The Meaning of Night (83 page)

Udolpho (1794), died of an asthma attack on 7 February 1823. Ed.]

? [Felltham, Resolves, xlvii (‘Of Death’). Ed.]

? [14 June 1645. Naseby is some thirty miles south-west of Evenwood. Ed.

? [Osborne House, built as a private retreat for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert

on an estate overlooking the Solent of nearly three hundred and fifty acres, purchased

from Lady Isabella Blachford. The work, begun in 1845 and supervised by the Prince

Consort, was completed in 1851. Ed.]

? [The name, no longer in use, of the area of London described in Murray’s

Modern London 1860 as ‘that vast city, in point of size, which the increasing wealth and

population of London has caused to be erected between 1839 and 1850 on the green

fields and nursery gardens of the See of London’s estate at Paddington’. It was roughly

bounded by the Edgware Road on the east, Bayswater on the West, Hyde Park on the

south, and Maida Hill on the north and was inhabited mainly by professional men and

City merchants and those, as Murray’s delicately puts it, ‘who are undergoing the

transitional state between commerce and fashion’. ‘Ah, ladies!’ writes Thackeray in

Chapter XVI of Vanity Fair (1848), ‘ask the Reverend Mr Thurifer if Belgravia is not a

sounding brass, and Tyburnia a tinkling cymbal. These are vanities. Even these will pass

away.’ Ed.]

? [In Covent Garden. A relatively inexpensive establishment, its typical clientele

were single gentlemen up from the country. Ed.]

? [A paraphrase of Psalm 32: 1. Ed.]

? [The feminist intellectual Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) had an illegitimate

daughter, Fanny, by the American speculator and author Gilbert Imlay, and another,

Mary, the future wife of the poet Shelley, by the political writer and novelist William

Godwin. Her Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in 1792. One infers that

Mrs Glyver’s aunt believed that her niece was pregnant by a lover, rather than by her

husband. Ed.]

? [By this rather obliquely delicate reference she appears to mean that she had

recently contrived to have marital relations with Captain Glyver, the potential outcome of

which would coincide with the birth of her friend’s child. Ed.]

? [Sir Charles Stuart (1779–1845), created Baron Stuart de Rothesay in 1828, was

British Ambassador to France from 1815 to 1824. I have not identified James Martin.

Ed.]

? [The street in which the British Embassy was, and is, situated. Ed.]

? [Part of the so-called Château of Dinan, which is actually built into the town’s

ramparts. The Salle des Gisants holds seven carved medieval tombs: that of Roland de

Dinan is said to be the oldest armed tomb in Western Europe. The carved figure referred

to by Mrs Glyver is probably that of Renée Madeuc de Quémadeuc, second wife of

Geoffroi Le Voyer, chamberlain to Duke Jean III of Brittany. Ed.]

? [‘Seek the truth’. Ed.]

? [A maxim of the tribune Lucius Cassius Longinus, quoted by Cicero, meaning

‘For whose benefit?’, often used to point a finger at someone who stands to gain most

from a crime. Ed.]

? [‘Love is a credulous thing’. Ed.]

? [The pseudonym, of course, of Charlotte Brontë. Villette was published in

January 1853. Ed.]

? [In Memoriam A.H.H. (i.e. Arthur Henry Hallam, 1811–33) was published by

Edward Moxon (Daunt’s publisher) in 1850, the year Tennyson was appointed Poet

Laureate following the death of Wordsworth. Ed.]

? [The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

(1928–82), John Everett Millais (1829–96), William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), and

others. Ed.]

? [‘Love conquers all’: Virgil, Eclogues. Ed.]

? [Hieroglyphickes of the Life of Man (1638) by the English poet Francis Quarles

(1592–1644). Ed.]

? [Turkey declared war on Russia in October 1853. The Turks defeated the

Russians at Oltenitza on 4 November, but the Turkish naval squadron was destroyed by

the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Sinope on the 30th of that month – an action that caused

outrage in England. These were the preliminary engagements of what was to become the

Crimean War. Britain and France declared war on Russia in March 1854. Ed.]

? [By Charlotte M. Yonge (1823–1901), published in 1853. The novel, which

dramatizes the spiritual struggles of its principal character, Guy Morville, reflected its

author’s Tractarian beliefs and was one of the most successful novels of the century. Ed.]

? [The first volume of The Stones of Venice by John Ruskin (1819–1900), in

which he championed Gothic architecture, was published in March 1851; volume two

followed in July 1853, and volume three in October 1853. Ed.]

? [Op. 28. Composed 1836–9, published in 1839. Ed.]

? [‘At my heart, at my breast’, from Schumann’s song-cycle for female voice and

piano, Frauenliebe und -leben (‘A Woman’s Life and Love’, 1840). Ed.]

? [‘I am not what I was’. Ed.]

? [Published in 1650. Ed.]

? [‘Lift up your hearts’. Ed.]

? [Charles-Marie-René Leconte de Lisle (1818–94), leader of the Parnassian

poets. His Poèmes antiques were published in 1852. Ed.]

? [Dalby’s Carminative, one of many patent medicines containing laudanum. Ed.]

? [‘The lover’s confession’. The title of the famous fifteenth-century poem by

John Gower (1325?–1403). Ed.]

? [Swiss physician and alchemist (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim,

1493–1541). Ed.]

