Rachel Hunter’s 1806 “Sentimental” Novel, Lady Maclairn, The Victim of Villainy…and What it Tells us about the shadow story of Mansfield Park!

In the end of October, 1812, Jane Austen wrote a letter [Letter 76(C) in Le Faye] to her literary niece Anna Austen, which is unique among JA’s surviving letters in that its entire (very short) content pertains to one novel by another writer:

“Miss Jane Austen begs her best thanks may be conveyed to Mrs Hunter of Norwich for the Threadpaper which she has been so kind as to send her by Mr Austen, and which will always be very valuable on account of the spirited sketches (made it is supposed by Nicholson or Glover) of the most interesting spots, Tarefield Hall, the Mill & above all the Tomb of Howard’s wife, of the faithful representation of which Miss Jane Austen is undoubtedly a good judge having spent so many summers at Tarefield Abbey the delighted guest of the worthy Mrs Wilson. [It is impossible for any likeness to be more complete.] Miss Jane Austen's tears have flowed over each sweet sketch in such a way as would do Mrs Hunter's heart good to see; if Mrs Hunter could understand all Miss Austen's interest in the subject she would certainly have the kindness to publish at least 4 vols more about the Flint family, & especially would give many fresh particulars on that part of it which Mrs H. has hitherto handled too briefly; viz the history of Mary Flint's marriage with Howard. Miss Jane Austen cannot close this small epitome of the miniature abridgement of her thanks & admiration without expressing her sincere hopes that Mrs Hunter is provided at Norwich with a more safe conveyance to London than Alton can now boast, as the Car of Falkenstein which was the pride of that Town was overturned within the last 10 days. “

The conventional wisdom about this letter, which has a complicated provenance described in Le Faye, is that it was a big joke shared by JA and Anna, in which they were both mocking Rachel Hunter’s “sentimental”, overly long, and silly 1806 novel Lady Maclairn, The Victim of Villainy. The tone for that critical reaction was set by Fanny Caroline Lefroy, Anna’s daughter, who wrote that the letter 'refers to a voluminous and most tiresome & prosy novel the Aunt & Niece had been reading & laughing over, together. It was in eight volumes and the tears of the heroine were for ever flowing' .

Le Faye leads the modern charge, in her 1985 N&Q Note: “The letter was supposed to be an expression of Jane's admiration addressed to Mrs Hunter of Norwich, the authoress of a sentimental novel which Jane and Anna had been reading together…. A reading of the work shows that the Austen family’s comments are fully justified. The heroine Rachel Cowley is sent to Tarefield Hall by her wicked guardian Mr. Flamall, and meets there the eponymous Lady Maclairn together with other members of the Maclairn/Flamall/ Flint/Howard family group, all suffering from secret griefs and guilty consciences. At Tarefield Abbey, Rachel finds the ‘worthy Mrs. Wilson’, and at the Mill she helps a virtuous yeoman family. Every new character gives a verbatim report of his or her life-story to date, a total of nearly twenty flashbacks in all. Nor is it only the heroine who is ‘always in floods of tears’—all the characters, male and female alike, are frequently found to be either weeping already or else burst into tears during conversation. Anna Lefroy’s memory of the work as being both long and silly was certainly quite correct, but if she had re-read it in the primmer atmosphere of the mid 19th century, she might by then have been shocked to realize that the moral Mrs. Hunter treated such matters as seduction, bastardy, perjury, elopements, secret marriages, bigamy, lunacy, and suicide as everyday occurrences.”

Whoa! Seems pretty straightforward, right? Well, read on to find out that just the _opposite_ is the case, and, what’s more, to find out that JA’s reaction to Hunter’s novel---not only in Letter 76(C) but also in _another_ letter she wrote to niece Anna Austen--- is actually a huge smoking gun pointing straight into the shadow story of Mansfield Park!

The key clue that enabled me to solve this heretofore undetected Austenesque mystery was the following paragraph in Letter 108 dated 9/28/1814, written by JA to Anna:

“Your Aunt Frank's nursemaid has just given her warning, but whether she is worth your having, or would take your place, I know not. She was Mrs. Webb's maid before she went to the Great House. She leaves your aunt because she cannot agree with the other servants. She is in love with the man, and her head seems rather turned. He returns her affection, but she fancies every one else is wanting him and envying her. Her previous service must have fitted her for such a place as yours, and she is very active and cleanly. She is own sister to the favourite Beatrice. “

As is often the case in my research, my discovery was serendipitous. I was looking into another issue entirely when I read this Letter 108 passage carefully for the very first time, and was struck by the strangeness _and_ suggestiveness of that last quoted sentence. At first, the syntax seemed awry, but then I learnt from Googling that “own sister” was an archaic version of “full sister” as opposed to, say, “half sister”.

But that did not satisfy my curiosity. My recent delvings into the allusions to Dante that I perceive in JA’s writings led me to wonder if JA was being poetic here, and was referring to Dante’s Beatrice. But a drama queen nursemaid did not seem to resonate to Dante’s angelic heroine—so perhaps Shakespeare’s Beatrice, from Much Ado, was the literary heroine JA was alluding to?

Or could “the favourite Beatrice” have been a real person? Le Faye’s Biographical Index entry for “Beatrice” points in that direction: “A maidservant to someone in the Chawton district?”.

But then, I already knew that Le Faye has an absolutely tin ear for JA’s wit, irony, and wordplay, as is evidenced by the funniest example of that, which I have written about before, when she wrote the following clueless Index entry for “Mr. Floor”, whom JA wrote was “_low_ in our estimation”:

“?Tradesman in Southampton—perhaps a dyer?”

Le Faye is _not_ someone you want as a guide into the “underworld” of JA’s punny wordplay! So I pressed on, hopeful that Google would lead me to the solution of this mystery—and guess where it led me? To the following passage in, of all books…..Rachel Hunter’s Lady Maclairn, The Victim of Villainy!:

Letter I. From Miss [Rachel] Cowley to Miss [Lucy] Hardcastle. Tarefield, June 24.
The short note which your father has, before this, delivered to you, and which I trust you have destroyed, my dear Lucy, as a proof unworthy to be preserved of your poor Rachel's little advancement in self-knowledge, shall, if it be possible, be rendered useful to me as a warning against presumption. But although I have been taught by experience not to think too highly of my wisdom, yet I mean not, Lucy, to give up the reins to folly. You will have no more despairing rhapsodies from me. The question has been decided, and reason tells me, that in a difficulty which admits of no other alternative but that of either laughing or crying, it is but to take that which will least disagree with my constitution. You have, my dear Lucy, called me many times a TWIN SISTER OF MY FAVOURITE BEATRICE. Whether you meant to compliment me as having a portion of her wit, or meant to repress in me the superabundance of her spirit and flippancy, remains with you to settle. I am contented with the resemblance, and I will, if I can, preserve a light heart, and her disdain of fools and knaves. I will, however, effect my purpose of breaking through the web of mischief which now entangles me, without wishing "I were a man," or "eating Mr. Flamall's heart in the market-place;" a more severe punishment will only satiate my vengeance, he shall live to feel the stings of a wounded conscience, and to see me happy….”

Talk about a smoking gun! So it _was_ Shakespeare’s Beatrice after all [with her wit, spirit, flippancy, and her famous averral to Benedick about Claudio in IV.1: “O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place.”] to whom Hunter had alluded, and then JA alluded to _both_ Hunter _and_ Shakespeare in Letter 108.

And of course it makes perfect sense that JA would allude to Lady Maclairn in two letters _both_ written to the same person, i.e., the 21 year old Anna Austen, the literary niece who obviously had also read Lady Maclairn (surely at JA’s suggestion) and would understand the allusion, in stark contrast to Le Faye’s blindness.

The Mystery of the Deleted Sentences in both Letter 76(C) and in Letter 108

Even at this early point in the arc of this thread of inquiry, I realized that this was clearly another example, in a very long list, of Le Faye trying to dismiss and minimize something in JA’s letters which actually warranted much closer attention. So I decided to push on, believing (correctly as it turned out) that the best was yet to come.

And as I examined this little mystery, the mystery expanded before my eyes. The first thing I found was that even though JEAL quoted brief excerpts from Letter 108 in his 1870 Memoir, and then Lord Brabourne purported to quote all of Letter 108 in his 1884 edition of JA’s letters, _neither_ of them included that very same suggestive sentence I’ve been discussing, “She is own sister to the favourite Beatrice”! How very odd, don’t you think?

Now, in JEAL’s case, where his quotation from Letter 108 was very short, this omission could easily have been an insignificant and inevitable byproduct of drastic editing. However, in Lord Brabourne’s case, that sentence was the _only_ omission from the version printed in Chapman and Le Faye’s editions of the Letters! It is hard to escape the conclusion that _someone_ (and if we can believe Le Faye’s provenance section, it was probably Fanny Caroline Lefroy) _deliberately_ deleted that one sentence for some reason!

It was also possible that Lord Brabourne might have been the mysterious Deleter, because, as I have posted on several occasions, he was rather prone to Bowdlerization of his great aunt’s letters (the most egregious instance being the deletion of JA’s acid joke about Mrs. Knight’s “accidental” pregnancy!).

But then I noted that in the _other_ letter to Anna, Letter 76(C), there was _also_ a single sentence (out of a long paragraph) deleted in Hill’s 1904 bio, but included in Chapman and Le Faye. Here is the context in Letter 76(C)nwith the deleted sentence in brackets:

“Miss Jane Austen begs her best thanks may be conveyed to Mrs Hunter of Norwich for the Threadpaper which she has been so kind as to send her by Mr Austen, and which will always be very valuable on account of the spirited sketches (made it is supposed by Nicholson or Glover) of the most interesting spots, Tarefield Hall, the Mill & above all the Tomb of Howard’s wife, of the faithful representation of which Miss Jane Austen is undoubtedly a good judge having spent so many summers at Tarefield Abbey the delighted guest of the worthy Mrs Wilson. [It is impossible for any likeness to be more complete.]”

What on earth could this _deletion_ signify?

