Barnaby Rudge, page 86
7. the New Jail at Clerkenwell: Built in 1775 to relieve Newgate, the New Jail or House of Correction – more usually known as the New Prison – was rebuilt in 1845–6.
CHAPTER THE SIXTY-SEVENTH
1. Lord President’s in Piccadilly, at Lambeth Palace, at the Lord Chancellor’s in Great Ormond Street, in the Royal Exchange, the Bank: The Lord President of the Council was Henry, second Earl Bathurst (1714–94), and Piccadilly one of the most fashionable addresses in London. Lambeth Palace was the official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which the rioters surrounded but failed to enter. The Lord Chancellor was Edward, first Baron Thurlow (1731–1806), whose ‘political principles were merely a high view of royal prerogative and an aversion to change’ (Concise Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 2979). He lived at No. 45, Great Ormond Street, the location of a number of fine late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses (Lord Thurlow’s house still stands). The Royal Exchange in Cornhill dates from 1567 and was rebuilt after the Great Fire and again in 1844; it was a trading centre and meeting-place for City merchants as well as the home of the insurance market Lloyds of London. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 and the first bank on the present site in Threadneedle Street was built in 1734; a detachment of the Brigade of Guards was sent to guard the Bank, a custom continued every night until 1973.
2. Lord Rockingham’s in Grosvenor Square: Charles Watson-Wentworth (1730–82), second Marquis of Rockingham, prime minister 1765–6 and 1782. From 1768 to 1781, Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords. His house was on the east side of Grosvenor Square, near Hyde Park and a fashionable and grand address.
3. King’s Bench and Fleet Prisons: The King’s Bench prison, medieval in origin, moved to St George’s Fields in Southwark, south-east London in 1755–8. It was burned down during the Gordon Riots, rebuilt and finally demolished in 1880. Many debtors were imprisoned there, including Mr Micawber in David Copperfield. The Fleet prison was also medieval in origin and a notoriously squalid and violent place. It was burnt down in the Riots, rebuilt 1781–2 and closed in 1842. Mr Pickwick is imprisoned in the Fleet in Pickwick Papers.
4. the Arsenal at Woolwich, and the Royal Palaces: The Arsenal, Woolwich, south-east London, was the centre for the manufacture and storing of arms and military ordnance. St James’s Palace, built by Henry VIII, was at this point the principal royal residence in London, and Buckingham House (‘the queen’s palace’), St James’s Park, was the early-eighteenth-century predecessor of Buckingham Palace.
5. the privy council: Originally, the British sovereign’s private council, but by this period a mainly formal body.
6. the queen’s palace: Buckingham House was bought by George III in 1762. In 1775, its ownership was transferred to Queen Charlotte, in exchange for Somerset House, and so was known as the Queen’s Palace.
7. the Temple, and the other Inns: The Inns of Court and the Inns of Chancery were medieval foundations whose main function has been to provide lodgings and training for lawyers. There are four Inns of Court: Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, Inner Temple and Middle Temple. There were a number of Inns of Chancery close to Holborn and the Strand, including Barnard’s Inn, Clement’s Inn, Clifford’s Inn and Furnival’s Inn, similar in function to the Inns of Court but unable to call students to the Bar. They increasingly became social clubs for lawyers and declined rapidly in the nineteenth century.
8. Lord Algernon Percy: (1750–1830), second son of the second Duke of Northumberland and Commander of the Northumberland militia; his men were praised for their refusal to be provoked by the mob. See Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England, p. 183.
9. the different companies: The City Livery Companies are craft guilds of medieval origin, which are incorporated by Royal Charter, and formerly controlled conditions of employment and trade, as well as electing the Lord Mayor and sheriffs.
10. the Borough Clink in Tooley-street: Small prison in Southwark, south London, burned down by the rioters and never rebuilt.
11. St Mildred’s church: In Poultry, in the City of London, rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren following the Great Fire and demolished in 1872.
