[Vwoolf] "Jacob's Room": Crux #1

Stuart N. Clarke stuart.n.clarke at btinternet.com
Mon May 11 09:53:53 EDT 2015


I am helping David Bradshaw edit JR for Cambridge University Press, and we have noticed several mysteries in the text.

Towards the end of ch. XII:

“Now it was dark. Now one after another lights were extinguished. Now great towns—Paris—Constantinople—London—were black as strewn rocks.”

The second sentence sounds like Sir Edward Grey’s ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime’.

Unfortunately, this appeared in his autobiography in 1925! “It was his only memorable saying, widely quoted and anthologized subsequently” (ODNB). Would it have been known about when VW was writing JR? If so, where? If not, we shall probably have to follow Sue Roe and Vara Neverow, and say that the sentence “prefigures” or “anticipates” Grey’s reminiscence in 1925.

Any answers gratefully received.

Stuart
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