Le Faye writes the following curious note: “This sentence does not appear in Anna Lefroy’s two copies, but only in those made by Fanny Caroline Lefroy. It is impossible to determine whether this was an omission by Anna or an invention by FCL.”
And by the way, don’t you wonder why Le Faye did not think it worth mentioning the deleted sentence in Letter 108, even though she mentioned it, re Letter 76(C), both of them occurring among the small handful of surviving JA letters written to Anna Austen? Could it be that Le Faye recognized the pattern, and did not want anyone else to recognize it?

But, by my usual obsession-driven serendipity, I _did_ recognize the pattern! And given my discovery of the deleted sentence in Letter 108, my vote was clearly for a deletion in Letter 76(C) as well, an attempt by someone to hide some aspect of JA’s meaning from the public—but what and why? If you read that passage carefully, and reflect on it, I think the answer is obvious.

The Parallel Between Hunter’s Fictional World & JA’s Real World

Several commentators have noted that JA in Letter 76(C) has adopted the conceit that she is actually writing to Rachel Hunter (who actually died in 1813, not long after the writing of Letter 76(C) and not long before the writing of Letter 108), a conceit that includes the notion that JA spent a lot of time at “Tarefield Abbey the delighted guest of the worthy Mrs. Wilson. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR ANY LIKENESS TO BE MORE COMPLETE.”

One would have to be a very dull elf----or a very deceitful elf--- to not affirm the meaning that JA is hinting at so broadly----she is hinting that there are two _real life_ estates located very close to each other, where JA spent “so many summers”, which must be the ones which completely resemble Tarefield Hall! And of course, anyone familiar with JA’s biography knows _exactly_ which real estates I am talking about---Godmersham and Goodnestone!

But if you delete that last sentence, which functions as a giant arrow pointing back at the _previous_ sentence, then the previous sentence becomes murkier, much more likely to just be glided by as a bunch of confusing details—especially to a reader who has not read Hunter’s novel---and what reader of JA’s letters is going to even attempt to read Hunter’s novel after reading Le Faye’s demolition of it?

It would almost be laughable if it weren’t sad--when Le Faye writes “…the moral Mrs. Hunter treated such matters as seduction, bastardy, perjury, elopements, secret marriages, bigamy, lunacy, and suicide as everyday occurrences, ” I was distinctly reminded of Dorothy in Oz: “Lions and tigers….and bears???!!!!” Shocking indeed! And certainly not something for a proper Austen scholar to examine, for fear of….who knows what?!

So it seems like more than one person was determined to do everything possible (short of burning Letters 76(C) and 108 to prevent, or at least strongly discourage, anyone from asking the question: What _is_ it in Lady Mclairn that so powerfully reminded JA of the real life world at Godmersham and Goodnestone? Read on to find out. We are almost “home”. ;)

Tarefield Hall/Abbey = Godmersham/Goodnestone = Mansfield Park/Northanger & Donwell Abbey

Before myself reading Hunter’s very long novel, I checked to see if someone else might have already done so, and saved me the trouble. And fortunately, there was someone very smart who had done so, and written all about it—my friend and fellow Austen scholar, Isobel Grundy, who took the opposite tack with Hunter’s novel than did Le Faye 9 years earlier—in 1994, Isobel wrote a long, thorough, insightful, probing article analyzing Hunter’s novel as a serious work of literature, in particular as it pertained to the hot button (in 1806) subject of West Indies plantation slavery. Here is the citation, I urge those of you who are so inclined to read it:

Women's Writing, Volume 1, No. 1, 1994, ppg. 25-34, “ Rachel Hunter and the Victims of Slavery”

I am not going to reinvent the wheel by even attempting to summarize and the rich and complex argumentation and analysis that Isobel presented in the above article. The bottom line from an Austenian point of view is that Rachel Hunter’s novel may well have been verbose, but it was also a nuanced, wide ranging exploration of the world of English plantation slavery, both in England and in the West Indies, which also drew disturbing parallels between the lives of African slaves on plantations, and the lives of Englishwomen in England. And if that does not bring to mind _Mansfield Park_ most of all, but also the dark shadows of Northanger Abbey, Emma and the other Austen novels as well, then you haven’t been paying attention to the strong current of Austen scholarship in the last few decades.

As I have, of necessity, gone on a very long time already to bring you to this point, I will henceforth limit myself to a handful of quotations from Isobel’s article that are directly relevant to my post today.

The first is Isobel’s description of Hunter’s heroine, Rachel Cowley:

“Self-contradiction characterises Rachel's views on gender as well as on slavery. She likens herself to Shakespeare's Beatrice for "spirit and flippancy" (she is remarkably well-read, from Philip Sidney to Ossian…Rachel astonishes a lawyer and a doctor by her strength of character: "I shall in future blush, when I hear strength of mind called a masculine endowment' (1, p. 80; 4, p. 235). She plays with the idea of role-reversal, and plans "to draw my sword should it be necessary". She several times assents to unpleasing female stereotypes in the course of distancing herself from them: "I am not a spiritless, whining, love-sick girl"; "Let us ... aim at being something better than mere teeming animals" (1, p. 234; 4, p. 273). Yet she is resolved not to emulate Beatrice in "wishing 'I were a man,' or 'eating Mr Flamall's heart in the market-place'" (1, pp. 154, 115-116). Despite her distrust of marriage shackles, she is domesticated by the close: "the vivacity and brilliancy of her mind, appear to yield to the satisfactions of her heart. She is always amiable; but [at home] she is more placid, more affectionate ..." (4, p. 309).”

Had Isobel been aware of the deleted sentence in Letter 108 at the time she was writing her article, she would obviously have connected the dots between it and Hunter’s novel—but she was not--so that happy task fell to me.


My second quotation arises from Isobel’s awareness of the allusion by JA to Hunter’s novel in Letter 76(C):

“Jane Austen, paying Lady Maclairn the dubious compliment of ironical encomium and fantasy, pretends to believe in the existence of the characters as real-life persons….Austen directs her mockery at the sentiment surrounding Mary (Flint) Howard, and ignores the Jamaican component…It is noteworthy that critics are divided as to whether her treatment of Sir Thomas Bertram's West Indian property reflects pro- or anti-slavery views.”

Had Isobel been aware of Letter 108’s veiled allusion to Hunter’s novel, and also had Isobel had the benefit of reading the past 17 years of scholarship about the slavery subtext of MP, and had realized that the consensus has clearly turned toward seeing MP as the unified, complex _anti_ slavery (and feminist) work that it so clearly is, perhaps she might have looked past the joking tone of Letter 76(C) and perhaps might been induced to read Letter 76(C) more deeply than she did.  Isobel's article is a gold mine for an Austen scholar with my feminist, anti-slavery perspective, demonstrating in a dozen ways why JA would have been so interested in Hunter’s novel, to the point of initiating her own beloved niece Anna into these mysteries as well, so that Anna, as a budding novelist, would learn to weave allusive shadows into _her_ fiction as well! This was much more important advice than the familiar nostrums about writing about people you knew, and only about a few families in a country village, and Anna’s fiction demonstrates that she absorbed this lesson very well indeed.

My third quotation relates to the oft-drawn parallel which my work extends, between the role of slave on a plantation, and of a wife in an English marriage, in JA’s era:

“It is tempting to read a parallel between Rachel's two closing acceptances - of marriage and of slavery - but both, and the latter particularly, remain opaque. In a later novel Hunter allows herself some explicit discussion of the marriage ending. "It has been", says the narrator of Family Annals/'for a considerable length of time, my secret hope, and avowed opinion", that her heroine, still beautiful at twenty-six, and having lost her first and only lover, would enjoy "the honours and rewards of a well-spent life, under the title of The Maiden Aunt".

I think the applicability of that discussion to JA’s fiction and also to JA’s own life, is unmistakable.

And finally, I quote the following because I believe JA found Hunter’s novel interesting in a variety of important ways, but most of all, perhaps in JA’s _emulation_ of Hunter in depicting her _own_ family and friend circle in her novels, exactly as Hunter, apparently, did—and JA’s conceit about writing directly to Rachel Hunter is exactly the clever way that JA showed this:

“We have already heard that Mr Cowley's dead wife was nee Marian Dawson, and that the novel's protagonist is Rachel Marian Cowley. It must be the case, though it is not made explicit, that Mrs Cowley gave her Christian name both to her daughter and a slave. (The novelist's bestowal of her own first name on the protagonist of this work, with its inevitable suggestion of possible autobiographical content, is another issue.)”

There’s much more, but that is the essential detail that lands the plane, and demonstrates that the attempt to conceal JA’s true attitude toward Hunter’s Lady of Maclairn, The Victim of Villainy, was motivated by a desire to conceal the slavery and feminist subtext of JA’s novels, and to substitute for same the notion of JA being amused by a silly, prosy novel by another female writer.

But now finally, that wrong has been righted, after nearly 200 years.

Cheers, ARNIE

Jane Fairfax's (and Jane Austen's) Independence Day

Purely by happenstance this morning, while revisiting some of my prior posts about _Emma_ for an entirely different reason, I was led to see some interconnections I had not previously noticed, which I wish to elaborate for you, as they represent, in a way, a crystallization of themes I have been working on for the entire duration of my writing project, and which, more and more, have been coming together for me in this final stage of my research:

To wit, three months ago (less a day), on July 4, 2011, I posted the following here and at my blog:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/search?q=Declaration+of+Independence

In a nutshell, I claimed then that the "courtship" charade in _Emma_ , in addition to all the other covert meanings hidden in it by JA which had previously been brought forward by various Janeites including myself, was also a parody of the American Declaration of Independence itself!

Now I see the connection of that argument to other key points in the Jane Austen Matrix I have been constructing all these years, and the added value from those connections gives me great pleasure and satisfaction. Read on to see why.


Not quite one year ago, I posted a second, secret solution to the "patriot" charade attributed to Henry Austen:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/12/answer-to-my-best-quiz-ever.html

My second secret solution was the name "Hancock" (I speak about this at each of my Jane Fairfax presentations, I urge you to read the way I arrived at my solution, it is, to say the least, surprising), and the connection I saw today for the first time was that, of course, John Hancock was the _American_ patriot who famously signed the Declaration of Independence with a huge signature, putting himself, in effect, at the front of the line for the firing squad if the British had squelched the American Revolution.


