The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [125]
22. Flatiron… Broadway: the 290-ft-high Fuller or ‘Flatiron’ Building, completed in 1902, is one of the oldest skyscrapers in New York City.
23. Mont Majour… Carcassonne itself: Mont Majour is a small town near Tarascon and Beaucaire in Provence, southern France, with a medieval abbey. Carcassonne is a medieval fortified town in the Aude region of southwest France, which was largely rebuilt in the nineteenth century.
24. Leghorn: the English name for Livorno, a port in central Italy on the Ligurian sea, south of Pisa and not far from Florence.
25. modistes and over the plages: a ‘modiste’ is a milliner and a ‘plage’ is a beach. Both words are French.
26. a Browning tea: founded in 1881 by F. J. Furnivall and E. H. Hickey and dedicated to examining every aspect of the poetry and life of the English poet Robert Browning (1812–89), the Browning Society is still in existence today (it is now no less concerned with the life and work of Browning’s wife, the poet Elizabeth Barratt Browning, 1806–61). A ‘Browning tea’ would have been a tea party involving either members of the Society or unaffiliated aficionados of Robert Browning’s work.
27. spelling bee: ‘a contest in spelling’ (NSOED).
28. Stuyvesant: the Dutch colonial administrator Peter Stuyvesant (c. 1610–72) was Governor of New Netherland until 8 September 1664, when the colony was taken from him by the British and divided into New York and New Jersey. There is a Stuyvesant Square in Manhattan. Dowell probably has in mind a philistine but wealthy crowd of socialites based around a family called Stuyvesant (see p. 67).
29. Frans Hals… Pre-Mycenaic: Frans Hals (c. 1581–1666) was born in Antwerp of Flemish parents, but spent most of his life in Haarlem. His talent was for portraiture and he is best known for the huge and lively groups of archers and musketeers which he painted from 1616. Philips Wouwerman (1619–1668), also a Haarlem painter and a pupil of Hals, painted genre scenes of horsemen, battles and camp life. Mycenaic civilization, the civilization of Bronze Age Greece, flourished between c.1650 BC and c.1200 BC.
30. Cnossos… Walter Pater: Cnossos (more commonly Knossos) was the principal city of Minoan Crete. It was excavated between 1899 and 1935 by the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941). The most influential and lasting work of the English critic Walter Pater (1839–94) is his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). It had a profound effect on the development of aestheticism in England.
31. Waterbury: an industrial city on the River Naugatuck in Connecticut, Waterbury was once famous as the brass centre of the USA.
32. Democrat… Republican: from 1869, when Ulysses S. Grant took office as the 18th President of the United States, until 1913, when Woodrow Wilson took office as the 28th, the American President had always been a Republican, apart from during Grover Cleveland’s two terms of office (1885–9 and 1893–7).
33. North Cape: considered to be (though not actually) the most northerly point of the European continent, North Cape is a promontory on a north Norwegian island and a traditional stop for tourist steamers.
34. Bramshaw: Bramshaw is situated on the edge of the New Forest, about six miles west of Fordingbridge, in Hampshire.
35. the Englischer Hof: the English Hotel.
36. the Chapeau de Paille of Rubens: otherwise known as The Straw Hat by the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), the most important northern European artist of his day and the greatest