[Vwoolf] The battle of life

[Stuart N. Clarke]

Not all phrases in quotation marks are quotations as such.  They may be what is now called “scare quotes”.  For example, they may be a distancing mechanism, implying that the phrase “is not necessarily the way the quoting person would express its concept” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes).

See Wharton’s “The Custom of the Country”, “passim”!

In “The Governess of Downing Street”, VW writes that “we are listening submissively to a severe lady who is preparing us in a clear metallic voice for something which is called ‘the battle of life’.” (The Essays, Vol. IV, p. 426)

Andrew McNeillie annotates this with “The source of this apparent quotation has not been discovered” (p. 428, n. 3).

If he hasn’t found it in book under review, Mrs Asquith’s “Lay Sermons” (and neither have I; see also
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt/search?id=mdp.39015063945920;view=1up;seq=9;q1=battle;start=1;size=10;page=search;orient=0), then it is likely that VW is distancing herself from the concept: she writes “something which is called ...”, not “something which Mrs Asquith calls ...”.

Although the phrase sounds Darwinian (he does use it several times in “Origin of Species” [1859]), it was probably popularised by Dickens in his Christmas book, “The Battle of Life” (1846).  I’m sure he didn’t invent the phrase.  Mrs Carlyle writes of “the battle of existence” in a letter of 5 Oct 1840.

Stuart
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