Yesterday
I reported on Jocelyn Harris’s excellent recent AGM presentation about the
satire of the Prince of Wales, which Harris persuasively argued was hidden in
plain sight by JA in Northanger Abbey & to a lesser extent in P&P. Before
retiring, I felt compelled to review my post, as something she had presented
was still tickling my subconscious, making me feel there was some further connection
to my research than I had as yet understood as such.
I was
drawn to what was perhaps her most persuasive textual example, in Chapter 9 of
NA, when John Thorpe “reassures” Catherine
that James and Isabella won’t really be injured riding in James’s gig, even
though Thorpe has just gotten through condemning that vehicle as dangerously ‘tittuppy” and “rickety”:
"Unsafe!
Oh, lord! What is there in that? They will only get a roll if it does break
down; and there is plenty of dirt; it will be excellent falling. Oh, curse it!
The carriage is safe enough, if a man knows how to drive it; a thing of that
sort in good hands will last above twenty years after it is fairly worn out.
Lord bless you! I would undertake for five pounds to drive it to York and back
again, without losing a nail."
Harris
informed us that in early July 1788, the Prince had a carriage accident in
Brighton while out driving too fast with his “wife” Mrs. Fitzherbert, as a
result of which they both fell out of the carriage, but, fortunately did not
sustain serious physical injury. Nonetheless, the tabloid press, particularly
the caricaturists, made hay out of the accident----most memorably and satirically,
as Harris displayed to the audience, in Gillray’s “The Fall of Phaeton”:
Before
moving on to her next example, Harris specifically noted the most shocking and
obvious detail in the above image----which, of course, is that the face of the
still-falling Prince (who, like the mythological Phaeton, was the son of a
“god”) is less than a foot away from landing broadside on Mrs. Fitzherbert’s
fully exposed and naked butt!
I am
sure Harris will, in her article, go on and give a satisfying explication of
the above, including many implications arising from same. And, as I wrote
yesterday, she already had me convinced at the AGM that this was indeed an
intentional allusion by JA to this specific caricature. But I also have no doubt that a number of you
reading this post are, like Fanny Price, shaking your heads vigorously in
strong disagreement with such a scandalous suggestion. After all, even if JA did
undeniably hate the Prince Regent for how he treated so many women during his
life, and even if she covertly alluded to him as the “Prince of Whales” via her
carefully constructed charade in Chapter 9 of Emma, would she have gone further still, and knowingly alluded to
a caricature in which such a disgusting “unbecoming conjunction” between the
Prince and Mrs. Fitzherbert is so openly flaunted?
Well,
I bet you guessed that my answer is “Yes, and then some!” Because it was at
that moment this morning that the light bulb went on in my head, and I realized
what it was that had been tickling my subconscious ever since Harris displayed the
text of John Thorpe’s mad little speech at the AGM, and noted how real life and
fiction had been aligned so neatly by JA. It is when Thorpe says “They will
only get a roll if it does break down; and there is plenty of dirt; it will be excellent
falling….”
Harris
did not elaborate on Thorpe’s logic, but the most benign implication, I think
it fair to say, is that Mrs. Fitzherbert’s ample female buttocks were very soft,
and therefore the Prince would have “excellent falling” when he landed on them!
But…there’s one big problem with that reading, which is that it ignores that
Thorpe makes his prophecy of a “happy ending” (sorry, I couldn’t resist!) explicitly
dependent on there being “plenty of dirt” for the Prince to land on. But how
would that happen? In the spatial layout of Gillray’s careful composition, it
is clear that the Prince’s face will be landing squarely on Mrs. F’s rear end,
not on the ground. So, he won’t even reach all that plentitude of dirt on the
road!
And
that was when I instantly recollected the argument I made just over two years
ago here…
…as
one of a series of posts in which I demonstrated that Jane Austen used the word
“dirt” a large number of times as code for “poop”, not just in NA, but in each
and every one of her novels! My above linked 2013 post includes the following
self-explanatory excerpt about the “dirt” in NA:
“CATHERINE’S
“DIRTY” RIDE WITH JOHN THORPE IN CHAPTER 11 OF NA:
I
reached this latest textual zone of interest by going right back to the
numerous examples I listed in my last post which were concentrated in the Bath
episode of Northanger Abbey, and even
more specifically in Chapter 11. They told one tale--the misadventures and
misprisions that Catherine Morland endures at the hands of John Thorpe, once
she makes the mistake of getting into his gig with him, until she makes her
safe escape from his clutches.
