The Meaning of Night

Chapter XVI of Vanity Fair (1848), "ask the Reverend Mr Thurifer if Belgravia is not a sounding bra.s.s, and Tyburnia a tinkling cymbal. These are vanities. Even these will pa.s.s away." Ed.]

But what will he do? . . .

He says that he will find him . . .

. . . My G.o.d, what was that?" Ed.]

6 [One of the famous Railway Guides published by George Bradshaw (180153), the first volume of which was published in 1841. Ed.]

1 ["Let us be judged by our actions". Ed.]

2 [King"s is the neighbouring college to St Catharine"s. Ed.]

3 [The Magus (1801) by Francis Barrett, born between 1770 and 1780, is a seminal work on the subject of magic and occult philosophy. The Preface states that it was written "chiefly for the information of those who are curious and indefatigable in their enquiries into occult knowledge, we have, at a vast labour and expence, both of time and charges, collected whatsoever can be deemed curious and rare, in regard to the subject of our speculations in Natural Magicthe CabalaCelestial and Ceremonial MagicAlchymyand Magnetism". Ed.]

4 ["Under guardianship or scholastic discipline"; i.e. undergraduates. Ed.]

5 [Alexander Wale of St John"s College, then Senior Proctor. The incident took place in April 1829. Ed.]

6 [i.e. sent down from the university for a specified time. Ed.]

1 ["Suspicion". Ed.]

2 [The Sultan to whom Scheherazade tells her stories in The Arabian Nights" Entertainments. Ed.]

3 [Side-whiskers, narrow at the ears, broad and rounded at the lower jaw. Ed.]

4 [In Fleet Street. Designed by Wren and completed in 1703. Ed.]

5 [The Three Tuns Tavern was in Billingsgate. Its celebrated fish "ordinaries" i.e. fixed price meals were served at 1 and 4 o"clock; the charge was 1s. 6d., including butcher"s meat and cheese. Ed.]

1 ["He is known by his companions". The author"s narrative resumes from this point in the MS. Ed.]

2 [From Mozart"s Don Giovanni. It is sung by Don Ottavio, Donna Anna"s finance. Convinced that Don Giovanni has killed Anna"s father, Don Ottavio swears to avenge her and to return "as the messenger of punishment and death". Ed.]

3 [i.e. Tasmania. Ed.]

4 [i.e. a member of King"s College. Ed.]

5 [A slang term for the criminal cla.s.ses. Ed.]

6 [Heavily greased side-whiskers, which swept back to, or over, the ears. Ed.]

7 [A common method of rigging races, along with pulling favourites and doping. As Baron Alderson noted in his summing up of a case brought before the Court of Exchequer after the 1844 Derby, "if gentlemen will condescend to race with blackguards they must expect to be cheated". Ed.]

8 [At 153 Aldersgate Street. Ed.]

9 [Ken-cracker: slang term for house-breaker. Ed.]

10 [A terrifying cloaked figure that began to terrorize London in 1837. His usual modus operandi was to pounce on unsuspecting pa.s.sers-by, often women, and rip at their clothes with claw-like hands. He was sometimes said to breathe fire, had eyes that burned like hot coals, and was capable of leaping great heights over walls and fences. Whether Jack was real or imagined is still debated, though the attacks were widely reported in the press. Ed.]

11 [Speeler: slang term for a cheat; buzzers: pickpockets; macer: a thief or sharp. By "the Highway" the author means the Ratcliffe Highway, which ran from East Smithfield to Shadwell High Street. It was described by Watts Phillips in The Wild Tribes of London (1855) as "the head-quarters of unbridled vice and drunken violence of all that is dirty, disorderly, and debased". Ed.]

12 [i.e. transportation. Ed.]

13 [Slang term for a gullible victim. Ed.]

1 ["Flame follows smoke" i.e. there is no smoke without fire (Pliny). Ed.]

2 [A mixture of opium and alcohol. Legal restrictions on the use of opium did not come into force until 1868 and at this period laudanum was widely prescribed, and widely abused. Initially a drug for the poor, laudanum became a favoured means of pain relief for the middle cla.s.ses: celebrated literary users included Coleridge, De Quincey, and Elizabeth Browning. The novelist Wilkie Collins became virtually dependent on it and confessed that much of The Moonstone (1868) had been written under its influence. "Who is the man who invented laudanum?" asks Lydia Gwilt in Collins"s Armadale (1866). "I thank him from the bottom of my heart." Ed.]

3 [Milton, Comus, in a pa.s.sage describing Chast.i.ty: "A thousand liveried angels lackey her,/Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt". Ed.]

1 ["Not all of me will die": Horace, Odes, III. x.x.x. 6. Ed.]

2 [Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform"d; or, The Artificiall Changeling (1650), a history of bodily adornments and mutilations, by the physician John Bulwer (fl. 164854). Ed.]

3 [This appears to have been the edition of Devotions published in octavo by William Pickering in 1840, which also included (as well as the reproduced frontispiece mentioned by Glyver) the famous "Deaths Duell" sermon, preached before King Charles, Lent 1630, and Izaak Walton"s Life of Donne. Ed.]

