The Complete Stalky & Co
Page 39
his Dikker : Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language: in Which the Words are Deduced from Their Originals, and Illustrated in Their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers, 1755; last revised by him in 1775.
For a draw : as a leg-pull.
Philistine : Matthew Arnold’s term for the English middle classes, first used in Culture and Anarchy, 1869, and much used in Kipling’s day.
Picciolas: Picciola, a sentimental novel about a prisoner and a flower, by Joseph Saintine, 1836, often used in schools.
Sammivel, not Binjimin : Samuel (Johnson), not Ben (Jonson); also of course a reference to Dickens (Pickwick Papers) and Surtees (Jorrocks).
228
della Cruscan : a school of poetry started by some young Englishmen in Florence in the eighteenth century, which took its name from the Accademia della Crusca (Academy of Chaff) founded in Florence in 1582, hoping to sift the ‘chaff from the Italian language, and publishing a dictionary in 1611.
Ap-Howell : ‘Ap’ is a Welsh prefix to a surname, meaning ‘son of.
divvy : divide up.
229
Claude Halcro in the ‘Pirate’ : unstoppably verbose poet in The Pirate by Sir Walter Scott. Nearly all the facts and names on this page and the next come from Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature.
Hell Crow chap : mispronunciation of Halcro.
Mandeville : Robert de Mandeville (1670–1733), a Dutchman who came to England and wrote medical and other works, including The Fable of the Bees in 1714.
two girls : Swift’s two loves, Vanessa and Stella (in real life, Esther Vanhomrigh and Esther Johnson).
Saw a tree an’ said ‘I shall die at the top’ : this is not in the Curiosities of Literature but is quoted by Sir Walter Scott in his Memoirs of Swift (1814): ‘I shall be like that tree, I shall die at the top.’
ridiculous and trivial : from Curiosities of Literature but not a direct quotation; Isaac D’Israeli mentions ‘ridiculous amusements’ and ‘perpetual trifles’.
Bags I : I claim, I’m having. Slang used by schoolchildren until recently; perhaps still used today.
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Diderot : Denis Diderot, 1713–64, French philosopher and man of letters.
Sappers : nickname for Royal Engineers.
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Not much : certainly not. Cf. ‘not half’.
some Transatlantic abomination about Shakespeare and Bacon : the suggestion that Shakespeare did not write his plays but that they were written by Francis Bacon was first made by Herbert Lawrence in 1769. In 1857 books by William Henry Smith and Delia Bacon appeared on the subject, and by the end of the century there were many ‘Baconians’, mainly American. The Great Cryptogram by Ignatius Donnelly, published in 1887, tried to show that cryptograms in the plays showed Bacon as their author, but this was too late for Stalky & Co, of course.
Sutton : a fictitious Oxford college.
233
hirpling : hobbling and limping.
Lundy : the island, famous for its puffins, which is visible from this part of the north Devon coast.
234
Elsie Venner : novel by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94), American physician and writer, about a woman whose mother was poisoned by a rattlesnake before her birth.
Nathaniel : Nathaniel Holmes, author of The Authorship of Shakespeare, New York, 1866.
Delia: Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded by Delia Bacon (1811–59), with a preface by Nathaniel Holmes, published in London and Boston, 1866.
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seidlitz powder : a laxative named after Seidlitz in Bohemia; a substitute for mineral water.
ushers : disparaging word for masters.
236
Bonnie Dundee : song with words by Sir Walter Scott.
237
Virtue has gone out of me indeed : Mark 5: 30 and Luke 8: 46.
ab initio : from the start.
‘rustic’ and ‘sorry poetaster’ : Nathaniel Holmes described Shakespeare as ‘the sorriest poetaster’.
lie in the soul : phrase used by Benjamin Jowett, 1817–93, in his introduction to his translation of Plato’s Republic: ‘The lie in the soul is a true lie.’
one Jowett : Jowett was Master of Balliol, ‘where King came from’.
238
‘There lives more faith … creeds’ : from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, XCVI.
spunging-house : a house kept by a bailiff or sheriffs officer, formerly used as a place of preliminary confinement for debtors.
nott : not a misprint but an attempt to give M’Turk’s Irish accent.
viva voce : oral examination.
239
gigs : spectacles, from gig-lamps; Kipling’s school nickname, from the spectacles he wore, was Gigger. See note to p. 56.
cushat dove : ring dove or wood pigeon.
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Don’t—make—a—noise … Baby! : from a popular song written and composed by G. W. Hunt, c.1875.
I bowed down in the House of Rimmon : see note to p. 153 above.
