Richard Dalloway

“ Richard Dalloway.
Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.
"That is all," she said, looking at the fishmonger's. "That is all," she repeated, pausing for a moment at the window of a glove shop where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves. And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves. ”

“ Seriously and solemnly Richard Dalloway got on his hind legs and said that no decent man ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes (besides, the relationship was not one that he approved) .* No decent man ought to let his wife visit a deceased wife’s sister.* Incredible! ”

“ And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider’s thread is blotted with raindrops, and, burdened, sags down. So she slept.
And Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread hesitated at the corner of Conduit Street at the very moment that Millicent Bruton, lying on the sofa, let the thread snap; ”

“ The Dominions and the Mother Country If ‘Health is proportion’ as Bradshaw maintains, where does this leave Millicent, Lady Bruton, Mrs Dalloway’s most ardent monomaniac? She has ‘lost her sense of proportion’ (p. 92) in pursuit of her scheme to export surplus Britons to Canada—so much so, indeed, that ‘Emigration had become, in short, largely Lady Bruton’ (p. 92) . Having nodded off to sleep following the departure of Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread from her lunch-table, Lady Bruton dreams of ‘commanding battalions marching to Canada’ (p. 95) . ”

“ Richard Dalloway's friends; but it was Richard himself who felt that he could not let the poor creature go on standing there all the evening by herself.
"Well, Ellie, and how's the world treating you?" he said in his genial way, and Ellie Henderson, getting nervous and flushing and feeling that it was extraordinarily nice of him to come and talk to her, said that many people really felt the heat more than the cold.
"Yes, they do," said Richard Dalloway. "Yes." ”

“ Miss Brush resented this familiarity intensely. She thought him an underbred fellow. She made Lady Bruton laugh.
Lady Bruton raised the carnations, holding them rather stiffly with much the same attitude with which the General held the scroll in the picture behind her; she remained fixed, tranced. Which was she now, the General's great-grand-daughter? great-great-grand-daughter? Richard Dalloway asked himself. Sir Roderick, Sir Miles, Sir Talbot—that was it. It was remarkable how in that family the likeness persisted in the women. She should have been a general of dragoons herself. ”

“ There are always competing tensions in a Woolf novel. Though Mrs Dalloway foregrounds the psychological lesions and social schisms of London, there is an almost equally strong emphasis on the underlying communality of the city, the latent ‘universal love’ (pp. 57, 125) which Septimus apprehends and in which Woolf passionately believed.27 This two-way pull is embodied in the contrast between the composed, ‘worldly’ (p. 65) , party-giving, well-connected, and snobbish (pp. 103, 161) Mrs Richard Dalloway, and the frail, retiring, unworldly, more considerate, and fragmentary Clarissa. ”

“ And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton.
It was due to Richard; she had never been so happy. Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Bourton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; or seen it between people’s shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. ”

“ Dalloway’s parasol, handled it like a sacred weapon which a Goddess, having acquitted herself honourably in the [Pg 44] field of battle, sheds, and placed it in the umbrella stand.
“Fear no more,” said Clarissa. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun; for the shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to lunch without her made the moment in which she had stood shiver, as a plant on the river-bed feels the shock of a passing oar and shivers: so she rocked: so she shivered. ”

“ For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping. What did the Government mean—Richard Dalloway would know—to do about India? ”

“ Dalloway was able to understand without words.
"I know," she said, actually putting one arm round Rachel's shoulder. "When I was your age I wanted too. No one understood until I met Richard. He gave me all I wanted. He's man and woman as well." Her eyes rested upon Mr. Dalloway, leaning upon the rail, still talking. "Don't think I say that because I'm his wife—I see his faults more clearly than I see any one else's. What one wants in the person one lives with is that they should keep one at one's best. I often wonder what I've done to be so happy!" ”

“ Like Lady Bruton, Bradshaw is a hereditarian eugenicist in that he believes that ‘unsocial impulses’ such as those he discerns in Septimus are ‘bred more than anything by the lack of good blood’ (p. 86) . He has ‘a natural respect for breeding’ (p. 83) in the same way that Richard Dalloway admires Lady Bruton, a ‘well set-up old wom [a] n of pedigree’ (p. 89) , a ‘strong martial woman, well nourished, well descended’ (p. 92) , and would like to research her family history. Yet is Dalloway’s own family as racially and genetically pure as he would wish it to be? ”

“ Richard merely thought it foolish of her to like excitement when she knew it was bad for her heart. It was childish, he thought. And both were quite wrong. What she liked was simply life.
"That's what I do it for," she said, speaking aloud, to life.
Since she was lying on the sofa, cloistered, exempt, the presence of this thing which she felt to be so obvious became physically existent; with robes of sound from the street, sunny, with hot breath, whispering, blowing out the blinds. But suppose Peter said to her, "Yes, yes, but your parties—what's the sense of your parties?" ”

“ Some details turn out to be significant, some do not, and with others it is impossible to say. Who is the typist, for instance, whom Clarissa hears on returning to her house from Bond Street (p. 25) ? It is most likely Miss Kilman, typing up work assignments for Elizabeth, or Elizabeth, typing up her response to such assignments, because Clarissa would seem to have no need of a typist and Richard Dalloway’s would almost certainly have been based at the House of Commons. And just how Clarissa and Peter Walsh respectively get home from Bond Street so quickly ”

