There
are no less than _three_ different tasty tidbits lurking in the shadows of
Letter 81 dated 2/9/13.
LADY
WILLIAMS’S SICKNESS: First we have this:
“Lady
W. has taken to her old tricks of ill-health again, & is sent for a couple
of months among her friends. Perhaps she may make THEM sick.”
This
Lady Williams was the second wife of Captain (later Admiral) Sir Thomas
Williams, whose first wife had been born Jane Cooper. Many Janeites will recall
that Jane Cooper was the brave first cousin of JA and CEA who had caused the
three of them (including Jane who was very very sick) from illness at age 7 at
the boarding school in Southampton, by managing to pass word to her mother
about the neglect of the seriousness of the girls’s illnessese there. And then
poor Jane Cooper Williams, when not long married, had died in a road accident
in 1798, leaving the Captain a widower who eventually married a woman who was
perhaps one of JA’s real life models for Mrs. Bennet and Mary Musgrove, her
greatest female hypochondriacs.
If it
appears that I am leaping to a conclusion based on scant evidence, it’s not so.
That passage made me curious and a quick check of Le Faye’s index showed me
that the second Lady Williams _really_ was not a favorite of Jane Austen, to put it mildly, over a period
of years. The above quoted passage is Exhibit B to that effect, but here are
Exhibits A and C, from letters written by JA to CEA before AND after Letter 67:
First Letter
67, Jan. 30, 1809: “A letter from Hamstall gives us the history
of Sir Tho. Williams’ return-the Admiral, whoever he might be, took a fancy to
the Neptune, & having only a worn out 74 to offer in lieu of it, Sir Tho.
declined such a command, & is come home Passenger. Lucky Man! to have so
fair an opportunity of escape.-I hope his Wife allows herself to be happy on
the occasion, & does not give all her thoughts to being nervous.”
And then
last, Letter 92, Oct. 15, 1813: “Lady
Williams is living at the Rose at Sittingbourn, they called upon her Yesterday;
she cannot live at Sheerness & as soon as she gets to Sittingbourn is quite
well.”
Somehow Lady Williams lived till 1824, and perhaps part of her survival
strategy was pleading hypochondria?
BELL,
BATH & CANDLE: Second we have this:
“I have
been applied to for information as to the oath taken in former times of Bell,
Book, & Candle but have none to give. Perhaps you may be able to learn
something of its origin & meaning at Manydown. Ladies who read those
enormous great stupid thick quarto volumes which one always sees in the
Breakfast parlour there, must be acquainted with everything in the world.”
Diana
commented as to the above: “Oddly,
someone has questioned her about the Oath taken as to "Bell Book & Candle," i.e.,
witchcraft; she counters with some pretty strict Phillipics about the "enormous great
stupid thick Quarto Volumes" at Manydown,
which must contain all the boring information in the world. Not like Capt. Pasley's
writing;
that paragon "condenses his Thoughts into an Octavo," and as she's indicated before she admires his
lucid and concise prose. Now why does
she vigorously instruct Cassandra, "Kill poor Mrs. Sclater if you like it, while you are at
Manydown." All we know about this
lady is that Le Faye tells us she was an
admirer of Emma. But of course, that
lies in the future, and the assiduous
collector of opinions does not know that
yet.”
Diana, after some enjoyable
sleuthing online, I am pretty sure that the business about the Oath is not
about witchcraft, although I am pretty sure I know why you made that
association. It turns out that “Bell, Book, and Candle” famously referred (and
perhaps still refers) to the curse of excommunication under Roman Catholicism!
There are famous scenes referring to this term in Shakespeare’s King John (where
The Bastard, following the King’s orders, comments that he will risk
excommunication for the monetary prize he hopes to earn) and in Marlowe’s Dr.
Faustus. And I found a remarkable publication from 1813 (i.e., close in time to
when JA wrote Letter 81), which
reproduced the actual text of a mid 18th century curse of
excommunication. The
Protestant advocate: or, A review of publications relating to the Roman Catholic Question is the publication and here is the first part
of the curse:
The Pope's Curse, by Bell, Book, and Candle, on a Heretic of Hampreston. By authority of the blessed Virgin Mary, of St.
Peter and Paul, and of
the Holy Saints, we excommunicate, we utterly curse and banish,
commit and deliver to the Devil of Hell, Henry
Goldney, of Hampreston, in the county of Dorset, an infamous heretic, that
hath, in spite of God and St. Peter (whose church this is), in spite of all
holy Saints, and in spite of our holy father, the
Pope, (God's vicar here on earth), and of the
reverend and worshipful the canons, masters,
priests, Jesuits, and clerks of our holy church,
committed the heinous crimes of sacrilege1, with
the images of our holy Saints, and forsaken our
most holy religion, and continues in heresy,
blasphemy and corrupt lust; excommunicate be
he finally, and delivered over to the Devil as a
perpetual malefactor and schismatic; accursed be
he, and given soul and body
to the Devil, etc. etc [for another half page]…
You
made the association to witchcraft, Diana, I believe, because of the famous
play and film of that same title, which were very successful and acclaimed, and
which was also one of the sources for the TV show Bewitched:
But…as
far as I can tell, there was nothing in particular in JA’s day associated this
phrase with witchcraft, so this would appear to be a cryptic witticism of JA’s
relative to Catholicism and excommunication, for some reason lost in the mists
of time, but which strikes me as purely satirical. I seriously doubt that JA
was actually asked that question by someone else, as if the Manydown crowd
really had some insight into that arcana. No, that request has the unmistakable
scent of one of JA’s little put-ons. And what further corroborates my sense of
her joking mood about this are two other passages in Letter 81.
First, early in Letter 81: “What a day was yesterday! How
many impatient grumbling spirits must have been confined!”
While the ostensible reality
behind this comment appears to have been some terrible weather that confined
people to home the day before, I detect a wickedly playful whiff of the damned
in the image of “impatient grumbling spirits” being “confined” in some Dantean
purgatory.
And, that same tone of black
humor rears its head one last time right after the Bell, Book & Candle
reference, when we read “Kill poor Mrs. Sclater if you like it, while you are at Manydown."
Apparently
CEA did not like to kill Mrs. Sclater—maybe she didn’t have the text for
excommunication at ready reference at Manydown?--- Le Faye informs us that Mrs.
Sclater lived to a ripe old age and died in 1840. But it tells me all I need to
know about Mrs. Sclater that she liked _Emma_, so I detect here some fond
affection expressed by JA for a clever female friend in JA’s inimitable
way.
LOOKING
FOR (MISSED) CLUES: And finally, fully
in keeping with the joking tone of Letter 81, we have some more of JA’s love of
puns here:
“Miss Clewes seems the very
governess they have been looking for these ten years-longer coming than J.
Bond's last shock of corn. If she will but only keep good & amiable &
perfect! Clewes is better than Clowes. And is it not a name for Edward to pun
on? Is not a clew a nail?”
The idea of looking for “missed clues”
for ten years is _very_ droll! And then JA shows her love of multiple meanings
when she verifies that a clew is actually a metal artifact—actually, per the
dictionary, a metal loop attached to the lower corner of a sail—so
it was a meaning JA heard about long
before from one of her sailor brothers, perhaps, as part of childish wordplay.
And note how her instinct is also to twist the word by changing the vowel, in
order to create a homophone for “close” in the form of “Clows”. Her fertile mind
was always turning words in search of quibbles…..
So
much material hiding just beneath the surface of an apparently throwaway letter
with little content—JA was not content to just write a short letter about not
much, so she invested the extra effort to make her sister smile a few times,
and I bet CEA did!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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