Notes Notes1. William Morris, ‘How Shall We Live’, unpublished lecture, given 1889, Bloomsbury, London, first published in The Unpublished Lectures of William Morris, edited and compiled by Eugene D. LeMire (Detroit, 1969).
2. William Morris, ‘The Decorative Arts, Their Relation to Modern Life and Progress’, an address delivered before the Trades Guild of Learning, published London, 1878.
3. William Morris, ‘Art and Socialism’, lecture to the Secular Society, Leicester, 1884, first published in The Works of William Morris, vol. 23, edited by May Morris, 1915.
1. St Michael: an archangel charged with fighting Satan. Daniel 12: ‘At that time [the end of the world] shall Michael rise up, the great prince, who standeth for the children of thy people.’ Demos is taking the same role in an earthly fight.
2. myrmidons: a warlike people, from Homer’s Iliad. Hannigan is aligning pre-Christian imagery with the aristocracy and Christian imagery with the workers to create a hierarchy of morality in line with biblical teachings. ‘Myrmidons’ can also be used to mean ‘hangers-on’, ‘sycophants,’ and ‘hired ruffians’ (Oxford English Dictionary [OED]), e.g., hirelings of an unscrupulous and disreputable kind.
1. Theocritus: Greek poet (300–260 BC), author of pastoral poetry termed idylls, which were criticized for assigning peasants characteristics of a greater capacity for language and sentiment than was deemed realistic.
2. Salisbury and Co.: a reference to Robert Gascoyne Cecil, Lord Salisbury’s (1803–1903) Conservative government (1886–92). The story is a thinly disguised criticism of Joseph Chamberlain’s (1836–1914) retreat from home rule support for the Irish Unionists after the 1886 general election.
3. Billingsgate: Billingsgate market in London, the largest fish market in the United Kingdom. Fish trading on the site dates back to 1699, when an act was passed allowing the general business market of Billingsgate to trade in any kind of fish. The porters working at the market had a reputation for swearing and bad language.
4. three acres . . . and a sea-cow: ‘Three acres and a cow’ was a phrase coined by Jesse Collings (1831–1920), friend and political ally of Chamberlain and mayor of Birmingham, 1878–80. The phrase was used in Chamberlain’s radical program for the general election in 1885 after the franchise was extended in the 1884 Third Reform Act. Part of the program was to distribute small portions of land to Irish tenants to encourage partial self-sufficiency, and this was seen as a poor alternative to the home rule he supported prior to the election.
1. pocket book: a small book to be carried in the pocket. The merchant is keeping a record of all his financial successes, drawing more money to himself and his family and away from those who need the money desperately, such as the dying man.
2. babbles o’ green fields: The hostess describes Falstaff ’s last moment in Henry V, act 2, scene 3: ‘ ’A made a finer end, and went away an it had been any christom child; ’a parted ev’n just between twelve and one, ev’n at the turning o’ th’ tide; for after I saw him fumble with the sheets, and play with flowers, and smile upon his fingers’ end, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and ’a babbl’d of green fields.’ Both men return to happier times before their death, but the return to nature is more poignant for the dying man in this story, as he dies in urban squalor far from the green fields of his memory.
1. pleased as Punch: derived from the Commedia dell’ Arte character Pulcinella, Mr. Punch is a comedic and violent puppet in Punch and Judy shows. His sense of self-satisfaction gives rise to this phrase.
2. first Reform Act: The Representation of the People Act 1832, generally known as the First Reform Act (there were eight ‘Reform Acts’ between 1832 and 1928, excluding those that dealt solely with Ireland and Scotland), redrew the constituency boundaries in England and Wales and extended the franchise, though the wealth criteria it imposed excluded most working-class men. It also introduced for the first time a system of voter registration. Dissatisfaction with the outcome of the 1832 act led directly to the creation of the Chartist movement (see note 6 to ‘Jack Clearhead’).
3. towsy: disheveled, unkempt, tousled; shaggy, rough; OED.
