Night and Day

ENDNOTES

Chapter I

1 (p. 6) Mr Fortescue, the eminent novelist: The verbose Mr. Fortescue may be based on American novelist Henry James (1843-1916), whom Woolf had known since childhood.

2 (p. 9) “Would it be the Battle of Trafalgar or the Spanish Armada”: Mrs. Hilbery is referring to two British naval victories. In the Battle of Trafalgar, fought on October 21, 1805, the British defeated the allied French and Spanish fleets and ended the threat of a French invasion of England. The Spanish Armada, sent in 1588 by King Philip II of Spain to invade England and dethrone Queen Elizabeth I, was defeated by British ships off the coast of Calais.

3 (p. 11) “rode with Havelock to the Relief of Lucknow”: The British garrison in Lucknow, a major city in northern India, was besieged during the Indian Mutiny of 1857-1858, in which Indian soldiers revolted against British rule. British general Henry Havelock recaptured Lucknow in March 1858.

4 (p. 13) “We’re a respectable middle-class family, living at Highgate”: Formerly a hilltop village to the north of London, Highgate had become a middle-class suburb by the end of the nineteenth century, though unlike fashionable Chelsea it lacked social prestige.

5 (p. 16) “the very chair that Mary Queen of Scots sat in when she heard of Darnley’s murder”: The Earl of Darnley (Henry Stuart, 1545-1567) was the second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. He became involved in a royal conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of David Rizzio, a favorite of Mary’s and secretary for French affairs in her court, and was mysteriously murdered shortly thereafter, possibly with Mary’s knowledge.

Chapter II

1 (p. 26) “What is happiness?”: Ralph’s question was of much concern at the gatherings of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury group, of whom Woolf was a prominent member. She writes in a journal entry dated May 7, 1919, “Happiness—what, I wonder, constitutes happiness? I daresay the most important element is work” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 269; see “For Further Reading”). Consider the many moments in the novel when the characters ask similar questions.

Chapter III

1 (p. 29) Mr. Galton’s “Hereditary Genius”: Hereditary Genius: An Enquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (1869) was the first major work of English scientist Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), founder of eugenics, the science of improving genetic qualities of a race or breed through selective breeding.

2 (p. 29) sailed with Sir John Franklin to the North Pole: English explorer Sir John Franklin (1786-1847) led several expeditions to the Arctic; his last expedition (1845-1847) proved the existence of the Northwest Passage but resulted in the deaths of himself and his crew.

3 (p. 37) she slipped her paper between the leaves of a great Greek dictionary: This gesture, connoting secrecy, recalls Jane Austen’s account in a letter of how she would hide pages of her novels under a basket when visitors appeared; it also foreshadows Mary Datchet’s action in chapter XXI (see p. 233).

Chapter IV

1 (p. 42) Septimus: Woolf also uses this name in her novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925) for the character of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of World War I.

2 (p. 48) “the passage just before the death of the Duchess?”: Rodney is referring to the tragedy The Duchess of Malfi (c.1613), by Elizabethan dramatist and poet John Webster.

3 (p. 48) “Didn’t you hear them say ‘Insurance Bill’?” “I wonder why men always talk about politics?” Mary speculated. “I suppose, if we had votes, we should too”: The National Insurance Bill, which was passed in 1911, proposed benefits during illness and unemployment, to be financed by charitable contributions. In Great Britain, although women over the age of thirty were given the vote in 1918, women did not have voting rights equal to those of men until 1928.

Chapter V

1 (p. 56) “With how sad steps she climbs the sky, /How silently and with how wan a face”: Rodney is slightly misquoting this line from Sonnet 31 of English poet Sir Philip Sidney’s sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591); the first line should read, “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb‘st the skies!”

Chapter VI

1 (p. 67) she made her way across Lincoln’s Inn Fields . . . until she reached her office in Russell Square: Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the largest of London’s squares, was designed in part by the renowned English architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652); located in the City of London near the Royal Courts of Justice and the four Inns of Court, it is the site of lawyers’ offices. Russell Square, the largest square in the Bloomsbury section of London, is near the British Museum and the University of London.

