Furin Chime Press™

Tag: Nineteenth Century popular culture

  • J.F. Smith’s Mystery of the Marsh — Twenty-first Instalment

    J.F. Smith’s Mystery of the Marsh — Twenty-first Instalment

    There is an idiosyncratic slide, moving from the omniscient narrator’s opening reflection on the parable of the “wise and foolish builders,” to Theophilus (Theo) Blackmore’s own seemingly spontaneous reflection on “Sand! sand!” in his meeting with Viscountess Allworth. It is almost as though the narrator informs as much as observes the character’s consciousness.

    To date, Smith’s allusions have been mostly historical or classic-literary, as in this episode’s playful gesture where he invokes the Hippogriff — a beast from Greek myth familiar to Harry Potter fans — in dramatizing a simple scene break, and thereby transporting the reader from London to Dinant, in France, at a speed faster than thought.

    It might be interesting, then, to consider the builders’ parable for a moment — especially given its “originary” significance to the Christian institution. The parable appears in Mathew 7:24-27 and Luke 6:46-49, attributing to Christ’s words the power to raise mankind above the chaos of the world. According to Saint John Chrysostom (c.340 – 407), in Christ’s telling of the parable:

    By “rain” here, and “floods,” and “winds,” He is expressing metaphorically the calamities and afflictions that befall men; such as false accusations, plots, bereavements, deaths, loss of friends, vexations from strangers, all the ills in our life that any one could mention. “But to none of these,” says He, “does such a soul give way; and the cause is, it is founded on the rock.”

    He [Christ] calls the steadfastness of His doctrine a rock; because in truth His commands are stronger than any rock, setting one above all the waves of human affairs. For he who keeps these things strictly, will not have the advantage of men only when they are vexing him, but even of the very devils plotting against him.”

    Homily 24 on Mathew

    The author of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles addresses his work to a listener who goes by the name of Theophilus, held traditionally to be a companion of Saul/Paul. Christian scholars have variously supposed this Theophilus to have been a Jewish high priest, a Roman official, or simply, as his name suggests, one “loved by God.”

    Luke’s explicit aim is to assure Theophilus of the truth “of the things he had been taught” (Luke 1:3-4); for example, of the resurrection and the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Smith’s character Theophilus is notable for his morbid bookishness and is, it emerges, increasingly morally compromised. Is he nonetheless redeemable?

    According to Christian standards, of course he is; by the logic of Smith’s own narrative, this remains to be seen. I wonder whether an extreme sacrifice may be necessary.

    Remarkably, the magic whisper our Theo receives from the narrator is like an inspirational summoning to ethics. Yet he plans to collaborate with the viscountess in some dastardly plot, evidently one intended to ensnare the lovely Lady Kate in a loveless marriage with her morally bankrupt loser of a son, the disgraced Royal Horse Guard, Clarence Marsham, currently residing in Dinant.

    The narrator himself refers the metaphor of building on the rock not to faith in Christ as such, but instead to a concept of “the rock of integrity,” suggestive of a more agnostic view, which may be more indicative, we feel, of Smith’s own. Viscountess Allworth’s riposte at Theo’s implicit censure goes a step further, and is worthy of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche:

    ‘My house is erected on indomitable will, cemented by past success — guarantees against the future,’ observed his visitor, sneeringly.

    Clearly not the approved perspective, as reasonable as it may seem to us postmoderns.

    The theme is developed as well at a tangent, the opposition of “superstructure” to “base”; which is equivalent to that of “superficial appeal” as opposed to “being solidly grounded” — such as in Christ or in some form of integrity (a Christian view being that the latter needs to be grounded in the former).

    This secondary version of the parable is in the form “all that glitters is not gold” — or after Shakespeare, all that “glisters”. Living our life in pursuit of superficial attractions would be analogous to building upon the sand. The viscountess is such a person, and we now become privy to the tenuous underpinnings of her privileged status, and their further manifestation in the character of her son.

    Her attraction to the glitter of social position, at the expense of integrity, generates the villainous momentum that placed Kate and her maid-servant at such dire peril in the novel’s opening scenes in the red barn at Deerhurst and is still at work hatching further dark schemes.

    Love’s Shadow (1867), Frederick Sandys. Source: Wikimedia Commons; Sotheby’s NY.

    CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

    A House Built on Sand — Very Showy but not Secure — News of Clarence Marsham and Squire Burcham — They Meet at Dinant, in France

    We are warned by an authority older than modern civilisation not to build our house upon sand. How many stately edifices have been swept away from being erected on no better foundation. The world witnesses it daily, and yet the supposed wiseacres of the earth are continually falling into the same fatal error, looking to the superstructure rather than the base. The rock of integrity, on which alone a solid mansion can be reared, appears to them so hard to dig — the process is too slow.

    From the glimpses already given of the character of Viscountess Allworth, our readers already, doubtless, have divined, that she has been one of the unwise builders alluded to. In the eyes of the world her position appeared a most enviable one. Born in obscurity and poverty, she had become rich and titled by the exercise of talents bestowed for far different purposes. Not that we despise wealth; on the contrary, we consider it a blessing, when honestly acquired and nobly used; but for mere rank — the thing that men are born to — we feel a profound indifference. Like the cap and bells, it merely serves to make folly appear more ridiculous, and adds not one iota to the consideration justly due to the really great and virtuous.

    Her ladyship felt greatly annoyed. She had just received a note from a person whom she had not met for years, and trusted never to meet again; and yet they had never lost sight of each other.

    The note was a very laconic one: ‘I must see you.’ It had no signature, but the address of the writer was given, an obscure street in the Strand.

    ‘What can he want?’ she murmured to herself. ‘Money?’ No, to do l him justice, he has never been unreasonable on that score. There can be no real cause for alarm, for, although my plans are laid, no overt action has been taken to put them in execution.’

    After a few minutes’ reflection she continued: ‘I dare not refuse. A false alarm, or, more likely still, some scholarly crotchet he wants my influence to gratify. Would he were dead,’ she added, deliberately. ‘I could breathe freely then. The grave is the only safe confidant.’

    Of course, it would never do for the fashionable Lady Allworth to be seen in her own equipage driving down one of the narrow, obscure lanes of the Strand, even if it did bear the aristocratic name of Cecil-street. A century previous and royalty might have been seen there without exciting surprise; but times have changed. Mansions formerly the abode of nobles have either been pulled down or converted into lodging-houses, and those not of the highest class.

    After attiring herself in a very plain dress and wearing a thick veil her ladyship quitted Allworth House unattended, and walked as far as the quadrant in Regent-street. There she took a cab, and directed the man to drive to No. 13 Cecil-street.

    It was so short a distance that the driver at once set her down for a stranger in the metropolis, and mentally resolved to charge her half a crown.

    Ivy Bridge Lane, in the Strand, from Old and New London, Vol. 3, (Cassell, Petter & Galpin, London, 1878). Source: British History Online.

    On reaching the house Lady Allworth felt greatly annoyed that the smallest coin in her purse was a half sovereign. The man eyed it greedily.

    ‘Can’t do it, Miss,’ he said. He always said ‘Miss’ to his female fares; fancied they liked it. ‘Yours was the first off the stand this mornin’. Large family; wife sick; very poor, but honest, that a well-known fact. If you like to trust me with the half skiv’ (slang word for half a sovereign) ‘I can melt it at the Fox and Geese and bring you back your change ker-rectly, Miss, in five minutes.’

    Of course her ladyship was not deceived, but she pretended to be so. Anything appeared preferable to waiting on the street and risking the chance of a discovery.

    ‘Yes, I dare say,’ she replied. ‘Very dreadful, no doubt. ‘I am not rich, but can feel for honest poverty. You may keep the half-sovereign, and may it do you all the good I wish.’

    ‘God bless you, Miss!’ exclaimed the driver, jumping on the box of his vehicle with an alacrity surprising for his years and starting his worn horse at a rapid pace.

    Lady Allworth stood watching him till he and his cab disappeared by turning into the Strand. Then, with a sigh of relief, she rang the bell of a respectable-looking house near her. It was answered by a slatternly-looking maid-of-all-work.

    Lady Allworth asked if the person whose address she had was in.

    ‘Yes, mam,’ said the maid. ‘Jest step into the parlor. ‘Missis is gone up to the gentleman’s room to see what he wants for dinner; down in a minute — do take a cheer.’

    The visitor, who felt tired as well as agitated, silently accepted one.

    ‘Come to git your fortin told?’ added the speaker.

    ‘Fortune told!’ repeated the lady, greatly surprised. ‘No. Why do you ask such a ridiculous question?’

    ‘Beg pardin, mam, didn’t know; thought you might. I and the missus made up our minds the gentleman wor sothing o’ that sort when we seed the books he brought with him; such odd-lookin’ letters. No Christian ever printed them.’

    ‘Perhaps you cannot read,’ observed the visitor, with a half-suppressed smile.’

    The maid-of-all-work tossed her head, curl papers and all — for she only took them down in the afternoon — indignantly, as if she had received some personal affront.

    ‘Indeed, mam, but I can read. ‘I wor edicated at St. Pancrass, and wor called the best scholard in the school.’

    Considering the lamentable state of the school system for the poor in England of the time, there appeared nothing very improbable in the assertion.

    The landlady now made her appearance, and inquired if she were the person whom her new lodger expected.

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘He is quite ready to receive you. This way, if you please. Will show you upstairs myself. His daughter, I presume?’

    The question was put forth as a feeler, but failed to elicit a reply.

    Second class furnished apartments, as their as their owners ambitiously term them, in the days of the regency, were sad uncomfortable affairs. The same crimson, moreen curtains, probably twice dipped, bordered with black cotton velvet; the half dozen regulation chairs, one facetiously called an easy one, and a ricketty table, generally comprised the entire furniture. In the more pretentious ones a couple of engravings — the death of Wolfe or the Battle of Trafalgar — might occasionally be found. Where such was the case, they added considerably to the price. Lodging-house keepers make money out of everything. The style has somewhat improved at the present day. Not in comfort — O! dear, no — but in show. As Shakespeare says, the world is still deceived by ornament.

    On the first floor, into such a room as we have described, the visitor was shown. Its occupant was a well-dressed man, with a white beard — an unusual appendage in those days. He was seated in the easy-chair. A pile of books, most probably Greek classics, which had so excited the curiosity of the maid-of-all-work, were on the table beside him.

    It was our readers’ old acquaintance, Theophilus Blackmore, the tenant of the martello tower and school-master of Deerhurst.

    ‘Take a chair, Zelinda,’ he said, without rising from his seat. ‘I will not trouble you to wait.’ This was addressed to the landlady, who disappeared with a dissatisfied air.

    Lady Allworth was about to close the door after her, when the speaker added:

    ‘Leave it open. It faces the staircase: She cannot return to listen without our being aware of it. Now turn your chair and face me. I will watch the door.’

    It was not till these instructions had been carried out that the viscountess raised her veil. The old man gazed upon her countenance long and earnestly.

    ‘Time has little changed “you,’ he observed. ‘You are still the same resolute being whose courage and strong will excited my admiration in the past. Well, Zelinda,’ he continued, ‘you have, succeeded in the objects of your ambition — wealth and rank. How the dead would laugh in their graves could they see to what heights you have climbed! You are rich and a peeress.’

    ‘Not so wealthy as you suppose. Clarence has been a sad drain upon me.’

    ‘You love your son, then?’

    ‘Devotedly.’

    ‘The question was an unnecessary one,’ said the questioner. ‘You would not be human if you did not. It is the weakness of maternity. The she wolf will fight for her young.’

    ‘Thank you, Theo!’ ejaculated the lady.

    ‘You know I rarely compliment,’ was the reply. ‘You still adhere to your project of this marriage?’

    ‘More tenaciously than ever,’ answered Lady Allworth, harshly. ‘My poor boy dares not return to England, or show his face in society if he did, till it is accomplished. Not so much for the girl’s fortune — that, although an important motive, might be got over — as on account of an unsuccessful attempt to — ‘

    ‘Yes! yes!’ interrupted her hearer. ‘I have heard all about the affair. It was foolishly contrived and badly managed. Clarence has not his mother’s brains.’

    ‘I thought you never complimented.’

    ‘Truth is no compliment,’ observed the schoolmaster. ‘The fact is, your son is a reckless idiot.’

    ‘Was it to tell me this,’ exclaimed her ladyship, her countenance flushed with mortification j and anger, ‘that you quitted your retreat, left your beloved books, and sought this interview? Your son — you see I am aware you have one,’ she added sarcastically — ‘is, doubtless, perfection?’

    ‘Benoni might be wiser,’ answered the old man, evasively, ‘but he is no fool, and has few scruples, as yourself. But we will not speak of him.’

    ‘As you please,’ said his strangely assorted confederate — for such they evidently were — in a tone of the utmost indifference. ‘But you have not yet informed me of the motive of your visit to London.’

    ‘I am uneasy in my mind.’

    ‘Some Greek root puzzled you?’ asked the lady, alluding to his favourite studies.

    The scholar smiled.

    ‘Ah, Zelinda,’ he said, ‘if you had only been content to share my labours; but it is useless to regret that now.’

    ‘Perfectly!’ ejaculated her ladyship. ‘Well, then, we will confine our conversation to the present and the future,’ observed Theophilus Blackmore, with a sigh. ‘You are fixed in your purpose of effecting this marriage?’

    ‘Immovably so.’

    ‘I have carried out your instructions,’ continued the former, ‘but you were wrong to have transmitted them through Brit. I doubt that man. It was still more unwise to assist him in his scheme for plundering Burcham, who has escaped from the Bitterns’ Marsh.’

    ‘Where can he have fled to?’

    ‘To France — to Dinant, Brittany.’

    ‘There must have been treachery!’ ejaculated his hearer.

    ‘Not on my part,’ answered the tenant of the tower. ‘Everything is prepared as you desired. The loopholes have been newly barred. The place is provisioned for a month, water unfailing. It would stand a siege. As for the wild inhabitants of the swamp, my influence over them since I obtained the lease is unbounded.’

    ‘In half the time you name,’ exclaimed the viscountess, in a tone of confidence, ‘Lady Kate will be the wife of Clarence. Pride — the dread of the world’s scandal — will overcome her childish repugnance, and my son’s position be secured.’

    ‘Sand! sand!’ murmured the ex-schoolmaster, half aloud.

    ‘What were you saying?’

    ‘Nothing; a mere allusion to the volume whose contents we have both of us, I fear, too long ignored. It warns us against building on such foundations as you have trusted to,’ he added, thoughtfully.

    ‘My house is erected on indomitable will, cemented by past success — guarantees against the future,’ observed his visitor, sneeringly. ‘But enough of this. We fully understand and can rely upon each other.’

    ‘Yes; I have no other choice,’ was the reply. ‘You always did as you pleased with me. I have been as plastic as potter’s clay in your hands; send or bring your victim when you will, all things shall be in readiness.’

    ‘It may be weeks and even months, first,’ said her ladyship. ‘The stake is a vast one, and must be cautiously played for.’

    And placing a roll of bank notes upon the table, the speaker lowered her veil and rose to depart, and had reached the head of the stairs, when something important seemed to strike her. She retraced her steps, and fixing her eyes searchingly upon those of her confederate, pronounced in an undertone, the name of ‘Nance?’

    ‘Dead, years since,’ answered the old man, calmly. ‘Ague and the marsh fever played into your hands. I thought you were aware of it.’

    A smile of intense satisfaction broke over the countenance of the scheming woman as she slowly descended the staircase.

    It was not till Theophilus Blackmore heard the street door open and shut that he raised the notes from the table, and began to count them. They amounted to £200.

