I
noticed something strange today in Jane Austen's Letter 63 (12/27-28/1808), which JA wrote to
sister Cassandra from Southampton:
“ My
mother has been lately adding to her possessions in plate—a whole tablespoon
and a whole dessert-spoon, and six whole teaspoons—which makes our sideboard
border on the magnificent. They were mostly the produce of old or useless
silver. I have turned the 11s. in the list into 12s., and the card looks all
the better; a silver tea-ladle is also added, which will at least answer the
purpose of making us sometimes think of John Warren.”
I
find much I cannot readily explain in this short passage, and I believe I am
not alone, because neither Le Faye nor any other Austen scholar I can access
online, nor the archives in Janeites, provides any enlightenment as to the
following mysteries:
ONE:
Why does JA use the word “whole” to describe the three sizes of spoons her
mother has apparently recently acquired for the Austen tea-things? Is JA joking
around--in a manner worthy of Lewis
Carroll’s word/logic games in the Alice stories,
in making a joking leap from the term “half-tablespoon” that you’d find in a
recipe (receipt) to the absurd idea of an actual physical half-tablespoon? I
think she is indeed making just such a joke, or does anyone familiar with the
nuances of silverware have a more mundane explanation?
TWO:
Does it make sense that these new spoons that supposedly were of such high quality
as to render the Austen sideboard “magnificent”
and yet were “ mostly the produce of old or useless silver”? Is this
also a joke, or were there skilled craftsmen who used recycled sliver products
to form high quality new silverware that the Austen women could have afforded?
THREE:
What are the 11s and the 12s? Are these sizes of silverware? How would JA have
turned silverware of one size into silverware of a slightly larger size? I
smell absurdist humor here as well….
FOUR:
Why would a silver tea-ladle in particular be so useless that its sole purpose
would be to prompt some sort of association to John Warren?
Here
is an image of an 1870’s silver tea-ladle:
I
think JA is joking around, as a tea-ladle would seem to be quite useful.
And finally
and most intriguing of all:
FIVE:
Why would JA and CEA associate tea-ladles with John Warren?
Apropos
John Warren, he of course is mentioned several times in JA’s earliest surviving
1796 letters, and in one of them, JA seems to suggest that Mr. Warren was interested
in her, when she attributes a non-jealous reaction to him while he performs a
Mr. Eltonesque service to JA:
“…I
mean to confine myself in future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I donot care
sixpence. Assure [Miss C. Powlett] also as a last & indubitable proof of Warren’s
indifference to me, that he actually drew that Gentleman’s picture for me,
& delivered it to me without a Sigh.”
Again,
I think JA is just horsing around, and that John Warren was just an old friend
(he had been a student at the Steventon Rectory school), that JA and CEA liked
to joke about.
Evidence
of that appears in a JA letter written four years later, where we read this:
“…Mrs.
Warren, I was constrained to think a very fine young woman, which I must regret. She has got rid
of some part of her child, & danced away with great activity, looking by no
means large. – Her husband is ugly enough; uglier even than his cousin John..”
Mrs.
Warren refers to the former Jane Maitland (a first maternal cousin of Anna
Austen—whom I suspect may have been a Creole), who married Lt-Col. Richard
Warren, and so “his cousin John” must refer to that same John Warren from
Steventon. So, the question is, was JA is joking, or did she and CEA really
think John Warren was so ugly that he won the Warren family ugliness award?!
So
hard to know when JA is joking, isn’t it? I am eager to hear reactions re any or all of
the above five questions!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
onTwitter
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