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Boy Mulcaster
Mr. Samgrass is a Professor at Oxford, and a friend of Lady Marchmain. He becomes Sebastian’s guardian after Sebastian is expelled from Oxford for drunkenness, and is paid by Lady Marchmain to take Sebastian on a historical tour of Europe. Mr. Samgrass is Catholic, and is initially hired by Lady Marchmain to research and write a book about her older brother, Ned, who was killed in World War I. During this process, Mr. Samgrass ingratiates himself with the family, and Lady Marchmain allows him to keep tabs on Charles and Sebastian at university and report back to her about their behavior. Mr. Samgrass is a sycophantic character and a “fraud.” He takes advantage of Lady Marchmain and Sebastian. On their tour around Europe, Sebastian runs away, and Mr. Samgrass does not tell Lady Marchmain because this would spoil his holiday. Instead, he allows Sebastian to stay in Istanbul with Anthony, only meeting up with him before they return to Brideshead for Christmas. Charles and Julia view Mr. Samgrass is a callous social climber and a “fraud” because he lies to Lady Marchmain. He is insufferable company, and everyone who meets him is bored and annoyed by him. Eventually Julia becomes irritated by his presence at Brideshead and tells her mother the truth about his and Sebastian’s time abroad. Charles also believes Mr. Samgrass is a voyeur and describes him as a “Victorian tourist.” (The Victorians famously collected and catalogued history but often did not show much respect for the cultures from which this history came.) Mr. Samgrass is fascinated by the past, and by the scandal and strife in the Marchmain family, and uses this to his own advantage and for his own entertainment without much consideration for the people involved.
Mr. Samgrass Quotes in Brideshead Revisited
The Brideshead Revisited quotes below are all either spoken by Mr. Samgrass or refer to Mr. Samgrass. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 1, Chapter 5
Quotes
He claimed to love the past, but I always felt that he thought all the splendid company, living or dead, with whom he associated slightly absurd; it was Mr. Samgrass who was real, the rest were an insubstantial pageant. He was the Victorian tourist, solid and patronizing, for whose amusement these foreign things were paraded.
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Mr. Samgrass’s deft editorship had assembled and arranged a curiously homogeneous little body of writing—poetry, letters, scraps of a journal, an unpublished essay or two, which all exhaled the same high-spirited, serious, chivalrous, other-worldly air and the letters from their contemporaries, written after their deaths, all in varying degrees of articulateness, told the same tale of men who were, in all the full flood of academic and athletic success, of popularity and the promise of great rewards ahead, seen somehow as set apart from their fellows, garlanded victims, devoted to the sacrifice.
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Mr. Samgrass Quotes in Brideshead Revisited
The Brideshead Revisited quotes below are all either spoken by Mr. Samgrass or refer to Mr. Samgrass. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part 1, Chapter 5
Quotes
He claimed to love the past, but I always felt that he thought all the splendid company, living or dead, with whom he associated slightly absurd; it was Mr. Samgrass who was real, the rest were an insubstantial pageant. He was the Victorian tourist, solid and patronizing, for whose amusement these foreign things were paraded.
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Mr. Samgrass’s deft editorship had assembled and arranged a curiously homogeneous little body of writing—poetry, letters, scraps of a journal, an unpublished essay or two, which all exhaled the same high-spirited, serious, chivalrous, other-worldly air and the letters from their contemporaries, written after their deaths, all in varying degrees of articulateness, told the same tale of men who were, in all the full flood of academic and athletic success, of popularity and the promise of great rewards ahead, seen somehow as set apart from their fellows, garlanded victims, devoted to the sacrifice.
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