I
noticed today that the esteemed senior Oxford literature Prof. Margaret Doody
has just published a book with the interesting title Jane Austen's Names: Riddles, Persons, Places. At page 8, Doody
writes: “Mr. Elton’s elaborate charade
on ‘Courtship’ is not his invention-nor Austen’s. It can be found in the second
volume of A New Collection of Enigmas,
Charades, Transpositions, etc. (1791). This set of verses is treated as if Mr. Elton were the ingenious original
author—but that is Austen’s joke, the smiling Mr. Elton simply plagiarized his
text, adding a couple of pointed lines of compliment (aimed at Emma, but
misread as directed to Harriet)….” END QUOTE
I
was not surprised, and yet also disappointed, to read the above, and I will briefly
explain why I had this mixed reaction.
WHY I
WAS NOT SURPRISED:
I was
NOT surprised because this is an old story of failed Austen literary
scholarship. I had, early in 2005, when I first began my research into Jane
Austen’s wordplay and puzzles, read the identical claim, first made by Doody
way back in 1986 in her article ‘Jane Austen’s Reading’ in The Jane Austen Handbook. Doody
claimed that A New Collection of Enigmas,
Charades, Transpositions, Etc. (London, 1791) contained the originals of JA’s
First Charade (Vol. I, p. 31), the Second Charade (Vol. II, p. 15) and Garrick’s
Riddle (Vol. I, p. 42) all presented in Chapter 9 of Emma.
Dowdy’s
claims of Jane Austen’s appropriations were picked up and repeated without
question in 2002 in Jane Austen: A
Companion by Josephine Ross, at P. 114:
“While
kindly, semi-senile Mr. Woodhouse searches his memory for a verse beginning
‘Kitty a fair but frozen maid,’ first published in The Lady’s Magazine in 1762. . . the sly, self-seeking clergyman,
Mr. Elton, without telling a direct lie, lets it be thought that his
contribution—a charade on the word ‘Courtship’—is his own invention. In fact,
like his other offering (a play on the word ‘Woman’), this appears in a
2-volume anthology of 17[9]1… ” END QUOTE
In
early 2005, I got my hands on the microfilm of the original New Collection, because I was
dissatisfied with Dowdy’s claim. That just didn’t ring true with my intuition
that Mr. Elton’s “courtship” charade was too elaborate to have been taken from
a generic riddle book collection. It felt like it had been written by JA
herself, especially given that I knew by then that Jane Austen and her family
loved to write charades. So when I had the original New Collection riddle book before me, I was encouraged by my not
being able to locate the second Emma charade
where Doody and Ross claimed it was. Then I realized, to my great delight, that
a big mistake had been made by Doody, and repeated by Ross!
I.e.,
that same Collection, a later 1810 edition of which can be viewed in Google
Books here....
…contained
the following different “courtship” charade at p. 184:
Great
homage in my first is often shown,
And
justice says you there will find her throne:
My
second braves our enemies in war,
And
bears Britannia's fame and glory far:
My
whole is grateful to each nymph and swain,
Tho'
often it produces heart-felt pain.
Of
course the answer is “court-ship”, but it’s obviously NOT the same charade as
appears in Chapter 9 of Emma! Nonetheless, I found Doody’s erroneous
attribution to be quite useful, because it is clear from reading the 1791
version that JA must have read that earlier charade! There is so much resonance
between it and what she eventually wrote herself in Emma, it is easy to see how Doody could mix them up. But what also became
clear to me in 2006, was that JA was not content with that earlier charade,
because she needed a charade that would fulfill two very specialized functions,
which the 1791 charade did not:
It
had to have multiple plausible answers, including but not limited to:
ONE: the
“courtship” answer that Emma cluelessly assumes is the only correct answer; AND
TWO: the
satirical “Prince of Whales” answer discovered by Colleen Sheehan in early 2006
(while brainstorming with me about Jane Austen’s wordplay in Emma), as outlined in Colleen’s 2007 Persuasions Online article…
…that
identified JA’s charade’s significant source as Charles Lamb’s satirical poem “The
Triumph of the Whale”, and as to which I shortly thereafter added the additional
connection to Cruikshank’s famous caricature of a beached-whale Prince Regent
which I use as the masthead of this blog;
AND
THREE:
the “Leviathan” answer discovered by Anielka Briggs in 2009; AND
FOUR:
the “Crown of Thorns” answer discovered by myself right after, and prompted by,
Anielka’s discovery.
AND….
…the
charade ALSO had to function not only as a charade but as an acrostic. I.e., as Colleen’s article
also brilliantly demonstrated, Jane Austen wrote her “courtship” charade so
that it had not one but two anagram-acrostics on the name “Lamb”.
And that was the crucial clue that in turn eventually
enabled me, later in 2007, to realize that the “acrostic” which Mrs.Elton refers
to as having been given to her by an unnamed “abominable puppy” is actually one
and the same as the “courtship” charade given to Emma and Harriet by Mr. Elton!
And…that in turn led me to the even cooler realization that Frank Churchill was
that “abominable puppy”, as I explain here:
So,
in short, it turns out that understanding that Jane Austen wrote that “courtship”
charade herself, with the above two crucial aspects which were lacking in her
riddle book models, leads straight to the heart of understanding the shadow
story of Emma, making that charade a
kind of Rosetta Stone for solving the Jane Austen Code.I.e., this is not just a
trivial pursuit regarding Austen arcana, this is a perfect illustration that
Jane Austen’s puzzles were at the heart of her creative literary genius.
WHY I
WAS NONETHELESS DISAPPOINTED
I was
disappointed that Doody’s 2015 book includes the identical error that she made in
1986, nearly 30 years before! That shows that Doody (and everyone else who had
a hand in producing her book) were all utterly oblivious of the subsequent
research and discoveries by Sheehan (in Persuasions
Online, which is a peer-reviewed journal, and one of JASNA’s two definitive
sister scholarly journals devoted exclusively to all things Jane Austen) and
also by Anielka and myself (who wrote our interpretations in Austen-L and
Janeites, being two of the three most widely subscribed and participated-in Jane
Austen amateur discussion websites of the past decade, Republic of Pemberley
being the third).
It is
deeply disappointing that some of the most cutting edge scholarly work being
done on Jane Austen in the world today continues to be ignored by many of the
most senior and elite Austen scholars, by reputation, in the world—Deirdre Le
Faye comes to mind immediately as a far more significant roadblock to
enlightenment than Doody, who just appears to have made a careless mistake.
And
finally, that ignoring has a secondary reifying effect—I Googled “Austen
courtship charade”, and there was nothing on the first page of “hits” to alert
a reader that Doody’s interpretation (which appears there on the first page as
the fifth “hit”) was in doubt in any way. A reader would have had to click on
the second page of “hits” and then scroll down nearly to the bottom to get to
two of my blog posts where I discussed alternative answers to the Emma courtship charade, before getting
any inkling that Doody’s claim might be incorrect. And how many readers are likely to be that
persistent? Not many!
This
shows me that there is still a steep mountain to climb, in order to really
begin to dismantle the Myth of Jane Austen, in particular the belief that Jane
Austen would not have engaged in such deeply subversive activities as joining
with Charles Lamb and George Cruikshank in their secret skewering of the debauched,
degenerate, sexist Prince of Whales, the very man whom Jane Austen famously
wrote she hated, in the famous 1812 letter to her trusted friend Martha Lloyd,
a letter which miraculously escaped burning.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAusten
on Twitter
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