4. spinning jenny: Invented in Lancashire by James Hargreaves around 1764–67, the spinning jenny was a revolutionary development in the industrialization of the textile weaving industry, which allowed spinners to fill eight or more spools of yarn simultaneously.
5. steam loom: a textile weaving machine powered by steam. Its invention is credited to Edmund Cartwright (1743–1823).
6. linotype machine: the proprietary name of a composing machine used in printing, invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler (1854–99), that sets type line by line (OED). Linotype was the industry standard for newspapers and magazines from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s and 1980s.
7. Cunninghame Graham: Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852–1936) was a Scottish politician and writer. He became the Liberal member of Parliament for North West Lanarkshire in the 1886 general election on a personal platform with strong socialist appeal. Becoming more radical during his service in the House of Commons, in 1888 he left the Liberal Party and founded the Scottish Labour Party (SLP) with James Keir Hardie (1856–1915), hence becoming the first socialist MP in the UK Parliament. He stood as the SLP candidate for Glasgow Camlachie in the 1892 general election but lost. He subsequently helped Keir Hardie to found the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1893 and was instrumental in the formation of the National Party of Scotland in 1928, which merged with the Scottish Party in 1934 to create the Scottish National Party (SNP).
8. Bradford: The founding location of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1893, Bradford, a city in West Yorkshire, was an international center of textile manufacture, especially wool. It grew rapidly as a manufacturing base, leading to a significant increase in its working-class population. The Manningham Mills strike of 1890–91, the impetus for which was the proposed slashing of workers’ wages in the face of a downturn in trade caused by increased global competition as well as tariffs on cloth imports into the United States, was most likely a factor in the choice of the city as the site for the conference that ended with the creation of the ILP.
1. photographic and lithographic: A photograph is an image copied onto sensitive material; a lithograph is an engraving or print on stone (OED). In both senses the money produced by Bullion is only a representation of the real.
2. paper money . . . a forger, a scoundrel: Paper money or bank notes are a form of promissory note where, in exchange for the note, the bank will supply the bearer with the equivalent value in gold. The value of British currency in the nineteenth century was based on the global price of gold (the gold standard), while America and France based their currency on the price of both gold and silver (bimetallism). The exchange of paper money, which in Britain has the words ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of . . . ,’ began in the seventeenth century and became the standard currency in 1844, when the exchange of metal was replaced by a note promising the bearer metal to the cost of the note. Bank notes were backed by the country’s gold reserves until the Great Depression in the 1930s, when Britain ended the gold standard (in 1931), and now all bank notes are fiduciary, meaning the value is based on consumer confidence or on securities; OED.
1. Jacobs notes his source for this story as follows: “From the Chap-book, c. 1660, in the Pepysian Library, edited for the Villon Society by Mr G. L. Gomme. Mr Nutt, who kindly abridged it for me, writes, ‘Nothing in the shape of incident has been omitted, and there has been no rewriting beyond a phrase here and there rendered necessary by the process of abridgement. But I have in one case altered the sequence of events putting the fight with the giant last.’ ”
1. ‘Dullards never, never, never shall be slaves’: The Dullards are singing a variation of ‘Rule, Britannia!’, a British patriotic song derived from the poem ‘Rule, Britannia’ by James Thomson (1700–1748). The chorus as sung nowadays is: ‘Rule, Britannia! / Britannia rules the waves / Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’.
2. Plumduff: Plum duff is a rich boiled or steamed suet pudding made with raisins (the ‘plums’), currants, and spices (OED). Being somewhat heavy, its use here as the name of one of the political parties carries overtones of dullness, stuffy entrenched attitudes, and stupidity.
3. Piecrust: ‘Promises are like pie crust, they are made to be broken’, i.e., promises are not to be trusted. This expression was first used in the political periodical Heraclitus Ridens in August 1681, and popularized by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) in his 1738 book Polite Conversation.
4. ugsome: horrible, horrid, loathsome; OED.
5. leal: loyal, faithful, honest, true; OED.
