p. 73, pew rates: A sum levied from churchgoers, used for church repairs and other costs.
p. 76, Cleopatra’s Needle: A name given to the Egyptian obelisk that was taken to London and erected on the Victoria Embankment.
p. 88, stretch lame hands of faith and grope: From Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849) lv, 17.
p. 89, The Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before him: From Habakkuk 2:20.
p. 100, The little girl in Wordsworth’s ‘We Are Seven’… Byron’s blighted pirates bored me: ‘We Are Seven’ is a poem by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) contained in Lyrical Ballads (1798), in which a young girl recounts talks of her siblings, alive and dead. “Blighted pirates” is a reference to the 1814 verse tale The Corsair by Lord Byron (1788–1824), which recounts the adventures of privateers.
p. 128, Persephone: The ancient Greek goddess of the Underworld and vegetation.
p. 129, A Dean Swift sees one race of people smaller… eighteen-penny size: The references are to Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745); The Coming Race (1871) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73); She (1886) and Allan Quatermain (1887) by H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925).
p. 144, Pluto: The Roman god of the Underworld.