So is it a coincidence that there would be a secret answer ("Declaration of Independence") to the "courtship" charade in Emma that would be so directly connected to a secret answer ("Hancock") to the "patriot" charade in the Austen family charade album?

Of course not! And what is most compelling to me is how well _all_ four of these answers, as well as the "Prince of Whales" answer that Colleen Sheehan first discovered in 2006, and the "Leviathan" answer discovered by Anielka in 2009, seamlessly fit with _each other_.


First, as to the "courtship' charade, we can fairly say that the American Revolution was, according to the American Declaration of Independence, the result of egregiously bad "courtship":

1. In terms of the bungling operations of the English royal "court", which at times must have resembled Hartfield, a kind of riderless horse, with King George III acting in many ways like Mr. Woodhouse; but also

2. In terms of the unwillingness of George III to "court" the colonies with reasonable and fair governance, resulting in those colonies reacting the way that Emma did to Mr. Elton on Christmas Eve in the carriage ride back to Hartfield from Randalls.

We can also say that King George III had himself at one time early in life been the Prince of _Wales_ but he also had as his eldest son a dissipated, narcissistic "gentleman" who was known as the Prince of _Whales_.

And Hobbes's "Leviathan" was about the nature of royal governance in England, in regard to an English king who lost his crown, in both senses of the word, i.e., Charles the First.


PLUS, as to the private charade, as I just wrote above, we can also fairly say that John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence, with the result that after the successful American Revolution, the "United" States (which is symbolized by "woman lovely woman") thenceforth did indeed overthrow British despotism and thenceforth did (and still does) "reign alone"!

All of that, as we Jews say at the Seder (a holiday about the most famous uprising of all an oppressed people against royal tyranny) would have been enough, but there's another layer that is even more spectacular than that. I.e., this consolidated interpretation of secret and overt answers relative to the theme of revolution and independence seamlessly works in concert with the level of the radical feminism that I ascribe to Jane Austen, and which receives special emphasis in _Emma_ as a novel.

I.e., I read Jane Fairfax as symbolizing the American colonies, and I see her as achieving, at the end of the novel, true independence---I believe that, having survived her harrowing ordeal of concealed pregnancy, attempts to find a husband, and finding a good placement for her baby, Jane F. never actually does marry the unworthy Frank Churchill (just as the young United States did not "marry" itself to "Frankish" France, but stood on its own completely independent feet), but instead takes the Churchill family jewels (symbolized as economic wealth) and establishes herself as an independent woman in London, free from domination by, or indebtedness to, any man--whether that man be named Campbell, Knightley or Churchill.

And how poignant and tragic is the historical fact that Jane Austen, the alter ego of Jane Fairfax, believed in early 1816 that _Emma_ was her own declaration of artistic independence, which would mark the dawn of a completely new epoch in her own life, in which she would live in economic prosperity using money she herself earned as an author, without the need for any of the Chawton Cottage ladies to "depend" upon help from unreliable brothers. And she also would have anticipated spending the next few decades writing more and more groundbreaking novels, which eventually would bring her the power to assume the public mantle once worn by Mary Wollstonecraft, and lead English womankind into a new era of pragmatic independence.

The tragedy is that less than 18 months later, JA lay in her fresh grave in Winchester Cathedral, and her dreams of female independence were as quickly covered over with cement (or whatever they used in those days) by her brother Henry in his Biographical Notice, and brother James with his hokey Venta poem, and it has taken nearly 200 years to exhume the "body" of her literary productions and to show the world that her ideas and dreams have never actually died, even if her mortal body did.

Cheers, ARNIE

P.S.: I got so carried away with all of the above that I almost forgot the _OTHER_ connection to the Declaration of Independence that I saw earlier today. Want to guess what date the secret of Jane and Frank's engagement was announced to Emma by Mrs. Weston? Which also happens to be the date on which, in the shadow story, Jane Fairfax was finally freed from the torment of her concealed pregnancy, having just given birth to her baby to deliver her into the safe hands of the wonderful Mrs. Weston, the beginning of the rest of Jane Fairfax's life (and don't believe for a second the fable that JA told her family that Jane F would die within three years)?

I would think you have by now guessed what date that all takes place, in Chapter 46 of _Emma_, but if not, I will save you the trouble of taking a peek at Ellen Moody's calendar for Emma, where she provides the following description for the date I am hinting at:

""By counting June 26 and the Monday as full days", "about ten days after Mrs Churchill's decease, Frank's ride from Windsor to Jane to make-up and then to Randalls to announce engagement ("he had not time to enter into much explanation. Jane looked "wan, sick", Frank thinks he persuaded it all away. He was here only a quarter of an hour") also occurs day after he and Mr Churchill received letters and he has time to tell his adopted stepfather; on same day, but "he cannot stay five minutes" and she "must come this morning" Mr Weston brings Emma to Mrs Weston; as they walk Frank "half way to Windsor by this time"; Emma tells Mrs Weston that "for at least three months" (from May, time of second visit) she has "cared nothing for him"; now that afternoon Emma and Harriet first understand one another. Time mentioned twice: Emma withdraws eyes from Harriet and meditates "for a few minutes. A few minutes ...", and she sees "Mr Knightley must marry no one but herself" ... her own conduct ... her own heart ... before her in the same few minutes. Harriet's story of Mr Knightley's growth of love for her are described as "Circumstances that might swell to half an hour's relation ...": Harriet measures strength of Mr Knightley's attachment by how much time he spends with her: "they had been walking some time before Emma came ... his having sat talking with her nearly half an hour ... when he first came in, he said he could not stay five minutes ... " The rest of the day; the following night, were hardly enough for her thoughts. 46:384, 387, 389; 47:396, 399"

http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/emma.calendar.html

For those of you who don't like to follow links, and who don't take broad hints, that date is.......................... July 4th!

Which makes me wonder, what happened in JA's personal life on July 4, 1814?

Well, that is the time period not long before Anna Austen's marriage to Benjamin Lefroy, when Anna, then 21 (the same age as Emma and Jane F, and also as Fanny Knight in real life) was writing her novel-that-she-never-completed under Aunt Jane's loving tutelage. It does not take a rocket scientist to read those famous letters JA wrote to Anna during that time period--letters which Anna obviously saved as precious remembrances of JA---and to realize that this was a period of exhilaration for JA, as she wrote her own masterpiece simultaneously with her beloved niece beginning her own literary career, walking in her aunt's footsteps.

And in JA's Letter 102, dated 6/23/1814, we read of JA's intent to spend up to a fortnight in London during July, as she writes:

"I certainly do not wish that Henry should think again of getting me to Town. I would rather return straight from Bookham; but if he really does propose it, I cannot say No, to what will be so kindly intended."

What comes through loud and clear to me from this passage is that the eternal rigamarole of having to depend on brothers to transport JA here and there has gotten intolerably old at this stage of her life. JA is dreaming of the day, hopefully not far off, when she will finally be independent in the precious liberty to travel when, where and how she might choose. Another dream ultimately shattered by harsh reality.

An Interesting & Significant Austen-Fielding PERSONAL Connection

My recent string of posts about the 1806 Godmersham amateur theatricals (which I claim were JA's dramatized adaptations of fiction written by both Sarah Fielding and her much more famous brother, Henry, fictions which JA later also alluded to in her own novels) led me to revisit all of my prior research about JA's literary allusions to the Fieldings, which I had accumulated over the past 6 years. However, what I am writing about today is a _biographical_ discovery that my revisiting took me to, an entirely unexpected bonus that arose when two files I had generated years ago on seemingly completely unrelated subjects turned out to have a point of crucial intersection.

I have discovered an Austen-Fielding _personal_ connection which, as best as I can tell online, has never been mentioned by any Austen biographer prior to me, in no small part because members of the Austen family did _not_ wish this connection to be noticed. Read on and see what _you_ think.

First, using Google Desktop, I searched through all my files which included both "Fielding" and "Austen"--a large number of files, but most of them pertained to Jane Austen's fiction vis a vis Tom Jones, which I had last exhaustively researched over a year ago, and which were not the tree I was barking up, so I quickly skimmed past them.

The point of intersection that serendipitously led to my latest discovery was the name "Denbigh". It showed up in a file describing Henry Fielding's ancestry, mentioning that Henry Fielding was born into a junior branch of an ancient noble family, the Earls of Denbigh. No big deal so far. You probably never heard of it in connection with Jane Austen, nor had I noticed it before, and it only rang a bell for me at all, because it was a character name in James Fenimore Cooper's 1820 Austen homage, entitled Precaution---but that appeared to me to be coincidental and insignificant.

But then, a short time later, another of the files I had retrieved _also_ mentioned the Earls of Denbigh--and what electrified me was that this latter file did not mention Henry (or Sarah) Fielding at all, but instead had mentioned the Earls of Denbigh in connection with the Bridges family at Goodnestone!

I had never previously paid attention to, or taken note of, the name "Denbigh" in either of those files, but I quickly realized why this intersection was so interesting--I recalled another factoid that I _had_ taken note of, in passing, round about 2005, which was that there were two female Fieldings who were part of the Bridges/Knight family matrix in Kent!

At that earlier time, as I now recalled, it was during my initial forays into Le Faye's edition of JA's letters, and the question had popped into my head, wondering if those Kentish female Fieldings (some of you might have noticed it, too, because one of them was known by the colorful nickname "Aunt Fatty") might have been family relations of _the_ Henry Fielding. But I also recalled that my curiosity in 2005 was quickly quenched when I read Le Faye's Bio Index entry for the Fielding family, which made _NO_ mention whatsoever of Henry Fielding. In 2005, although I was already neck deep in sleuthing out the shadow story of _Emma_, I was much much less suspicious and inquisitive, and much more passive, than I am today about the standard understanding of JA's biography. So, in 2005, I took Le Faye's Index at face value and assumed that if there _had_ been a personal connection of part of the Austen family to the famous Henry Fielding, of course it would have been discovered long ago.

