2 (p. 118). Pica: A size of printer’s type.
3 (p. 118). Castalian ink: Castalia was a spring on Mount Parnassus, sacred to Apollo and the Muses and believed to have powers of poetic inspiration.
4 (p. 118). bulls: Papal edicts.
5 (p. 119). Lord John Russell… Palmerston and Gladstone: Prominent contemporary politicians. For Lord John Russell see Chapter 2, note 12. Lord Palmerston (1784–1865), a Whig, was Home Secretary from 1852 to 1855 and succeeded Lord Aberdeen as Prime Minister in 1855. William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98) was at this time a Peelite Tory, soon to become a Liberal and Prime Minister in 1868; he was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1852 to 1855 and again from 1858 to 1866.
6 (p. 119). fifty thousand impressions: Trollope had earlier (p. 60) put the circulation at forty thousand; the 1878 edition alters both to eighty thousand.
7 (p. 121). ambrosia and… nectar in the shape of toast and tea: The food and drink of the gods.
8 (p. 121). Themis: Greek goddess of Law and Justice. Her ‘abode’ here is the Temple, where lawyers and law students resided in two collegiate Inns of Court, the Inner and Middle Temple, so called because the buildings once belonged to the Knights Templar.
9 (p. 121). rich tide which… passes from the towers of Caesar to Barry’s halls of eloquence: The Thames, between the Tower of London, popularly but erroneously supposed to have been built by Julius Caesar, and the Houses of Parliament, designed by Sir Charles Barry (1795–1860). The description of the ‘rich tide’ bringing back ‘new offerings of a city’s tribute’ is an ironic reference to the sewage which at this time made the Thames a notoriously polluted and evil-smelling river.
10 (p. 121). Old St Dunstan, with its bell-smiting bludgeoners: The old church of St Dunstan in Fleet Street, replaced in 1833 by the new church of St Dunstan in the West, had a projecting clock on which two figures armed with clubs struck the hours and quarters.
11 (p. 121). the bar itself is to go: Temple Bar, the stone gateway which until 1878 separated the Strand from Fleet Street and marked the outer boundary of the City of London.
12 (p. 121). some huge building… dedicated to law: Speculation about the building of new law courts had gone on since the fire of 1834 destroyed the old law courts around Westminster Hall and the old Houses of Parliament, but it was not until 1866 that an architect (G. E. Street) was appointed, and not until 1874 that work started on the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand.
13 (p. 122). the Paphian goddess: Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, was worshipped in many places, but Paphos in Cyprus is particularly associated with her.
14 (p. 122). Bacchus: God of wine in classical antiquity.
15 (p. 122). the tenth Muse who now governs the periodical press: In Greek mythology the Muses were nine in number.
16 (p. 122). older Pembroke brother… for all daily uses: A small four-legged table with hinged leaves.
17 (p. 122). Stafford House: The Duke of Sutherland’s luxurious town house, now Lancaster House, said to be the finest private mansion in London at this time. Sir Charles Barry had recently added a staircase and upper storey.
18 (p. 123). bust of Sir Robert Peel, by Power: Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), reforming Home Secretary from 1828 to 1830 and Tory Prime Minister in 1834–5 and from 1841 to 1846. Peel was a convert to Free Trade and split his party in 1846 by repealing the Corn Laws which had ensured a high price for home-grown wheat and therefore protected the landed and agricultural interests. At this time his name was associated with a progressive and pragmatic Toryism.
Hiram Powers (1805–73) was an American sculptor renowned for his busts and statues of famous men.
19 (p. 123). Millais: Sir John Everett Millais (1829–96), the most brilliant of the Victorian painters. With Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, and nearly all his work of lasting importance was produced in the next ten years under the stimulus of this movement and with the encouragement of John Ruskin, the great Victorian art-critic. The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of painters and poets who attempted to revolutionize English art by returning to the pre-baroque freshness of fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance painting. Their work is very various but in general is characterized by bright colours and fully lit canvases, painstaking naturalistic detail, a penchant for archaic and literary subjects, strong narrative and allegorical elements, and as Trollope suggests in the next paragraph, a certain stiffness in the human figure.
20 (p. 123). the devotional lady looking intently at a lily as no lady ever looked before: A reference not to a painting by Millais but to Charles Allston Collins’s Convent Thoughts, in which a nun is portrayed leaning forward examining a flower by the side of a lily-pond. It was exhibited with other Pre-Raphaelite works at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1851 and received a hostile press, which in turn occasioned Ruskin’s letter to The Times in defence of the Pre-Raphaelites. Ruskin did not care for the figure of the nun but, typically, he had high praise for the flowers: ‘as a mere botanical study of the water lily and Alisma, as well as of the common lily and several other garden flowers, this picture would be invaluable to me, and I heartily wish it were mine’ (Works, ed. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, 39 vols, 1903–12, XII, p. 321).
