Mrs Beeton’s Christmas Pudding Exercise 1 – key and notes
1 a bygone age
2 Firstly, it immediately reminds you of a past age, when people had servants and domestic staff, and secondly, it is amusing because it is such a different world from the one we know today.
3 It is the word ‘spirit‘ taken in two senses – firstly, the man teases the woman, asking her where her Christmas spirit is. The Christmas spirit is a sense of generosity, kindness, and celebration.
Spirits are strong distilled alcoholic drinks such as rum, whisky, vodka, brandy. Sometimes people buy some bottles of these especially for Christmas – so you could call them your Christmas spirits ……… see below …..
The woman replies ”Cook’s drunk it‘. She’s conjuring up an image of the cook drunk over the food in the kitchen. It’s because of this wordplay on the word ‘spirit’ that the couple laugh.
4 As 3 shillings and 6 pence. 3sh and 6d, 3/6d, 3s-6d.
There were twenty (20) shillings per pound. The shilling was subdivided into twelve (12) pennies. The penny was further sub-divided into two halfpennies or four farthings (quarter pennies). The symbols ‘s’ for shilling and ‘d’ for pence derive from the Latin coins solidus and denarius used in the Middle Ages. The ‘£’ sign developed from the ‘l’ for libra – the Latin for a pound in weight or money. A guinea was £1-1s-0d ( £1/1/- ) = one pound and one shilling = 21 shillings (which is £1.05 in today’s money).
crackly – a series of minute cracking sounds – here caused by slight cracks on the surface of the gramophone record
poke fun at – to tease or make fun of
a cut-glass accent – an upper-class accent
"Chocks away!" – RAF term for ‘Let’s go!" – A chock is a wedge or block placed against a wheel or rounded object to prevent it moving or to support it. One version of the song also has ‘Bottoms up!" which means everyone drinks from their glass, so you see the bottom of everyone’s wine / whisky glass. It’s an encouragement to drink. Here it’s again a way of making people laugh, and feel in the party spirit.
The French expression a ‘coup de grâce‘ exists – a merciful blow to finish something off, to kill it / him probably originates from the language of tournaments – but a coup de gras does not – it’s invented. It pokes fun at the English person’s mispronunciation of foreign languages. The word ‘gras’ means ‘fat’, nothing like ‘mercy’!