    ‘Books?’ he muttered, in a tone of satisfaction — ‘mere books! They are the only friends left me, and I cannot have too many of them. But even they are not always to be relied upon. How I should like to examine the precious manuscript of Josephus in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, and collate it with my own copy. The best critics pronounce the disputed passage an interpolation. Who knows? Possibly I might be able to bring new light upon the subject.

    ‘This affair of Zelinda’s once concluded, I shall be enabled to indulge in the dream of tranquil study my soul so longs to realise. But, will she keep her promise?’ he added, to himself.

    For several instants the aged bookworm appeared lost in profound reflection.

    ‘She dares not play me false!’ he exclaimed at last. ‘She is in my power, and I can crush her like some worm beneath my feet !’

    With this reflection we take our leave of the schemers for a time.

    Roger délivrant Angélique (1824), by Louis-Édouard Rioult. Louvre.

    Many of our readers have, doubtless, heard of the hippogriff — that fabulous monster, half horse and half griffin, which owed its existence to the fertile imagination of the Greeks, who named it the Centaur. The middle ages changed the form of its first conception. Poets and romance writers are the only persons who have ever seen it but, then, poets and romancists, like the Scottish highlanders, sometimes see strange things. The gift of double sight is not always to be relied upon. Amongst the extraordinary powers attributed to the hippogriff, a speed far outstripping steam — in short, every known means of locomotion — was, perhaps, the most remarkable. The flight of the eagle was as the creeping of the snail in comparison. Thought alone could outstrip it.

    We are about to invite the readers of the “Evening News” to take a ride with us on the back of one of these monsters. They need not be alarmed; the seat is easy, the motions pleasant enough. Even as we write its wings are spread, the journey accomplished, and we are safely landed at the little town of Dinant, in the ancient province of Brittany, in France.

    It was to this obscure place that Clarence Marsham had retreated after recovering from his wound, to exist, as he termed it, on the reduced allowance his mother prudently made him. But few of his countrymen had hitherto found their way there. Its inhabitants are a reserved, unsocial race, particularly shy of strangers. The little community of Englishmen were compelled, in self-defence, to associate together. The cafe, billiards, botany and fishing occupied most of their time; the rest of it, we fear, was spent in idleness and debauchery. This condition of things has greatly changed since we first visited Dinant; the English form quite an important colony, taking, as the Scotch say, the crown o’ the causeway, from their wealth and numbers. We say wealth, by comparison, the native inhabitants, including the nobility, being as poor as they were proud; the Reign of Terror and the iron hand of Napoleon had completely crushed them for their adherence to the Bourbons and the ancient faith.

    The return of Louis XVIII somewhat alleviated their misery.

    Such was the state of society in this obscure corner of France when Clarence Marsham took up his abode there. The change from the Guards, the excitement of the mess-table, the turf and his club, had a most depressing effect upon him, but not a salutary one, and he soon began to experience what our Gallic neigbours describe as the English malady — the spleen. They, too, suffer from the same disease. True, they call it ennui — a much prettier name.

    In the state of what he was pleased to call his mind, the young roue naturally felt relieved by the appearance of Burcham, whom he had met occasionally in London, and rather patronised. The meeting proved agreeable to both, and they soon contracted a species of friendship— intimacy probably would be the better word, for it is almost a profanation to employ the first.

    Honour is much more chary of confidence than vice; it bestows it slowly, but, then, it is generally lasting. Vice, on the contrary, is capricious in its intimacies, contracting and breaking them heedlessly. The similarity of their position drew them yet more closely together, till at last, over a bowl of punch, each made a clean breast of it to the other.

    ‘Ah,’ hiccoughed Clarence, ‘my position is bad enough, but yours is worse — forger!’

    ‘Pshaw!’ interrupted Burcham; ‘a ridiculous letter. It had no commercial value, at any rate. I am safe here, and can fight Moses and Co. at a distance. My steward, Banks, holds the estate; they can’t get it from me. He served my father, and will stick to me like the old house-dog. Brit, the family lawyer, warned me against that rascally Jew; but I was a fool, wanted money, and refused to listen to him.’

    ‘The way with most of us, I suppose,’ remarked his companion, philosophically. ‘What do you intend to do?’

    ‘Compromise,’ was the reply. ‘Get the letter out of the claws of that vulture of Israel. Willing to act squarely — do anything but give up the lands, I should never get an acre back again.’

    ‘Not unlikely,’ remarked Clarence, with drunken gravity. After a pause he added: ‘Settle your affair as soon as you can, and I have something to propose to you.’

    ‘What is it?’

    ‘Settle your affair first, I tell you.’

    ‘Some turf speculation, I suppose; mine have been most unlucky. I have lost all faith in them,’ said the squire, despondingly. ‘Lost three thousand on the Eclipse race. The ring is too strong for outsiders,’ he added.’

    ‘I won on it!’ exclaimed Marsham, with a grin of satisfaction; ‘only a brace of fifties, though; funds were low; dared not venture more; was in the Guards at the time. In the Guards we are always expected to pay up. But the affair I hinted at has nothing to do with racing; there is a woman in it.’

    ‘A rich one?’

    ‘That of course.’

    ‘Ah!’ ejaculated the squire, ‘like my own case; for good or evil, they are generally mixed up in our affairs. Fatality, I suppose.’

    As time dragged its weary length along, the speakers became more and more confidential with each other. They took long walks together, discussed their plans, which were so far matured that they waited only till the signal from England should be given to put them in execution. Having few mental resources, the conspirators generally spent their evenings at the principal cafe in Dinant, where the inhabitants and the little colony met, as it were, on neutral ground. It was awfully slow work, as Clarence declared, but better than the painful reflection of their own thoughts.

    As their countrymen were generally poor, they gathered round Clarence and the squire, in the hope of gathering a few francs at pool, and laughed at their jokes as parasites laugh at the stale jests of their patrons. The gains of these unfortunates could not have been very large; the rich rogues played an excellent game.

    Amongst other frequenters of the cafe were two Englishmen who attracted the attention of the exiles. One was a fellow about forty years of age, who called himself Captain Brandle. There was no such name in the army list, and yet few men ventured to question him or his decisions on billiards; his bullying airs, and a certain fierce rolling of his eyes, cowed them, and he obtained credit cheaply for courage; it was considered dangerous to tackle him.

    The second, a young man, who wore the dress of a fisherman, appeared remarkably quiet and unassuming in his manners. He drank little, and only occasionally took a hand at pool. His quiet, unobtrusive manners excited the curiosity of the two conspirators — not that they apprehended any danger from his presence in Dinant; there appeared nothing suspicious about him, except his name — Smith — the most ill-used and unjustly abused one in the world — that is to say, the English world.

    A pool of billiards was being played at the cafe, in which Captain Brandle and the bearer of the long vilified name of Smith, we suspect it was only borrowed, took a part. Clarence Marsham and his friend were standing near the table, merely looking on.

    ‘That was a foul stroke!’ exclaimed the young man, ‘and ought not to count!’

    The spectators looked aghast at the speaker; the captain, who had made it, having impressed them with an awful opinion of his courage by his constant braggadocio. The impostor (for true courage rarely or ever boasts) glared at him ferociously, twisted his moustache, stamped angrily upon the ground, and called him a liar.

    ‘We will soon see,’ observed his accuser calmly, ‘which of us merits that appellation. I repeat, the stroke was a foul one, and appeal to these gentlemen,’ he added, turning to Clarence and the squire; ‘they must have seen it.’

    The two gentlemen declared they had not seen the stroke made; something had distracted their attention at the moment it was made.

    The accuser bowed somewhat sarcastically.

    ‘Of course I cannot dispute your word.’ he said. ‘I thought you had; but find I must settle the point with the bully without the assistance of your evidence.’

    ‘Bully!’ repeated the captain, who appeared thunderstruck at his presumption.

    ‘And coward,’ coolly added his accuser.

    The quarrel was becoming interesting. All present expected to see the speaker, who had so rashly provoked the hostility of the fire-eater, annihilated on the spot. Instead of springing on his victim like a roused tiger, as they anticipated, he mastered his rage and advancing towards the speaker, asked him if he were tired of his life.

    ‘Not quite yet, for I have never disgraced it,’ was the reply.

    One or two of the spectators began to smile.

    Possibly the redoubtable captain did not like the cool, steady gaze which encountered his. As a last effort to redeem his reputation he exclaimed:

    ‘This must be settled elsewhere. For a less insult I have spitted two such cockerels before breakfast.’

    ‘Did you. eat them afterwards?’ inquired his opponent, with the utmost seriousness.

    ‘Turn him out of the café!’ shouted the disconcerted bully. ‘ I cannot answer for my rage ; something dreadful will occur — murder done — or — ‘

    ‘Petty larceny committed,’ added the speaker, turning to the crowd. The first time I saw this cheat and rascal,’ he continued, ‘was in the felon’s dock at Bow-street. I thought I knew him when I arrived at Dinant. Although he has got himself up exceedingly well for the part he has been playing, I am now convinced that he is the same miserable scamp.’

    ‘You shall hear from me in the morning,’ repeated the pretended captain. ‘If I remain, rage and indignation at his insolent assertions will choke me. ‘

    ‘This,’ said the young Englishman, giving him a kick, ‘to remind you of your promise.’

    The kick was repeated. The exposed scamp fairly took to his heels, and escaped across the square.

    ‘A resolute fellow,’ whispered Clarence to the squire; ‘might be useful in our own affair.’

    His confederate nodded assent, and it was agreed to invite him to supper.

    Thus it was that the quiet, unpretending young man made the acquaintance of his fellow countrymen.

    This edition © 2019 Furin Chime, Michael Guest

    Notes

    rascally Jew: Please see my brief consideration of historical anti-Semitism in Chapter 14. In no instance does Smith himself express anti-semitic attitudes, apart from attributing them to characters whom he valorizes negatively.

    ricketty: Alt. spelling “rickety”

    the world is still deceived by ornament: Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, 3.2: “The world is still deceived with ornament” (Bassanio).

    crown o’ the causeway: The middle of the street. Fine Dictionary.

    Eclipse race: Horse race established at Sandown Park, 1886, named after a famous 18th century racehorse. Now known as the “Coral-Eclipse.” Contemporary newspaper results of the inaugural race here.

  • J.F. Smith’s Mystery of the Marsh — Twentieth Instalment

    J.F. Smith’s Mystery of the Marsh — Twentieth Instalment

    Sometimes the anomalies in a text can provide a starting point to explore possibilities of meaning that aren’t immediately evident. The first such a one in this chapter is striking: Smith’s misquotation from Romeo and Juliet, which ought to read:

    These violent delights have violent ends,
    And in their triumph die. (2.6)

    An erroneous word, “transports,” conceals both the true terms “delights” and “triumph,” as though they fall into a conceptual blind spot. “Transports” is a distinct concept from the others, denoting the sense of an ecstatic loss of control, which is absent from the actual terms. At the same time, it is illogical that “transports” (of caprice) die in their own “transports,” as the misquotation circularly proposes. The quote seems to summon the virtues of self-restraint, but in a mere rhetorical gesture, one that lacks sufficient conviction even to check the logic.

    We assume that an alternative species of love will endure — “true, manly passion” he calls it. An issue of true love flows beneath the ensuing narration of the perennial courtship ritual, reenacted by two youthful couples. The narrator’s perspective, which he assumes the reader will share, is self-assured and authoritative — one of disengagement, having access to the superior wisdom of age. Just as pointedly, the narrator’s point of view is one of retrospection, that of an elderly man looking back upon his own youth, and applying to the young those realizations beyond their grasp, which can only be acquired with time and life-experience.

    Such an ever-so-slight but unmistakably condescending tone colours the narrative, this erroneous word “transports” loaded with a pejorative sense of “ecstasis” — a being beside oneself, being taken or stepping outside the self, as in a rapture or trance: a danger to which youth is singularly vulnerable in matters of sexual love. The courtship and fate of Romeo and Juliet exemplify the transcendence and peril. (Let’s overlook the later underwhelming allusion to Juliet assigned to Lady Kate: “Parting is always sad.”)

    A further anomaly is the conspicuous mention made of the Greek lyric poet Anacreon (c. 582 – c. 485 BC), whose brows were “crowned with snow,” says the narrator (in Anacreonic mode), when he wrote his love poetry, though the topic is the young William Whiston’s attempt to express his passion to Kate in verse — but not only in verse. Anacreon’s relevance would appear to be not so much to Willie, however, as to the narrator, as a proxy for Smith himself, who finds himself here “cheering his age” with the remembered sweetness of past love.

    We can assume a degree of familiarity with Anacreon on the part of Smith’s ideal reader. Thomas Moore’s (1779 – 1852) Odes of Anacreon, Translated into English Verse with Notes (1800) spawned a vogue of ‘Anacreonics’ — the art of imitating Anacreon — among further Irish and English poets, expanding a more minor European tradition that went back several centuries, an ancient tradition of erotic verse. Poets of such significance as Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth took one interest or another in the Greek, who was “one of the original lyricists of wine, women and song” (Jane Moore passim.)

    For a sample, let’s see Thomas Moore’s translation of Ode XVII, as illustrated by the French Anacreonic translator and artist Girodet de Roussy (1767 – 1824), said to have captured the essence:

    Now the star of day is high,
    Fly, my girls, in pity fly,
    Bring me wine in brimming urns,
    Cool my lip, it burns, it burns!
    Sunn’d by the meridian fire,
    Panting, languid I expire!
    Give me all those humid flowers,
    Drop them o’er my brow in showers.
    Scarce a breathing chaplet now
    Lives upon my feverish brow;

    Every dewy rose I wear
    Sheds its tears and withers there.
    But for you, my burning mind!
    Oh! what shelter shall I find?
    Can the bowl, or floweret’s dew,
    Cool the flame that scorches you?

    Here Anacreon, like Smith’s narrator, facilitates the encounters of two imagined couples, except in an explicitly voyeuristic rite, all the signifiers in free play. Symbolism of humid flowers, burning of lips, scorching of flames, wearing of dewy roses. Nothing like a good orgy in the middle of the day.

    Turning now to the more prosaic scene, structured by Victorian proprieties, we are a little sensitive to the fluttering hearts, a smouldering subtext beneath the cut and thrust of Lord Bury and Clara’s repartee and ripostes, undercurrents of love yet undeclared. Similarly in the circular drawing-room, William’s love sings his Anacreonic lyrics, his urge to break out of the restrictions placed upon his burgeoning passion.

    It’s more in keeping with the Smith we have come to know, the wine-imbibing Bohemian wanderer. Not the fuddy-duddy uncle who sits “playing propriety,” putting a damper on this youthful excitation, but that wag who blew up the Mississippi river boat and elevated a printer’s devil.

    Wine, women and song? Hell, you can drink and sing any time.

    CHAPTER TWENTY

    A Lesson on Prudence — Clara Meredith’s Defence of her Friends — Love Vs the Absurd Teachings of the World

    When a man begins to feel puzzled as to the nature of his feelings towards a woman, we may feel assured that something akin to love is mingling-with them. He may not be conscious of it; in fact, we very much doubt if any male creature was ever yet perfectly aware of the heart’s entanglement till the net had become too strong for its meshes to be broken.

    In speaking thus of love, of course it is to be understood that we are describing it in the true, manly, common sense of the word, not of those sudden caprices to which Shakespeare alludes when he says

    These violent transports have violent ends,
    And in their transports die.

    Lord Bury began to feel a strong but, as he conceived, purely platonic friendship for his cousin Clara. There had been no attempt to catch him, no efforts to attract; great points in the lady’s favor. Although, like most young men, a great admirer of beauty, it ceased to charm as soon as it becomes demonstrative; like the magnet, it had two poles — one to attract, the other to repel.