WRONG! Today, with my policy of questioning every part of the received wisdom about JA, I would have immediately sleuthed out an answer to that question--but better late than never, because this one is significant. Anyone who wishes can use Google and other online resources to verify the following essential genealogical connections:

ONE JUNIOR LINE:

Henry and Sarah Fielding were some of the children of Edmund Fielding (1681-1741), the 3rd son of John Feilding (1650-77), who was in turn the youngest son of George Feilding (1614-65), the 1st Earl of Desmond (and also younger brother of the 2nd Earl of Denbigh and also uncle of the 3rd Earl of Denbigh and great uncle of the 4th Earl of Denbigh)-or, stated in another way, Henry and Sarah Fielding were great grandchildren of the 1st Earl of Denbigh. (Wikipedia is wrong on this point, by the way)

A SECOND JUNIOR LINE:

Colonel Charles Fielding was the son of another Charles Fielding, the 3rd son (therefore the grandson) of the 4th Earl of Denbigh. And he also married Sophia, the niece of the 8th Earl of Winchilsea, but he died of war wounds in 1783. Aunt Fatty, Isabella Fielding, was the spinster sister of that same younger Colonel Charles Fielding! So this means that JA personally knew a 4th cousin (i.e., sharing the 1st Earl of Denbigh as an ancestor) of Henry and Sarah Fielding, and also the widow of a 3rd cousin of Henry Fielding.

So we have one junior line associated with the Goodnestone Bridges family, and a second junior line leading to Henry and Sarah Fielding.

I could not ascertain from the Internet whether Henry or Sarah Fielding, or any of Henry's descendants, ever met any of their cousins, the members of the junior branch of the Feilding family that included Aunt Fatty and her sister in law (JA's Mrs. Fielding). But even if such a meeting never occurred, this heretofore unrecognized family connection is still interesting, for the following reasons.

First and foremost, what the above means is that at the 1806 Godmersham theatricals, three of the participants, Harriot-Mary Bridges (who would shortly marry George Moore), her elder sister, Elizabeth Knight (Edward's wife, who had less than 3 years to live), and of course Fanny Knight, then age 13, were _all_ lineal descendants of Anne Palmer Bridges, who, after the death of her first husband, Brook Bridges II, had, 50+ years earlier, married into that junior line of the Earls of Denbigh, in the person of the aforementioned Col. Charles Fielding, 4th cousin of Henry and Sarah Fielding!

And here's where it gets even more interesting. Even though I appear to be the first Austen scholar to take note in print of this Austen-Fielding connection, I believe this connection _would_ have been well known to JA herself!

Why? Because the Bridges and Knight families would obviously have been well aware, and very proud, of their connection to a junior line of the family of the Earls of Denbigh, and also, for that matter, of their connection by marriage to the family of the Earls of Winchilsea (which included the Miss Finches of whom JA often writes in her letters). And in their pride, they'd have been sure to make JA and CEA aware of those connections, in exactly the same way Sir Walter Elliot tells the world about their connection to Lady Dalrymple.

And JA, as the _literary_ scholar she most definitely was, would have been aware that Henry and Sarah Fielding were also members of a junior line of that same family of the Earls of Denbigh. Google Books shows that several published accounts of Henry Fielding's biographical info were extant prior to 1806, and we know from JA's earliest surviving letters from 1796 of her longterm interest in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones.

So JA would most certainly have connected the "Denbigh dot" to both Aunt Fatty and Mrs. Fielding at Goodnestone, and also to Henry and Sarah Fielding, and that is why I reach the only logical conclusion, which is that JA chose to adapt Sarah's The Governess and Henry's The Virgin Unmasked for that special group of performers and audience, precisely _because_ of that connection!

In light of all the above, it is very interesting to read the following bit of biographical info in Lord Brabourne's 1884 edition of JA's letters remembering that he too was a distant cousin of Henry and Sarah Fielding. We can see Lord Brabourne's class snobbery in full bloom:

"But, in following up the Finches and Hattons, I have left Anne, the third Miss Palmer, too long alone, and must hasten back to her, with many apologies. She was the lady who, as has been already mentioned, married the second Sir Brook Bridges; but, whether the honour of the alliance, or the responsibilities of the office of High Sheriff of the county, or some other cause, brought about the catastrophe, certain it is that Sir Brook left her a widow, as has already been stated, in 1733; and, in 1737, she took to herself a second husband, in the person of Charles Fielding, second son of Basil, fourth Earl of Denbigh, by whom she had two sons and two daughters before her death in 1743. This lady's second son Charles was a commodore in the navy; he married Sophia Finch, sister of George Finch, eighth Earl of Winchilsea, and daughter of William and Lady Charlotte Finch (nee Fermor). Lady Charlotte was governess to the children of King George III., and her daughter, Mrs. Charles Fielding, lived with her at Windsor and St. James', so her children were brought up with the Royal Family. This will explain the various references to members of the Fielding family which will be found in Jane Austen's letters; and, though I feel rather ashamed of having inflicted upon my readers such a dull chapter of genealogy, those who care to do so will be able to identify by its aid many of the people who were her contemporaries, friends, and relations."

What is so juicily ironic is that I bet Brabourne was well aware of Henry Fielding's being from a junior line from the Earls of Denbigh, but that's the last thing he's going to mention--foolish status snob that he obviously was, what he wants to emphasize is the _aristocratic_ connections of his family, not the aesthetic connections, especially Henry Fielding's "vulgar" fictions!

Also, in the Appendix of his 1884 edition of JA's letters, which contained the text of three 1791 letters written to "Mrs. Fielding" by Fanny Fowler, the widow of Brook Bridges III and the Lady Bridges JA knew well, announcing the engagement of her three daughters, respectively, during that fruitful year, Lord Brabourne added the following biographical details:

"Sir Brook died before his daughters were married. ' Fatty' was Isabella, sister of Mrs. C. Fielding's husband, and daughter of ' Anne Palmer,' by her second husband Col. Fielding. She seems to have been a popular person, known all her life as ' Fatty Fielding,' and often at Goodnestone and Godmersham. She was godmother to one of Mr. E. Knight's children (Marianne), and died unmarried in 1812."

Fatty is Fanny Fowler's sister in law, in that Fatty is a half sister of Brook Bridges And Mrs. Fielding must be Sophia Finch Fielding, widow.

And think about Henry Austen's Bio Notice in light of my discovery--I believe he also knew of this connection, just as I believe all the Austen siblings knew:

"She did not rank any work of Fielding quite so high. Without the slightest affectation she recoiled from every thing gross. Neither nature, wit, nor humour, could make her amends for so very low a scale of morals. Her power of inventing characters seems to have been intuitive, and almost unlimited. She drew from nature; but, whatever may have been surmised to the contrary, never from individuals."

Talk about protesting too much, again, shame on Henry Austen for such an unseemly deception! He has to mention Fielding specifically, so as to try to snuff out the very idea that there was an unseemly Austen-Fielding family connection!

I finish with a famous example of Henry Fielding's wit, which happens to pertain to his being from the Denbigh line, and which could very well have been read by JA prior to publication of all of her novels other than S&S:

Literary anecdotes of the eighteenth century, Vol. 3, by John Nichols, Samuel Bentley, 1812: "The following anecdote has been communicated to Dr. Kippis by a friend, who had it from the present Mr. Fielding, our author's son. Henry Fielding being once in company with the Earl of Denbigh [that would have been the 5th Earl], and the conversation turning on Fielding's being of the Denbigh family, the Earl asked the reason why they spelt their names differently; the Earl's family doing it with the E first, (Feilding), and Mr. Henry Fielding with the I 'first, (Fielding.) "I cannot tell, my Lord," answered Harry*, "except it be that my branch o*f the family were the first that knew how to spell."

And how ironic that this spelling error was the very same one that JA chronically made, putting "e" before "i", even when not following "c", was it because she could not spell, or was this a little homage to Fielding's bon mot?

Cheers, ARNIE

P.S.: It has been previously noted by literary scholars that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was Henry Fielding's much younger second cousin, but that family connection is independent of the one I have outlined.

P.P.S.: Another associated factoid: Ironically, Charles Austen (and his wife) served on the Namur in 1813, LONG after Charles Fielding's command as Captain of the Namur ended in 1779, more or less when Charles Austen was born--but again, it was a factoid JA would have been aware of.

The Governess & Jane Austen: the Scholarly Plot Thickens!

, As followup to the four posts I have posted during the past several days about the 1806 Godmersham theatricals, and also Jane Austen's _Emma_, as being strongly connected to various literary works by the famous brother and sister Henry and Sarah Fielding, I got around to checking more deeply, and only then became aware of an article published in the 2009 print edition of the JASNA journal Persuasions, entitled "Identifying Jane Austen’s “Boarding-school”: A Proposed Author for The Governess; or, the Boarding School Dissected" by Arden Hegele.

I quickly read her article, and here is the relevant portion of the email I sent her a short while ago:

...I am writing to you about your 2009 Persuasions article...have a read of the following four entries at my blog that I've written during the past several days:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/jane-austens-playlet-adaptation-of.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/theres-even-more-fielding-subtext-in.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/sarah-fieldings-governess-unmistakable.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/sempronius-in-sarah-fieldings-governess.html

Now let me try to brlefly put all of this together. After reading your article, I went right to the ECCO database and quickly found and skimmed the 1785 play, and I have now (tentatively) concluded as follows:

1. I think the 1785 playlet is ITSELF an adaptation of Sarah Fielding's 1749 novella, The Governess and Henry Fielding's play The Virgin Unmasked. The character name "Teachwell" seems a spin on Sarah's character name "Teachum", and there is both an apothecary and a dancing master mentioned in the 1785 play, just as there are in Henry Fielding's play. And... I also note that there is a character in the 1785 play surnamed Simple (like Sarah Fielding's famous hero, David Simple), and also a character named Miss Sly (just as in Sarah Fielding's The Governess).

So I think that Mrs. Paxson, or whoever wrote the 1785 play, was clearly pointing to those earlier Fielding works, BUT....Paxson took the story in a very very different direction. There is very very little overlap, content-wise, between the 1749 novella and the 1785 play. What Paxson did was akin to what Mary Sherwood did in 1820 (i.e., after Jane Austen's death) when Sherwood adapted Fielding's novella, and "defanged" it, making it much less subversive and mysterious as to its meaning.

