In
Chapter 7 of Northanger Abbey, we
read the following exchange between Catherine Morland and John Thorpe about contemporary
novels:
“…[Catherine]
ventured at length to vary the subject by a question which had been long
uppermost in her thoughts; it was, "Have you ever read Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe?"
"Udolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read
novels; I have something else to do."
Catherine,
humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question, but he prevented
her by saying, "Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has
not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk;
I read that t'other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest
things in creation."
"I
think you must like Udolpho, if you
were to read it; it is so very interesting."
"Not
I, faith! No, if I read any, it shall be Mrs. Radcliffe's; her novels are
amusing enough; they are worth reading; some fun and nature in them."
"Udolpho was written by Mrs.
Radcliffe," said Catherine, with some hesitation, from the fear of
mortifying him.
"No
sure; was it? Aye, I remember, so it was; I was thinking of that other stupid
book, written by that woman they make such a fuss about, she who married the
French emigrant."
"I
SUPPOSE YOU MEAN CAMILLA?"
"Yes,
that's the book; such unnatural stuff! An old man playing at see-saw, I took up
the first volume once and looked it over, but I soon found it would not do;
indeed I guessed what sort of stuff it must be before I saw it: as soon as I
heard she had married an emigrant, I was sure I should never be able to get
through it."
"I
have never read it."
"You
had no loss, I assure you; it is the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there
is nothing in the world in it but an old man's playing at see-saw and learning
Latin; upon my soul there is not."
This
critique, the justness of which was unfortunately lost on poor Catherine,
brought them to the door of Mrs. Thorpe's lodgings, and the feelings of the
discerning and unprejudiced reader of Camilla
gave way to the feelings of the dutiful and affectionate son, as they met Mrs.
Thorpe, who had descried them from above, in the passage.” END QUOTE
That
reference to Fanny Burney’s Camilla (published
in 1796, fittingly not long before the action of Northanger Abbey begins in 1798) has been universally understood,
by all Austen scholars who have discussed it, to be evidence of Thorpe’s
primitive, prejudiced view of good literature, but nothing more.
That narrow
interpretation is of course encouraged, upon a rereading of Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen’s own reference
to Camilla in Chapter 5, in a famous authorial
intrusion which condemns Thorpe in
advance for the wrong-headed verdict he will hand down on it two chapters later:
“…there
seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the
labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only
genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am no novel-reader—I seldom
look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well
for a novel." Such is the common cant. "And what are you reading,
Miss—?" "Oh! It is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while
she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It
is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest
powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human
nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of
wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” END QUOTE
Today,
I have one straightforward addition to bring to the table of Austen scholarship
on this subject of the Austenian allusion to Camilla in Northanger Abbey.
But in addition, as my Subject Line suggests, I may not be the first reader of Northanger Abbey and Camilla to detect this cover allusion—that
honor might just belong to a very unlikely reader…..Lord Brabourne! Read on for
the details…
,
I.e.,
it turns out, as my Subject Line suggests, that the character of John Thorpe
owes much to the character of Alphonso Bellamy in Camilla. So that, with classic Austenian irony, his dismissal of Camilla as “horrible” can be seen by the
knowing reader as his failure to see himself in the character of Bellamy.
Here
is what seems to me to be an excellent Wikipedia synopsis of Bellamy’s
character in Camilla:
“Nicholas Gwigg (Alphonso Bellamy): the younger son of the master
of a great gaming-house. In his first youth, he had been utterly neglected, and
run wild; but his father afterwards becoming rich, had bestowed on him as good
an education as the late business with which it had begun could possibly give
(it was pity, perhaps, that the education did not include morals). He tried
gaming, but spending as fast as he earned, he acquired nothing; and once, in a
tide of disfavor, he had cheated, and been found out. His father dead, his
elder brother passive, he went to London, hoping to elope with some heiress by
relying on his handsome face and lots of compliments. In the process he changed
his name to Alphonso Bellamy. He had first met with the beautiful Mrs.
Berlinton, and though this would not make him any money, her romantic turn of
mind and loveliness tempted him to a scheme yet darker. They had exchanged
letters with each other after she left, and soon after he forced Eugenia to
marry him by shocking her gentleness of disposition with a suicidal threat. He
treated her cruelly, yelling at her and trying to force her to write to her
uncle for money, and continuing his heinous correspondence, and even meeting with,
Mrs. Berlinton. Several unpleasant debts of honor being claimed, he had tried
to force Eugenia to write to her uncle for money by putting a gun to her head
and saying he would kill himself immediately after she was dead. Terrified, she
was beginning to agree, when the alarmed postillion shouted out, "Hold,
villain! or you are a dead man!" His hand shook—the gun went off—and he
dropped dead. His behavior to Eugenia throughout was selfish, unfeeling, and
brutally cruel. At first, Eugenia really believed in his passion for her, and
though refusing to accept it, she sincerely pitied him and would not suspect
him. After the marriage, she found out what he was really like, but refused to
persecute him in court ("Solemn has been my vow! sacred I must hold
it!")”
Fortune
hunter, cruel, emotional blackmailer, gambler, insensitive—he is the very “twin”
of John Thorpe. However, whereas Burney ends her nasty villain’s life by a
suicide, Jane Austen, black humorist and realist that she is, lets Thorpe
survive to fortune-hunt again.
