Keys
Situating common experiences with literal keys in the opening paragraph—losing them, having keys don’t seem to open any lock, an unwillingness to part with those that seem to serve no purpose—also the author transform keys into a symbol for a number of things through association. Keys and locks serve as symbols for education, life’s big and small mysteries, memory and others aspects of life which can be metaphorically locked, unlocked or remain eternally closed because of the loss of a key.
Mrs. Grundy
Mrs. Grundy is the symbol of everything that most people think of when they think of Victorian England: prudish morality expressed in the form of priggish superiority. In the author’s hands, Mrs. Grundy—who is not her own creation, but was at the time a kind of British symbol for superiority—become an object of deftly handled ironic scorn.
Alice in Wonderland
The book, not the actual character, is the symbol. In an essay on the subject of children’s literature, Lewis Carroll as the author and Alice in Wonderland as the literary work in question becomes symbol what is wrong with that particular genre. Carroll’s fantasy had been in print for less than fifteen years when the essay appeared in this collection, but had already attained a level of success beyond the norm for most children’s literature. Webster’s explanation for this is what transforms it into the symbolic: the book’s popularity was due to its adult readership rather than the children of England among whom it barely registered more than any other.
Champagne
Champagne is first described in the essay named it as a popular beverage of middling purity, middling strength and middling expense. It is both exhilarating and rather easily digested. It is also, by the second paragraph, a symbol for a certain type of literature also becoming popular among the British public. This type of literature is described—akin to the beverage which inspired the symbolism—as being read without really ever being tasted. Even worse is the long-term effects of champagne literature: readers are not tempted to seek out unique flavors and the popularity of this kind of writing is likely to spread from fiction to non-fiction.
Home
Home is described in the opening essay as a peculiar British privilege which is the envy of foreigners even as they fail to completely understand. By home is specifically meant a house isolated from its neighbors to at least a noticeable degree and which must—and this is non-negotiable—feature a separate front door which opens onto the street. These conditions are soon placed in juxtaposition with the changing face of the British house which has begun to grow horizontally and vertically as buildings connected to each other. Home under these conditions of the past giving way to a changing present become a symbol for a changing England; an England perhaps no longer dominated by houses making it quite so misunderstood and far less the envy of foreigners.
