Pomp and Circumstance [antikvár]

AUTHOR'S NOTE Every writer frets about the authenticity of his characters' dialogue as, at the same time, he wants to protect the English language by putting it down on paper correctly. As William Safire pointed out in the New York Times: do writers wish to contribute to the slow strangulation of the beautiful English language by writing it the way even the best-educated actually speak it? When researching the speech patterns of the antebellum slaves, I found an excellent source of how the slaves actually talked. During the Depression, the Federal Writers' Project, part of the WPA, dispatched interviewers to seek out and question the approximately two thousand former slaves who were still alive in America during the mid-1930's. Their reminiscences, recorded in Bullwhip Days, edited by James Mellon, are not only fascinating and haunting but alsó give us today an accurate "recording" of how the slaves talked more than 130 years ago. Although I have eliminated such things as "Ah" for "I" and "gwine" for "going," I will stand by what I have written as being accurate. In the transliteration of Hindi words, I was faced with a bewildering variety of spellings. To track through this maze, I relied on what seemed to be the most consistent orthography. I did the same with the names of towns. From our modern viewpoint, it is easy to poke fun at the Victorian Age and the woman who gave it its name. But the more one gets to know Queen Victoria, the better one likes her. Even her severest biographer, Lytton Strachey, ended up falling under her spell. Oddly, while most of her subjects were what we would call racists, the Queen herself was not one. I have read many of her letters. There are alsó dozens of quotes in Lady Longford's excellent biography. Her epistolary style was idiosyncratic but, somehow, quite wonderful. She of course used the royal "we" and referred to herself in the third person: for example, "The Queen thinks . . . "The Queen believes . . . etc. I have done my best to imitate faithfully her style in this book.