Selected Short Fiction (65 page)

2
(p. 241)
‘Rich and rare were the gems she wore.'
The opening line of one of Thomas Moore's
Irish Melodies
(1808-34) which the Uncommercial Traveller subsequently weaves into his description of his surroundings:

3
(p. 243)
Robinson Crusoe ... in his first gale of wind.
There are other illusions in ‘A Christmas Tree' and ‘Nurse's Stories' to this fondly remembered novel of Dickens's childhood.

4
(p. 243)
a bull's eye bright.
A bull‘s-eye lantern.

5
(p. 243)
those Calais burghers who came out of their town by a short cut into the History of England, with those fatal ropes round their necks.
One of the conditions on which Calais was surrendered to Edward III in 1347.

6
(p. 244)
Calais will be found written on my heart.
Calais was retaken by the French in 1558 during the reign of Queen Mary who is reputed to have said in her final illness, as Dickens quotes in
A Child's History
of
England,
‘When I am dead and my body is opened ... ye shall find Calais written on my heart.'

7
(p. 244)
‘an ancient and fish-like smell
.' cf. Shakespeare,
The Tempest,
II, ii, 26-7.

8
(p. 246)
Vauban.
Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), French military engineer.

9
(p. 246)
such corporals as you heard of once upon a time, and many a blue-tyed Bebelle.
Described in the story contained in ‘His Boots‘, in the extra Christmas number of
All the Year Round for
1862. See note 1 to
Somebody's Luggage,
below.

10
(p. 246)
Richardson's.
There is a re-creation of a Richardson's Show in ‘Greenwich Fair', one of the
Sketches by Boz
omitted from this selection.

The monologues presented here were first published in
Somebody's Luggage,
the extra Christmas number of
All the Year Round
for 1862 which provides the present text. ‘His Leaving it till called for' and ‘His Wonderful End' opened and closed the Christmas number while ‘His Brown-Paper Parcel' formed one of the pieces which Dickens introduced into this framework. In addition to contributions by other authors,
Somebody's Luggage
also contained a story by Dickens about a little French girl, narrated in the third person and supposedly found in ‘His Boots‘, omitted from this selection. For the contents of the Christmas numbers, see Deborah A. Thomas, ‘Contributors to the Christmas Numbers of
Household Words
and
All the Year Round,
1850-1867',
Dickensian,
part 1, vol. 69 (1973), pp. 163-72; part 2, vol. 70 (1974), pp. 21-9, as well as
Dickens and the Short Story
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), pp. 140-53.

1
(p. 252)
Lord Palmerston.
Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston (1784-1865) British statesman and prime minister.

2
(p. 253)
screws.
Slang for miserly people.

3
(p. 253)
union
. A workhouse.

4
(p. 253)
Consols.
Contraction of consolidated annuities — interest-bearing, British government securities.

5
(p. 257)
calimanco.
‘A cotton and worsted textile, highly glazed, plain or twilled' (C. Willet Cunnington, Phillis Cunnington, and Charles Beard, A
Dictionary of English Costume
[London: A & C. Black, 1960], p. 246).

6
(p. 258)
oro.
Originally divided here at a page end with the notation ‘Carried forward... £140' and ‘Brought forward ...
£
140'.

7
(p. 260)
Blue Beard.
See note 7 to ‘Nurse's Stories' (p. 422).

1
(p. 264)
‘domestic drama of the Stranger, you had a silent sorrow there.'
A translation of Augustus von Kotzebue's
Menschenhass und Reue.
The popular version translated by Benjamin Thompson, first produced in 1798, contained a song by Richard Brinsley Sheridan which began:

2
(p. 264)
‘coining or smashing?'
Slang for counterfeiting, or passing bad money.

3
(p. 265)
‘An honest man is the noblest work of God.'
cf. Alexander Pope,
An Essay on Man
(1733-4), Epistle IV, p. 248, and Robert Burns,
The Cotter's Saturday Night
(1786), line 166.

4
(p. 265)
Hunger is a ... sharp thorn
. Proverbial.

5
(p. 267)
green-eyed monster.
Shakespeare,
Othello,
III, iii, 166.

6
(p. 267)
improve each shining hour.
‘Against Idleness and Mischief', the twentieth of Isaac Watts's
Divine Songs for Children
(1715) opens with the lines:
(The second chapter of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
[1865] contains a parody of this by Lewis Carroll.)

7
(p. 269)
Britons Strike
...
Home!
The title of an opera by Charles Dibdin (1803), from a song in Henry Purcell's
Bonduca
(1695).

1
(p. 274)
A.Y.R.
An abbreviation of
All the Year Round,
the journal edited by Dickens in which this Christmas number originally appeared. As explained in the Introduction (p. 26) the number was intended as an elaborate spoof of the difficulties inherent in what had by 1862 become an annual Christmas production. (See the letter to Wilkie Collins, 20 September 1862, in
The Letters of Charles Dickens,
ed. Walter Dexter (London: Nonesuch Press, 1938), vol. 3, p. 304.) Here, as in his footnotes, Dickens is poking fun at his own editorial activities.

2
(p. 275)
the last echoes of the Guy-Foxes.
Fireworks on s November commemorating the detection of the Gunpowder Plot in which Guy Fawkes (1570-1606) was one of the leading conspirators.

3
(p. 277)
Basilisk.
A legendary reptile whose gaze was supposedly fatal. The Boy at Mugby, who adds his own inimitable errors to some of Christopher's literary pretensions, likens Mrs Sniff's observation of her husband to that of the ‘fabled obelisk' (p. 378).