4 [From the Music on the Death of Queen Mary, performed in March 1695. The music was performed again at Purcell"s own funeral in November 1695. Ed.]

5 [From Donne"s last sermon, the aforementioned "Deaths Duell", preached before Charles I at Lent 1631. Ed.]

1 ["There is danger in delay" (Livy, Ab urbe condita). Ed.]

2 [Celebrated pleasure gardens near Battersea Bridge. Regular entertainments included fireworks, dancing, concerts, and balloon ascents. It was open from three in the afternoon until midnight. After its respectable patrons had departed, it became an infamous haunt of prost.i.tutes. It finally became so great an annoyance to its neighbours that in 1877 it was forced to close. Ed.]

3 [Built in 1724 for the Maids of Honour of George II"s wife, Caroline of Ans.p.a.ch. Ed.]

1 [The author"s narrative temporarily concludes on the previous page of the ma.n.u.script. The following account, on smaller sheets and in another hand, has been bound in at this point. Ed.]

1 [Lord Castlereagh (17691822). He became Foreign Secretary in February 1812 and committed suicide by cutting his throat with a penknife in August 1822. Ed.]

2 [Spenser, Faerie Queene, II. xii. 65. Ed.]

3 [Named after Hamnet Duport, 20th Baron Tansor (16561712), who made extensive alterations to Evenwood in the 1690s. Ed.]

4 [Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (c.1520c.1584), French architect and engraver. Ed.]

1 [Ann Radcliffe (born 1764), author of the Gothic cla.s.sic The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), died of an asthma attack on 7 February 1823. Ed.]

2 [Felltham, Resolves, xlvii ("Of Death"). Ed.]

1 [14 June 1645. Naseby is some thirty miles south-west of Evenwood. Ed.

1 [Osborne House, built as a private retreat for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on an estate overlooking the Solent of nearly three hundred and fifty acres, purchased from Lady Isabella Blachford. The work, begun in 1845 and supervised by the Prince Consort, was completed in 1851. Ed.]

2 [The name, no longer in use, of the area of London described in Murray"s Modern London 1860 as "that vast city, in point of size, which the increasing wealth and population of London has caused to be erected between 1839 and 1850 on the green fields and nursery gardens of the See of London"s estate at Paddington". It was roughly bounded by the Edgware Road on the east, Bayswater on the West, Hyde Park on the south, and Maida Hill on the north and was inhabited mainly by professional men and City merchants and those, as Murray"s delicately puts it, "who are undergoing the transitional state between commerce and fashion". "Ah, ladies!" writes Thackeray in Chapter XVI of Vanity Fair (1848), "ask the Reverend Mr Thurifer if Belgravia is not a sounding bra.s.s, and Tyburnia a tinkling cymbal. These are vanities. Even these will pa.s.s away." Ed.]

3 [In Covent Garden. A relatively inexpensive establishment, its typical clientele were single gentlemen up from the country. Ed.]

4 [A paraphrase of Psalm 32: 1. Ed.]

5 [The feminist intellectual Mary Wollstonecraft (175997) had an illegitimate daughter, f.a.n.n.y, by the American speculator and author Gilbert Imlay, and another, Mary, the future wife of the poet Sh.e.l.ley, by the political writer and novelist William G.o.dwin. Her Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in 1792. One infers that Mrs Glyver"s aunt believed that her niece was pregnant by a lover, rather than by her husband. Ed.]

6 [By this rather obliquely delicate reference she appears to mean that she had recently contrived to have marital relations with Captain Glyver, the potential outcome of which would coincide with the birth of her friend"s child. Ed.]

7 [Sir Charles Stuart (17791845), created Baron Stuart de Rothesay in 1828, was British Amba.s.sador to France from 1815 to 1824. I have not identified James Martin. Ed.]

8 [The street in which the British Emba.s.sy was, and is, situated. Ed.]

9 [Part of the so-called Chateau of Dinan, which is actually built into the town"s ramparts. The Salle des Gisants holds seven carved medieval tombs: that of Roland de Dinan is said to be the oldest armed tomb in Western Europe. The carved figure referred to by Mrs Glyver is probably that of Renee Madeuc de Quemadeuc, second wife of Geoffroi Le Voyer, chamberlain to Duke Jean III of Brittany. Ed.]

1 ["Seek the truth". Ed.]

2 [A maxim of the tribune Lucius Ca.s.sius Longinus, quoted by Cicero, meaning "For whose benefit?", often used to point a finger at someone who stands to gain most from a crime. Ed.]

1 ["Love is a credulous thing". Ed.]

2 [The pseudonym, of course, of Charlotte Bronte. Villette was published in January 1853. Ed.]

3 [In Memoriam A.H.H. (i.e. Arthur Henry Hallam, 181133) was published by Edward Moxon (Daunt"s publisher) in 1850, the year Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate following the death of Wordsworth. Ed.]