    His lordship was fastidious in his tastes, as might naturally be expected from his education and the surroundings of his youth. Fortunately he possessed a safeguard in those high principles which most certainly he had not imbibed from his father, whose profligate example failed to corrupt him, as an overdose of poison sometimes fails to destroy life from its excess.

    Clara Meredith and Lord Bury were conversing in the conservatory at Montague House, whilst their cousin, Lady Kate, was giving a lesson in music to William Whiston, now a constant visitor in the circular drawing-room, where Martha, who shared the peril and flight of her young mistress, was seated at a distance to play propriety.

    ‘Hush!’ said Clara, interrupting the conversation with her cousin. ‘How perfectly their voices blend together!’

    ‘Too perfectly!’ observed gentleman, dryly.

    ‘Bury,’ replied the lady, ‘that is really the first ungenerous word I ever heard you utter. I thought you liked her preserver.’

    ‘And so I do,’ continued her cousin, ‘like him for his perfectly unaffected manners, his plucky perseverance at the university — the studies would have killed me — the reputation he has already acquired, and his fixed determination to win a name.’

    ‘Win a name!’ repeated Clara. ‘Why he has one already.’

    ‘Ah, indeed!’

    ‘And you know it as well as I do — William Whiston.’

    ‘I cannot find it in the Herald’s books,’ observed his lordship.

    ‘Possibly,’ said Miss Meredith; ‘he wishes to avoid bad company — a great many bad names there. Seriously,’ she added, ‘you are ungenerous — unlike yourself.’

    ‘You think that I am naturally generous then?’

    ‘Yes,’ replied Clara, ‘when you speak and act for yourself, I mean your real self, and not from the prejudices of the world. Why should he not be received here? The service he rendered Kate was immense; his family is respectable, his character without reproach, his talents undeniable.’

    In the warmth of her defence of the absent the speaker had risen from her seat and was about to leave the conservatory.

    ‘Come and sit by me again,’ said his lordship. ‘We must not quarrel; that would be too absurd. Let us talk reasonably.’

    Clara Meredith silently complied with his request, yet felt angry with herself for doing so.

    ‘Thanks,’ said her cousin. ‘I knew you would not judge me unheard.

    ‘But I have heard you —’

    ‘Only partially,’ continued the gentleman. ‘Recollect there are two sides to every medal.’

    ‘And to most faces,’ added her cousin.

    ‘An epigram!’ exclaimed her cousin, archly.

    ‘I did not intend it for one,’ continued Clara. ‘Merely an observation. You know I never can disguise my thoughts, and would not if I could, unless to avoid giving pain to these I love,’ she added.

    The young guardsman began to feel a wish to be one of those she alluded to.

    ‘Clara,’ he said, ‘I cannot endure to be misjudged by those whom I respect. Listen to me calmly.’

    He took her hand in his, and the heart of the young girl began to flutter wildly.

    ‘It is not our fault,’ resumed the speaker, ‘that we are born in the rank and privileged station that we hold in the world.’

    ‘Nor our merit,’ was the reply.

    ‘Granted,’ said his lordship. ‘But having been born to them, it is our duty to fulfil the obligations they impose upon us.’

    ‘Some of them. A broad charity in estimating the worth of others, and a helping hand not only to the poor and humble, but to all who by cultivation, intellect and honourable industry are seeking to escape the trammels of prejudice, the worldly jealousies which would cuff down rising merit, clip the wings of the young eaglet, to prevent its soaring to these nobler heights where fortune’s owls are perched in idle security.’

    ‘These are strange doctrines,’ observed her hearer, ‘for one of your age and sex.’

    ‘I cannot help it, coz. They come naturally to me.’

    Lord Bury rose from his seat, paced the length of the conservatory, then turned and reseated himself by the side of the speaker.

    ‘You approve, then,’ he said, in calm, dispassionate tones, ‘in your cousin, Lady Kate Kepple, the last descendant of an ancient and noble race, falling in love with William Whiston, the son of an obscure farmer? I grant that he is honourable; not a speck upon his reputation. I have ascertained that.’

    ‘I am not aware that there is yet any question of love between them,’ answered his hearer.

    ‘Aye, but there is, or at the very least a danger. I have watched them closely, Clara. His tongue may have been mute — I trust it has — but his eyes, those windows of the soul, are eloquent. He will declare himself,’ he added, ‘and that is the danger I wish to guard against. You, too, have seen it. It is useless to deny it. I have watched you both.’

    Clara Meredith began to feel extremely embarrassed. The words of the speaker were not without influence on her prejudices. Education was to blame for that. But they failed to shake her principles. There she felt firm as the rock of reason on which they were based. Conversion at the swiftest is but a slow process, the world has so many ties to draw us back, to stifle our best instincts. Clara was too truthful to deny the uneasiness she had long felt on her cousin’s account. As yet she knew nothing, if she feared much. She felt that the speaker was treading upon treacherous ground, so, with true feminine instinct, she hastened to change the position.

    ‘I am perfectly satisfied,’ she said, ‘that Kate will never disgrace herself by contracting an improper marriage.’

    Lord Bury smiled. He was not much of a logician, but he detected the ruse.

    ‘An alliance with meanness, with vulgarity, sordid interest. She has a sensitive nature; pride almost equal to your own, Egbert. None but a true heart could win her.’

    ‘I am as firmly convinced of that as you are,’ observed her cousin. ‘Whiston possesses the quality you name. I do him that justice. Were he a mere scheming adventurer, I should feel perfectly easy on our cousin’s account. More, he is gifted with rare talents, and that still rarer quality, perseverance. Therefore I fear him,’ he added.

    ‘As a rival, perhaps.’

    ‘Pshaw!’ ejaculated his lordship, impatiently. ‘You know me better than that. I never thought of Kate on my own account.’

    ‘What is it you fear, then?’

    ‘A misalliance in our family.’

    ‘Oh, you men! you men!’ exclaimed Clara, impatiently, ‘with your pride of rank, your worship of a mere accident, your absurd veneration for musty parchments and the Herald’s blazon! You laugh at our sex — the weaker one, as you insolently term us — for our love of bric-a-brac, majolica, Sevres, antique lace and niello, whilst with admirable inconsistency, you bow down before idols which have not even artistic beauty to recommend them.’

    ‘If you advocate Kate’s cause so warmly, I shall begin to think you share her weakness.’

    ‘That was a most ungenerous thrust,’ observed the lady coldly, ‘and unlike yourself, because it was discourteous. If there is one quality more than another which I like in you,’ she added, ‘it is your perfect tone and manner with women.  I should regret being compelled to change the opinion I have formed of you; very sorry.’

    His lordship felt the reproof all the more from the consciousness that he had merited it. He was gratified also by the compliment with which she had withdrawn the sting.

    ‘Let us change the subject,’ he said. ‘I perceive I shall not have you for an ally. Let what will happen, we must remain fast friends, coz. I cannot afford to lose you and Kate; it would leave a void in my existence greater than you dream of.’

    Clara blushed at the words — which might have meant much or nothing. Reflection — for she had a very humble opinion of her attractions — convinced her of the latter. Still, she treasured them in her memory.

    Whilst the above conversation was taking place in the conservatory, one far more eloquent, because far less worldly, occurred in the circular drawing-room, where Lady Kate Kepple and our hero had been practising a duet together. William was about to return to the university, and each knew that nearly a year would elapse before they met again.

    Poetry and music are the keys of the heart — fortunately, there is sometimes a third one, which fetters its voice in silence — prudence; not that it is always sufficiently strong to guard the tongue from uttering the words that quiver on the lips of a true, manly passion. Feeling often becomes too powerful to be governed by self -imposed restraints. A look, a sigh, and, still more frequently, a tear, will break the strongest resolution. In age we can reason on these things calmly, else it would be impossible to describe them truly.

    The brows of Anacreon were crowned with snow when he wrote his passionate love-verses. The realities had passed; but the dream, like the exquisite perfume of some precious flower, remained to cheer his age with its remembered sweetness.

    From Ode XX: “Sing, sing of love, let music’s breath / Softly beguile our rapturous death.”

    William, who had won the chancellor’s medal for the prize poem the preceding year, wrote a few lines on the subject of his approaching departure, which, in a rough, unscientific way, no doubt, he contrived to set to music, then sent them to Lady Kate, modestly requesting her to correct the music for him.

    ‘Artful,’ we hear some of our fair readers exclaim. Perhaps it was; but, if so, it was artfulness without craft— the artfulness of nature. It is scarcely necessary to add that the grateful girl complied with his request — the words touched her more than she would like to have confessed, and the simple, unskilled melody to which the youthful author had set them haunted her. Were it averred that she murmured it even in her sleep, we should scarcely doubt it.

    This was the composition, which had so strongly excited the suspicions of Lord Bury and created considerable uneasiness in the mind of Clara Meredith, who knew the world and shrank from its sneers, although in a just cause she felt that she could brave them.

    ‘I think I have succeeded,’ observed Lady Kate, when the poet hesitatingly presented himself in the drawing-room. ‘I have arranged it as a duetto.’

    ‘The very thing I most desired.’

    ‘You can look it over,’ added the fair girl, pointing to the sheet of music upon the pianoforte; ‘afterwards we will try it.’

    Little did she suspect the snare she had prepared for her own heart.

    Sufficient to add that the arrangement was gratefully approved of, and they commenced singing together:

    Farewell! Farewell! I would not fling
    Around thy brow the veil of sorrow;
    Brightly for thee the morn shall spring,
    And mirth and music wait thy morrow.

    I dare not leave one parting token,
    Or breathe a sigh of vain regret;
    Dream not the word I leave unspoken,
    Or if thou dost, thy dream forget.

    The poet seeks his cloistered hall,
    Thy home will still be beauty’s bower;
    Should memory his strains recall,
    Forgive the madness of the hour.

    Twice had the youthful singers repeated the strain which betrayed the feelings they dared not express. On the last occasion the rich voice of our hero trembled with emotion, but with a strong effort he mastered himself, and a silence more dangerous than words ensued. Kate was the first to break it. Strange to say, she had been more successful in suppressing all outward signs of agitation than the youth who so truly and, as he believed, hopelessly loved her; that exquisite reserve and sensitive modesty which are a girl’s best safeguards restrained her, for William had never hinted at his passion before — he considered it hopeless, and no true woman ever yet could bring herself to acknowledge she had, unsought, been won.

    Kate was the first to speak.

    ‘Parting is always sad,’ she observed, ‘especially from those we esteem; but you must not feel its pangs too keenly. Consider it but a cloud obscuring the bright morning of your young life. Your good, kind uncle, who loves you like a son I am certain, views the separation as I do. The cloud will pass,’ she added, attempting to force a smile, ‘and all be fair again.’

    ‘I was not thinking of my uncle,’ observed our hero; ‘and yet I feel most grateful to him. I shall find him unchanged on my return, even should I disappoint his expectations.’

    ‘Doubting yourself, Willie,’ resumed the object of his thoughts. ‘Is not that unwise? Why even I, who am a poor, weak girl, possess more courage and hopefulness than that. I am not a judge of such things, but every one tells me the highest honours of the university are within your reach; and in this land, where there are no barriers of caste that may not be surmounted, we know what they lead to. I speak not of wealth, but of the world’s consideration, respect from the respected. The senate and the bar have long been ruled by men who won their way as you will do.’

    ‘They have ceased to attract me,’ observed her hearer, sadly. ‘I have fixed my heart upon a prize so immeasurably above my reach that even hope is denied me, like the golden apples of the fabled garden, it hangs so high above my reach I can only gaze wistfully at a distance. Life,’ he added, ‘has lost its best incentive to exertion.’

    ‘Patience,’ said Kate, scarcely conscious of the import of the words she uttered, ‘patience and perseverance, and the branches will descend to you, borne down by the weight of their fruit.’ Then, as the sudden flush, the flashing eyes of her lover betrayed the construction he placed upon her speech, broke upon her mind, she hid her face in her hands.

    In an instant he was at her feet, pouring forth a torrent of impassioned words all the more eloquent for having been so long restrained. We cannot trust our pen to repeat the words in which he clothed his feelings; they would appear cold and vapid to those who never felt the pangs of a true love, whilst to those who have felt them they are unnecessary.

    A true passion, like Proteus, takes many forms, but the same soul animates each. Love is a mighty lord indeed; gentle as a child, despotic as an autocrat by turns. Poor Kate had resolved to be very reasonable — in fact, she had been so; for what can be a higher exercise of reason than to place our affections worthily!

    ‘William,’ she murmured, as he buried her blushing face upon his bosom, ‘I did not mean to betray myself. You will think me very weak.’

    ‘Angel!’

    ‘But I could not endure to see you so unhappy.’

    ‘Angel!’ repeated her lover, as his arm stole around her waist, and he imprinted a kiss, the first of love he had ever given upon her yielding lips, sealing her as it were to himself, and to himself alone.

    ‘Kate,’ he whispered fondly, ‘you will not mar the immeasurable happiness of an hour like this by one regretful thought?’

    ‘I feel none,’ came a gently murmuring voice.

    ‘From the hour we first met I loved you,’ continued Willie, ‘although I knew not what love meant. Saw you nightly in my dreams, and felt impatient of the garish day till slumber should return, bringing the blissful vision back to my sight again. I believed you to be poor — poorer even than myself. It was for your sake I wasted the midnight oil, striving to win a name to offer you, and a fortune to protect you. Oh! how, these thoughts sustained me; hope and courage both were high within me; but when the truth was made apparent, and I saw how immeasurably you were placed above me, despair took possession of my heart, its energies died out— all but its love had faded.’

    ‘Dwell not on such sad fancies,’ replied the now happy girl — happy despite her tears. ‘There can be no inequality where love is mutual.’

    ‘Bless you, dearest, for these words,’ said her lover. ‘You know not the strength they have given me; the steady will of manhood has returned, and I will yet win a name that shall justify your choice in the eyes of your friends, your family and the world.’

    ‘I care not for the last,’ observed Lady Kate Kepple. ‘My choice is made; my heart is given; the faith that accompanies them can never change. We are both young, and must wait till you have finished your career at college. Should it prove successful, none will hail your triumph more truly than myself. Should it fail you,’ she added, ‘my heart and hand shall still be yours.’

    With such a prospect, and an angel’s promises to cheer him, no wonder that our hero returned to Cambridge a happy man.

    This edition © 2019 Furin Chime, Michael Guest

    Notes, Reference and Further Reading

    play propriety: An older term: ‘play the chaperone’, in a sense

    Herald’s books: Records of heraldry, family pedigrees.

    golden apples of the fabled garden: The myth of Tantalus, whom the gods punished by immobilizing him in the royal garden next to an enchanted apple tree, whose branches would move away each time he reached for one. Note that apples traditionally symbolize the female’s breasts,  which motivates Kate’s double entendre about the apples descending.

    Proteus: Note that Proteus, the Greek god of change, is also an elderly figure.

    Moore, Jane. ‘Thomas Moore, Anacreon and the Romantic Tradition’. Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 21 (2013): 30–52. Jump to pdf.

    Moore, Thomas, Trans. The Odes of Anacreon, with Fifty-Four Illustrative Designs by Girodet de Roussy (1869). Jump to html version at gutenburg.org

    The Works of Anacreon, Sappho, and Musaeus. Translated from the Greek by Francis Fawkes (1810)
    (Includes a section on the life of Anacreon as well as several odes). Jump to free ebook (Google).

    Roche, John B. The First Twenty-eight Odes of Anacreon, In Greek and in English, and in Both Languages, in Prose as Well as in Verse : with Variorum Notes  a Grammatical Analysis, and a Lexicon (1827). Jump to free ebook (Google).

    Hunt, Leigh. ‘Anacreon’, in Arthur Symons, ed., Essays by Leigh Hunt 1887: 169-173. Facsimile available at Internet Archive. Jump to page.

