The Way We Live Now (135 page)

2
(p.
417
).
a god
: A hit at Disraeli.

3
(p.
420
).
the Amphitryon of the night
: Presumably Wilson was the barrier preventing access to the emperor. The mythological allusion is obscure; Amphitryon had the task of hunting down a terrible fox, and the honour of being cuckolded by Zeus. He does not seem to have assumed the duties of chamberlain, as Wilson has on this occasion.

Chapter 55

1
(p.
423
).
I fear
: T. was a lifelong Liberal.

2
(p.
424
).
I think that men… ago
: Here the bishop puts the argument for progress elsewhere supported by T., though never by Carbury.

3
(p.
425
).
Hoc, hoc… militum
: Supposedly meaning ‘this, this, is your tribune of the knights!' The application seems clear enough, but the allusion and the sense of the Latin have not been adequately explained.

Chapter 57

1
(p.
437
).
got one
: The Catholic hierarchy was restored in England in 1850, with Westminster as the seat of the archbishop.

Chapter 59

1
(p.
453
).
faithful Achates
: Fidus Achates, companion of Aeneas.

2
(p.
454
).
Banquo's seats
: A not entirely apt allusion to
Macbeth
III.iv, where Macbeth's problem is not that there are empty seats but that ‘the table's full'(l.
₄₅
).

Chapter 62

1
(p.
477
).
Non omnis moriar
: ‘I shall not wholly die.' Horace is depending on his poems to preserve his memory
(Odes
, III.xxx).

Chapter 64

1
(p.
489
).
oppress… seats
: From the Magnificat: ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seats.'

Chapter 66

1
(p.
509
).
old French saying
: ‘Qui s'excuse s'accuse.'

Chapter 67

1
(p.
513
).
dodging her
: A mistake for ‘dogging'?

Chapter 69

1
(p.
524
).
political master
: Disraeli. Melmotte might, as ‘tribune of the people', effect the injection of radicalism into standard Conservative attitudes that Disraeli professed to want.

Chapter 70

1
(p.
533
).
trick… sky
: Milton, ‘Lycidas', II. 170–71.

2
(p.
533
).
uno avulso… alter
: When one has been turned away another is not wanting (Virgil,
Aeneid
, VI.143).

3
(p.
539
)
Rosherville
: Rosherville Gardens, a pleasure park at Gravesend.

Chapter 72

1
(p.
554
).
pleasant vices
: Reminiscence of
King Lear
, V.iii.170–71: ‘The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices/ Make instruments to plague us…'

Chapter 73

1
(p.
557
).
drawer
: Melmotte forged the letter to get possession of the deeds. Sutherland rightly points to the awkwardness arising from the improbability of this piece of plotting, and also suspects that T. was here trying to make Melmotte's crime more serious by inconsistently introducing forgery. Earlier in the book the need for it could not be foreseen, for there had been little question that all parties agreed to the Pickering sale.

Chapter 74

1
(p.
563
).
John
: See Note 3, Chapter
26
.

Chapter 75

1
(p.
570
).
angel… dragon
: Reminiscence of Revelation 12.

Chapter 76

1
(p.
583
).
Lowestoft
: T., who has written ‘Lowestoffe' many times, seems now to have settled for the more usual form.

Chapter 77

1
(p.
592
).
‘Nec pueros… trucidet'
: Horace,
Ars Poetica
, 1.185.

Chapter 78

1
(p.
597
).
your wife's sister
: The law against marriage to a deceased wife's
sister was the subject of much debate, in and out of Parliament Matthew Arnold, for instance, found the notion of repeal repugnant Such marriages were legalized only in 1907.

2
(p.
597
).
One of the greatest judges
…: In fact it was only in 1873 that a Jew first became a judge.

3
(p.
601
).
after twenty years
: Allusion to the Tichborne claimant, an impostor who claimed to be a baronet thought to have drowned twenty years earlier.

Chapter 81

1
(p.
626
).
not all die
: See Note 1, Chapter
62
.

Chapter 84

1
(p.
647
).
no bad odour
: Remembering the proverbial
pecunia non olet
, money has no smell.

Chapter 87

1
(p.
665
).
a certain lady
: The Whore of Revelation, commonly identified by Protestants as allegorically the Church of Rome.

Chapter 88

1
(p.
673
).
felo de se
: One who deliberately and criminally ends his or her life; such ‘self-murder' attracted the penalty here foreshadowed.

2
(p.
673
).
manes
: Shades, souls.

3
(p.
675
).
one great festival
: The shooting of game birds begins (Sutherland).

Chapter 89

1
(p.
678
).
Oh, Amos Cottle
…: Byron,
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
, 11. 401–2. Cottle was a minor poet from Bristol, brother to Joseph Cottle, who published the
Lyrical Ballads
of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

2
(p.
679
).
three volumes
: A standard length for novels at this time; see Note 10, Chapter
1
.

