A Room with a View - E. M. Forster [102]
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), an emblematic figure of brooding Romanticism; A Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman (1859-1936), with its picture of youth in the countryside; the posthumously-published autobiographical novel by Samuel Butler (1835-1902), The Way of All Flesh, whose lack of sentimentality marked it as a departure from Victorianism; and works by Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), presumably including his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which condemned decadence and endorsed intellectual freedom. Mr. Beebe also observes that the Emersons own works by two German philosophers: Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who focused on human will, and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), best known for his critiques of religion and morality.
16 (p. 120) an amateur had painted this inscription: ”Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes”: In the first chapter of Walden (1854), the book inspired by his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond, Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau writes, ”I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”
17 (p. 137) Only sovereigns and pennies.... Freddy had half a quid and his friend had four half-crowns: A quid is 1 pound sterling (or 1 sovereign), a bob (the driver’s tip) is 1 shilling, and a half crown is 2 shillings and sixpence.
18 (p. 182) ”let it be a shop, then. Let’s go to Mudie’s”: Charles Mudie opened his London subscription library and bookstore in 1842. Through its book selection and promotion strategies, Mudie’s became a significant arbiter not only of public taste during the Victorian era, but also of the very form novels took: It gave significant institutional support to the so-called three-decker novel (books that, because they comprised three volumes, could be divided among three subscribers at a time).