Bungay

“ I have already I think, mentioned how, long before we offered Tono Bungay to the public, we took over the English agency of certain American specialties. To this was presently added our exploitation of Moggs’ Domestic Soap, and so he took up the Domestic Convenience Campaign that, coupled with his equatorial rotundity and a certain resolute convexity in his bearings won my uncle his Napoleonic title. ”

“ Roseline was not at all better reconciled to the plan, nor more at ease than himself. She was apprehensive he might in the great world see some one he like better than herself. She had heard men inconstant and prone to change. The heart she had gained in the dungeon of Bungay-castle might perchance, when engaged in the great world, surrounded by pleasure, and besieged by the bright eyes of beauty, stray from her bosom to that of a more lovely and accomplished mistress;—to a more fond and faithful on it could not be entrusted ”

“ The town of Harleston is near the Waveney proper, and at Bungay, on the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk, where [Pg 365] the river describes a curious loop towards the village of Ditchingham, the Broads district is held to have its south-western boundary. There are no Broads, however, near, but the tourists who hire their wherries and make water parties for periods of weeks and months frequently push on to this point. The ruins of Bungay Castle remind us of the old days when Barons held their sway, and there is a parish church which was once connected with a nunnery. ”

“ That gives you—Tono-Bungay! There is a Bungay, you know. Lord Tono of Bungay—in bottles everywhere. Eh?”
My uncle astonished me by losing his temper.
“Damn it. George, you don’t seem to see I’m serious! You’re always sneering at Tono-Bungay! As though it was some sort of swindle. It was perfec’ly legitimate trade, perfec’ly legitimate. Good value and a good article.... When I come up here and tell you plans and exchange idees—you sneer at me. You do. You don’t see—it’s a big thing. It’s a big thing. You got to get used to new circumstances. You got to face what lies before us. ”

“ My ideas of a novel all through are comprehensive rather than austere....
Tono-Bungay still figures on the hoardings, it stands in rows in every chemist’s storeroom, it still assuages the coughs of age and brightens the elderly eye and loosens the elderly tongue; but its social glory, its financial illumination, have faded from the world for ever. ”

“ They must meet their foes in the field: they must not be belied and misrepresented by hireling advocates: they must not have Grub Street publishing Gazettes from Whitehall; “that’s a dig at Bacon’s people, Mr. Bungay,” said Shandon, turning round to the publisher. Bungay clapped his stick on the floor. “Hang him, pitch into him, Capting,” he said with exultation: and turning to Warrington, wagged his dull head more vehemently than ever, and said, “For a slashing article, sir, there’s nobody like the Capting—no-obody like him.” ”

“ As I look back on those days in which we built up the great Tono-Bungay property out of human hope and credit for bottles and rent and printing, I see my life as it were arranged in two parallel columns of unequal width, a wider, more diffused, eventful and various one which continually broadens out, the business side of my life, and a narrow, darker and darkling one shot ever and again with a gleam of happiness, my home-life with Marion. ”

“ I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it Waste. I have told of childless Marion, of my childless aunt, of Beatrice wasted and wasteful and futile. What hope is there for a people whose women become fruitless? I think of all the energy I have given to vain things. I think of my industrious scheming with my uncle, of Crest Hill’s vast cessation, of his resonant strenuous career. Ten thousand men have envied him and wished to live as he lived. ”

“ The Duchess of St Bungay had a happy bevy of young ladies who were to act as counter attendants under her grace; and who so happy as any young lady who could get herself put upon the duchess's staff? It was even rumoured that a certain very distinguished person would have shown herself behind a stall, had not a certain other more distinguished person expressed an objection; and while the rumour was afloat as to the junior of those two distinguished persons, the young-ladydom of London was frantic in its eagerness to officiate. ”

“ Alice thought of her cousin George, and wished that he, instead of herself, was sitting next to the Duke of St. Bungay. "But I'm afraid I never shall be a leading Radical," she said.
"You shall lead me at any rate, if you will," said he.
"As the little dogs lead the blind men," said Lady Glencora.
"No, Lady Glencora, not so. But as the pretty women lead the men who have eyes in their head. There is nothing I want so much, Miss Vavasor, as to become a Radical;—if I only knew how." ”

