I could not resist going back and doing a second round of Googling, to seek out a few “quadrillion” more connections between JA and quadrilles.
BLIND QUADRILLES:
The Sociable; or One Thousand and One Amusements Containing Acting Proverbs; Dramatic Charades; Acting Charades, or Drawing Room Pantomimes; Musical Burlesques; Tableaux Vivants; Parlor Games…., 1858, by George Arnold: “The Blind Quadrille. This is performed when a great number of forfeits are to be disposed of. A quadrille is danced by eight of the company with their eyes blindfolded, and as they are certain to become completely bewildered during the figures, it always affords infinite amusement to the spectators.”
Given the often-noted saturation of Emma with words pertaining to blindness, which we find in no other Austen novel in anywhere close to that density, AND given the centrality of the significance of the “courtship” charade for the whole novel, I find the metaphor of a blind quadrille, where the participants are blindfolded (or to borrow another term from Garrick’s Riddle recalled by Mr. Woodhouse, ‘hood-wink’d’) and find themselves bewildered as they struggle to find their “proper” partners, to be uncannily descriptive of the action not only in Emma, but also in one of its most important literary ancestors (as so brilliantly described by Jocelyn Harris 24 years ago), A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I already hear Nancy asking whether the “blind quadrille” was thought of during JA’s time? The earliest reference to blind quadrilles is from 1846, in a memoir of a young woman (who I believe, based on the snippets I could read, died as a young adult) named Ellen Parry, where we read the following:
“We had a dance in the evening. The harper played to us, and we danced a blind quadrille. Those who danced were blindfolded, and it was very funny to see them all knocking each other…”
But as I was searching around in that same 1846 Memoir, I came across the following curiosities:
“Mrs. Jowett, the Rector’s wife, at Hartfield…” and also references to Ellen Parry visiting a “valued friend” named “Mrs. Bertie” at Weymouth… And, by the way, the memoirist, Charles Henry Parry, whom I suspect was also the father of Ellen Parry, happened to be a physician (and the son of another famous physician whose medical discoveries included significant ones relating to the digestive system of the body, and the grandson of the Revd. Joshua Parry, a famous nonconformist minister)…and CHP also wrote a memoir of a guy named Peregrine Bertie, who just happens to be someone JA was connected to and about whom she wrote in her letters!
Make of all that what you will…..I am eager to move on to the next area of interest, to wit:
QUADRILLES AS POEMS:
I was VERY intrigued to find the following:
The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, Vol. VII. (1823):
“[Letter from a bashful bachelor]: I would….read a library of romances at her desire, and spend hours in writing out quadrilles, charades, or sonnets, to please her…”
It seems crystal clear from the above, written only 7 years after the publication of Emma, that quardrille was the name not only of a form of dance and a card game, it was also apparently the name of a form of short verse—but was it akin to a riddling charade or a poetic sonnet? My vote is the former, because that would make the “courtship” charade itself literally also a quadrille, and would fit like a glove with all that has been presented so far re quadrilles.
But there’s more….
A DRAMATIZED ACCOUNT OF A (CARD) GAME OF QUADRILLE:
The following delightful dramatization of a game of quadrille strikes me as almost supplying the dialog we might have heard if we’d had a secret microphone at Hartfield to listen in on the conversation amongst Mr. Woodhouse and his three lady-friends. My guess is that this is yet another one of the jokes of Emma’s cluelessness, that she perceives Mrs. Bates and Miss Bates as being out to lunch, mentally, and yet they are able to play this game that, per Wikipedia, went out of fashion and was supplanted by whist precisely because it was so complicated.
Read, and enjoy. I would like to think that JA at some point actually read this delightful mini-play, which also stars a man and three ladies! And it provides a lot of incidental detail as to how the game itself was played, which clearly was a betting game related to whist or bridge (because of having trump suits being declared for each hand). From the Wikipedia description of the complex rules of the game, I discern that ‘mattadores’ were what we would today call, in poker, “wild cards”, and a “vole” seems to be an early ancestor of what we would today call, in bridge, a “slam”.
Poems, &c. &c By Mary Alcock, 1799 “A Party At Quadrille”, p. 139 et seq:
LADY POOLE'S HOUSE. Enter Lady WRANGLE, Mrs. FRETT, and Mr. CARDER.
Lady P.: Ladies, your servant. This indeed is kind to come to one so much distress'd in mind; since Friday last, the day poor Pompey died, no soul I've seen, nor left my fire-side.
Lady W.: Well, dearest Madam, talk no more of that. Nothing is like a game at cards, and chat, to ease the mind. I'm sure I found it so when poor Sir Simon died; you all well know how very much reliev'd I was by play; when morn was over I began the day.
Mr. C.: Come ladies, then 'tis best to lose no time, to dwell on griefs I always deem a crime.
Lady P.: Pray, ladies, take your places as you chuse; In every seat I know I'm sure to lose.
Mrs. F.: To lose! dear Ma'am, I think to leave off play, such cards I sat with all the other day, when in this very house your La'ship won; 'tis what I never do, I've such a run. Boasted such hands! I lost on Tuesday night three double mattadores, they broke me quite.
