A correspondent writes:
So I’m reading a short novel called The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill and came across this description of one of the characters: “…white-handed and white-shirted, and gentleman to the very purse of him…”
My first (and so far only) assumption is that since one’s stash of money was so precious, something that must be guarded at all times, analogically his “gentleman-ness” was the most sacred part of his being, his inner core, and therefore most important for him to maintain. But I may be off base here.
Ever come across this use of “purse” before? Google didn’t help me.
I had not, so I thought I’d place the question before the Varied Reader. Ideas? (I might add that The Big Bow Mystery has apparently been called “the first full-length locked room mystery”; maybe I should give it a try.)
A half-century earlier, Carlyle in The French Revolution had similarly suggested that the purse was at some folks’ inner core:
And yet, in those days, for men that have a country, what a glow of patriotism burns in many a heart; penetrating inwards to the very purse! So early as the 7th of August, a Don Patriotique, ‘Patriotic Gift of jewels to a considerable extent,’ has been solemnly made by certain Parisian women; and solemnly accepted with honourable mention. Whom forthwith all the world takes to imitating and emulating. Patriotic Gifts, always with some heroic eloquence, which the President must answer and the Assembly listen to, flow in from far and near: in such number that the honourable mention can only be performed in ‘lists published at stated epochs.’ Each gives what he can: the very cordwainers have behaved munificently; one landed proprietor gives a forest; fashionable society gives its shoe-buckles, takes cheerfully to shoeties. Unfortunate-females give what they ‘have amassed in loving.'[1] The smell of all cash, as Vespasian thought, is good.
penetrating inwards to the very purse!
Aha, I’ll bet Zangwill was deliberately alluding to Carlyle. Excellent find!