Mrs. Dalloway has me thinking of London. I've traveled to Asia and around the U.S. but I've never made the trip to the United Kingdom or anywhere in Europe. Virginia Woolf does an excellent job of creating a world within the city of London by using great detail and evoking strong sensory cues.

As Peter Walsh sits in Regents Park after seeing Clarissa Dalloway and landing in London from India, he recalls his memories of the park as a child. He also thinks about his time as an adolescent at Bourton and the stinging memory of Clarissa rejecting him for Mr. Dalloway. He falls asleep on a bench briefly in the park. A bench that might look like this:

"He looked for an empty seat. He did not want to be bothered (feeling a little drowsy as he did) by people asking him the time." This imagine helps to visualize Peter snoring on this sturdy metal bench in London's most famous park. A park that was around before his time and stayed around after his time. Great Britain, more so than the United States has a strong sense of longevity and tradition. The characters throughout the novel seem to have a love for their country. Even Peter Walsh, who admits to hating the army and patriotism seems to paradoxically take pride in England. "One had to respect it; one might laugh; but one had to respect it, he thought" (p.77).

The red coats and tall black caps may look silly today and to Peter Walsh, they may have been silly then too, but they represent a tradition of British military might that famously protected (and suppressed opposition to) an empire so big, the sun never set on it. 

In the picture below, there is an artist's rendering of the gardens in Regent's park around the time that Mrs. Dalloway was written. "There was Regent's Park. Yes. As a child he had walked in Regent's Park--odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coming back to me--the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps..." (p. 83). Everything looks proper and tamed. The hedges are all grooms and the walkways are carefully fenced off. Victorian England was a time of order and strictness in many facets of life.

Also interesting to me because I was in the "Birds" group was the relationship of sparrows and Septimus. Sparrows are small, brown birds that live in large groups. Septimus believes that the sparrows are speaking to him so here is a audio clip of the little birds tweeting here. "A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death" (p.17).