2. I think that you and Vivien Jones are probably correct in your guess that Jane Austen's reference to giving The Boarding School to Fanny Knight in her 1801 letter to Cassandra is indeed a reference to the 1785 play--so your article has made me retract the claim that the 1801 letter reference was to Fielding's Governess. BUT....

3. I nonetheless believe that the June 1805 amateur theatrical at Godmersham reported by Fanny Knight in her diary was NOT principally based on the 1785 play, but was instead primarily based, as I argued in my four blog entries, on the two 1749 works by Sarah and Henry Fielding, respectively. If the name of the Governess noted in Fanny Knight's Diary had been "Teachwell" instead of "Teachum", I might well have agreed with you-but I think that very distinctive name is crucial and decisive in making this determination--Teachum can only refer to Sarah Fielding's famous protagonist. BUT....

4. Given #2, that obviously means that Jane Austen was ALSO aware, in 1801, of the 1785 play, and of its being an allusion to the Fielding play, and so it seems plausible that the 1785 play was also in the back of Jane Austen's mind as well, and perhaps some elements from it were therefore woven into the Godmersham theatrical, perhaps at the request of Fanny Knight, then aged 11, who might have made the request for performance of the 1785 play, thereby triggering Jane Austen to make things more interesting by instead substituting a Fielding spinoff. END QUOTE


If she responds to me substantively, and gives me permission, I will pass on to you what she writes.

Just think--all of this wonderful complexity rescued from history only because the 11 year old Fanny Knight was apparently so affected by her aunts's theatricals that she happened to mention the name "Teachum" in her diary 205 years ago, starting a chain of connection that has led me to all of the above!

Cheers, ARNIE

Sempronius in Sarah Fielding's The Governess

In followup to my last post, I was curious to know why Sarah Fielding chose the name Sempronius for the "older man" ("Knightleyesque") suitor for Chloe and Caelia in The Governess, and I found the following excerpt in an 1813 book, entitled _The rule and exercises of holy living_ by Jeremy Taylor:

"But that which we miscall poverty, is indeed nature: and its proportions are the just measures of a man, and the best instruments of content. But when we create needs that God or nature never made, we have erected to ourselves an infinite stock of trouble that can have no period. Sempronius complained of want of clothes, and was much troubled for a new suit, being ashamed to appear in the theatre with his gown a little thread-bare; but when he got it, and gave his old clothes to Codrus, the poor man was ravished with joy, and went and gave God thanks for his new purchase; and Codrus was made richly fine and cheerfully warm by that which Sempronius was ashamed to wear; and yet their natural needs were both alike: the difference only was that Sempronius had some artificial and fantastical necessities super-induced, which Codrus had not; and was harder to be relieved, and could not have joy at so cheap a rate: because he only lived according to nature, the other by pride and ill customs, and measures taken by other men's eyes and tongues, and artificial needs. He that propounds to his fancy things greater than himself or his needs, and is discontent and troubled when he fails of such purchases, ought not to accuse providence, or blame his fortune, but his folly. God and nature made no more needs than they mean to satisfy; and he that will make more must look for satisfaction where he can."

So Sempronius was, during JA's time, a symbol of a man who has been corrupted by wealth into being unsatisfied with simple goods, that were pleasing to a poor man, Codrus, who had lower expectations.

Looking behind still further, Wikipedia told me that Codrus was the last of the semi-mythical Kings of Athens....an ancient exemplar of patriotism and self-sacrifice. Whereas there was a real life prominent Roman family named Sempronius, and one member was co-consul with Scipio during the Punic Wars---Tiberius Sempronius Congus--who apparently was reputed to be very greedy.

So....that all provides an intriguing subtext to Sarah Fielding's choice of the name Sempronius, and JA's decision to allude to Fielding's Sempronius in the character of Knightley--does it suggest a mercenary motivation in marrying Caelia.

Sarah Fielding's The Governess: The Unmistakable Austen allusions to same in Emma and S&S

My recent two part discovery was that JA, CEA and Anne Sharpe, joined by Elizabeth Knight, put on a Fielding extravaganza combining Sarah's The Governess with Henry's The Virgin Unmasked----joined, no doubt, by Fanny, Louisa, and Marianne Knight, playing some unknown combination of the girls at the Female Academy and the very un-naive heroine of The Virgin Unmasked:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/theres-even-more-fielding-subtext-in.html

(which includes a link to my first post)

I will now disclose the principal Austenian allusions to The Governess I see:

First and foremost, the story of Chloe, Caelia, and Sempronius was taken by JA and reworked in the most interesting and complex way imaginable into the characters of Emma, Jane F/Harriet S, and Knightley, respectively.

Chloe and Caelia are two girls of 22 (Emma and Jane are both 21) who lost their mothers while they were six (Emma was 3, Jane was younger still), who are supposed to be friends, but one (Chloe) tells jealous and slanderous tales about the other (Caelia) --sound familiar?

And, even more important, the same disturbance noted in Ellen's blog at the Machiavellian character of Sempronius has been mirrored even more disturbingly in the character of Knightley. He is the self-interested Pygmalion who covertly sets up "educational" experiences for the young women who place their trust in him.

I think JA was well aware of Sarah Fielding's subversive silence about Sempronius's machinations, and mirrored it with her own subversive silence about the dark side of Knightley's machinations---and it's no accident that the tale of Sempronius comes not longer after we read the fairy tale of the two giants, one benevolent, one malevolent----those are transformed by JA into two _alternative_ views of Knightley.

And there's much, much more to this allusion when you carefully read Fielding's tale, and match it, in your mind, against the 1000 times more complex interaction of Jane F and Emma in Austen's novel.

And that's just the beginning....

We also, of course, have Mrs. Teachum, the wise, proactive governess of the Little Female Academy, transformed satirically into Mrs. Weston, the governess who seems to have _no_ power to educate her primary charge, Emma, and also into the societal role of governess itself, which is held up by Jane Fairfax as a horrible fate to be avoided at all costs, "the sale of human intellect".

And....we have Mrs. Teachum's boarding school transformed satirically into Mrs. Goddard's parlour boarding school, where the primary education the girls receive seems to be how to place themselves in the path of dangerous and/or mercenary young men, and/or to ingratiate themselves to rich naive girls they can manipulate to gain advantage.

And the story of Lucy Sly is transformed by JA into the story of the very sly Lucy _Steele_ Ferrars ("Lucifer", as I noted years ago), a survivor who finds a way to level the playing field tilted so heavily against females. Lucy Sly has "a pair of exceeding fine black eyes, only with the alloy ofsomething cunning in their look". Lucy Sly also says of her original governess, "I knew by her tone of voice, and her manner of speaking, that she did not blame me in her heart, but rather commended my ingenuity." Lucy-Ferrars to a tee, I'd say.

And, continuing with allusions in _Emma_, take a look at this description in The Governess of the youngest student in Mrs. Teachum's Little Academy, Polly _SUCKLING_:

"Miss Polly Suckling was just turned of eight years old, but so short of her age, that few people took her to be above five. It was not a dwarfish shortness; for she had the most exact proportioned limbs in the world, very small bones, and was as fat as a little cherub. She was extremely fair, and her hair quite flaxen. Her eyes a perfect blue, her mouth small, and her lips quite plump and red. She had the freshness of a milkmaid; and when she smiled and laughed, she seemed to show an hundred agreeable dimples. She was, in short, the very picture of health and good-humour, and was the plaything and general favorite of the whole school."

JA not only gives the last name of this little girl to Mrs. Elton's sister and brother in law, JA also gives many of the little girl's physical and personality attributes (shortness, plumpness, fairness, blue eyes, milkmaidishness, good humour) to Harriet Smith!

And, what's more, look at how JA transforms the following description in Fielding's story of the al fresco adventure Mrs. Teachum takes her little female charges on:

"The housekeeper led them through an avenue of tall elm-trees into this magnificent house, in which were many spacious apartments, furnished with the utmost grandeur and elegance. Some of the rooms were adorned with fine pictures, others were hung with tapestry almost as lively as those paintings, and most of the apartments above stairs were furnished with the finest sorts of needle-work.....in short, they should not go till they had been in her room, and eat some sweetmeats of her own making. The good woman seemed to take so much delight in giving them any pleasure, that Miss Jenny could not refuse accepting her offer; and, when they were all in her room, Polly Suckling said, 'Well, this is a most charming house; I wish we could all live here for ever. How happy must the lord and lady of this fine place be!'

There you have the prototype of Harriet Smith at Donwell Abbey, being led by Mr. Knightley through an avenue of lime trees, and then not long afterwards shocking Emma with Harriet's ambition to marry Knightley and become the lady of Donwell Abbey (and by the way, the fairy tale (and there are two fairy tales in The Governess) of Harriet and the Gipsies takes place just outside Highbury on a road "deeply shaded by _elms_ on each side"! And when Emma's nephews insist on hearing the story of Harriet and the Gipsies repeated just so, we hear the echo of the girlsat Mrs. Teachum's school also wishing to hear the fairy tales recited just so.

And as I was just editing this post, I realized that this passage in The Governess is also (and equally disturbingly) pointed to in Lizzy Bennet's reactions upon first seeing Pemberley.

And underlying all of the above is the overarching question of female education--what is good for girls to learn, and what role should imagination play in the development of their minds? The mind reels at the richness and mysteriousness of Austen's allusions to The Governess, which seem to me to demonstrate that JA read Fielding _against_ the grain, picking up on the unstated satire subtly embedded by Sarah Fielding beneath the seemingly conventional moral message to young girls to conform, accept, and obey the orders of men.

And there's more, but that's plenty for now.....

So, how is it possible that so many Janeites, including a fair number of knowledgeable Austen scholars, could actually read Sarah Fielding's The Governess and _not_ see any of the above unmistakable parallels that, it is obvious to me, were intentionally drawn by JA to Fielding's _very_ famous and influential novella, which is generally acknowledged as the first English fiction written for _and_ about children?

