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‘Gordon Comstock’ was a pretty bloody name, but then Gordon came from a pretty bloody family. The ‘Gordon’ part of it was Scotch, of course. The prevalence of such names nowadays is merely a part of the Scotchification of England that has been going on these last fifty years. ‘Gordon’, ‘Colin’, ‘Malcolm’, ‘Donald’ these are the gifts of Scotland to the world, along with golf, whisky, porridge, and the works of Barrie and Stevenson.
The Comstocks belonged to the most dismal of all classes, the middle-class, the landless gentry. In their miserable poverty they had not even the snobbish consolation of regarding themselves as an ‘old’ family fallen on evil days, for they were not an ‘old’ family at all, merely one of those families which rose on the wave of Victorian prosperity and then sa
