The Eustace Diamonds (86 page)

1
.
Bobsborough:
One of Trollope's pseudonyms (by the homophonic resemblance) for his favourite cathedral town, Salisbury.

2
.
Brook Street:
Trollope locates Lady Linlithgow's house in both Brook Street and Bruton Street.

3
.
the reputation of a gallant soldier:
The date is 1864; Sir Florian's gallantry was, one assumes, in the 1854–6 Crimean campaign.

1
.
Portray Castle:
From later references (see
Ch. 21
) Portray can be exactly located on the small nub of land sticking out from Troon, on the west coast of Ayrshire, south of Glasgow. Troon was, in the nineteenth century, possessed of a good harbour and a thriving shipbuilding industry. It was connected, at the period of
The Eustace Diamonds
, to Glasgow by the Glasgow & Southwestern Railway. It seems likely that Trollope based Portray Castle on Fullarton
House, one mile south-east of Troon, the seat of the Duke of Portland.

2
.
Mount Street, near the park:
Mount Street is close to Brook Street and to Hyde Park.

3
.
chignon:
‘Switch', or coil of false hair designed to make the head more impressively coiffed. There were three styles: massed coils; massed plaits; and a row of vertical sausage-shaped curls (
PP).
The fashion reached its highpoint in the 1860s. As a number of grumpy observations in his late fiction indicate, Trollope disliked the chignon intensely, and often associated it with moral, as well as cosmetic, falseness in his novels. See, for example, Lady Linlithgow's acid remarks about young women with ‘unclean, frowzy structures on their head, enough to make a dog sick' in Ch. 34.

4
.
transparent nostrils:
What, one wonders, does Trollope mean by this description? Possibly that Lucy does not ‘paint'.

1
.
Becky Sharp:
Heroine of Thackeray's
Vanity Fair
(1848). The similarity between Becky and Lizzie struck a number of contemporary critics and Trollope himself comments in his
Autobiography
, ‘As I wrote the book, the idea constantly presented itself to me that Lizzie was but a second Becky Sharp' (
Ch. 19
).

2
.
Mrs Dean:
Her name, as Trollope uses it in the subsequent narrative, is ‘Mrs Greystock'. She is the dean's wife. Either the author is being arch, or he has suffered a momentary lapse of memory.

3
.
during Clara Fawn's long illness:
More definitely a lapse of memory. On the previous page (and elsewhere in the narrative) it is made clear that Clara Fawn has, for ‘ten or twelve years', been Mrs Clara Hittaway. Lucy has only been with the Fawns for four years. It must have been some other Fawn daughter (all of whose names end with ‘a') whom she nursed.

4
.
croquet
…
piquet:
The entry on middle-class amusements and recreation in
Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia
is relevant: ‘the game that Mrs. Horton, a character in Elizabeth Meliorates' 1870 novel
From Thistles — Grapes?
, called the foremost invention of the nineteenth century is croquet.' Piquet is a 3 2-card game for two players.

5
.
blue-books
…
India Office:
Blue-books were British Government
reports, so called from the colour of their covers. The India Office, after an Act of 1854 which removed the last powers from the East India Company, was responsible for the direct government of India under the Crown.

6
.
the Sawab of Mygawb:
Allusion to the long-running administrative problem in Mysore, a native state in southern India, which would certainly have been high on the India Office's agenda in 1865. In 1862 the insolvent Maharaja's debts were liquidated and the territory effectively put into receivership. Over the following years the ruler applied, unsuccessfully, to have his sovereign powers restored. The quarrel rumbled on, with the bickering in Parliament that Trollope describes, until 1867 when the Maharaja died.

1
.
Durham
…
deans:
Durham was a notoriously rich deanery.

2
.
encroachments:
Disputes over property lines.

3
.
the woolsack:
Chair occupied by the Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords. Mrs Greystock is ambitious for her boy.

4
.
nearly thirty years old:
Earlier (
p. 67
) we have been told that he has passed this age. Trollope, like a photographer, is still ‘fixing' the image of his hero as he writes.

5
.
It was bad to interfere
…
were all bad:
Trollope's straw-man conservative objects to every interference with the status quo, from the execution of Charles I to the major reforms of the nineteenth century, especially to the 1832 Reform Bill, the Catholic Relief Bill of 1829, the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, of church rates in 1868 and of oaths and tests in 1828, to the investigation of the universities and the subsequent acts of 1854—6, to the disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1869, to the Irish Land Act of 1870 and the Elementary Education Act of the same year.

6
.
Apollyon
…
Mr Lowe
…
Abomination of Desolation
…
Conservative:
Apollyon is the angel of the Bottomless Pit (Revelation 9:11); for the Abomination of Desolation see Daniel 12:11. Robert Lowe (1811-92) held many political offices including the chancellorship of the exchequer. He is best known for his part in introducing the notorious system of ‘payment by results' under which government aid to schools was tied firmly to examination success, and for his
opposition to Russell's Reform Bill in 1866. It may not be inappropriate to mention here Trollope's own strong, if somewhat paradoxical, political sentiments: ‘I consider myself to be an advanced, but still a conservative liberal.' Trollope stood for election at Beverley in 1868 and, in the most corrupt constituency of its day, came bottom of the poll for the Liberal interest. In the volume reprints of the serial version of
The Eustace Diamonds
it is the radical politician John Bright (1811—89), not Robert Lowe, who is described as ‘the Abomination of Desolation'. The revision may have been made by Trollope or by a solicitous editor at Chapman and Hall.

