James Wood

Big Ben quarters the hours.

Time is, as Woolf puts it, ratified by Greenwich.

And a phrase she uses three times in the book is,

The leaden circles dissolved in the air.

Once Big Ben strikes, the vibrations of the sound go out from the clock, out through Westminster where the Dalloways live.

And then we might think of the novel's portrait of a certain kind of English society and power as a series of concentric circles.

If you have this kind of power, then you have the kind of power that Keynes is talking about, to order things up, to prospect in other countries.

Messages, as Woolf puts it, were passing from the fleet to the admiralty in this kind of London.

And as Mrs. Dalloway goes out to buy flowers for the party she will have later on in the day, so she sees a mysterious car, a grand car with dove-grey upholstery that seems to be slowly making its way through the nicer parts of London.

Who is in it?

Is it the Queen?

Is it the Prime Minister?

Some Duke?

Someone of importance, that's for sure.

But what about this marvelous description as the prime minister's car, let's say it's the prime minister's car, passes one of the gentleman's clubs in St.

James's.

It's the club White's.

And we just get this little description.

Wolf sort of goes inside the club.

The white busts and the little tables in the background, covered with copies of the Tatler and siphons of soda water, seemed to approve, that's to say, seemed to approve of whoever was in the car, seemed to indicate the flowing corn and the manor houses of England.