2 (p. 71) the British Museum . . . Elgin marbles . . . the Ulysses: London’s British Museum houses the Elgin marbles, a collection of ancient Greek sculptures that once adorned the Parthenon, the famed temple to Athena in Athens. The collection, which includes the frieze and parts of the pediment of the Parthenon, was brought to England in the first decade of the nineteenth century by Thomas Bruce, seventh earl of Elgin, and sold to the British government in 1816; one of the sculptures is a head wearing a sailor’s cap, thought to represent Ulysses.

3 (p. 71) another gallery devoted to engraved obelisks and winged Assyrian bulls: The museum contains several examples of obelisks, four-sided, tapering, usually monolithic pillars that terminate in a pyramid. The Assyrian bulls are a pair of huge winged stone bulls with human heads that once guarded the gates to the citadel of the Assyrian king Sargon II (721-705 B.C.), in what is today the village of Khorsabad, Iraq.

4 (p. 74) “Salford’s affiliated”: Clacton means that the Salford society for suffrage reform has joined the larger fictional society for general suffrage. Salford is an industrial city near Manchester in northwestern England.

5 (p. 74) “Partridge’s last speech? ... the best thing they’ve had in the House this Session”: Partridge is a fictitious member of Parliament and a supporter of suffrage in the House of Commons.

6 (p. 79) “that verse from the Psalms . . . about the sowers and the seed”: Rather than Psalms, Sally seems to be thinking of the biblical Parable of the Sower and the Seed (Luke 8:5-8): “A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold.”

7 (p. 81) enchanted people in a bewitched tower, with the spiders’ webs looping across the corners of the room: The passage is possibly an echo of English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1832 poem “The Lady of Shalott”: “There she weaves by night and day / A magic web with colours gay.”

Chapter VII

1 (p. 84) “ ‘It’s the younger generation knocking at the door’ ”: This is an allusion to a line from Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 play The Master Builder. “Presently the younger generation will come knock at my door.”

2 (p. 86) “the name of the lady Hamlet was in love with”: Mrs. Hilbery is referring to Ophelia, in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet.

3 (p. 90) the Hilberys subscribed to a library: Lending libraries were extremely popular in England.

Chapter VIII

1 (p. 94) Mr. Hilbery’s study . . . Shelley . . . Byron . . . Keats’s: Mr. Hilbery is studying the lives of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron, 1788-1824), and John Keats (1795-1821), all English romantic poets.

2 (p. 94) whether Coleridge had wished to marry Dorothy Wordsworth: The close friendship between English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850), and William’s sister Dorothy (1771-1855), a prose writer known for her diaries and recollections, is well documented.

3 (p. 95) “Ibsen and Butler . . . He has sent me a letter full of quotations—nonsense, though clever nonsense”: Cyril is apparently defending his decision not to marry by quoting Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) and English novelist Samuel Butler (1835-1902); both attacked the bourgeois values of nineteenth-century society and presented new models of gender and family.

Chapter IX

1 (p. 102) “I can see them now, sweeping over the lawns at Melbury House”: Mrs. Hilbery recalls an actual event—the artistic garden parties at Little Holland House (in what is today Melbury Road) held by Woolf’s great aunt Mrs. Sara Prinsep, who lived there from 1850 to 1871. Woolf’s mother often attended them, and it was here that Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, met the daughters of English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), Minny (who would become his first wife) and Anny.

2 (p. 104) “off we went for a day’s pleasuring—Richmond, Hampton Court, the Surrey Hills”: Richmond upon Thames is a borough of London known for its domestic architecture and large green. Nearby Hampton Court Palace, about which Woolf wrote a short essay in 1903, is the former home of Henry VIII and other kings and queens of England. Immediately south of London, the district of Surrey is a hilly, rural area frequented by day-trippers from London.

3 (p. 105) “I went to his rooms, when I knew he was engaged at the poor men’s college.... an address in Seton Street, off the Kennington Road”: Seton Street is fictitious, but Kennington Road runs through a poor district of south London. Like Cyril, Woolf also taught at a college for the working class, Morley College in south London, from 1905 to 1907.

