Orlando (40 page)

9.
the Cocoa Tree… Papists
: the Cocoa Tree was strictly a chocolate (rather than a coffee) house, at 64 St James’s Street; around 1745 it became a centre for Jacobites (who would largely have been Pap ists, i.e. Catholic sympathizers). At this time political activists and men of letters met at (particular) coffee houses. John Dryden (1631–1700) was the leading Restoration poet and later in life a Catholic convert (i.e. a Papist). Joseph Addison (1672–1719) was an essayist and an Anglican. He was lampooned by Alexander Pope (1688–1744), also a Catholic. There were portraits of Dryden and Pope in the Poets’ Parlour at Knole, and one of Addison in the Leicester Gallery (
Phillips,
II, pp. 439, 433). Dryden was a fre quent visitor and a close friend and beneficiary of Charles Sackville, the sixth Earl, to whom he dedicated his
Essay of Dramatic Poesy;
Pope wrote an epitaph for the Earl’s monument at Withy-ham (
Knole,
pp. 144–5, 151).

10.
home in Blackfriars… suits
: the Sackvilles owned Dorset House at Blackfriars (now demolished), and Vita’s mother had lived there at one time (Nicolson). Bow Street Runners were policemen, named after the Bow Street law courts, near Covent Garden. The case against Orlando parallels the ‘Pepita’ case, brought against Lionel Sackville-West by his illegitimate cousin Henry in 1910 (see above, Chapter III, Note 12).

11.
in Chancery
: under the jurisdiction of the Lord Chancellor for the duration of the case. Chancery lawsuits were those that could not be resolved in the regular courts; the Chancellor’s court was notori ously slow.

12.
Mrs. Grimsditch, Mr. Dupper… Canute
: see Chapter II, Notes 3, 35.

13.
the arras… pot-pourri
: see Chapter I, Notes 4, 30; Chapter II, Notes 34, 35, 36. One particular silver hair brush in the King’s Bedroom was supposed to have belonged to King James (though later editions of
Knole
dismiss this); Knole had a special recipe for pot-pourri, derived from Lady Betty Germain, a friend of the first Duchess of Dorset, whose portrait hung in the bedroom named after her (
Knole,
p. 172).

14.
the Prayer Book.… Royal blood
: the prayer book of the executed
Mary Queen of Scots is in the Chapel at Knole (Nicolson; and see above, Chapter I, Note 14).

15.
that doctor…Browne
: see above, Chapter II, Note 5.

16.
High battlements of thought
: in her letter thanking Virginia for
Orlando,
Vita wrote, ‘There are a dozen details I should like to go into… phrases scattered about (particularly one on p. 160 [p. 124] begin ning “High battlements of thought, etc.” which is just what you did for me)…’ (11 October 1928,
Letters of Vita,
p. 305.)

17.
Hair,pastry… dissemblables
: dissemblables, the antithesis of’semblables’, are things unlike one another. For an earlier ‘humane jumble’, see Chapter II, p. 55.

18.
that obscene vulture
: is lust (see p. 82), though whether felt by Orlando for the Archduchess or by the Archduchess herself remains obscure.

19.
twenty million… gape
: Lord Lascelles inherited Harewood House and large estates (and income from them) in Yorkshire (Nicolson; and
Vita,
pp. 49, 50). The Archduke seems particularly concerned with the opportunities for hunting on his estates; the gape is a disease of poultry; ‘the does slipped their young’, means they mis carried or gave premature birth to them.

20.
the Archduke… up again
: on his lack of conversation see above, Chapter II, Note 39.

21.
Fly Loo
: loo is a card game in which penalties are paid into a pool. Fly Loo, played at Knole, seems to involve betting on which sugar lump the flies will settle. Apparently Vita did once win by gluing a dead fly to a lump of sugar (Nicolson).

22.
dipping sheep… scab
: the summer section of Vita’s poem
The Land
(Orlando’s ‘The Oak Tree’) describes the process of sheep washing or dipping. The scab is a skin disease.

23.
so dark… so soft
: cf. Ben Jonson’s ‘Celebration of Charis, IV, Her triumph’: ‘O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!’