I claim that this deep blindness has arisen because nobody before me has read JA as being so audacious, sly, _and_ erudite, as to allude so subtly and covertly, so as to hide such massive parallels in plain sight. JA knew from personal experience in the world, especially at Godmersham where she was viewed by many of the rich and powerful she met as a poor spinster nobody, that her readers would not accord JA sufficient respect to pay attention to those echoes, but instead would treat these echoes the way that Emma treats Miss Bates's stream of comments about everything--as so much blah, blah, blah, to be ignored, and thereby the most important layer of meaning is missed entirely. No one before me has suspected JA of this sort of massive subversive feminist agenda, and therefore no one has seen it. Because, as Tom Wolfe so cleverly turned the proverb on its head 40 years ago, believing is seeing--and no one has previously believed that JA was this sort of author!

JA knew exactly what she was doing, and hoped that there would be some sharp elves among her readers who would pick up on some or all of this. Her novels were _her_ incredibly sophisticated version of Mrs. Teachum's fairy tales and parables, intended to educate her adult female readers as to what they needed to know in order to survive in a man's world!

And all of the above must be related back to JA's enactment of an amateur theatrical at Godmersham in 1805 (ie., 10 years before she wrote _Emma__), and we must realize that JA made very very good use of the delay in publication of her novels until she was in her mid 30's, enabling her to send all six of them out into the world as works of mature fiction, all informed by her fully developed genius.

Cheers, ARNIE

There's EVEN MORE Fielding Subtext in the 1805 Godmersham All-Female Theatricals

Diana Birchall in Janeites and Austen L: "…I am delighting in the Fielding connections. I don't think I've read anything that has charmed me so much as the little word-picture image of Aunt Cassandra playing Miss Teachum to Jane Austen's The Governess, and Miss Sharpe in the thick of it!"

And I am equally delighted, Diana, at all the responses I've received, both in these groups and privately, to my discovery of the Sarah Fielding’s The Governess subtext in the 1805 Godmersham all-female theatricals, as (for those who might have missed it) I posted here:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/jane-austens-playlet-adaptation-of.html

Among those responses, it was suggested to me that if The Governess was actually adapted/parodized, it must have been a very free adaptation, because several of the characters listed by Fanny Knight in her diary entry do _not_ appear in The Governess. It was also suggested to me that perhaps The Governess was not adapted at all, but that, as was the Godmersham custom on Twelfth Night, characters were assumed like costumes, and all was improvised.

These were both plausible observations, and they made me curious to have a second, closer look at those subordinate characters, and see what else Google might turn up, which might bring further clarity to these interesting and important questions. And, it turned out that in this instance, to my great good fortune, lightning struck a second time, and just as powerfully!

First, here again is that excerpt from Fanny Knight’s diary for June 26, 1805:
“Aunts and Grandmama played at school with us. Aunt Cassandra was Mrs Teachum, the Governess Aunt Jane, Miss Popham the Teacher Aunt Harriet, Sally the Housemaid, Miss Sharpe, the Dancing master the Apothecary and the Serjeant. Grandmama Better Jones the Pie woman, and Mama the Bathing Woman. They dressed in Character and we had a most delightful day…”

At first I misidentified Miss Popham as a character name, but then realized that must have been a real life Miss Popham, part of the Godmersham social circle (and probably a close relation of Sir Home Popham, the famous English military man, as to whom JA wrote the following poem in 1807:

ON SIR HOME POPHAM'S SENTENCE, APRIL 1807.
Of a Ministry pitiful, angry, mean,
A gallant commander the victim is seen.
For promptitude, vigour, success, does he stand
Condemn'd to receive a severe reprimand!
To his foes I could wish a resemblance in fate:
That they, too, may suffer themselves, soon or late,
The injustice they warrant. But vain is my spite,
They cannot so suffer who never do right.

So, while that was an interesting factoid, it was a dead end in terms of allusive sources for the thematic significance of these Godmersham all-female theatricals. But then I Googled “Dancing Master” & “Apothecary”, and look at what popped up on my monitor!:

http://books.google.com/books?pg=PA120&dq=apothecary+%22dancing+master%22&ei=xBWDTuq3I8OCgAfCxZFS&ct=result&id=EPEjAAAAMAAJ#v=onepage&q=apothecary%20%22dancing%20master%22&f=false

An Old Man Taught Wisdom, or The Virgin Unmask’d by Henry Fielding, Esq. (1734)
Dramatis Personae: Good-will, Lucy, his daughter, Blister, an _apothecary_, Coupee, a _dancing-master_, Quaver, a singing-master, Worm-wood, a lawyer, Mr Thomas, a footman

Was it just a coincidence that Googling character names from those theatricals had _again_ led me to a work written by a Fielding, this one by _Henry_? Of course it could not be a coincidence!! I quickly read through the text of Fielding’s wicked little farce, and concocted the following very interesting synopsis:

Goodwill, an arrogant 70-year old, rich widower, wants to marry off his 16 year old daughter Lucy to a rich relative, to keep his wealth ‘in the family’ (shades of Mr. Collins in P&P, and also the Bible stories of Zelophehad’s daughters!). Goodwill is cocksure that Lucy, whom he has deliberately raised in isolation, is under his complete control. However, as the action quickly unfolds, and not surprisingly in a farce, it is immediately apparent that Lucy has her own mind, including some strong but conflicting mercenary and sexual inclinations, far beyond the control of her clueless father.

Lucy winds up marrying Thomas the handsome footman of a neighboring lord, but first deftly deflects several unpleasant suitors, including Blister the _apothecary_ (who tries to physic everyone, even Lucy), and Coupee the _dancing master_ (who finds it scandalous that Lucy has not been taught to dance).

And, apropos the role of “Serjeant” that Fanny also listed, would you be surprised to learn that there are different ranks of footmen, and that the one just beneath valet status is called “_sergeant_ footman”?!

And, for good measure, there is also a character named Mr. Achum, a disabled old man—so now we have a Fielding triumvirate of Thwackum (from Tom Jones), Teachum (from The Governess), & Achum (from The Virgin Unmask’d)!]

And Blister, by the way, sounds disturbingly like the real life Harris Bigg Wither, when Lucy tells him point blank that she finds him too fat and ugly.
And perhaps most relevant to my inquiry vis a vis the Governess, the threat that Goodwill hangs over the head of Lucy (the same name, by the way, as the sharp-eyed girl in The Governess) is that if Lucy disobeys his courtship orders, he will send her to a _boarding school_ where she will be whipt.
So, from the half dozen direct echoes I have just quickly outlined, I feel safe in claiming that the performance that day at Godmersham was in some way a blending of Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, with Henry Fielding’s The Virgin Unmask’d, a truly Fieldingesque extravaganza!

And…(apropos Diana’s comments in particular), it also seems clear to me that Miss Sharpe, in playing the apothecary, the dancing master and the serjeant (footman), has played all three of the listed _male_ parts, the exact reverse of an Elizabethan performance of Shakespeare (as portrayed so memorably in Shakespeare in Love) when men played all the parts, including the female parts! Could there be a more feminist message conveyed to young Fanny? And what, if anything, does this casting suggest regarding Anne Sharpe? Is she like Tom Bertram—whose sexual orientation we have discussed in the past--taking the role of the Rhyming Butler?

The mind reels at all these connections and intimations.

What immediately came to my mind in particular, though, was the following passage from Henry Austen’s 1818 Biographical Notice:

“Richardson's power of creating, and preserving the consistency of his characters, as particularly exemplified in "Sir Charles Grandison," gratified the natural discrimination of her mind, whilst her taste secured her from the errors of his prolix style and tedious narrative. She did not rank any work of Fielding quite so high. Without the slightest affectation she recoiled from every thing gross. Neither nature, wit, nor humour, could make her amends for so very low a scale of morals.”

To which I can only respond “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” Henry Austen, you naughty man, you were successful for a very long time with your charade that JA found Henry Fielding too gross and lacking in morals—quite the contrary, Fielding’s writing was grist for JA’s mill, just as Richardson’s Grandison—and is it just coincidence that we have JA’s playlet of Grandison alongside this (alas) now lost text of a Fielding playlet? No, of course not! Henry knew there was a lot of “Fielding” smoke surrounding his recently deceased sister (don’t forget the 1796 Tom Lefroy letters!), and now that she was no longer alive to complain, he seized the moment to try to bury any sign of JA’s sympatico with Henry Fielding (and perhaps also with Sarah Fielding). And, as I suggested in my previous message, I suspect that if Le Faye did know about JA’s sympathy for “the devil” Fielding, she was not going to bring that to anyone’s attention!

But wait…..there’s even _more_!

I Googled “Virgin Unmask’d”, and I was immediately transported from Henry Fielding’s short, wicked 1734 farce (which, while not famous today, was deemed worthy of inclusion, later in the 18th century, , in the above-linked collection of great farces), to a truly infamous work of literature from 1724 by Bernard de Mandeville, entitled The Virgin Unmask’d: Or, Female Dialogues Betwixt an Elderly Maiden-Lady and her Niece, On several Diverting Discourses On Love, Marriage, Memoirs and Morals, &c. of the times.

Mandeville’s greatest infamy arose from his very popular Fable of the Bees. Here is what Fredson Bowers, in his 1975 edition of Tom Jones, says, in a footnote at ppg. 268-9, re the beginning of Book VI of Tom Jones, when Fielding addresses the “modern doctrine” that there is no such thing as love in human beings, and “that there were no such things as Virtue or Goodness really existing in Human Nature, and who deduced our best Actions from Pride”:
“Throughout his career as novelist and journalist, Fielding warmly denounced the views of those “Political Philosophers’ who followed Hobbes….In Fielding’s own century, the most notorious exponent of this cynical doctrine was Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), who in several essays in The Fable of the Bees (1714-34) dedicated himself to refuting Shaftesbury and to elaborating the proposition that ‘the nearer we search into human nature, the more we shall be convinced, that the moral virtues are the political offspring which flattery begot upon pride.” (“An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue” (1714)…Accordingly, Fielding’s sharpest criticism of this school was generally directed at ‘that charming Fellow Mandevil’, as Miss Matthews calls him in Amelia (1751, III.v)….”

So….as with my previous post, this additional discovery opens a half dozen doors of fruitful further inquiry, in terms of the significance of there now being not one, but _two_ Fielding subtexts embedded at the heart of the 1805 Godmersham all-female theatricals. It seems clear to me that these were not just random assignments of amusing literary characters, but that there was, as we see with the Sir Charles Grandison playlet that JA wrote (with some unknown input from Anna Austen), some sort of script.

