- Jul 2021
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icla2021.jonreeve.com icla2021.jonreeve.com
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“The Last Rose of Summer”
This song "The Last Rose of Summer" to Sergeant Cuff like the Robinson Crusoe to Betteredge.
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He had seen her before either I or the gardener had seen her, though we knew which way to look, and he didn’t. I began to think him rather a quicker man than he appeared to be at first sight.
Sergeant Cuff diffs from his appearance is someone with a profound insight
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I began my life among them in my father’s nursery garden, and I shall end my life among them, if I can. Yes. One of these days (please God) I shall retire from catching thieves, and try my hand at growing roses. There will be grass walks, Mr. Gardener, between my beds
The word "Rose" might be frequently pair up with Sergeant Cuff
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a grizzled, elderly man, so miserably lean that he looked as if he had not got an ounce of flesh on his bones in any part of him. He was dressed all in decent black, with a white cravat round his neck. His face was as sharp as a hatchet, and the skin of it was as yellow and dry and withered as an autumn leaf. His eyes, of a steely light grey, had a very disconcerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself. His walk was soft; his voice was melancholy; his long lanky fingers were hooked like claws. He might have been a parson, or an undertaker–or anything else you like, except what he really was. A more complete opposite to Superintendent Seegrave than Sergeant Cuff, and a less comforting officer to look at, for a family in distress, I defy
Sergeant Cuff' appearance is different from expectation.
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- Sep 2020
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icla2020b.jonreeve.com icla2020b.jonreeve.com
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white moss rose is all the better for not being budded on the dog-rose
This has been mentioned repeatedly by Cuff at this point. Roses have classically been used as a symbol of nobility in England. "Budding" may refer to the mingling or mixing between two different classes of people. If we understand Cuff's words through this interpretation, he is arguing for the "purity" of nobility, or strict adherence to class stratification.
Rosanna's name can also be construed as a reference to the roses in Cuff's argument. By "budding" with nobility, Rosanna has become entangled in an unfortunate event for which she would have been "all the better for not" being involved at all.
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Why Superintendent Seegrave should have appeared to be several sizes smaller than life, on being presented to Sergeant Cuff, I can’t undertake to explain. I can only state the fact. They retired together; and remained a weary long time shut up from all mortal intrusion.
It's unclear why for the moment, but there are several references to death here. See"grave", "smaller than life", "undertake", "retire", "weary long time", "mortal". My initial guess is that Seegrave will be witness to a death given the pun on his name. As for Cuff, it remains to be seen what role he will have in the story, but this passage does hint at some entanglement with death at some point.
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- Jul 2018
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course-computational-literary-analysis.netlify.com course-computational-literary-analysis.netlify.com
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There is here, moral, if not legal, evidence, that the murder was committed by the Indians.
This is a very interesting take on "evidence" as being moral if not legal by Sergeant Cuff. It makes me question exactly what he means by that if there is a way to use computational analysis to find out. We could perhaps start by parsing out "evidence" throughout the text with a machine learning algorithm to help he define evidence and then, going forward, device a way (maybe with sentiment analysis) to determine moral evidence from legal evidence.
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I propose to tell you–in the first place–what is known of the manner in which your cousin met his death; appending to the statement such inferences and conclusions as we are justified (according to my opinion) in drawing from the facts
Sergeant Cuff's narrative is very straight forward and to the point compared to the others, especially Miss Clack. Because Cuff's intention in this narrative is to relay facts to Franklin, and also because he is a detective, Cuff uses few unnecessary adjectives or "flowery" language. I would be interested in running a POS (Parts of Speech) analysis on Cuff's narrative and compare it to Clack and Betteredge, as well as the rest of the text.
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On the day before, Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite arrived at his father’s house, and asked (as I know from Mr. Ablewhite, senior, himself) for a loan of three hundred pounds. Mark the sum; and remember at the same time, that the half-yearly payment to the young gentleman was due on the twenty-fourth of the month. Also, that the whole of the young gentleman’s fortune had been spent by his Trustee, by the end of the year ’forty-seven.
The facts elicited by the inquiry were stated by Sergeant Cuff in the most discreet and circumspect manner. The Sergeant, though placidly retired at this moment, still retained his habitual discreetness when writing his report. He took a particular attention to the due dates and sum of money, which, evidently were the keys to unravel the mystery shrouding Mr.Godfrey Ablewhite's conducts.
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Inquiring at the hotel, I received the necessary directions for finding the Sergeant’s cottage. It was approached by a quiet bye-road, a little way out of the town, and it stood snugly in the middle of its own plot of garden ground, protected by a good brick wall at the back and the sides, and by a high quickset hedge in front. The gate, ornamented at the upper part by smartly-painted trellis-work, was locked. After ringing at the bell, I peered through the trellis-work, and saw the great Cuff’s favourite flower everywhere; blooming in his garden, clustering over his door, looking in at his windows. Far from the crimes and the mysteries of the great city, the illustrious thief-taker was placidly living out the last Sybarite years of his life, smothered in roses!
Right here, the tenderness of Sergeant Cuff emerged again. The adjectives used to describe his cottage and his lifestyle could be extracted to delineate a clearer profile of the Sergeant.
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Shall we say that she walked through the water from this point till she got to that ledge of rocks behind us, and came back the same way, and then took to the beach again where those two heel marks are still left?
I find Sergeant Cuffs monologue at this point in the narrative very interesting. He posits his analysis about what occurred as questions to Mr. Betteredge in a way that also describe the scene to the reader without being overly expository. This device is used frequently throughout the narrative. I would be interested to run an analysis on Cuffs dialogue throughout the narrative to see how often he uses this type of questioning inform his detective work. It could be accomplished by analyzing how many question marks occur in his dialogue compared to other punctuation.
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You are an observant man–did you notice anything strange in any of the servants (making due allowance, of course, for fright and fluster), after the loss of the Diamond was found out? Any particular quarrel among them? Any one of them not in his or her usual spirits? Unexpectedly out of temper, for instance? or unexpectedly taken ill?”
This series of questions Sergeant Cuff fired at Betteredge demonstrated his clairvoyance. The examples of anomalies after a theft came easily enough to him, showing the expertise he had in his profession. And the mention of "unexpectedly taken ill" immediately reminded the reader and Mr.Betteredge of Rosanna's implication in all these plots.
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While we were waiting, Sergeant Cuff looked through the evergreen arch on our left, spied out our rosery, and walked straight in, with the first appearance of anything like interest that he had shown yet. To the gardener’s astonishment, and to my disgust, this celebrated policeman proved to be quite a mine of learning on the trumpery subject of rose-gardens.
The unconcealed passion the Sergeant Cuff had for the rosery garden initially impressed Betteredge as "trumpery", and evidently inappropriate of a man of his profession. Curiously enough, further reading reveals that whenever the detective was onto some clues, he would stare out the window, and whistle the song "The Last Rose of Summer" to himself. The Sergeant's affection for roses here not only did not impede his "horrid clearness", but symbolized his tenderness for human infirmity, from my perspective. Just like the roses, human nature is lovable and fragile, but with thorns that occasionally stings. As a detective, Cuff didn't have that much opportunity to execute his tenderness, maybe the roses is a vent for this.
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“This is a miserable world,” says the Sergeant.
Sergeant Cuff is total downer. His dialogue tends to be really negative. I would be interested in doing a text analysis of the words his character uses to see the frequency of words with a negative connotation in comparison to the neutral and positive words used.
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