Jan 7, 2009

The Japanese Quince | Galsworthy's, Japanese Quince

Cervo is an educator at Franklin Pierce College, in Rindge, New Hampshire. In the following essay, he delineates the similarities between Galsworthy's '"The Japanese Quince'' and the works of Sir Thomas' 1716 book Christian Morals.

John Galsworthy (1867-1933) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932. He had been educated at Harrow and Oxford. He graduated from Oxford with honors in law. It is therefore highly likely that he not only read Sir Thomas Browne, whose works were considered of crucial importance in the liberal arts program of that day, but brought a fine and attentive mind to his perusal of Sir Thomas's writings. In what follows, I shall explicate the word "five," as it appears in Galsworthy's short story "The Japanese Quince" (first published in 1910), within the "Trismegistan" context of Sir Thomas's...