Can you contribute to The Age of Innocence?
The Drum Book Club is now open for contributions. Anyone can add a bookmark, Setting place, review or glossary item. Best of all, every one of your contributions will be credited individually to you.
The inaugural profile is Edith Wharton's masterpiece of romance and manners, The Age of Innocence. We hope you've been reading it in the two weeks since our last newsletter, but if not there's still time to get started. We will use the Oxford World's Classics edition (9780199540013) to set the page numbers, but you can read a different edition, or the free Gutenberg ebook available online.
You'll find the OWC edition in most good bookshops, or you can order a copy online:
The Age of Innocence (Oxford World's Classics) (UK)
The Age of Innocence (Oxford World's Classics) (USA)
Once you've read the book, the only question will be what to contribute! You can write a standard book review, or add a couple of glossary terms, or create one of the main Setting places:
New York
St Augustine, Florida
Newport, Rhode Island
Boston, Massachusetts
London, England
Paris, France
New York Society in the 1870s
Alternatively, you can create a bookmark or two. We've identified some really interesting potential bookmarks, listed below with their OWC page numbers. If you'd like to add other bookmarks, and you don't have the OWC edition, please use the number 300 and we'll insert the OWC page number for you.
Whether you're interested in art, fashion, history, food, music, mythology, literature, high society or carriage design, at least a few of these will be right up your street! So pick a bookmark and start writing...
3 Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust
3 the Academy of Music
3 a new Opera House
3 more convenient ‘Brown coupé.’
3 at the back of the club box
3 the curtain had just gone up on the garden scene
4 finial-topped chairs
4 he loves me – he loves me not – he loves me!
4 the little brown Faust-Capoul
5 a modest tulle tucker
5 the floral pen-wipers
5 Mr Luther Burbank’s far-off prodigies
5 a reticule dangling from a blue girdle
6 the march from Lohengrin
7 when to wear a black tie with evening clothes
7 pumps versus patent-leather ‘Oxfords’
7 a ‘Josephine look,’
8 the old Opera-house on the Battery
9 an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park
10 the private hotels of the Parisian aristocracy
10 among pre-Revolutionary furniture and souvenirs of the Tuileries of Louis Napoleon
10 like her Imperial namesake
10 the intimate friend of Mme Taglioni
10 the ‘made dishes’
11 the Mephistopheles-and-Martha scenes
11 preparing to enter the lists as the lady’s champion
13 in knickerbockers and pantalettes
13 thought ‘provincial’ to put a ‘crash’ over the drawing-room floor
14 droit de cité
15 My wife’s gloxinias
15 gets them out from Kew
15 hot canvas-back ducks
15 Veuve Clicquot without a year
15 just before the Jewel Song
15 a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms
16 furnished with Buhl and malachite
16 putting on their dancing gloves
16 the much-discussed nude of Bouguereau
16 the dashing aigrettes
16 highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh glacé gloves
17 the soft waves of the Blue Danube
17 made the cup of his bliss overflow (Biblical origin?)
19 certain other old family houses in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue (whose?)
19 cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets
19 the frivolous upholstery of the Second Empire
20 a looped-back yellow damask portière
20 the love-scenes of ‘Monsieur de Camors’
21 by the great Ferrigiani
21 don’t wait till the bubble’s off the wine
22 in Madison Square
24 The Marble Faun
24 the Archer Madeira had gone round the Cape
24 they cultivated ferns in Wardian cases
24 subscribed to ‘Good Words’, and read Ouida’s novels
24 Dickens, who ‘had never drawn a gentleman’
24 considered Thackeray less at home in the great world than Bulwer
24 learned persons who read Ruskin
24 an elderly embonpoint
26 with Living Wax-Works
26 safe past the Siren Isle
29 a Carcel lamp with engraved globe
32 in the books on Primitive Man (what were they, in the 1870s?)
