Endnotes
1 (p. 16) Taking up Baedeker’s Handbook to Northern Italy, she committed to memory the most important dates of Florentine History: German publisher Karl Baedeker printed his first travel book, a guide to the Rhine Valley, in 1829. In the next thirty years, the Baedeker series expanded to cover most of Europe, and it is still in print today. With their formula of practical advice for travelers, including detailed maps and a star-rating system for hotels, restaurants, and cultural sights, Baedeker’s handbooks enabled travelers to visit foreign countries without employing personal guides. Like their competitor, Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers, Baedeker’s handbooks became indispensable companions in print form and coincided with the rise of middle-class tourism in the nineteenth century.
2 (p. 19) “If it is Mrs. Grundy who is troubling you, I do assure you that you can neglect the good person. Miss Honeychurch will be perfectly safe”: Mrs. Grundy is an imaginary watchdog of conventional opinion. In Thomas Morton’s play Speed the Plough (1798), Dame Ash-field continually invokes the name of her neighbor, Mrs. Grundy, as an unseen but feared arbiter of respectability: “What would Mrs. Grundy say?” is her anxious refrain.
3 (p. 20) San Miniato—beautiful as well as interesting; the crucifix that kissed a murderer—Miss Honeychurch would remember the story: Baedeker tells the story to which Miss Lavish alludes: Above the altar in the church of San Miniato “is the small crucifix which is said to have nodded approvingly to San Giovanni Gualberto when he forgave the murderer of his brother” (Italy: Handbook for Travellers, p. 522; see “For Further Reading”). The guidebook explains that in showing mercy to his brother’s assassin, this son of a powerful eleventh-century Florentine family chose peace over a blood feud.
4 (p. 20) “My father always voted for Mr. Gladstone, until he was so dreadful about Ireland”: William Gladstone (1809-1898) served four terms as prime minister of Britain and was known for his policies of social reform. His persistent support of Irish nationalism, however, alienated many of his supporters in the Liberal Party (of whom Lucy’s father was apparently one).
5 (p. 23) There was no one even to tell her which . . . was the one that was really beautiful, the one that had been most praised by Mr. Ruskin: John Ruskin (1819-1900), essayist and art critic, was the author of Modern Painters, a five-volume series completed in 1860 that played a major role in shaping the aesthetic sensibilities of Victorian England, particularly of its rising professional class. His Stones of Venice (1851-1853) celebrated the Italian city’s Gothic architecture, influencing the Gothic revival in Victorian architecture. Baedeker quotes liberally from Ruskin’s writings on Italy, including his essay “Mornings in Florence” (1875), in which, to answer Lucy’s question, Ruskin identifies the sepulchral slab of Galileo Galilei (an ancestor of the astronomer) in Santa Croce as “one of the most beautiful pieces of fourteenth century sculpture in this world.”
6 (p. 30) “I don’t believe in this world sorrow.... Make him realize that by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes—a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes”: An article in the Sunday Magazine (London) in 1896 took “The World-Sorrow” as its subject, suggesting that the idea (and the phrase) was gaining currency as the new century dawned. Mr. Emerson’s “everlasting Why” evokes two chapter titles in Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle’s treatise on revolution, human will, and belief: “The Everlasting No” and “The Everlasting Yea.” Carlyle’s book bears a connection to a more famous Emerson as well: Soon after its serialization in Frasier’s Magazine in 1833 and 1834, it was championed in the United States by Ralph Waldo Emerson and proved influential, along with other works by Carlyle, in shaping the American Transcendental movement.
7 (p. 49) she had been in the Piazza since eight o‘clock collecting material.... The two men had quarreled over a five-franc note: As Baedeker notes, the French monetary system was widely used in Italy, with a franc equivalent to the Italian lira. At the time, 5 francs were equal to 4 shillings, or 1 dollar (about 12 dollars in today’s currency).