“ Bungay. "Look yonder in the Grand Stand," he said. "There sits the Chinese embassador with the mandarins of his suite. Fou-choo-foo brought me over letters of introduction from the Governor-general of India, my most intimate friend, and I was for some time very kind to him, and he had his chop-sticks laid for him at my table whenever he chose to come and dine. But he brought his own cook with him, and—would you believe it, Mrs. ”

“ Thomas de Bungay (Suffolk) has been traditionally associated with Roger Bacon and regarded as a wizard by later generations. Very little is known of him. He perhaps entered the Order at Norwich. He lectured as D.D. in the Franciscan convent at Oxford about 1270; he seems like Roger to have attached a great importance to mathematics and may have held his views on the value of natural science and of induction. He lectured afterwards at Cambridge, being the fifteenth in the list of Franciscan masters there. ”

“ She was a woman with square jaws, and a big face, and stout shoulders: but she was not, of her own unassisted height, very tall. But of that tiara and its altitude she was proud, and as she stood in the midst of the stalls, brandishing her umbrella-sized parasol in her anger, the ladies, as they entered, might well be cowed by her presence.
"When ladies say half-past two," said she, "they ought to come at half-past two. Where is the Duchess of St Bungay? I shall not wait for her."
But there was a lady there who had come in behind the Mackenzies, whom nothing ever cowed. ”

“ For a real angler or sportsman such a house as that in which George Borrow spent the latter years of his long life must have been a perfect paradise. The world is utterly away from you, and, what is better still, in such a spot the world has no chance of finding you out. Approaching by road, you see no sign of the house till you are in it, so completely is it hidden in the nook of trees in which it stands. Only to the water is it open. It would be really beautiful to live there in the summer, and have a gondola to row into Beccles or Lowestoft or Bungay when you wanted to be gay. ”

“ Have we got to that?”
“Whad you driving at, George?”
“You know. They’d never do it, man!”
“Do what?” he said feebly; and, “Why shouldn’t they?”
“They’d not even go to a baronetcy. No!.... And yet, of course, there’s Boom! And Collingshead and Gorver. They’ve done beer, they’ve done snippets! After all Tono-Bungay—it’s not like a turf commission agent or anything like that!... There have of course been some very gentlemanly commission agents. It isn’t like a fool of a scientific man who can’t make money!”
My uncle grunted ”

“ Sometimes she would do things for me, make me a tie or a pair of slippers, and fill me with none the less gratitude because the things were absurd. She ran our home and our one servant with a hard, bright efficiency. She was inordinately proud of house and garden. Always, by her lights, she did her duty by me. . . .
Presently the rapid development of Tono-Bungay began to take me into the provinces, and I would be away sometimes for a week together. This she did not like; it left her "dull," she said, but after a time she began to go to Smithie's again and to develop an independence of me. ”

“ Amory, The Life, etc., of John Buncle, Esq.
Bundle, the gardener, father of Wilelmi'na and friend of Tom Tug the waterman. He is a plain, honest man, but greatly in awe of his wife, who nags him from morning till night.
Mrs. Bundle, a vulgar Mrs. Malaprop, and a termagant. "Everything must be her way or there's no getting any peace." She greatly frequents the minor theatres, and acquires notions of sentimental romance.
Bun'gay (Friar) , one of the friars in a comedy by Robert Green, entitled Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. ”

“ Comes London Bridge, and the great warehouses tower up about you waving stupendous cranes, the gulls circle and scream in your ears, large ships lie among their lighters, and one is in the port of the world. ”

“ For the third part of the panorama of London is beyond all law, order, and precedence; it is the seaport and the sea. One goes down the widening reaches through a monstrous variety of shipping, great steamers, great sailing-ships, trailing the flags of all the world, a monstrous confusion of lighters, witches’ conferences of brown-sailed barges, wallowing tugs, a tumultuous crowding and jostling of cranes and spars, and wharves and stores, and assertive inscriptions. ”

