[106] Unblowing, ungrowing are the roses: Isa’s poetry echoes the words and the mood of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poem “The Garden of Proserpine” (1866), with its longing for the quiet and peace of the underworld, and escape from the doubts and pressures of time: “But no such winds blow thither, / And no such things grow there” (lines 23–24). Proserpine (Persephone), the daughter of the earth mother Ceres (Demeter), was seized by Hades, the god of the underworld, and carried away by force, but when her mother grieved so much that the earth turned barren, Persephone was permitted to return to her mother for a portion of each year, thus explaining the cycle of the seasons.

  [106] the great pear tree: The pear is an ancient symbol of fecundity and fertility possibly due to the correspondences between its shape and a rounded breast or pregnant womb. In Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss,” another story about a woman who suspects her husband of adultery, the wife believes she shares a hallowed moment with the other woman, looking at a flowering pear tree. In T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” spiritual sterility is instantiated in the obverse image: “Here we go round the prickly pear.”

  [106] caravanserai: Although Woolf confuses this word, taken from the Persian and referring to “a roadside inn,” with the long procession of camels, mules, or wagons making up a traveling caravan, she evokes a powerful image—used in Three Guineas as well—for the long, arduous journey that is life. A caravanserai figures in FitzGerald’s “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” as a tavern that offers a brief hedonistic respite from the bleakness of the journey.

  [107] leaders who in that they seek to lead desert us: As early as 1919, Woolf wrote in her diary, “And more & more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will” (Diary 1: 256). Psychoanalysts like Gregory Zil-boorg later argued that the isolation of even a normal leader results in emotional detachment from the people, so that power and a sense of responsibility are inversely correlated. (See Robert A. Clark, “Psychiatrists and Psychoanalysts on War,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 19 [1965]: 540–58.)

  [107] London street cries: Vendors and hawkers for centuries called out their wares in the London streets, and over time their calls gradually acquired distinctive pitches and sounds. The famous Cries of London inspired numerous paintings and musical works.

  [107] to skip two hundred years: Woolf stretches historical time by placing two hundred years between the reigns of Queen Anne (1702–1714) and Queen Victoria (1837–1901).

  [107] What’s history without the Army?: Woolf records a conversation, in 1921, with Lytton Strachey: “History must be written all over again. Its all morality—/ & battles, I added” (Diary 2: 115).

  [107] a Grand Ensemble, round the Union Jack: Pageants of the time would traditionally end with a patriotic glorification of the British Empire. Conversely, “The Abinger Pageant,” a collaboration between producer Tom Harrison and E. M. Forster, ends—one wonders how they did it—with a flock of sheep.

  [108] a hansom . . . a growler . . . runners: Hansom and growler refer to two different kinds of horse-drawn carriages (two wheeled and four wheeled), and runners were porters who ran alongside hoping to be hired to unload luggage.

  [108] D’you remember: The following memories mix London low life (thieves, cutthroats, prostitutes, the poor Irish) with the privileged upper classes. Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Sybil: or, the Two Nations (1845) launched a stinging critique of Victorian society as divided into the separate worlds of the rich and the poor.

  [108] Knocked ’em in the old Kent Road: Another well-known music-hall song reflecting the experiences of the Victorian working class and the urban poor. The Old Kent Road, in South London, was also the route taken by Chaucer’s pilgrims on their way to Canterbury.

  [108] the Crystal Palace: The song stirs memories in the audience of the contrast between the harsh conditions of servants’ lives and the grand architectural and technological accomplishments of the Victorian age. The Crystal Palace, a marvel of modern design built out of iron and glass, was the site of the Great Exhibition of 1851, a world fair organized to celebrate and stimulate British manufacturing throughout the empire.

  [109] ring up the Stores: Replacing the row of little Victorian specialty shops, the modern city brought the economical efficiency of the department store. The Army and Navy Store, or “the Stores,” was initially a cooperative formed in the nineteenth century to provide goods to the officers and families of those in the higher ranks of the armed forces at reduced cost; after World War I “the Stores” made its reasonable prices available to a free and open membership.

