The Scarlet Pimpernel

I am rereading the Scarlet Pimpernel (London: Hutchison), a wonderful romantic, swashbuckling, 1905 adventure novel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy, set during the early French Revolution. Our hero, Sir Percy, passes for a foppish baronet. His alter ego, the Scarlet Pimpernel, along with nineteen friends, smuggles French aristocrats to England before they are guillotined by French revolutionaries in the Reign of Terror. After each successful venture, Sir Percy or one of his company leaves a scrap of paper with a drawing of the little red flower, the pimpernel.

Just as Dickens introduced the first detective in literary history, Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, so, according to the Wikipedia entry, at least, Orczy gives us the first hero with a secret identity, the ancestor of Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman.

I say rereading because I know I must have read it a hundred years ago.  As a teenager, my dad read his way through the Santa Barbara Library, dictionaries and all. At some point in my young life, he mentioned this book, and so I read it.

But I did not follow my own rule:  if you don't know a word, put down what you are reading and look it up. I know this because I just now came across the word defalcation, which, as it happens, means embezzlement, and did not know its meaning. Apparently, I just could not drag myself away from the story to look it up in a dry old dictionary.

To this day, I still love the hero who lives as Everyman but does great deeds in secret. And I try to follow my own rules.

Anagalis arvensis, the scarlet pimpernel, a low-growing plant in the primrose family native to Great Britain.

CC by-SA 3.0. Created by Jean-Jacques Milan.

Words Take Flite

Miss Flite is a secondary character in Dickens's great novel, Bleak House, first published in serial form between March 1852 and September 1853. Her first appearance is in Chapter 3, when, as Esther writes, "a curious little old woman in a squeezed bonnet, and carrying a reticule, came curtsying and smiling up to us, with an air of great ceremony." She wants to meet Ada and Richard, wards in the Chancery case Jarndyce and Jarndyce, as she once was, and their companion, Esther.

She has a bird-like quality about her, evident in her name, in her person (we get to see her in Phiz's wonderful etching), in the birds she keeps caged in her garret, and in her role as messenger of doom. Richard, despite the softening influence of Esther and Ada, becomes obsessed with the case and finally dies after it is settled--or rather just plain old terminated, because the entire estate has been "absorbed in costs."

Dickens never says, Miss Flite is like a bird (in which case, in every passage she appears in, she would provide an excellent example of a simile). This not dramatic enough for Dickens's purposes.  Instead, she is a wonderful example of metaphor.  Figuratively, she is a bird.

Miss Flite with the wards of Jarndyce & Jarndyce.

The Little Old Lady, by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne), 1853.
Scanned image and text by George P. Landow.