12. Holborn Bridge: One of the five bridges spanning the Fleet River.
13. a charmed life: Macbeth V.x.12.
CHAPTER THE SIXTY-EIGHTH
1. Finchley: Village in Middlesex, now a London suburb, which was a retreat for the wealthy in the eighteenth century, but also a notorious haunt of highwaymen.
2. drank until they died: Gager suggests that there is a parallel here with Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure I.ii.120–22 (Shakespeare and Dickens, p. 333).
CHAPTER THE SEVENTIETH
1. Wenis: Venus, the Roman goddess of love.
2. deaf as any adder: ‘They are as venomous as the poison of a serpent: even like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ears’ (Psalm 58:4).
3. a convenient piece of water in its midst: ‘When the square was laid out and paved in 1727, it had a central “basin” of water’ (Hill).
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-FIRST
1. potter’s wessel: ‘They shall dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel’ (Psalm 2:9).
2. whitening and suppulchres: ‘Ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness’ (Matthew 23:27).
3. his legs … crushed into shapeless ugliness: Dickens may have been influenced in his description of Sim’s fate by a passage in Charles Lamb’s ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars’, in Essays of Elia (1823):
These dim eyes have in vain explored for some months past a well-known figure, or part of the figure, of a man, who used to glide his comely upper half over the pavements of London, wheeling along with most ingenious celerity upon a machine of wood; a spectacle to natives, to foreigners, and to children … Few but must have noticed him; for the accident, which brought him low, took place during the riots of 1780, and he has been a groundling so long.
See Grahame Smith, Cbnr00007533harles Dickens: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 68–9.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-SECOND
1. the defence of the Savannah: In the autumn of 1779, in the American War of Independence, British troops were unsuccessfully besieged by French and American troops at Savannah, Georgia.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-THIRD
1. one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds: Probably an underestimate, as was pointed out to Dickens by the Revd. G. W. Brameld (see Pilgrim, 2, p. 401). The loss of Langdale’s house and distillery was estimated at £50,000, and a further seventy houses and four prisons were also destroyed.
2. Mr Herbert: Henry Herbert (1741–1811), later first Earl of Carnarvon.
3. Monday se’ennight: Monday the week after: 19 June.
4. one good deed in a murky life of guilt: Cf. ‘So shines a good deed in a naughty world’ (Merchant of Venice V. i. 91).
5. I will love and cherish: ‘To love, cherish, and to obey’ from the Marriage Service in the Book of Common Prayer.
6. death would have been his portion: Dickens is here drawing on contemporary accounts of Kennet’s words (Hibbert, King Mob, p. 129).
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-FOURTH
1. ‘I was formed for society’: ‘Man was formed for society’, Sir William Blackstone, introduction to Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9).
2. cut off in your flower: ‘Man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down’ (Job 14:1–2).
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-FIFTH
1. Surgeons’ Hall: In the Old Bailey, where bodies of murderers were dissected after their execution.
2. worldly wisdom: 1 Corinthians 3:19.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-SEVENTH
1. Service for the Dead: From the Book of Common Prayer.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-NINTH
1. gall and wormwood: ‘Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall’ (Lamentations 3:19).
2. Prince of Wales: Prince George (1762–1830), later King George IV.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTIETH
1. milk of human kindness: ‘Yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness’ (Macbeth I.v.13–14).
2. bank-note: The smallest banknote current at this time was for £10. It is difficult to give a value in contemporary terms, but multiplication by a factor of 70 gives a rough approximation.
CHAPTER THE LAST
1. Archbishop of Canterbury: John Moore (1730–1805), Archbishop of Canterbury, 1783–1805, excommunicated Gordon from the Church of England in 1786 for refusing to appear in an Ecclesiastical court as a witness.
2. Ten or a dozen years ago: In fact, the death of Robert Watson, who claimed to be Gordon’s secretary at the time of the Riots, was reported in The Times of 22 November 1838. According to The Times, Watson, aged 88, had committed suicide and nineteen wounds were discovered on the body. On Watson’s relationship with Gordon, see de Castro, The Gordon Riots, pp. 225–9, and Pilgrim, 2, p. 295nn.
