The Way We Live Now (Trollope, 1875)
From Commonplace Book
General Notes
- 29 "It was a ball on a scale so magnificent that it had been talked about ever since Parliament met, now about a fortnight since." -- interesting technique for keeping the narrative feeling temporally proximate: "now"
- 30 Melmotte the financier introduced
- 52 the verbal patterning of indeterminacy - Montague's father might have had money, Lady c doesn't quite know what attending to her profligate son would entail - track
- 60-1 perhaps in Roger's refusal to have anything to do with the Melmottes a conflict between the class system and the rank system? He disdains the duchesses' condoning of Melmotte and espouses rural bourgeois gentry values. Interesting that capital takes up with rank
- 62 "A social connection with the first crossing-sweeper would be less objectionable" -- Bleak House (1853)
Theme Tracking
Reading/Writing
- 11: "He [Booker] was quite adept at this sort of work, and knee well how to review such a book as Lady Carbury's Criminal Queens, without bestowing much trouble on the reading. He could almost do it without cutting the book, so that it's value of after sale might not be injured."
- 22 Hetta Carbury's face was a "true index" to her character: could you trace the link between indexical/informational forms of literature and understanding character? Has anyone?
Shakespeare References
- 7 Lady Carbury's Criminal queens: "Cleopatra, of course, I have taken from shakespeare"