  [110] ’Yde Park: Speaking like a Cockney, Budge drops the H in Hyde Park, hansom cab, and horses.

  [110] Shah of Persia; Sultan of Morocco: Budge gestures to the growing cosmopolitan nature of London, which he interprets as a sign of Britain’s predominance in the world. Persia and Morocco, however, were not part of the British Empire.

  [110] Cook’s tourists: The firm of Thomas Cook began to operate in the mid-nineteenth century specifically to facilitate middle-class travel by providing organized tours, passports, guidebooks, and currency exchange.

  [110] Mansion House: The official residence of the lord mayor of London, located in the financial district and used for public functions and as a court of law. The following speech mixes government, finance, and religion in a satiric critique of Victorian hypocrisy.

  [110] Famine. Fenians: During the nineteenth century, the Irish suffered intensely from famines, notably the Great Famine caused by the potato blight in 1845–1849 that lasted until 1852. In a rising independence movement, the Fenian Brotherhood was formed by immigrant Irish in the United States, mounting attacks on the British Empire first through physical force, and then through financial support for the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a forerunner of the Irish Republican Army. Although Home Rule was achieved in 1921, the division of Ireland and the continuing ties to Britain angered the revolutionary nationalists and in 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, the IRA began a bombing campaign in English towns.

  [111] natives of Peru: In the middle of the nineteenth century, Peru was at the height of its guano trade, experiencing a financial boom due to the value of dried bird excrement as a natural fertilizer. But as artificial fertilizers were developed and the supply of guano became depleted, Peru fought a financially disastrous war with Chile over possession of the guano coast—the Costaguana of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. Britain, seemingly nonimperialist in its support of Peruvian independence against imperial Spain, nevertheless benefited from assuming Peru’s foreign debts in return for concessions on Peruvian railroads and guano exports, although by this time Britain was primarily interested in Peru’s silver.

  [111] wherever one or two . . . come together: A phrase echoing “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20), echoed in turn in the order for Morning Prayer in the Anglican service: “and dost promise that when two or three are gathered together in thy Name thou wilt grant their requests.”

  [111] Cripplegate; St. Giles’s; Whitechapel; the Minories: Areas of London associated with poverty, crime, or Jewish immigrant settlement, and thus aspects of the city excluded from centers of power like Mansion House.

  [111] white man’s burden: A common expression, taken from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” (McClure’s Magazine, February 1899), and referring to the duty of the white races to spread the benefits of their civilization to the undeveloped world. Whether Kipling’s poem is interpreted as imperialist racism, moral exhortation, or ironic self-deprecation, in October the same magazine consolidated the popular understanding of the phrase through an ad for Pears Soap—possibly parodied in the words “THE SOAP” in the “Circe” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses—which promoted the “virtues of cleanliness” as the “first step towards lightening THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN” and “brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances.”

  [112] the basement: A reference to downstairs, the partially belowground area of the house where the servants would be located.

  [112] peg-top trousers: Peg-leg or peg-top trousers, so called because they were wide and pleated at the top and narrow at the ankles, thus resembling the shape of a child’s toy, a cone-shaped spinning top. See note to “pegged down” (13) for repetitions of peg as a rhyming homonym.

  [113] the best days of life are over: In spirit, the nineteenth-century act resembles the light comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, with their satiric spoofs on Victorian institutions and behavior, and their parodic replications of melodramatic plots. Edgar’s speech and the following dialogue make fun of Victorian moral earnestness, while pointing to the gap between such high-minded spirituality and the exploitative dimension of imperialist missionary zeal.

  [113] butterfly nets . . . botanical cases: An amateur craze for science blossomed in the nineteenth century, inspired by such earlier works as Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (see note to pages 70–71). Collecting bugs, moths, and butterflies was a passion of Virginia Woolf’s own childhood, when she and her siblings formed their own Entomological Society.

