3 (p. 391) in the pit of the Coliseum.... some remote place such as Camberwell, or Sidcup, or the Welsh Harp: The Coliseum Theatre, on St. Martin’s Lane in London’s West End, opened as a music hall in 1904 (and is presently the home of the English National Opera); Camberwell and Sidcup are in the southeastern boroughs of Camberwell and Bexley, respectively; and the Welsh Harp Reservoir, a popular place of recreation named after an old alehouse, lies to the northwest in the borough of Brent.
Chapter XXXII
1 (p. 400) Hampton Court was decided upon, . . . for though Cassandra had dreamt as a child of the brigands of Hampstead, she had now transferred her affections . . . to William III: Hampstead Heath, a large—and largely uncultivated—park in north London, had long been known for its thieves; King William III (1650-1702) employed renowned English architect Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) to renovate Hampton Court Palace.
2 (p. 401) “William shall die, and Cassandra shall be given rooms as the widow of a distinguished poet”: The allusion is to the old practice of awarding apartments surrounding the smaller courts of Hampton Court Palace to pensioners of the Crown.
Chapter XXIII
1 (p. 417) “From Shakespeare’s tomb!”: In fact, the tomb is not outside, but inside Holy Trinity Church.
2 (p. 419) the meeting between Keats and Coleridge: This encounter, which took place in Highgate on April 11, 1819, is recorded by Keats in a letter to his brother George four days later, and by Coleridge in an August 14 entry of his collected essays Table Talk (1836).
3 (p. 422) a little song about a miller’s daughter: This is perhaps a reference to Austrian composer Franz Schubert’s 1823 song cycle Die schone mullerin (“The Fair Maid of the Mill”).
4 (p. 425) “I always feel that our physical ailments are so apt to turn into mental ailments. I think Matthew Arnold says something of the same kind about Lord Byron”: Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was an English poet and critic. Such a passage has not been found in Arnold’s works, although he did publish an essay on Byron in 1881.
5 (p. 416) “marry her in Westminster Abbey . . . marry her in St. Paul’s Cathedral”: Weddings in these two churches are restricted to the select few. A church has stood on the site of Westminster Abbey since before A.D. 1000; the present Gothic-style church was erected by King Henry III in the thirteenth century. St. Paul’s Cathedral was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and built from 1675 to 1710 (an earlier church on the site was destroyed in the Great Fire of London).
6 (p. 429) so that he could see certain streets, books, and situations wearing a halo: Ralph’s reverie strongly resembles a passage in Woolf’s essay “Modern Fiction” (in A Common Reader): “Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
Chapter XXXIV
1 (p. 441) the golden light of a large steady lamp: This description also recalls the passage in “Modern Fiction” cited in note 6, chapter XXXIII.
VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE HOGARTH PRESS
In 1917 Leonard and Virginia Woolf purchased a small used hand-press and began printing books in the dining room of their home, Hogarth House, in Richmond upon Thames, London. The couple originally began the venture as a hobby, a distraction they hoped would alleviate Virginia’s bouts of depression and the emotional duress she suffered from the pressures of writing. In a humble missive written to an unidentified correspondent on December 10, 1930, as an apology for a printing error, Virginia neatly described the operations of the press: “All I have to urge in excuse is that printing is a hobby carried on in the basement of a London house; that as amateurs all instruction in the art was denied us; that we have picked up what we know for ourselves; and that we practise printing in the intervals of lives that are otherwise engaged.” Hogarth’s first publication was a slim volume entitled Two Stories (1917), featuring “The Mark on the Wall,” by Virginia, and “Three Jews,” by Leonard; the printing was limited to 150 copies.
Despite its modest origin, during its first twenty years the Hogarth Press published books by several of the most important writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. Many of these were notables from the Bloomsbury group, to which both Leonard and Virginia belonged. From its inception Hogarth’s catalog was diverse, with stories by Katherine Mansfield and E. M. Forster; the multi-volume series The International Psycho-Analytical Library, which included English translations of Sigmund Freud’s writings; “Stavrogin’s Confession” (1922), an English translation of the lost chapter of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed; Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies, 1931), by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke; Benito Mussolini’s The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism (1933); H. G. Wells’s The Idea of a World Encyclopaedia (1936); and critical works by Leonard Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and John Maynard Keynes.
Leonard and Virginia published according to their tastes rather than releasing safe profit-makers, and they produced many of their favorite titles by hand. One of these was T. S. Eliot’s volume of poetry The Waste Land (1922), which, along with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s own Jacob’s Room (both published the same year), is considered to have officially heralded the modernist movement in literature. In 1923 Hogarth reissued The Waste Land in a handsome hand-printed volume—an edition, like many in Hogarth’s catalog, that is now a highly coveted collector’s item. Virginia wrote to Barbara Bagenal on July 8, 1923: “I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr Eliot’s poem with my own hands: You see how my hand trembles.”
The Hogarth Press published most of Virginia Woolf’s own writings as well. The 1919 publication of her short story “Kew Gardens,” which included woodcuts by her sister Vanessa Bell, was Hogarth’s first highly successful book. Woolf wrote in a June 10, 1919, diary entry: “We came back from Asheham to find the table stacked, littered, with orders for Kew Gardens. They strewed the sofa and we opened them intermittently through dinner.... The pleasure of success was considerably damaged . . . by the necessity of getting some 90 copies ready, cutting covers, printing labels, glueing backs, and finally despatching, which used up all spare time and some not spare till this moment.” This small volume transformed the Woolfs’ publishing venture into a serious enterprise.