6. “The three colours which you see . . . Green for nature”: Social-Ism’s colours are those of the Chartist flag. Chartism was a pre-socialism working-class movement in Britain from 1838 to 1858, which sought electoral reform to make the political process more democratic (e.g., extension of suffrage to every man over the age of twenty-one; secret ballots; no property qualifications for members of Parliament, but instead salaries for MPs so that ordinary men could afford to be parliamentary representatives), following dissatisfaction with the 1832 Reform Act, which extended the vote but only by lowering the level of means-testing.
7. kine: archaic plural of ‘cow’, i.e., cattle; OED.
1. board-school: a school under the management of a school-board, as established by the Elementary Education Act of 1870 (OED). This act made education compulsory for children from the ages of five to thirteen.
2. Ting-a-ling-ting-tay: a popular American song from 1892, written and composed by Harry Dacre (the pen name of Frank Dean) (1857–1922). He is best known for his song “Daisy Bell” (‘Daisy, Daisy / give me your answer, do . . .’).
3. Band of Hope: a temperance society first established in Britain in 1847.
4. P.S.A.: Pleasant Sunday Afternoon was a nondenominational Christian society formed in 1875 by John Blackham, a deacon of Ebeneezer Congregational Church in West Bromwich (near Birmingham, UK). Its aim was to offer Christian instruction in a lighter fashion than church services, usually with other recreations as well, such as musical entertainment.
1. purple sweets: violets. The Victorians were fond of associating flowers with certain human attributes, and the violet represents modesty, virtue, faithfulness, love, and the willingness to take a chance on love.
1. Embankment . . . Temple Gardens: Opened in 1870, the Thames Embankment, the collective name for the Victoria, Albert and Chelsea Embankments, reclaimed around thirty-seven acres of marsh land at the side of the Thames between Westminster and Chelsea Hospital. The Embankment, like Trafalgar Square, had become a place where the homeless gravitated at night to sleep, and it was an image of the problem of poverty in London at the end of the nineteenth century. Sociological surveys of poverty in the capital included descriptions of the Embankment homeless in works by Charles Booth, George Sims, Andrew Mearns, and others. The image was also drawn into fiction by other socialist authors, including A. Neil Lyons and Robert Blatchford. Middle Temple and Inner Temple Gardens sit beside the Victoria Embankment between the Blackfriars and Waterloo Bridges.
2. co-proprietors of the Municipal wealth: a worker; somebody who creates municipal wealth and has a right to its disposal.
1. Penrhyn Anachronisms . . . Tyrannies: a reference to George Sholto Gordon Douglas-Pennant (1836–1907), second Baron Penrhyn, who founded the North Wales Property Association in 1886 to resist land nationalization plans promoted in the press. He rescinded the 1874 Pennant Lloyd agreement at his slate quarry, which allowed workers to control wages and management and to set wages by collective bargaining. The Penrhyn dispute between owner and workers, lasting between 1900 and 1903, saw riots and the use of troops against the workers and ended only when the workers’ funds ran out.
2. West Ham . . . hundred other suits: clothing associated with the poor working class: the worker in the slums of London, the agricultural laborer, the low-ranking soldier, the police, the sailor and the life-boatman. All are essential to create and protect the wealth and body of the rich but are regarded as inferior to those they protect. The worker will ‘look very well’ as an MP, but the public is not yet ready for the worker in a position of power.
3. Charles Kingsley . . . William Morris . . . John Ruskin: Charles Kingsley (1819–75), the son of a Hampshire country gentleman, was ordained in 1842 and worked to alleviate poverty; he practiced Christian socialism by setting up co-operative workshops as well as preaching the ideas of the movement. He declared himself a Chartist but rejected the revolutionary aspect, and he drew his moral Chartism and Christian socialism into novels such as Yeast (1849) and Alton Locke (1850). William Morris (1834–96) was the eldest surviving son of a wealthy City financier; he first found fame as a poet and began the move toward socialism after reading Ruskin’s chapter ‘On the Nature of Gothic Architecture’ in The Stones of Venice (1853). Morris went on to join the SDF in 1883. Unhappy with the parliamentary direction in which Henry Hyndman, chairman of the SDF, was leading the group, he left the SDF to form the revolutionary Socialist League at the end of 1884. John Ruskin (1819–1900), son of a prosperous sherry merchant, was a critic of both art and society. Although not a socialist, declaring himself an old-school Tory, Ruskin’s work combined both the aesthetic and the social, and he criticized the conditions of manufacture that dehumanized the producer. All three men were from a class of society that benefited from the status quo but who relentlessly criticized the social structure and its effects on the worker.
