Duke's Daughter
| Page # | Quote | Research |
| Proust quotation | People are always prepared to think of books as a sort of cube which has one surface removed - this results in the author hastening to ‘introduce therein’ people he comes across (as characters presumably). | |
| 7 | Lloyd-George peerage | In 1910 there was a constitutional crisis over the budget. Conservatives in the House
of Lords were at odds with Liberals in the Commons pushing for social reforms introduced by Lloyd-George. When
the King agreed to create enough Liberal peerages to pass the measure the Lords capitulated and gave up the power
of absolute veto, resolving the problem officially with passage of the Parliament Bill in 1911. Hence the song:
Lloyd-George knew my father, father knew Lloyd-George”.Lloyd-George peerages” were evidently considered somewhat inferior to the older creations. |
| 8 | Palafox | see OBH p.23 for first mention |
| 8 | Speckled Tootings = Buff Orpingtons | Tooting and Orpington are both London suburbs |
| 8 | Heptarchy | The seven kingdoms into which England was divided by 650 AD after the Anglo-Saxon conquest. |
| 8 | Face-à-main | what most of us would call a lorgnette! |
| 10 | Lord Hartletop’s coming-of-age | Trollope, Last Chronicle of Barset, I think? |
| 13 | Scenes From Clerical Life | George Eliot, 1858. Includes The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton, Mr Gilfil’s Love Story, and Janet’s Repentance. |
| 14, 15 | Good Lord Deliver Us | From Ghosties and Ghoulies and long leggittie beasties, and things that go bump in the night Good Lord deliver us! A Scottish prayer used on Hallowe’en.|
| 15 | ingans | Scottish word for onions |
| 16 | The struggle has naught availed | poem by Arthur Hugh Clough, Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth / The labour and the wounds are vain / The enemy faints not, nor faileth / And as things have been they remain |
| 17 | Escamillo | The bullfighter in Bizet’s Carmen. In true Thirkell style she is alluding to manzanilla. There would have been no imports from Spain during WWII.|
| 18 | In the spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove/In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. | >Tennyson, Locksley Hall. |
| 18 | Daughter am I in my father’s house, but Mistress in my own |
see Kipling Our Lady of the Snows. A Nation spoke to a Nation, / A Throne sent word to a Throne: / Daughter am I in my mother’s house, / But mistress in my own.See also County Chronicle, p.18. |
| 22 | Mr Crawley’s daughter | Trollope, Framley Parsonage and Last Chronicle of Barset. |
| 24 | In total wacancy of hoofs | Joe Gargery, Great Expectations, by Dickens, Chapter 15. which I meantersay as even a set of shoes all four round might not be acceptable as a present, in a total wacancy of hoofs.. |
| 24 | Lucina’s chariot | Lucina was the Roman goddess of childbirth. |
| 24 | Roasted Manningtee ox | Henry IV Pt 1 the description of Falstaff as a Roasted Manningtree ox with a pudding in his belly is thought to derive from the custom of ox-roasting in the town of Manningtree in Essex. |
| 25 | The Book of Ezra | comes between Chronicles II and Nehemiah. |
| 25 | Propria Persona | a legal term meaning for one’s self, eg, acting on one’s own behalf. |
| 25 | Supererogation | good actions going beyond what is morally required. |
| 27 | Red Tape & Sealing Wax Department | from Thackeray, who uses it in several books, including Vanity Fair. |
| 30 | Dry Fly | an artificial fly used in fishing, often made of feathers and tied with silk, with names like Brown Turkey, Tin Tadpole, etc. Lord Norton, even though he is only the son of a Lloyd-George baron (see 7 above) will be a fly-fisherman, rather than an angler or coarse fisherman which is definitely for the lower classes. It’s also a brand of sherry. |
| 31 | Holding a child over the fonts | tenir un enfant sur les fonts, to stand as a sponsor/godparent to a baby at its baptism. Now superseded by “être parrain (marraine). [thanks to Edith Fearn for the translation] |
| 36 | A Man mayn’t Marry.. | Many of us have whiled away the time during over-long sermons by reading the Table of Kindred and Affinity Wherein Whosoever are Related are Forbidden by the Church of England to Marry Together, found at the end of the Book of Common Prayer. |
| 39 | He and his sister were in the village one winter | Marling Hall. |
