p. 3, Bentley’s Miscellany: A literary periodical founded by Richard Bentley (1794–1871) in 1836, and of which Dickens himself was the first editor (until 1839). The pieces that make up The Mudfog Papers originally appeared in the magazine in 1837–38.
p. 3, Our Mutual Friend: The last novel completed by Dickens, published in 1864–65.
p. 3, Mr Lupton… so unrivalled a teacher: The English calligrapher Thomas Tomkins (1743–1816) was a writing master at St Paul’s School in London. Joseph Hirst Lupton (1836–1905) was a later surmaster (deputy headmaster) of the same institution.
p. 3, George Bentley: George Bentley (1828–1895) was the son of Richard Bentley, the original publisher of Bentley’s Miscellany. This preface was written in 1880 to accompany the first publication of The Mudfog Papers in book form.
p. 6, Limehouse and Ratcliff Highway: Ratcliff Highway, known today simply as “the Highway”, is a road that runs between the City of London and Limehouse in the East End. In the nineteenth century it was synonymous with crime and vice, not least because of a series of vicious killings in 1811 that became known as “the Ratcliff Highway murders”.
p. 8, Whittington: A reference to the English folk tale about Dick Whittington, a poor orphan who, accompanied by his cat, travels to London and rises to be lord mayor. The character is named after the real-life Richard Whittington (d.1423), who served as lord mayor of London four times.
p. 14, two-pair-of-stairs’ windows: Meaning a window two floors from the ground. A “pair” is an old-fashioned name for a flight of stairs.
p. 14, Captain Manby’s apparatus: The English sea captain George William Manby (1765–1854) was the inventor of the “Manby Mortar”, a device that fired a line from the shore to a sinking ship, enabling crew and passengers to be brought to safety.
p. 16, seventy-four pounder: A cannon firing shot of this weight.
p. 16, eight-day clock: A clock that only needs to be wound once every eight days.
p. 19, court card: A king, queen or jack in a deck of playing cards.
p. 20, Life Guardsman’s sabre: The Life Guards is the household division of the British army, the troops employed to protect the king or queen.
p. 26, like the anonymous vessel… till next day: In the poem ‘The Bay of Biscay’ by the Irish writer Andrew Cherry (1762–1812), the speaker describes how he and his shipmates are forced to weather an overnight storm in the notoriously tempestuous gulf between the western coast of France and the northern coast of Spain: “The night both drear and dark, / Our poor devoted bark, / Till next day, there she lay, / In the Bay of Biscay O!”
p. 32, Full Report… Advancement of Everything: This piece and the one that follows are intended as satires on the British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, an organization regularly ridiculed in the press as the “British Ass”. The correspondent’s reports that constitute the two stories are parodies of the accounts of the British Association’s meetings that appeared in the literary magazine the Athenaeum.
p. 45, ‘The Industrious Fleas’: The Extraordinary Exhibition of the Industrious Fleas was a flea circus on Regent Street, which opened in 1832. A flea circus was a sideshow in which real insects were made to perform feats such as pulling miniature chariots, rowing miniature boats and fighting duels with one another.
p. 48, M. Garnerin: André-Jacques Garnerin (1769–1823), pioneer of the parachute.
p. 48, Vauxhall Gardens: Pleasure garden in Kennington, on the south bank of the Thames.
p. 49, Somers Town: An area of north London.
p. 52, MRCS: Member of the Royal College of Surgeons.
p. 55, He found that… Simple Simons gave the same result: The Hermit: Or, the Unparalleled Sufferings and Surprising Adventures of Mr Philip Quarll, an Englishman (1727) was a popular adventure story, generally attributed to Peter Longueville, about the eponymous Quarll’s fifty years of isolation on a South Sea island. As this description suggests, it was highly derivative of Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe (1660–1731). Valentine and Orson is a medieval French romance about two twins separated at birth, one of whom is raised as a knight, the other of whom is raised by bears. It was known to British readers in several English versions, the earliest of which dates from around 1550. The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, a variation on the Cinderella legend, was published anonymously in 1765 by John Newbery (1713–67), “the Father of Children’s Literature”, and became one of the best-known children’s stories of its day. “Seven Champions” probably refers to The Famous Historie of the Seaven Champions of Christendom (1596) by Richard Johnson (1573–c.1659), which tells the stories of seven patron saints of European countries, including St George, patron saint of England. ‘Simple Simon’ is a traditional English nursery rhyme.
p. 56, Mungo Park: Mungo Park (1771–1806), Scottish explorer of Africa, famous for following the course of the Niger River.
p. 58, Bank: The Bank of England, in the City of London.
p. 62, Boz: The pseudonym used by Dickens in his early writings.
p. 63, Oldcastle: Possibly the town of this name in County Meath, Ireland.
p. 64, New Burlington Street: Off Regent Street in the West End of London. New Burlington Street was the location of the office of Richard Bentley, the publisher of Bentley’s Miscellany.
p. 68, has just called ‘woman’: According to Dickens himself in the second chapter of The Pickwick Papers, the dragon depicted on a gold sovereign being slain by St George was referred to as a woman: “‘Not worth while splitting a guinea,’ said the stranger, ‘toss who shall pay for both – I call; you spin – first time – woman – woman – bewitching woman,’ and down came the sovereign with the dragon (called by courtesy a woman) uppermost.”
p. 73, savans: “Savan” is an old spelling of “savant”, meaning a learned and scholarly person.
