Victor Canning: characters, themes and locations

Aunt Felicia (Polycarp's Progress)

See Felicia

Avon Gorge (Polycarp's Progress)

Aunt Felicia's house was beside Clifton Down, "so close that at night Polycarp could hear the cargo boats come hooting up the Avon Gorge".

Bacon, Francis (Polycarp's Progress)

English statesman and essayist. "If Bacon had written an essay entitled 'On reaching Manhood', it is possible that his didactic phrases and Latin quotations might have offered Polycarp some guide as to the right conduct of a young man on attaining his twenty-first birthday."

Bristol Grammar School (Polycarp's Progress)

School that Polycarp has attended.

Cotswold mercers (Polycarp's Progress)

The novel opens with Polycarp stranded between Cheltenham and Oxford, looking out over a track which had been a route for the Cotswold woollen mercers.

Cromwell, Oliver (1599-1658) (Polycarp's Progress)

Polycarp's humger resembled "the mood which set Cromwell's men whitewashing mural paintings and docking shurch spires".

Downs (Polycarp's Progress)

Polycarp lives with his Aunt Felicia in a house beside Clifton Downs in Bristol.

Felicia (Polycarp's Progress)

Presumably Felicia Jarvis, since she is Polycarp's father's sister and we never hear of a husband. She has brought up Polycarp since he was orphaned at the age of six. "She was a thin, bloodless-complexioned woman who always wore high-necked black silk dresses, set off by a long gold chain with a watch hanging like a dull sun at the end, and she had a mole on the left-hand side of her upper lip which advanced three stout hairy feelers in the fashion of a lobster’s antennae."

Gravesend (Polycarp's Progress)

Departure port of the ship on which Polycarp's parents had been travelling to Africa when it was wrecked.

Jarvis, John Polycarp (Polycarp's Progress)

See Polycarp

Marche Militaire (Polycarp's Progress)

See Schubert

Miss Europe (Polycarp's Progress)

Polycarp would sacrifice all the Miss Europes of the last five years for a sausage when he is stranded on the way to Oxford. According to Wikipedia the Miss Europe beauty contest was first held in 1928, seven years before the writing of this novel but five years after the date of this part of the story.

Polycarp (Polycarp's Progress)

The hero of the novel. Named John Polycarp Jarvis by his father who was worried that Christian names were insufficiently Christian, so had given him the middle name of the first bishop of Smyrna. He had borne this name like a cross at school for ten years and then become proud of it.

sausages (Polycarp's Progress)

What the hungry Polycarp values above human and artistic beauty as he walks towards Oxford.

Smyrna (Polycarp's Progress)

The first bishop of Smyrna was Saint Polycarp (c.69-155), hence Polycarp's name.

Start Point (Polycarp's Progress)

Headland with lighthouse in Devon, where the ship carrying Polycarp's parents had been wrecked when he was six.

Schubert (Polycarp's Progress)

"… whistling a shrill tune which he stoutly imagined to be Schubert’s Marche Militaire." (p. 20) Schubert's Marche militaire for piano duet Opus 51 No. 1 D. 733 is one of his best known works and exists in many different arrangements. There are very few references to classical music in Canning's work. Two of them are to Schubert, the other being in Birdcage.

Suspension Bridge (Polycarp's Progress)

When his aunt suggests Polycarp might one day get married, he responds: "I’d sooner jump off the Suspension Bridge with a paper-bag for a parachute." Brunel's bridge crosses the Avon Gorge with a drop of 75 metres and is a frequent site of suicides.

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