8 (p. 51) that intimate knowledge, or rather perception, of Florence which is denied to all who carry in their pockets the coupons of Cook: Thomas Cook (1808-1892), a pioneer of modern tourism who developed and led group excursions within England and abroad, instituted a coupon system for the convenience of travelers. Cook negotiated fair prices with preferred hotels, whose proprietors would then accept his coupons in lieu of cash as payment for meals and accommodations.
9 (p. 51) “This very square ... witnessed yesterday the most sordid of tragedies. To one who loves the Florence of Dante and Savonarola there is something ... portentous and humiliating”: Mr. Eager’s two examples, on closer inspection, cast Florentine history in perhaps a more volatile, less hospitable light than he intends. Dante Alighieri, the great Florentine poet, was banished from his native city in 1302 and died nineteen years later, still in exile. The Christian preacher Girolamo Savonarola rose to power in fifteenth-century Florence, but his thirst for control of the city’s spiritual and political destiny alienated first the Medicis, then the Pope, and ultimately the people. He was executed in the same square where, centuries later, Lucy Honeychurch witnesses a murder.
10 (p. 86) “I promessi sposi,” said he: Cecil has broken the news of their engagement by speaking the title of a much-admired Italian novel, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1825-1827).
11 (p. 97) “Let’s hope that Mrs. Harris there warn’t no sich person,” said her mother: Mrs. Honeychurch is quoting from Charles Dickens’s The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (189-4), in which the cockney midwife Mrs. Gamp regularly refers to a Mrs. Harris, who proves to be an imaginary character Mrs. Gamp invokes chiefly to confirm her opinions.
12 (p. 110) “I trusted they were no relations of Emerson the philosopher, a most trying man”: Mrs. Honeychurch is referring to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), poet, essayist, and leader of the New England Transcendentalists.
13 (p. 111) She clasped her knees for the name. Something in Thackeray. She struck her matronly forehead: Mrs. Honeychurch’s mnemonic device for the name that eludes her is indeed a Victorian novelist—but she means Dickens, not William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863).
14 (p. 112) “George Meredith’s right—the cause of Comedy and the cause of Truth are really the same”: English poet and novelist George Meredith (1828-1909) gave a lecture in 1877-“The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit”—that he adapted into a preface to his 1879 novel The Egoist. In it, he identifies comedy as a civilizing force, the key to “the Book of our common wisdom,” and a weapon against pretension.
15 (pp. 119-120) “What have they got? Byron. Exactly. A Shropshire Lad. Never heard of it. The Way of All Flesh ... Gibbon. Hullo! Dear George reads German.... Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and so we go on: The Emersons’ library runs the gamut from Romanticism to nihilism. It includes poems by Lord Byron (1788-1824), an emblematic figure of brooding Romanticism; A Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman (1859-1936), with its picture of youth in the countryside; the posthumously-published autobiographical novel by Samuel Butler (1835-1902), The Way of All Flesh, whose lack of sentimentality marked it as a departure from Victorianism; and works by Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), presumably including his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which condemned decadence and endorsed intellectual freedom. Mr. Beebe also observes that the Emersons own works by two German philosophers: Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who focused on human will, and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), best known for his critiques of religion and morality.
16 (p. 120) an amateur had painted this inscription: ”Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes”: In the first chapter of Walden (1854), the book inspired by his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond, Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau writes, ”I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”
17 (p. 137) Only sovereigns and pennies.... Freddy had half a quid and his friend had four half-crowns: A quid is 1 pound sterling (or 1 sovereign), a bob (the driver’s tip) is 1 shilling, and a half crown is 2 shillings and sixpence.
18 (p. 182) ”let it be a shop, then. Let’s go to Mudie’s”: Charles Mudie opened his London subscription library and bookstore in 1842. Through its book selection and promotion strategies, Mudie’s became a significant arbiter not only of public taste during the Victorian era, but also of the very form novels took: It gave significant institutional support to the so-called three-decker novel (books that, because they comprised three volumes, could be divided among three subscribers at a time).