  • J.F. Smith’s Mystery of the Marsh — Nineteenth Instalment

    J.F. Smith’s Mystery of the Marsh — Nineteenth Instalment

    Philosophical Victorian John Stuart Mill considered his era an “age of transition.” Certain critical transitions, such as those we touched upon in the previous instalment, were visited by the industrial revolution.

    British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner’s (1920-33) idea of liminality is worthy of a mention in the context. It refers to a “betwixt and between” mode of being, “a limbo of statuslessness” that is integral to a ritualistic process of accession — a rite of passage leading to a structured, approved mode of social status.

    Enter Smith’s “Bitterns’ Marsh”, a disorientating space, cast as historically and socially indeterminate, if tending towards pre-historical and pre-civilized poles. The marsh borders both London and its rural neighbours, a component part of neither country nor city. Here we cross over an invisible line, into a mysterious, mystical zone inhabited by outsiders, a place of immorality, criminality, and suspect economies; smugglers and fugitives from the law; a place of dark superstition. It is a liminal zone, with no roads apart from foot-tracks through treacherous peat bogs — a regular Slough of Despond.

    The flora and fauna are ancient and bordering on extinction: giant oaks that perhaps — how may one know? — shielded the Druids from the advance of the Romans based at Colchester (in anticipation, perhaps, of the ‘Druid of Colchester,’ whose remains from 40–60 AD rested undiscovered till 1996?). In Smith’s day, you may have been lucky enough to observe the endangered great auks and grey woodpeckers “worth ten pounds each to the collector.” The great auk (Pinguinus impennis) was hunted out in the mid-19th century.

    Great Auk. Extracted from C.B. Beach, ed., New Student’s Reference Work (Chicago: Compton, 1914). Source: Wikimedia Commons

    Bechstein’s guide Chamber Birds (1848) refers to the “grey woodpecker” only by way of a single-page running header, above content pertaining to its 57th entry, the “Green Woodpecker”, Picus viridus, with no further entries until the 58th specimen, the “Great Spotted Woodpecker”, Picus major; so I suspect that running header to be a misprint.

    The location of the Essex Marshes presents a portal to the Continent. A transient bark lies anchored off the banks of the marsh, enabling the fictional entrance and exit from the scene, of characters possessing such opposing sets of traits they almost seem to pursue trajectories of charged particles. On the one hand, a greedy landed bully and cheat makes off to France; on the other, a youth of exemplary courage and bravery — despite  his wretched origins in the Marsh — returns in disguise as a Breton sailor, to undertake a perilous but virtuous mission.

    According to Turner, “liminal personae” or “threshold people” like these

    … elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions.

    The Ritual Process, 95

    On the historical scale, martello towers erected in the vicinity of the Nore sandbank at the mouth of the Thames, to prevent Napoleon Bonaparte from blockading and choking London, memorialize national anxieties. The towers became inhabited by “lawless outcasts” who “flocked” to the region like the bitterns themselves.

    Terms defining the Marsh, this “wild tract of land”, suggest the ritual transition encoded in the story, as progress towards an enlightened and civilized future, from a past with ancient murky roots. These are broad, accessible dimensions that resonate with a mass audience and exemplify J.F. Smith’s appeal as a grand popular storyteller and polymath.

    Mouth of the Thames, showing the Nore sandbank and Essex banks. Source: A Vision of Britain Through Time.

    CHAPTER NINETEEN

    A Slight Description of the Bitterns’ Marsh — Burcham’s Escape to Dinant, where he Meets with an Associate Worthy of Him — The Mutual Understanding and a Compact

    Many of our readers no doubt consider it high time they should be made acquainted with the topography of the Bittern’s Marsh, to which lone spot Squire Burcham had been so cleverly inveigled. Moses, the money lender, and his sleeping partner, Lawyer Brit, were cunning in their generation, troubled with few scruples, and these limited to personal considerations for their own safety. Their client, or, as they facetiously termed him, their pigeon, was only half-plucked, his estate involved to little more than a third of its value. The interest — highly usurious — formed no inconsiderable portion of the money advanced. It is the curse of avarice that the thirst of gain destroys the sense of prudence. Vice and dissipation share in the weakness, and thus folly and craft play into each other’s hands. The human spiders rejoiced at first at their success. Soon it appeared insignificant; they thirsted for the whole estate.

    Their dupe, without entertaining any very clear perception of their design, had hitherto resisted every attempt of Brit to obtain the receivership of his property, which still remained in the hands of the old family steward. This was embarrassing, and the conspiracy came to a standstill till an act of positive fraud, committed by their victim, revived their hopes.

    On the death of his aunt, Squire Burcham found himself dreadfully pressed for money. Creditors were impatient; miscalled debts of honor had to be paid, and what was stronger still with him, vicious habits to be indulged in. In his philosophy of life it never entered into his calculations that Clara Meredith would reject him, or her father forego the opportunity of consolidating his political interests in the country by uniting the estates. Under these convictions he wrote a letter to the money-lender — who made difficulties respecting further advances — in which he stated that the lady had accepted him, and the marriage delayed only till a fitting time from the death of his aunt had elapsed.

    This was something, but not sufficient to answer the purposes of the crafty firm, and the supplies asked for were again refused.

    In an evil hour for himself he forged a letter from Clara, in which she was made to accept his offer, and placed the document in the hands of Moses.

    The cash was advanced.

    Experience teaches us that in the affairs of life one entanglement generally leads to another. Moses very soon intimated his knowledge of the crime that had been committed, and as the price of his forbearance demanded that the estate should be placed in his hands. The eyes of his dupe at last were opened, and the condition refused with that dogged obstinacy which neither threats nor danger could shake. Lawyer Brit, who, as our readers are aware, was the real head of the firm of usurers, found himself placed in a difficult position. He could not appear in the affair himself, and the reputation of his partner was so bad that he hesitated to place him in the witness-box. True, he could destroy the reputation of the squire, but it would be at the risk of certain ugly truths creeping out.

    In this dilemma he thought of The Bitterns’ Marsh. Blackmore and he were old acquaintances, and he was not unfamiliar with the affairs of Viscountess Allworth. In fact, he regarded her as one of his most profitable clients.

    We have already shown the ruse by which the half-plucked pigeon had been drawn into the toils and taken, with Benoni to act the spy upon his proceedings, to the Bitterns’ Marsh.

    Bittern advancing through water amongst reeds. Coloured woodcut, 1921. Source: British Museum
    A bittern advancing through water amongst reeds. Colour woodcut print. Allen William Seaby (1882-1914). Source: British Museum

    Now, then, to fulfil our promise, and give our readers something like a description of the Bitterns’ Marsh.

    This wild tract of land — for even to the hour of writing no attempt worthy of the name has been made to reclaim it — runs for several miles along the Essex coast parallel with the river Thames till it reaches the Nore, where the river is not only sufficiently wide but deep enough for vessels of large size to lie at anchor and blockade the port of London. To prevent such a catastrophe England, during her wars with the first Napoleon, caused to be constructed a number of martello towers along the banks. They were circular buildings of considerable strength, and in the then state of artillery capable of offering a stout resistance to any invading force. Deep wells within the walls supplied the inhabitants with water, and the ground floors consisting entirely of vaults for storing ammunition and provisions. Windows there were none, properly speaking, but merely loop-holes for the guns, and to admit light and air. The only mode of entrance or egress to or from these towers was a strong iron postern, some ten or twelve feet from the ground. In fact, the entire buildings were fire-proof. On the termination of the war they were suffered to fall into decay, government having no further use for them — a fate from which only a few of the larger ones escaped, and these were seized upon by the lawless outcasts who gradually came flocking into the Marsh.

    During the shooting season they received sportsmen, who, attracted by the enormous quantity of wild fowl and fish, ventured into the district to procure supplies for the London markets. Smuggling, however, as we stated in an earlier number, constituted the chief resource of the inhabitants.

    Fringe of the Marshes. Extracted from Rivers of Great Britain: The Thames, from Source to Sea (Cassell & Co., 1891).
    Fringe of the Marshes. Extracted from Rivers of Great Britain: The Thames, from Source to Sea (Cassell & Co., 1891).

    Extending some eight or ten miles inland lay the dreary, solitary marsh, intersected by pools of stagnant water, as well as by several living streams abounding in trout. There were no regular roads — foot-tracks, nothing more; even these were dangerous from the treacherous patches of bog and peat, which doubtless concealed the bodies of many a plundered victim enticed by curiosity or the love of adventure into the dreary maze.

    The author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, we suspect, must have taken his description of the Slough of Despond from such a place. In his early years he had been a travelling tinker, and possibly might have visited it.

    To all but the sportsman or the naturalist, the Bitterns’ Marsh presents a scene of savage desolation. The latter will find it rich in specimens of birds and insects, which, if not extinct are now extremely rare. The grey woodpecker and great auk, who are worth ten pounds each to the collector, may still be found there, but only in the wildest recesses, where are giant oaks, beneath whose gloomy branches the Druids possibly found shelter, when driven by the advance of the Romans from the neighbouring station of Colchester, one of their principal seats.

    Of course there are sparse patches of land rudely cultivated, and here and there something like a garden may be seen. The only manufactures of the inhabitants are guns, fishing-rods, and coarse attempts at cloth, woven by the women, of unbleached wool and the hair of goats; the men, however, disdain this latter occupation. Some vague traditions of religion may still be found amongst these wretched people, but schools and chapels they have not. And yet they live within less than a day’s journey from the richest city in the world, in a country boastful of its civilisation, proud of its universities and wealthy establishments.

    Hadleigh Castle near the Nore (1832), cropped. John Constable and David Lucas. Source: Tate.

    Such an abode and such surroundings soon began to tell upon the hitherto stubborn resolution of Squire Burcham. Entire loneliness, facilities for drink, no moral principles to sustain him, began to do their work. He felt himself gradually breaking down, and he resolved to fly. Having still some money left, he watched his opportunity, which soon presented itself. A bark from Dinant — a town on the north coast of France, about twelve miles from the port of St. Malo — lay anchored off the banks of the Bitterns’ Marsh. It was manned by Bretons, a hardy, half-savage race, yet not without some redeeming qualities. The prisoner — for such he actually was — had too much prudence to betray the slightest curiosity respecting this foreign vessel or the picturesque-looking crew which commanded it. Benoni, who suffered quite as much from ennui as the poor dupe he was employed to watch, had to propose a walk to the banks twice before the latter carelessly assented.

    ‘He cannot hold out much longer,’ said the master, as he watched them from his dreary abode. ‘The fool has no mental resources; hates books, as if there were anything else in the world, worth caring for. He must soon give way, and then for my share of the spoil.’

    ‘Not so soon as you expect, master!’ exclaimed a shrill, querulous voice behind him.

    Blackmore turned hastily round, and recognised in the speaker the aged woman who had so long kept house for him. During his temporary residence at Deerhurst he had not taken her with him. He required some one to take charge of his home in the Marsh. Her presence there he knew would be sufficient protection, seeing that the inhabitants stood in considerable awe of her, not for her strength, for she was weak as a child, and could only support her tottering steps by means of a staff, which, whenever she stopped to speak to anyone, she clasped with both her long bony hands. Many winters must have passed over her head, but although her hair was white as snow, her cold blue eyes appeared bright and clear. At times, too, they were lit with a strange intelligence.

    ‘Ah, Nance, is that you?’ said her master. ‘Why, you came upon me like a noiseless shadow.’

    ‘The shadows of your evil deeds,’ observed the woman, ‘like the heavy mists which rise sullenly and unceasingly from the stagnant waters of the Marsh. I see them gathering round you. The end is drawing near.’

    Her hearer laughed quietly, as he regarded her with an air of mingled surprise and amusement.

    ‘You forget, Nance,’ he said, ‘that it was I who taught you how to act the character you have so successfully assumed — half sibyl and half sorceress. That it was I who showed you the properties of the plants which calm the raging fever, lull the distracting pains of the burning rheumatism, still the chattering ague fit, and so establish an influence over the superstitious dwellers of the Marsh.

    ‘Would you turn the lessons I imparted against your instructor?’ he added.

    ‘I owe you no gratitude,’ replied the woman, sadly. ‘It was to serve your own purposes you trained me, You owed me some compensation for driving from my side the only being who cared for me.’

    ‘I did not force him to leave,’ said the schoolmaster, gloomily. ‘Perhaps it was unwise. I should have kept him here under my own eyes.’

    ‘To train him like yourself!’ ejaculated the woman, scornfully. ‘Such were your first intentions. To make him a cold, heartless, selfish being, without love or human sympathy. But you failed. Benoni proved the more apt pupil of the two. Besides,’ continued the speaker, in a less excited tone — ‘besides, when you quitted the swamp to become schoolmaster of Deerhurst, it was necessary to arm the feeble hands that guarded your home with a weapon the lawless wretches round it would respect. You have returned to that home as the serpent returns to its den, doubtless to restore its half-exhausted venom.’

    ‘Let us not quarrel,’ observed Theophilus Blackmore. ‘Words are a sign of weakness.’

    ‘I know that you prefer actions,’ answered Nancy, sarcastically.

    ‘Did I not conceal and protect you?’

    ‘Because it served your purpose. I owe you no gratitude for that,’ said the former speaker, sullenly. ‘The debt is cancelled.’

    ‘Not yet,’ thought the schoolmaster, as he walked from the tower, taking the direction Benoni and Squire Burcham had pursued, for his mind began to misgive him concerning the intentions of the latter, and he felt anxious to keep an eye upon him. ‘These last affairs concluded, and I will take a receipt in full. I will. no longer be fooled by empty promises. The lease of the Bittern’s Marsh is worth but little to me. Lady Allworth must come to a settlement with me, or —’

    What the alternative might be he did not even mutter to himself.

    ‘It was unwise in me to speak as I did to him,’ said Nancy, half aloud; but when the heart is full the tongue at times forgets discretion. I had been thinking all the night of my poor boy. Last night I dreamt of him. I wonder if he still lives?’

    She seated herself at the foot of a gigantic boulder which some extraordinary convulsion of nature had torn from earth’s rocky entrails, and cast within a few yards of the spot where the martello tower stood. Moss-grown and partially covered with lichen, the huge stone might have served as a Druid altar when that mystic race fled before the advance of the conquering Romans.

    ‘Why — why is this?’ murmured the aged woman, unconscious of the tears that were trickling down her wrinkled cheeks. ‘It is not often that I permit myself to think of him. The feeling softens me. And yet today memory is continually conjuring up his image. I see him an infant as when Blackmore brought him senseless to this den, and placed him in my arms. I thought it a trouble, and felt angry till his little hands, as he recovered, clasped themselves around my neck. Then what a change came over me. A new sensation seemed born within my heart, and soon — very soon — I learned to love him.’

    Lost in these and similar reflections, Nancy became gradually so absorbed that she noticed not the approach of a young man in the garb of a Breton sailor — boots of untanned leather, short breeches — which might have been taken for a kilt, they were so widely cut — a red sash around the waist, and a jacket with double rows of buttons; a broad-brimmed hat drawn over his swarthy brows, with the usual accompaniment of a flower stuck in the brim, completed the costume of the stranger, whose appearance could scarcely be considered prepossessing, so dark were his features, and darker still the straight, long masses of hair which partially shaded them. As he neared the spot his steps became somewhat quicker, and his eye glanced rapidly round the scene till they rested on the form seated, or, rather, crouching at the foot of the boulder; then he paused as if to consider. If so, his mind was rapidly made up. and he resumed his walk till be stood within six or seven feet of the object of his curiosity.

    The woman, however, did not seem to notice him.

    ‘Good mother,’ he said at last, speaking in the Breton tongue.

    There was no reply.

