Apropos
my three recent posts about Sir Walter Elliot's color-coded wit relative to all
things nautical in Persuasion...
...I
just came upon yet ANOTHER piece of that matrix, and it makes the collective
even wittier and more interesting, and internally mutually coroborative, and
now it adds a direct Austen family connection to boot.
What
I stumbled upon is evidence that JA's brother Frank Austen—the future admiral---was
part of the witty mix in the back of Jane Austen's mind, when she made Sir
Walter Elliot such a connoisseur of all this salty color-coding, especially in
his satirical comments about....admirals.
I
come to this evidence courtesy of Lord Brabourne, of all people, who wrote the
following in 1884, but without his (or anyone prior to myself) realizing the Persuasion connection:
"As
I am upon anecdotes, let me tell one also of Sir Francis Austen, since it shall
never be said that I omitted that which I have heard of him all my life as one
of the things most like himself that he ever did. He was exceedingly precise,
and spoke always with due deliberation, let the occasion be what it might,
never having been known to hurry himself in his speech for any conceivable
reason. It so fell out, then, that whilst in some foreign seas where sharks and
similar unpleasant creatures abound, a friend, or sub-officer of his (I know not
which), was bathing from the ship. Presently Sir Francis called out to him in
his usual tone and manner,
'Mr.
Pakenham, you are in danger of A SHARK OF THE BLUE SPECIES! You had better
return to the ship.'
'Oh!
Sir Francis; you are joking, are you not?'
'Mr.
Pakenham, I am not given to joking. If you do not immediately return, soon will
the shark eat you.'
Whereupon
Pakenham, becoming alive to his danger, acted upon the advice thus deliberately
given, and, says the story, saved himself 'by the skin of his teeth' from the
shark. " END QUOTE
Frank's
"shark OF THE BLUE species" is a witty echoing of the "admiral
OF THE BLUE" terminology, and I assert further that JA had this anecdote
in mind when she made her own single solitary novelistic reference to sharks, of
course in Harriet's (knowing) questions about the answer to Mr. Elton's charade:
"What can it be, Miss Woodhouse?...Can it
be woman?
And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.
Can
it be Neptune?
Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!
Or a
trident? or a mermaid? or a SHARK? Oh, no! SHARK is only one syllable. It must
be very clever, or he would not have brought it. Oh! Miss Woodhouse, do you
think we shall ever find it out?"
"Mermaids
and SHARKS! Nonsense! My dear Harriet, what are you thinking of? Where would be
the use of his bringing us a charade made by a friend upon a mermaid or a
SHARK? Give me the paper and listen. …” END QUOTE
In
2006, Colleen Sheehan brilliantly demonstrated that Harriet's reference to
sharks was one of the words covertly tagged to Charles Lamb's Triumph of the Lamb which had as its
punch line the "Prince of Whales".
In
2009, Anielka asserted that "Shark" was (along with Harriet's other guesses)
the name of a sloop in the Royal Navy, but without any particular connection to
the Austen family.
Now,
I am tieing Harriet's "shark" to yet another Austen referent, and this
one is very personal. Frank's vignette about the "shark of the blue species",
would, I think it safe to assume, have been well known and oft repeated in
Austen family circles, probably long prior to JA's writing Emma and Persuasion.
And
finally I assert further that JA added to the nautical subtext of Chapter 9 of
Emma, by including _three_ references to ADMIRATION in Chapter 9, in order to
subliminally suggest ADMIRALS, vis a vis JA's very nautical charade:
"The
picture, elegantly framed, came safely to hand soon after Mr. Elton's return,
and being hung over the mantle-piece of the common sitting-room, he got up to
look at it, and sighed out his half sentences of ADMIRATION just as he
ought....
"My
dear Harriet, you must not refine too much upon this charade. You will betray
your feelings improperly, if you are too conscious and too quick, and appear to
affix more meaning, or even quite all the meaning which may be affixed to it.
Do not be overpowered by such a little tribute of ADMIRATION....
"Oh!
here's the charade you were so obliging as to leave with us; thank you for the
sight of it. We ADMIRED it so much, that I have ventured to write it into Miss
Smith's collection. Your friend will not take it amiss I hope. Of course I have
not transcribed beyond the eight first lines." END QUOTES
So
here we have a second example of Frank Austen's wit and love of wordplay (the
other being his "rears and vices" joking recollection in his letter
to Miss Quincy in 1852), which totally belies the widely held notion
that he was a humorless dour fellow. And this Frank Austen connection almost
makes me wonder whether Frank Churchill--he who so loved wordplay at Donwell
Abbey---derived his Christian name, at least in part, from Frank Austen.
And
so I conclude by asserting, three times, my admiration for Jane Austen's clever
and significant “admiral-able” wordplay in
Emma and Persuasion having to do
with nautical color-coding.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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