| 40 | Who’s your Lady Friend | Who, who, who's your lady friend? Who's the little girlie by your side? I've seen you with a girl or two. Oh,oh,oh I am surprised at you! Hallo, hallo, stop your little game! Don't you think your ways you ought to mend? It isn't the girl I saw you with at Brighton. Who, who, who's your lady friend? (Presumably a music hall song.) |
| 40 | Lest all should think that we were proud | The morning came, the chaise was brought, / But yet was not allow'd / To drive up to the door, lest all / Should say that she was proud. John Gilpin, - William Cowper (1731-1800> |
| 41 | The Heir of Redclyffe | Novel by Charlotte M Yonge, 1853. The Heir marries his guardian’s daughter, Amabel, or Amy. |
| 42 | Annabel Lee | Poem by Edgar Allan Poe, 1839. |
| 42 | Riding the whirlwind | James Boswell in his essay On War(written in 1717, and well worth reading today) quotes Addison as representing the Duke of Marlborough as ‘an angel riding in a whirlwind and directing the storm’. But does it originally come from the Bible? |
| 42 | In charge of remounts | providing new horses to replace those which had been killed. |
| 43 | Spurlos versenkt | WWI military jargon - German for ‘sunk without trace’. |
| 44 | Bracebridge Hall | Bracebridge Hall: scenes from English life, by Washington Irving, published 1822 |
| 47 | L’ami de la maison | |
| 48 | Washington’s Vimphos, Corbett’s Bono-Vitasang and Holman’s Phospho-Manuro | any ideas on these? It is tempting to think that there may have been a brand of fertiliser made by Lincoln or Jefferson, Hunts, or Fords, or some other name associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. |
| 51 | The grasshopper is a burden | Ecclesiastes xi.6. (also OBH p.301) |
| 52 | Mammon of Unrighteousness | Luke 16.9 |
| 53 | Monstrous Regiment | The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Title of pamphlet by John Knox, 1558. |
| 53 | Praetorium here, Praetorium there | Praetorian here, Praetorian there, I mind the bigging o’t.Scott, The Antiquary, ch.4. |
| 55 | Beltons, Harefield, Hosiers | Girls’ Foundation School, etc, see The Headmistress. |
| 55 | Thornes of Ullathorne | Trollope, Dr Thorne |
| 55 | Lord Nutfield | ...one letter. William Morris (not the one we associate with Burne-Jones) was the founder of the Morris car factory in Oxford. He became a baron in 1934, and a viscount in 1938. |
| 56 | Rare Baronetcies that can go sideways | In Titles and Forms of Address I find that failing a son to the first holder, the title goes to the nearest male descendant of a former holder. |
| 59 | Dr Mothersill | Dr (later Baroness) Edith Summerskill was Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Food (1945-50), Minister of National Insurance (1950-51). |
| 59 | wigs on the green | a fight, brawl or fracas, or to a difference of opinion that could lead to fisticuffs. It often appears as
there’ll be wigs on the green, as a warning (or a prediction) that an altercation is likely to occur. It’s originally Irish, dating from the eighteenth century, when men usually wore wigs. If a fight started, the first thing that happened was that the wigs of those involved would be knocked off and would roll incongruously about on the grass, to the amusement of bystanders and the embarrassment of participants. |
| 60 | Plassey, Arcot, Dowlah, etc. | Clive of India captured Arcot in 1751, this was followed by the battle of Plassey where he defeated Suraj-ad-Dowlah’s army in 1757 |
| 65 | Sound and fury | It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Macbeth, V, v. |
| 68 | 1949 Ocelot | Jaguar |
| 69 | Never, no never | What never? No never! What never? Well, hardly ever!- W S Gilbert, HMS Pinafore. |
| 70 | Drinking the King’s health with one foot on the table | presumably this refers to some archaic custom in the Royal Navy, but I can’t find out what. |
| 72 | Touchstone | It’s a poor thing, but mine own- I have had the utmost trouble checking this, because it turns out to be a common misquotation and should read An ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own. As You Like It, V,iv. |
| 72 | The late and lamented H W Fowler | author of classic reference works on English usage. Modern English Usage, 1926, and co-editor with his brother FG The King’s English, 1906, and He lived from 1858-1933. |
| 73 | Half-pay officer | receiving the allowance paid to an officer when neither retired nor in actual service. |
