass the Second Reform Bill. Reputedly one of the wealthiest men in England, with vast winnings on the turf, he was also a great Lancashire magnate, very active at this time (1862–3) as chairman of the central cotton famine relief committee at Manchester.
3 (p. 519). Mr Spurgeon: Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–92). A Baptist minister, and the most celebrated preacher of his day, with a reputation firmly established by his early twenties. After drawing huge crowds to a makeshift venue at the Surrey Gardens music hall, the purpose-built Metropolitan Tabernacle at Newington Causeway, capable of holding 6000, was opened for his use in 1861. He attracted extensive Times publicity and is also referred to as a figure of public notoriety in Framley Parsonage, Chapter 3, when Miss Dunstable is discussing her potential as a preacher.
CHAPTER 48
1 (p. 523). a rubber: a rubber of whist, Trollope’s own favourite pastime.
2 (p. 524). London is gayer in May: See p. 46, where Trollope points out that ‘no Londoner cares to be absent in May’. The only decidedly fallow months in the capital’s social calendar were August, September and October; but the height of the season was the spring. As the cosmopolite Madame Gourdeloup points out in The Claverings, Chapter 18, ‘There is only de one place to live in, and that is London, for April, May and June.’
3 (p. 527). from our house: i.e. from Gazebee’s firm, Gumption, Gazebee and Gazebee.
CHAPTER 49
1 (p. 536). what the lady says in the play… that word ‘no’; from Sir Henry Taylor’s blank verse drama Philip Van Artevelde (1834), Part I, I, ii. Adriana Van Merestyn is wondering if it is possible to refuse her lover without hurting him. What she actually says is:
In truth,
To mould denial to a pleasing shape
In all things, and most specially in love
Is a hard task; alas! I have not wit
From such a sharp and waspish word as ‘no’
To pluck the sting.
2 (p. 538). those preparations for house-moving: Trollope’s most recent move, had been from Donnybrook, Dublin to Waltham House, Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire in December 1859.
CHAPTER 50
1 (p. 548). heaping coals of fire on her head: cf. Proverbs 25:22.
2 (p. 550). Let her go out… They do in America: Trollope had recently returned from a visit to the United States when he began to write The Small House at Allington. Is He Popenjoy? features a militant Vermont feminist named Miss Doctor Olivia Q. Fleabody.
CHAPTER 51
1 (p. 554). Things Which He Ought Not To Have Done: from the General Confession at Morning and Evening Prayer in the book of Common Prayer (1662); ‘We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.’
2 (p. 554). east of Whitehall: see Chapter 2, note 6.
3 (p. 556). drinking bad tea, and reading good books?: This passage closely resemble a passage in An Autobiography, Chapter 3, written thirteen years later: ‘In such a condition of life a young man should no doubt go home after his work, and spend the long hours of the evening in reading good books and drinking tea.’ The whole of this chapter of An Autobiography should be set against this account of Johnny Eames’s dissipations.
4 (p. 560). respectable: compare the ‘hammering’ of this word in the present chapter with Charley Hexam’s obsession with respectability in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, which appeared the year after The Small House at Allington: ‘It is an extraordinary circumstance attendant on my life, that every effort I make towards perfect respectability is impeded by somebody else through no fault of mine’ (Our Mutual Friend, II, Chapter 7).
5 (p. 562). quizzing: Mocking, ridiculing wittily.
6 (p. 566). as the sparks fly upwards: Job 5:7: ‘Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.’
CHAPTER 52
1 (p. 572). He had not grown on the sunny side of the wall: cf. Henry Taylor, Philip Van Artevelde, I, ii.:
But we are women when boys are but boys.
God gives us grace to ripen and grow wise
Some six years earlier. I thank Heaven for it;
We grow upon the sunny side of the wall.
Clara Van Artevelde is disputing with her page, who is ‘almost as old’ as she is.
2 (p. 573). an usher at a commercial seminary: in 1834 Trollope taught for six week as a classics ‘usher’ (instructor) in a Brussels academy conducted by the Reverend William Drury, son of his former headmaster at Harrow, and brother of the Headmaster of his preparatory school at Sunbury.
3 (p. 573). castles in the air: this account of Johnny Eames’s day-dreaming is strongly autobiographical. See An Autobiography (Chapter 3), and Chapter 4, note 3.
4 (p. 576). constancy… of a Jacob: Jacob served Laban seven years to gain Rachel as his bride, but was tricked into marrying her elder sister Leah. He then served seven more years before marrying Rachel. See Genesis 29:1–30.
CHAPTER 53
1 (p. 579), Loquitur: a stage direction meaning ‘begins to speak’.
2 (p. 584). Hingies: probably India.
3 (p. 585). gashly: ghastly (dialect).
CHAPTER 54
1 (p. 591). nigging away at them foutry balls: hammering (from stone-breaking) away at those worthless [croquet] balls (dialect).
CHAPTER 55
1 (p. 601). hide her lights under a bushel: cf. Matthew 5:15.
2 (p. 602). serve both God and Mammon: cf. Matthew 6:24.
