The Eustace Diamonds (88 page)

2
.
hunting:
Trollope loved hunting with an ‘affection which I cannot myself fathom or understand' and always felt deprived ‘when the nature of the tale has not allowed… a hunting chapter' (
Autobiography
, Ch. 4). In his obituary essay on the other novelist Henry James playfully dismissed Trollope as a ‘novelist who hunted the fox', but it is possible to see the fox hunt in the following chapter, where the important prey is human and not animal, as one of the best episodes in the novel.

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.
the advice which Job got from his wife:
‘Curse God, and die' (Job 2:9).

2
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You hardly gave him powder enough:
Term borrowed from musketry (‘powder' = gunpowder). ‘You didn't push him hard enough.'

1
.
Rosalind:
Heroine of Shakespeare's
As You Like It.

1
.
the fox's brush
…
to give her:
In the traditional hunt, after the kill, the fox's tail was cut off and given to the victor in the chase (who would be ritually ‘bloodied' around the face with it). The head or snout was was dismembered to be stuck as a trophy on the kennel door and the remaining carcass thrown to the pack to be devoured on the spot. By Trollope's day this bloody jubilation had been toned down. He was an eloquent defender of his favourite sport in the pages of the
Fortnightly Review
at this period.

1
.
Likewise the Bears in Couples Agree:
From the popular air ‘Mother Machree', by the Irish songsmith and performer Samuel Lover (1797-1868).

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abigail:
Generic term for a lady's maid.

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episcopal place of worship:
There being no Church of England in Scotland, Mr Emilius attends the local place of worship over which an Anglican Bishop has unofficial jurisdiction.

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pension:
Commonly a lodging house, here a boarding school.

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Petruchio
…
his own peculiar shrew:
Ironic reference to Shakespeare's
The Taming of the Shrew.

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all vanity and vexation of spirit:
Lizzie quotes Ecclesiastes 1:14. She has been attending to Mr Emilius, we assume.

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Houris:
Virgins in Paradise, whom the lucky virtuous man will enjoy (it is hard to imagine that Trollope — who was not above making jokes about his own name in his novels — is not thinking of a similar and less flattering noun).

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Mrs Carbuncle's house in Hertford Street:
Fashionably located, near Piccadilly and Park Lane. The street may well have been chosen for its associations with the Marquis of Hertford — inspiration for the villainous Marquis of Steyne (Becky's nemesis) in Thackeray's
Vanity Fair.

1
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patent Bramah key:
Design patented under the name of Joseph Bramah (d. 1814). It would probably have been old-fashioned. To judge from contemporary advertisements Lizzie would have been better off with a Chubb New Patent Detector Lock.

1
.
Mrs Grey
…
Lady Glencora:
For the connection of Alice Grey (née Vavasor) to her cousin Lady Glencora Palliser (née MacCluskie) see
Can You Forgive Her?
, Ch. 18.

2
.
intending to alter the value of the penny:
Palliser and decimal coinage is a recurrent joke in the political novels. It is not an invention of Trollope's however. There was considerable interest in the question, with associations for the decimalization of the coinage and proposals put before Parliament. Palliser ultimately graduates from something of a clown to heroic stature and arrives at a more mature understanding of what money really is (see
The Duke's Children
, Ch. 65).

3
.
ballot:
After much controversy the ballot (secret voting in general elections) was introduced in 1872. Trollope depicts its novel operation in
The Way We Live Now
and the traditional mode of voting (which he preferred, thinking it more ‘honest') in
Ralph the Heir.

4
.
our last duel:
Between Phineas and Lord Chiltern, in
Phineas Finn.

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Lord George had been at the house of Messrs Harter and Benjamin:
Lord George would have gone there to pay the interest and to renew a promissory note. In
An Autobiography
Trollope tells how as a Post Office clerk he paid back over £200 on a loan of £16 from a moneylender (Ch. 3). Not surprisingly it is something of an obsession in his novels, reaching a climax in
The Way We Live Now's
furious onslaught on the credit system and ‘paper'.

2
.
Tuesday, the 30th of January:
The perpetual calendar reveals this to be 1866.

1
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they've photographed me
…
the “Hue and Cry”:
In
The Birth of Photography
(1969) Brian Coe describes the vogue for the use of ‘secret' cameras in the 1860s. In 1869, for example, clandestine photographs were taken at the Epsom Derby of — as it embarrassingly emerged — gentiemen in the company of ladies not their wives. The
Hue and Cry
was the police journal in which crimes and details of criminals on the run were reported.

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pinchbeck:
Cut-price.

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.
The Noble Jilt:
Trollope is enjoying what we would now call an ‘in-joke'. The ‘very eminent author' was himself, for he had written the play in 1850. A well-known actor advised Trollope that the piece was not suitable for production and Trollope incorporated his comments in the ladies' criticisms after the performance. The most important point, namely that the character of a jilt must always be unsympathetic, was refuted by Trollope when he used the plot again in his fine novel
Can You Forgive Her?