21 (p. 123). Sybarite: One devoted to luxury and the pleasures of the senses, from Sybaris, a Greek colony in Ancient Italy renowned for luxurious living.
22 (p. 123). tiger: A boy-footman dressed in a livery of horizontal black and yellow stripes, hence the name.
CHAPTER 15
1 (p. 127). Dr Pessimist Anticant was a Scotchman: Dr Pessimist Anticant is Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), the Scottish essayist and historian. Brought up in Scotland and educated at Edinburgh University, Carlyle came to settle in London in 1834, having made his reputation in the previous ten years as a translator and interpreter of German literature and philosophy, chiefly the work of Goethe. This phase of his work culminated in his fictionalized spiritual autobiography, Sartor Resartus (1833), which had a profound influence on the early Victorians. Thereafter Carlyle became increasingly the sage, bringing a heady mixture of Calvinist rhetoric and German idealism to the analysis of the nascent industrial civilization of Victorian England, in such works as ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829), Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843).
2 (p. 128). His allusion to the poet and the partridges was received very well: What follows is essentially a parody of Carlyle’s writing in his most influential decade, the 1840s. The poet ‘gauging ale-barrels, with sixty pounds a year, at Dumfries’ is of course Robert Burns (1759–96), who held a job as an exciseman in Dumfries for the last seven years of his life. Burns figures in On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840) with Dr Johnson and Rousseau as ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ (Lecture V), and is mentioned again in the Latter-Day Pamphlet ‘Downing Street’ (1850).
The scorn for an idle, game-killing aristocracy is a familiar theme in Carlyle: see, for example, the attack on ‘the Idle Aristocracy, the Owners of the Soil of England; whose recognized function is that of handsomely consuming the rents of England, shooting the partridges of England…’ in Past and Present, Book III, Chapter 8.
3 (p. 129). His attack upon despatch boxes… speak his sentiments: specifically a parody of the anti-Parliamentary sections of Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850); see, for example, Carlyle’s attack on ‘red tape’ in ‘Downing Street’ (III) and ballot-boxes in ‘Parliaments’ (VI).
4 (p. 129). Chubb’s patent: See Chapter 8, note 9.
5 (p. 129). Lord Aberdeen… Lord Derby: Lord Aberdeen (1784–1860), leader of the Peelite or Free Trade Tories and Prime Minister of a coalition government from December 1852 to January 1855. Lord Derby (1799–1869), leader of the anti-Peel, protectionist Tories, was Prime Minister for nine months in 1852 and from February 1858 to June 1859. For Lord John Russell see Chapter 2, note 12, and for Gladstone and Palmerston Chapter 14, note 5.
6 (p. 129). Disraeli: Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) with Lord D
erby led the protectionist Tories in Parliament; he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1852, and again in 1858–9 and 1867, and was Prime Minister in 1868 and from 1874 to 1880.
7 (p. 129). Molesworth: Sir William Molesworth (1810–55), radical MP and Utilitarian.
8 (p. 130). a comparison between ancient and modern times, very little to the credit of the latter: The ensuing passage is a parody of the method of historical juxtaposition employed by Carlyle in Past and Present, where the medieval monastery of St Edmundsbury is compared to the modern St Ives workhouse. Trollope’s is a clever parody here, for of course the subject of his novel dovetails nicely with one of Carlyle’s best known works.
9 (p. 130). treasure to which thieves do not creep in: See Matthew vi, 19–20.
10 (p. 130). Belgrave Square and suchlike vicinity: Fashionable district of London.
11 (p. 131). the first number of ‘The Almshouse’: Mr Popular Sentiment is Charles Dickens (1812–70) and the nearest parallel in his work to The Almshouse is Bleak House (1852–3), which was published in monthly numbers and concerns the corruption of ancient institutions. It too is ‘a direct attack on the whole system’ and has a very striking opening chapter.
12 (p. 131). Dulwich: A college of celibates whose income had risen out of all proportion to the meagre educational provision it continued to make for its poor scholars; it was suppressed by the Charity Commissioners, who used the money to create the modern Dulwich College.
13 (P. 132). some éclat in the matter. Acclaim, applause.
14 (p. 132). rich flavour of Attic salt: Refined wit, the spice of banquets in Athens in classical times.
15 (p. 135). shilling numbers: Most of Dickens’s novels were published in nineteen monthly numbers (the last a double number) priced at a shilling each.
16 (p. 135). Mrs Radcliffe’s heroines: Mrs Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), author of such ‘gothic’ romances as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), works of powerful atmosphere but weak and conventional characterization.
17 (p. 136). Bucket and Mrs Gamp… a detective police officer or a monthly nurse: Characters in Dickens’s Bleak House and Martin Chuzzlewit respectively.
18 (p. 136). Mephistopheles: The devil with whom Faust strikes his bargain in the Faust legend.