3. Millbank: The north bank of the Thames between Westminster and Chelsea. Dickens describes it in ch. 47 of David Copperfield as ‘a melancholy waste’.
4. moved or grew, or had its being: ‘For in him we live, and move, and have our being’ (Acts 17:28).
5. the vulgar tongue: ‘It is expedient that Baptism be ministered in the vulgar tongue’, from the service for the Publick Baptism of Infants in the Book of Common Prayer.
APPENDIX II: MASTER Hbnr00007586UMPHREY’S CLOCK
1. Mr Miles: Owen Miles, a former merchant and one of Humphrey’s friends. See A Note on the Text and Illustrations for house styling applied here.
2. the single gentleman’s name: The brother of Little Nell’s grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop, who arrives too late to save her, is known as the ‘single gentleman’.
3. St Paul’s: St Paul’s Cathedral, designed by Sir Christopher Wren and completed in 1710.
4. Mr Pickwick … Jack and my deaf friend: Members of Master Humphrey’s circle: Mr Pickwick, whose adventures in The Pickwick Papers (1837) had made Dickens’s reputation, was revived, not altogether successfully, in the early numbers of Master Humphrey’s Clock; Jack Redburn is Humphrey’s ‘librarian, secretary, steward, and first minister: director of all my affairs and inspector-general of my household’.
5. money-changers … the Temple: ‘And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves’ (Matthew 21:12).
6. Day of Judgment: See note 3 to ch. 23.
7. Mr Weller’s Watch: Dickens also revived Mr Pickwick’s celebrated servant, Sam Weller, and his father, Tony. While Humphrey, Pickwick and their friends meet upstairs, Tony Weller convenes a parallel group of storytellers, known as ‘Mr Weller’s Watch’, in the servants’ quarters.
APPENDIX III: PREFACE TO Tbnr00007601HE CHEAP EDITION (1849)
1. Mr Waterton’s … extinct in England: Charles Waterton (1782–1865), naturalist and author of three sets of essays on natural history. Dickens owned a copy of his Essays on Natural History, Chiefly Ornithology (1838), with this argument that the raven was becoming extinct.
2. The raven in this story: Dickens owned three different ravens in the 1840s. The first, called Grip, died in March 1841 and was the subject of a number of letters by Dickens to his friends (see The Letters of Charles Dickens, Volume 2, 1840–1, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 230–34, 266–7). He was then stuffed and, after Dickens’s death, sold at auction for £126. He is now on display in the Rare Book Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia. His replacement was ‘comparitively of weak intellects’ (Letters of Charles Dickens, p. 304) but was replaced after his death by a third ‘Yorkshire’ raven ‘before whom the raven (the dead one) sinks into insignificance’ (Letters of Charles Dickens, p. 412).
3. Sir Hugh Evans says of Anne Page: Slender says: ‘I know the young gentlewoman; she has good gifts’; and Evans responds: ‘Seven hundred pounds, and possibilities, is goot gifts’ Merry Wives of Windsor, I.i.54–5 (Alexander edition).
4. ravenless: The 1858 Library Edition replaces this sentence with Dicken’s commemoration of a later bird: ‘After this mournful deprivation, I was, for a long time, ravenless. The kindness of another friend at length provided me with another raven; but he is not a genius. He leads the life of a hermit, in my little orchard, on the summit of SHAKESPEARE’S Gad’s Hill; he has no relish for society; he gives no evidence of ever cultivating his mind; and he has picked up nothing but meat since I have known him – except the faculty of barking like a dog.’ Gad’s Hill Place, near Rochester, was Dickens’s home from 1857.
5. Mary Jones … Sir Samuel Romilly: See notes 3 and 4 to 1841 preface.
6. SIR WILLIAM MEREDITH: (d. 1790), third baronet, Whig politician and MP. Dickens quotes from Meredith’s speech in the House of Commons, 13 May 1777, which argued against the death penalty on the grounds of its ineffectiveness and cruelty.
