Epigraphs are like little appetizers to the great entrée of a story. They illuminate important aspects of the story, and they get us headed in the right direction.
And others came … Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions, and veiled Destinies,
Splendours and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs,
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes,
Came in slow pomp; – the moving pomp might seem
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream.
- Percy Bysshe Shelly, Adonais, canto 13
What's Up With the Epigraph?
The title is derived from the poem that makes up the epigraph of Splendors and Glooms since it speaks of splendors and glooms (along with a bunch of other things). There's a sense of polar opposites in the epigraph with things like splendors versus glooms, sorrow versus pleasure, and hopes versus fears. The idea is that these dichotomies exist in our lives—things are not always just good or just bad—and this is definitely the case for the characters in Splendors and Glooms. Lizzie Rose is both a poor orphan and a young lady, and Parsefall is both a dirty street urchin (and pickpocket) and a master puppeteer. They are all multifaceted and complex.