DLS annotation: Nell Cook

[truepenny]

If you've been wondering who Lord Peter was talking about in Busman's Honeymoon: "Dear me! what a shocking sound--like Nell Cook under the paving-stone!" (BH 72), the answer is in the Ingoldsby Legends and can be found here:

'There is a heavy paving-stone fast by the Canon's door,
Of granite grey, and it may weigh some half a ton or more,
And it is laid deep in the shade within that Entry dark,
Where sun or moon-beam never play'd, or e'en one starry spark.
*
'That heavy granite stone was moved that night, 'twas darkly said,
And the mortar round its sides next morn seem'd fresh and newly laid,
But what within the narrow vault beneath that stone doth lie,
Or if that there be vault or no -- I cannot tell -- not I!
*
'But I've been told that moan and groan, and fearful wail and shriek
Came from beneath that paving-stone for nearly half a week --
For three long days and three long nights came forth those sounds of fear;
Then all was o'er -- they never more fell on the listening ear.


My gift to you all on a slow Friday afternoon.

Comments

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

Cool ... and what a great site!

Was also amused to note the inclusion of the poem "The Lost Chord." Victorian sentimentalism at its, er, finest.

http://www.exclassics.com/ballads/lostchrd.htm

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

One of the really brilliant moments in Topsy-Turvy is Sullivan's sincere and rapturous performance of that ghastly thing.

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

Doesn't DLS have Harriet looking at a picture of Peter that either she or Bunter has titled "The Lost Chord"?

I might need to see Topsy Turvy. Although my favorite Gilbert & Sullivan moment is actually Anna Russell's "How to Write Your Own Gilbert & Sullivan Operetta." :)

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

Clarity: Harriet looking at a picture of Peter that PETER'S MOTHER or Bunter...

because "she" is a bit vague there. sorry.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Also in Busman's Honeymoon, as it happens:

Brought out family album. Thankful to say she didn't go all broody and possessive over Peter kicking baby legs on a rug--can't stand maternal young women, though P. really a very comic infant with his hair in a tuft, but he controls it very well now, so why rake up the past? She instantly seized on the ones Peter calls "Little Mischief" and "The Lost Chord" and said, "Somebody who understood him took those--was it Bunter?"--which looked like second sight.
(BH 14-15)

A quote which has always, tangentially, bothered me, because "Little Mischief" sounds to me like it must be a picture of Peter as a child, and we know, also from BH, that Bunter didn't meet Peter until WWI, and didn't become attached to his service until after the Armistice. I've never been able to make that resolve satisfactorily.

[pameladean]

That has always bothered me too. Even more than the fact that Harriet's note to Philip Boyese, introduced as evidence in Strong Poison, is signed "M."

Pamela

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, that's at least explicable by virtue of the fact that Harriet's name was originally Marian Delaney (as I discovered in an endnote in Catherine Kenney's The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers). I can't make sense of the photograph thing at all.

In my edition of Strong Poison, the "M" has been emended to "H".

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Boy, am I late to the party. I've just avoided grading two stacks of compositions by reading all your DLS posts at once, so thank you!

IMverysusceptibleO, "Little Mischief" is a picture of the adult Peter when he's got that expression on his face that he has at the end of "Talboys," when he and Bredon are contemplating mayhem-via-Cuthbert. I can't remember the exact quote, but I know it's got "square face and hatchet face" suddenly resembling each other. (It's the same expression that Aral gets when he smiles at Cordelia, and she goes "oh, do that again.")

[johnwcowan.livejournal.com]

Aral and Cordelia are a lot like Peter and Harriet, modulo the time in which they live.