A Room with a View - E. M. Forster [104]
7 (p. 49) she had been in the Piazza since eight o‘clock collecting material.... The two men had quarreled over a five-franc note: As Baedeker notes, the French monetary system was widely used in Italy, with a franc equivalent to the Italian lira. At the time, 5 francs were equal to 4 shillings, or 1 dollar (about 12 dollars in today’s currency).
8 (p. 51) that intimate knowledge, or rather perception, of Florence which is denied to all who carry in their pockets the coupons of Cook: Thomas Cook (1808-1892), a pioneer of modern tourism who developed and led group excursions within England and abroad, instituted a coupon system for the convenience of travelers. Cook negotiated fair prices with preferred hotels, whose proprietors would then accept his coupons in lieu of cash as payment for meals and accommodations.
9 (p. 51) “This very square ... witnessed yesterday the most sordid of tragedies. To one who loves the Florence of Dante and Savonarola there is something ... portentous and humiliating”: Mr. Eager’s two examples, on closer inspection, cast Florentine history in perhaps a more volatile, less hospitable light than he intends. Dante Alighieri, the great Florentine poet, was banished from his native city in 1302 and died nineteen years later, still in exile. The Christian preacher Girolamo Savonarola rose to power in fifteenth-century Florence, but his thirst for control of the city’s spiritual and political destiny alienated first the Medicis, then the Pope, and ultimately the people. He was executed in the same square where, centuries later, Lucy Honeychurch witnesses a murder.
10 (p. 86) “I promessi sposi,” said he: Cecil has broken the news of their engagement by speaking the title of a much-admired Italian novel, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1825-1827).
11 (p. 97) “Let’s hope that Mrs. Harris there warn’t no sich person,” said her mother: Mrs. Honeychurch is quoting from Charles Dickens’s The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (189-4), in which the cockney midwife Mrs. Gamp regularly refers to a Mrs. Harris, who proves to be an imaginary character Mrs. Gamp invokes chiefly to confirm her opinions.
12 (p. 110) “I trusted they were no relations of Emerson the philosopher, a most trying man”: Mrs. Honeychurch is referring to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), poet, essayist, and leader of the New England Transcendentalists.
13 (p. 111) She clasped her knees for the name. Something in Thackeray. She struck her matronly forehead: Mrs. Honeychurch’s mnemonic device for the name that eludes her is indeed a Victorian novelist—but she means Dickens, not William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863).
14 (p. 112) “George Meredith’s right—the cause of Comedy and the cause of Truth are really the same”: English poet and novelist George Meredith (1828-1909) gave a lecture in 1877-“The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit”—that he adapted into a preface to his 1879 novel The Egoist. In it, he identifies comedy as a civilizing force, the key to “the Book of our common wisdom,” and a weapon against pretension.
15 (pp. 119-120) “What have they got? Byron. Exactly. A Shropshire Lad. Never heard of it. The Way of All Flesh ... Gibbon. Hullo! Dear George reads German.... Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and so we go on: The Emersons’ library runs the gamut from Romanticism to nihilism. It includes poems by Lord Byron (1788-1824),