32 the Idyls of the King
32 Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters
33 as Thackeray’s heroes so often exasperated him by doing
33 the Babes in the Wood
33 a Roman punch
35 signed the Declaration
35 received General Burgoyne’s sword after the battle of Saratoga
35 the Pitts and Foxes
35 Count de Grasse
35 the first Dutch governor of Manhattan
35 fought under Cornwallis
36 Gainsborough’s ‘Lady Angelica du Lac.’
36 portrait by Huntington
36 Venetian point
36 as fine as a Cabanel
37 a green rep curtain
39 the boom of a minute-gun
40 next summer’s International Cup Race
40 the seventeen-hand chestnuts
41 Esther interceding with Ahasuerus
41 the great C-spring barouche
41 No one but Patti ought to attempt the Sonnambula
42 dancing a Spanish shawl dance
42 singing Neapolitan love-songs
42 she could turn it into Manzoni
42 drawing from the model
42 playing the piano in quintets
42 a ball at the Tuileries
42 a yacht at Cowes
42 a kind of sulphurous apotheosis
43 their standing in Debrett
44 East India Company
44 an Isabey miniature
44 like another recent ducal visitor (who?)
46 looked like a Diana just alight from the chase
47 far down West Twenty-third Street
49 a phrase out of Dante and Petrarch
49 John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee’s ‘Euphorion,’ the essays of P.G. Hamerton
49 ‘The Renaissance’ by Walter Pater
49 He talked easily of Botticelli, and spoke of Fra Angelico with a faint condescension
50 of the Italian school
50 Rogers statuettes
50 Jacqueminot roses
50 built in a ghastly greenish-yellow stone
50 sham Buhl tables and gilt vitrines full of modern Saxe
51 ‘sincere’ Eastlake furniture
51 a stepper’s hoofs
53 bargaining for attar-of-roses in Samarkand
53 arctics for a New York winter
55 do you want to hear Sarasate
58 some of the new ideas in his scientific books
58 the Kentucky cave-fish
59 in the rue de la Paix
59 a pair of black cobs
60 Swinburne’s ‘Chastelard’
60 a volume of the ‘Contes Drôlatiques,’
60 she hovered Cassandra-like before him
63 a humming-bird-feather screen
68 Are we only Pharisees after all?
69 The Death of Chatham
69 The Coronation of Napoleon
70 their damned heathen marriage settlements (property ownership in marriage)
72 Edwin Booth and Patti and William Winter
72 the new Shakespearian actor George Rignold
72 Washington Irving, Fitz-Greene Halleck and the poet of ‘The Culprit Fay.’
72 we knew everybody between the Battery and Canal Street
72 gala nights at the Italiens
73 the talk of Mérimée
73 he met them at the Century
73 Paul Bourget, Huysmans, and the Goncourt brothers
74 a close-fitting armour of whale-boned silk
74 the new painter, Carolus Duran
74 the sensation of the Salon
75 the little oyster supper I’d planned for you at Delmonico’s
75 with Campanini and Scalchi
80 at Wallack’s theatre
80 The play was ‘The Shaughraun,’
81 as fine as anything he had ever seen Croisette and Bressant do in Paris
81 or Madge Robertson and Kendal in London
91 the delicious play of Labiche
91 a spin in the ice-boat
92 he borrowed a cutter
92 in the steel-engraving style
95 rows of Delft plates
96 this new dodge for talking along a wire
96 allusions to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne
97 bounded by the Battery and the Central Park
98 a new volume of Herbert Spencer
98 Alphonse Daudet’s brilliant tales
98 a novel called ‘Middlemarch’
98 The House of Life (inspiration for The House of Mirth?)
99 the sandy main street of St Augustine
100 when a man-of-war came in
101 Sonnets from the Portuguese
101 How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix
101 dancing at the Assemblies now
103 the ruinous garden of the Spanish Mission
103 Granada and the Alhambra
103 the Easter ceremonies at Seville
107 a black velvet polonaise with jet buttons
109 he took French leave
110 a shaggy yellow ulster of ‘reach-me-down’ cut
110 what the French called a ‘Macfarlane.’