  [114] those skulls and things: Fossil collecting was another avid pursuit of the amateur scientist—one that profoundly disturbed the Victorian mind, however, not only by exposing geological records that conflicted with the biblical account of creation but also by evidencing the disappearance of whole species. The challenge to religious faith posed by “quarried stone” is captured in the image of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam (LVI).

  [115] O has Mr. Sibthorp a wife?: Repetitions resembling the reprise sung by the chorus in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

  [115] “The Last Rose of Summer”: The nineteenth-century scene includes a number of popular parlor songs, stories, and poems, evoking the sentimentality of the Victorians yet also testifying to the circulation of popular culture through quotation and misquotation in a range of other works. “The Last Rose of Summer” (from Thomas Moore’s A Selection of Irish Melodies 5, 1813) adapted the tune of an earlier song, “The Groves of Blarney,” a comic burlesque on a still earlier song, “Castle Hyde,” set to an old Irish folk melody. “The Last Rose of Summer” was itself interpolated into the German composer Friedrich von Kotow’s opera Martha (1847), much loved by nineteenth-century London audiences. Numerous allusions to both the song and the opera weave their way through the “Sirens” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

  [115] “I Never Loved a Dear Gazelle”: The opening line of Lewis Carroll’s satirical “Tema Con Variazioni” (1869), which parodies “I never nursed a dear gazelle,” a poem from Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (1817). Changing the meaning of dear from “loved” to “expensive,” Carroll accompanies his parody with the argument that poetry, like music, should be subject to “that process of Dilution” called by composers “setting,” in which a few notes of a tune are woven into the new composition, saving us from the transports of the original in its concentrated form. Carroll’s misquotation is repeated but resentimentalized by the character Leopold Bloom in the “Circe” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

  [115] “I’d be a Butterfly”: A song by Thomas Haynes Bayly, translated solemnly into Latin by the Reverend Francis Wrangham, the archbishop of Cleveland, in 1828, but parodied by a young William Makepeace Thackeray as “I’d be a tadpole” (Gownsman, November 12, 1829). Referenced ubiquitously throughout the nineteenth century, Bayly’s song is described by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, in the poem of that name, as “a paltry tune you never fairly liked” but that you cannot get out of your head (lines 960–65).

  [116] “Rule, Britannia.”: The patriotic poem by the Anglo-Scot James Thomson, set to music by Thomas Arne as part of the masque Alfred (1740), based on the life of Alfred the Great. In the nineteenth century, the exhortatory line “Britannia, rule the waves” was changed to “Britannia rules the waves,” and the song came popularly to epitomize the idea of empire, accompanying, for example, along with the next song, “Home, Sweet Home,” Queen Victoria’s opening of the Colonial Exhibition in 1886.

  [117] time, gentlemen, time ladies: The traditional closing call of the publican (and therefore appropriate for the actor playing Budge) but with the ominous sense of mortality in the similar call, “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME” in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (line 140 ff.)

  [117] ’Ome, Sweet ’Ome: A song from the operetta Clari (1823) with music by the English composer Henry Rowley Bishop and adapted from a play by the American poet John Howard Payne, in turn inspired by a Parisian ballet Clari (1820) with music by Rodolphe Kreutzer. Immortalized by Jenny Lind, “Home, Sweet Home” is referenced by Leopold Bloom while listening to the orchestra tuning up at the Gaiety Theatre in the “Sirens” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

  [117] For here . . . comes the bread-winner, home from the city: An inversion of “Home is the sailor, home from sea, / and the hunter home from the hill,” the last lines of the poem “Requiem” by Robert Louis Stevenson, which were engraved on Stevenson’s tomb.

  [117] Sindbad the sailor: The stories of Sindbad’s seven fantastic voyages are narrated in tht Arabian Nights (translated into English by Sir Richard Burton in 1850). There are references to “Sinbad” in both the “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca” chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses, in which Sinbad acquires multiple reflections as “Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer,” etc., and ultimately merges with Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman, and the Ancient Mariner.