Lady P.: Ladies, your stakes. We play our usual rate.
Mrs. F.: Here, Madam's, mine; 'tis gone as sure as fate.
Lady P.: Sir, you have pass'd, I now may shew my cards; six mattadores; four fifths are my reward.
Lady W.: Indeed! this way the cards are sure to go, whatever game I play, or high or low. The other night I lost at Lady Vole's my twenty shillings, now at Lady Poole’s this night I'm like to lose three times that sum; I swear I'll keep from Mrs. Fuzz's drum.,
Mrs. F.: I take a king if no one plays alone.
Lady W.: Madam, I do; I'll not sit like a drone with mattadores, six trumps; 'tis monstrous hard to have a vole within one single card. Might I have took a king I'd had it clear, but some folks cards will always play severe.
Mrs. F.: Severe indeed! Sure mine the hardest cafe is, to sit thus long, and never see the aces. And now, the first time I could take a king, I'm superseded, that's the very thing. I sometimes get a hand, but never play; I owe your La'ship four, I've none to pay.
Lady P.: I'll mark you up, dear Ma'am, the usual way.
Mrs. F.: Well, now by chance at last I've got a game, and if you all give leave, my trump I'll name; hearts then it is; spadille I lead, oh fie! One hand without a trump! how hard they lie.
Lady P.: Madam, you have your game, no trump is in.
Mrs. F.: Yes, Ma'am, because this hand of course must win.
Lady P.: Upon my honour, now, I've never play'd but one poor hand, and now six fish have paid. I vow next time I deal I'll make a fuz.
Mrs. F.: I wonder how your next door neighbour does. I heard last week he lost his only son.
Lady P. : Yes, and his wife is dying. What is done? I think your La'ship ask'd? I pass of course; upon my life my cards get worse and worse.
Mrs. F.: I'm quite supriz'd, I'm really call'd this time. It is your La'ship's trick, 'tis none of mine; for if not call'd I'd been a bitter foe. Let's see those cards, I know not how they go.
Mr. C.: Ladies, I think the vole's at your command, at least I can't prevent it by my hand.
Lady W.: Ma'am, you're to speak; pray search the tricks again.
Mrs. F.: My dearest Ma'am, I fear 'tis all in vain, one fatal chance would overset the whole; and yet 'twould make us both to win a vole. Can you forgive me ? May I now declare.
Lady P. : Madam, proceed; this is not quite so fair.
Lady W.: Oh, Mrs. Frett, you've ruin'd me indeed; how could it e'er be won, and you to lead? My Lady Poole did well to bid us play when she'd that knave; we've all the world to pay.
Mrs. F.: Indeed, I think so too; she drew me in; yet sure the chance was great that we should win.
Lady W.: By no means, Ma'am; your play I can't excuse; I'm sadly wrong'd, for I could not refuse.
Lady P. : Well, Ladies, please to lay your money down, the pool's my constant care, 'tis always known; I'm sure you'd mattadores, so give us five; now this may turn my luck, and I may thrive. Poor Mr. Carder was without a fish, but now he's rich, and just as he could wish.
Lady W.: I know not who is rich, I'm sure I'm poor, and lay my ruin at that Lady's door.
Mrs. F.: Indeed, dear Ma'am, you see I'm quite undone; ‘tis very hard to twit, when if we'd won, you'd been the first to justify my play; but let it pass your Ladyship's own way; this fine lone hand some of my debts will fettle; 'tis but my due to ride on my own cattle.
Lady W. : 'Tis very lucky, Mrs. Fret, for you, but with these losses what am I to do? I wish with all my heart the pool was out, for I'm engag'd to Lady Racket's rout.
Lady P. : That's quite distressing, Ma'am, but I submit; 'twill break our set; but just as you think fit. The pool is out, upon my word I win.
Lady W.: Indeed, I thought your La'ship's pawn was in.
Lady P.: Oh no, I took that oat an hour ago;.I'm sure, Sir, you will witness it was so.
Mr. C: Madam, I always think your La'ship right; I just have lost three guineas by the night.
Lady P.: O lack-a-day ! 'twas unpolite to beat our only man—'twas an unlucky feat. We've won an even share, or very nigh. The cards to-night have not run very high. Ladies, your humble servant, Sir, good bye.
1810, Fashionable Follies: CONTAINING THE HISTORY or A PARISIAN FAMILY, WITH A PEEP INTO The English Character. BT THOMAS VAUGHAN, Esq.
"O ! then," exclaimed the sister, " do indulge us with a country dance, that we may get an appetite for our dinner."—It was no sooner said than done; and the ladies having arranged their dress for the purpose, danced a quadrille, with all the grace of a court ball, and all the glee of holiday folks at a fair.”
RESPONSE TO NANCY’S COMMENTS:
Nancy: “There is debate about the date of Quadrilles in England. I wonder if Jane Austen knew the dance. However that can be researched. “
Nancy, are you suggesting that JA, by the many connections she had with French culture, most importantly cousin/sister-in-law Eliza, would have been unaware of the dance that was the rage of France before becoming the rage of England within a year after Emma was published?