3
(p.
679
).
Your historical novel
: Meaning not hers, but any historical novel. This very advice had been given to the young T., as he reveals in the
Autobiography.

4
(p.
680
).
a certain number of weeks
: In being so methodical she resembles her author, so this can hardly be censorious.

5
(p.
680
).
Mudie
: Until the 90s the dominant circulating library.

Chapter 91

1
(p.
696
).
Marylebone underground railway
: The Metropolitan line.

Chapter 94

1
(p.
720
).
cantraps
: Cantrips – spells or charms, or simply mischievous tricks.

2
(p.
723
).
quiver full
: Psalm 127.5.

Chapter 95

1
(p.
727
).
bread… serpent
: Matthew 7.9–10.

2
(p.
729
).
the presentation
: The living is in his gift, but he can sell it.

3
(p.
730
).
uncanonical
: Because it had to take place after 3 P.M.? (Tracy; Sutherland).

Chapter 96

1
(p.
731
).
'The Wild Asses
…: Psalms, 104.11.

2
(p.
731
).
Bismarck
: Virtual ruler of Germany after 1871.

3
(p.
733
).
12th August
: Grouse-shooting begins and everybody goes away.

4
(p.
735
).
‘In life
…': Unidentified.

5
(p.
737
).
blue books
: Parliamentary reports.

Chapter 97

1
(p.
742
).
Wenham ice
: From the ponds of Wenham in Massachusetts (Sutherland).

Chapter 98

1
(p.
748
).
Croll would do as well as any other
: But Croll seems to have a family already.

Chapter 99

1
(p.
757
).
leather or prunello
: A favourite tag of T.'s, usually with the correct spelling ‘prunella.' It occurs, for instance, in the
Autobiography
and in
He Knew He Was Right
, and means something like ‘irrelevant decoration.' It derives from Pope's
Essay on Man
, iv. 203–4.

Chapter 100

1
(p.
764
).
‘Thou hadst little wit…': King Lear
, I.iv.162–3.

¹
It has been calculated that in 1870 four hundred peers owned over one sixth of the country. Robert Blake,
Disraeli
, p. 237.

²
R. Mullen,
Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in his World
, 1990, pp.
533
–4

³
Nevertheless there was a marked improvement in working-class wages and conditions of labour in the period between 1850 and the time of Trollope's novel.

⁴
This ‘advance lay out' was first printed by Michael Sadleir as an appendix to his
Trollope: A Commentary
(1927; new edition, revised, 1945), pp. 426–8.

⁵
L. Woodward,
The Age of Reform, 1815–1870
, 2nd edn,
Oxford History of England
, Vol. 13, 1962, pp. 604–5. Woodward explains that the model of such finance companies was the French Crédit Mobilier, which was predominantly Jewish; this might account for Melmotte's supposedly French origins.

⁶
Trollope claimed that he had not read
Little Dorrit
, but it has been pointed out that he had offered to review it when it first appeared. A reviewer might ask for a book and not get it, a failure that could well be followed by a failure to read it, but it is known that Trollope was annoyed by Dickens's ‘Circumlocution Office', and wrote (a lost paper) against this slur on the industry of civil servants like himself, so he presumably did read the book.

⁷
Mullen, p. 558.

⁸
Partial Portraits
(1888), extracted in R.C. Terry, ed.,
Trollope: Interviews and Recollections
, 1987, p. 202.

⁹
Stephen Wall,
Trollope and Character
, 1988, p. 374.

¹⁰
‘A Lesser Thackeray? Trollope and the Victorian Novel', in T. Bareham, ed.,
Anthony Trollope
, 1980, pp. 194–
5.

¹¹
The speech as reported in the
Halstead Times
is quoted by R.C. Terry,
A Trollope Chronology
, 1989, p.xxvi.

¹²
Mullen, p. 470. For a good discussion of the Jewish problem in Trollope see Bill Owen,
The Unofficial Trollope
, pp. 8–11. Owen makes the important point that ‘Trollope's fiction often implies more insight and awareness than his stock attitudes argue.'

¹³
Letter to John Blackwood of 12 September 1878; M. Sadleir,
Trollope: A Commentary
, new edn revised, 1945, p. 354.

¹⁴
Sadleir,
Trollope: A Commentary
, p. 354a.

¹⁵
ibid., p. 352.

¹⁶
See Richard Faber,
Proper Stations
, 1971, especially Chapter
6
, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen.'

1
‘Trollope at Work on
The Way We Live New', Nineteenth Century Fiction
, 36 (1982), 472–93, and ‘The Commercial Success of
The Way We Live Now', Nineteenth Century Fiction
, 40 (1986), 460–67.