An Illustrated Companion to Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited

I have recreated here the extremely enlightening annotations of David Cliffe, whose Evelyn Waugh website—while still accessible on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine—has been offline since 2016. Since then, Mr. Cliffe's work has been available on another blog made to house the seemingly abandoned annotations. The creator of this blog does not identify themself; whoever they are, I (along with, I am sure, plenty of other Brideshead readers) owe them a great deal of gratitude for preserving such a wonderful and helpful resource! Let us, lacking a proper name, call them Mr. Casaubon in honor of the obsessive tendancy to collect and organize information, a tendency I also share! Mr. Casaubon's blog is a lovely thing, but it is not infallible; it has a few typographic errors and, more importantly, is still missing some of the information from Cliffe's blog, most notably the entire "Chronology" section. This website is an attempt to present a more complete version of the original Brideshead Companion. I do not necessarily agree with everything Mr. Cliffe says—see, for example, his seeming insinuation in his Preface notes that the book is not a "homosexual classic"—but I nevertheless endeavour to present his work as it was on his website, though with the inclusion of more images, links to relevant text, and occasional editorial notes.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Right now I am only focused on the Cliffe's Brideshead Companion set of annotations. Perhaps in the future I will also recreate Cliffe's "The Story of Brideshead Revisited" page, which contains a chapter by chapter summary of the book and related stills taken from the 1981 mini-series. Cliffe maintained two versions of his annotations: one for the "British Edition" of the novel—published by Chapman and Hall, London in 1960—and one for the "American Edition"—published by Little, Brown and Company of Boston in 1945. Somewhat confusingly, these two editions contain subtly different versions of the text—you can read more about these differences in Cliffe's introduction to the American Edition. I have decided, for the sake of simplicity and ease of reference, to combine the two versions on this website. As the slight differences between the editions necessitated slight differences in the content of the annotations, there are subtle disparities between the two. I will indicate these differences in the body of the annotations themselves. The page numbers also differ between editions; the page number of the British edition will be given first, followed by the number for the American edition in parentheses, for example: 9 (3). For slight discrepancies between editions—e.g., double quotes in the British edition and single quotes in the American—the British text will be used.

As a sidenote: there is basically no information about David Cliffe online. His name only comes up in reference to his website. If anyone has any information on who he is or where he might be I would be very interested!

This website will also be different from Mr. Casaubon's blog as it is my goal to greatly increase the number of images and illustrations accompanying the text, as well as the amount of hyperlinks to relevant pages. The original website includes some images, which Mr. Casaubon duitifully presents in his blog, but there are plenty of annotations pertaining to visual references made by Waugh which get no accompanying image on either Cliffe's website or Mr. Casaubon's blog. I would hazard a guess that this selectiveness was not due to any sense of editorial discrimination on Cliffe's part, but was rather an inevitable restriction caused by the stark technical limits the website faced in the late 90s / early 00s. Indeed, Cliffe goes so far as to ask potential readers of the "Story" page to "please remember that illustrations take longer to download than text, and as these illustrations are generally of good quality, they take even longer than usual." Some of the images even get as large as 600x900—Lord, protect my modem! Operating under much more liberal bandwith restrictions, my goal is to present a fully illustrated edition of Cliffe's annotations. Waugh makes extensive reference to artistic and architectural movements and motifs—along with numerous mentions of specific artists and locations—and being able to visualize these references helps immeasurably in immersing oneself in the richly imagained and, in the 21st century, quite alien world presented in Brideshead Revisited. When a work of writing is mentioned I may also provide an hyperlink to the text, if I can find a stable source online; if you notice any dead links please let me know!

I am still figuring out how to set up comments on this website. In the meantime, I ask anyone with notes, suggestions, questions, missives, theses, polemics, prophetations, or otherwise to contact at me through my email, which can be found at the bottom of the page!

The Brideshead Revisited Companion: Combined British and American Editions
By David Cliffe