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quote:It's never explained why John refers to his stepmother as "the mater", he seems to be the only one in the family who does. As we probably all know, in England it is vitally important to know where one stands in the class system; far more so in 1918 than today, as Hastings will eventually show us. Many words in England are used as subtle (or less subtle) class shibboleths which aid in spotting people who are moving between classes. "Pardon" and "toilet" are two of the better-known ones; when it was claimed that Kate Middleton's mother had dared to say both those words in front of the Queen, they were reported as "allegations", a word usually reserved for criminal cases and political scandals. To the gutter press, it was yet more evidence that she was really far too middle-class to be socialising with royalty. (For more on this, see Nancy Mitford.) Calling one's parents "mater" and "pater" is one of these shibboleths; they're based on Latin words, and are so only used by the upper classes and the aristocracy who have all learned Latin at public school for several generations. (The alternatives are "mummy" and "daddy", or "ma" and "pa"). If Christie is doing this deliberately, the word "mater" appearing alongside "mother" could be taken as an indication that John's father appears to have married down a little (never mind that she appears to have had plenty of her own money; the correct implication may be that she's a nouveau-riche), and she's then taught her step-children to say "mother" and "father". Alternatively, it could just be that Christie, from an upper-middle Army family, didn't fully appreciate the significance of "mummy" and "daddy" for those slightly above her; or possibly she did, but intentionally didn't use them to make her characters a touch more relatable for a middle-class audience.
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Aug 17, 2022 01:03
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| # ¿ May 18, 2024 11:51 |
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Truthkeeper posted:I note that Hastings, despite being injured enough that he can’t do wars anymore, is apparently perfectly capable of playing tennis. I don’t know enough about World War I or the British army to have any kind of idea how badly you’d have to be injured to be sent home. Christie avoids Doyle’s error in mixing up where Watson’s injury was by simply never actually saying what happened to Hastings. The Poirot TV series had him walking with a cane for the early part of the episode adapting this book, until he decided he didn’t need it and gave it away at the first opportunity. They also implied that he’d developed some fairly serious PTSD, All Christie said is that he was "invalided", and there are other ways to get sent home than physical wounds. It could be what at the time was known as neurasthenia, but it's also just as likely to have been some 'orrible and lasting disease. The best-known of the various lurgies was trench fever, caused by the Bartonella quintana bacteria hosted by many of the louses who did very well out of the war. It was responsible for nearly a quarter of all medical casualties on all sides, and was also very well-read, claiming A.A. Milne, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis's case was relatively light, but for both Milne and Tolkien it put paid to their service as battalion signals officers. Milne took a year to recover to the point where he could aid the war effort by writing propaganda; Tolkien's case recurred several times as he was sent on a tour of various recuperative postings, and he was still sufficiently affected when demobilised in mid-1919, nearly three years after being invalided home, to be awarded a temporary disability pension. quote:Emily sure does loves to talk about how well connected she is. Oftentimes in stories featuring upper class twits, they talk up their own family history a great deal; Emily never does this, either for her own family, her first husband’s family, or Alfred’s. I suspect that Emily’s desperately trying to fit in with the class she married into and overdoing everything in the process. This is clearly an advanced case of Hyacinth Bucket-ism. The established upper class and aristocracy would never be so gauche as to mention this sort of thing out loud if at all possible; they don't need to, everyone knows who they are, and in any case modesty is one of the most important English values. (If anyone's interested in the intricacies of all this tremendous nonsense, Kate Fox's Watching the English is available on Kindle for just 99p; in which an expert anthropologist turns her analytical lens on the rules of her own culture.) quote:There’s a lot of talk about nurses at the hospital being overseen by a terrifying and tyrannical “Sister”. Was the Red Cross staffed by nuns in this time period? "Sister" is the traditional British title for the leading nurse on a shift or ward. In popular culture, they are generally either Miss Honey or Miss Trunchbull with very little in between. quote:this is the second time he describes her as “gipsy faced”, still no idea what the hell that description is supposed to mean, were certain facial features considered unique to Romani at this point The word "gypsy" is at this time used extremely loosely to cover anyone who lives a travelling life and spends enough time in the sun to get a decent tan on. English travelling carnival showmen, and Irish Travellers, and yer actual Romany, and anyone else who happens to be cutting about on wheels. The implication is usually that they're shifty, clever in a bad way, vaguely foreign, make a questionable living, and aren't to be trusted any further than one could kick them. Not entirely unlike the traditional anti-Semitic caricature, although your "gypsy" is typically at the bottom of the heap, whereas your "Jew" has generally managed to insinuate himself into society. The best way to get a fuller understanding of the attitude behind Christie's word choice here is to break out the lashings of ginger beer and read a Famous Five story; either Five Fall Into Adventure, Five Have Plenty of Fun, or Five Have A Wonderful Time; all of which guest star "Jo the gypsy girl". Somewhere under the weight of Enid Blyton's Edwardian racism there's a fine adventure story for children; in the same way that there's good detective novels under Christie's. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Aug 18, 2022 |