7. Falkland Islands: In the South Atlantic, about 300 miles from the coast of South America. The British garrison, established in 1765, was expelled by the Spanish in 1770 and restored in 1771.
Glossary
SOED The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. C. T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)
For other sources, see introductory note to Notes.
address: Skill, dexterity (ch. 81).
anchorite: Religious hermit or recluse.
area-head: An area is a court-yard enclosed by gates (ch. 35) at the front of a house which gives access to the basement. The area-head is the opening into this court-yard.
bag-wig: Peruke attached to an elaborate silk bag or purse, tied at the back with a silk bow.
basilisk: Fabulous serpent in Hellenistic and Roman legend, also known as the cockatrice, whose look and breath were thought to be fatal to all living creatures, except the weasel.
bearding: Defying or affronting.
blowzed: Slatternly, frowzy, ruddy in the face.
bob-wig: ‘A wig having the bottom locks turned up into bobs or short curls’ (SOED).
boot-jack: Device for pulling off boots.
bradawl or gimlet: Tools for boring small holes.
broadcloth: High quality, plainly woven, dressed, double-width black cloth, mainly used for men’s clothes.
browzing: Feeding on leaves and shoots of trees and bushes; in ch. 61 used as a synonym of grazing.
bulk: ‘A framework projecting from the front of a shop; a stall’ (SOED).
bumper with a bead in the middle: Full glass with a foaming head.
burden: Refrain or chorus (chs. 22, 48).
chaf: Banter or ridicule.
chair: Sedan chair, carried on poles (ch. 13).
chuckey: Term of endearment.
chuck-farthing: Gambling game, in which the winner keeps all the coins s/he can successfully throw into a hole.
close borough: Or pocket borough, a parliamentary constituency under the control of a single person or family, usually with a small number of electors who could be readily controlled.
‘come upon the county’: To make a demand or claim, or become a burden, upon.
‘coming over her’: Deceiving her.
commission of the peace: Justice of the Peace or magistrate, responsible for the local administration of justice.
composing-draught: Dose of liquid medicine to make someone calm.
conformation: Structure or form.
corpse candles: Lambent flames seen in a churchyard and believed to portend a death or funeral.
crow to pluck: Grievance to sort out, dispute to settle.
crown: Silver coin, worth five shillings (25p).
depone: Declare upon oath.
dog sleep: Light or fitful sleep.
domino: Costume for masquerades, consisting of a loose cloak and a small mask over the top of the face.
drums: A drum was ‘an evening assembly of fashionable people at a private house’ (SOED).
dumb-foundered: Dumbfounded, struck dumb.
dun-haunted: Followed by creditors.
Dutch Pin: Ninepin or skittle.
ell: The universal measure for wool cloth in the medieval period, but varied in length in different places. An English ell was forty-five inches; a Flemish ell twenty-seven inches.
equipage: Furniture, retinue or carriage.
fire-dogs: Horizontal bars placed on either side of a hearth to support burning wood, also known as and irons.
flip: Mixture of small beer, brandy and sugar, heated with a hot iron.
footpads: Highway robbers who worked on foot.
foster-mother: Foster-nurse (ch. 27), rather than adoptive mother.
frail: Sexually unchaste.
frowzy: Unkempt, musty.
fugleman: Soldier, particularly skilled in drill, chosen as an example to his regiment or company; so an orchestrator or rabble-rouser.
full blow: In full blossom.
gave them the wall: Allowed them to pass on the side farthest from the road ‘to acknowledge inferiority of station, or to shew courtesy, or to act from fear of reprisal’ (Hill).
‘Give it mouth’: ‘A rude request to an actor or orator [to] speak up’ (J. C. Hotten, A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (London: J. C. Hotten, 1860)).
griffin: In Greek myth, fabulous creature with the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle.
hackney-chairs: Sedan chairs for hire.
half-pay officers: Retired military or naval officers, or those not on active service, who drew half their pay.