1. What do they know of England . . . modern poet: ‘The English Flag’ (1891) by Rudyard Kipling (1895–1936): ‘Winds of the World, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro—/ And what should they know of England who only England know?—/ The poor little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag, / They are lifting their heads in the stillness to yelp at the English Flag!’ Kipling’s poem celebrates the global power of England, asserting that those who know only England cannot understand its worldwide strength; Skeat uses Kipling’s question as a motivation to discover the beauties of England.
2. old lad: not Hargold, Skeat’s old friend, but a slang term for the Devil.
3. Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm: authors of fairy tales. Andersen (1805–75) was the Danish author of tales such as ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’; the Brothers Grimm (Jacob, 1785–1863; Wilhelm, 1786–1859) were the authors of stories such as ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Snow White’.
4. cocoanut matting: a rough and hard-wearing material made from coir. The term is used to indicate the unkempt appearance of a person’s hair.
5. Eastgate-street . . . Grosvenor Museum: The historic Roman city of Chester (northwest England, close to the border with Wales) has many sites of interest to Skeat and Hargold. Eastgate Street, running either side of the east gate of the city walls, is the site of the Victoria Clock, which was erected in 1899 to celebrate Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Grosvenor Park, on the banks of the Dee, was designed by the renowned landscape gardener Edward Kemp (1817–91) and was opened in 1867. The Rows are covered walkways at first-floor level running along the four main streets of the city above the ground-level shops. The origin of the medieval walkways is unknown, but they are unique to Chester. The city wall dates back to the Roman occupation and is the most complete set of city walls in Britain. The building of the Gothic structure of Chester Cathedral was begun in 1260, although there had been religious buildings on the site dating back to the Druids. The Grosvenor Museum was opened in 1886.
6. Eaton Hall: Eaton Hall, about six miles south of Chester and a mile south of the village of Eccleston, is the country house of the Duke of Westminster—hence the reply to the ‘red-faced fellow’s’ question. The house is situated near the River Dee, which runs through the city of Chester.
7. ‘Who is Reason? What is she?’: a play of words on the song ‘Who is Silvia?’, act 4, scene 2 of Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare (1564–1616).
1. slavies: servants, usually female, who carried out general housework instead of being assigned specific duties. ‘Slavies’ would generally be the only servants employed in a household and were employed to indicate the status of a lower-middle-class family of the ‘shabby-genteel’ type, as the area is later described.
2. supper . . . dinner: The vocabulary used for the main meals of the day is an indicator of social class.
3. red-jackets . . . Crimear: The Crimean War between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the British, French and Ottoman Empires was fought between October 1853 and February 1856. The British army uniform was the red coat, except for the artillery, rifles and light cavalry, and ‘red coats’ was the general term used to indicate a British soldier.
4. Soho Square: a square and park located near Charing Cross Road and Tottenham Court Road, London.
5. Regent’s Park: a park to the north of Soho Square. It was designed by John Nash (1752–1835) on the orders of the Prince Regent (later George IV), and work began in 1818. The park is Crown property.
6. Bethnal Green: a slum area of East London renowned for the Old Nichol rookery used by Arthur Morrison (1863–1945) as the setting for A Child of the Jago (1896).
7. Le-ster Square: Leicester Square, London.
8. Alhambra: Alhambra Theatre and Music Hall, Leicester Square. Built in 1854 as the Royal Panopticon of Science and Arts, it became the Alhambra in 1858 and was demolished in 1936.