| 74 | Bumped | Oxford and Cambridge hold rowing races between the colleges annually, where the boats try to bump, rather than overtake, each other. |
| 75 | Lisa Bedale/Isabel Dale | Old Bank House. |
| 76 | Lotus-eater | from Homer. People who ate of the lotus-tree forgot their friends and homes and lost all desire to return to their native country. |
| 76 | Rape of the Book | she is alluding to Pope’s mock-heroic comic poem The Rape of the Lock. |
| 78 | Second pip | The senior master just made it from second to first lieutenant. The pips are stars on the uniform shoulder straps. |
| 78 | Pippa Parson | apart from sounding like Browning’s Pippa Passes, does this refer to any particular film star? From the hairstyle it would seem to be Veronica Lake, but why? Cf. OBH p.142. |
| 79 | Trailing clouds of glory | Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality, stanza beginning Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. |
| 81 | Bathwater Cold | does this refer to anywhere in particular? It sounds a bit like Dartington Hall in Devon. In the Cotswolds I can only find Cold Aston and Bourton on the Water, neither of which have any connection with teaching arts and crafts as far as I know. |
| 82 | Morpheus | the Greek god of sleep |
| 83 | Mr F’s aunt | see Dickens’s Little Dorrit. |
| 83 | Threnody | an ode, song or lamentation for the dead. |
| 83 | Whom the Lord loveth He chastened | Epistle of Paul to the Hebrews, xii.6 |
| 85 | Old Cripps | Sir Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the postwar Labour Government. Very left-wing, he was expelled from the party from 1939-1945 for recommending closer links with the Communist Party. |
| 87 | Wemmick | Mr Jaggers’s clerk and Pip’s friend in Dickens’s Great Expectations. |
| 88 | Gaiters’ + Boots the Chemists, Sheepskins’ | Woolworths, Lukes and Huxley = Marks & Spencer (the evangelists Luke and Mark, and Spencer and Huxley who were both involved in the great 19th C evolution debates as well as Darwin. |
| 88 | Pickwickian | said of words or epithets, usually of a derogatory nature, that, in the circumstances in which they are employed, are not to be taken as having quite the same force or implication as they naturally would have. See Pickwick Papers, Chapter 1. |
| 88 | Mark of the Beast | The number of the Beast, 666, received on the right hand or forehead so that no-one could buy or sell until he had this mark. Revelations 13, 16-18. |
| 88 | Petroushka | In the ballet by Stravinsky, Petroushka is a doll stuffed with sawdust. |
| 91 | And a ropewalk | This sounds as if it might be Dickens, but the only reference I can find to a ropewalk is in Great Expectations, Chapter 46, but it doesn’t quite fit. |
| 93, 130, 150 | The Nelson Touch |
became the phrase used to refer to the ability of one man to touch the lives of many and command an almost unwavering loyalty |
| 98 | Each glance of the eye | Robert Browning, the Lost Mistress |
| 99 | If wishes were horses, Beggars would ride / If turnips were watches, I’d wear one by my side. | AT often uses this old rhyme, and one of Aubrey Clover’s plays is called If Turnips were Watches. |
| 103 | Caveat Emptor | let the buyer beware |
| 104 | Grobury | see Trollope, Last Chronicle of Barset |
| 111 | moist energy | |
| 116 | Prince Giglio | W M Thackeray The Rose and the Ring |
| 117 | Prettyman | Trollope, Last Chronicle of Barset |
| 119 | Friends the merest | Robert Browning, The Lost Mistress|
| 120, 129 | He knew what the ten-year soldier tells | Kipling, The Road to Mandalay |
| 125 | Story of Kay and Gerda | Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen. |
| 126 | Professor Henbane | Which despised woman academic is meant here? |
| 127 | There was an old man of Sid Sussex | Sidney Sussex is a Cambridge college. Is the limerick one of Edward Lear’s? It might be, as it uses his rhyme scheme rather than the one usually used nowadays. |
| 129 | Take up the white man’s burden | title of a poem by Kipling, 1899 |
| 130 | Flowers of the Forest | There seem to be two 18th C poems with this title, one by Jean or Jane Elliot, and one by Alison Cockburn, both re-workings of an older Scottish ballad about the non-return of some 10,000 soldiers from the Battle of Flodden. |
