Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (1997)
Read Professor Irwin Corey's acceptance speech for Pynchon's 1974 National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow.
Also, have a look at Douglas Kløvedal Lannark's exhaustive documenting of "love" in Gravity's Rainbow.
Whigs
Eric Alan Weinstein posted the following on the Pynchon List regarding Whigs:
The following is quoted from Christopher Lee's This Septred Isle:
Shaftesbury starts the Whigs (derived from the Wigamores, who had marched on Edinburgh) a party named by their rivals, the Tories. A Whig in the 1670's had been slang for "a sour, bigotted, canting money grubbing Scots Presbyterian". Dr Johnson said he always thought that the first Whig had been the Devil. Tory benches satirized the Whigs as typically talking of --- "new light and prophecy; spiritual incomes, indwellings, emanations, manifestations. [The Whig] prays for the King---but with more distictions and mental reservations than an honest man would in taking the covenant." It is this Tory-derived description of the Whigs and their "talk" which Bonk seems to have in mind when he tells Mason to keep his Whig views to Dixon and himself.
Meanwhile, the term Tory, so named by their Whig party rivals,
refered to "Irish papist bandits ravaging estates and manor houses." From
the back benches the Whig party members described their Tory counterparts
as "a monster with an English face, a French heart, and an Irish conscience;
a creature of a large forehead, prodigious mouth, supple hands, and no brains.
They are a sort of wild boar that would root out the Constitution....blow up
the bullwark of our freedom, Parliament, and juries."
Lest we think that the Whigs were merely or purely a party of Irish bashers,
(there were a few bastards, but this would be unfair to pin on all)
they were in fact the party of parliament, the equal rule of law, religious
toleration (as long as that didn't mean a Catholic king on the throne who
would likely take away such liberty and rekindle ties to Rome). England's most
venomous anti-Catholic laws were repealed in 1672, during the cash deal
with France over the Dutch wars which saw New Amsterdam turn into New York (after the King's brother James, himself a Catholic and the Duke of York).
While the Tories were a party that drew a great deal of its support,
initally, from the landed gentry who were more traditionally Royalist,
and more pro-Catholic, the Whigs were less firmly Royalist (in the sense
of the King's actual power, rather than his right to position) and a bit more
in the radical tradition (though most Whigs could not be called very radical).
[Emphasis added]