    At last he repeated the words in English; but not till he had looked carefully around him.

    At the second sound of his voice Nancy started to her feet, and stood for more than a minute gazing upon him in silence.

    ‘I am the fool of my own fancies,’ she muttered at last. ‘The echo buried in my old heart is no longer a truthful one.’

    ‘What would you?’ she said at last, in a tone of disappointment.

    ‘I hurt my arm,’ replied the sailor, ‘on board the cutter, which you can see at anchor yonder in the bay. Not a wound; merely a sprain. But it is a painful one. One of your neighbours, who came to assist in removing the cargo, told me to apply to you; boasted of your skill in herbs and roots, and so I made my way here. Do your best for me,’ he added, ‘and you shall have no reason to complain of the reward.’

    ‘I will do my best for you without fee or recompense. You have paid me already.’

    ‘I do not understand you, good mother,’ said the young man. ‘I have given you nothing yet.’

    ‘Paid me by a memory,’ added Nance, ‘and that is sufficient. Let me see your arm.’

    ‘Are we alone, Mother?’

    ‘God is with us,’ answered the woman, surprised, but not alarmed at the question. ‘I am poor; you would gain little by plundering me. Were you to murder me,’ she added, ‘the lawless inhabitants of the Bitterns’ Marsh would terribly avenge me.’

    ‘They love you, then?’

    ‘Not so,’ said the woman, coldly; ‘but I am of use to them; besides which they fear me.’

    ‘Surely you have done them no evil,’ observed the sailor.

    ‘I have done them naught but good,’ was the reply.

    ‘Then why should they fear you?’

    ‘Because they do not understand what good means. My skill in fevers, setting broken bones, in dressing wounds, my knowledge of herbs and plants appears to them something unholy — they cannot understand it; hence their dread of me. Some call me a witch — a few feel grateful; but not many. Come, show me your arm.’

    The man removed his jacket, which he placed upon the ground, and then commenced slowly to roll up the sleeve of his shirt. His hands — like his visage — appeared to be almost black, sunburnt and stained; but the arms showed white, almost as white as a woman’s.

    A cry of surprise burst from the lips of Nance.

    ‘It is you who are the sorcerer,’ she observed.

    ‘Look me full in the face, good mother,’ said the pretended patient, in a low, earnest tone, ‘and suppress all outward signs of joy or fear, whilst I explain this seeming riddle. Can you be firm?’ he added.

    ‘Try me.’

    ‘My face, hair, and hands are dyed.’

    ‘That I have already discovered.’

    ‘My skin, as you perceive, is fair — fair as the infant’s you received many years since, and bestowed upon him a mother’s love.’

    A half-suppressed cry of joy broke from the lips of his hearer.

    ‘Once more I ask you to be firm,’ continued the speaker. ‘There — grasp my arm, that, if curious eyes are watching our proceedings, it may seem you are examining my injury. And now,’ he said, satisfied that his instructions were understood, and would be followed, ‘look in my face and see if you cannot recognise some features of the boy you so befriended.’

    ‘Bunce!’ exclaimed Nance, eagerly.

    ‘Yes, that was the name old Blackmore gave me.’

    For several minutes the agitation of the woman, who had acted like a second mother to him, was so intense that she could only gasp out a word or two at intervals.

    ‘I — I knew that, if you lived, you would one day return to seek your old nurse. My heart is so full — but joy will not kill me. I should grow calm could I but once embrace you — feel that my joy was real.’

    ‘My second mother!’ exclaimed Bunce; ‘for you have acted like one to me.’

    ‘You must not,’ interrupted Nance, hastily. ‘Do not attempt it. An eye we cannot perceive may be at this moment watching us. You know not half the cunning of our enemy. There, I am stronger now.’

    ‘At least I may take your hand,’ observed the pretended sailor. ‘You can pretend to be examining my arm; the hurt is not a severe one.’

    Nance grasped the hand extended to her, and began to examine the injury. As she did so, the tears rolled down her withered cheeks. The arm appeared slightly inflamed from the elbow to the wrist.

    ‘I did it myself, good mother,’ said the speaker, ‘as an excuse for seeking you.’

    ‘The world has taught you a sad lesson,’ sighed the aged woman.

    ‘Suffering has,’ replied, the young man. ‘Dry your tears, and listen to me. Yonder I perceive Blackmore and his son; they are coming towards the tower. Collect yourself. We must contrive some way to meet again, for I have much to ask.’

    ‘Do you mind a little pain?’ asked Nance.

    ‘Try, my mother.’

    ‘I will retire to my den to procure you a lotion and a box of salve. The first will cool the heated blood; the second, produce the appearance of violent inflammation and increased pain. Use it only when you want an excuse to return here. The old man and Benoni will be sure to question you, for guilt is always suspicious. Mind that you answer only in the Breton tongue; and mind you banter with me on the price of my nostrum, for you must pay me,’ she added with a faint smile. ‘Am I understood?’

    ‘Clearly — clearly,’ answered Bunce.

    The woman caught up the staff which, in her agitation, she had let fall, and walked steadily towards the martello tower.

    When the schoolmaster and Benoni reached the spot where the sailor remained standing, calmly awaiting them, they eyed him, not exactly with suspicion, but curiosity; they appeared excited. Something had evidently occurred to annoy them both.

    ‘What seek you here?’ demanded the old man, sharply.

    Bunce shook his head, as if he did not comprehend the question.

    The question was repeated in the Breton tongue.

    ‘I have injured my arm,’ was the reply, ‘and the wise woman, to whom the captain sent me, has gone to prepare me a salve.’

    ‘Humph,’ ejaculated Blackmore. ‘But you will have to pay her. The wise woman, as you call her, knows the value of her drugs and simples.’

    ‘So I suppose,’ observed the patient, in a sullen tone, as if the prospect of payment was not an agreeable one.

    ‘Father!’ exclaimed Benoni, impatiently, ‘why waste time in prating with this fool? You forget that 1 must start with the news of Burcham’s escape at once, and you have your letter to write. Won’t Brit and Moses be furious!’

    ‘Let them,’ replied his patent. ‘I do not fear them; they are more in my power than I in theirs. Not another word. Here comes Nance with her drugs.’

    The woman soon joined them, with a bottle wrapped in paper and a box of salve in her hand.

    ‘Wash your arm with the liquid,’ she said, ‘and apply the salve only occasionally; but before I part with them, you must pay me.’

    A haggling ensued over the price, during which Nance and her patient acted their parts capitally; finally, they referred it to Blackmore, who fixed it at a crown, which the pretended seaman paid sullenly.

    ‘Too little,’ muttered Nance, ‘too little.’

    ‘As much as your nostrums are worth,’ said Benoni, laughingly.

    ‘How do you know what they are worth?’ demanded the woman, sharply; ‘wait till you have tried them.’

    ‘It will be a long time first,’ observed the former. ‘Your cooking is bad enough; still I can put up with that, but it will be a long time before I venture on your simples. Come father,’ he added, we have other matters more pressing than idle gossip to think of.’

    ‘The young serpent is wise,’ thought Nance, as father and son walked towards their abode. ‘He feels that I hate him. I have been often tempted — but, no, no,’ she added, ‘unless in self-defence, or to save my poor boy — their lives are safe.’

    ‘Should danger threaten him,’ she added, ‘let them beware.’

    With slow steps and a thoughtful brow she retraced her way to the tower.

    Although burning with impatience to obtain a second interview with the weird woman who, from his earliest recollection, had taken so singular an interest in his fate, Bunce restrained himself till the second day from visiting her at her dwelling. This time his arm was swarthy as the rest of his body, much swollen and inflamed. He had used the unguent Nance had given him.

    Blackmore had not the slightest suspicion of any secret understanding between them. Still he thought it best to witness their meeting, and tore himself away from his beloved Horace to see and hear what passed.

    Benoni had not yet returned from London.

    ‘Your skill has failed,’ observed the old man, with a smile. ‘The arm appears much worse.’

    ‘I expected it,’ replied Nance. ‘He has more crowns in his purse. I saw them when he paid me; and I intend to have them,’ she added.

    ‘Eager for gain as ever,’ said her master. ‘Attend to your patient; he begins to regard.us with suspicion. His faith in your nostrum is failing.’

    ‘This will revive it stronger than ever,’ answered the former, as she poured a portion of the cooling lotion on his arm.

    ‘How does it feel now?’ she added addressing her patient.

    ‘Better — much easier,’ replied Bunce; ‘but you see how it is swollen, and at night the pains are dreadful. I can scarcely bear them.’

    ‘The injury is more deeply seated than I thought,’ observed Nance. ‘I must prepare another salve.’

    ‘Will it take long, good mother?’

    ‘Nearly an hour. Why do you ask?’

    ‘Because the day is warm and I am tired with my walk. May I not rest awhile within your dwelling?’

    ‘Not for an instant,’ replied the woman, sharply. ‘The master and I receive no stranger beneath our roof. You can repose beneath the shadow of the boulder,’ she added, pointing to the huge rock where they had met previously when he made himself known to her.

    So well was the scene acted that Blackmore did not think it worth his while to listen to their further conversation, but returned to his favorite author; and with a warning glance to her patient to act prudently, Nance slowly hobbled after him.

    When she returned with her medicaments, she whispered as she gave them — for age is naturally cautious:

    ‘There is a packet beneath my ragged mantle; contrive to take it from me and conceal it under your jacket, but do not read the contents till you are safe on board your vessel, which sails tomorrow.’

    ‘How know you that?’

    ‘My means of information are certain. Now pay me,’ she added, ‘and speak the last sad word, farewell.’

    Poor Bunce felt deeply affected. He had not met with much kindness in his checkered path through life. The devotion and long-enduring love of the woman touched him.

    ‘Alas!’ he said, ‘should we never meet again you will never know how grateful I feel for all your kindness to your poor boy; and I may not even thank you —’

    ‘Not another word,’ interrupted Nance; ‘your enemy and mine — not that Blackmore is your greatest one — must not see a tear upon my withered cheek. It might set him thinking, and his thoughts are dangerous. We shall meet again,’ she added, ‘for God is just, and he owes us both that recompense. Now, then, the money, and depart.’

    The wanderer, in whom, from infancy, the weird woman had taken so strong an interest, had already possessed himself of the packet, Placing several crowns in her hand, he started for the bark.

    ‘God bless him,’ murmured Nance. ‘We will right him yet.’

    This edition © 2019 Furin Chime, Michael Guest

    Notes, References, Further Reading

    • cunning in their generation / drawn into the toils: Interesting old expressions, slightly elusive. The first may possibly resonate Luke 16:8 (“And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely: for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light”) with a substitution of “cunning” for “wisdom”. The consensus on the Biblical expression seems to be along the lines that the “children of this world” are wise(r) or (more) shrewd regarding the world around them, that is, wiser about “their own kind” (see various versions and interpretations at Biblehub). At the same time, “cunning in their generation” suggests that those in question are relatively more cunning than their peers. The expression “drawn into the toils” seems relatively self-explanatory as well, in the sense of “co-opted” or “conscripted”, with a recurrent usage being “drawn into the toils of error”.
    • simples: No, not that one. Rather: “simple: 2a: a medicinal plant; b: a vegetable drug having only one ingredient” (Merriam-Webster).

    Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (NY: Cornell UP, 1969).

    • On industrial revolution etc., see William Ralph Inge, “The Victorian Age,” Rede Lecture, Cambridge UP, 1922.
    • On liminality, see Sarah Gilead, “Liminality, Anti-Liminality and the Victorian Novel”, ELH, 53.1 (Spring 1986), 183-97.
    • On the Essex Marshes, see Herbert Winckworth Tompkins, Marsh-Country Rambles (London: Chatto & Windus, 1904). Available free at Internet Archive. Jump to title page.
    • Fringe of the Marshes (illustr.): N.A., Rivers of Great Britain: The Thames, from Source to Sea (Cassell & Co., 1891). Available free at Project Gutenberg. Jump to beginning.

     

  • J.F. Smith’s Mystery of the Marsh — Eighteenth Instalment

    J.F. Smith’s Mystery of the Marsh — Eighteenth Instalment

    In the previous chapter, Clara expresses her relief when William turns out to be a gentleman, as is borne out by the credentials printed on his card and his reputation as a scholar, which has become a matter of public knowledge. Lady Kate hadn’t doubted it, perhaps thanks to her greater sensitivity to him and his actions, or because her noble breeding better equips her to judge.

    The theme of interpreting gentleman-like virtues and qualities continues in the present chapter, incorporating a theme of etiquette. To be a Victorian gentleman, it would appear, requires an innate, transcendent trait of nobility, but as well, the ability to negotiate a finely-tuned symbolic system of ritual and convention, in order to be able to present oneself as a gentleman.

    On the other hand, Goliah seems to possess at least two innate virtues of the gentleman: honesty and bravery. Place him in a situation requiring a modicum of gentlemanly savoir faire, however, and he can’t measure up. He expresses himself with childlike spontaneity and needs a poke in the ribs to keep quiet. When Bunce insists that Goliah is a gentleman, that “It is the heart that gives the title. The rest is the mere gilding of the surface,” it is in a tone of kindly rhetoric. Goliah is clearly as yet a primitive if well-intended ‘unsuspecting rustic’ and comic relief, competent at only the most basic ropes.

    ‘Love Will Triumph’ (1900). Charles Haigh-Wood. Source: artnet.com

    But how should a gentleman behave in Lady Montague’s mansion on a social call? She is a stickler for the protocols. Why was the meeting in the park necessary in the first place? Did Lady Kate not repay his services with a gift? — which ought to be sufficient in the language of etiquette. Kate’s reply demonstrates her own finesse at interpreting and balancing symbolic actions and their meanings.

    There are actions which the most costly gifts cannot repay, but which a few kind words may amply recompense. Besides, she added, ‘Mr. Winston is a gentleman.’

    When a servant takes William’s card and ushers him to the morning-room, he is pitiably afflicted with confusion and doubt. Smith-narrator worries about what William will do with his hat, “that terrible test to young men”. Perhaps he should read something like that most useful guide,The Spirit of Etiquette; Or Politeness Exemplified, by Lady de S****** (London, 1837):

    On paying a morning call, keep your hat in your hand unless at the house of an intimate friend. If you leave it in the hall, it appears as though you intended staying; and unless you are very intimate with the party, it is a liberty.

    Or perhaps he has. A slew of such books appeared in the Victorian era, a more accessible variation on the previous “courtesy” genre, which had enjoyed currency since the Renaissance. Addressed to an aristocratic audience, courtesy books discoursed on manners as an expression of moral ideals (Curtin 411). The publication of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774) marked a turning point, attending to more pragmatic, outward, imitable issues, toward the ends of self-interest:

    Observe the shining part of every man of fashion, who is liked and esteemed; attend to and imitate that particular accomplishment for which you hear him chiefly celebrated and distinguished; then collect those various parts and make yourself a Mosaic of the whole.

    Henceforth the discussion of manners was disassociated from high culture and disdained by distinguished authors. In the pattern set by Chesterfield for his son, etiquette books addressed themselves to the upwardly mobile members of the burgeoning middle class. Those who had become financially successful now looked to rub shoulders with those of “le suprême bon ton,” to advance socially and hide their humble origins by assuming the manners of the aristocracy.

    Chesterfield writes on the implications of what a gentleman wears:

    Your dress (as insignificant a thing as dress is in itself) is now become an object worthy of some attention; for, I confess, I cannot help forming some opinion of a man’s sense and character from his dress; and I believe most people do as well as myself. Any affectation whatsoever in dress implies, in my mind, a flaw in the understanding.

    We may note in this light the understated taste with which William dresses — which is entirely appropriate, as Lord Bury tacitly discries, “to a mere morning call”.

