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Jane Bramble
Bill Bramble is the wife of Jane, the father of Harold, and a professional pugilist, or boxer, who fights under the name Young Porky. In the past, he enjoyed his reputation as an unpredictable fighter with a powerful left hook, confidently boasting that he could beat anyone in London “weighing eight stone four” in a twenty-round contest. Despite his violent vocation, Bill is “the mildest and most obliging of men” in his personal life. He lets his wife name their son and thinks of Harold as being a league above himself. Bill firmly resolves to quit boxing lest Harold learn the truth about his rough profession, although he fears the subsequent wrath of his wife and his trainer, Jerry. He plans to retire and become a boxing instructor for boys’ schools or colleges, where his record of respectability and sobriety could be rewarded with a cushy, well-regarded position—and where, ironically, many young men will want boxing lessons.
Bill Bramble Quotes in Keeping it from Harold
The Keeping it from Harold quotes below are all either spoken by Bill Bramble or refer to Bill Bramble. 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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Keeping it from Harold
Quotes
And then Harold had come into his life, and changed him into a furtive practiser of shady deeds. Before, he had gone about the world with a match-box full of press-notices, which he would extract with a pin and read to casual acquaintances. Now, he quailed at the sight of his name in print, so thoroughly had he become imbued with the necessity of keeping it from Harold.
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“He’s seen the error of his ways,” cried Percy, the resilient. “That’s what he’s gone and done. At the eleventh hour it has been vouchsafed to me to snatch the brand from the burning. Oh! I have waited for this joyful moment. I have watched for it. I—”
“Goodness knows I’ve never liked your profession, Bill, but there is this to be said for it, that it’s earned you good money and made it possible for us to give Harold as good an education as any duke ever had, I’m sure. And you know yourself you said that the five hundred pounds you were going to get if you beat this Murphy, and even if you lost it would be a hundred and twenty, was going to be a blessing, because it would let us finish him off proper and give him a better start in life than you or me ever had.”
“There’s a fellow at our school who goes about swanking in the most rotten way because he once got Bombardier Wells’s autograph. Fellows look up to him most awfully, and all the time they might have been doing it to me. That’s what makes me so jolly sick. How long do you suppose they’d go on calling me ‘Goggles’ if they knew that you were my father?”
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Bill Bramble Quotes in Keeping it from Harold
The Keeping it from Harold quotes below are all either spoken by Bill Bramble or refer to Bill Bramble. 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:
).
Keeping it from Harold
Quotes
And then Harold had come into his life, and changed him into a furtive practiser of shady deeds. Before, he had gone about the world with a match-box full of press-notices, which he would extract with a pin and read to casual acquaintances. Now, he quailed at the sight of his name in print, so thoroughly had he become imbued with the necessity of keeping it from Harold.
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Explanation and Analysis:
“He’s seen the error of his ways,” cried Percy, the resilient. “That’s what he’s gone and done. At the eleventh hour it has been vouchsafed to me to snatch the brand from the burning. Oh! I have waited for this joyful moment. I have watched for it. I—”
“Goodness knows I’ve never liked your profession, Bill, but there is this to be said for it, that it’s earned you good money and made it possible for us to give Harold as good an education as any duke ever had, I’m sure. And you know yourself you said that the five hundred pounds you were going to get if you beat this Murphy, and even if you lost it would be a hundred and twenty, was going to be a blessing, because it would let us finish him off proper and give him a better start in life than you or me ever had.”
“There’s a fellow at our school who goes about swanking in the most rotten way because he once got Bombardier Wells’s autograph. Fellows look up to him most awfully, and all the time they might have been doing it to me. That’s what makes me so jolly sick. How long do you suppose they’d go on calling me ‘Goggles’ if they knew that you were my father?”
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