"The most intense curiosity and excitement prevailed, and though the weather was uncertain, enormous masses of densely packed people lined the road, shouting and waving hats and handkerchiefs as we flew by them"
About this Quote
Crowd fever is the real protagonist here: a rolling, contagious force that turns a shaky day into a public holiday and converts mere passage along a road into spectacle. Kemble’s sentence moves like the carriage (or coach) it describes - propelled by velocity and momentum, with the people reduced to a single, surging body. “Enormous masses” and “densely packed” don’t just report numbers; they press the reader into the crush, making celebrity feel physical, almost architectural.
The phrasing is deceptively neutral, but it carries an actress’s acute awareness of staging. This is performance without a stage: the road becomes a runway, the travelers “flew,” and the crowd supplies the sound design - “shouting” - and the props - hats and handkerchiefs. Those items matter. A waved hat is masculine, public, and boisterous; a handkerchief is intimate, domestic, and coded feminine. Together they blur class and gender into one unified language of recognition. It’s early fandom as choreography.
The weather line is the sly tell. “Though the weather was uncertain” is a small shrug that underscores how little nature, decorum, or inconvenience can compete with the hunger to witness. Subtext: the crowd’s devotion is irrational by design, and Kemble knows it. She’s both impressed and faintly amused, catching the thrill of being the object that makes strangers synchronize their bodies, their noise, their symbols. In an era when public life was one of the few arenas for mass emotion, this kind of attention isn’t just flattering; it’s power, briefly lent to a performer passing at speed.
The phrasing is deceptively neutral, but it carries an actress’s acute awareness of staging. This is performance without a stage: the road becomes a runway, the travelers “flew,” and the crowd supplies the sound design - “shouting” - and the props - hats and handkerchiefs. Those items matter. A waved hat is masculine, public, and boisterous; a handkerchief is intimate, domestic, and coded feminine. Together they blur class and gender into one unified language of recognition. It’s early fandom as choreography.
The weather line is the sly tell. “Though the weather was uncertain” is a small shrug that underscores how little nature, decorum, or inconvenience can compete with the hunger to witness. Subtext: the crowd’s devotion is irrational by design, and Kemble knows it. She’s both impressed and faintly amused, catching the thrill of being the object that makes strangers synchronize their bodies, their noise, their symbols. In an era when public life was one of the few arenas for mass emotion, this kind of attention isn’t just flattering; it’s power, briefly lent to a performer passing at speed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Travel |
|---|
More Quotes by Fanny
Add to List