p. 83, glee singers: A glee was an English song for at least three men’s voices, usually unaccompanied, popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
p. 86, Four-in-hand Clubs: A four-in-hand was a carriage driven by horses and controlled by one person. The eighteenth-century “Four-in-hand Club” was made up of reckless, well-to-do young men who would bribe carriage drivers to let them take the reins of their vehicles and drive them at great speeds. By the nineteenth century recreational driving had evolved into a respectable leisure pursuit, and many membership clubs existed.
p. 87, Signor Gagliardi: Apparently the owner of a real exhibition of mechanical figures in the period. One notice for this spectacle boasted that it was a “Splendid mechanical museum of 200 automaton figures”, in which were represented “His late Majesty William IV, Queen Victoria the 1st and her most gracious mother the Duchess of Kent, as they appeared in their box at Her Majesty’s Theatre, on the 18th of July, 1837”.
p. 92, Sir William Courtenay… recently shot at Canterbury: Born in Cornwall, John Nichols Thom (1799–1838) was an imposter who assumed the name of Sir William Courtenay and claimed the earldom of Devon. An eccentric and outlandish figure, he gained something of a following and stood for Parliament in Canterbury, though failed to win a seat. He was shot and killed in a fight between his band of supporters, which consisted mainly of disgruntled rural labourers and artisans, and some soldiers at Bossenden Wood in Kent.
p. 94, Newgate Market: A meat market in the City of London, demolished in 1869.
p. 95, spavined: Bone spavin is a form of osteoarthritis of a horse’s hock, resulting in lameness.
p. 95, Professor John Ketch: Named after Jack Ketch (d.1686), executioner under Charles II.
p. 95, the late Mr Greenacre: James Greenacre (1785–1837), known as the “Edgware Road murderer”, killed his fiancée and was hanged at Newgate on 2nd May 1837.
p. 98, Pantaloons… Harlequins and Columbines: Pantaloon, Harlequin and Columbine were stock characters from the Italian commedia dell’arte, a form of comic theatre popular from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Along with two other characters, Clown and Pierrot, they became part of the English pantomime tradition known as the harlequinade, acting out the same basic plot in which Pantaloon, the father of Columbine, attempts to separate his daughter from her lover, Harlequin.
p. 102, Grimaldi: Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837) was a famous Regency actor and comedian, best remembered for his performances as the Clown in the harlequinade, a role with which he became synonymous. He wrote an autobiography that was edited (and in effect rewritten) for publication by Dickens himself in 1838.
p. 102, C.J. Smith as did Guy Fawkes, and George Barnwell at the Garden: The story of Guy Fawkes and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to destroy Parliament was the subject of a pantomime, titled Harlequin and Guy Fawkes, or, the Fifth of November, performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in 1835. Another pantomime from around the same time, Harlequin and George Barnwell, or, The London ’Prentice, seems to have been a comic send-up of playwright George Lillo’s (c.1693–1739) tragedy The London Merchant, or, The History of George Barnwell, first performed in 1731. C.J. Smith was an actor involved in both productions.
p. 102, Brown, King and Gibson, at the ’Delphi: Apparently a famous trio of performers of the period. The Adelphi Theatre is on the Strand in London.
p. 102, Popish conspirator: Guy Fawkes and his fellow would-be terrorists were Catholic fanatics.
p. 107, immediately after the change too, the parallel is quite perfect: Traditionally, the harlequinade occurred at the end of a pantomime or other theatrical presentation, which consisted of an entirely unrelated story and characters. The change from one to the other was signified by an extravagant transition scene, in which the characters from the first play were magically transformed into the stock figures of the harlequinade. Dickens is here comparing this spectacle to a change of government resulting from a general election.
p. 108, summersets: An old spelling of “summersaults”.
p. 108, the late Mr Richardson: The actor and impresario John Richardson (1766–1836), who was the founder of an itinerant fairground theatre that performed in and around London. Dickens provides a description of Richardson’s Theatre in ‘Greenwich Fair’ in Sketches by Boz (1836).
p. 110, All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: The opening words of Jaques’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Act ii, Sc. 7.
p. 112, the Zoological Gardens: A reference to the zoo in London’s Regent’s Park, established in 1826 by the Zoological Society of London. Originally accessible only to members of the society, it opened to the public in 1847.
p. 112, box-lobby: The lobby of a theatre.
p. 115, sign manual: Autograph. The term “sign manual” usually refers to the signature of the sovereign.
p. 117, Boswell: James Boswell (1740–95), Scottish biographer of the English lexicographer and writer Samuel Johnson (1709–84).
p. 117, hack cab: A hackney carriage, the official name for a taxi.
p. 120, the Whigs: One of the two political parties in Parliament in the first half of the nineteenth century (the other being the Tories). In this period the Whigs stood for the interests of industrialists, supporting free trade religious dissenters and those seeking constitutional and social reforms.
p. 120, there’s a book as belonged to Pope, Byron’s Poems: The point being that this is impossible, since the Augustan poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) died over forty years before the celebrated Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) was born.
p. 122, d’Orsay: A kind of top hat made with beaver fur fashionable in the early nineteenth century.
p. 122, high-lows: Boots worn by military personnel.
p. 125, Mysteries of Udolpho: A Gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), one of the pioneers of the form, published in 1794 and characterized by suspense, sensational incidents of horror and apparently supernatural occurrences.