Author: David Gorsline

At the present time, in the dark little parlour certain feet below the level of the street—a grim, hard, uncouth parlour, only ornamented with the coarsest of baize table-covers, and the hardest of sheet-iron tea-trays, and offering in its decorative character no bad allegorical representation of Grandfather Smallweed’s mind—seated in two black horse-hair porter’s chairs, one in each side of the fireplace, the superannuated Mr and Mrs Smallweed wile away the rosy hours.

—Bleak House, ch. 21, p. 343

Wile away: eggcorn or no? Arnold Zwicky isn’t so sure. My edition is merely the 1971 Penguin paperback, and doesn’t offer any editorial suggestions about Dickens’ intentions. There are many versions of the book online that amend the phrase to the more widely accepted while away.

In chapter 38, Mr. Guppy is hypermeticulously securing an oral witness (Caroline) to a renunciation of a marriage proposal:

‘Married woman, I believe?’ said Mr Guppy. ‘Married woman. Thank you. Formerly Caroline Jellyby, spinster, then of Thavies Inn, within the City of London, but extraparochial; now of Newman Street, Oxford Street. Much obliged.’ (p. 602)

A dictionary and some thought gives us extraparochial as “outside of any church parish.” So before she married Turveydrop, Caroline lived in a place within the City that was not part of any parish. But the connotations of this term run deeper, when we consider Dickens’ (who composed Bleak House in the early 1850s) steady theme of providing for the poor. A UK government guide to 19th century census reports elaborates:

Besides parishes, with their tythings or townships and chapelries, there were also many places in England and Wales not contained in the limits of any parish. These extra-parochial places had inherited an independence by which they enjoyed virtual exemption from taxation; from maintaining the poor, since there was no Overseer on whom a Magistrate’s Order could be served; from the Militia Laws because there was no Constable to make returns; and from repairing the highways, because there was no official surveyor….

In 1857 the peculiar privileges enjoyed by extra-parochial places were curtailed under an Act ‘to provide for the Relief of the Poor in Extra-Parochial Places’ which decreed that places named extra-parochial in the 1851 Census report were to be deemed parishes for this purpose and to have Overseers appointed for them by the Justices of the Peace. In the case of extra-parochial places covering a very small piece of land, the place was annexed to an adjoining parish, if the consent of the owners and occupiers of two-thirds in value of the land was forthcoming. Special provision was made for the particular cases of the places in London termed the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn where the officer acting for the time being as Under Treasurer, and the Registrar in Charterhouse were appointed Overseers. This act did not apply to places not specified as extra-parochial in the census reports. In these cases the act was merely permissive and, therefore, largely inoperative. In a later Act of 1868 it was declared that every extra-parochial place existing on 25 December 1868, should be added to the next adjoining civil parish which had the longest common boundary. In spite of these acts there are still some places in England and Wales which are extra-parochial from civil parishes. They are all islands or lighthouses which were probably overlooked in the act since they were not contiguous with any parish and, therefore, could not be added to any. There are also still many extra-parochial places from ecclesiastical parishes which enjoy special privileges under Church laws or custom.

Yes, I’m a little woozy after reading that, too. According to a Wikipedia article stub, certain places in the City are yet today considered extraparochial. Something to do with the Knights Templar, ’nuff said.

Kinbote writes of dialling 11111 to summon first responders to the scene of the shooting (“I then dialled 11111 and returned with a glass of water to the scene of the carnage,” Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, note to line 1000). At the time of these events, various countries were beginning to adopt 3-digit emergency telephone numbers, following the lead of Britain’s 999. New Zealand introduced a 111 emergency number in 1958; the year before, California rolled out a ZEnith 1-2000 (presumably one asked for rather than dialled this number, since Z is not assigned a digit on the telephone dial); Australia adopted 000 in 1961. Use of 11111 for emergency purposes is undocumented, as far as my searches go.

Old World/New World: “…the disguised king’s arrival in America where he descended by parachute from a chartered plane piloted by Colonel Montacute, in a field of hay-feverish, rank-flowering weeds, near Baltimore whose oriole is not an oriole.” (note to line 691) As is often the case, a New World family of birds (the black and yellow Icteridae, “jaundiced ones”) is not closely related to its Old World namesake, in this case the orioles, family Oriolidae.

Nabokov appears to have introduced two coinages in the book, one by Shade (“And that odd muse of mine,/My versipel, is with me everywhere,/In carrel and in car, and in my chair.” [ll. 946-948]) and one by Kinbote (“The Shades were out, said the cheeky ancillula, an obnoxious little fan who came to cook for them on Sundays and no doubt dreamt of getting the old poet to cuddle her some wifeless day.” [note to line 802]). Versipel is glossed as a back-formation from versipellous, “changeable; protean; having a form, nature or appearance that changes often.” Ancillula is from the Latin, and is a diminutive of ancilla, “handmaid.”