9 Wesley: John Wesley (1703–91) founded the Society of Methodists in 1738, and spent much of the rest of his life establishing and encouraging local societies. He frequently visited Whitby, first in 1761, and opened the town's new Methodist chapel in 1788. He made his last visit here in 1790.
10 the glorious Revolution: that of 1688, in which William of Orange replaced James II as King of England.
11 ‘It is the Lord's doing’: Psalm 118:23: ‘This is the Lord's doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.’
12 Kirk Moorside: this is clearly Kirby Moorside, a North Riding village about twenty miles west of Whitby. In the manuscript and earlier editions it is given its correct name whenever it appears. In the fourth edition, however, Gaskell changed the name (to ‘Kirk Moorside' in Chapters VI, VII and XXIX, and to ‘Scarby Moorside' in Chapter XXXI) after James Dixon had pointed out that Kirby Moorside was a real place (letter of 14 November 1863). Elsewhere, she had no scruple about using actual place-names, e.g. Middleham and Robin Hood's Bay, even though these were in the Whitby neighbourhood.
13 main: very, exceedingly.
CHAPTER VII: Tête-à–Tête—The Will
1 Mason on Self-Knowledge and Law's Serious Call: two of the most popular and influential spiritual works of the period. John Mason's Self-Knowledge; Shewing the Nature and Benefit of that Important Science and the Way to Obtain It was published in 1745, and William Law's Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life was published in 1728; both went into several editions. Gaskell is here questioning the highly self-analytical and introspective tendencies of her own age.
2 William Coulson: the manuscript here has ‘John Coulson’, another instance of Gaskell's confusion over names.
3 ‘dread the grave’: from ‘An Evening Hymn' (1695) by Bishop Thomas Ken (1637–1711) (Sanders):
Teach me to live, that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed.
4 boil her paste: ‘paste' is pastry, but this seems to be a reference to some kind of boiled or steamed pudding.
5 First Day: Alice refuses to say ‘Sunday' because, like many strict Quakers, she regards the appellation as pagan.
6 gnashing o' teeth: Luke 13:28; Jesus' prophecy of the exclusion from heaven of his malicious questioners: ‘There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out.’
CHAPTER VIII: Attraction and Repulsion
1 mangold-wurzel: variant of ‘mangel-wurzel’, variety of beet cultivated for cattle feed.
2 led: from ‘to lead‘, i.e. to convey goods by cart or other vehicle.
3 something to crack on: something to boast of, talk about.
4 an old Cumberland receipt: Cumberland sausages are spiced sausages, usually made in long coils.
5 ‘for I loves the tossin'say!’: like Sanders, I have been unable to find a source for this.
6 the lover of Jess MacFarlane: an inaccurate quotation of verse 3 of this song, published in vol. 2 of Robert Archibald Smith's The Scottish Minstrel (6 vols., 1821–4). The correct version is (Sanders):
I took it in my head
To write my love a letter
But alas! She canna read
And I like her a' the better.
7 dip-candle: candle made by dipping the wick in melted tallow.
8 Nelson and the North: after his appointment to the Albemarle in August 1781, Nelson cruised in the north seas around the Danish coast before being sent to Newfoundland and Quebec. Gaskell's reference is too vague to suggest a specific campaign.
9 give a pair o'gloves: there are many customs linking courtship and marriage to the giving of gloves. This scene recalls an incident in Chapter V of Mary Barton, in which Jem Wilson comes upon the sleeping Margaret Jennings: ‘An old fashioned saying about a pair of gloves came into Jem's mind, and stepping gently up, he kissed Margaret with a friendly kiss.’
10 mim: prim, demure.
CHAPTER IX: The Specksioneer
1 cranching: from ‘cranch‘, to crush underfoot, break up with a cracking sound.
2 bed-gown: jacket worn by working-women in the north of England.
3 linsey-woolsey: kind of cloth, originally mixture of wool and flax (linen); material of coarse inferior wool.
4 duty on salt: see n. 12 to Chapter V
5 ‘There's three things to be afeared on’: for the close correlation between the following whaling stories and details in Scoresby, see Appendix 1.
6 reeved: secured by passing a rope through a hole cut in a whale's fin. Scoresby describes both this process and that of ‘sweeping' the fish.