“ Here he began searching in his pockets and eventually discovered a card, which he planked down on the table before Rachel. On it she read, “Mr. and Mrs. Richard Dalloway, 23 Browne Street, Mayfair.”
“Mr. Richard Dalloway,” continued Vinrace, “seems to be a gentleman who thinks that because he was once a member of Parliament, and his wife’s the daughter of a peer, they can have what they like for the asking. They got round poor little Jackson anyhow. ”

“ But to be frank (and she felt that Peter was an old friend, a real friend—did absence matter? did distance matter? She had often wanted to write to him, but torn it up, yet felt he understood, for people understand without things being said, as one realizes growing old, and old she was, had been that afternoon to see her sons at Eton, where they had the mumps) , to be quite frank, then, how could Clarissa have done it?—married Richard Dalloway? a sportsman, a man who cared only for dogs. ”

“ When have you ever encouraged a living artist? Or bought his best work? Why are you all so ugly and so servile? Here the servants are human beings. They talk to one as if they were equals. As far as I can tell there are no aristocrats.”
Perhaps it was the mention of aristocrats that reminded her of Richard Dalloway and Rachel, for she ran on with the same penful to describe her niece. ”

“ He was already half-way to the House of Commons, to his Armenians, his Albanians, having settled her on the sofa, looking at his roses. And people would say, “Clarissa Dalloway is spoilt.” She cared much more for her roses than for the Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice (she had heard Richard say so over and over again) —no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it the Armenians? but she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?) —the only flowers she could bear to see cut. But Richard was already at the House of Commons ”

“ Dalloway turned to Willoughby and began:
"What I find so tiresome about the sea is that there are no flowers in it. Imagine fields of hollyhocks and violets in mid-ocean! How divine!"
"But somewhat dangerous to navigation," boomed Richard, in the bass, like the bassoon to the flourish of his wife's violin. "Why, weeds can be bad enough, can't they, Vinrace? I remember crossing in the Mauretania once, and saying to the Captain—Richards—did you know him?—'Now tell me what perils you really dread most for your ship. ”

“ And Richard and Elizabeth were rather glad it was over, but Richard was proud of his daughter. And he had not meant to tell her, but he could not help telling her. He had looked at her, he said, and he had wondered, Who is that lovely girl? and it was his daughter! That did make her happy. But her poor dog was howling.
"Richard has improved. You are right," said Sally. "I shall go and talk to him. I shall say goodnight. What does the brain matter," said Lady Rosseter, getting up, "compared with the heart?"
"I will come," said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? ”

“ But Lady Bradshaw anticipated her.
"We are shockingly late, dear Mrs. Dalloway, we hardly dared to come in," she said.
And Sir William, who looked very distinguished, with his grey hair and blue eyes, said yes; they had not been able to resist the temptation. He was talking to Richard about that Bill probably, which they wanted to get through the Commons. Why did the sight of him, talking to Richard, curl her up? He looked what he was, a great doctor. A man absolutely at the head of his profession, very powerful, rather worn. ”

“ He had a sudden revelation. "She will marry that man," he said to himself. He didn't even know his name.
For of course it was that afternoon, that very afternoon, that Dalloway had come over; and Clarissa called him "Wickham"; that was the beginning of it all. Somebody had brought him over; and Clarissa got his name wrong. She introduced him to everybody as Wickham. At last he said "My name is Dalloway!"—that was his first view of Richard—a fair young man, rather awkward, sitting on a deck-chair, and blurting out "My name is Dalloway!" Sally got hold of it ”

“ Wilde was asked by the prosecuting counsel: ‘Have you ever adored a young man madly?’ and upon being pressed on the matter Wilde answered, ‘No. The whole idea was borrowed from Shakespeare, I regret to say—yes, from Shakespeare’s sonnets.’ Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987) , 422. This is almost certainly why, in the 1890s, Richard Dalloway does not approve of them.
No decent man . ”

“ How much she wanted it—that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was silly to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves; but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand) for no one was ever for a second taken in. ”

“ Here she is mending her dress; mending her dress as usual, he thought; here she's been sitting all the time I've been in India; mending her dress; playing about; going to parties; running to the House and back and all that, he thought, growing more and more irritated, more and more agitated, for there's nothing in the world so bad for some women as marriage, he thought; and politics; and having a Conservative husband, like the admirable Richard. So it is, so it is, he thought, shutting his knife with a snap.
"Richard's very well. Richard's at a Committee," said Clarissa. ”

“ But she is too cold, he thought; sewing, with her scissors; Daisy would look ordinary beside Clarissa. And she would think me a failure, which I am in their sense, he thought; in the Dalloways’ sense. Oh yes, he had no doubt about that; he was a failure, compared with all this—the inlaid table, the mounted paper-knife, the dolphin and the candlesticks, the chair-covers and the old valuable English tinted prints—he was a [Pg 65] failure! I detest the smugness of the whole affair he thought; Richard’s doing, not Clarissa’s; save that she married him. ”