We also see that the overarching theme is that of female education, the pros and cons of good and bad boarding schools, but all filtered through at least two literary works, Henry Fielding’s The Virgin Unmask’d,

And we are left with the very interesting question of why JA (with CEA’s obvious consent) would choose to stage a performance of works of literature that would not only subvert male authority by promoting a female-centered education for girls, but would go one step further and would seem to celebrate darkly cynical views of human nature and morality, as were at the heart of the satire of both Mandeville and Fielding?

What I wonder is, what was Elizabeth Knight’s take on all of this? Was she Fanny Price, dragged into playing a minor role (the Bathing Woman), while the main players had a satirically good time, and all of this with an audience that included Elizabeth’s own 12 year old daughter, Fanny, who seemed to enjoy the proceedings.

Cheers, ARNIE

Jane Austen's Playlet Adaptation of a Famous Novel (other than Sir Charles Grandison)

A few days ago, I wrote the following to Christy Somer in Austen L and also here in this blog:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/jane-austens-rapidly-moving-fingers.html

"...if you look at all of _your_ posts from the past 72 hours, there is information contained in _one_ of them which I (with my suspicious eye, working on the assumption that there are interesting connections and meanings everywhere which have never been noticed by Le Faye et al) immediately identified as worthy of closer examination in one respect. That information immediately (via _one_ Google search) led me to a heretofore unidentified, significant, and meaningful connection from Jane Austen to an allusive source from the world of literature published and extant in her world. And, that connection, upon further examination, turns out to strongly support my claim that Jane Austen had a strong authorial agenda to educate and empower young women to think critically and independently, and not to passively accept male prescriptions for female education."

In that post, I promised a quick explanation of the above, and, after a few days’ delay due to travel, here is my explanation.

This is what Christy wrote that caught my eye:

“Another recording from Fanny [Knight]’s diary for Wednesday, the 26th: “Aunts and Grandmama played at school with us. Aunt Cassandra was Mrs Teachum, the Governess Aunt Jane, Miss Popham the Teacher Aunt Harriet, Sally the Housemaid, Miss Sharpe, the Dancing master the Apothecary and the Serjeant. Grandmama Better Jones the Pie woman, and Mama the Bathing Woman. They dressed in Character and we had a most delightful day…” From DLF Record: :”In July some of the Bridges in-laws joined the house-party, and three years afterwards Jane remembered how ‘animated’ she and Cassandra had been when talking with Harriet Bridges and the Godmersham governess, Anne Sharp…..Miss Sharp left Godmersham a few months later, early in 1806.…” END QUOTE

As you see, Christy was quoting from Fanny Knight’s and Le Faye's accounts of an all-female Godmersham amateur theatrical that took place early in 1806.

What struck me immediately was the farcical name Mrs. TEACHUM, the role played by CEA in the theatrical. It reminded me of THWACKUM, the pious horrible hypocritical clergyman/tutor in Henry Fielding's very famous 1749 novel Tom Jones. It was just the kind of verbal—and character- similarity I thought JA-- to whom I ascribed the role of stage director---would definitely have been aware of. And so I thought, hmm… there's a pretty good chance that Teachum was either a name made up by JA as a parody of Thwackum, or maybe, just maybe, it was an allusion to some other work of literature which in some way was related to Fielding’s Tom Jones.

So I Googled "Teachum" and I saw a remarkable validation of my hunch beyond my wildest expectations. In a nutshell, it turns out that Mrs. Teachum is the main adult character in _another_ novel, which, amazingly, shared _three_ crucial similarities with _Tom Jones_:

Both were published in 1749; both were wildly successful, going through many 18th century editions, and (last but certainly not least)…..both were written by an author with the surname Fielding!!!!

How could this be? Because that other novel was _The Governess, or The Little Female Academy_, and its author was none other than SARAH Fielding, the less famous but still well known (among literary scholars) _sister_ of Henry Fielding!

As far as I can tell, after diligent online search during the past 5 days, no literary scholar prior to myself has ever pointed out that this little "play" staged at Godmersham was an adaptation of Sarah Fielding’s famous didactic novel. And what is particularly curious about that lack is the following passage in JA’s Letter 32 dated 1/22/1801….

“Fanny shall have the Boarding-school as soon as her Papa gives me an opportunity of sending it-& I do not know whether I may not by that time have worked myself up into so generous a fit as to give it to her for ever….”

…and Le Faye’s footnote to that passage:

“This would appear to be one of JA’s own childhood storybooks, now being lent to little Fanny; in which case, it may have been Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, or, Little Female Academy (1741, and reprinted up to 1768), or [two other possible books]…”

So there we have Le Faye speculating—based on what might seem to be a tenuous resonance between the two titles, “The Boarding School” and “Little Female Academy”--that JA may have given Sarah Fielding's novel to niece Fanny, age 8 in 1801.

But then Le Faye appears completely unaware of a connection of that passage in Letter 32 to the amateur theatricals that actually occurred at Godmersham in early 1806, a connection which would appear to validate Le Faye’s footnoted speculation, as it would make perfect sense that JA gave that novel to Fanny in 1801, and then, 5 years later, when Fanny has become a young teen, JA and CEA put on a little performance of scenes from that same novel with the participation of the Godmersham women, in effect turning Godmersham into a Little Female Academy for that time period!

There is so much more about the complex relationship between Sarah Fielding’s and Jane Austen’s writing, of which I was previously aware, but which becomes much more interesting in light of this discovery, but that is far beyond the scope of this posting.

Suffice for now to say that I believe I have fulfilled my promise of producing significant evidence of JA’s complex relationship to feminist literature available to be read during her lifetime, which has literally been hiding in plain sight under the nose of Le Faye and all those who swear by her authority. This example is, as I have previously stated, one of a thousand just like it that I have uncovered during the past 7 years, for one simple reason—I actively look for them, and expect to find them!

And my discovery doesn’t just have significance for Austen scholars—I wonder how many Fielding scholars have ever taken note of the coincidence of the character names Teachum & Thwackum (which would make a rather satirical name for a boarding school in JA’s era), and have written about covert coordination between Sarah and brother Henry in their two contemporaneous publications—that would certainly seem likely in the instance of _The Governess_ and _Tom Jones_!

And one final thought—I would not at all be surprised to learn that Le Faye was _already_ aware of the Sarah Fielding subtext underlying Fanny Knight’s 1806 diary entry, but chose not to say anything about it in a footnote—why? Because Sarah Fielding’s novel was _subversive_ in a very proto-feminist way (and there are several excellent modern scholarly articles on that very topic), and Le Faye would rather not raise the ominous spectre of feminism in the minds of readers of JA’s letters.

Or maybe Le Faye really was just clueless about it. Either way, it’s not exactly an advertisement for the usefulness of her footnotes.

Cheers, ARNIE

Teaching what cannot be taught, Pope and Austen style

" I appreciate your response."

Christy, I ALWAYS enjoy, and am grateful for, your unfailingly creative AND polite engagement with my ideas, regardless of whether you agree or not. ;)

"Here is an extract from Alexander Pope's 1719, "An Essay on Criticism":
"Men must be taught, as if you taught them not, And things unknown propos'd as things forgot."

A truly EXCELLENT find, Christy! Not only does that sound very much like it was THE primary inspiration for JA's aphorism in P&P, it also resonates strongly with Eliza de Feuillide's quotation from Pope's poem "Eloisa and Abelard" in a letter to Phylly Walter (aka Fanny Price), which I discussed two weeks ago—I believe Eliza in particular shared her love of Pope’s irony with young and impressionable cousin Jane:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/search?q=Eternal+Sunshine


"The above sounds a bit Zen-like also~~~:-)"

Precisely! Indeed it does, in exactly the same way I interpret JA's aphorism. And I think you did not realize that the entire stanza in Pope's poetic essay is directly relevant to our current discussion:

'Tis not enough your Counsel still be true, BLUNT TRUTHS more Mischief than NICE FALSEHOODS do; Men must be taught as if you taught them not; And Things ne'er known propos'd as Things forgot; Without Good Breeding, Truth is not approv'd, That only makes Superior Sense beloved."

There you have, in that SAME stanza, the EXACT rationale I claim JA operated under as an author of moral fiction—i.e., I claim JA chose to follow Pope’s pragmatic advice by masking her bluntest truths about hypocrisy and moral turpitude, especially in the male of the species, under the cover not of nice falsehoods, but of a significantly less hard-edged take on the human comedy.

I claim that JA, like Pope, recognized that subterfuge was an honorable attribute in a writer who wished to teach effectively. So her novels embody the quintessence of the kind of literary “good breeding” Pope prescribed, in order to make more palatable the “superior sense” she wished to convey to her readers, a superiority of sense that we all agree is universal in all of her writing.

And, by the way, I wonder whether Knightley was channeling Pope when he spoke angrily to Emma about Robert Martin and Harriet?: "No, he is not her equal indeed, for he is as much her SUPERIOR in SENSE as in situation...."


And I would bet the store that Pope’s advice was saliently in JA’s mind when she wrote Mrs. Smith’s description of her savior, friend and colleague, Nurse Rooke:
“….Nurse Rooke thoroughly understands when to speak. She is a shrewd, intelligent, sensible woman. Hers is a line for seeing human nature; and she has a fund of good SENSE and observation, which, as a companion, make her infinitely SUPERIOR to thousands of those who, having only received "the best education in the world," know nothing worth attending to. Call it gossip, if you will, but when Nurse Rooke has half an hour's leisure to bestow on me, she is sure to have something to relate that is entertaining and profitable: something that makes one know one's species better. One likes to hear what is going on, to be au fait as to the newest modes of being trifling and silly. To me, who live so much alone, her conversation, I assure you, is a treat."

Nurse Rooke “thoroughly understood when to speak”—that sounds like the same sort of discretion that Pope recommends.

And as for any remaining points of disagreement between us….

“And we'll just have to agree to disagree I suppose.... since imho, there's nothing 'meek' about such tactics applied to literary agenda's -even if that is there true intention.”