9. Her eyebrows . . . she paints: The wearing of makeup was one of the signs of prostitution, which is reinforced here by setting the scene outside a theatre. There has been a historical association between the theatre and prostitution, as Jeffrey Kahan points out in his biography of John Kean (1811–68): ‘Prostitution in London was nothing new, nor was its association with the theatre’; The Cult of Kean (Alder-shot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 84. See also K. Pullen, Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), for her consideration of prostitution and performance.
10. Frenchies and Prooshians coming to blows: The Franco-Prussian War was fought between July 1870 and May 1871.
11. Piccadilly: Piccadilly, along with Leicester Square, the Haymarket, Oxford Street, and Pall Mall, had some of the highest levels of prostitution in the capital, as ‘the West End of London was the epicenter of commercial sex in the metropolis in the decades after 1885’; see J. Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, quote p. 79), for further information.
12. Guy’s Hospital: Founded by Thomas Guy and opened in Southwark, London, in 1725, the hospital originally cared for the incurably ill, but by the nineteenth century Guy’s practiced medicine rather than simply palliative care.
1. ‘Begin, ye Muses . . .’: from Theocritus, Idyll I, The Song of Thyrsis, translated by Andrew Lang (1844–1912).
2. Arcady: meaning poet. The narrator is chiding the churchman for wanting to hear secular songs.
3. “My goats . . . among the artintus”: a series of quotations from Theocritus, The Fifth Idyll. Comatas and Lacon are two rural peasants who accuse each of stealing from the other, and settle the difference by a battle of pastoral song. The version quoted is the Andrew Lang (1844–1912) translation Theocritus, Bion and Moschus (1880). Blatch-ford replaces ‘Lacon’ with ‘McGinnis’ in the accusation, and ‘artintus’ should be ‘arbutus’.
4. When Britain . . . tricks: a pastiche of the crier’s nationalism, making a medley of ‘Rule, Britannia!’ (When Britain—first—at heaven’s command—arose from out—the azure—main), a mnemonic rhyme about Guy Fawkes (and gun—powder—treason was plot) and the national anthem (confound their knavish—tricks, which should read ‘frustrate their knavish tricks’).
1. clomb: i.e., ‘climbed’; archaic past tense of ‘to climb’; OED.
1. St. Stephen’s: St. Stephen’s Hall, on the site of the Royal Chapel where the House of Commons sat until 1834, when the chapel was destroyed by fire.
2. the shrieking sisterhood: a derogatory term for women demanding suffrage. The origin of the term is a cartoon published in Punch, 17 January 1906, entitled ‘The Shrieking Sister’.
3. Rome was saved by the cackling of her geese: The cackling of geese woke sleeping Roman soldiers when Rome was attacked by Gauls.
4. exults over a Boer War . . . foot the bill: The successes of the British army in South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899–1902) were celebrated with excessive exuberance, but the £200 million cost to the country was not so well received.
5. Chinese Slavery: After the Second Boer War had ended, British companies were importing indentured Chinese labor, who were paid considerably less than British workers would have expected to receive.
6. Manchester school: advocates of free trade, opponents of war and imperialism, and the protection of consensual contract between peoples.
7. Stirling Burghs: a United Kingdom parliamentary constituency in Scotland, which, until 1918, consisted of Stirling, Dunfermline, Inverkeithing, and Culross.
8. Plautus: Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254–184 BC) was a Roman comedic playwright. His surviving plays are the earliest extant works of Latin literature.
9. Herbert Spencer . . . Or Machiavelli: Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) argued that human beings were controlled by immutable natural laws and that the role of the state was to protect individual freedom; Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was author of The Prince, which showed pragmatic politics based on cunning and duplicity.
1. Coma: in this context, a reference to the blurring of an object under a microscope due to an aberration in the lens.
2. Myopians: Myopia is a condition of the eye that prevents distant objects from being seen clearly. The naming of these people suggests that there is no long-term vision for their lives or society.