Chapter X

1 (p. 110) When he had found this beauty or this cause, no force, she knew, would avail to restrain him from pursuit of it. She suspected the East: Perhaps Woolf is referring obliquely to her husband, Leonard, who spent seven years in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) with the Colonial Service.

2 (p. 114) was in the process of turning him from Tory to Radical: That is, she was making him more liberal; Tories were supporters of the Conservative Party, and Radicals were left-wing followers of the Liberal Party (which was losing support to the newly emerging Labour Party).

3 (p. 114) “It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering—the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself at all”: Katharine is recalling lines from The Idiot (1868-1869), a novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky.

4 (p. 115) “Don’t you think Mr Asquith deserves to be hanged?” . . . with respect to the Women’s Suffrage Bill: Herbert Henry Asquith, the Liberal prime minister from 1908 to 1916, strongly opposed women’s suffrage; in 1918, bending to political pressure, he reluctantly voted in support of the enfranchisement reform bill, which gave the right to vote to women over the age of thirty.

Chapter XI

1 (p. 123) “Sylvano enters, accompanied by the rest of the gentlemen of Gratian’s court”: Gratian was an emperor (A.D. 367-383) of the late Roman Empire, though William’s play sounds more like a Renaissance pastoral romance.

2 (p. 124) fell into a dream state, ... there dwelt the realities of the appearances which figure in our world; ... the beauty seen here in flying glimpses only: Katharine’s dreams, here and elsewhere, recall Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 B.C. ) and his theory of Forms, which holds that the phenomena of this world offer mere hints of their ideal versions, and that reality exists only in the world of Forms, or Ideas.

Chapter XII

1 (p. 130) “I come from Woking, . . . because of the sunsets.... Where are the sunsets now? Alas! There is no sunset now nearer than the South Coast”: Woking is a town in southwestern Surrey, south of London. Mrs. Cosham implies that, although she moved there for its scenic vistas, the suburbs are now so built up that it has become impossible to view the sunset there.

2 (p. 133) Alfred Tennyson . . . “The Princess”: “The Princess” (1847), a long narrative poem by Tennyson, calls for the education of women and features a women’s college from which men are excluded.

3 (p. 133) “We want some one to show us what a good man can be. We have Laura and Beatrice, Antigone and Cordelia”: Mrs. Cosham is referring to Laura, the inspiration for Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374); Beatrice Portinari, muse of Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321); Antigone, titular heroine of the tragedy by Greek dramatist Sophocles (c.496-406 B.C.); and Cordelia, the youngest daughter of King Lear in the tragedy by William Shakespeare (1564-1616).

4 (p. 134) “Pendennis—Warrington—I could never forgive Laura . . . for not marrying George. . . . George Eliot did the very same thing”: In Thackeray’s novel The History of Pendennis (1848-1850), Laura Bell marries the hero, Arthur Pendennis, rather than his friend George Warrington—a questionable choice that Mrs. Cosham compares to English novelist George Eliot’s taste in men. The liaison between Eliot (1819-1880) and English philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes (1817-1878) lasted more than twenty years, though the married Lewes was unable to divorce his wife.

5 (p. 135) “There was a pond with tadpoles.... Millais made studies of it for ‘Ophelia’”: English painter John Everett Millais (1829-1896) is perhaps best known for this work, which hangs in London’s Tate Gallery and was inspired by the drowning of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet.

6 (p. 136) “To be imprison’d . . . pendant world”: In this passage from Measure for Measure (act 3, scene 1), Claudio describes his horror of death to his sister Isabella.

Chapter XVIII

1 (p. 203) “I’m wandering about Lincoln looking for the ruins”: The city of Lincoln in eastern England is the site of the ancient Roman town Lindum Colonia. Mrs. Hilbery is searching for Newport Arch, the north gate of Lindum, which probably dates from the early second century.

2 (p. 207) a lonely spot marked by an obelisk of granite: Woolf may be suggesting the Dunston pillar, which stands about 8 miles to the south-east of Lincoln; built in 1751 by Sir Francis Dashwood (founder of a secret society known as the “Mad Monks of Medmenham”), it served as an “inland lighthouse” to guide travelers over the heath.