7 moulds: earth.
8 ‘M or N?’: first question in the Prayer Book Catechism. It should read ‘N or M’, i.e. Nomen or Nomina (name or names), the ‘M' representing a double N.
9 dwined: pined away, shrunk or shrivelled.
CHAPTER X: A Refractory Pupil
1 farred: removed far off.
2 barm: leavening agent derived from froth on top of fermenting beer.
3 fain: fond, well-disposed towards.
4 keep a calm sough: keep quiet, say little or nothing (from ‘sough’, rushing or murmuring sound).
5 t' Side: at this time the principal street of Newcastle, containing houses of the city's chief merchants. For the sources of Gaskell's local knowledge here, see P. J. Yarrow, ‘Mrs Gaskell and Newcastle Upon Tyne‘, Gaskell Society Journal, vol. 5, 1991, pp. 62–73.
CHAPTER XI: Visions of the Future
1 love-feast: term for Methodist practice of shared meal, organized for fellowship and testimony and containing sermon and prayer.
2 marlock: play, frolic, romp. The word recurs in Chapter XXVII (‘making marlocks… at‘) where it means ‘making eyes at’. Wright cites Gaskell's usage here as a Yorkshire idiom.
3 weaver: horse that ‘weaves' or rolls body and neck from side to side.
4 lile: little.
5 kittle: ticklish, difficult to deal with (cf. ‘tickle‘, Chapter XLIV).
CHAPTER XII: New Year's Fête
1 watch-night: Methodist service held on New Year's Eve (originally monthly midnight service).
2 Mavor's Spelling-book: William Mavor (1758–1837) published his English Spelling Book in 1801, hence the reference is anachronistic.
3 Yates and Peels… palempours: process of textile printing, imitating chintzes and calicoes originally imported from India and enabling production of green patterns such as the ‘parsley-leaf’. Howarth, Yates and Peel was a prominent Lancashire calico printing firm. Palempours, or palampores, are patterned Indian Chintz bedcovers. (Sanders.)
4 fash thysel': disturb yourself, be bothered.
5 vanitas vanitatum: Ecclesiastes 1:2: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; al is vanity.’ Latin form here probably from Vulgate.
6 stawed: full, glutted (‘stalled‘).
7 jorum: bowl (large) of punch.
CHAPTER XIII: Perplexities
1 apples o' Sodom: Coulson may be making loose reference to Deuteronomy 32: 32: ‘For their vine is of the vine of Sodom, and of the fields of Gomorrah: their grapes are grapes of gall, their clusters are bitter‘, i.e. outward appearance belies inner rottenness. Milton's Paradise Lost, Book X, lines 560–65, also describes the ‘fruitage fair to sight' but bitter to taste which grows near Sodom. See also Chapter XXIX (p. 305), where the same phrase is used to indicate the gap between illusion and reality.
2 flags: flagstones.
3 throng: busy, full of people.
CHAPTER XIV: Partnership
1 Yorkshire pie: there is a strong tradition in North Yorkshire of making raised meat pies, and this may be what is being referred to here.
2 The oppressive act against seditious meetings: the Seditious Meetings Act was passed in 1795, restricting meetings and political lectures. Together with the Unlawful Societies Act of 1799 it was drawn up to suppress corresponding societies. See n. 4 below.
br /> 3 the young Corsican warrior: Napoleon, in 1796 now back in favour in France.
4 Corresponding Society: the London Corresponding Society was founded in January 1792 in order to promote manhood suffrage and annual parliaments. Because it looked to France for inspiration, it was seen as dangerous. It was suppressed in July 1799.
CHAPTER XV: A Difficult Question
1 druv e'en King Solomon silly: Sanders suggests a reference to Ecclesiastes 7:256: describing his investigations into wisdom and folly, the preacher (i.e. Solomon) concludes, ‘I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as bands: whoso pleaseth God shall escape from her; but the sinner shall be taken by her.’
2 afterings: last milk from cow, extracted by ‘stripping’.
3 bearing away the bell: carrying off first prize (perhaps a golden or silver bell awarded as prize in races, etc.).
4 teem: pour out (strained) milk into bucket.
5 fremd: unknown, not intimate.
