Preface to This Edition
Editor’s Note
Among the lesser papers salvaged from the Vorpel-Mallard trunks at Sussex was a slim bundle tied with a faded ribbon, marked in a neat but hurried hand: “Not for publication—unless circumstances demand.” The hand is Viola’s.
Whether she intended these fragments as a second volume of her Trumpet in the Dust lectures, or as an altogether separate book, is unclear. The sisters disagreed even on that. Octavia, in Sydney, maintained they were notes never finished. Gloriana, predictably, declared them “complete” and pressed them upon her son as a necessary education. Elspeth wrote to Jeanne (a letter survives, the ink washed thin) saying: “Viola cannot leave men alone—she must have the last word, even in their own language.”
What is certain is that the pages were bundled with a series of annotations in another hand—that of Arthur Frederick Blandy, valet to Gloriana’s son Fabrice. That the same Blandy who styled himself a scholar of “U and Non-U speech” should meddle in Viola’s manuscript is both unsurprising and deeply suspicious. He admits, in one margin, to “tidying where necessary,” though his definition of necessity may have been broad. In one place, he has inserted a footnote longer than the original page.
In another, he confesses: “If the Lady herself had seen fit to include this, I cannot see why it should be omitted by me.”
The trunk contained other contradictions: Elspeth’s comments clipped to Octavia’s essays; Gloriana’s underlinings in thick pencil; even a pencilled remark, likely Fabrice’s, in which he scrawls: “Mother’s obsession with titles has made me an anachronism.”
Readers should therefore approach these pages with the scepticism appropriate to all Mallard archives. They are neither complete nor reliable. The word gentleman, which Viola here skewers with her usual élan, shifts meaning with every voice: parasite, patron, parvenu, liar, dilettante. Perhaps the only continuity is fraudulence.
And yet—taken together, the fragments do form a parallel story to the decline of the dukes. If Falling from Grace charts the collapse of titled nobility, then Raised to Grace traces the hollow rise of the gentleman: from the parasite of 1750 to the empty signifier of 2000. That it concludes with Fabrice—tutored by Blandy, yet rejecting all pretensions to gentility by becoming a purveyor of pleasure—is either the perfect irony or the final indictment.
The reader may decide.
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