Chirp the First quotations

Chirp the first.

"Mrs Peerybingle, going out into the raw twilight, and clicking over the wet stones in a pair of pattens that worked innumerable rough impressions of the first proposition in Euclid all over the yard.."

She was wearing a pair of metal over-shoes to protect her indoor shoes from the mud and water in the yard. These left footprints in the mud that looked like mathematical formulae. Euclid was a mathematician, who lived 325 to 265 BC.


"It would lean forward with a drunken air, and dribble a very idiot of a kettle…And the hull of the Royal George has never made half the monstrous resistance to coming out of the water, which the lid of that kettle employed against Mrs Perrybingle, before she got it up again".

This is a reference to the Royal George ship which was launched in 1756, at the start of the 7 years war. After a chequered history it sank in 1781 while repairs were being undertaken. The canons were moved to enable the repairs to be done, and the ship listed over and sank killing about 1400 people. The story was written in 1845, some 64 years after the sinking of the Royal George.

"And here, if you like, the cricket DID chime in! With a Chirrup, Chirrup, Chirrup of such magnitude, by way of chorus; with a voice so astoundingly disproportionate to its size, as compared with the kettle; (size! you couldn’t see it!)"…

Perhaps this quotation means that the cricket is there in spirit rather than in material form as it has no size and is invisible. The kettle and cricket are competing with each other to express the extent of domestic happiness they see in this household.

"For the maternal and paternal Slowboy were alike unknown to Fame , and Tilly, had been bred by public charity, a foundling; which word, though only differing from fondling by one vowel’s length, is very different in meaning, and expresses quite another thing".

Tilly was an orphan abandoned at birth in an orphanage with no explanation given. She would have had an institutionalised up-bringing with little or no love (hence the word “fondling” which was not meant to be understood in a sexual sense). In her teens she had been put with the Perrybingles as a nurse maid rewarded only by receiving her keep, as was the custom of the day with orphans. She has never experienced life in a regular home before and has probably only been living there for a few months. This explains her “clumsiness” or gawkiness and lack of experience.

"The carrier put his hand into a pocket of the coat he had taken off ; and brought out carefully preserved in moss and paper a tiny flower-pot. “There it is !” he said adjusting it with great care. “Not so much as a leaf damaged. Full of buds.!”Caleb’s dull eye brightened , as he took it, and thanked him. “Dear, Caleb” said the Carrier “Very dear at this season”
“Never mind that. It would be cheap to me whatever it cost”

Caleb has bought his blind daughter a present. He dotes on her and later it is revealed that he lies to her about who has bought the presents that he buys her.

"She (Dot/Mary) honours and obeys, no doubt, you know” said Tackleton; and that, as I am not a man of sentiment, is quite enough for me. But do you think there’s anything more in it”
“I think” observed the Carrier,” that I should chuck any man out of the window, who said there wasn’t”
“Exactly so” returned the other with an unusual alacrity of assent. “To be sure! Doubtless you would .Of course. I’m certain of it…”

An example of Tackleton’s sarcastic frame of mind.

"But what was that young figure of a man, which the same Fairy Cricket set so near her stool, and which remained there, singly and alone? Why did it linger still, so near her with its arm upon the chimney piece, ever repeating “Married! and not to me!”
ODot ! O failing Dot ! There is no place for it in all your husband’s visions; why has its shadow fallen on his hearth?"

Dot/Mary loved another before she married John. His spirit is the cricket in the hearth. She has never forgotten him.

A question for you

What did Dot want to tell John in this quotation but seemed too scared to say?

“But Dot? I hope and pray that I might learn to love you? How you talk! I had learnt that, long before I brought you here, to be the cricket’s little mistress, Dot” She laid her hand, an instant, on his arm, and looked up at him with an agitated face, as if she would have told him something. Next moment she was down upon her knees before the basket, speaking in a sprightly voice, and busy with the parcels".