wood and drawers of water’ (Joshua 9:27).
CHAPTER XXXI
1. delf … deal: delf: Plain glazed earthenware made in Delft, Holland; deal: cheaply cut wood, generally pine or fir wood.
2. ‘The air … balm’: Misquotation of lines in Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel, in which Lady Margaret laments the wounds of the hero she has sought to heal: ‘So pass’d the day; the evening fell, / ’Twas near the time of curfew bell; / The air was mild, the wind was calm, / The stream was smooth, the dew was balm’ (Bk III, stanza xiv, ll. 1–4).
3. Lot’s wife: A somewhat ridiculous comparison. Lot’s wife, unable to resist her curiosity in looking back at Sodom, on which God in judgement had rained fire and brimstone, was turned into a pillar of salt (Genesis 19:26).
4. earthly angel: Oxymoron, implying erotic but not spiritual perfection.
5. Peri: Allusion to the beautiful spirits of late Persian mythology, popularized in the orientalism of Byron’s The Bride of Abydos and Thomas Moore’s epic poem, Lalla Rookh (1817), one of whose tales is entitled ‘Paradise and the Peri’.
6. knife-grinders and scissor-merchants: These occupations imply that the neighbouring town of ‘S—’ is based on Sheffield.
CHAPTER XXXII
1. ‘sitting … sweet’: Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh, Part III, l. 346.
2. Amazon’s cap: The Amazons were an army of equestrian female warriors in classical mythology: they wore light helmets with blue badges.
3. elysium … Paradise: Pagan as against Christian heaven.
4. mission warfare: As a priest of the church militant, St John is at war with the world, the flesh and the devil. His scarcely repressed violence of temperament focuses his Christian evangelism as an arm of European imperialism.
5. lusus naturae: Freak of nature, anomaly.
6. ‘Marmion’: Charlotte Bront?’s haphazard datings obscure the novel’s chronology. Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem, Marmion, was published in 1808, a date inconsistent with other textual clues. Marmion is concerned with a woman walled up alive, vowing revenge upon her persecutors.
7. burst … silent sea: Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ‘We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent sea’ (ll. 105–6).
8. delicious poison: Complex allusion to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (I. v. 27), and to Alexander Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’: ‘Still on that breast enamour’d let me lie, / Still drink delicious poison from thy eye, / Pant on thy lip, and to thy heart be press’d; / Give all thou canst – and let me dream the rest’ (ll. 121–4).
9. blood-bleached robe: The justified in the Book of the Revelation of St John, having come ‘out of great tribulation’, ‘have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’ (7:14). St John alludes to the saving grace of Christ’s crucifixion.
10. deistic philosophers: Deists, Enlightenment thinkers, emphasized a single God and valued reason and good works: Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and Voltaire (the pseudonym of Fran?ois-Marie Arouet) (1694–1778) were deists.
11. ‘till … immortality’: 1 Corinthians 15:53.
12. Rose of the World: Explicit reference to the allegorical naming of Rosamond, deriving from the Latin, rosa mundi, ‘rose of the world’. The surname ‘Oliver’ implies the olive branch, sacred to Venus, goddess of love.
13. Cui bono: For whose good? (Italian)
CHAPTER XXXIII
1. ‘Day set … lustre shone’: A slightly corrupted text of the opening lines of Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion.
2. morocco: Made of Morocco leather.
3. Medusa: In Greek myth, a gorgon who turned all who looked at her to stone.
4. I carried my point: The law allowed Jane, though still a minor (under twenty-one), to dispose of property in this manner, though she would still have the power of revocation.
CHAPTER XXXIV
1. not be barren on my side: Jane makes gifts to the children.
2. paysannes and B?uerinnen: French peasants and German farmers’ wives.
3. talents: Reference to Christ’s parable of the talents in Matthew 25. The man who fails to multiply his talent (originally, a unit of money) but hides it in the earth, is denounced as ‘the unprofitable servant’ who shall be cast ‘into outer darkness’ (14–30). In making this allusion, St John is by implication threatening Jane with hellfire.
4. confusion worse confounded: PL, Bk II, l. 996.
5. Caffre: Kaffir, South African.
6. drawing away: Dying.
7. When … went: Matthew 8:9.
8. seal affixed to my fetters: Ruefully ironic reference to the biblical love poem, The Song of Songs: ‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death’ (Song of Solomon 8:6).
9. East Indiaman: Ship engaged in East Indian trade.
10.