CHAPTER THE SIXTY-SEVENTH
1. Lord President’s in Piccadilly, at Lambeth Palace, at the Lord Chancellor’s in Great Ormond Street, in the Royal Exchange, the Bank: The Lord President of the Council was Henry, second Earl Bathurst (1714–94), and Piccadilly one of the most fashionable addresses in London. Lambeth Palace was the official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which the rioters surrounded but failed to enter. The Lord Chancellor was Edward, first Baron Thurlow (1731–1806), whose ‘political principles were merely a high view of royal prerogative and an aversion to change’ (Concise Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 2979). He lived at No. 45, Great Ormond Street, the location of a number of fine late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses (Lord Thurlow’s house still stands). The Royal Exchange in Cornhill dates from 1567 and was rebuilt after the Great Fire and again in 1844; it was a trading centre and meeting-place for City merchants as well as the home of the insurance market Lloyds of London. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 and the first bank on the present site in Threadneedle Street was built in 1734; a detachment of the Brigade of Guards was sent to guard the Bank, a custom continued every night until 1973.
2. Lord Rockingham’s in Grosvenor Square: Charles Watson-Wentworth (1730–82), second Marquis of Rockingham, prime minister 1765–6 and 1782. From 1768 to 1781, Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords. His house was on the east side of Grosvenor Square, near Hyde Park and a fashionable and grand address.
3. King’s Bench and Fleet Prisons: The King’s Bench prison, medieval in origin, moved to St George’s Fields in Southwark, south-east London in 1755–8. It was burned down during the Gordon Riots, rebuilt and finally demolished in 1880. Many debtors were imprisoned there, including Mr Micawber in David Copperfield. The Fleet prison was also medieval in origin and a notoriously squalid and violent place. It was burnt down in the Riots, rebuilt 1781–2 and closed in 1842. Mr Pickwick is imprisoned in the Fleet in Pickwick Papers.
4. the Arsenal at Woolwich, and the Royal Palaces: The Arsenal, Woolwich, south-east London, was the centre for the manufacture and storing of arms and military ordnance. St James’s Palace, built by Henry VIII, was at this point the principal royal residence in London, and Buckingham House (‘the queen’s palace’), St James’s Park, was the early-eighteenth-century predecessor of Buckingham Palace.
5. the privy council: Originally, the British sovereign’s private council, but by this period a mainly formal body.
6. the queen’s palace: Buckingham House was bought by George III in 1762. In 1775, its ownership was transferred to Queen Charlotte, in exchange for Somerset House, and so was known as the Queen’s Palace.
7. the Temple, and the other Inns: The Inns of Court and the Inns of Chancery were medieval foundations whose main function has been to provide lodgings and training for lawyers. There are four Inns of Court: Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, Inner Temple and Middle Temple. There were a number of Inns of Chancery close to Holborn and the Strand, including Barnard’s Inn, Clement’s Inn, Clifford’s Inn and Furnival’s Inn, similar in function to the Inns of Court but unable to call students to the Bar. They increasingly became social clubs for lawyers and declined rapidly in the nineteenth century.
8. Lord Algernon Percy: (1750–1830), second son of the second Duke of Northumberland and Commander of the Northumberland militia; his men were praised for their refusal to be provoked by the mob. See Hayter, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England, p. 183.
9. the different companies: The City Livery Companies are craft guilds of medieval origin, which are incorporated by Royal Charter, and formerly controlled conditions of employment and trade, as well as electing the Lord Mayor and sheriffs.
10. the Borough Clink in Tooley-street: Small prison in Southwark, south London, burned down by the rioters and never rebuilt.
11. St Mildred’s church: In Poultry, in the City of London, rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren following the Great Fire and demolished in 1872.
12. Holborn Bridge: One of the five bridges spanning the Fleet River.
13. a charmed life: Macbeth V.x.12.