“ The hand of change rests on it all, unfelt, unseen; resting for awhile, as it were half reluctantly, before it grips and ends the thing for ever. One frost and the whole face of things will be bare, links snap, patience end, our fine foliage of pretences lie glowing in the mire. ”

“ Bunyan replied in seventy stanzas in ballad measure, thanking his correspondent for his good advice, of which he confesses he stood in need, and which he takes it kindly of him to send, even though his feet stand upon Mount Zion, and the gaol is to him like a hill from which he could see beyond this world, and take his fill of the blessedness of that which remains for the Christian. Though in bonds his mind is free, and can wander where it will. ”

“ Our main object is to give a simple and coherent account of a most unusual man—and then we should like to turn to some instructive purpose the peculiarities of his singular history, and no less singular works.
John Bunyan was born at Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628. His father was a brazier or tinker, and brought up his son as a craftsman of like occupation. There is no evidence for the gipsy origin of the house of Bunyan; and though extremely poor, John’s father gave his son such an education as poor men could then obtain for their children. He was sent to school and taught to read and write. ”

“ Folk-tales are scarcely literature, but a question affecting the world’s literature arises out of these Gypsy folk-tales. Was the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress an English peasant or a Gypsy half-breed? The Rev. J. Brown, in John Bunyan: his Life, Times, and Work (1885) , shows that the family of Bunyan—a name spelt in thirty-four different ways—was established in Bedfordshire as early at least as 1199, and that in 1327 a William Bownon was living at Elstow on the very spot where John Bunyan was born in 1628. ”

“ In 1327, the first year of Edward III., one of the same name, probably his descendant, William Boynon, is found actually living at Harrowden, close to the spot which popular tradition names as John Bunyan’s birthplace, and was the owner of property there. We have no further notices of the Bunyans of Elstow till the sixteenth century. We then find them greatly fallen. ”

“ SHANTY BOY In Paul Bunyan’s time, camp entertainment was of, by and for the woodsmen. In Paul Bunyan’s camp there were hypnotic story-tellers, singers who could make you laugh and cry in the same moment, and steppers who could do a breakdown fit to shatter the frame of a bunkhouse. “Ol’ Paul” knew the importance of social pleasures for his loggers, and he made natural provision for them. A good bunkhouse bard was marked by the great logger’s especial favor; many a man who toiled poorly was saved from the lowly life of a farm hand by his ability to dance, whistle and sing. ”

“ The other, from without, was the spiritual ferment of the age, the multiplication of strange sects,--Quakers, Free-Willers, Ranters, Anabaptists, Millenarians,--and the untempered zeal of all classes, like an engine without a balance wheel, when men were breaking away from authority and setting up their own religious standards. Bunyan's life is an epitome of that astonishing religious individualism which marked the close of the English Reformation.
He was born in the little village of Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628, the son of a poor tinker. ”

“ Two eminent Baptists, with whom Bunyan had been engaged in controversy, were in great peril and distress. Danvers was in danger of being hanged; and Kiffin’s grandsons were actually hanged. The tradition is that, during those evil days, Bunyan was forced to disguise himself as a wagoner, and that he preached to his congregation at Bedford in a smock-frock, with a cart-whip in his hand. But soon a great change took place. James II. was at open war with the church, and found it necessary to court the dissenters. Some of the creatures of the government tried to secure the aid of Bunyan. ”

“ A bronze statue, by Boehm, was presented to the town by the duke of Bedford in 1874.
↑ The name, in various forms as Buignon, Buniun, Bonyon or Binyan, appears in the local records of Elstow and the neighbouring parishes at intervals from as far back as 1199. They were small freeholders, but all the property except the cottage had been lost in the time of Bunyan’s grandfather. Bunyan’s own account of his family as the “meanest and most despised of all the families of the land” must be put down to his habitual self-depreciation. Thomas Bunyan had a forge and workshop at Elstow. ”