242
Cyrano de Bergerac : play, 1897, by Edmond Rostand, 1868–1918, on a seventeenth-century author famous for the largeness and redness of his nose.
fags : see note to p. 31.
‘burning marl’ : Milton, Paradise Lost, I, 295–6; Satan’s ‘uneasy steps/Over the burning marle’.
coals of fire : Proverbs 25: 22.
blue-snouted Mandrill : large, hideous, and ferocious baboon.
243
Royal Line of Ashantee : King Prempahl of Coomassie then represented the royal line.
His naval uncle had fought in those parts : in the Ashantee War of 1873–4.
The Temple of Janus was opened : war was declared. Janus, the most ancient king in Italy, and according to some the son of Apollo, was shown with two faces because he knew the past and the future. The gates of his temples were opened in times of war, closed in peacetime.
Cartel : written challenge to a duel.
the Gaboon : a river in West Africa, which gave its name to the delta district.
Dahomey : a large country in the Gulf of Guinea, famous for its Customs, an annual festival in October at which human victims were put to death. Dick ‘robed in a tablecloth’ may have been imitating the way victims were dressed in white shirts and long white nightcaps.
Fantee : large tribe living south of Ashantee, whose language, also called Fantee, was used widely on the Gold Coast.
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The Lord’s Anointed : king by divine right; in other words, indescribably grand, don’t touch him.
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‘slugs in a saw-pit’ : from Marryat’s Peter Simple. The midshipman challenges Peter to a duel: ‘Then sir, as a gentleman, I demand satisfaction. Slugs in a saw-pit. Death before dishonour.’
sally : saloon pistol. See note to p. 73.
Plica Polonica … Polish plat : a matted, filthy condition of the hair, due to disease (Polish plait).
Marryat : see note to p. 224.
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Selah! : Hebrew word of unknown origin, supposed to be a musical direction and used in the psalms.
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the King of Coomassie : Dick Four. Coomassie was the capital of Ashantee.
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‘I’ve drilled the Mandrill …’ : to drill was a slang term in duelling; see Peter Simple, chapter 4: ‘Being winged implied being shot through the arm or leg, whereas being drilled was to be shot through the body.’
in absentia : in his absence.
250
scrabbling, like King David : when he pretended to be mad, fearing Achish the King of Gath. 1 Samuel 21: 13.
lousy Fenians : in this case, merely ‘Irish’; strictly, members of the league founded in 1858 among the Irish in America to promote revolution and overthrow English rule in Ireland.
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nott : see note to p. 238.
252
Rabbit’s Eggs : see note to p. 59.
253
nott : see note to p. 238.
R.E. : Royal Engineers.
254
he tipped like Croesus : Croesus, 560–46 bc, was king of Lydia and immensely rich.
House of Rimmon : see note to p. 153.
in Abraham’s bosom : dead. Luke 16: 22.
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Non omnis moriar : I shall not altogether die. Horace, Odes III, 6.
257
Cathay : China. Dunsterville served there in 1900–2.
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Sinim : Isaiah’s name for the land at the back of the Orient, therefore usually taken to mean China. Isaiah 49: 12.
259
the College paper which Beetle edited : the United Services College Chronicle, Nos. 4–10, from June 1881–July 1882.
Swillingford Patriot : a reference to Surtees’s Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour.
Hakluyt : Richard Hakluyt, 1553–1616, compiler of first-hand accounts of travels and explorations, published in 1589 as The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation, now more familiarly known as ‘Hakluyt’s Voyages’.
Rubáiyát : Edward Fitzgerald, 1809–83, translated (freely) the Rubáiyát of Omar Khyyám, the astronomer-poet of Persia (died c.1122). This was published in 1859, revised and enlarged in 1863, revised again in 1872 and revised finally and reprinted in 1879. It is still popular and much quoted.
Alexander Smith : poet, 1830–67.
L.E.L. : Letitia Elizabeth Landon, a mid-nineteenth-century poetess.
Lydia Sigourney : American poetess, born Lydia Howard Bentley, who wrote children’s books, stories, moral pieces in prose and verse, and biographies.
Fletcher : Phineas Fletcher, 1582–1650, who wrote The Purple Island (1633), a long poem.
Ossian : Gaelic poet, translated very freely by James Macpherson, 1736–96, the authenticity of whose poems was challenged, especially by Dr Johnson.
The Earthly Paradise : a long poem by William Morris, published in 1863.
Atalanta in Calydon : a poetic drama by Algernon Charles Swinburne, published in 1865.
journals, long dead : the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine of 1856, which contained much early work by William Morris (prose and verse), and contributions from Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and Price himself. Also The Germ, a much earlier Pre-Raphaelite paper.
