{"id":193,"date":"2007-07-21T19:23:10","date_gmt":"2007-07-22T00:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/?p=193"},"modified":"2007-07-21T19:26:07","modified_gmt":"2007-07-22T00:26:07","slug":"more-wilkie-collins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/?p=193","title":{"rendered":"More Wilkie Collins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some quotations from The Guilty River<\/em> (1886):<\/p>\n

1. The hero’s stepmother describes their Member of Parliament, who has been unlucky in love (VI):<\/p>\n

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“. . . quite broken-hearted about Lady Lena; gone away to America to shoot bears.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

2. The hero on himself (VII):<\/p>\n

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The habits that I had contracted, among my student friends in Germany, made tobacco and beer necessary accompaniments to the process of thinking. I had nearly exhausted my cigar, my jug, and my thoughts, when I saw two men approaching me from the end of the terrace.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

3. The (very handsome, and deaf) villain addresses the heroine (XIII):<\/p>\n

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“Are you one of the few women who dislike an ugly man? Women in general, I can tell you, prefer ugly men. A handsome man matches them on their own ground, and they don’t like that. ‘We are so fond of our ugly husbands; they set us off to such advantage.’ Oh, I don’t report what they say; I speak the language in which they think.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

4. The hero again (XVII):<\/p>\n

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When the detective police force encounters intelligence instead of stupidity, in seven cases out of ten the detective police force is beaten.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here are two more quotations from A Rogue’s Life<\/em> (1856), which I read a few weeks ago:<\/p>\n

5. The rogue-narrator lists the principal categories of “professedly hard-hearted persons” who will be uninterested in the story of his love for the heroine (VII):<\/p>\n

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. . . monks, misogynists, political economists . . .<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

6. One of the more surprising bits of A Rogue’s Life<\/em> was the parenthetical description of “a frugal curate’s dinner” (XII):<\/p>\n

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. . . bit of fish, two chops, mashed potatoes, semolina pudding, half-pint of sherry . . .<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That seems like quite a lot for one frugal meal. Perhaps the chops were very small.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some quotations from The Guilty River (1886): 1. The hero’s stepmother describes their Member of Parliament, who has been unlucky in love (VI): “. . . quite broken-hearted about Lady Lena; gone away to America to shoot bears.” 2. The … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}