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Aug 18, 2022 01:10
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Truthkeeper posted:Is Christie… under the impression that people breathe through their arms? Or was this a real method of CPR at some point? Modern CPR as we know it today was developed in the mid-1920s in America, and didn't become established as the primary method until after the Second World War. What we're probably seeing here is the Silvester method, developed by Dr Henry Silvester in the 1850s. It's a far cry from walloping on someone's sternum until it cracks to the rhythm of the Bee Gees. quote:Maybe this is me being a dumb American again, but wouldn’t Emily’s husband be the most likely person who would need to sign off on that? English law does not define next of kin, and it's up to the doctor to decide who is most appropriate to make those decisions. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Aug 18, 2022 |
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Aug 18, 2022 19:36
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quote:since Alfred was from “the Hall” (Mace and the old guy from earlier both keep using that term to refer to Styles Court, I feel like I’m missing something here) The implication is that they're locals who probably haven't travelled very far or had much to do with the outside world; to them Styles Court is the only building on that scale they ever need to mention, and so theirs just becomes "the Hall". "Hall" is commonly used as a suffix for that kind of house (e.g. Holkham Hall, in the same way as "Court" in "Styles Court". quote:“Wilful Murder against some person or persons unknown." Given Inglethorpe's apparently obvious guilt, this is a particularly shocking moment to a contemporary reader. At the time an English inquest was a quasi-criminal proceeding not unlike a grand jury, in which the jury had the right not only to say that someone had been murdered, but also to name the murderer. The coroner then had the power to commit that person to the courts for trial. This was commonplace in the 18th and first half of the 19th century, and then began slowly falling into disuse with the rise of the modern police, their spread throughout England, and their taking on investigative functions which were previously done by agents of a coroner or magistrate. In the 1930s it is unusual but still recognised as a Thing that can happen. The most famous of these cases was in 1975 when an inquest jury brought in a verdict of "murder by Lord Lucan"; two years later there were significant reforms that removed this function. Today, a coroner's investigation will be immediately adjourned until the police investigation has finished, juries are rare, and the burden of proof and system of verdicts is completely different.
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Aug 23, 2022 20:26
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Truthkeeper posted:Interesting. I'll admit that I've just been substituting "grand jury" for "inquest" in my mind every time the term comes up in any of Christie's stories off of a vague idea that the two proceedings fulfill similar roles, so it's good to know I'm not completely off-base, even if the specifics aren't quite the same. Interestingly, the grand jury itself is well on the way out at this point; in 1933 it will disappear except as a theoretical possibility before being finally abolished in 1948, one in a long list of things that persist in American criminal procedure despite long since having been got rid of in the place that invented them.
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Aug 25, 2022 00:26
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quote:John’s still in his unspecified financial trouble, but can see the light at the end of the tunnel now that he’s inherited, even though he has to pay for the house now (I assume property taxes on old English manor houses are a bitch). As he's inheriting, he will first have to pay the hated death duties, a horribly complicated series of individual taxes on inherited wealth that nevertheless enabled the rich to slide past them with careful planning and good legal advice. Happily, this has now all been reformed; the modern single Inheritance Tax is very simple, and so allows the rich to slide past it with careful planning and good legal advice. He will then be faced with a hefty domestic rates bill, charged on the assessed rental value of Styles Court. Local taxation has long been a political hot potato in Britain, so controversial that when Margaret Thatcher tried to take it on at the height of her power, she was out of office within a year of its replacement by the poll tax. The hastily-implemented replacement-for-the-replacement of Council Tax has survived for 30 years, despite being ridiculous in several important ways. (The post-Thatcher world is far too hostile to the obvious solution of a land value tax, and trying to do anything else would be more trouble than it's worth.)