3 (p. 213) they were like the children in the fairy tale who were lost in a wood, and with this in her mind she noticed the scattering of dead leaves all round them: In the English fairy tale “Babes in the Wood,” abandoned children perish in the woods and are covered with leaves by Robin Redbreast.

Chapter XX

1 (p. 227) “To know the truth—to accept without bitterness” . . . the statue of Francis, Duke of Bedford: Whig politician Francis Russell, fifth duke of Bedford (1765-1802), was a noted stockbreeder. His statue stands in Russell Square, Mary’s workplace, and shows him with a plough and sheep. The passage Mary quotes is inscribed on the statue’s base.

Chapter XXI

1 (p. 236) one could have a life of one’s own: This passage anticipates Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), in which she argues that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Chapter XXIII

1 (p. 262) Kew: Woolf often walked in the Royal Botanic Gardens, known as Kew Gardens, in the southwest London district of Kew. She used the site as the setting for her short story “Kew Gardens,” which she wrote simultaneously with Night and Day.

Chapter XXIV

1 (p. 266) Anne Hathaway had a way, among other things, of writing Shakespeare’s sonnets: Mrs. Hilbery is taking her place in a long line of critics who argue that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the sonnets attributed to him—possibly his wife, Anne Hathaway (c.1556-1623).

2 (p. 267) “Rosalind . . . old nurse . . . Hamlet . . . the fools ... Hotspur ... Henry the Fifth”: Mrs. Hilbery refers to characters from several of Shakespeare’s plays: Rosalind in As You Like It; Juliet’s nurse in Romeo and Juliet; the title characters of Hamlet and Henry the Fifth; the fools in As You Like It, King Lear, and Twelfth Night, and Hotspur in Henry IV, Part One.

Chapter XXV

1 (p. 287) The world . . . offers no happiness, no rest from struggle, no certainty: This passage recalls lines from English poet Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867): “for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, ... / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”

2 (p. 287) “Here she comes, like a ship in full sail”: Ralph may be alluding to the arrival of Dalila in English poet John Milton’s lyrical drama Samson Agonistes (1671), who “Comes this way sailing, / Like a stately ship . . . / With all her bravery on, and tackle trim, / Sails fill‘d, and streamers waving.” Or he may be alluding to Mirabell’s description of Mrs. Millamant’s appearance in English dramatist William Congreve’s 1700 drama The Way of the World: “Here she comes, i’faith, full sail, with her fan spread and streamers out, and a shoal of fools for tenders” (act 2, scene 5).

3 (p. 287) the rigid tail of the Ducal lion: Katharine, glancing across the River Thames, catches sight of the stone lion on the roof of Syon House, Middlesex, home of the duke of Northumberland; the lion is the ducal emblem.

Chapter XXVI

1 (p. 308) “At twelve my horses turn into rats and off I go”: This is an allusion to the fairy tale “Cinderella,” in which Cinderella’s fairy god-mother transforms a pumpkin and mice into a carriage and horses to transport her to the royal ball, with the stipulation that the spell will be over at midnight.

2 (p. 309) he had drawn up a scheme for the education of labour, for the amalgamation of the middle class and the working class, . . . combined in the Society for the Education of Democracy, upon Capital: The language of this passage suggests the influence of German political philosopher Karl Marx (his 1867 work, Das Kapital, is an analysis of the economics of capitalism), as well as Mary’s and Ralph’s far-left views.

Chapter XXVII

1 (p. 317) After visiting the National Gallery, or Hertford House, or hearing Brahms or Beethoven at the Bechstein Hall: Cassandra would be visiting notable London arts sites. The National Gallery, located in Trafalgar Square, houses one of Great Britain’s permanent national art collections; Hertford House contains the Wallace Collection, the extensive private art collection of Sir Richard Wallace (1818-1890); Bechstein House, now Wigmore Hall, is a concert hall where Woolf might have heard the works of German composers Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827).

2 (p. 318) Sunday . . . is usually dedicated to Nature . . . But Cassandra rejected Hampton Court, Greenwich, Richmond, and Kew in favour of the Zoological Gardens: Hampton Court Palace, Greenwich, Richmond upon Thames, and Kew are areas in and around London known for their royal parks and gardens. The London Zoo opened in Regent’s Park in 1828.