| 132 | Hick, hock, hackery hail | I think AT made this one up, but it is very similar to some of the old English rhymes in her Mother Goose essay. All the leaf-dipping in the spring is very reminiscent of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. |
| 136 | Mithra-worshippers | In the Roman worship of Mithras a bull was involved, though not in the Iranian cult. |
| 136 | Lord Dumbello | Trollope, Framley Parsonage and Last Chronicle of Barset |
| 140 | John Knox | protestant Scottish preacher, who was exiled to Geneva during the reign of Mary Tudor and in 1558 published a First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.|
| 140 | Who will to Cupar maun to Cupar | sounds like a quotation from Sir Walter Scott to me, though I can’t trace it, Mr Macpherson often lapses into somewhat impenetrable Scottish dialect. |
| Feeling rather like Jo that everyone was allus a-chivvying on him | Dickens’s Bleak House | |
| 141 | Parables from Nature, by Mrs Gatty, published between 1855 and 1871 | The real name of the artist Claud Lorrain or Lorraine, 1604-1682, was Claude Gelée |
| 142 | Todgers’s can do it | Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit |
| 144-5 | The cottage with the stream running through it | this appears in The Carasoyn, by George Macdonald, Works of Fancy and Imagination, 1871. see also CC 244) |
| 145 | Dine on mince and slices of quince | Edward Lear, The Owl and the Pussycat. |
| 145 | Made the Priory its washpot and cast its shoe over it | Moab is my washpot; over Edom shall I cast my shoe, Psalm 108. |
| 147 | Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time | painting, 1834, by Sir Edwin Landseer, now in the collection at Chatsworth |
| 147 | Door with a grill in it | grille, surely! |
| 147 | Lord Welter | Charles Ravenshoe’s friend in Henry Kingsley’s Ravenshoe,1861. |
| 148 | Jasper and his grandmother | see Growing Up |
| 148 | What Nelson felt like every time he went to sea | Nelson was renowned for never overcoming seasickness, or is it his sense of duty that Cecil means? |
| 150 | Meteor flag of England | nickname for the Red Ensign, (although that is now the flag of the merchant navy, it was that
of the Royal Navy until 1864). The meteor flag of England Shall yet terrific burn Till danger's troubled night depart And the star of peace return . . . Ye Mariners of England, by Sir Thomas Campbell, 1801 |
| 151 | O.C.T.U. | Officer Cadet Training Unit |
| 158 | As we have just | found the reference with great difficulty - This book was written in 1950, just at the time when Margaret Bird came into AT’s life and started to help her |
| 158 | Tyrell...William Rufus | William II of England, known as Rufus, was shot, possibly not accidentally, by a huntsman called Walter Tyrell in the New Forest in 1100. |
| 159 | Ghost’s Walk at Chesney Wold | The rain is ever falling -- drip, drip, drip -- by day and night upon the broad flagged terrace- pavement, the Ghost's Walk. The weather is so very bad down in Lincolnshire that the liveliest imagination can scarcely apprehend its ever being fine again. Dickens’s Bleak House. |
| 160 | Europa | She was abducted from Phoenicia to Crete by Jupiter in the form of a bull. |
| 161 | The Statue and the Bust | Poem by Robert Browning |
| 161 | Thoughts, Silent Thoughts | Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death, like waters flowing, Bear me indeed as through the regions infinite |
| 161 | Passage to India | by Walt Whitman, used as the text for Vaughan-Williams’s Sea Symphony. |
| 161 | Phantastes | Phantastes: a faerie romance, by George Macdonald, in prose and verse, 1858. In Chapter 23 the hero is imprisoned in a tower, but every night when the moon shines through a hole in the roof the walls of the tower vanish in a mist, only to reappear at sunrise. |
| 162 | The Pit and the Pendulum | short story by Edgar Allan Poe, 1842, about a man undergoing torture during the Spanish Inquisition. |
| 168 | Chinese rococo Garden House at Harefield | see The Headmistress |
| 174 | Emmy...fell in to the pond | see Wild Strawberries |
| 174 | People that call a turnip a navvy | French for turnip is ‘navet’. A navvy is a labourer, short for ‘navigator’, from the days when the canals were first dug and were called ‘navigations’. |
| 175 | If you want a proud foe to make tracks | from ‘My name is John Wellington Wells’, W S Gilbert The Sorcerer |
| 180 | Consulibus Illis | literally in that year- but why? |
| 186 | Oh Miss Shepherd |
