Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · English Edition
The Keepers of the People
A Critical Edition of the 1898 Novel
Swipe or use the arrow keys.
English Edition · Branch 246 of 254
Notes
The Keepers of the People
p. 359NOTES
Keyed by book, chapter and phrase, in the order the phrases occur. Nothing in the reading text points to these notes; a reader who does not want them will never know they are here.
❧
BOOK I
Chapter i
the famous statue of Diana Huntress, brought from Sicily by the third Earl Lisdor — Diana the huntress, Artemis: virgin, armed, and dangerous to men who see her unclothed. Ruth, surprised barefoot in front of it, is described a sentence later as "a very presentment of the statue behind her awakened to life and wrath." The Grand Tour import is the period detail; the identification is the point.
"It's all so jolly 'Arabian Nights'" — the Thousand and One Nights, known in England chiefly through Edward Lane's expurgated version (1838–40) and, since 1885–88, Richard Burton's unexpurgated one. Lord Lisdor means only that the jewels are picturesque. The novel will take the comparison more seriously than he does: see Haroun Al Raschid at II.iii.
Chapter ii
picquet — piquet, a trick-taking card game for two, of long standing among the English gentry and by the 1890s slightly old-fashioned.
"the better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay dodge" — Tennyson, Locksley Hall (1842): "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." Lord Lisdor is asking whether Ralph's wife will insist on coming home. The line was by 1898 the standard English shorthand for the superiority of the progressive West to the changeless East, which makes it exactly the sentiment the rest of the novel exists to contradict.
Chapter iii
"And now I am décavé" — French gaming slang, from cave, the stake a player puts up: to be décavé is to have lost the whole of it and be unable to continue. Melinsky translates it himself, roughly, as "broken."
Benedictine — the Fécamp liqueur, commercially revived in 1863 and fashionable in the 1890s.
"a new country — a new El Dorado … Cortes and Pizarro!" — el dorado, the gilded man: originally a Muisca ritual, then the name of the golden kingdom sought in South America for two centuries, notably by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1595 and 1617. Hernán Cortés took Mexico, Francisco Pizarro Peru. Melinsky is proposing to do to Varandaleel what the conquistadors did to the Americas, and the old Prince of Varandaleel is named Raleigh.
"my good cousin the Tsar" — Nicholas II, on the throne since 1894.
Socrates
Reading The Keepers of the People · Notes · Notes
Ask about a concept, passage, contradiction, or connection.
Socrates will begin with this book and its sources.About This Reading Edition
Edgar Jepson’s The Keepers of the People begins as a late-Victorian lost-kingdom romance and becomes an unsettling political argument. Ralph Falcon moves from an English country house to the hidden state of Varandaleel, where laughter, secrecy, violence, education, and the duties of rulers are tested against one another.
Historical Text
The novel was first published in London in 1898 by C. Arthur Pearson. This reading text follows the owner-supplied critical edition, whose copy-text is the Methuen Colonial Library issue of the same year digitised by the Internet Archive. The supplied editorial note records the edition’s corrections, normalisations, limits, and unresolved textual risks.
About This Edition
This English Edition preserves the complete supplied text and apparatus: the introduction, reading guide, key words, plot outline, editorial note, both books and all thirty chapters, and the end notes. Its reader branches end at paragraph boundaries, with the original chapter structure and chapter page references mapped to the 1898 printing.
Rights
Edgar Jepson’s 1898 novel is in the public domain. The introduction, reader’s guide, key words, outline, editorial note, notes, editorial arrangement, and design of the supplied edition are © 2026 Diotimos Editions.