I
will now briefly repeat those five passages in Ch. 11, omitting the comments I
added for each of them in my previous post, but instead just asking you to
absorb the entirety, to get the rhythm of this textual drumbeat on the same
motif—“dirt” as “s-t”:
"No
walk for me today," sighed Catherine; "but perhaps it may come to
nothing, or it may hold up before twelve."
"Perhaps
it may, but then, my dear, it will be so DIRTY."
"Oh!
That will not signify; I never mind DIRT."
"No,"
replied her friend very placidly, "I
know you never mind DIRT."
After a short pause…
“…whether
Catherine might still expect her friends, whether there had not been too much
rain for Miss Tilney to venture, must yet be a question. It was too DIRTY for
Mrs. Allen to accompany her husband to the pump-room…”
"Well,
I saw him at that moment turn up the Lansdown Road, driving a smart-looking
girl."
"Did
you indeed?"
"Did
upon my soul; knew him again directly, and he seemed to have got some very pretty cattle too."
"It
is very odd! But I suppose they thought it would be too DIRTY for a walk."
"And
well they might, for I never saw so much
DIRT in my life. Walk! You could no more walk than you could fly! It has not been so DIRTY the whole winter;
it is ANKLE-DEEP everywhere."
Isabella
corroborated it: "My dearest Catherine, you cannot form an idea of the DIRT; come, you must go; you cannot
refuse going now."
“It
was now but an hour later than the time fixed on for the beginning of their
walk; and, in spite of what she had heard of the prodigious accumulation of DIRT in the course of that hour, she
could not from her own observation help thinking that they might have gone with
very little inconvenience.”
“…Why
were not they more punctual? It was DIRTY, indeed, but what did that signify? I
am sure John and I should not have minded it. I never mind going through anything, where a friend is concerned…”
I
just now fully appreciated the humor of “the prodigious accumulation of dirt”---if
you think about it, dirt churned up from heavily trafficked streets would not
accumulate prodigiously during an hour, it would be an endless but gradual process. But the
prodigious accumulation of horse manure on heavily trafficked streets, I can
readily imagine all that crap accumulating prodigiously! But that’s just icing on the cake of
yesterday’s point. What I realized today was that Jane Austen did not
arbitrarily decide to cluster these veiled scatological references to “dirt” in
Chapter 11, when, you might think, she could just as easily have clustered them
in another chapter, or even scattered them throughout the entire novel. No, she
didn’t follow those other strategies, because there was something very specific
about where in Bath the action was
taking place during Chapter 11, which JA was subtly winking at,
repeatedly---five times, in reminding her readers who knew what was what at
Bath of something everybody knew!
THE
HISTORICAL FACTS OF THE BAD SMELLS OF THE LOWER TOWN OF BATH
Without
further prologue, then: as my Subject Line suggests, these five passages are
all veiled innuendoes pointing at the Lower Town of Bath during Jane Austen’s
stays there as a very sad place for many reasons, but most dramatically and
unavoidably of all, because that sector of Bath was literally blanketed by the
overpowering stench of horse dung. Think I am exaggerating? Take a look at the
following description, taken from a book I found today, Jane Austen in Bath: Walking Tours of the Writer's City (2006), written
by a local Bath scholar, Katharine Reeve [followed
by an extended quotation from Reeve’s book elaborating on that blanketing of
sections of the real-life Bath street network in poop!]
END
QUOTE FROM MY 2013 POST
So…I
think it must be obvious that I have expanded my claims from 2013, and now see
Thorpe’s reference to “plenty of dirt” in Chapter 9 (i.e., only 2 chapters
earlier than all of the above previously quoted examples from Chapter 11) as
Jane Austen’s deliberate reference to Mrs. Fitzherbert’s butt—or, more
specifically, to the unpleasant, albeit soft, contents of her butt, which the
Prince’s face will very shortly encounter there upon landing! I.e., that whole series of references to
“dirt” as “poop” in Chapter 11, I now see, have actually been slyly introduced
by Thorpe’s reference in Chapter 9—but it is only fully visible to those
readers who are aware of Gillray’s caricature and that specific detail!