24.
a drop falling or a fountain rising
: important images for Woolf: a fountain of joy rises, at different times, for Mrs Ramsay, Lily Briscoe and Cam in
To the Lighthouse
(1927), while the gathering and falling drop haunts Bernard in
The Waves
(1931).

25.
off she drove
: in the MS this passage is followed by a description of Orlando’s house at Blackfriars (see above, Note 10), which is rather underfurnished, though the library is well-stocked, and includes Ariosto, as well as
The Faerie Queene,
Montaigne and many Eliza bethan plays.

26.
if the reader… her face
: the picture on p. 111 of Vita holding a scarf over her shoulders was probably taken by Lenare in the summer of 1927 (see letter to Vita, 30 Oct. 1927,
Letters,
III, p. 434). There are two ‘photographs’ of Orlando dressed as a man: ‘as a Boy’ (the frontispiece) and ‘as Ambassador’ (p. 87), but as his hands are invisible in the second portrait, this passage probably refers to the frontispiece. The much quoted notion that ‘it is clothes that wear us and not we them’ exposes the artifice of gender roles.

27.
if Orlando was a woman
: Nicolson points out that the details of Orlando’s behaviour in this paragraph are all applicable to Vita, who dressed fast, drove fast and maintained that, since the south was downhill, the Nile must flow uphill.

28.
the heroine of the celebrated lawsuit
: according to Nicolson, this is connected not to the ‘Pepita’ case of 1910 (see above, Chapter III, Note 12) but to another much publicized lawsuit of 1913 brought against Vita’s mother concerning a legacy left her by John Murray Scott, in which Vita was called to give evidence (
Vita,
pp. 57–8).

29.
billets
: short informal letters, or notes.

30.
routs
: large evening parties, receptions.

31.
the reign of Queen Anne
: 1702–14.

32.
her spaniel Pippin
: the actual name of Vita’s spaniel (Nicolson).

33.
great writer… invisible
: this idea also occurs in Henry James’s short story ‘The Private Life’ (1892), which Woolf read in 1921, and took some notes on in preparation for writing a review of James’s ghost stories, though she did not in the end mention it (
CE,
I, pp. 28696).

34.
Madame du Deffand
: (1697–1780), a French aristocrat and wit, she corresponded with Voltaire and Horace Walpole, and was hostess to a salon of well-known writers and philosophers. Her celebrated witticism, the ‘mot de Saint Denis’ (see the next paragraph), con cerns the legend that St Denis had walked two leagues carrying his head in his hands:
‘la distance n’y fait rien; il n’j a que le premier pas qui coûte.’
(The distance is nothing; it is only the first step which is difficult.)

35.
our modern Sibyl
: a sly reference to the London hostess Lady Sibyl Colefax who lionized Woolf and whom she associates in her diary with the ‘party consciousness’ (27 April 1925,
Diary,
III, p. 13).

36.
Link-boys
: carried torches (links). South Audley Street is in Mayfair,
behind Park Lane, and on its corner stands Chesterfield House, built for Lord Chesterfield (see Note 44, below) in 1750. In 1927 it was occupied by Lord Lascelles and Princess Mary.

37.
Piccadilly Circus… her own sex
: Woolf regularly associated Piccadilly with prostitutes and therefore with the evils of patriarchy, though later in this chapter there is a lighter portrayal of their way of life.

38.
the Rape of the Lock
…
at a ball
: these lines are from Pope’s
The Rape of the ‘Lock
(1714), canto II, 105–9.

39.
congee
: bow made when leaving.

40.
Addison… Spectator
: Addison wrote essays both for the
Spectator
and the
Tatler.
This passage is in fact from the
Tatler
(116, Thurs day 5 Jan., 1710) and is the final paragraph of a case brought against the hooped petticoat. A tippet is a cape or scarf, a muff is a cylindrical covering for keeping the hands warm, and both were often made of fur or feathers. This passage, like the quotation from Pope, continues the emphasis on the limitations imposed on women, which is one of the central themes of this chapter.

41.
Swift… Gulliver’s Travels
: (1726); the quotation is from the fourth book, ‘A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms’ (a society of rational horses), Chapter X. Swift’s
Journal to Stella,
partly written in a private code, is referred to in the phrase, ‘talks baby language to a girl’. Swift was a friend of Lady Betty Germain (see above, Note 13) and his portrait hung in her room (
Phillips,
II, p. 426).