4
(p. 280)
four-wheeler.
A hackney carriage with four wheels.

5
(p. 280)
Beaufort Printing
House. The printer for
All
the
Year
Round was C. Whiting, Beaufort House, Strand, mentioned again at the end of the first section of
Doctor Marigold's Precriptions
(p. 363).

‘How Mrs Lirriper carried on the Business' and ‘How the Parlours added a few words' were first published as the framework of
Mrs Lirriper's Lodgings,
the extra Christmas number of
All the Year Round
for 1863 which provides the present text.

1
(p. 285)
Airy.
Area, a sunken space providing access to the basement of a building. In
Bleak House,
on her first visit to the Jellyby family, Esther extricates one of the Jellyby children who has caught his head in the area railings.

2
(p. 285)
a man and a brother.
The seal of the London Anti-Slavery Society contained the motto ‘Am I not a man and a brother?'

3
(p. 290)
engine.
Fire engine. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary
a common eighteenth-century usage which persisted into the nineteenth century.

4
(p. 290)
‘sufficient for
the day is the evil thereof.' Matthew 6: 34, ‘Sufficient unto the day...'

5
(p. 294)
Sleeping
...
Beauty.
The fairy-tale princess who sleeps for a hundred years.

6
(p. 298)
treasured His sayings in her heart.
Luke 2: 19, 51.

7
(p. 302)
him as sweeps the crossings.
Human crossing-sweepers, like Jo in
Bleak House,
were a familiar sight in Victorian London (see Mayhew's
London Labour and the London Poor,
voL 2 [1861; reprinted New York: Dover, 1968], pp. 465-507).

8
(p. 302)
L.S.D.-ically.
Slang for monetarily.

9
(p. 304)
Italian iron.
A cylindrical, hollow iron containing a heater, used for lace and frills.

10
(p. 304)
larding-needle.
A needle used to insert strips of bacon into meat and poultry in preparation for cooking.

11
(p. 308)
salad days.
In Shakespeare's
Anthony and Cleopatra
(I, v, 73-5), Cleopatra dismisses the time of her earlier romance with Caesar as

‘Mrs Lirriper Relates how She Went On, and Went Over' and ‘Mrs Lirriper Relates how Jemmy Topped Up' were first published as the framework of
Mrs Lirriper's Legacy,
the extra Christmas number of
All Year the Round
for 1864 which provides the present text.

1
(p. 315)
ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
From the order for the burial of the dead in the Book of Common Prayer.

2
(p. 316)
‘stump up.'
Slang for pay up.

3
(p. 317)
dressed almost entirely in padlocks like Baron Trenck.
Baron Friedrich von der Trenck (1726-94) imprisoned from 1754 to 1763 in the fortress at Magdeburg. His
Memoirs.
detailing his confinement and, in particular, the heavy chains with which he was loaded, were published in 1787 and quickly translated into several languages

4
(p. 318)
garden-engine.
‘A portable force-pump used for watering gardens'
(Oxford English Dictionary
)
.

5
(p. 320)
Johnson
's
Dictionary.
Samuel Johnson's
A Dictionary of the English Language
appeared in 1755 and remained authoritative well into the following century. It was still in use as late as 1870 when Robert Gordon Latham completed
A Dictionary of the English Language ... Founded on That of... Samuel Johnson, as Edited by
...
H. J. Todd.

6
(p. 320)
Hamlet and the other gentleman in mourning before killing one another.
In the concluding scene of Shakespeare's
Hamlet.

7
(p. 321)
boned.
Slang for stolen.

8
(p. 326)
Plymouth Sister.
The Plymouth Brethren, an evangelical religious sect which makes no official distinction between clergy and laity, arose c. 1830 at Plymouth, England.

9
(p. 328) Old
Moore's Almanack with the hieroglyphic complete.
Francis Moore's
Vox Stellarum
first appeared in 1700 (with predictions for 1701). The idea and the name became popular, and several almanacs with a variety of prognostications emerged in the nineteenth century under the tide of ‘Old Moore's'.

10
(p. 329)
Fortunatus with his purse.
In the folktale of Fortunatus (dramatized by Thomas Dekker in 1600), the beggar Fortunatus meets Fortune who gives him a choice of a variety of gifts. He chooses riches instead of wisdom and receives a magic purse from which he can always take ten pieces of gold. Equipped with this purse, he embarks on a series of adventures, at the height of which Fortune terminates his life 11· (p. 333)
Your sin has found you out!
Numbers 32: 23, ‘behold, ye have sinned against the Lord: and be sure your sin will find you out'.

12
(p. 336)
dressed in blue like a butcher.
The characteristic colour of butchers' aprons and often other articles of their clothing in the nineteenth century.

13
(p. 337)
Barricading.
In the wave of revolution which engulfed France and most of the rest of Europe in 1848, militant members of the working class threw up barricades in the streets of Paris and plunged the city into successive riots which drove Louis-Philippe from the throne, ultimately left thousands dead and wounded, and set the stage for Napoleon III and his Second Empire. The insurrection was sixteen years in the past at the time of this Christmas number, but, like many of her contemporaries who congratulated themselves on the relative stability of England during the period of turmoil, Mrs Lirriper evidently still mentally associated France with the possibility of revolution. In ‘A Flight', the traveller known as Monied Interest dogmatically insists that ‘the French are revolutionary, — “and always at it” '.