David Copperfield, Chapter 18 |
| 189 | Cora, coram | Coram = in the presence of, openly |
| 189 | Patient Griselda | Originally from Boccaccio’s Decameron, but used by Chaucer for Canterbury Tales, the Clerk’s Tale. Model of enduring patience and wifely obedience, and subjected to almost unendurable trials. |
| 192 | The one to wash the other | I think this must be from a nursery rhyme, but I can’t trace it. |
| 193 | A laggard in love | A laggard in love and a dastard in warYoung Lochinvar, from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion (1808) |
| 193 | Eventré | = disembowelled |
| 194 | Little red decoration | presumably the Légion d’honneur |
| 194 | On va vous en dire des nouvelles | I’ll tell you what |
| 194 | Society for the Propagation of English | could this be the English Speaking Union? |
| 195 | Stuck close to his desk and never gone to sea… | and you all may be rulers of the Queen’s Navee – W S Gilbert, HMS Pinafore. |
| 195 | Soliloquy in a [sic: should be of the] Spanish Cloister | Poem by Robert Browning, often quoted by AT |
| 196 | Embusqué | one who avoids active service in wartime, shirker |
| 196 | Chivvies and worrits | evidently Dickens, but where? |
| 197-8 | Those things we ought not to have done | The General Confession from the Book of Common Prayer. |
| 199 | Hold your hand but as long as all may | Robert Browning, The Lost Mistress |
| 199 | This is the heart the Queen leant on | From Browning’s Misconceptions This is a heart the Queen leant on, Thrill'd in a minute erratic, Ere the true bosom she bent on, Meet for love's regal dalmatic. |
| 203 | Mr Guppy | A character in Dickens’s Bleak House |
| 205-6 | A former Dowager Lady Lufton | Lucy Robarts, Justinia Lufton who married Sir George Meredith fromTrollope, Framley Parsonage |
| 206 | George Richmond, RA | 1809-1896, studied under Fuseli, influenced by Blake, was one of the|
| 206 | Peter Gray, Somers, Robinson | Etiquette, a Bab Ballad, by W S Gilbert |
| 210 | The Black Douglas | Sir James Douglas, (1286-1330), champion of Robert Bruce, and a figure of dread to the English of the Border. |
| 210 | Sweeney Todd | The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. He cut his customers’ throats and they were put into pies. |
| 211 | Turk | see Marling Hall |
| 212 | Mr Attlee | Labour Prime Minister who supplanted AT’s beloved Churchill |
| 224 | Kate Barlass | King James I of Scotland, a cultured and firm ruler, was seen by some of his countrymen as
a tyrant. Under attack by his enemies while staying at the Dominican chapter house in Perth on
20 February 1437, he was holed up in a room whose door had the usual metal staples for a wooden
bar, but whose bar had been taken away. The legend has it that Catherine Douglas, one of the queen’s
ladies-in-waiting, tried heroically to save James I by barring the door with her naked arm. Her attempt
failed, her arm being broken in the process, and the King was murdered, but she was thereafter known
as Catherine Barlass. Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote a poem about her in 1881, entitled The King’s
Tragedy, of which one stanza is: Like iron felt my arm, as through |
| 224 | The Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight | During the 17th century, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, sentenced a soldier to be
shot for his crimes. The execution was to take place at the ringing of the evening curfew bell. However,
the bell did not sound. The soldier’s fiancée had climbed into the belfry and clung to the great clapper
of the bell to prevent it from striking. When she was summoned by Cromwell to account for her actions,
she wept as she showed him her bruised and bleeding hands. Cromwell’s heart was touched and he
said, Your lover shall live because of your sacrifice. Curfew shall not ring tonight! |
| 270 | The dead they cannot rise | Kipling, Barrack Room Ballads |
| 273 | Drink eisel and eat a crocodile | Hamlet’s rage against Laertes at Ophelia’s funeral in Act V Scene 1 |
| 273 | Sixpence will not part us | Nicholas Nickleby, Chapter 23, by Charles Dickens |
| 274 | Thomas à Becket’s mother was said to be a Saracen Princess | The only two English words she knew were Becketand London |
| 314 | Sir Crossjay Patterne | Mr Crossjaye Patterne is a character in The Egoist, by George Meredith |
| 334 | Punic faith | treacherous |