ABSTRACT
The notion of “a slip between the cup and the lip” comes up time and again in Anthony Trollope’s 1864 novel The Small House at Allington. The platitude serves as a warning against exuberance in the expression of passionate emotions, as in the quotation above. It further serves as a warning against the impetuous, as when Mrs. Dale cautions her daughter: “‘Lily, don’t be in too great a hurry to say anything. You may be mistaken you know; and there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip’” (549). The metaphor itself signifies a problem of timing and of space, the failure of a vessel to find its proper point of contact with the body, and the improper, premature spilling of a liquid. Throughout The Small House, the always-imminent possibility of a “slip” underscores the novel’s fear of those disastrous detours that seem all but inevitable. The slip between the cup and the lip is a parable of narrative as well as sexual misfire in a novel stubbornly at odds with the very formal conventions that shape it.
