The Keepers of the People

"Scratch the Russian and you find the Tartar" — a proverb current in English through the nineteenth century and variously fathered on Napoleon and on Joseph de Maistre. Lord Lisdor uses it as an insult and Jepson uses it as a structural principle: the novel's Russians are consistently presented as a Western veneer over an Asiatic interior, which is precisely the charge the novel's Varandals would be open to if anyone thought to make it.

Chapter iv

"write to the S.P.G. and C.M.S. at once" — the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (founded 1701, High Church) and the Church Missionary Society (1799, Evangelical). Naming both at once is characteristic of Lady Hammersmith, who supports causes rather than doctrines.

"the Romish superstition" — Roman Catholicism. Lady Hammersmith's objection to the executions evaporates on the suggestion that the victims may have been Catholics, which is the joke.

"They worship Indra, and my father" — Indra, king of the gods in the Rig Veda: thunderer, wielder of the vajra, slayer of the serpent Vritra, and above all the war-god. By the nineteenth century he was a figure of scripture rather than of living devotion in most of India; see the Introduction, Signs and symbols, for why the choice is probably deliberate.

"How are the Armenians getting on?" — the Hamidian massacres of 1894–96 in the Ottoman Empire, which were a first-rank British political controversy and Gladstone's last great public cause. Lady Lisdor raises the subject to change it; the note to the reader is that Lady Hammersmith's indignation is real and that it is also a conversational commodity.

"the latest advances of the woman movement" — the standard contemporary term, in use well before "feminism" entered English.

Chapter v

the purity of the wearing of knickerbockers by women — the rational dress controversy, sharpened by the cycling boom of 1895–96. The quarrel between Lady Hammersmith and Miss Freshington is a real generational quarrel: the older purity-and-temperance wing of the women's movement against the younger wing that wanted the freedoms men had.

Chapter vii

"the article in the Nineteenth Century on the Revolution in Morality" — The Nineteenth Century, the monthly review founded by James Knowles in 1877, which carried the period's heavyweight symposia on marriage, morals and the woman question. The title is invented; the kind of article is not.