The Eustace Diamonds (87 page)

5
.
Lady Glencora
… a
man who had sought her for her money:
Refers to Lady Glencora's pre-marital involvement with Burgo Fitzgerald, narrated at length in
Can You Forgive Her?

6
.
Madame Goesler
…
declined to marry an English peer:
The Duke of Omnium, in
Phineas Finn.
She is no Lizzie Eustace.

7
.
to show the white feather:
To show cowardice.

8
.
Gresham:
The Prime Minister. Gresham is normally taken to be Gladstone in the Palliser series. Trollope rather confusingly also
refers to the politician by his real name in
The Eustace Diamonds.

9
.
quadrille:
Square dance for couples, rather old-fashioned by 1865.

1
.
in reversion:
Legal term meaning in effect that Frank had no expectations of property coming his way in the future.

2
.
underground railway:
The Metropolitan Line, opened in 1863, connected Baker Street with Swiss Cottage. At this period the trains were steam powered.

3
.
Chiltern Hundreds:
Once a genuine office, the ‘stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds' became in the eighteenth century a nominal post for which an MP would apply if he wished to resign his seat in the House.

1
.
Launcelot
…
Arthur:
Lizzie draws on three principal sources of poetic allusion: Tennyson when she wants to be thought moral; Byron when she wants to be thought daring; Shelley when she wants to be thought intellectual and spiritual. The reference here is to
Lancelot and Elaine
, one of Tennyson's
Idylls of the King
(1859). The poem is apt for a number of reasons which Lizzie is aware of. Lancelot is caught between his guilty love for Guinevere and the pure maiden love of Elaine, which parallels Frank's situation. The idyll, appropriately enough, deals with the ‘great diamond in the diamond jousts', which Lancelot wins and gives to Guinevere, who throws it into the stream by Camelot, a gesture which Lizzie continually threatens to emulate (see Ch. 26).

2
.
twelfth:
12 August, when the grouse-shooting season starts. Lizzie means, of course, at the earliest possible date that decency will permit.

3
.
tire-woman:
Maid who helps her dress (i.e. with her attire); in this narrative the redoubtable Patience Crabstick.

4
.
The King himself
…
gone before:
From Goldsmidi's
Elegy on Mrs Mary Blaize(1759).

1
.
job-carriage:
Carriage hired from a contractor.

1
.
timber
…
there:
Trollope seems to have forgotten that in Ch. 13 John Eustace complained to Frank Greystock that Lizzie was marking and cutting old oaks at Portray and had ‘begun to cut down a whole side of a forest'.

2
.
the horses jobbed:
Lizzie did not have the expense of owning horses but hired them as needed.

3
.
Newgate:
London prison famous in fiction as the lodging of Moll Flanders in Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel. A school of fiction dealing with low life and crime was known as the ‘Newgate Novel'. Lizzie's anachronistic fear suggests how readily her mind returns to fiction and romance.

4
.
with its glittering smile:
Not, apparently, a quotation from
Queen Mab
(1813) although ‘glittering' is one of Shelley's favourite epithets in the poem, occuring three times.

1
.
biggit:
Built.

2
.
who's to tent the pownie:
Who is to attend to the pony?

1
.
limited mail train:
Mail train with a limited number of seats for passengers. Since, for next-day delivery, the mail went fast, the seats were sought after.

2
.
Fortnum and Mason's:
‘specialized grocers in Piccadilly', which had become the most fashionable purveyor of provisions to the upper classes (particularly sporting men) in the 1860s (
PP).
The firm (still utterly fashionable) was founded by one of Queen Anne's footmen in 1707.

3
.
this fuss about making men and women all the same:
Reference to John Stuart Mill's latest pro-feminist campaign. Mill was a champion of women's rights for many years, and author of
The Subjection of Women
(1869). Mill was elected as MP for Westminster in 1865 and became famous as ‘the man who wants girls in Parliament'. He attempted, vainly, to bring in a bill to enfranchise women in May 1867.

4
.
Patient Grizel:
Griselda, the type of the patient wife. One version of her story may be most conveniently found in Chaucer's ‘Clerk's Tale' (c.1387).

1
.
nae that sib that a weedow is to be hailed aboot jist ane as though she were ony quean at a fair:
Not that closely related that a widow should be manhandled just as if she were any common wench at a fair.

2
.
That idea as to the greater number of women :
The census of 1861 revealed a greater number of women than men in England. The ‘surplus woman' (doomed to spinsterhood by the demographics of the time) became a political issue, particularly among early feminists. Female emigration was one proposed solution.

1
.
the opinion which Mr Dove gave:
The authorities and legal cases that are numerously cited in Mr Dove's letter can all be tracked down in the legal literature and were, presumably, provided to the novelist by a lawyer friend. Michael Sadleir in his invaluable
Trollope: A Commentary
(3rd edn,
pp. 388-9
) records that after attacks on the accuracy of the presentation of the legal issue in
Orley Farm
Trollope sought written legal opinion for the case in
The Eustace Diamonds.
Mr Dove's report is
a good example of what Trollope calls in
Phineas Finn
(Ch. 29) the ‘terrible meshes of the Law… rocks and shoals [which] have been purposely arranged to make the taking of a pilot on board a necessity'.

2
.
Omne utensil robustius
…
Termes de Ley
…
Ascun parcel des ustensills:
Every piece of hardware (Latin); terms of law (Old French); no portion of the utensils (Old French).

1
.
Lubin:
Conventional name from pastoral literature.