42.
the Round Parlour
: at Knole, the Poets’ Parlour (also known as the Round Parlour or the Dining Room) is hung with portraits of the sixth Earl’s (Charles Sackville’s) literary friends, including Dryden and Pope (
Knole,
pp. 148–9; and see above, Note 9).

43.
plates at dinner.
‘It is also related that Dryden, when dining with Dorset, found a hundred-pound note hidden under his plate’ (
Knole,
p. 149).

44.
Lord Chesterfield
: (1694–1773) Chesterfield was a friend of Pope, but disliked by Dr Johnson. This slightly misquoted piece of misogyny (he actually wrote, ‘Women, then, are only children…’) is from his posthumous
Letters to his Son
(5 September 1748; published 1774). A pastel portrait of Lord Chesterfield hung in the sitting-room at Knole (
Phillips,
II, p. 437). In the MS this passage is both more oblique and more openly critical of Chesterfield, who is classed with Mr Arnold Bennett, Mr Desmond McCarthy and Mr Orlo Williams as among ‘the most illustrious of the tribe of
masculinists’ (on these, see
A Woman’s Essays,
Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 30–38). She adds that Chesterfield ‘forgot that children some times see things which their elders try to keep hidden. He forgot too that children grow up.’

45.
Mr. Pope… of Women
: Pope’s second Epistle, ‘To a Lady: of the Characters of Women’ (1735), includes several satirical portraits of contemporaries, though Woolf probably had in mind the opening lines:

Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
Most women have no Characters at all.

Pope’s treatment of Orlando is reminiscent of Nick Greene’s in Chapter II.

46.
the plain Dunstable of the matter
: a phrase meaning ‘in plain language’, deriving from the very straight road from London to Dunstable. Woolf would have found it spoken by a maidservant in Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa
(1748).

47.
women… each other’s society
: the sense of women speaking to one another behind closed doors is also strong in Woolf’s next book,
A Room of One’s Own
(1928; Penguin Books, 1945, especially Chapter V). Vita’s cousin Edward Sackville-West complained to Virginia that ‘Mr S.W.’, quoted in this passage, referred to him, especially as a reference to Orlando’s cousin appears on the following page, where her poems are mistakenly attributed to him (Edward Sackville-West also wrote poetry). Woolf wrote back to him mendaciously, accord ing to Nicolson, ‘Mr. S.W. was (if anybody) Sydney Waterlow. How could it have been you?’ (21 November 1928,
Letters,
III, p. 559).

48.
and clip the nut trees
: Harold Nicolson had planted nut trees at Long Barn. Orlando’s night wanderings dressed as a man parallel Vita’s (
Vita,
pp. 83, 95, 99).

49.
a duel… followed them
: in 1920 Vita had run away with Violet Trefusis to Amiens, pursued by both their husbands (Nicolson; and
Vita,
p. 108).

50.
shadows’ names
: Samuel Johnson (1709–84), poet, lexicographer and man of letters, was the major literary figure of the second half of the eighteenth century; James Boswell (1740–95) was his friend and biographer; the blind Mrs Williams was a member of Johnson’s household. Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Samuel Johnson (1769) hung in the Reynolds Room (
Phillips,
II, p. 419).

51.
light, order and serenity
: Woolf characterizes the age of Enlightenment, contrasting it on the one hand with the violence of Elizabethan England and on the other with the approaching clouds of the nineteenth century.

1.
the constitution of England was altered
: both in the narrow sense — that is, the principles according to which a state is governed were changed – and, more loosely, in the sense that the character or nature of England changed.

2.
the brothers Adam
: eighteenth-century architects and interior design ers whose style was characterized by neo-classical elegance.

3.
muffin… and the crumpet
: two different kinds of cake, usually eaten at tea-time, toasted and with butter.

4.
obfuse green
: to obfuscate is to darken or obscure. In the MS this sentence is followed by a description of the Squire’s chill and his desire to cover everything in sight: ‘to muffle, to conceal, now became the chief pursuit of the educated classes’.

5.
British Empire… existence
: i.e. in order to accommodate the superflu ous population.

6.
scrolloping
: see Chapter II, Note 32; the threatening vegetation recalls that of Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’.