6 buff: colour of buff-leather, i.e. yellowish hue.
7 parish 'prentice: pauper or orphan apprentice, supported by parish.
8 gaum-like: able to understand (cf. ‘gaumless' = witless).
9 bingy: curdled, sour.
CHAPTER XVI: The Engagement
1 leading manure: see n. 2 to Chapter VIII.
2 stubs: worn horseshoe nails, used as material for making stub-iron, an especially strong iron.
3 bandanas: coloured silk handkerchiefs, of Hindu origin, whose varied coloration was achieved by tying knots in them during dyeing to prevent the dye from spreading uniformly.
4 ‘damn the faults we have no mind to’: perhaps a misquote of lines 213–14 of Hudibras, Part I (1662), by Samuel Butler, a satirical account of the ‘odd perverse Antipathies' and peevish, contrary ways of a Presbyterian sect of whom Hudibras is a representative (Sanders):
Compound for sins, they are inclin'd to
By damning those they have no mind to.
5 stockings: long socks worn by men at this time.
6 Davis' Straits: stretch of water between Greenland and Baffin Island, discovered by John Davis in 1585 and popular fishing-ground for whalers.
7 dree: long (cf. n. 1, Chapter V).
CHAPTER XVII: Rejected Warnings
1 smacks: single-masted sailing vessels, chiefly employed as coasters or for fishing. At the time of the novel, it was quicker to go to London from the north-east by sea than by land.
2 ‘Is thy servant a dog?’: in 2 Kings 8, the sick king of Syria, Benhadad, sends Hazael to the prophet Elisha to inquire if he will recover. Elisha foretells the king's death, hinting at Hazael's complicity in this, and the latter replies indignantly, ‘Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?’ (v. 13). In the first edition, Gaskell mistakenly attributes the remark to Gehazi, Elisha's servant.
3 pleugh: dialectal variant of ‘plough’.
CHAPTER XVIII: Eddy in Love's Current
1 ‘Norroway over the foam’: from the fourth stanza of the Scottish ballad of ‘Sir Patrick Spens' (Sanders):
‘To Noroway, to Noroway,
To Noroway o'er the faem.’
2 Urania: manuscript has ‘Arrow' here – yet another instance of Gaskell's indecision about names.
3 peeping Tom: prying, inquisitive fellow. From eleventh-century legend of Lady Godiva, who, when she rode naked through the streets of Coventry, was politely ignored by all townsfolk except a tailor named Tom. Its current reference to a form of sexual perversion is of more recent date.
4 Billy Taylor'syoung woman: probably a reference to the ballad of ‘Bold William Taylor‘, which tells how a young woman disguises herself as a man in order to join her lover, William, who has enlisted as a soldier; on discovering that he has betrayed her by marrying someone else, she shoots him and his wife. In the Lincolnshire version of this ballad, she is rewarded for her spiritedness by being made a ship's commander. The themes of betrayal and revenge in love (though the gender configurations are not quite identical) expressed here clearly ironically underline the central concerns of Gaskell's text.
CHAPTER XIX: An Important Mission
1 wafered: process of sealing letter or document by appending wafer made of flour and gum.
2 one-and-twopence postage: before the advent of the penny post in 1840, postage on letters was usually paid by the recipient.
3 Mordecai sitting in Haman's gate: Esther 5 describes how, when Esther invites King Ahasuerus and Haman to a great feast, at which the king honours Haman, the exiled Jew, Mordecai, refuses to acknowledge the latter's advancement; ‘when Haman saw Mordecai in the king's gate, that he stood not up, nor moved for him, he was full of indignation against Mordecai' (v. 9).
CHAPTER XX: Loved and Lost
1 LOVED AND LOST: another quotation from Tennyson's In Memoriam – ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all' (XXVII).
2 sweet-briar: Rosa eglantaria or eglantine, species of wild rose valued for its richly aromatic foliage, pretty flowers and red hips.
3 hen-and-chicken daisies: kind of compound daisy.
CHAPTER XXI: A Rejected Suitor
1 melling: meddling with, disturbing oneself about.
2 gi'en him the bucket: rejected him; origin obscure.