Chapter XXVIII

1 (p. 339) “I’m out of my mind. . . . it’s insanity, and yet it’s perfectly reasonable”: Ralph’s seemingly contradictory statements are staples of love poetry, English and otherwise.

2 (p. 342) an odd image came to his mind of a lighthouse.... senseless against the glass: This passage is a striking anticipation of Woolf’s later novel To the Lighthouse (1927).

3 (p. 347) “what fools we both are!”: Rodney’s outburst recalls Puck’s statement in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he is gazing upon the confused arrangements of lovers: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” (act 3, scene 2).

Chapter XXIX

1 (p. 355) “The love of husband and wife is the most holy we know. That is the lesson Mamma’s children learnt from her”: Mrs. Hilbery is referring to Katharine’s paternal grandmother.

Chapter XXXI

1 (p. 372) Shakespeare’s command to leave his bones undisturbed applied only to odious curiosity-mongers: Mrs. Hilbery recalls the inscription on Shakespeare’s tomb—“Good frend for Jesus sake forbeare / To digg the dust encloased heare; / Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones / And curst be he yt moves my bones”—but decides that it will not impede her literary sleuthing.

2 (p. 386) “Mount Ararat Road, Highgate”: There is no such road in Highgate, but there is a Mount Ararat Road in Richmond near Paradise Road, where the Woolfs lived.

3 (p. 391) in the pit of the Coliseum.... some remote place such as Camberwell, or Sidcup, or the Welsh Harp: The Coliseum Theatre, on St. Martin’s Lane in London’s West End, opened as a music hall in 1904 (and is presently the home of the English National Opera); Camberwell and Sidcup are in the southeastern boroughs of Camberwell and Bexley, respectively; and the Welsh Harp Reservoir, a popular place of recreation named after an old alehouse, lies to the northwest in the borough of Brent.

Chapter XXXII

1 (p. 400) Hampton Court was decided upon, . . . for though Cassandra had dreamt as a child of the brigands of Hampstead, she had now transferred her affections . . . to William III: Hampstead Heath, a large—and largely uncultivated—park in north London, had long been known for its thieves; King William III (1650-1702) employed renowned English architect Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) to renovate Hampton Court Palace.

2 (p. 401) “William shall die, and Cassandra shall be given rooms as the widow of a distinguished poet”: The allusion is to the old practice of awarding apartments surrounding the smaller courts of Hampton Court Palace to pensioners of the Crown.

Chapter XXIII

1 (p. 417) “From Shakespeare’s tomb!”: In fact, the tomb is not outside, but inside Holy Trinity Church.

2 (p. 419) the meeting between Keats and Coleridge: This encounter, which took place in Highgate on April 11, 1819, is recorded by Keats in a letter to his brother George four days later, and by Coleridge in an August 14 entry of his collected essays Table Talk (1836).

3 (p. 422) a little song about a miller’s daughter: This is perhaps a reference to Austrian composer Franz Schubert’s 1823 song cycle Die schöne müllerin (“The Fair Maid of the Mill”).

4 (p. 425) “I always feel that our physical ailments are so apt to turn into mental ailments. I think Matthew Arnold says something of the same kind about Lord Byron”: Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was an English poet and critic. Such a passage has not been found in Arnold’s works, although he did publish an essay on Byron in 1881.

5 (p. 416) “marry her in Westminster Abbey . . . marry her in St. Paul’s Cathedral”: Weddings in these two churches are restricted to the select few. A church has stood on the site of Westminster Abbey since before A.D. 1000; the present Gothic-style church was erected by King Henry III in the thirteenth century. St. Paul’s Cathedral was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and built from 1675 to 1710 (an earlier church on the site was destroyed in the Great Fire of London).

6 (p. 429) so that he could see certain streets, books, and situations wearing a halo: Ralph’s reverie strongly resembles a passage in Woolf’s essay “Modern Fiction” (in A Common Reader): “Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

Chapter XXXIV

1 (p. 441) the golden light of a large steady lamp: This description also recalls the passage in “Modern Fiction” cited in note 6, chapter XXXIII.