1
.
Mors omnibus est communis:
The law is the same for everyone.

2
.
fee-simple:
I.e. equivalent to the purchase price.

3
.
under the rose:
Clandestinely.

1
.
gage d'amour:
Pledge of love (French).

2
.
Helen
…
Greeks and Romans are to fight:
It was, of course, Greeks and Trojans. As always, Lizzie is more enthusiastic than accurate in her poetic effusions. Helen, the wife of the Greek Menelaus, was abducted by the Trojan Paris, precipitating the Trojan war commemorated by Homer.

3
.
under less than seven keys:
As Bluebeard, in Perrault's fable
La Barbe-bleue
(1697), kept the bodies of his dead wives locked up.

4
.
Mentors
…
Telemachus:
Mentor, friend of Odysseus, was made the guardian of his household. Athena assumed his form when she accompanied Telemachus on his search for Odysseus, his father.

5
.
fainéant:
Do-nothing (French) — a favourite Trollope term for passive people, especially politicians.

1
.
Mr Cook:
Travel agent Thomas Cook, ‘who organized the first railway excursion in 1841 and founded the travel agency that bore his name, [a] name synonymous with the new institution of tourism' (
PP).

2
.
Morning Post:
Journal associated with the vanities of the London
monde
(ever since Thackeray's
Book of Snobs
(1848), and
Punch's
vendetta against ‘Jenkins of the
Morning Post').
It was the paper's habit to list who had attended the capital's most select dinner parties the evening before.

1
.
the duchess:
Presumably the duchess in
Alice
in
Wonderland
(1865). Tenniel's famous illustrations make the duchess an imposing but not a fearsomely unlovable creature.

1
.
Tupper's great poem:
Martin Tupper's
Proverbial Philosophy
appeared in three parts in 1838, 1842 and 1867. Its theme of self-help is appropriate to Lucy's situation at this point.

2
.
Miss Edgeworth's novels
…
Mudie's
…
“Bandit Chief”:
Maria Edge-worth's novels are
Castle Rackrent
(1800),
Belinda
(1801 ),
The Absentee
(1812). With Lady Linlithgow's complaint against Mudie's, Trollope is poking fun at the great circulating library of the day. Mudie's was inclined to restrict severely what it thought suitable for clients. Lady Linlidigow was asking for a ‘fast' book in George Eliot's
Adam Bede
(1859) and so received
The Bandit Chief; or Lords of Ursino. A Romance
(1818).

1
.
Ivanhoe
…
Tresilian:
The lovers are drawn from Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe(1819),
Old Mortality (i816)
and
Kenilworth
(1821).

2
.
dorsal excrescence:
Towards the end of the 1860s the bustle began to supersede the cage crinoline. Women's hairstyles became more elaborate at the same time. Trollope's tone is somewhat irritable towards the fluctuations of fashion, but his faithfulness in recording them is worth especial note. Other nineteenth-century novelists such as George Eliot, Thackeray and Dickens often avoid confrontation with the present by ante-dating the scene of their action.

1
.
Mrs Siddons:
Mrs Sarah Siddons (1755—1831), the great tragedy queen of the British stage.

2
.
she had been made beautiful for ever:
R. D. Altick suggests, plausibly, that Mrs Carbuncle has benefitted from the attentions of the notorious (and criminal) ‘beautifier', Madame Rachel (i.e. Sarah Rachel Leverson) in her New Bond Street establishment.

3
.
Brinvilliers
…
Cleopatra
…
Queen of Sheba:
All seem to agree that Lucinda is a fine but possibly destructive woman. The Marquise de Brinvilliers poisoned her father and two brothers because they had imprisoned her lover, one of her husband's friends. She failed to kill her husband. She was executed 16 July 1777, having declared at her trial: ‘Half the people of quality are involved in this sort of thing, and I could ruin them if I were to talk. ‘ Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba (see I Kings: 10) are legendary in their effect upon men.

4
.
the Baron:
W. J. McCormack points, helpfully, to a relevant passage in Trollope's
Autobiography:
‘I got home [from travel abroad] in December 1872, and in spite of any resolution to the contrary, my mind was full of hunting as I came back… At first I went back to Essex, my old country, but finding that to be inconvenient, I took my horses to Leighton Buzzard, and became one of that numerous herd of sportsmen who rode with the “Baron” ' (Ch. 19). As McCormack notes, the ‘Baron' was Meyer Amschel de Rothschild (1818—74).

5
.
all the brothers were made lords:
The Crimean Battle of Balaclava took place in 1854 and the Indian Mutiny began in 1857. It was evidently in this year, or the next (only eight years before this point of the narrative), that Lord George was unexpectedly ennobled. Rather confusingly, Trollope says it was ‘some twelve years before the date of our story'.

6
.
Colonel of Volunteers:
The National Volunteer Association (a territorial army) was formed in 1859 and was actively mustered through trie 1860s, in the face of feared Prussian or French invasion. This loyal service to the Queen seems somewhat at odds with Lord George being, as we are told here, a bitter radical (invited to stand by the congenially radical Tower Hamlets constituency in East London), and a suspected Fenian mastermind. Founded under that name in 1858, Fenianism made little head way until outrages in Britain in 1865 (the year of this narrative) made it infamous on the English mainland.

1
.
demonstrations, and Demosthenic oratory:
There were political demonstrations throughout the 1860s, culminating in the great Hyde Park Riot, of July 1866, in favour of reform. Demosthenes was the most famous of ancient Greek orators.