The Keepers of the People

Chapter x

"Are you Mr. Tennyson?" — "No; Tennyson is dead." — Alfred, Lord Tennyson died on 6 October 1892. The exchange dates the scene and also sets up the joke: Althea's only idea of a poet is the Laureate, and what she has found is an absinthe-drinking decadent of the 1890s.

"the daughter of Nausicaa … the young Diana … Endymion's child and Diana's" — Nausicaa, the princess who finds Odysseus on the shore in Odyssey vi; Diana/Artemis the virgin huntress; Endymion the shepherd whom the moon goddess loved as he slept, a story Keats had made the property of every English aesthete. Morrel is improvising a genealogy out of the only three things he has left.

they dined at the Savoy, went to the Empire, and supped at the Cafe Royal — the Savoy Hotel (opened 1889); the Empire Theatre of Varieties in Leicester Square, whose promenade had been the subject of a celebrated public quarrel in 1894 when Mrs Ormiston Chant's purity campaign forced it to be screened off; and the Café Royal in Regent Street, the headquarters of literary and artistic London. A child of thirteen is being taken round the whole of fast London in one evening.

the "Valkyre" — Wagner's Die Walküre, second of the Ring operas. The spelling is the 1898 printing's and has been left. What Jepson gives Althea to watch is not the opera but Ralph Falcon watching the opera: the Spring music, the sword motif, the ride of the Valkyries and the fire music are listed in order, and each does something to his face.

a narghile — the water-pipe, nargileh.

Chapter xi

all the air of a madman that absinthe can give — absinthe, and the ruin of it, was the standing emblem of the English and French decadence of the nineties; Ernest Dowson is the obvious contemporary parallel for Francis Morrel, and Jepson, who knew that world, is drawing from life.

"Horrible, phlegethonian jade!" — from Phlegethon, the river of fire in the classical underworld (Aeneid vi). The poet is calling Lady Hammersmith a hell-woman, in the most ornamental way available to him.

"Alone in this modern Babylon" — Babylon as the type of the wicked city; the phrase had been fixed in English usage by W. T. Stead's "The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon" (Pall Mall Gazette, 1885), the exposé of child prostitution that produced the National Vigilance Association and raised the age of consent. It is exactly the literature Lady Hammersmith lives on, and exactly why she assumes the worst.