    In the era of the industrial revolution and the advent of what Karl Marx termed commodity fetishism, extravagant garments no longer proclaim rank and status. Rather, co-opting a new cosmopolitan aesthetic, clothes become a protective shield against invasion, a mechanism of codes and signs and a process of discernment.

    Details of workmanship now show how “gentle” a man or woman is. The fastening of buttons on a coat, the quality of fabric counts, when the fabric itself is subdued in color or hue. Boot leather becomes another sign. The tying of cravats becomes an intricate business; how they are tied reveals whether a man has “stuffing” or not, what is tied is nondescript material.

    As watches become simpler in appearance, the materials used in their making are the mark of the owner’s social standing. It was, in all these details, a matter of subtly marking yourself; anyone who proclaims himself a gent obviously isn’t.

    (Sennett, 165)

    It is more than just lavender gloves as things-in-themselves. An emerging bourgeois self is dislocated from its tranquil sources in the family and in the country and exposed to a mechanism of intrusive forces and gazes that seek to determine it — just as we see Kate’s family array itself as her protective shield in determining to its satisfaction what William is.

    Deep anxieties underpin these new social processes, such as Lady Montague embodies, seemingly risibly characterised with her phobia of social exposure. Why so humiliating for the scandalous details surrounding Lady Kate and Clarence Marsham to come out? Perhaps because codes that define the male, in terms of how he matches up against a positive model of the gentleman (and not a “coxcomb” or a “scoundrel”), are the same that determine the lady against a relatively negatively valorised model of the “loose woman”. Hence, the spontaneity that Kate exhibits — even in abruptly stopping the carriage, blocking the orderly flow of traffic — may be perceived as a disturbing, hysterical trait:

    [W]hen a society proposes to its members that regularity and purity of feeling are the price for having a self, hysteria becomes the logical, perhaps the only means of rebellion.

    (Sennett, 182)

    CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

    Lawyer Whiston Makes a New Acquaintance — A Glance at the Past — Plans for the Future

    However excellent in theory the law of England may be, like most human institutions, it presents many singular anomalies. In practice its professors are divided into two distinct branches, or bodies. First in rank are the barristers who alone possess the right of pleading in the superior courts. They are generally men of university education, and not unfrequently have won its proudest honours.

    From them the lord chancellors, vice chancellors and judges are invariably taken.

    The second, or inferior class, as they are considered, are the attorneys, or solicitors, whose forensic abilities are confined to the police courts and quarter sessions. They act as wet-nurses to the barristers, collect evidence, and prepare their briefs, which none but a solicitor can present. A client, no matter how intelligent and capable, may not draw up his own brief, or statement of his case. No barrister would receive it; it would be considered against the usages of the courts.

    Solicitors divide their practice into several branches, some of them exceedingly lucrative; the conveyance of real estate, which in England is beset with difficulties, being one of them. Divorce cases and criminal defence are two others, to say nothing of offences against the excise laws, poaching, and civil suits generally. They have to prepare all the evidence, and although they may not open their lips in the superior courts, may frequently be seen seated by the side of the privileged barrister, prompting or coaching him.

    The wealthiest and probably most respected members of this branch of the legal profession are the family solicitors to the nobility, landed aristocracy, and great mercantile firms. In the first two instances they have the management of the estates and of honourable men; are consulted on all occasions, looked upon in the light of a friend.

    In this class of solicitors the uncle of our hero held a distinguished position. His clients were not numerous, but they were wealthy, and of high social standing. To such a man the means of obtaining information were sore and varied. Lately he had spent considerable time in piecing together the fragments of half-burnt letters, which Bunce had given him, and the result was that he began to feel considerable interest in the antecedents of Viscountess Allworth. Amongst other bits of information he discovered that her first husband, Gervais Marsham, had a brother, a wealthy merchant in the city, who bore a high character for integrity and honourable dealing.

    As a general rule, if there is any little speck of dirt, flaw of reputation, or circumstance that we particularly wish to conceal, relatives are the first to disclose it, especially if the unfortunate tainted wether of the flock happens to be placed in a more enviable position regarding rank and fortune than the rest. Richard Whiston was far too close an observer of human nature, both as a lawyer and a man, for this peculiarity to have escaped him, and he set about turning it to advantage in his own quiet ways. It was an easy matter to obtain an introduction to the merchant, to whom he made himself so agreeable that invitations were soon exchanged.

    On the occasion of his first visit he contrived to be just ten minutes too late for dinner — not long enough to disturb the equanimity of his host, or, what was of more consequence, that of his maiden sister, Miss Penelope Marsham, who presided over her brother’s bachelor establishment.

    ‘Not a word, my dear sir, said the city man, cutting short his apologies. ‘A dozen turns, more or less, of the spit will not hurt the haunch, and turtle can’t spoil. Will you take my sister in?’

    Their new acquaintance gave his arm to the lady, and the small but select party proceeded to the dining-room.

    The dinner proved an excellent one — a little heavy, perhaps; but that was to be expected in the city, yet not uncomfortably so. It was not till the dessert made its appearance that the wily lawyer alluded to the cause of his delay.

    ‘Consultation,’ he said, ‘with a noble client in rather an intricate affair between two ladies of the fashionable world — Lady Montague and Viscountess Allworth. Ladies — pardon the remark. Miss Marsham — are at times disposed to be a little prolix.’ Turning to her brother, he added, as he eyed the bronze beading on the rim of his glass. ‘This is exquisite Burgundy.’

    ‘Imported it myself,’ observed his host.

    At the name of the viscountess Miss Penelope gave one of those scarcely perceptible little shrugs, which sometimes convey a vast amount of meaning.

    ‘Are you concerned in any legal affairs for Lady Allworth?’ she asked.

    ‘Oh, dear, no! not in the slightest degree. My client is opposed to her. A question of guardianship —’

    ‘Your client,’ remarked the spinster, ‘had better be upon her guard.’

    ‘Pen,’ interrupted her, brother, ‘our friend, I suspect, has had quite enough professional business for one day. Had we not better change the subject?’ A frown accompanied the observation.

    The lady looked displeased, but took the hint, although it lost her an occasion for airing her resentment.

    Richard Whiston appeared perfectly unconscious of this little piece of by-play, but came at once to the conclusion that the sister was the one likely to afford the information he sought.

    With some men — and they are not the worst of their kind — there is nothing like good dinners to cement intimacy. They even assist friendship. The wealthy merchant was a bon vivant, and the lawyer’s cook an artist of peculiar merit. Visits were frequently exchanged; gradually they became intimate. Like an experienced general, Mr. Whiston attacked the weakest side of the fortress; directed all his inquiries to Miss Penelope, and soon succeeded in drawing from her much curious information respecting the antecedents of the crafty viscountess, whom she hated — bitterly — intensely — only as a woman can hate.

    Her brother, Walter Marsham, it appeared, had been left a widower, with only one son, a boy six years of age. It was an awkward position for a young man immersed in affairs. Too fond of his child to commit him to the care of strangers, he engaged a lady, who came, highly recommended, to take charge of his household and superintend the education of his infant heir.

    The next fact extracted from the garrulous old maid was that, six months after the arrival of the governess, the boy was drowned; the body never found.

    ‘A sad misfortune,’ observed the lawyer, in a sympathetic tone.

    ‘A terrible one,’ added the narrator. ‘But for his loss, poor Walter would never have become the dupe of that artful woman. He married her within a year.’

    ‘I can comprehend your feelings,’ said Mr. Whiston, ‘especially if the antecedents of the Lady —’

    ‘She had no antecedents,’ interrupted Miss Penelope Marsham. ‘No one knows anything about her. As my brother, Gervais, said, when he heard of it, she came into the family like a doubtful bill, without any endorsement. We city people have our pride. Neither my brother nor myself ever noticed her.’

    ‘And your sister-in-law is now Viscountess Allworth?’

    ‘No mistake about that,’ observed Penelope, just a little spitefully. ‘His lordship married her for her money. Walter left her everything — but he did not get it, after all. The schemer was too cunning for him.’

    It took at least half a dozen dinners and quite as many calls to draw out the information which we have thus briefly condensed for the satisfaction of our readers.

    After carefully weighing all these circumstances, the astute lawyer at last made up his mind that the time had arrived for him to act, and the morning after the arrival of Goliah in town he sent for Bunce to come to his private room at the office, having given strict orders to the managing clerk that they were not to be disturbed under any pretence.

    ‘Are you satisfied,’ he asked, as soon as they were seated, ‘with the manner in which I have treated you?’

    ‘Satisfied!’ repeated the ex-tramp. ‘Ah, sir, I am most grateful. Your confidence has been most generous. With nothing but my simple word to support my assertions, you have placed a confidence in me almost against reason to expect. I would give my life to serve you.’

    ‘I believe you,’ observed the gentleman with a smile. ‘In the service I am about to ask of you fortunately there is no such risk to be encountered. And yet,’ he added, ‘it is not without some danger.’

    ‘Try me,’ said the young man, eagerly.

    ‘You are well acquainted, I believe, with the Bittern’s Marsh?’

    ‘Every track is familiar to me. Regular roads — that is to say, roads worthy of the name — there are none. Reckless and unprincipled as the inhabitants are, at war with justice and the world, it would not answer their purpose to have any.’

    ‘Reflect well before you answer my question,’ said Mr. Whiston, ‘and let not gratitude sway your judgment. Do you think it would be possible for you to visit that den of outcasts without much risk of detection? I would not you should endanger your life to serve me — added to which, the sacrifice would defeat my project.’

    A pause of several instants ensued in the conversation, during which the grateful fellow coolly but rapidly turned over in his mind all the difficulties of the task.

    ‘I was a mere boy,’ he replied at last, ‘when I quitted the Marsh, and am so changed in person that the fear of recognition is not great. Possible, but not probable; nothing more. The real danger lies in the suspicion with which the steps of every stranger are watched — unless, indeed, in the shooting season, when the hope of gain renders them less cautious. The majority of the inhabitants are smugglers; vessels laden with brandy and silks frequently land their cargoes from the left bank of the Thames. They come from Dinant in Brittany. Could I land from one of these, pass for one of the crew, I should have little doubts of the result.’

    ‘Can you speak the language of those smugglers?’ inquired his benefactor.

    ‘It was familiar to me as my mother tongue when a boy, sir. The captains and mates of the barks generally lodged with the old man who said he had kept me from charity.’

    ‘Your idea is an excellent one,’ observed the lawyer, ‘and a vast improvement on my original plan, for in Dinant you can render me an equally important service. In what character do you think of going?’

    ‘As a sailor.’

    ‘You shall be well provided with money,’ said his employer.

    ‘Not too much, sir,’ answered Bunce, with a smile.

    ‘And when will you be ready to start?’

    ‘In two days.’

    ‘In two days be it then,’ said Mr. Whiston; but recollect, you are to run no unnecessary risks. Greatly as I value the success of the enterprise, it may be too dearly purchased.’

    The above conversation took place on the morning of the day when our hero and Goliah encountered Lady Kate and Miss Meredith in the park. With his usual frankness, Willie informed his uncle of the meeting and exchange of cards, and concluded by asking him if it would not be the correct thing to call.

    ‘Evidently,’ was the reply.

    ‘I have so often puzzled my brain, sir, wondering if we should ever meet again. Was it not a lucky accident? How fortunate that you advised us to drive in the park.’

    We cannot assert it, but are rather inclined to suspect that the lawyer foresaw the great probability of Lady Kate’s meeting with her protector.

    The next day the visit was duly made. Goliah, however, did not accompany his friend. Richard Whiston so particularly required his opinion on the capabilities of a farm he was about to purchase in the neighbourhood of London, that the unsuspecting rustic could not refuse to go with him.

    Decidedly the uncle of our hero ought to have been a diplomat. He was born with a vast amount of natural tact.

    The heart of the youth beat violently as he alighted at the stately mansion of Lady Montague, and when the groom of the chamber ushered him into the morning-room, saying that he would take his card to the young lady, his confusion increased to so pitiable a degree that he almost regretted the step he had taken.

    ‘Why render my regrets indelible?’ murmured he to himself. ‘What can Lady Kate Kepple ever be to me? The disparity is too great.’

    By this time, we suspect Willie already began to have a faint suspicion of the feelings which were gradually entwining themselves with his existence — haunting his dreams, absorbing his waking thoughts. The romance of the first meeting with the fair girl he had so gallantly protected, made a powerful impression, on his imagination — that beneficent or dangerous quality which, for good or ill. as we employ it, controls the greater part of man’s existence; so subtle are its operations that brain and heart are enthralled before we feel conscious of the process which youth, especially in its firsts love, rarely perceives. The man — and the observation we are about to add applies equally to woman — who can analyse its effects, count and estimate the strength of every link as it is added to the chain, may entertain a caprice, but he is not in love.

    ‘The Patient Competitors’ (1892). Charles Haigh-Wood. Source: The Athenaeum

    When her niece and Clara informed Lady Montague of the meeting in the park, that exceedingly correct personage appeared slightly annoyed. We say slightly, for the dread of scandal had died out, nearly two years having elapsed since the adventure which so troubled her at the time.

    ‘I thought,’ she observed gravely, ‘that you had already acknowledged his services by the gift you forwarded to him?’

    ‘Gift!’ repeated Lady Kate, warmly. ‘There are actions which the most costly gifts cannot repay, but which a few kind words may amply recompense. Besides, she added, ‘Mr. Winston is a gentleman.’

    ‘Mr. Whiston!’ repeated the aunt, in surprise.

    Her niece silently handed her our hero’s card.

    ‘Mr. William Whiston, Trin. Col., Cam.,’ said her ladyship, reading it aloud. ‘Well, it certainly does look as if he might be a gentleman.’

    She passed the card to Lord Bury, who was present, and whose frequent and prolonged visits to the country, intimate association with two sensible, right-minded girls, who placed principle before fashion, and what they felt to be right before the conventionalities of the world, had shaken a vast amount of nonsense out of his lordship’s disposition, and the operation had greatly improved him; he had always been strictly honourable. If a certain residuum of pride still remained, it was pride without meanness, based on true manhood and honour.

    ‘I do not see, Lady Montague,’ he observed, ‘how my cousin could have acted otherwise — it would have been ungrateful. A call does not necessarily lead to intimacy. I think you ought to receive him.’

    ‘You, too!’ exclaimed the spinster, half-reproachfully. ‘Well, I suppose I must.’

    ‘I and Clara,’ he added, ‘will, if you wish it, both be present; it may relieve Kate from some embarrassment.’

    ‘Thanks!’ exclaimed the latter, ‘for I should feel dreadfully embarrassed at receiving him alone.’

    ‘Not to be thought of, my love!’ exclaimed the aunt.

    In consequence of this arrangement, all of the speakers were present when our hero was shown into the morning reception room at Montague House.

    The young guardsman eyed him as critically as he would have done a colt which he had serious thoughts of introducing into his own stables. On the important points of dress, person and appearance nothing could be more satisfactory. Plain morning suit; not a trinket visible; pale lavender gloves; his hat — that terrible test to young men, who so rarely know what to do with it — in his hand, it being a mere morning call.

    ‘Well,’ thought his lordship, ‘he certainly does look like a gentleman.’

    Lady Kate, having first introduced him by name to her relatives, began to falter forth her thanks for the protection to had afforded her.

    ‘Pray do not allude to it.’ said Willie, perceiving her embarrassment. ‘A hundred such services would be amply repaid by the simplest expression of thanks. ‘It is I,’ he added, raising his eyes timidly to her blushing countenance, ‘who ought to feel grateful for the pleasure it has afforded me by this introduction.’

    ‘Not bad,’ whispered Lady Montague to Clara; ‘he certainly is a gentleman.’

    ‘I told you so, aunt,’ was the reply.

