Dr Thorne - Anthony Trollope [300]
* Notes to this introduction are to be found on p. xxii.
* In the nineteenth-century sense of paying court to someone.
* It is, I know, alleged that graces are said before dinner, because our Saviour uttered a blessing before his last supper. I cannot say that the idea of such analogy is pleasing to me.
Notes
CHAPTER I
1 (p. 5) Goshen: The land Joseph gave to the Israelites in Egypt (Genesis 45:10-11).
2 (p. 6) Peelism: When Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, split the Conservative Party by the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 against the interests of the landowners.
3 (p. 6) St Stephen’s: Synecdoche for the House of Commons. St Stephen’s was the chapel in the Palace of Westminster where the Commons met until twenty years before the date that Trollope gives as the time in which Dr Thorne takes place, 1854.
4 (p. 7) Reform Bill: There were three Reform Acts extending voting rights in nineteenth-century Britain, in 1832, 1867 and 1884. Dr Thorne was not published until 1858, so Trollope must be referring to the Act of 1832. This redistributed parliamentary seats to favour growing industrial areas and, by lowering property qualifications, admitted the industrial middle class to the electorate.
5 (p. 13) Longleat: The estate of the Marquess of Bath in Wiltshire and the site of a famous Elizabethan manor house.
6 (p. 13) Hatfield: Bishop John Morton of Ely’s palace (completed 1497) in Hertfordshire.
CHAPTER II
1 (p. 21) rusticated: dismissed or sent down from a university for a specified time as a punishment.
2 (p. 22) Galen: a celebrated physician of the second century AD.
CHAPTER III
1 (p. 31) en règie: ‘in order’.
2 (p. 32) Aesculapius: the Roman god of medicine.
3 (p. 34) Journal of Medical Science: This periodical no more existed than did the Weekly Chirurgeon and the Scalping Knife.
4 (p. 42) Cantabili: Trollope has given the Greshamsbury music teacher a surname appropriate to his profession, as was often his habit with minor characters. Cantabile is an Italian term of instruction to musicians, meaning ’singable’ or ‘singingly’.
CHAPTER IV
1 (p. 63) The veiled prophet: Hakin ben Allah Mokanna in Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore.
2 (p. 63) Zuleika: From the Persian, meaning ‘brilliant beauty’. Zuleika was the beautiful heroine of Byron’s poem of Turkey ‘The Bride of Abydos’.
CHAPTER V
1 (p. 67) Malthusians: Frank’s definition is facetious. A Malthusian was a follower of T. R. Malthus (1766-1835), who held that as population increases faster than the means of subsistence, its increase should be checked.
2 (p. 67) plucked: When a candidate was rejected in examinations the action was described as being ‘plucked’, a relatively new (1852) slang term at the time Trollope was writing.
3 (p. 73) Monsoon: An actual horse, listed in the General Stud Book.
CHAPTER VI
1 (p. 80) ‘In maiden meditation, fancy free’: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II, i, 164.
CHAPTER IX
1 (p. 112) Eleusinian mysteries: In ancient times the festival of the Eleusinia was celebrated every year at Athens, by initiates only, in honour of Demeter and her daughter Persephone.
2 (p. 115) a canal, from sea to sea, through the Isthmus of Panama: Trollope must have been amusing himself with a little informed foresight here. Though the construction of a waterway between the Atlantic and the Pacific had been considered as early as the sixteenth century, the first attempt to carry out the idea was not begun until 1880. Then the work was undertaken not by the British but by the privately owned Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique under the leadership of Ferdinand de Lesseps.
3 (p. 120) Sir Omicron Pie: A combination of the fifteenth and sixteenth letters of the Greek alphabet, this is one of Trollope’s less happy efforts at naming a character in accordance with or to suit his occupation.