3 neither marrying nor giving in marriage: Jesus' reply to the Sadducees' trick question about marriage in the afterlife: ‘Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven' (Matthew 22:29–30)
CHAPTER XXII: Deepening Shadows
1 the Sorrows of Werther: Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) was first translated into English in 1779; there were many editions and further translations over the next thirty years.
2 Law's Serious Call: see n. 1, Chapter VII.
3 Klopstock's Messiah: long poem in three parts, published between 1749 and 1773, by Gottlieb Friedrich Klopstock (1724–1803), the earlier part translated into English in 1763–6.
4 the Complete Farrier: Sanders suggests that this may be The Experienced Farrier, first published in 1678.
5 Jacob's twice seven years' service for Rachel: in Genesis 29:16–28. Jacob agrees to serve Laban, Rachel's father, for seven years in order to win Rachel as his wife, but after this period Laban offers him Rachel's sister, Leah, instead; Jacob has to serve another seven years before being granted Rachel.
CHAPTER XXIII: Retaliation
1 the famous maxim of Rochefoucault: no. 99 of the cynical and witty Reflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (1665) of Francois, duc de La Rochefoucault (1613-80), a member of the literary society at the court of Louis XIV, states: ‘In the adversity of our best friends we always find something which does not displease us.’ (Sanders.)
2 pea-jacket: short, stout overcoat of coarse woollen cloth, commonly worn by sailors.
CHAPTER XXIV: Brief Rejoicing
1 treacle-posset: hot drink of milk or cider and treacle.
2 hoasts: coughs.
3 parish-pound: enclosure, maintained by parish, for detention of stray or trespassing cattle.
4 coneys: rabbits.
5 clem: starve.
6 read th' act: the Riot Act of 1714 stated that where twelve or more persons were unlawfully, riotously, or tumultuously gathered together to the disturbance of public peace, ‘Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and com-mandeth all persons being assembled immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations or to their lawful business.’ The Act was often seen, especially by the working classes, as an infringement of the right to protest against injustice.
7 making a coil: making a fuss or disturbance.
CHAPTER XXV: Coming Troubles
1 dang: variant of ‘ding‘, to bang, strike, thrash.
2 gyves: leg-irons, shackles.
3 Bridewell: royal palace built by Henry VIII in 1525 between Fleet Street
and the Thames, made over in 1553 by Edward VI to the City of London as penitentiary for vagabonds and loose women. Other such institutions were frequently known as Bridewells.
4 wild justice: from the opening line of Francis Bacon's essay ‘On Revenge' (1597): ‘Revenge is a kind of wild justice.’
5 the 4th section… chapter 5: the Riot Act. See n. 6 to Chapter XXIV.
6 tax-cart: two-wheeled open cart drawn by one horse, used mainly for agricultural and trade purposes, and charged reduced duty.
CHAPTER XXVI: A Dreary Vigil
1 maskit: drawn, brewed (‘mashed‘).
2 Botany Bay: bay on eastern coast of New South Wales where a penal settlement was established in 1787–8 to accommodate transported felons.
CHAPTER XXVII: Gloomy Days
1 Some of this… the real question: in all earlier editions, this passage reads:
Some of this very natural indignation might possibly be expressed and interwoven into the counsel's speech for the defence. It was their only chance, since Simpson's evidence was conclusive as to the part Robson had taken; and indeed there was no use attempting to prove an alibi. But again, the worst was, that, in a recent trial at Bristol,—in late events at Hull,—the court and magistrates had almost behaved as though they were advocates against the prisoner; and the judge might so behave as to quench any counsel who might attempt to stir up the sympathies of the jury in any matter in which Government had a direct interest.
Gaskell made the change after an anonymous correspondent (perhaps Judge Sir John Taylor Coleridge) had told her that at this period the counsel for the defence was not allowed to speak for the prisoner, only to watch and examine witnesses. See Chapple and Pollard (eds.), Letters, p.521.
2 some forty miles: corrected from the ‘twenty miles' of earlier editions, which considerably underestimates the distance from Whitby to York.
3 ‘who knoweth… are dust’: a misquotation of Psalm 103:14: ‘For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.’
4 redd theirselves up: look brighter, set themselves to rights.
5 ‘Be the day weary’: this would seem to be a versed adaptation of the proverb, ‘Be the day never so long, at length cometh evensong.’ (Sanders.)