    ‘Allow me to express my own and Lady Montague’s feelings,’ said Lord Bury, extending his hand to their visitor, ‘for your conduct on an occasion which I will not further allude to, although it can never be forgotten. May I ask,’ he added, by way of changing the subject, ‘if you are related to the Whistons of Northumberland? I have occasionally met several  members of that family.’

    ‘Not in the slightest degree, that I am aware of,’ answered our hero, unhesitatingly. ‘The only relative of standing I possess is my uncle and guardian, Richard Whiston, the eminent solicitor of Lincoln’s Inn Field, to whose bounty I am indebted for my university education — to whose affection for me more than I can ever repay.’

    ‘He is a noble fellow,’ thought his lordship, ‘No pinchbeck about him.

    ‘I am perfectly aware of your uncle’s respectability and high standing in his profession,’ observed the stately old maid. ‘For many years,’ she added, ‘he has had the management of my affairs.’

    ‘Whiston’s nephew,’ she mentally added. ‘Of course I can rely on his discretion.’ Speaking aloud, she added:

    ‘I receive every Wednesday. Mine is not a very brilliant circle but you will meet some celebrities worth knowing, should you favour me with your presence.’

    As the speaker did not add the word ‘occasionally,’ Clara and Kate considered it a sure sign that the invitation had been cordially given .

    More visitors being announced, Willie took his leave.

    ‘What tact,’ observed Lord Bury. ‘Not being acquainted with the fresh arrivals, it might have looked as if he sought an introduction. I think I shall like the fellow,’ he added.

    Considering the source from whence it came, this was high praise.

    ‘I already like him very much,’ observed Clara Meredith.

    ‘Of course. He has such remarkably fine eyes,’ said his lordship.

    Kate remained silent.

    This edition © 2019 Furin Chime, Michael Guest

    Notes and References

    pinchbeck: Alloy of copper and zinc used to imitate gold in jewelry; hence ‘something counterfeit or spurious’ (Merriam-Webster)

    Lady de S******. The Spirit of Etiquette; Or Politeness Exemplified, (London, 1837). Available free at Google Books (jump to cover).

    Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774). Good edition available free at Adelaide Univ. ebooks (jump to file).

    See also, James Pitt, Instructions in Etiquette, intended for the use of schools and young persons (1840). Available free at Google Books (jump to cover).

    Michael Curtin, “A Question of Manners: Status and Gender in Etiquette and Courtesy,” Journal of Modern History, 57.3 (1985).

    Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (NY: Penguin, 1986)

  • J.F. Smith’s Mystery of the Marsh — Seventeenth Instalment

    J.F. Smith’s Mystery of the Marsh — Seventeenth Instalment

    Old newspapers are not much cared about and are often applied to undignified functions, recalling Dryden:

    From dusty shops neglected authors come,
    Martyrs of pies, and relics of the bum.

    (‘Mac Flecknoe’)

    or tossed on the rubbish heap, as in Joyce:

    About that original hen. Midwinter (fruur or kuur?) was in the offing and Premver a promise of a pril when, as kischabrigies sang life’s old sahatsong, an iceclad shiverer, merest of bantlings observed a cold fowl behaviourising strangely on that fatal midden or chip factory or comicalbottomed copsjute (dump for short) afterwards changed into the orangery […]

    (Finnegans Wake, Ch. 5)

    Biddy the hen scratches up an old letter in the rubbish heap, which stands for Finnegans Wake the novel itself, or the Bible, or even the substance of universal human history. Mere “bits and scraps” (Samuel Beckett) though they may be, they are impregnated with the world in which they were manufactured, and which decays along with them. Note that as Biddy scratches and pecks on the letter, she creates marks and holes that later exegetes interpret as part of the original message.

    This project of raising Smith’s penny novel is achievable thanks to the work accomplished by scholars and librarians such as those who established the Trove digital archives of the National Library of Australia, from where I’ve obtained the original serials of The Mystery of the Marsh.

    Convenient, comprehensive and flexible a resource as Trove is, we find many instances where the text breaks down in one way or another, presenting a jigsaw puzzle. Figure 1 shows a fundamental type of this problem. Here there are two horns of the dilemma: i) the easier, where a librarian needed to piece together the paper, like an actual jigsaw; and ii) where the text, to varying degrees, becomes difficult to read, either because of damage to the original, or because of a problem in the copying process. For example:

    Figure 1. Sample of torn and blurred copy.

    Here is how the machine-reader deals with the text in Figure 1, extending from “His friend gave a short, dry cough”:

    ffi^MBnd-g8-fi^HteB^^ooBi^i-^lsfeit4«
    had ^g^. calLad..Ojp)6n ^tb jBssent tr- a proposition
    – ‘ Heidi I ‘ fie eiBonlatedl . ”Jtmx -^nidn ts
    :f&nn4id~ cmL .«.? Ealt trutlL. Tt A* ar6 m- pldea

    After “There are two sides”, it seems to give up and omit the rest as a smudge.

    Very Wake-esque but unedifying. Usually the machine-read copy is useful in piecing together a rough cut and saving a fair amount of keying-in, though every word still needs to be checked against one or both of the (digitalized) original copies.

    Thankfully there are two different copies of the serial, appearing in different publications, originally separated by about eight years, and edited by different editors. When the earlier “fair” copy is damaged (so-termed because it is closer to the author and has proven itself reliable), the later “foul” copy can provide clarification.

    At the same time, the editor of the foul copy sometimes slaps things together cavalierly. This is understandable — they’re not handling a manuscript of Shakespeare’s or the Dead Sea scrolls. Their job is to fill up available space in the most economical way. But in so doing, they often fiddle about with points of spelling, grammar and lexicon, probably aiming to make the story “more readable,” but sometimes achieving the opposite.

    Figure 2 demonstrates one of a couple of befuddling gaffes on the part of the foul editor this fortnight:

    Figure 2. Editorial gaffe from the foul copy.

    Perhaps you’ve spotted the problem already: there is no such word as “obinsensible”. At the end-of-line hyphen the text jumps to somewhere unrelated to the original scene: from Goliah and William’s reunion, to Benoni’s apprehension by the villains (in the previous chapter of the fair copy), where it stays for the rest of the chapter, hopelessly throwing out the entire narrative and requiring all sorts of calisthenics to get back on track. It’s interesting to observe how the editor’s fast moving eye has been deceived by an illusion of continuity created by the references in both scenes to two characters conversing, and by the formatting. The reader glides on blithely — and suddenly thinks, “What the blazes is going on?!”

    The sample in Figure 3 presents a satisfying teaser.

    Figure 3. Sample of blurred word in fair copy.

    This is from the scene where William finally meets his love-interest Lady Kate again, when they are both being driven in carriages in London’s Hyde Park — a popular Sunday recreation of the well-to-do.  We can clearly see that Kate “involuntarily pulled” something that stops the carriage, but what? The words are not quite clear enough to be confident without further reference.

    The foul copy doesn’t help: the cavalier editor doesn’t seem to know either, or maybe thinks their readership won’t, and treats the incident thus:

    The former recognised her protector in an instant, and involuntarily, for it was the impulse of gratitude, called the driver to stop the carriage.

    However, calling the driver to stop is not really an involuntary action in the sense that physically pulling on a device that automatically stops the carriage may be considered. Such a device enables the chain of action to occur in an instant: the sighting; the recognition; and her involuntarily activating the device, which automatically stops the carriage.

    The device in question is found in Dearden’s Miscellany (1839): a “check string”, an invention that causes the reins to be pulled up automatically from inside the carriage in case of an emergency. Why on earth did the foul editor muck up Smith’s perfectly good line? The term was used in Australia, as its occurrence in Caroline Leakey’s novel Broad Arrow (1859) evidences.

    CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

    The Tables Begin to Turn — Lady Kate Meets Her Protector — A Lawyer’s Plot, but an Honest One

    It is a sad thing when parents, by dishonourable practices, give their children the right to despise them. The natural law is sure to avenge the violation of the divine one; for, with respect, filial love gradually dies — fading like some young tree planted in an ungenial soil; first indifference, then contempt usurps its place. In rough, uncultivated natures a worse tyranny is not unfrequently exercised over the erring parents who have no moral force to resist it, and they either sink into the slaves of the offspring their example has corrupted, or consent to pander to their vices.

    No doubt this is a terrible picture, but, alas! it is a true one; and may be seen, allowing for difference in tone and colour, in almost every grade of society — the highest as well as the lowest. In the former, the veil of a flimsy refinement hides the more revolting traits; but they exist. The facts are there. In the latter, they stare you in the face in all their cynical deformity.

    Viscount and Lady Allworth were beginning to feel the truth of this. The fashionable season had once more commenced in London, but Lord Bury never appeared at any of his father’s parties. He ceased to frequent the club of which they were both members, in order to avoid meeting him. Occasionally, however, it was unavoidable; but when society threw them together he treated him merely with that formal respect which, in some instances, is more cutting than downright rudeness, and far more painful to receive than positive insult. The more polished the weapon the deeper the wound.

    What made the conduct of the young nobleman still more mortifying to his father, was that he never failed to attend the receptions of Lady Montague, who had returned to town for the season. Sir George Meredith and his daughter were her ladyship’s guests; they had accepted an invitation to spend the season with her, to the great delight of Kate and Clara, who become warm friends.

    The fashionable world, which is far more observant than outsiders give it credit for, soon began to notice this polite estrangement between father and son; and the viscount, who was not wanting in tact, resolved to have an explanation with Bury. Half a dozen times he had called at his chambers, but never found him at home. ‘Absent,’ ‘On duty,’ or ‘In the country,’ were the answers he received from the obsequious porter, as he respectfully received his lordship’s card and placed it on the rack In his office. The aged roué knew that the fellow was lying, and almost respected him for the grace with which he did it.

    An actor himself, he could appreciate good acting in others.

    So he muttered, as he drove from the Albany —

    ‘Bury has taken his part and seems resolved to carry it out. Let him — cursedly ungrateful, though. I hate ingratitude. I first suggested Meredith’s girl — he ought to remember that, and not feel so resentful at the Chellston affair.’

    That any higher principle had actuated his lordship’s conduct never entered into the imagination of the worldly-minded man.

    Lady Allworth already began to discern this painful truth; in forfeiting the respect of her son she had lost all hold on his affection, which had never been very strong. From Dinant, a small town in Brittany, to which he had retired on recovering from his wound, he was continually writing for money to supply his vulgar extravagance, and yet the allowance made him was a liberal one. In answer to a letter refusing to send additional funds, he wrote back threatening to return to England and expose her share in the attempt to force Lady Kate into a clandestine marriage; if he could not rob, he would disgrace her.

    The reply of her ladyship was characteristic and laconic:

    ‘Return without my permission, and I will not only reduce the allowance I promised, but disinherit you. You cannot scare me.’

    Not a word of affection. She felt that he had none. She could not appeal to his honor; it had too long been forfeited. It was to his selfish fears that she addressed her answer, and it proved successful. Clarence Marsham knew his mother too well to doubt for an Instant that, if further provoked, she would execute her threats. He was entirely at her mercy, and he knew it. It was a bitter pill for him to swallow, but after a brief struggle with his passionate temper and sundry profane curses he did swallow it, sat down and wrote a penitential letter, declaring that he was drunk when he made his insolent demand, and asking her forgiveness, which in due time was coldly accorded.

    Lady Allworth was what the world would call a strong-minded woman; if any real strength can be found in evil, undoubtedly she merited the designation. Up to the present period her life had been a series of successes, purchased by sacrifices which will appear hereafter in all their questionable details. The crowning scheme — the marriage of her worthless son with Lady Kate Kepple — had hitherto proved a failure which discouraged without inducing her to change her purpose, which remained fixed as ever, although at times, when dwelling on the future, she began to discern faint outlines of that dark shadow which from the first step into crime follows one’s footsteps. Sometimes it appeared to be drawing nearer, frowning menacingly; then it would disappear, and courage revive again.

    We must not forget William Whiston, the hero of our tale, who had passed his first year at Cambridge, where to the great delight of his uncle, he had obtained two scholarships — one in mathematics and one in classics, and was now in London for the vacation.

    William Powell Frith (1836-8), attrib. Douglas Cowper.

    It was not the trifling income derived from this success that gratified his guardian; that was a matter of perfect indifference to him. It was the proof that his nephew had used his time at college wisely. Tutors had written most encouragingly respecting him, predicting his future success.

    Still the old lawyer did not feel quite satisfied; the pale cheeks and certain dark circles round the eyes of the tired student alarmed him, and the first thing he did on his arrival was to send for a physician.

    ‘Overwork,’ said the man of science. ‘No organic disease.’

    The uncle breathed more freely.

    ‘We will soon remedy this,’ he observed. ‘The boy is up for the long vacation, and shall work only six hours per day.’

    Dr. Canton shook his head.

    ‘What! You think that too much? Four, then.’

    ‘Not one,’ replied the doctor emphatically.

    ‘I have frequently observed that you lawyers,’ he added, ‘astute enough in your own profession, are like children when they wander out of it — bewildered and unreliable in their judgment. I would as soon consult my tailor on a plea in chancery,’ he added, ‘as a lawyer on a point of hygiene.’

    His friend gave a short dry cough — a habit he had when called upon to assent to a proposition that did not appear quite clear to him.

    ‘Hem!’ he ejaculated. ‘Your opinion is founded on a half truth. There are two sides to the question. I am not so incapable of judging as you suppose. Have you forgotten how I cured my carriage horse after Harrassian, the prince of veterinaries, had pronounced that nothing could be done?’

    ‘And pray, how did you treat your horse?’ demanded Canton, with a half-suppressed twinkle in his eyes, for he felt that he had cornered him.

    ‘Very simply,’ replied his friend. ‘Took off his shoes and turned him loose.’

    ‘Excellent!’ exclaimed the doctor. ‘Exactly what I have been prescribing. Take off your nephew’s shoes — in other words, lock up his books — and turn him out to grass. The result will be the same.’

    With these words the friendly physician took his leave.

    ‘Canton is right!’ exclaimed the man of law, after a few minutes’ reflection. ‘I was a fool not to perceive it at first. The boy’s brain has been overtaxed. No more work till the end of the vacation. What a terrible error I was about to fall into! He shall enjoy himself. Won’t let him go to Deerhurst, though.’

    Two days afterwards our hero was delighted by the arrival of his faithful friend, Goliah. Knowing their attachment to each other, Lawyer Whiston had arranged that the two young men should spend a month together in London. There was nothing selfish in the old man’s affection for his nephew. He knew that the sympathies of youth require youth to draw them forth. The wisdom of age, however the young may venerate it, sometimes appears dry to them. Paradox as it may seem, hearts sometimes require weakness instead of strength to lean upon.

    For several instants the long separated friends sat silently grasping each other’s hand. The honest rustic was the first to speak.

    ‘This be like old times ag’in,’ he observed. ‘Deerhurst has been mortal dull without thee. Willie,’ he added, ‘thee do look pale and tired like.’

    ‘A little over-worked. Nothing more,’ replied the student. ‘I shall soon get over it.’ My uncle is very kind to me, and I have done my best to please him.’

    ‘Kind to thee?’ repeated his friend. ‘How can he help being kind to thee? Thee hast such a curious way of making a home in the hearts of all who know thee.’

    ‘Not all,’ said Willie, with something like a sigh.

    ‘All!’ added Goliah emphatically. ‘And those who don’t love thee don’t know thee. But never mind that now. I be come to spend a whole month with thee. The hay be all in, and Uncle Whiston settled it all right with mother.’

    His hearer heard the arrangement with almost as much surprise as pleasure. It was an additional proof of the place he had won in the regard of his relative.