1
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The shirt
…
Dejanira sent to Hercules:
Better known as the shirt of Nessus. Nessus, a lustful centaur, was the vengeful, passed-over lover of Dejanira, Hercules' wife, and the toxic shirt was his fatal revenge on his rival Hercules.

2
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You would not find it cold there by the sea-side:
The climate of the West Coast of Scotland is, as Frank observes, clement by virtue of the Gulf Stream.

3
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Childe Harold:
Ultra-romantic poem, which made Byron famous overnight. Canto IV, which contains florid rhapsodies on Italy, was published in 1818.

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every Baring and every Rothschild
…
seats in the House by right:
Scions of the banking house of Baring had been MPs since the late eighteenth century. Lionel Nathan de Rothischild had been elected to Parliament but not allowed to sit because as a Jew he could not conscientiously take the member's oath. He was repeatedly re-elected and finally took his seat in 1858.

1
.
“Fortnightly Review”
…
month:
Another little joke.
The Eustace Diamonds
was, of course, appearing in the
Fortnightly Review.
The review was true to its name for the first thirty-five issues, from 15 May 1865 to 15 October 1866, but after that it appeared monthly.

2
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fourpenny bits:
I.e. the ‘groat', as in the popular nineteenth-century expression, ‘I don't care a groat'.

1
.
lacs.
A lac is 100,000 rupees.

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rum be b
—: ‘Buggered', presumably. Trollope is not usually so explicit.

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the ‘Rising Sun' in Meek Street:
There is (and was then) a pub just north of Gray's Inn Road, as Trollope says, with this name, but it is on the corner of Lamb's Conduit Street and High Holborn.

1
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the lines
…
had portrayed them:
‘Sun pictures' (or heliographs) as they were called required long-time exposures in bright sunlight. The calotype process, introduced by Fox Talbot in the early 1840s, reduced the time required. But, servant that she is, Patience cannot afford a studio portrait. See Coe's
The Birth of Photography
, cited above.

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which might cost her and her husband their licence:
The authorities were becoming stricter about such things with the Wine and Beer House Act of 1869 and incessant pressure from the temperance movement.

1
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colloguing:
Whispering furtively together.

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governess
…
make her attempt:
The desirability of Fawn Court and the difficulty of Lucy's position on the open market may be judged from this letter to
The Times
ten years earlier. The writer was a poor governess who applied as one of fifty applicants for an advertised post:

After having been kept standing in a cold draughty hall more than an hour, I at last obtained an interview with the lady, and learnt that the duties of the governess would consist in educating and taking the entire charge of the children, seven in number, two being quite babies, to perform for them all the menial office of a nurse, make and mend their clothes, to teach at least three accomplishments and fill up leisure hours of an evening by playing to company.

1
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some absurdity:
Such as the proposal of marriage in
Phineas Finn
to Madame Max Goesler, which she wisely declined.

1
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Cut the painter
…
wires:
‘Cut the painter' was a slang expression with a vogue at this time meaning take an unceremonious departure, the painter being a rope used to secure a boat to shore. The wires, of course, are the telegraph. In 1867 telegraphs, introduced commercially in the 1840s, were installed in every metropolitan jurisdiction police station.

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levanted:
Departed unceremoniously.

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Merlins
…
Viviens:
Another reference to Tennyson's
Idylls.
Vivien captivates the aged enchanter Merlin and as soon as she has gained knowledge of a charm from him leaves him shut for ever in an old oak. By the reference Trollope reinforces the already strong element of sexual temptation in this scene.

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because the things were bought on long credit:
I.e. there will be £15 interest to pay.

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ci-devant:
Previous (French).

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had taken a sitting for thirteen Sundays:
Had rented a fine pew for her exclusive use; one of the ways in which the fashionable preacher increased his tithes and stipend.

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at £3 16s. 3d.:
Per ounce, that is.

4
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Greek Kalends:
I.e. never. The Greeks had no Kalends, which were the first day of each month in the Roman calendar.

1
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King David:
Reference to David's sexual appetite; he seduced Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, and made her his wife.

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Tooriloo:
Probably a light-hearted corruption of the tongue-twister ‘truly rural', a common test of sobriety, which fits with Lizzie's assumed recklessness here.

1
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I am constrained… husband than yourself :
The lines are, evidently, of Lizzie's own composition.

2
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certain legal formalities:
Topical, if a little anachronistic for 1865—6. Extradition Acts and treaties between Britain and the rest of Europe were brought in over the period 1870—73, as Trollope was writing.

3
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who I am:
Major Mackintosh would seem to be based, loosely, on Sir Richard Mayne, Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1850 to 1868.

1
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Howell and James's:
In Regent Street, 'silk mercers, etc., to the Royal Family', as the firm liked to describe itself.