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high and disposedly : a reference to Sir James Melville’s description of Queen Elizabeth in his Memoirs.
Cooper’s Hill : familiar name for the Royal Indian College of Civil Engineering.
262
Ulpian serves your need’, ‘Aha! Elucescebat, quoth our friend" : both from Browning’s ‘The Bishop orders his tomb at St Praxed’s church’.
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Confer orationes Regis furiosissimi : Kipling’s own Latin: Compare the speeches of the very furious King.
formes : the forme is a metal frame into which the type is locked after composition. Loose blocks of type are made into a single solid mass by hammering in wedges of wood, called quoins. Thus a forme can be moved about, stood on its side, etc.
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In Verrem: actio prima : one of Cicero’s Orations, delivered in 70 bc.
‘Member what the considerate Bloomer did … Hounds?’ : a Bloomer was a follower of Mrs Bloomer’s dress reforms of 1849, of which bloomers were a part. In R. S. Surtees’s Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, 1853, chapter XLII, a girl altered an account written by Spraggon about a hunt, making nonsense of it. Hence, ‘we must sugar Mr King’s milk for him’.
One of those scientific rests … celebrated : another reference to Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour.
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Quis multa gracilis : Horace’s Ode, I, 5, much translated and quoted.
‘Let me from the bonded ware’ouse… knowledge’ (and the following quotations): R. S. Surtees, Handley Cross, chapter XXXII.
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‘Hellish dark and smells of cheese’: Handley Cross, chapter LVII.
Pomponius Ego : a self-satisfied character in Handley Cross.
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Hakluyt : see note on page 259.
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Tulkiss is an honourable man : reference to Mark Anthony’s speech after Caesar’s murder, beginning ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which he says repeatedly that Brutus is an honourable man.
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Pretty lips … : popular song of the 1870s.
gig-lamps : see note to p. 73.
Didn’t I ‘Eric’ ’em? : didn’t I use Farrar’s sort of language and attitudes on them?
276
par-ergon : a by-work, any work subsidiary to another.
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Dolabella & Co. : Dolabella was an associate of Verres whom Cicero was attacking in this speech.
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frabjously : taken from the Jabberwocky poem in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and made into an adverb. See note to p. 81.
279
Boh : a chief of dacoits in Burma.
detrimentals : slang, meaning younger brothers of heirs, or unsuitable suitors.
cut the service : resign my commission.
Tamar : a troopship, used mainly to take soldiers to and from the UK on change of station or on leave.
280
a lean Irishman : M’Turk.
dak-bungalow : Indian rest-house.
princess-skirt : see note to p. 56.
281
broke : here means cashiered, dismissed from the army.
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Khye-Kheen Hills : an invented name, not a real place, though the story is based in part on the defence of Chitral in 1895.
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summo ingenio : with the greatest cleverness.
nucleused : possibly an invented word; it means ‘made a nucleus of’.
D.A.Q.M.G. : Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General.
Umballa : Umbala or Ambala, city in the Punjab (now Pakistan).
Durbar Sahib at Amritzar : holy audience offered by Sikhs to the Golden Temple at Amritsar.
khud : a deep ravine or chasm; a precipitous cleft or descent in a hillside.
Old, old story : reference to the hymn ‘Tell me the old, old story’ by Katherine Hankey, 1834–1911.
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poshteen : according to the OED, it should be ‘posteen’. An Afghan leather pelisse, generally of sheepskin, with the fleece on it; a sheepskin coat worn with the wool inside.
whack : rations.
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sungars : breastworks of stone.
promiscuous : in no special order or position.
Jullunder : a good recruiting area between Amritsar and Ludhiana.
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nullah : riverbed.
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grabbed his boots : made obeisance.
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Pushtu : The language of the Afghans, intermediate between the Iranian and Sanskrit families of the Arian languages.
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Koran Sahib : Indian pronunciation of Corkran Sahib.
‘Kubbadar! Tumbleinga!’ : ‘Careful, you’ll fall!’ ‘Kubbadar’ means ‘news’, ‘tumbleinga’ is a mixture of English and Urdu.
Dera Ismail : a large trading town in the Punjab.
Martinis : the service rifles of the Indian Army at the time.
brownin’ : firing into the mass without taking precise aim.
290
à la pas de charge : at the double.
Arrah, Patsy … Baby : see note to p. 55.
Sepoy : see note to p. 194.
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gram-bags : bags containing horse-fodder.
a Brahmini bull : sacred bull of the Brahmin, which must not be interfered with in any way.
consilio et auxilio : with the advice and help [of].