I was listening to Radio Four’s serialisation of the Palliser novels while doing the washing-up after Sunday lunch, and I heard Mr Wharton saying that he preferred Arthur Fletcher to Ferdinand Lopez because he had a ‘proper job’. (We’re in The Prime Minister; it does rattle along, somewhat to the detriment of the characterisation.) That’s funny, I thought, it doesn’t sound like Trollope.
Blow me if a few minutes later we didn’t get the Duke of Omnium complaining that being prime minister was turning out not to be a ‘proper job’ like being chancellor of the exchequer. So as soon as I had finished chasing the teaspoon that got away round the sink, I dried my hands and went to check.
Sure enough the word job was used in neither passage. (It might turn up somewhere else — it is hard to confirm an absence, unless a book is on a word-searchable ‘computer jobbie’ as one might say.)
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