19 (p. 136). addicted to Puseyism and the curate: Puseyism was the usually hostile term used by contemporaries to denote the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, associated with the name of E. B. Pusey (1800–82) because of his position as Regius Professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church at Oxford, although John Henry Newman was the moving spirit. Their doctrines were set out in the series of Tracts for the Times (1833–41), from which the more neutral term ‘Tractarian’ is derived: insistence on the Apostolic succession as the true source of spiritual authority in the Church, the urgent need to revive the discipline and ritual of the Anglican prayer-book, the primacy of the sacraments in the spiritual life. Their attempt to restore a Catholic spirituality to the Church of England was accompanied by an enthusiasm among their followers for practices such as private confession and decoration of the altar, which seemed Romanizing to many contemporaries. Dickens was very hostile to the Puseyites and had included a satirical portrait of one of them, Mrs Pardiggle, in Bleak House.
Trollope’s parody of Dickens is less specifically recognizable than his parodies of Carlyle. By stressing the moral simplifications of The Almshouse he seems to be drawing less on Bleak House than on a diffused recollection of the early novels, such as the Dotheboys Hall chapters of Nicholas Nickleby (1838–9) and the Pecksniff daughters Mercy and Charity in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4).
CHAPTER 16
1 (p. 140). Convent Custody Bill: See Chapter 7, note 4.
2 (p. 141). Bradshaw: Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, the standard railway timetable of the Victorian period.
3 (p. 143). William Pitt: The younger (1759–1806), Tory Prime Minister from 1783 to 1800 and again from 1804 to 1806. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.
4 (p. 147). a London supper-house: These provided food and entertainment for a largely male clientele coming on from theatres and casinos, and were notoriously places frequented by prostitutes. The more stylish and expensive offered the Victorian equivalent of a cabaret, but Mr Harding has chosen one catering for the working-class Londoner’s taste for shellfish. ‘At none of these night haunts, smart, low, native or exotic, could one expect to see a respectable woman’ (Kellow Chesney, The Victorian Underworld (Temple Smith, 1970), p. 311).
5 (p. 148). cigar divan: Cigar-shop offering a room for smoking and drinking. The word ‘divan’ is of Persian origin and came to mean the chamber where an oriental divan, or privy council, met.
6 (p. 148). Sherbet: In the East a cooling drink of sweetened fruit-juice and snow, in the West a drink made of effervescent fruit-flavoured powder.
7 (p. 149). Blackwood: Blackwood’s Magazine, founded in Edinburgh in 1817.
CHAPTER 17
1 (p. 151). Lord Chancellor: The head of the judiciary in England and Wales, and a member of the Prime Minister’s cabinet.
2 (p. 154). Quixotism: A lofty and idealistic but impractical approach to life, after the chivalrous hero of Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote (1605).
CHAPTER 18
1 (p. 158). Macready: William Charles Macready (1793–1873), famous Victorian actor who did much to revitalize the production of Shakespeare. He was renowned for his powerful performances as Macbeth and Lear.
2 (p. 160). God, that feeds the young ravens: See Psalm 147, v. 9: ‘He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens which cry.’
3 (p. 161). Job: Proverbially patient and long-suffering patriarch in the Old Testament.
CHAPTER 19
1 (p. 163). sotto voce: In an undertone.
2 (p. 169). gravelled: Perplexed.
3 (p. 170). Quiverful: A comic derivation from Psalm 127, vv. 4–5: ‘As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them…’
CHAPTER 20
1 (p. 172). wretched clerical Priam… Hecuba… Hectors: Trollope is comparing Mr Quiverful ironically to the last king of Troy, married to Hecuba, who according to Homer fathered fifty sons and fifty daughters by his wife and concubines. Their son Hector was the greatest of the Trojan warriors.
2 (p. 173). simony: The illegal buying and selling of a Church living, considered a corrupt and sinful practice.
3 (p. 174). Pharisee: Jewish sect advocating strict adherence to the laws and forms of religion, and in the Gospels more concerned with the letter than the spirit; hence a formalist and religious hypocrite.
4 (p. 175). her teapoy and his cellaret: A teapoy is a small three-legged table or stand which originally had nothing to do with tea-making, although by this time Eleanor’s would probably be used for just that. A cellaret is a case or small sideboard with compartments for holding wine-bottles.
5 (p. 175). esprit de corps: Pride in and loyalty to one’s order.
6 (p. 180). his mortal coil would be shuffled off: See Hamlet, III.i.67: ‘When we have shuffled off this mortal coil’.
CHAPTER 21
1 (p. 181). court plaster: Sticking-plaster for superficial wounds made of silk, so called because of their use in the eighteenth century for beauty patches.
2 (p. 183). perfect church: Many details in this picture suggest the tiny church of St Swithun-upon-Kingsgate in Winchester, and provide further evidence for the view argued in the Introduction that Trollope’s memory of his schooldays at Winchester played a significant part in the conception of Barchester.
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