3. Thews and sinewa: Thews and sinews in this context refer to the bodily vigor and physical strength of the individual, as if the person consists of muscles or tendons alone. Thew is also an archaic term for a slave or thrall and an apparatus of punishment; OED.
4. yclpet: The correct spelling is ‘yclept’; it means ‘to name’ or ‘named’, ‘called’.
5. recked: past tense of ‘reck’—to know about, to be aware of; OED.
1. “Lower” House . . . “Upper” House: the House of Lords and the House of Commons in the British parliamentary system, as the Martian goes on to explain. The Martian’s account of the House of Lords’ history focuses on the ‘Lords Temporal’ members—peers and noblemen, who in the feudal period would raise and command armies. The House of Lords is also attended by the ‘Lords Spiritual’—bishops and archbishops. Parliament in Britain became the two distinct Houses in the fourteenth century. In 1909 the Lords rejected the Liberal government’s budget, also known as the ‘People’s Budget’. This budget was to introduce new tax rates (including heavy land and property taxes), tax allowance for poor families with children, health and unemployment insurance for workers, and old age pensions. The unelected Lords’ rejection of the budget, desired by both the electorate and their representatives in the House of Commons, caused a constitutional crisis and led to the passing of the 1911 Parliament Bill, which removed the Lords’ right to veto any Commons Bill other than the extension of Parliament beyond five years.
2. pari passu: side by side, simultaneously and equally; OED.
3. Vestigial Rudiments: something remaining from an earlier, less developed period.
4. 7,500,000, of whom 6,500,000: Footnote to the original article: “Mr. Chiozza Money estimates that there are roughly one million persons in the receipt of incomes of £160 per annum and over. Making the large assumption that these have all a Parliamentary vote, and subtracting this number from the total number of electors, we arrive at the number above stated.” Sir Leo George Chiozza Money (1870–1944), born in Genoa, Italy, was a politician and author who changed his name from Leone Giorgio Chiozza in 1903. He developed a reputation for economic, political, and statistical journalism. He was elected as Liberal MP for North Paddington in 1906 and East Northamptonshire in 1910. He argued for the redistribution of wealth through taxation.
5. one-twelfth of the whole House: In the 1906 general election, twenty-nine Labour candidates had been elected to the House of Commons out of a total of 670 constituencies. This makes the proportion nearer to one-sixteenth.
6. Sisyphus: In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is condemned to rolling an immense boulder uphill for eternity.
7. ranked: i.e., become rancid.
1. Stockerau to Mödling: villages to the north and south of Vienna. The prediction is for Vienna to have grown in size to encompass these two villages, a forecast that has not yet been achieved in the early twenty-first century. Vienna was a socialist stronghold, and the city elected the Social Democratic Party to power after the First World War. Its left-wing politics earned it the name Red Vienna. The author hopes that the strength of Vienna and its socialist politics will grow to greater importance in the twentieth century.
2. Cotta style: a small land measure containing eighty square yards; OED. The houses have space and land surrounding them, differentiating the socialist attitude to planning from the pre-socialist period described by the old man, who recalls the overcrowded slums of capitalism.
3. Brigittenau: an area to the northeast of Vienna’s city center. There is a clear geographical separation between work and home.
4. “poorhouses” or “alms houses”: buildings for housing the poor and needy, often funded by individual philanthropy.
5. Goethe’s “Faust”: Faust: A Tragedy (1808; 1832) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). The line is from part 2, act 5, where Faust has died—as the contract with Mephistopheles demanded—when he attained a moment he wanted to last forever. This came as he imagined a free land: ‘I willingly would such a throng behold, / Upon free ground with a free people stand’. Faust is taken by angels and redeemed in Heaven despite his contract with Mephistopheles.
6. Kahlenberg: a mountain in the Wienerwald, or Vienna Woods, on the edge of Vienna and a popular tourist destination.
1. The lesson: This lesson is given to the Sunday School of Glasgow’s Socialist Labour Party (SLP), a Marxist group with a strong membership in Clydeside.