CHAPTER THE SIXTY-EIGHTH
1. Finchley: Village in Middlesex, now a London suburb, which was a retreat for the wealthy in the eighteenth century, but also a notorious haunt of highwaymen.
2. drank until they died: Gager suggests that there is a parallel here with Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure I.ii.120–22 (Shakespeare and Dickens, p. 333).
CHAPTER THE SEVENTIETH
1. Wenis: Venus, the Roman goddess of love.
2. deaf as any adder: ‘They are as venomous as the poison of a serpent: even like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ears’ (Psalm 58:4).
3. a convenient piece of water in its midst: ‘When the square was laid out and paved in 1727, it had a central “basin” of water’ (Hill).
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-FIRST
1. potter’s wessel: ‘They shall dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel’ (Psalm 2:9).
2. whitening and suppulchres: ‘Ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness’ (Matthew 23:27).
3. his legs … crushed into shapeless ugliness: Dickens may have been influenced in his description of Sim’s fate by a passage in Charles Lamb’s ‘A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars’, in Essays of Elia (1823):
These dim eyes have in vain explored for some months past a well-known figure, or part of the figure, of a man, who used to glide his comely upper half over the pavements of London, wheeling along with most ingenious celerity upon a machine of wood; a spectacle to natives, to foreigners, and to children … Few but must have noticed him; for the accident, which brought him low, took place during the riots of 1780, and he has been a groundling so long.
See Grahame Smith, Cbnr00007533harles Dickens: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 68–9.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-SECOND
1. the defence of the Savannah: In the autumn of 1779, in the American War of Independence, British troops were unsuccessfully besieged by French and American troops at Savannah, Georgia.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-THIRD
1. one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds: Probably an underestimate, as was pointed out to Dickens by the Revd. G. W. Brameld (see Pilgrim, 2, p. 401). The loss of Langdale’s house and distillery was estimated at £50,000, and a further seventy houses and four prisons were also destroyed.
2. Mr Herbert: Henry Herbert (1741–1811), later first Earl of Carnarvon.
3. Monday se’ennight: Monday the week after: 19 June.
4. one good deed in a murky life of guilt: Cf. ‘So shines a good deed in a naughty world’ (Merchant of Venice V. i. 91).
5. I will love and cherish: ‘To love, cherish, and to obey’ from the Marriage Service in the Book of Common Prayer.
6. death would have been his portion: Dickens is here drawing on contemporary accounts of Kennet’s words (Hibbert, King Mob, p. 129).
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-FOURTH
1. ‘I was formed for society’: ‘Man was formed for society’, Sir William Blackstone, introduction to Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9).
2. cut off in your flower: ‘Man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down’ (Job 14:1–2).
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-FIFTH
1. Surgeons’ Hall: In the Old Bailey, where bodies of murderers were dissected after their execution.
2. worldly wisdom: 1 Corinthians 3:19.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-SEVENTH
1. Service for the Dead: From the Book of Common Prayer.
CHAPTER THE SEVENTY-NINTH
1. gall and wormwood: ‘Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall’ (Lamentations 3:19).
2. Prince of Wales: Prince George (1762–1830), later King George IV.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTIETH
1. milk of human kindness: ‘Yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness’ (Macbeth I.v.13–14).
2. bank-note: The smallest banknote current at this time was for £10. It is difficult to give a value in contemporary terms, but multiplication by a factor of 70 gives a rough approximation.
CHAPTER THE LAST
1. Archbishop of Canterbury: John Moore (1730–1805), Archbishop of Canterbury, 1783–1805, excommunicated Gordon from the Church of England in 1786 for refusing to appear in an Ecclesiastical court as a witness.
2. Ten or a dozen years ago: In fact, the death of Robert Watson, who claimed to be Gordon’s secretary at the time of the Riots, was reported in The Times of 22 November 1838. According to The Times, Watson, aged 88, had committed suicide and nineteen wounds were discovered on the body. On Watson’s relationship with Gordon, see de Castro, The Gordon Riots, pp. 225–9, and Pilgrim, 2, p. 295nn.