And to
bolster this point---when you think about it, one of the most famous factoids
about the Prince, which Jane Austen and all of Great Britain would have been
aware of from 1795 onward, and which many Janeites are aware of in 2015, was
how, when he first met his fiancée, Caroline of Brunswick, in 1795, he was
appalled at her awful personal hygiene “down below”—in fact, it made it nearly
impossible for the normally randy Prince to bring himself to consummate the
marriage.
Now,
while Gillray, presumably lacking the gift of psychic foresight, would have had
no idea in 1788 that the Prince would
take his famous tumble in 1795, Jane Austen, looking back as she wrote and rewrote
NA at least three times between 1798 and 1816, would certainly have noticed,
and would, I argue, have opportunistically taken full advantage of the lucky intersection
of Gillray’s dirty mind with the Prince’s later, dirty nuptial Gothic horror.
So, please
step back and reflect on all you’ve just read, above. What were the chances
that Jocelyn Harris, finding Gillray’s “Fall of Phaeton” without, I am sure,
the slightest awareness of what I had written two years ago in my blog about
“dirt” as code for “poop”, would unwittingly lead me to such a dramatic
epiphany, which would then confirm both my earlier interpretation and also her
current one? Vanishingly small!
And that’s
not all. I quickly sleuthed out that there are three more very specific winks by JA in NA at the scatology of Gillray’s
“Fall of Phaeton”:
ONE:
Jane Austen concentrated her usage of the word “phaeton” in FOUR usages in that
same “dirty” Chapter 11—obviously not a coincidence!:
"Not
they indeed," cried Thorpe; "for, as we turned into Broad Street, I
saw them—does he not drive a PHAETON with bright chestnuts?"….Thorpe
talked to his horse, and she meditated, by turns, on broken promises and broken
arches, PHAETONS and false hangings, Tilneys and TRAP-DOORS….“…I had rather,
ten thousand times rather, get out now, and walk back to them. How could you
say you saw them driving out in a PHAETON?" Thorpe defended himself very STOUTLY,
declared he had never seen two men so much alike in his life, and would hardly
give up the point of its having been Tilney himself…..
"Oh!
Mr. Tilney, I have been quite wild to speak to you, and make my apologies. You
must have thought me so rude; but indeed it was not my own fault, was it, Mrs.
Allen? Did not they tell me that Mr. Tilney and his sister were gone out in a PHAETON
together? And then what could I do? But I had ten thousand times rather have
been with you; now had not I, Mrs. Allen?"
And I
see JA winking one last time at the equipage of the Prince and his entourage near
the end of novel:
“A
heroine returning, at the close of her career, to her native village, in all
the triumph of recovered reputation, and all the dignity of a countess, with a
long train of NOBLE RELATIONS IN THEIR SEVERAL PHAETONS, and three
waiting-maids in a travelling chaise and four, behind her, is an event on which
the pen of the contriver may well delight to dwell; it gives credit to every
conclusion, and the author must share in the glory she so liberally bestows.”
TWO: In
NA, there are, I have long believed, two sexual double entendres on Isabella
Thorpe’s “cheek”—which may innocently be the cheeks on her face, but also
scandalously may equally plausibly be the cheeks that comprise her butt!—Now I
see that they do not stand alone, but are part of the much larger, “dirty”
matrix I’ve been outlining:
Chapter
10:
"Oh,
yes you would indeed; I know you better than you know yourself. You would have
told us that we seemed born for each other, or some nonsense of that kind,
which would have distressed me beyond conception; my CHEEKS would have been as
red as your roses; I would not have had you by for the world."
"Indeed you do me injustice; I
would not have made so improper a remark
upon any account; and besides, I am sure it
would never have entered my head."
Isabella
smiled incredulously and
talked the rest of the evening to James.
Chapter
18:
Catherine,
looking up, perceived Captain Tilney; and Isabella, earnestly fixing her eye on
him as she spoke, soon caught his notice. He approached immediately, and took
the seat to which her movements invited him. His first address made Catherine
start. Though spoken low, she could distinguish, "What! Always to be
watched, in person or by proxy!"
"Psha,
nonsense!" was Isabella's answer in the same half whisper. "Why do you
put such things into my head? If I
could believe it—my spirit, you know, is pretty independent."
"I
wish your heart were independent. That would be enough for me."