2. told a lie . . . believe it: ‘A lie told often enough becomes the truth’; attributed to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
3. reel and strath-spey: reel, a traditional Scottish dance of four or more participants; strath-spey, a lively dance or reel, the music to accompany the dance; OED.
4. quoit: a game played by throwing rings of flattened iron, rope, rubber, etc., at a peg placed in the ground; OED.
5. sweay: also spelled ‘swey’—a flat iron rod suspended in the chimney, on which pots and kettles are hung; OED.
6. waggity we-clock: also wag-at-e-wa(a), wag at a-, -i-, -y-, waggitawa, waggity-, wag o the wa— an unencased pendulum clock, originally with some wooden mechanism, of a kind made in Germany, and hung on a wall; Dictionary of the Scots Language, wag, I. 4. ii.
7. Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”: Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire blamed the decline of the Roman Empire on its corresponding decline of civic responsibility, with the Christian focus on an afterlife undermining the motivation for progress. Mr. Davis is intimating that the same situation is being repeated in Western capitalist countries as the rich eschew moral and ethical responsibility to society as a whole, focusing only on the acquisition of money. This is compounded by their insistence that workers look to the afterlife for their reward.
8. shewed the white feather: a symbol of cowardice.
9. “pass” . . . tenter or “overseer”: pass, passageway, or corridor between the looms; tenter, either someone who stretches out cloth to dry after dying or someone who oversees (or tends) machinery; overseer, someone in charge of the workers in a specific area or room of the mill. This scene describes the hierarchy among workers in the mills, as an employee in charge of the machinery (spinners, weavers) would sub-contract part of the work to others, their wages being paid out of the spinner’s or weaver’s wages. Charles Allen Clarke describes this subdivision of labor and the double standards of the unionized weaver or spinner when dealing with their own employees through the experiences of Jim Campbell in ‘The Red Flag’, serialized in Justice, 2 May 1908–12 December 1908, the complete text of which can be found in Mutch, British Socialist Fiction 1884–1914, vol. 4, pp. 147–254.
1. hum and shock: George Gordon Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1811), canto 2, stanza 26: ‘But midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men.’
2. Moloch: the name of a Canaanite god, the worship of whom seems to have been associated with the sacrifice of children by burning (Leviticus 18:21); OED.
3. the teeth and claws of nature were red: Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–82), In Memoriam (1850), stanza 60: ‘Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw’.
1. Goodwood: a racecourse in Sussex, north of Chichester.
2. Alhambra matinée . . . Maud Allen species: ‘Alhambra’ was a popular name for theatres in Britain in the nineteenth century. Maud Allen (1873–1956) was born Beulah Maude Durrant in Toronto, Canada, and was a popular music hall entertainer. She was renowned for her scanty costumes, and her ‘Salome Dance’ was excluded from some performances in her national tours as it was deemed licentious by some theatre censors.
3. Leicester-square: an area in London associated with the theatre. The Alhambra Theatre stood in Leicester Square from 1858 (originally opening in 1854 as the Royal Panopticon of Science and Arts) until its demolition in 1936.
4. Nore observation station: The Nore anchorage in the Thames Estuary was the location of a naval mutiny in 1797, following the Spithead mutiny at the anchorage in the Solent. The power of the British navy has been superseded by the power of the air force.
5. dirigible: a balloon or airship; OED.
6. chewing-gum: Chewing gum had been used in various forms for centuries, but the use of chicle, imported from Mexico, in the 1860s produced what is recognized as chewing gum today.
7. Ouida’s guardsman: Ouida was the pseudonym of Marie Louise de la Ramée (1839–1908). The reference to the guardsman is to the character of Hon. Bertie Cecil in Under Two Flags (1867), a member of the Life Guards who carries out many heroic acts under the name ‘Louis Victor’ after having faked his own death to save the honor of his brother.
8. I mean billiards: an allusion to Francis Drake (1540–96) playing bowls at Plymouth Hoe while the Spanish Armada was sailing toward England. Drake is supposed to have waited to finish the game before setting off to defeat the Armada.