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Aug 28, 2022 14:49
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I swear this was only supposed to be a few lines long and then suddenly it was hours later  Truthkeeper posted:Some business required Hastings to travel to Paris, and in a time when air travel is the exception rather than the norm, that means train to ferry to another train, and then the reverse when you return home. I say, the idea of all this glamorous international train travel seems like rather an appealing setting for a murder mystery! quote:I’m suddenly curious about the popularity of jazz in early 1920s Britain. Jazz has a very interesting history in Britain, and occupies a frankly bizarre cultural space compared to America; it came over with the doughboys in 1917 and 1918, then Musicians Union regulations made it very difficult for American jazzmen to come to the country to play. Without much of a native black community to sustain it (there were definitely more black people in the country than pop history would have us believe, but they're far more of a minority than would be the case post-Windrush) and without any way to push dance bands out of the way in its early days, it's always struggled to gain much attention in popular culture and has mostly been a very rebellious-upper-middle/upper-class form of music enjoyed by a relative minority. This leads us to the archetypal English jazzman: Humphrey Lyttleton, who was educated at Eton, and was a close relative of Viscount Cobham. Its heyday, such as it was, was the Second World War, particularly 1941-1945; the most famous English jazz musicians are Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan, and Peter Sellers. They met playing jazz at the end of the war, but gained their fame in radio comedy with The Goon Show, the source of just about all modern alternative/surreal comedy. I've always been amazed that SA has never picked up on them, given that Peter Sellers later became a major movie star, our sense of humour is very much informed by their sense of humour, and they're literally called Goons. quote:Having made her little drama, she immediately hides behind a paper (Christie calls it a comic paper, I’m not clear if she means comic book or newspaper comics), looking at Hastings over the top waiting for his stolid English stoicism to break The comic paper is the forerunner of what Americans call comic books and we call just comics. British comics were almost exclusively for children (and the very young at heart) until the success of 2000AD from 1977, who most famously gave us Judge Dredd and Alan Moore. Here we're still about 10-15 years from the launch of the canonical British comic, the Beano (home of Dennis the Menace). Without further context I'd assume this was likely Comic Cuts, which reprinted a wide range of short newspaper-style comic strips without much regard for copyright. Combined with her language, I'd also call it a pretty clear signal that Christie is presenting her as being uneducated/lower-class/dim. However, we're still in France, and she's specifically reading a French comic. This is potentially a great deal more interesting; the Francophone bande dessinee tradition has often aimed itself at a far more mature audience closer to what in English we call the graphic novel. Here we're still six years away from the first appearance of Tintin, and French-speaking creators are only just starting to adopt Anglo-American innovations like speech balloons instead of captions and publishing in dedicated magazines. This could be a hint that she's got more about her than Hastings sees; or it could be that Christie intended her to be reading a French girls' magazine such as La Semaine de Suzette, which printed Becassine and others; or (and I suspect most likely) it could be Christie thinking her intended audience won't know any of this and just wants them to think of something like Comic Cuts but smelling faintly of garlic and onions. quote:Hastings’ new friend (still unnamed in the text) explains to him that she and her sister, although American by birth, have lived in England all their lives, raised as child acrobats, and now do a variety stage act. Apparently, Vaudeville (clearly the idea, even if Christie hasn’t heard the name) is new and going to be big, with lots of money in it. There is a direct British equivalent to vaudeville in the music hall, which has just hit its peak and is about to begin its long decline. I think what she means by "we've got a new show" is "we've got a new act to appear on a music hall bill", not "we've got a whole new form of entertainment". quote:By this point, the two have hit it off quite well, talking merrily until an announcement that the train is passing through Amiens causes Hastings to think about the war. Which leads to him telling the girl about how he was wounded, leading to his being invalided and then later becoming the MP’s secretary. Hastings does specifically now use the word "wounded". Amiens could hardly fail to make him think of the war; it gave its name to the first British battle in the final Big Push of 1918 that literally won the war by accident. Incidentally, British MPs had only been given salaries in 1911, and received no expenses to pay office staff until 1987. Either the MP is paying Hastings from private means, or his party is picking up the bill. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Oct 4, 2022 |
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Oct 4, 2022 23:24
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| # ¿ May 18, 2024 11:51 |
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quote:Hautet, the examining magistrate (from context, I’m assuming a form of forensic specialist, but ‘magistrate’ makes it sound like he works in some judicial capacity) This is one of the defining differences between the English adversarial/common law tradition, and the European civil law tradition. The French system of the time is strongly inquisitorial, and many prosecutions are led by a juge d'instruction (a better translation is perhaps "investigating judge"). Crucially, he has the power to personally direct the investigations of the police and the prosecutor. He is not entirely unlike a combination of the modern English senior investigating officer (the detective in overall charge of an investigation) and an American grand jury, rolled into one person. It will fundamentally be his job to decide whether a crime has been committed, and whether there is enough evidence to commit a suspect for trial. A different panel of judges will then hear the trial. The powers of the investigating judge have always been strongest in France; it has been said that the office was the most powerful one in the country during the 19th century. Many European countries have abolished the investigating judge; those like France who retain them now restrict their use to the most serious cases. In France these reforms did not begin until the mid-1980s. Truthkeeper posted:Is that supposed to be a French accent looks like spelled phonetically? Good moaning... Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Oct 7, 2022 |
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Oct 7, 2022 20:23
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