? [George Duport (1710–71), 22nd Baron Tansor. Ed.]

? [Written 28 March 1816, and first published in Poems (1816). Laura Fairmile

married Julius Duport in June of that year. Byron himself married Annabella Milbanke in

January 1815. Ed.]

? [‘Who shall separate us?’. Ed.]

? [Words from the first two lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 137: ‘Thou blind fool,

Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,/That they behold, and see not what they see?’ Ed.]

? [Marie Tussaud, née Grosholz (1761–1850). During the French Revolution she

had assisted the wax modeller Dr Philippe Curtius to make moulds of the heads of

decapitated victims of the Terror. She established her Bazaar in Baker Street in 1835. The

name ‘Chamber of Horrors’ was coined by a contributor to Punch in 1845 to describe the

room containing the gruesome relics of the Revolution along with newly created figures

of murderers and other criminals. Ed.]

? [‘To know all things is not permitted’ (Horace, Odes, IV. iv). Ed.]

? [The bookseller David Nutt, at 270 and 271 Strand. Ed.]

? [A Collection of Poems, edited by Charles Gildon (1665–1724) and published

by Bernard Lintot in a small octavo one-volume edition in 1709 (it later appeared in two

volumes). It contains Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim,

and ‘Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Musick’, which are in fatct the last six poems in the

preceding work. Ed.]

? [‘I shall rise again’. Ed.]

? [Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723), German-born portrait painter. The picture in

question, of Anthony Charles Duport (1682–1709), is now in the National Portrait

Gallery. Ed.]

? [George William Frederick Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon of the second

creation (1800–70). He was Foreign Secretary from 1853 to 1858. No doubt he and Lord

Tansor had much to discuss concerning the impending hostilities in the Crimea. Ed.]

? [The bookseller Henry Seile (fl. 1619–61). See note on p. 000. Ed.]

? [Proverbs, 13: 19. Ed.]

? [The quotation is from Felltham’s Resolves, xi (‘Of the Trial of Faith and

Friendship’. Ed.]

? [‘The materials of war’. Ed.]

? [A resort on south coast of the Isle of Wight known for its mild climate. Ed.]

? [As the subsequent reference to ‘Mrs Browning’s Portuguese sonnets’ (i.e. the

‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’) makes clear, this is the volume of Poems published in

two volumes by Chapman and Hall in November 1850. Ed.]

? [‘The day of wrath’. Ed.]

? [This was Charles Duport (1648–1711). As a consequence of his actions, his

son, Robert Duport (1679–1741), a stout Protestant and elder brother of the

aforementioned Anthony Duport, inherited only the Barony, the Dukedom conferred on

his father having no legal existence in England. Ed.]

? [The following sections of the MS are composed of pasted-in strips of unlined

paper. The writing on these strips is occasionally almost illegible. Conjectured readings

are in square brackets. Ed.]

? [Corbyn, Beaumont, Stacey & Messer, well-known chemists and druggists,

situated at 300 High Holborn. Ed.]

? [An avenger or punisher. Ed.]

? [The sword of Justice wielded by Sir Artegal in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Ed.]

? [A public-house at No. 11 Windmill Street, Haymarket. Ed.]

? [An inferior, usually juvenile, street thief and pickpocket. Ed.]

? [The bookseller Bernard Quaritch, 16 Castle Street, Leicester Square. Ed.]

? [At 160, Piccadilly. Ed.]

? [‘It is finished’. Ed.]

? [The Earl of Aberdeen (George Hamilton Gordon, 1784–1860). He became

Prime Minister after the resignation of the Earl of Derby in 1852. He was widely blamed

for the mismanagement of the Crimean War and resigned in February 1855. Ed.]

? [The battle took place on 5 November 1854 – the day Florence Nightingale

arrived at Scutari. Ed.]

? [Marie Taglioni (1801–84), the celebrated Swedish-Italian dancer, for whom her

father, Filippo Taglioni, created the ballet La Sylphide (1832), the first ballet in which a

ballerina danced en pointe for the duration of the work. Ed.]

? [Large ornamental dispensers of sweets, etc. Ed.]

? [The following three letters have been bound in at this point in the manuscript.

Ed.]

? [Religio Medici, part I, section 48. Ed.]

? [Dion Boucicault (Dionysius Lardner Boucicault, 1820?–90), Irish-American

actor, producer, and dramatist. The play that provided Glyver’s alibi in question was

Pierre the Foundling, adapted by Boucicault from the French, the first performance of

which was on 11 December 1854 at the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand. The existence of

his ‘impeccable’ witness may be doubted. Ed.]

? [William Howard Russell (1820–1907), The Times’ correspondent in the

Crimea. His reports of the conditions suffered by the British Army, and especially by the

wounded in the hospital at Scutari, during the winter of 1854–5 scandalized the nation.

Ed.]

I write to you as a true friend. Beware of Edward Glapthorn. He is not what he

seems. As you value your happiness, you would do well to sever all connexion with him

immediately. I know of what I speak. Take heed.

P. R.. Daunt

Evenwood Rectory

Evenwood, Nthants

P. R.. Daunt

Evenwood Rectory

Evenwood, Nthants

Anson Tredgold, Esq.

Senior Partner

Tredgold, Tredgold & Orr

17, Paternoster-row, City