…..I NEVER suggested that JA as meek, only that she PRETENDED (as in her letters to Stanier Clarke) to be meek. And had JA lived another two decades, I believe she WOULD have inherited the earth, or, at least, the good opinion of those in her society whose good opinion was worth having!

Cheers, ARNIE

ANSWER TO MY TRICK QUESTION: THERE’S THE RUB!

I received one answer to my trick question--in the Janeites group-- from the very astute Elissa Schiff, and she was spot-on when she wrote:

“answer to #1: Hamlet, Act V, scene ii, ~line 340ff; answer to #2: Ulysses - 3 possibilities the Cyclops chapter, or Oxen in the Sun chapter, or late scene where Bloom, the father, finally meets up with Stephen, the "son." “

The obvious answer #1 was indeed the climactic scene of Hamlet, and the two male characters are Hamlet and Horatio, who do indeed spend a lot of face time together in the play. And the trick answer #2 was indeed from Joyce’s Ulysses, as I will explain in detail further down in this post.

This post is a long one, by the way, because I quote at length from both Hamlet and Ulysses, but if you are interested enough in my point to have clicked on the link for THIS post, I think you won’t mind the length, as it is the only way to give the full flavor of what I am arguing, without your having to scurry to read the texts of both of those works.

So first, here is the text of the ultra-famous scene in Hamlet where those words all appear:

HAMLET
Heaven make thee free of it! I follow thee.
I am dead, Horatio. Wretched queen, adieu!
You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audience to this act,
Had I but time--as this fell sergeant, death,
Is strict in his arrest--O, I could tell you--
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead;
Thou livest; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.

HORATIO
Never believe it:
I am more an ANTIQUE ROMAN than a Dane:
HERE’S YET SOME LIQUOR LEFT.

HAMLET
As thou'rt a man,
Give me THE CUP: let go; by heaven, I'll have't.
O good Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.

March afar off, and shot within

What warlike noise is this?

OSRIC
Young Fortinbras, with conquest come from Poland,
To the ambassadors of England gives
This warlike volley.

HAMLET
O, I die, Horatio;
The potent POISON quite o'er-crows my spirit: (V.2, Hamlet)

The “liquor” of course is the dregs of Claudius’s poison intended for Hamlet but drunk by Gertrude instead; and the dying Hamlet talks Horatio out of committing “sympathetic suicide” so that Horatio can live to tell Hamlet’s tale.

And NOW here is the passage in the Eumaeus episode of Ulysses—yes, Elissa, that is the scene late in Ulysses, right after Circe when Bloom and Stephen start talking to each other--- which contains all those same words and elements:

[Bloom] “…It's a horse of quite another colour to say YOU BELIEVE IN THE EXISTENCE of a supernatural God.

—O that, Stephen expostulated, has been PROVED CONCLUSIVELY BY SEVERAL OF THE BESTKNOWN PASSAGES IN HOLY WRIT, APART FROM CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE.

On THIS KNOTTY POINT however the views of the pair, POLES APART as they were both in schooling AND EVERYTHING ELSE with the marked difference in their respective ages, clashed.

—Has been? the more experienced of the two objected, sticking to his original point with a smile of unbelief. I'm not so sure about that. That's a matter for everyman's opinion and, without dragging in the sectarian side of the business, I beg to differ with you in toto there. My belief is, to tell you the candid truth, that those bits were genuine forgeries all of them put in by monks most probably or it's the big question of our national poet over again, who precisely wrote them like HAMLET and Bacon, as, YOU WHO KNOW YOUR SHAKESPEARE INFINITELY BETTER THAN I, OF COURSE I NEEDN’T TELL YOU. Can't you DRINK THAT COFFEE, by the way? Let me stir it. And take a piece of that bun. It's like one of our skipper's bricks DISGUISED. Still NO-ONE CAN GIVE WHAT HE HASN’T GOT. Try a bit.

—Couldn't, Stephen contrived to get out, his mental organs for the moment refusing to dictate further.

Faultfinding being a proverbially bad hat Mr Bloom thought well to stir or try to THE CLOTTED SUGAR FROM THE BOTTOM and reflected with something approaching acrimony on the Coffee Palace and its temperance (and lucrative) work. To be sure it was a legitimate object and beyond yea or nay did a world of good, shelters such as the present one they were in run on teetotal lines for vagrants at night, concerts, dramatic evenings and useful lectures (admittance free) by qualified men for the lower orders. On the other hand he had a distinct and painful recollection they paid his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy who had been prominently associated with it at one time, a very modest remuneration indeed for her pianoplaying. The idea, he was strongly inclined to believe, was to do good and net a profit, there being no competition to speak of. SULPHATE OF COPPER POISON SO4 or something in some dried peas HE REMEMBERED READING OF IT in a cheap eatinghouse somewhere BUT HE COULDN’T REMEMBER WHEN IT WAS OR WHERE. Anyhow inspection, medical inspection, of all eatables seemed to him more than ever necessary which possibly accounted for the vogue of Dr Tibble's Vi-Cocoa on account of the medical analysis involved.

—Have a shot at it now, he ventured to say of the coffee after being stirred.

Thus prevailed on to at any rate taste it Stephen lifted THE HEAVY MUG from the brown puddle it clopped out of when taken up by the handle and took A SIP OF THE OFFENDING BEVERAGE.

—Still it's solid food, his good genius urged, I'm a stickler for solid food, his one and only reason being not gormandising in the least but regular meals as the sine qua non for any kind of proper work, mental or manual. You ought to eat more solid food. You would feel a different man.

--Liquids I can eat, Stephen said. But O, oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. IT REMINDS ME OF ROMAN HISTORY.

Mr Bloom promptly did as suggested and removed the incriminated article, a blunt hornhandled ordinary knife with nothing particularly Roman or antique about it to the lay eye, observing that the point was the least conspicuous point about it.

--OUR MUTUAL FRIEND'S STORIES ARE LIKE HIMSELF, Mr Bloom _apropos_ of knives remarked to his _confidante sotto voce_. Do you think they are genuine? HE COULD SPIN THOSE YARNS for hours on end all night long and lie like old boots. Look at him.

END OF EXCERPT FROM ULYSSES

You judge for yourself if the matrix of allusion that I have outlined is a figment of my imagination (and note that this excerpt begins with Bloom and Stephen debating the existence of a supernatural God, i.e., debating the existence of something significant), or was merely an unconscious allusion by Joyce to Hamlet. Note that “Holy Writ” in the mind of the atheist Stephen would most plausibly be the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, not the Bible!

And did you notice the sly allusion to the third equally famous author, that Joyce inserted in that same scene? Of course I am referring to Charles Dickens, the author of Our Mutual Friend. And in a very real sense, Dickens, who was obsessed with Shakespeare during his entire life, and alluded to his plays hundreds of times in all his novels, was thus a “mutual friend” of both Shakespeare and Joyce!
And, if you still retain any doubt, allow me now to recall two of my recent posts in this blog which I claim ALSO connect Leopold Bloom with Hamlet in previously undetected ways:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/10/sign-sure-this-finance-jews-day-joyce.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/10/shape-of-stephen-dedalus.html

PLUS…in another post I wrote in the Joyce –Ulysses group, I made the argument for Bloom’s nickname “Poldy” being an ultrasly allusion to the character of “Pylades” in the ancient Greek play cycle The Oresteia, a character who has been likened by many Shakespearean scholars to….who else? Horatio from Hamlet!

Now, even if I have succeeded in making you wonder if I have found something intentional on Joyce’s part, your first reaction may be---very clever, but who cares? And my answer is that while I am not prepared to reveal my own still tentative exegesis of what I think Joyce was up to in all of this, I presented this trick question to illustrate a theme which has played out hundreds of times during the course of my literary sleuthing into the works of Austen, then Shakespeare, and now also Joyce, and which is of the greatest importance to me as I try to convince lovers of these great writers that I have, by my quirky methodology of literary sleuthing, found important things that have eluded literary scholars who have preceded me in this quest.

Perhaps the strongest foundational dogma of my research is that when a great author goes to the trouble of inserting a sly allusion (to a prior author’s fiction, and/or to some real-life historical event, whether past or present, including events in the author’s personal life), there is ALWAYS an IMPORTANT reason. It’s never trivial, it’s never “just a pun”, it’s never “just careless”, and it’s rarely unconscious.

There have been few works of literature which have been read as widely and as closely, by armies of very intelligent scholars and amateur readers, as Austen’s novels, Shakespeare’s plays, and Joyce’s Ulysses. And yet, on hundreds and hundreds of occasions, I have found allusions which, to the best of my ability to confirm via the Internet, scholarly databases, and actual print books, I am the first to take public notice of. And in hundreds and hundreds of other instances, there has been one or two previous scholars who have noted the allusion, and maybe even have ascribed a significance to the allusion, but the insight has not reached the general awareness of readers of those authors, but remains a bit of scholarly esoterica.
My belief is that what accounts for this pattern is that long-standing standards of critical interpretation of the greatest works of literature are WRONG! It turns out, I have found, in one of literary history’s greatest ironies, that the greatest authors are the BIGGEST tricksters when it comes to this sort of literary shell game. Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Joyce, Tolstoy, and many of the others in the highest tier of literary reputation engaged regularly and systematically in this sort of punning, secretive legerdemain, which is generally looked down upon by many literary critics as somehow beneath their genius.

And the second strongest foundational dogma of my research is that when an author peppers one of their masterpieces with such covert allusions, it will always be found that they are not random and disconnected, but they actually comprise, in aggregate, a coherent alternative interpretation of the story of the novel or play, and my term for that secret story is the “shadow story”.

So, I leave it to you who are interested in Ulysses to ask yourselves why Joyce would go to the trouble of hinting very covertly, and yet, upon examination, distinctly, of a correspondence between “Poldy” Bloom and Hamlet’s sidekick Horatio in several places in Ulysses?

Have I (to quote Joyce’s own sly metafictional description of the reader’s dilemma in assessing the probability of a secret allusion to Hamlet in that passage) “proved conclusively by several of the bestknown passages in Holy Writ, apart from circumstantial evidence” that Joyce was up to this sort of trickery?

Aye—as Bloom might have said before entering a Turkish bath for a massage--there’s the rub!

Cheers, ARNIE