112 the Direct Contact
116 miscellaneous heap of overshoes, shawls and tippets
119 Ah, don’t make love to me! (clarify meaning)
125 the chancel step of Grace Church
126 Handel’s March swelled pompously
126 the imitation stone vaulting
128 in her enormous Bath chair
129 the first chords of the Spohr symphony
130 the Mendelssohn March
130 with big white favours on their frontlets
130 curvetting and showing off
131 the endless wooden suburbs
132 pose for a Civic Virtue
133 the monumental Britannia ware
134 one night at Botzen
134 alighted at Brown’s Hotel
135 made macramé lace
135 read the memoirs of the Baroness Bunsen
136 Why not wear your wedding-dress?
136 Worth hasn’t sent it back
136 July at Interlaken and Grindelwald
136 a little place called Etretat
136 the fascinating new game of lawn tennis
136 the Paris cafés chantants
136 an audience of ‘cocottes’
138 in the hansom
138 a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented
139 his last symposium
139 had had to leave Harrow
139 the milder air of Lake Leman
140 frequented the Goncourt grenier
140 been advised by Maupassant
140 quant à soi
140 a second secretaryship at Bucharest
143 The Newport Archery Club
144 At the Century
144 at the Knickerbocker
144 Mount Desert
145 a limp Leghorn hat
146 delicious solitude at Portsmouth
146 The steam-yacht, built in the Clyde
147 a new Meissonnier or Cabanel
148 victorias, dog-carts, landaus and ‘vis-à-vis,’
148 down Narragansett Avenue
148 a many-peaked and cross-beamed cottage-orné
149 the fringe of the anti-macassars
149 leave it in fee to your eldest girl
149 all these gods and goddesses
150 revealing old silent images in their painted tomb
151 the glint of the Lime Rock
151 the heroic light-house keeper, Ida Lewis
151 the flat reaches and ugly government chimneys of Goat Island
151 to Prudence Island
151 the shores of Conanicut
151 the grey bastions of Fort Adams
151 the sail of a catboat
154 explore tombs in the Yucatan
154 the Cup Race day
154 thé dansant
156 turned down the Old Beach Road and drove across Eastman’s Beach
157 up the Saconnet
157 surmounted by a wooden Cupid
159 Doesn’t she remind you of Mrs Scott-Siddons
159 Lady Geraldine’s Courtship
159 She’s staying at the Parker House
160 out of the Fall River train
160 drove to the Somerset Club
161 walk across the Common
162 he’s always at Cowes or Baden
163 down to Point Arley
164 one of the new stylographic pens
165 the plush-lined ‘herdic’
173 When you ask for a porter they give you chewing-gum
174 A horse-car received him
178 the rugged features of the President of the United States (which one?)
180 the Reverend Dr Ashmore
180 a text from Jeremiah (chap. ii., verse 25)
186 kept properly trimmed
189 his failure promised to be one of the most discreditable in the history of Wall Street (real cases?)
189 the high staggering omnibuses of the Fifth Avenue line
192 sent on approval from Ball and Black’s
193 rosewood ‘Bonheur du Jour’
193 the brass ledge of the Western Union office
196 who should meet her at Jersey City
199 met Archer at the ferry
199 the Pennsylvania terminus
199 there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York
202 I’ve had to look at the Gorgon
202 the piles of the slip
206 under a Spartan smile
206 a volume of Michelet
215 a passing by on the other side
215 Adelaide Neilson in Romeo and Juliet
216 There’s the Art Museum
216 the popular ‘Wolfe collection’
216 cast-iron and encaustic tiles
216 Cesnola antiquities
216 recovered fragments of Ilium
216 Some day, I suppose, it will be a great Museum
220 bringing the student lamp
223 asked where Morny’s money came from
230 thickest gilt-edged bristol
233 the Venus of Milo
233 Verbeckhoven ‘Study of Sheep,’
234 sailing tomorrow in the Russia
237 dressed by Poole
237 typewriter this time
241 the inauguration of the new galleries at the Metropolitan Museum
241 the ample magnificent irreplaceable Bishop
242 Nobody nowadays had ‘Colonial’ houses
242 the Governor of New York, coming down from Albany
242 the active service to which Theodore Roosevelt had pointed
243 founding the Grolier Club
243 inaugurating the new Library
243 carried off by the infectious pneumonia
244 with English mezzotints
244 the Archer vault in St Mark’s
244 as the altered fashion required
245 unhooked the transmitter
245 Mauretania
246 Rheims and Chartres
248 the wide silvery prospect of the Place Vendôme
248 the new-fangled ‘palaces.’
248 the century-long home of kings and emperors
249 the score of the last Debussy songs
249 go to the Grand-Guignol
249 to the Assomption
250 lunch at Henri’s
251 walked across the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries gardens
251 the bridge that leads to the Chamber of Deputies
251 talking excitedly and abundantly of Versailles
252 the great tree-planted space before the Invalides
252 The dome of Mansart
253 moving toward the porte-cochère he put his head into the porter’s lodge