I conclude
this section of my post by asserting that Jane Austen meant for the reader who
catches the Bellamy subtext of Thorpe’s primitive character to also think of
another, even more famous literary character, another brutal, primitive, dangerous
male beast who has a place in the lineage of John Thorpe. Courtesy of Oscar
Wilde:
“The
nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own
face in a glass. / The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of
Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.”
We
might say that Thorpe rages at the realism of Camilla as a mirror which reflects his own very real horridness
back at him in a very unflattering light!
There
is much more that could be said in parsing the details of this allusion, but I
leave that pleasure to those who love both Burney and Austen enough to want to
invest the time to suss all of it out.
LORD
BRABOURNE SHARP ELF?:
The
remainder of this post will concern the intriguing possibility that I am not
the first scholar reading Northanger
Abbey to find this covert allusion to Alphonso Bellamy in John Thorpe. Lord
Brabourne, in his 1884 edition of Jane Austen’s letters, in one of his
editorial comments, praises his great-aunt’s matchless ability to retain reader
interest even with a minimal amount of incident and plot twisting, and then
contrasts Jane Austen’s writing to that of Fanny Burney, as follows:
“To t[JA’s]
standard Miss Burney never seems to me to approach, or to come within a mile of
Jane Austen, whilst in some instances she
approximates both to the vulgar and the horrible, neither of which is to be
found in the pages of the immortal Jane. The scenes in 'Evelina' in which the
unfortunate Madame Duval is victimised by the French-hating Captain Mirvan (a
character to read of which makes an Englishman blush for his nationality), the
courtship of Mr. Dubster, and the whole character of Mrs. Mittin in 'Camilla,' as well as the eccentricities of Mr. Briggs in
'Cecilia,' certainly savour of vulgarity, whilst THE ‘HORRIBLE’ IS EXEMPLIFIED
BY the suicide of Mr. Harrell in 'Cecilia’, THE DEATH OF BELLAMY IN ‘CAMILLA,’' and sundry other harrowing passages which season Miss
Burney's performances.”
Pretty
much all Janeites would take Lord Brabourne at face value, and infer that
ONE: Lord
B. has used the word “horrible” to describe the death of Bellamy in ‘Camilla’,
in comparing that scene to scenes in novels by his aunt such as Northanger Abbey, without any conscious
awareness of the allusion to Bellamy in the character of Thorpe which I have
laid out, above, and
TWO: Lord
B. was totally sincere in his harsh judgment on Burney’s literary merits.
But…there’s
more than a small chance, I’d suggest, that Lord Brabourne was a super sly elf
who knew exactly what he was doing
when he wrote his above comments. How could that possibly be argued?
Well,
by reminding you of two curious facts relative to John Thorpe which I have
already presented earlier in this post:
ONE: “horrible”
is a variant of “horrid”, which is the very word that John Thorpe, who I’ve
claimed is modeled on Burney’s Bellamy, uses to describe Camilla as I will now re-quote in relevant part:
"You
had no loss, I assure you; it is the HORRIDEST nonsense you can imagine; there
is nothing in the world in it but an old man's playing at see-saw and learning
Latin; upon my soul there is not."
That’s
suspicious enough standing alone, but now add this strangeness:
TWO: Jane
Austen, in Chapter 5, pre-condemned John Thorpe for the sin, committed by him
in Chapter 7, of dismissing Fanny Burney’s novels, including Camilla specifically. But guess what—isn’t
that exactly what Lord Brabourne has
done in the above-quoted editorial comments? He has ripped Fanny Burney’s
writing as both “vulgar” and “horrible”! I.e., he has done precisely what Jane
Austen herself condemned in Chapter 5 of Northanger
Abbey.
So
smoke starts to come out of our ears as we contemplate a paragraph of literary
criticism in which Lord B. is both a staunch advocate for his great-aunt, while
in the next breath he commits the cardinal sin of literary criticism, in
obvious violation of Jane Austen’s literary manifesto. There could not be a more egregious inconsistency,
and in the most specific way possible.
So….unless
this is all a massive Trojan Horse Moment on Lord B.’s part, in which a
subconscious Freudian awareness of Thorpe’s debt to Bellamy leaks through into
a sincere condemnation of Burney, I’d say it is much more likely that Lord
Brabourne was actually consciously emulating his great-aunt, paying her the worthiest
sort of homage, by making a sly, learned, but totally covert allusion to Jane
Austen’s having used Bellamy as a model for Thorpe, and JA’s having tied that
modeling to her very famous call to arms on behalf of female authors.
And…that
tickled my memory to my post 4 months ago….
…in which
I took note of Lord Brabourne’s having, elsewhere in his 1884 edition of the Letters,
recounted a strange, seemingly satirical, anecdote about Frank Austen and “sharks
of the blue species”. At that time, I just could not imagine that Lord
Brabourne was “in on the joke”.
But now,
in light of this Burney-Austen shenanigans, I am really beginning to wonder
about Lord Brabourne…..I’m wondering whether, despite the truly horrible
Victorian-prudery-driven deletions by him of “vulgar” material from some of JA’s
letters, he might nonetheless have been a clever enough reader of JA’s fictions
to realize that there were matters in them, like the covert allusion to Camilla’s Alphonso Bellamy in Northanger Abbey’s John Thorpe, which
were worthy of the sincerest form of flattery, i.e., imitation!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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