"My
heart, indeed! What can you have to do with hearts? You men have none of you
any hearts."
"If we have not hearts, we
have eyes; and they give us torment enough."
"Do they? I am sorry for it;
I am sorry they find anything so disagreeable in me. I will look another way. I
hope this pleases you" (TURNING HER BACK on him); "I hope your eyes
are not tormented now."
"Never more so; for THE EDGE
OF A BLOOMING CHEEK IS STILL IN VIEW—AT ONCE TOO MUCH AND TOO LITTLE."
Catherine heard all this, and
quite out of countenance, could listen no longer…
I am also
still ROFL at the references in both of these seemingly unrelated passages to (a)
a young woman’s objections to something improper being “put into her head”,
which is a 180 degree reversal of the imminent and highly improper insertion of
the Prince’s head into a private place where the sun does not shine, and (b)
the idea of Isabella’s teasing Captain Tilney by showing him the edge of her
butt, which would indeed, in a sexual sense, be, as JA’s witting narrator
observes, “at once too much and too little”! And I also believe that latter wit
was inspired by those very same lines from Ovid’s Metamorphoses which Gillray chose to insert at the bottom of his
caricature:
“ Th’
imaginary Bride with Beauty glows For
Envy Magnifies What e’er she shows”
I.e.,
JA deliberately took those Ovid lines out of context, and played with them
wittily, as only she could, in order to once again point the reader back to
Gillray’s caricature, as well as tapping
into Ovid’s tale of a jealous sister (which is exactly the emotion Catherine is
feeling toward Isabella in that latter scene)!
THREE:
Most amazingly of all, I think, it turns out there was yet another famous depiction
of the “Fall of Phaeton” in the zeitgeist of Georgian England, seen here…
“The
Fall of Phaeton” 1780
..in
which George Stubbs, Wedgwood’s master artist, depicted the runaway carriage
carrying Phaeton to his doom. And, in that regard, would you believe that I found
the following link this morning, that, for reasons having no apparent connection
to the Prince or “dirt”, was independently connected by another Austen scholar,
Laura Boyle, to….Northanger Abbey!:
by Laura
Boyle, 6/20/11:
[First
Boyle quotes from Chapter 22 of NA: “The elegance of the breakfast set forced
itself on Catherine’s notice when they were seated at table; and, luckily, it
had been the general’s choice. He was enchanted by her approbation of his
taste, confessed it to be neat and simple, thought it right to encourage the
manufacture of his country; and for his part, to his uncritical palate, the tea
was as well flavoured from the clay of Staffordshire, as from that of Dresden
or Sêvre. But this was quite an old set, purchased two years ago. The
manufacture was much improved since that time; he had seen some beautiful
specimens when last in town, and had he not been perfectly without vanity of
that kind, might have been tempted to order a new set. He trusted, however,
that an opportunity might ere long occur of selecting one — though not for
himself. Catherine was probably the only one of the party who did not
understand him.”]
Then
Boyle wrote: “It is often remarked that Jane Austen made no reference to
current events in her work; and yet, it seems that the quote above must refer
to the many improvements in English pottery introduced by Josiah Wedgwood and
his descendants. Let us examine the many advances Josiah Wedgwood (1730-95) brought
to English pottery in Staffordshire. Wedgwood introduced a superior inexpensive
clear-glazed creamware pottery in 1764. The excellence of his product soon
attracted a wide market for Wedgwood pottery. When George III’s wife, Queen Charlotte, ordered a tea set Wedgwood
rechristened creamware as Queen’s ware in the first celebrity marketing
campaign.… Artists employed by Wedgwood Potteries produced many famous
design motifs. …In 1780, artist George
Stubbs, known for his remarkable renderings of horses, created the “Fall of
Phaeton.”
So, I
suggest, as my final observation, that Jane Austen has General Tilney boast
about his expensive breakfast set precisely so that she can ping the memory of
readers familiar with Stubbs’s famous design, and thereby connect the dots back to Gillray’s caricature, John Thorpe’s
plentitude of dirt, and Isabella’s blooming cheeks!
And
there I will finally stop my carriage, and give my “horses” a rest—hope you
enjoyed the ride…..and that the only thing that fell by the wayside were any
illusions you may have had that Jane Austen was not ten times more
sophisticated and clever at sexual innuendo than even Laurence Sterne and Henry
Fielding!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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