3. Millbank: The north bank of the Thames between Westminster and Chelsea. Dickens describes it in ch. 47 of David Copperfield as ‘a melancholy waste’.
4. moved or grew, or had its being: ‘For in him we live, and move, and have our being’ (Acts 17:28).
5. the vulgar tongue: ‘It is expedient that Baptism be ministered in the vulgar tongue’, from the service for the Publick Baptism of Infants in the Book of Common Prayer.
APPENDIX II: MASTER Hbnr00007586UMPHREY’S CLOCK
1. Mr Miles: Owen Miles, a former merchant and one of Humphrey’s friends. See A Note on the Text and Illustrations for house styling applied here.
2. the single gentleman’s name: The brother of Little Nell’s grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop, who arrives too late to save her, is known as the ‘single gentleman’.
3. St Paul’s: St Paul’s Cathedral, designed by Sir Christopher Wren and completed in 1710.
4. Mr Pickwick … Jack and my deaf friend: Members of Master Humphrey’s circle: Mr Pickwick, whose adventures in The Pickwick Papers (1837) had made Dickens’s reputation, was revived, not altogether successfully, in the early numbers of Master Humphrey’s Clock; Jack Redburn is Humphrey’s ‘librarian, secretary, steward, and first minister: director of all my affairs and inspector-general of my household’.
5. money-changers … the Temple: ‘And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves’ (Matthew 21:12).
6. Day of Judgment: See note 3 to ch. 23.
7. Mr Weller’s Watch: Dickens also revived Mr Pickwick’s celebrated servant, Sam Weller, and his father, Tony. While Humphrey, Pickwick and their friends meet upstairs, Tony Weller convenes a parallel group of storytellers, known as ‘Mr Weller’s Watch’, in the servants’ quarters.
APPENDIX III: PREFACE TO Tbnr00007601HE CHEAP EDITION (1849)
1. Mr Waterton’s … extinct in England: Charles Waterton (1782–1865), naturalist and author of three sets of essays on natural history. Dickens owned a copy of his Essays on Natural History, Chiefly Ornithology (1838), with this argument that the raven was becoming extinct.
2. The raven in this story: Dickens owned three different ravens in the 1840s. The first, called Grip, died in March 1841 and was the subject of a number of letters by Dickens to his friends (see The Letters of Charles Dickens, Volume 2, 1840–1, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 230–34, 266–7). He was then stuffed and, after Dickens’s death, sold at auction for £126. He is now on display in the Rare Book Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia. His replacement was ‘comparitively of weak intellects’ (Letters of Charles Dickens, p. 304) but was replaced after his death by a third ‘Yorkshire’ raven ‘before whom the raven (the dead one) sinks into insignificance’ (Letters of Charles Dickens, p. 412).
3. Sir Hugh Evans says of Anne Page: Slender says: ‘I know the young gentlewoman; she has good gifts’; and Evans responds: ‘Seven hundred pounds, and possibilities, is goot gifts’ Merry Wives of Windsor, I.i.54–5 (Alexander edition).
4. ravenless: The 1858 Library Edition replaces this sentence with Dicken’s commemoration of a later bird: ‘After this mournful deprivation, I was, for a long time, ravenless. The kindness of another friend at length provided me with another raven; but he is not a genius. He leads the life of a hermit, in my little orchard, on the summit of SHAKESPEARE’S Gad’s Hill; he has no relish for society; he gives no evidence of ever cultivating his mind; and he has picked up nothing but meat since I have known him – except the faculty of barking like a dog.’ Gad’s Hill Place, near Rochester, was Dickens’s home from 1857.
5. Mary Jones … Sir Samuel Romilly: See notes 3 and 4 to 1841 preface.
6. SIR WILLIAM MEREDITH: (d. 1790), third baronet, Whig politician and MP. Dickens quotes from Meredith’s speech in the House of Commons, 13 May 1777, which argued against the death penalty on the grounds of its ineffectiveness and cruelty.