    It was dinner-time before the lawyer made his appearance in Soho Square. He brought Bunce with him. The appearance of the poor tramp was so improved that Goliah scarcely recognised him.

    ‘Why, thee do look like a born gentleman!’ he exclaimed, at the same time shaking hands with him cordially. ‘They wouldn’t know thee at Deerhurst,’ he added.

    ‘You are as true a gentleman as I am,’ observed the wanderer. ‘Probably more so.’

    ‘I see thee be poking fun at me.’

    ‘Not so,’ replied his former acquaintance. ‘Fine clothes do not make a gentleman, or the ruffian upon whose face you left the mark of your whip would be the better gentleman of the three. It is the heart that gives the title. The rest is the mere gilding of the surface.’

    ‘There be some truth in that,’ said the honest rustic, thoughtfully.

    His hearers remarked with pleasure that considerable improvement had taken place less in the language than the manners of the speaker. He was far more quiet. His rough, boisterous fits of laughter no longer jarred upon the ears. If occasionally they broke forth, they were quickly suppressed. Mr. Whiston and Bunce felt more surprised than our hero did at the change. He thought of Susan, and understood it. His own recollections of Kate — the influence they had exercised upon his mind, although he still ignored her rank and fortune — explained it to him.

    Love is a great beautifier. The fable of Cymon and his nymph contains a delicate truth. Few of us, we suspect, but have learnt the lesson.

    ‘Not at home to any one,’ said the lawyer, as the butler placed the dessert upon the table, ‘and do not disturb me unless I ring.’

    The well-trained domestic withdrew.

    ‘And now, boys,’ continued the speaker, ‘as my nephew is enjoying his vacation, I think it only fair that I should take mine for an evening or two at least. Impossible to take more. The affairs of others might suffer.’

    ‘How stand affairs at Deerhurst?’ he added, addressing himself to Goliah. ‘Commence with Farmer Hurst, his wife and the pretty Susan.’

    At the last name his visitor coloured slightly and looked embarrassed, till a smile from Willie encouraged him to proceed.

    ‘Farmer Hurst is a changed man,’ he replied. ‘He do miss his nephew sadly. For the matter of that, so do the whole village. I don’t think,’ he added, ‘the grey mare be the best horse in the stable as it wor once. The filly ha’ taken her place. Not altogether,’ he added thoughtfully; ‘wish she had; but in a great many things.’

    ‘You mean to say that Peggy has not so much her own way as she used to have,’ observed the lawyer.

    ‘That’s it. How clever thee do put it.’

    ‘Mere practice,’ observed the man of law. ‘You, too, Goliah, are becoming a logician in your way.’

    ‘What be that?’ demanded the latter. ‘Nothing to do with law, I hope.’

    ‘More than you imagine, I expect,’ answered Mr. Whiston, with a smile. ‘But never mind that now. What is the news from Deerhurst?’

    ‘Schoolmaster Blackmore and his son Benoni ha’ left the place. Neighbours began to look coldly on them, so they started off, bag and baggage, without a word to any one; and a good riddance, too.’

    ‘And where are they gone? To London?’

    ‘Not so far as that,’ continued the lad. ‘Leastways Benoni has been seen several times in the village. He do come mostly at nights. People do say they be livin’ at their old home in the Marsh.’

    The lawyer and Bunce exchanged glances.

    ‘Mind,’ added the speaker, ‘I don’t know that it is so. At any rate he took all his books there. Breeze and Howard helped to carry them. It be a queer place to live in, fit only for wild geese and teal. Justice’s clerk told mother that schoolmaster ha’ gotten a lease of the whole place from some great lord in London.’

    The questioner brought the forefinger down to the palm of his hand — a habit he had when he wished to impress any fact or legal point upon his mind.

    Goliah looked upon all this as mere love of gossip on the part of Richard Whiston. In his simple, honest heart he never once suspected that the shrewd man of law was putting him through a regular examination.

    ‘And is this all?’ he asked.

    ‘All as I can recollect,’ was the reply.

    ‘So Benoni came merely to visit his old friends,’ observed the lawyer.

    ‘Since he went back on Willie all the boys despise him — turned him out of the cricket club, thof he wor one of the best bowlers we had. Stay, I do recollect something. The first time he came wor to get some iron bars his father had ordered of Mottram, the blacksmith.’

    A second finger was turned down.

    ‘And the next time?’ said the lawyer, insinuatingly.

    ‘He met Peggy Hurst at the Red Barn. I don’t think,’ added the speaker, ‘he will go near the farm again.’

    ‘And why not?’

    ‘I thrashed him,’ said Goliah, quietly. ‘I heard him tell Peggy that he wor in love wi’ her daughter, and I couldn’t stand that.’

    ‘Jealous,’ observed Willie.

    ‘Not a bit,’ answered his friend. ‘Susan despises him. What true-hearted girl could fancy a coward. I wor never jealous of any one but thee.’

    ‘And with quite as little reason,’ replied our hero. ‘It is quite true that Susan and I love each other; but it is only as brother and sister — nothing more.’

    ‘I know that,’ said the admirer of his cousin. ‘Thee told I so afore, and thee do allays speak the truth. It took such a lump off my heart; for what chance should I ha’ had again thee? Susan told I the same thing when I spoke my mind to her.’

    ‘And she answered —’

    ‘Nay, Willie, that beant fair,’ interrupted his friend. ‘There be two to that secret. When thee do fall in love thee will know all about it. P’raps she laughed at I — p’raps she did not; at any rate, she wor not very angry, though her mother is — she be dead set agin me. The farmer, I think, is all right, or soon will be.’

    Our hero sighed, and mentally repeated the words of the speaker, ‘When thee do fall in love.’ The poor boy was already in love. The fair girl he had rescued had left her image in his young heart. The gift of the watch — and, still more, the simple words from Kate — had confirmed the impression. The desire of pleasing his uncle was not the only motive for his hard studies at the university; a yet stronger impulse inspired him — the thought of making himself worthy of her; for, without the slightest suspicion of her real rank or fortune, he felt they were superior to his.

    ‘Now, boys,’ said the lawyer, as he bade them good night, ‘amuse yourselves in the morning as you please. The carriage and horses are at your disposal. After lunch I would advise you to take a drive in Hyde Park. The season is at its height for equipages, beautiful girls, and remarkable personages. Europe has not a scene to equal it. I can’t accompany you; neither can I spare Bunce — most important case to come off. But we shall meet at dinner.’

    ‘And my studies, sir —’ suggested Willie.

    ‘Hang your studies!’ interrupted his uncle. ‘Of course I don’t exactly mean that; but merely for the present. Recollect that for the present,’ he added, laughingly, ‘I have taken off your shoes and turned you out to grass.’

    Goliah slapped his thigh — a habit he had when greatly pleased — and exclaimed, triumphantly:

    ‘That be right, lawyer! It will soon bring back the colour to Willie’s cheeks, which those plaguey books ha’ stolen away. I opened one of ’em, and it made my eyes ache to look at the crooked lines and figgers; never seed anything like it, except in a conjuring book at fair time. Ecod!’ he added, ‘thee beest almost as sensible as a farmer.’

    Richard Whiston bowed gravely; there was an amused expression on his face.

    ‘I fear you flatter me,’ he said.

    Bunce and Willie laughed heartily.

    Poor Goliah coloured to the roots of his hair; he was quite quick enough to perceive the ridiculous side of his speech, and hastened to amend it.

    ‘I meant about horses,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think thee knowed so much. Of course, in law, book-larning, and such things, thee do know a great deal more. Why don’t thee help I, Willie?’ he exclaimed, turning to his friend. ‘I always helped thee. Thee do know what I mean.’

    ‘And so does my uncle,’ replied our hero. ‘He understands you even better than I do.’

    ‘Then he beant angry wi’ I?’ said the honest rustic.

    ‘Not in the least,’ said Mr. Whiston shaking hands with him before quitting the room. ‘We perfectly understand each other.’

    ‘Of course we does,’ observed Goliah, as the gentleman disappeared, ‘though Willie and Bunce both laughed at I.’

    Rotten Row and Hyde Park Corner. c.1890-1900. Photomechanical print. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

    The following day our hero and his friend did not neglect the lawyer’s advice of driving in Hyde Park at the hour he named, when the scene appears most attractive, especially to those who contemplate it for the first time. No doubt there are spots in the world equally beautiful; a few, perhaps, still more so, but none more animated. The throng of equipages in which elderly persons take their ease whilst inhaling the fresh pure air, the crowd of lovely girls, all life and animation, cantering on well-trained steeds, attended by fathers, brothers and admirers, the former proud of their charge the latter trusting to win a smile from the lips that enthralled them.

    Talk of the Isle of Calypso! The graceful fable of Fenelon never presented half its charms. His goddess and worshippers were a myth — those of Hyde Park are living realities, pure flesh and blood, fresh from the hand of nature.

    Youth! youth! such are thy glorious visions! They haunt its dreams; nor are those of age entirely free from them, dimly seen, perhaps, through the falling mists of a once happy past. So great was the excitement of Goliah that Willie had to check his outspoken bursts of admiration, which more than once attracted attention; and yet there was nothing coarse in them. The heart of the honest rustic was too well guarded for that by the recollection of the pretty Susan.

    Nothing like a pure, manly love to keep the lips and heart pure.

    As they were about to quit the ring the carriage of the lawyer crossed the elegant barouche of Lady Montague. Fortunately its noble owner was not in it — only her niece and Clara Meredith. The former recognised her protector in an instant, and involuntarily pulled the check-string. We say involuntarily, for it was the impulse of gratitude. Nothing more! Of course not! Had the high-born girl taken time to reflect, the fashionable surroundings, the familiar faces passing and repassing, might have prevented her. We do not mean to say that it would, but merely possibly.

    Mr. Whiston’s coachman — he had once been in the service of a lord chancellor — perfectly well understood what the drawing-up of Lady Montague’s equipage meant, and quietly drew up beside it. Clara Meredith looked on wonderingly. She could not understand the blushing, half-hesitating manner of her friend as she addressed our hero whose confusion equalled if it did not exceed her own.

    A very few words explained it.

    ‘I cannot,’ she said, ‘suffer the opportunity to escape me of expressing my gratitude to those who so generously protected me from a very great danger; that I have not done so personally before has not been from heartlessness, but ignorance of his name and address.’

    ‘It is the happiest recollection of my life,’ answered Willie, modestly; ‘but I fear you overrate my services.’

    ‘What!’ exclaimed Goliah, upon whose sluggish brain the truth was slowly dawning. ‘Be thee the —’

    ‘Even so,’ interrupted Lady Kate, hastily, for she had an instinctive dread of what was about to follow. ‘Do you not recollect me?’

    ‘How should I?’ replied the former. ‘Not but I ha’ often thought on thee. When I seed thee afore thee wor —’

    A violent nudge in the ribs, which, as the speaker declared, almost drove the breath out of him, gave him an unmistakable hint that he was treading on forbidden ground. Poor Willie was in agonies lest he should not take it.

    ‘So differently dressed,’ added the rustic, suppressing the allusion to her being disguised as a boy, which trembled upon his lips; ‘but that be only natteral; people don’t wear such fine clothes in the country as they do in London.’

    His friend breathed more freely, and the burning blush which had risen to the cheeks of the agitated girl gradually receded as the words were so adroitly turned.

    ‘You will find me at the residence of my aunt and guardian, Lady Montague,’ observed Lady Kate, at the same time giving him her card, and accepting the one he proffered.

    ‘I ain’t got no card,’ observed Goliah; ‘but I can write my name if Willie will lend I a pencil; that’s if’ — a second nudge, equally emphatic with the first one, cut short the rest of his speech.

    ‘Home!’ said Kate, at the same time bowing her adieu.

    The equipages separated, and for some minutes the ladies drove from the Park in silence.

    ‘O, Kate! Kate,’ said Clara Meredith, who was the first to speak.

    ‘You think I have acted wrongly?’

    ‘Incautiously, my love; wrongly, no — a hundred times no. Better, perhaps, to have let the recollection of the adventure fade from the memory of each.’

    ‘And endure the self-reproach of ingratitude?’ observed Kate.

    ‘Well, there is something in that,’ replied her companion. ‘I wonder what your dear old aunt will say — for, of course, you will tell her?’

    ‘Of course,’ was the reply.

    ‘Can you tell me, James,’ said Miss Meredith, addressing the coachman, ‘to whom the carriage in which those gentlemen were riding, belongs?’

    ‘Certainly, Miss,’ answered the man. ‘To Mr. Whiston, the great lawyer, who has the management of Lady Montague’s estates. The youngest of the gentlemen is his nephew, a great scholar, they say; and —’

    ‘Thank you, that will do.’

    Lady Kate glanced furtively at the card.

    ‘It is the same name,’ she whispered.

    ‘Thank Heaven he is a gentleman,’ exclaimed Clara.

    Her friend made no reply. She had never doubted it.

    Our hero felt too much excited by the unexpected meeting which had set his young heart dreaming to pay much attention to his companion, who sat silently by his side, turning the affair over in his mind in the hope of finding a solution.

    At last he broke into a low chuckle.

    ‘Ecod, Willie,’ he said, ‘thee beest a sly one.’

    ‘I do not understand you.’

    ‘Thee never told I about the — thee knowest who I mean. I can believe now,’ added the speaker, ‘that thee do love Susan only like a brother.’

    ‘Nonsense, Goliah! I have never seen the lady till this morning since we lost sight of her on Chandos-street. She is evidently far above me in rank as fortune. Her speaking to me was merely the result of gratitude, nothing more.’

    His friend gave a knowing wink.

    ‘No, for thee do allays speak the truth when thee do know it. I ha’ learnt many things since thee was puzzling thee brains over them dreadful books that make my eyes ache to look at, and be wiser nor thee in some things.’

    ‘Not unlikely. Susan is a very clever girl,’ observed his friend, with a smile.

    ‘Never mind Susan now,’ added Goliah. ‘I tell ’ee thee girl is in love wi’ thee.’

    ‘Ridiculous!’

    ‘’Diculous or not, be it so. Eyes don’t lie, though the tongue does.’

    Somehow our hero did not feel quite as angry at the absurdity of the speaker as he ought perhaps to have done. During the rest of their ride to Soho Square he remained silent, chewing the cud, as Shakespeare says, of sweet and bitter fancies — a weakness we are all liable to, age as well as youth.

    This edition © 2019 Furin Chime, Michael Guest

    Notes

    Finnegans Wake: For a pertinent site on the Wake, see Susie Lopez’s piece at Lithub, ‘Finnegan’s Wake at 80: In Defense of the Difficult: On the Pleasure of Annotating One of Literature’s Most Challenging Works’.

    Trove: Trove, National Library of Australia

    Cymon and his Nymph: See John Dryden, ‘Cymon and Iphigenia‘, from Boccace, in Fables Ancient and Modern (1700).

    Isle of Calypso: Reference to Angelica Kauffman’s painting, Telemachus and the Nymphs of Calypso (1782), showing a scene from François Fénelon’s novel The Adventures of Telemachus (1699).

    Rotten Row and Hyde Park Corner (image): A likely site for Lady Kate and William to have crossed paths. See ‘Victorian London: Entertainment and Recreation’.  ‘Rotten Row’ is a corruption of Route du Roi, The King’s Road, which William III had built at the end of the seventeenth century as a safe route for him to travel between Kensington Palace and St. James’s Palace. In the image, Rotten Row is to the right; it was for saddle-horses only.

    Ecod: Egad.

    chewing the cud, as Shakespeare says: Common misquotation of As You Like It, 4.3: “Chewing the food of sweet and bitter fancy”.

    Dearden’s Miscellaney (1839).  Jump to page on Internet Archive for ‘check string’ entry (under “Important Invention”, p.121).