  [117] mechanics’ institute: As part of the adult-education movement in the nineteenth century, mechanics’ institutes were created to provide workers with technical training and scientific instruction in the evenings; as the education offered moved into areas of culture, however, the institutes became vulnerable to the charge that they were imposing middle-class values on the working class.

  [118] unhygienic: Domestic hygiene was greatly promoted during the early twentieth century, as streamlined designs and developments in technology made possible a greater cleanliness than in the cluttered, unsanitary conditions of the nineteenth-century household. Hygienic concerns relating to physical health, however, expanded in metaphorical ways to include mental, spiritual, social, and ultimately racial hygiene. The quotation marks around the word thus imply that Woolf’s satire cuts both ways.

  [118] You don’t believe in history: William’s remark reflects the approach known as “historicism,” which emphasizes the distinctiveness of past eras, regards time as change, and bases all understanding on historical context Against the view that art is “immortal” and therefore “unprogressive,” for example, Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, posited the historicist view that the individual is “an organ of the society in which he has been brought up” and “dependent on what in the modern phrase we call his ‘environment’” (English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century 8).

  [119] one-making: Compare the comic attempts at such one-making as performed by Jinny Carslake in Jacob’s Room (chapter 11), or by the Christian missionaries in Forster’s A Passage to India (chapter 4); yet also, in Forster’s novel, the more profound, humble, and generous attempt to encompass the whole performed, in the Hindu temple, by Professor Godbole (chapter 33).

  [119] Shakespeare and the musical glasses!: An expression, originating in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), where it represents “fashionable” conversational topics in high society, not unlike T. S. Eliot’s “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) Coming to signify high culture, the phrase entered the popular lexicon, quoted variously in Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842); Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up as a Flower: an Autobiography (1867); Henry James, The American (1877) and The Ambassadors (1903); Rudyard Kipling, The Story of the Gadsbys (1888); Israel Zangwill, Without Prejudice (1896); William Archer, America To-day, Observations and Reflections (1899); Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson, The Princess Passes: A Romance of a Motor-Car (1905); and G. K. Chesterton, The Return of Don Quixote (1927). “Musical glasses” refers to an instrument, highly popular in the eighteenth century, made from a set of wineglasses containing differing amounts of water. Benjamin Franklin perfected a version that in 1761 he named the “glass armonica,” for which numerous composers, including Mozart, wrote. Due to its soft tones, the instrument did not survive the advent of the large concert hall in the nineteenth century.

  [120] a fund for installing electric light: The production in 1934 of The Rock, a pageant for which T. S. Eliot wrote the choruses, was similarly in aid of fund-raising for the Forty-Five Churches Fund of the London Diocese. See also the note to page 123, “rebuilt (witness man with hod) by human effort.”

  [121] Four and twenty blackbirds: From another nursery song, “Sing a song of sixpence,” where the first stanza ends, “The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes, / When down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose!” Isa’s shift to an eagle and the overtones of punishment recall the altered nursery rhyme in the opening section of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, following “the eagles will come and pull out his eyes” (4).

  [122] One window, looking east: Directional symbolism in religious observance is ancient in origin, evident in pagan, Jewish, and Christian rituals. Facing in the direction of the rising sun traditionally signified resurrection, rebirth, and hope. In Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935; London: Penguin, 1940), however, the story is told of a Hindu saint, supposedly Gandhi, who was chastised for sleeping in the direction with the image of God at his feet, whereupon the saint replied that God is everywhere, and it was discovered that if the saint’s body was turned, the image of the god moved as well (139).

  [122] ten mins. of present time: This portion of the pageant presciently anticipates the American composer John Cage’s stochastic or aleatoric composition 4'33" (1952), in which the performer(s) sit silently on the stage for the duration of the piece, during which time the audience listens to the ambient sounds and the sounds that they make themselves. Cage’s purpose was to have “no purpose”: that is, to focus his audience’s attention on awareness, rather than understanding, and on responsiveness to the random collective whole.