7. Falkland Islands: In the South Atlantic, about 300 miles from the coast of South America. The British garrison, established in 1765, was expelled by the Spanish in 1770 and restored in 1771.
Glossary
SOED The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. C. T. Onions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)
For other sources, see introductory note to Notes.
address: Skill, dexterity (ch. 81).
anchorite: Religious hermit or recluse.
area-head: An area is a court-yard enclosed by gates (ch. 35) at the front of a house which gives access to the basement. The area-head is the opening into this court-yard.
bag-wig: Peruke attached to an elaborate silk bag or purse, tied at the back with a silk bow.
basilisk: Fabulous serpent in Hellenistic and Roman legend, also known as the cockatrice, whose look and breath were thought to be fatal to all living creatures, except the weasel.
bearding: Defying or affronting.
blowzed: Slatternly, frowzy, ruddy in the face.
bob-wig: ‘A wig having the bottom locks turned up into bobs or short curls’ (SOED).
boot-jack: Device for pulling off boots.
bradawl or gimlet: Tools for boring small holes.
broadcloth: High quality, plainly woven, dressed, double-width black cloth, mainly used for men’s clothes.
browzing: Feeding on leaves and shoots of trees and bushes; in ch. 61 used as a synonym of grazing.
bulk: ‘A framework projecting from the front of a shop; a stall’ (SOED).
bumper with a bead in the middle: Full glass with a foaming head.
burden: Refrain or chorus (chs. 22, 48).
chaf: Banter or ridicule.
chair: Sedan chair, carried on poles (ch. 13).
chuckey: Term of endearment.
chuck-farthing: Gambling game, in which the winner keeps all the coins s/he can successfully throw into a hole.
close borough: Or pocket borough, a parliamentary constituency under the control of a single person or family, usually with a small number of electors who could be readily controlled.
‘come upon the county’: To make a demand or claim, or become a burden, upon.
‘coming over her’: Deceiving her.
commission of the peace: Justice of the Peace or magistrate, responsible for the local administration of justice.
composing-draught: Dose of liquid medicine to make someone calm.
conformation: Structure or form.
corpse candles: Lambent flames seen in a churchyard and believed to portend a death or funeral.
crow to pluck: Grievance to sort out, dispute to settle.
crown: Silver coin, worth five shillings (25p).
depone: Declare upon oath.
dog sleep: Light or fitful sleep.
domino: Costume for masquerades, consisting of a loose cloak and a small mask over the top of the face.
drums: A drum was ‘an evening assembly of fashionable people at a private house’ (SOED).
dumb-foundered: Dumbfounded, struck dumb.
dun-haunted: Followed by creditors.
Dutch Pin: Ninepin or skittle.
ell: The universal measure for wool cloth in the medieval period, but varied in length in different places. An English ell was forty-five inches; a Flemish ell twenty-seven inches.
equipage: Furniture, retinue or carriage.
fire-dogs: Horizontal bars placed on either side of a hearth to support burning wood, also known as and irons.
flip: Mixture of small beer, brandy and sugar, heated with a hot iron.
footpads: Highway robbers who worked on foot.
foster-mother: Foster-nurse (ch. 27), rather than adoptive mother.
frail: Sexually unchaste.
frowzy: Unkempt, musty.
fugleman: Soldier, particularly skilled in drill, chosen as an example to his regiment or company; so an orchestrator or rabble-rouser.
full blow: In full blossom.
gave them the wall: Allowed them to pass on the side farthest from the road ‘to acknowledge inferiority of station, or to shew courtesy, or to act from fear of reprisal’ (Hill).
‘Give it mouth’: ‘A rude request to an actor or orator [to] speak up’ (J. C. Hotten, A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (London: J. C. Hotten, 1860)).
griffin: In Greek myth, fabulous creature with the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle.
hackney-chairs: Sedan chairs for hire.
half-pay officers: Retired military or naval officers, or those not on active service, who drew half their pay.
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