3 (p. 603). Mrs Arabin: in The Warden Eleanor Harding, Septimus Harding’s younger daughter, marries John Bold, but she is soon widowed. In Barchester Towers she marries Francis Arabin, who is subsequently made Dean of Barchester when her father refuses to take up the position. See Chapter 16, note 1.
4 (p. 609). Tattersall’s: the most fashionable racehorse auctioneers, Tattersall’s was established in 1799 in premises at Hyde Park Corner by Richard Tattersall, a former groom to the 2nd Duke of Kingston. The ninety-nine-year lease expired in 1865 and the premises were pulled down.
5 (p. 609). cuirass: a piece of armour, especially a coupled breastplate and backplate, covering the body from neck to girdle.
6 (p. 609). brougham: a light closed carriage with seats inside for two or four, and with the forewheels capable of turning sharply.
7 (p, 610). crushing party: a crowded social gathering.
8 (p. 610). because there was to be no dancing: evengelicals disapproved of this recreation, an important factor in Trollope’s next novel, Rachel Ray. See Chapter 17, note 2.
9 (p. 610). all was vanity: cf. Ecclesiastes 1:2.
10 (p. 611). sigh like a furnace: a reference to the lover in Jaques’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech. See As You Like It, II, vii, 148.
11 (p. 611). either to the sublime or to the ridiculous: cf. Napoleon Bonaparte after the retreat from Moscow, 1812: ‘From the sublime to the ridiculous there is only one step.’
12 (p. 612). to carry off their Dulcineas: proverbial for a sweetheart. Dulcinea del Toboso is the name given by Quixote in Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605–15) to the peasant girl Alonza Lorenzo.
13 (p. 612). faute de mieux: for the lack of anything better.
14 (p. 613). to press somewhat forward: Trollope completed The Small House at Allington in February 1863, and in August (after the rapid composition of Rachel Ray) commenced the first of the Palliser novels, Can You Forgive Her?, for which the present paragraph essentially functions as a mise-en-scène.
15 (p. 613). Lord of the Isles: in The Language and Style of Anthony Trollope, John W. Clark has an interesting footnote on the dubiousness of the Marquis of Auldreekie’s second title, ‘borne, by courtesy, after his death, by his nephew a
nd successor’s eldest son (he himself having left no son). But in The Way We Live Now, the courtesy title has become “Lord Nidderdale”. Evidently Trollope learnt, some time between 1863 and 1873, that “Lord of the Isles” had for over two centuries been a title of the eldest son of the sovereign (and one that, like “Duke of Cornwall”, he is born with)’ (Clark, p. 9).
16 (p. 613). Auldreekie: slang name for Edinburgh’s old town, so called because it generally appeared to be capped by a cloud of ‘reek’ or smoke.
CHAPTER 56
1 (p. 616). He comes home before dinner at half-past six… and goes away at half-past nine: cf. Crosbie’s hours on p. 523 soon after his marriage – a clear indication of deteriorating relations with Lady Alexandrina.
CHAPTER 58
1 (p. 636). I have never envied Bernard… or anything that is his: cf. Exodus 20:17.
2 (p. 637). Balmoral boots: heavy, front-laced waling boots.
3 (p. 640). the story of the boy who would not cry though the wolf was gnawing him underneath his frock: a Spartan boy stole a fox (not a wolf!) and when questioned let in gnaw him to death under his clothes rather than confess to his crime. Usually cited as a parable of Spartan self-control, the story originally comes from Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus.
4 (p. 642). If she be not fair… : a reference to ‘The Lover’s Resolution’ in George Wither’s collection Faire-Virtue, the mistresse of Phil’arete (1622). Trollope misquotes the real text, which runs:
Shall I, wasting in despair
Die because a woman’s fair?
Or make pale my cheeks with care
’Cause another’s rosy are?
Be she fairer than the day,
Or the flow’ry meads in May,
If she think not well of me,
What care I how fair she be?
Johnny Eames makes use of the quotation again in The Last Chronicle of Barset, Chapter 77, the last chapter in which Lily Dale appears.
CHAPTER 59
1 (p. 651). shaking the dust from his feet: cf. Matthew 10:14.
2 (p. 653). Great Western Railway Hotel: built by Philip Hardwick in 1852, the Great Western Royal Hotel masks the south side of Paddington Station, scene of Eames’s triumph against Crosbie in Chapter 34.
CHAPTER 60
1 (p. 664). what that bad man says in his novels about mothers-in-law: a reference to Thackeray, whose difficulties with his own ill-natured and interfering mother-in-law, Mrs Shawe, led him to satirize the type repeatedly. The most notable figures are Lady Southdown in Vanity Fair, Mrs Mackenzie in The Newcomes, and Mrs Baynes in Philip, which was running in the Cornhill when Trollope embarked on The Small House at Allington. For a sprightly account of the topic, see John Carey, Thackeray: Prodigal Genius (Faber, 1977), pp. 137–41. Trollope greatly admired thackeray, and wrote a judicious account of his life and work for the English Men of Letters series (1879).