4 [The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (192882), John Everett Millais (182996), William Holman Hunt (18271910), and others. Ed.]

1 ["Love conquers all": Virgil, Eclogues. Ed.]

2 [Hieroglyphickes of the Life of Man (1638) by the English poet Francis Quarles (15921644). Ed.]

3 [Turkey declared war on Russia in October 1853. The Turks defeated the Russians at Oltenitza on 4 November, but the Turkish naval squadron was destroyed by the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Sinope on the 30th of that month an action that caused outrage in England. These were the preliminary engagements of what was to become the Crimean War. Britain and France declared war on Russia in March 1854. Ed.]

4 [By Charlotte M. Yonge (18231901), published in 1853. The novel, which dramatizes the spiritual struggles of its princ.i.p.al character, Guy Morville, reflected its author"s Tractarian beliefs and was one of the most successful novels of the century. Ed.]

5 [The first volume of The Stones of Venice by John Ruskin (18191900), in which he championed Gothic architecture, was published in March 1851; volume two followed in July 1853, and volume three in October 1853. Ed.]

6 [Op. 28. Composed 18369, published in 1839. Ed.]

7 ["At my heart, at my breast", from Schumann"s song-cycle for female voice and piano, Frauenliebe und -leben ("A Woman"s Life and Love", 1840). Ed.]

1 ["I am not what I was". Ed.]

2 [Published in 1650. Ed.]

3 ["Lift up your hearts". Ed.]

4 [Charles-Marie-Rene Leconte de Lisle (181894), leader of the Parna.s.sian poets. His Poemes antiques were published in 1852. Ed.]

5 [Dalby"s Carminative, one of many patent medicines containing laudanum. Ed.]

1 ["The lover"s confession". The t.i.tle of the famous fifteenth-century poem by John Gower (1325?1403). Ed.]

2 [Swiss physician and alchemist (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 14931541). Ed.]

3 [George Duport (171071), 22nd Baron Tansor. Ed.]

4 [Written 28 March 1816, and first published in Poems (1816). Laura Fairmile married Julius Duport in June of that year. Byron himself married Annabella Milbanke in January 1815. Ed.]

1 ["Who shall separate us?". Ed.]

2 [Words from the first two lines of Shakespeare"s Sonnet 137: "Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,/That they behold, and see not what they see?" Ed.]

3 [Marie Tussaud, nee Grosholz (17611850). During the French Revolution she had a.s.sisted the wax modeller Dr Philippe Curtius to make moulds of the heads of decapitated victims of the Terror. She established her Bazaar in Baker Street in 1835. The name "Chamber of Horrors" was coined by a contributor to Punch in 1845 to describe the room containing the gruesome relics of the Revolution along with newly created figures of murderers and other criminals. Ed.]

1 ["To know all things is not permitted" (Horace, Odes, IV. iv). Ed.]

2 [The bookseller David Nutt, at 270 and 271 Strand. Ed.]

3 [A Collection of Poems, edited by Charles Gildon (16651724) and published by Bernard Lintot in a small octavo one-volume edition in 1709 (it later appeared in two volumes). It contains Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim, and "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Musick", which are in fatct the last six poems in the preceding work. Ed.]

1 ["I shall rise again". Ed.]

2 [Sir G.o.dfrey Kneller (16461723), German-born portrait painter. The picture in question, of Anthony Charles Duport (16821709), is now in the National Portrait Gallery. Ed.]

3 [George William Frederick Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon of the second creation (180070). He was Foreign Secretary from 1853 to 1858. No doubt he and Lord Tansor had much to discuss concerning the impending hostilities in the Crimea. Ed.]

4 [The bookseller Henry Seile (fl. 161961). See note on p. 000. Ed.]

5 [Proverbs, 13: 19. Ed.]

6 [The quotation is from Felltham"s Resolves, xi ("Of the Trial of Faith and Friendship". Ed.]

1 ["The materials of war". Ed.]

2 [A resort on south coast of the Isle of Wight known for its mild climate. Ed.]

3 [As the subsequent reference to "Mrs Browning"s Portuguese sonnets" (i.e. the "Sonnets from the Portuguese") makes clear, this is the volume of Poems published in two volumes by Chapman and Hall in November 1850. Ed.]

1 ["The day of wrath". Ed.]

2 [This was Charles Duport (16481711). As a consequence of his actions, his son, Robert Duport (16791741), a stout Protestant and elder brother of the aforementioned Anthony Duport, inherited only the Barony, the Dukedom conferred on his father having no legal existence in England. Ed.]

3 [The following sections of the MS are composed of pasted-in strips of unlined paper. The writing on these strips is occasionally almost illegible. Conjectured readings are in square brackets. Ed.]

4 [Corbyn, Beaumont, Stacey & Messer, well-known chemists and druggists, situated at 300 High Holborn. Ed.]

1 [An avenger or punisher. Ed.]

2 [The sword of Justice wielded by Sir Artegal in Spenser"s Faerie Queene. Ed.]

3 [A public-house at No. 11 Windmill Street, Haymarket. Ed.]