9. financiers and Bourse thieves: A bourse is a meeting place for merchants and the name of the French equivalent of the Stock Exchange. The biggest danger to Britain comes from capitalists and moneymen.
10. promissory note: a written promise to pay the bearer of the note the sum stated; OED.
11. propria forma: in proper form, in a form legally binding.
1. the strike at Waihi: a six-month mining strike at the goldmines of Waihi. On 12 November 1912 escalating violence aimed at strikebreakers culminated in gunfire, the storming of the miners’ hall by police, and the death of striker Fred Evans by beating.
2. Labour is prior to . . . not first existed: from US president Abraham Lincoln’s State of the Union Address, 3 December 1861.
1. This is not at all improbable. Russian political prisoners have been known to communicate their inmost thoughts by these means.
1. Pentecostal Convention: Pentecostalism is a revivalist branch of Protestant Christianity that practices radical evangelism and which emerged in Britain and America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The annual Sunderland Convention was organized by Alfred Boddy (1854–1930).
2. Whit-week: Whitsun is the seventh Sunday after Easter; Whitsuntide is the week following Pentecost, the seventh Sunday after Easter, and a religious holiday for Christians. The holiday was celebrated in the north of England with towns organizing walks or parades of Sunday School children through the town, brass band displays, and competitions to herald the beginning of summer. The Whitsun holiday is a relic of feudal society when the lord would allow his serfs time away from work.
3. Jarrow: a town in the northeast of England associated with shipbuilding. It is most famously associated with the 1936 Jarrow March, when men walked from Jarrow to London to protest against unemployment.
4. not Scott, mostly Wesley and Newman: Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), poet and novelist; John Wesley (1707–91), founder of Methodism, who published a large collection of hymns entitled A Collection of Hymns, for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780); John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801–90), part of the Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 1840s that believed High Church Anglicanism to be one of the branches of Catholicism. The March Hare takes Alice’s exclamation to differentiate between the secular poetry of Walter Scott and the hymnal poetry of the churches.
5. She wants to go . . . down to Dixie: a rewording of Irving Berlin’s (1888–1989) ‘I Want to Be in Dixie’ (1912): ‘I want to be / I want to be / I want to be down home in Dixie’.
6. Annfield Plain: a mining village in County Durham, to the west of Sunderland.
7. Tell me not . . . Burnsian speech: a critical reference to the speeches of John Burns MP (1858–1943). Burns was elected to Parliament in 1892 as an independent Labour candidate along with James Keir Hardie. Burns lost the support of the socialist and Labour politicians and members when he gravitated toward the Liberal Party, accepting a position as president of the Local Government Board in the Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) administration in 1905.
8. Maskelyne and Devant: Former watchmaker John Nevil Maskelyne (1839–1917) and his friend former cabinetmaker George Alfred Cooke (1825–1904) were stage magicians and illusionists who have been credited with devising some of the most famous illusions, including levitation. After the death of Cooke, Maskelyne formed a partnership with David Devant (1868–1941), a partnership that became even more successful than Maskelyne and Cooke and lasted until just before Maskelyne’s death. The mysteries of religion and of stage magicians are all the same to Alice.
1. gink: a fellow, a man; usually pejorative; OED.
2. Moss Back: a slow, rustic, or old-fashioned person; one attached to antiquated ideas; OED.
3. hep: well-informed, knowledgeable, ‘wise to’; OED.
4. yap: a fool, someone easily taken in; also, an uncultured or unsophisticated person; OED.
5. simp: a fool, a simpleton; OED.
6. bughouse: crazy, very eccentric; OED.
7. laps: applied to certain parts of the body—of the ear, liver, lungs (c.f. lobe) (OED). ‘I’ve had my laps on . . .’ would seem to mean ‘I’ve been listening to . . .’.
8. Clermont: the first practical and commercially viable steamboat, designed and built by Robert Fulton (1765–1815) and Robert R. Livingstone (1746–1813) in New York in 1807.
9. Langley: Samuel Pierpont Langley (1834–1906), pioneer of aviation.