1
.
Chancery:
Court of the Lord Chancellor of England, which at the period of the novel's action was the highest judicature in the country. In its unreformed state (before 1873) it is the principal villain of Dickens ‘ s
Bleak House
(1853).

2
.
Corsair:
Lizzie is imagining herself as one of the women in the life of Byron's dazzling, sexually irresistible hero Conrad in
The Corsair
(1814). Medora, his wife, loves him so much that on hearing the (false) news of his death she dies. Gulnare, the head of the harem of Conrad's enemy Seyd, is saved by Conrad and in turn saves him from captivity and flees with him back to the pirate band.

3
.
Hansom cab:
Horse-drawn carriage for public hire in London, introduced in 1834, forerunner of the modern taxi cab.

1
.
Oh, come ye
… in
war:
From Walter Scott's ballad ‘Lochinvar' (1808). As it transpires the young warrior is coming to abduct his true love from the hall of his enemies.

2
.
as a widow, you can't wear ‘em:
Her husband is only two years dead and she is still in (at least) half-mourning. Queen Victoria, after the death of Albert in 1861, dressed in mourning for the remainder of her long life. Her dutiful subjects would be expected to follow suit.

3
.
St Cecilia:
Roman martyr of the early church and Patroness of music.

1
.
Mr Burke's Speeches:
Edmund Burke (1729–97) was a famous orator, MP for Bristol, 1774–80, and spoke eloquently urging the impeachment of Warren Hastings, 1786-7. His political sentiments would have been most unconducive to Lord Fawn.

1
.
The Conquering Hero Comes:
Properly, ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes', from Handel's
Judds Maccabaeus
(1746).

2
.
Horticultural:
Royal Horticultural Society Gardens at Chiswick.

3
.
Lord Melbourne:
Melbourne's governments ran from July to November 1834 and from April 1835 to June 1841.

4
.
Tipperary:
As W. J. McCormack notes: ‘one of the largest Irish counties, in the south midlands; in the 1867 Fenian rebellion… one of the few counties where conflict occurred.' Lord Fawn's colonial concerns will, in a short while, be closer to home than Mygawb.

1
.
Hercules:
One of the labours of Hercules was to get the golden apples which Ge gave to Hera on the day of her wedding with Zeus. The apples were guarded by a dragon. See also
Love's Labour's Lost
(IV. iii. 316-17): ‘For valour, is not Love a Hercules,/Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?'

2
.
Violet Effingham:
The reader will have no real image of Violet Effingham, largely because of the interconnected quality of Trollope's political novels. ‘An orphan, an heiress, and a beauty', she is presented to the eye in
Phineas Finn.
Ch. 10: ‘She had sweet, soft grey eyes, which never looked at you long, hardly for a moment, — but which yet, in that half moment, nearly killed you by the power of their sweetness. ‘ The description continues at length. Other characters in
The Eustace Diamonds
, for example, Barrington Erle, Madame
Goesler, Plantagenet Palliser, Lady Glencora and the Duke of Omnium, who may seem quite colourless, have their real substance in other of the Palliser series. To this extent allowance has to be made for the fact that
The Eustace Diamonds
is a part of a larger work.

3
.
cadette of the family:
Youngest girl.

1
.
May 30, 186—:
One of the clear dating references fixing the year as 1865.

2
.
Killeagent… Killaud:
I.e. ‘kill the agent, kill the lord'. Lord Fawn's tenants evidently have no love for their absentee landlord, or his employees.

1
.
Golconda:
Indian city, legendary for its cutting of diamonds.

1
.
the dangers… were greater than the advantages:
Members of Parliament, unless they held office, were unpaid until 1911.

2
.
Doan't thou… where munny is:
Allusion to Tennyson's ‘Northern Farmer, New Style' (1864): ‘But I knaw'd a Quaäker feller as often towd ma this:/Doant thou marry for munny, but goä wheer munny is!'

3
.
somewhere north of Oxford-street:
‘By 1846 the district north of Oxford Street, south and south-west of Regent's Park, was covered with handsome new terraces and squares for the prosperous professional class who now preferred this part of London to any other' (Alethea Hayter, in
A Sultry Month, Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846
(1965)). Frank does not, we apprehend, relish the prospect of North London respectability.

4
.
pillar letter-box:
Trollope probably got the same sly satisfaction from this reference as from later mention of the
Fortnightly Review
(see n. 1
to Ch.
55
) and
The Noble Jilt
(see n. 1 to Ch. 52). In
An Autobiography
(Ch. 15) he claims to have been the ‘originator' of the pillar box during his thirty-three years' service with the Post Office.

1
.
24th September, which was the day after Sir Florian's return from Scotland with his bride:
But in Ch. 1 we are told the Scottish honeymoon lasted six weeks, in which case the couple would not have returned to London until mid October. It is an important anomaly, given the dispute over whether the necklace was given to Lizzie at Portray (during her honeymoon diere) or not.

1
.
London season:
‘In Victorian Britain national social life revolved around a three-month period in early summer termed “the season”. Large numbers of people from the upper classes came to London during these months (May, June, July) to participate in a wide variety of social activities' (
VB).

2
.
crape… weeds:
Black bordering material for hats — indicating mourning — and ‘widow's weeds' (mourning clodies).

3
.
jointure:
Property settled on a wife in the event of her husband's death.

4
.
another man
…
she might cease to be a widow:
In
Phineas Finn
the hero, Phineas, proposes to Violet Effingham (later Chiltern) and Madame Max proposes to Phineas. One of Trollope's frequent references to his own work.