No Name

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No Name Page 83

by Wilkie Collins


  2. (p. 146). the country theatres are in a bad way. Provincial theatres were in general decline in England during the nineteenth century.

  THE SECOND SCENE

  Skeldergate, York

  Chapter One

  1. (p. 149). the railway mania of that famous year. 1846 witnessed an enormous boom in investment in railway stocks and shares. In 1847 came the crash, in which many small investors, like Wragge, lost savings.

  2. (p. 155). a rope-walk. A piece of open ground where ropes were made.

  Chapter Two

  1. (p. 172). mendicity officers. Professional investigators who inquired into the validity of paupers’ claims for relief. They were employed by the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity, founded in 1818.

  2. (p. 172). Rothschild or Baring. Famous bankers.

  Chapter Three

  1. (p. 184). your first benefit in a London theatre. Performance from which the profits went directly to a particular actor. The system of paying performers through benefits had more or less died out by the 1840s.

  BETWEEN THE SCENES

  1. (p. 190). the late inimitable Charles Mathews, comedian. Mathews (1776–1835) was a performer famous for his ‘At Homes’, during the course of which he assumed a large variety of different characters.

  THE THIRD SCENE

  Vauxhall Walk, Lambeth

  Chapter One

  1. (p. 211). Belshazzar… the Writing on the Wall. Belshazzar was the son of Nebuchadnezzar. His demise was predicted in words written by a mysterious hand on the wall of his palace (Daniel, 5).

  2. (p. 211). the deserted dead body of Vauxhall Gardens. A famous pleasure spot for over a hundred and fifty years, Vauxhall Gardens was more or less derelict by the 1840s, and was closed in 1859.

  BETWEEN THE SCENES

  1. (p. 264). Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues. Published in 1807, it was reprinted many times thereafter. All of Wragge’s scientific facts are borrowed straight from this book.

  2. (p. 264). Verbum sap. Abbreviation of Verbum satis sapiente: ‘a word to the wise is enough’

  3. (p. 265). Esto Perpetua. ‘Be you everlasting.’

  NOTES THE FOURTH SCENE

  Aldborough, Suffolk

  Chapter One

  1. (p. 266). Aldborough. Collins visited Aldeburgh, as it is usually spelt, in the summer of 1861 to scout locations for this section of the book.

  2. (p. 266). The German Ocean. Now called the North Sea.

  3. (p. 266). The poet CRABBE. George Crabbe (1754–1832) wrote mainly narrative poetry set in this part of Suffolk. Collins was a great admirer of his work.

  4. (p. 275). Ars longa… vita brevis. ‘Art is long, life is short.’

  Chapter Six

  1. (p. 328). sauviter in modo, fortiter in re. ‘Gentle in manner, resolute in deed.’

  Chapter Eight

  1. (p. 344). whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. It was customary for fathers or guardians to draw up legal settlements stipulating separate provisions for their daughters on marriage. Without such settlements, all a married woman’s property legally belonged to her husband.

  2. (p. 353). Figaro. Epitome of a clever rogue. Figaro is the barber in Beaumar-chais’s Le Barbier de Seville (1775), and the valet in its sequel, Le Manage de Figaro (1784).

  Chapter Nine

  1. (p. 363). the date. i.e. the postmark.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1. (p. 404). the Spud. The iron head or blade fixed to a handle and used for cleaning parts of the plough.

  THE FIFTH SCENE

  Baliol Cottage, Dumfries

  Chapter Two

  1. (p. 451). threw the laudanum out of the window, and the empty bottle after it. It was Dickens who counselled the destruction of the laudanum bottle: ‘I think Mrs Lecount should break it before Noel Vanstone’s eyes. Otherwise, while he is impressed with the danger he supposes himself to have escaped, he repeats it, on a smaller scale, by giving Mrs Lecount an inducement to kill him, and leaving the means at hand’ (Letter of 14 October 1862).

  Chapter Three

  1. (p. 476). Anything that publicly assumed to be a marriage, was a marriage… in Scotland. In Scotland long-term cohabitation constitutes a legal marriage.

  THE SEVENTH SCENE

  St Crux-in-the-Marsh

  Chapter One

  1. (p. 513). made-dishes. Stews or casseroles.

  Chapter Three

  1. (p. 530). the revolution which expelled Louis Philippe from the throne of France. The revolution of 1848. Louis Philippe escaped to England in February of that year.

  Chapter Four

  1. (p. 552). Jezabel. An epitome of the lascivious, unprincipled woman (2 Kings, 9:30).

  2. (p. 556). carneying. Sly, flattering talk.

  THE LAST SCENE

  Chapter One

  1. (p. 579). a surgeon in general practice. Although surgeons in general practice had a lower social status than physicians, they took pride in their greater reliability and competence in practical medicine.

  2. (p. 582). Lady Day. The feast of the Annunciation (25 March), and one of the quarter days on which rents are due.

  3. (p. 582). tan. Fragments of bark left over from the tanning of hides.

  Chapter Two

  1. (p. 586). Dum vivimus, vivamus! ‘While we live, let us live.’

  2. (p. 586). Aloes, Scammony and Gambage. Potent purgatives.

  FURTHER READING

  Baker, W., ‘Wilkie Collins, Dickens and No Name,’ Dickens Studies Newsletter, 11:2 (June 1980), pp. 49–52.

  Baker, W., and Clarke, W. M. (eds), The Letters of Wilkie Collins, 2 vols., London, 1999.

  Barrickman, R. S., MacDonald, and Stark, M., Corrupt Relations: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Wilkie Collins and the Victorian Sexual System, New York, 1982.

  Blain, V., ‘The Naming of No Name’, Wilkie Collins Society Journal 4 (1984); PP- 25–9

  Clarke, W. M., The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, London, 1988.

  Cvetkovich, A., Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian

  Sensationalism, Rutgers, NJ, 1993. David, D., ‘Rewriting the Male Plot in Wilkie Collins’s No Name’, Wilkie

  Collins, ed. Lyn Pykett, Basingstoke, 1998. Eliot, T. S., ‘Wilkie Collins and Dickens’, Selected Essays, London, 1932. Hellar, T., Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, Yale, 1992. Hughes, W., The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Princeton,

  1980. Lonoff, S., Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: a Study in the Rhetoric of

  Authorship, New York, 1982. O’Neill, P., Wilkie Collins: Women, Property, and Propriety, London, 1988. Nayder, Lilian, Wilkie Collins Revisited, New York, 1997. Page, N. (ed.), Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, London, 1974. Peters, C, The King Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, London, 1991. Pykett, Lyn, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New

  Woman Writing, London, 1992. ______ The Sensation Novel from The Woman in White to The Moonstone,

  Plymouth, 1994.

  ______ Wilkie Collins, ed. Lyn Pykett, Basingstoke, 1998.

  Rance, N., Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists, London, 1991. Showalter, E., ‘Family Secrets and Domestic Subversion: Rebellion in

  the Novels of the 1860s’, The Victorian Family: Structures and Stresses, ed. A.

  Wohl, London, 1978.

  Smith, N. and Terry, R. C. (eds), Wilkie Collins to the Forefront: Some

  Reassessments, New York, 1995. Sutherland, J., Victorian Novelists and Publishers, London & Chicago, 1976.

  ______ Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers, Basingstoke, 1995.

  Taylor, J. B., In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative,

  & Nineteenth Century Psychology, London & New York, 1988.

 

 


 


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