And take a look at the following comment from an 1885 book: “In those days the contre-danse had not hardened itself into the quadrille. It was danced, not in fours, but in sets of varying numbers, and of characters and figures mostly undefined.”
I don’t have to tell you the significance of country dancing in JA’s novels, and the above quote shows that country dance and quadrille were intimately related.
And speaking of the metaphor of dance for courtship, I also don’t need to remind you of the following immortal words spoken by Henry Tilney to Catherine: “I consider a country–dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both; and those men who do not choose to dance or marry themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their neighbours.”
Indeed, one could call JA’s charade (aka quadrille) an ‘emblem of marriage”!
Nancy: “The Lady Jersey who is said to have brought the Quadrille to England and the Ton was Darah not her mother in law Frances. Frances was the one who was the mistress of the Prince of Wales.”
It’s every bit as telling, and far beyond the realm of coincidence, if the “courtship” charade which conforms so extensively to the structure of the dance famously associated with the daughter in law, just happens to also be a covert and extensive skewering of the famous man who was notoriously associated with the mother in law. Especially when you then add in all the other connections I outlined in my previous post, as well as this one.
But if you remain in doubt, then I have ANOTHER bridge to sell you if you think these are all coincidences. ;)
ARNIE
Friday, February 12, 2010
Games (like Quadrille) that People Play
In response to a post in Austen L and Janeites, I wrote the following today:
Anielka’s analysis of the mathematics of the acrostics in the “courtship” charade in Chapter 9 of Emma is both first-rate and spot-on. Indeed, the probability that such an elaborate structure could have arisen by chance is (less than) zero. But, in my opinion, that certainty was already previously established, given the already understood complexity and aptness of all the hidden meanings of that charade, as they pertain to the novel as a whole. But it is very tasty icing on the cake nonetheless!
As cool as the mathematical aspects of the charade are, the significance of the concept of “quadrille” for our understanding of the shadows of Emma is much greater still. There is a great deal more going on than acrosticking.
To begin…there are those who say that Wikipedia is an unreliable resource, but I think Jane Austen, and one of her alter egos, Mrs. Bates, would have violently disagreed, if they could have read the following, as I did, this morning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrille
QUADRILLE AS DANCE:
Wikipedia first tells us that this word, in Jane Austen's time, not only referred to a card game, it also referred to a dance. And it should be no surprise that the description of that dance provided at Wikipedia (no citation is given, but I would imagine the description is accurate) corresponds uncannily closely to the poetic structure that Anielka so precisely outlined:
“Thus the quadrille was a very intricate dance. The standard form contained five different parts, and the Viennese lengthened it to six different parts. The following table shows what the different parts look like, musically speaking:
• part 1: Pantalon (written in 2/4 or 6/8)
theme A – theme B – theme A – theme C – theme A
• part 2: Été (always written in 2/4)
theme A – theme B – theme B – theme A
• part 3: Poule (always written in 6/8)
theme A – theme B – theme A – theme C – theme A – theme B – theme A
Part 3 always begins with a two-measure-introduction
• part 4: Trénis (always written in 2/4)
theme A – theme B – theme B – theme A
• part 5: Pastourelle (always written in 2/4)
theme A – theme B – theme C – theme B – theme A
• part 6: Finale (always written in 2/4)
theme A – theme A – theme B – theme B – theme A – theme A
Part 6 always begins with a two-measure-introduction
All the themes are 8 measures long.” END OF WIKIPEDIA SECTION RE DANCE
Which means, I would think, unless I am missing something, that JA’s charade, if it were set to music, would function nicely as the LYRICS to a quadrille that could be danced to it! Anyone with a musical bent want to compose the tune of a quadrille? ;)
But what could this mean for understanding the action in the novel itself? The safe and standard interpretation, that would fit beautifully, would be that the novel is a representation of a courtship “dance” in which four couples (the Eltons, Emma and K, Harriet and Robt Martin, and Jane and Frank) go through the motions of courtship and wind up wedded. Mr. Elton’s charade would thus be a diabolically clever representation of that overarching structure of the novel.
A more alarming interpretation I choose to make, however (which relates to what our soon-to-be guest Jill Heydt Stevenson discusses in her chapter on the “Felicities of Rapid Motion”, although, as far as I can see, she did not connect the dots to the “quadrille”), is that the “quadrille” described in the charade is a dance around the maypole, i.e., the “steps” taken by all eight of those participants, as they changed partners repeatedly, were, shall we say, less than chaste.
Still more alarming, though, is the oblique suggestion I perceive, which is that the evenings of ‘tea and quadrille” at Hartfield were perhaps a “whole” lot more lively among Mr. Woodhouse and his three “come-atable” female friends, than might at first have been suspected. In that regard, Diana, as for your lovely fantasy about that redoubtable quartet of worthies, I would not be so wicked as to suspect you of two VERY arch puns when you referred to “sweetbreads” and to things “slipping out” without the awareness of the participants! ;)
Now, if some hardened skeptic raises a demand for evidence that JA was aware of the quadrille as a dance, the Jane Austen Centre website tells us the following:
“First imported from France by Lady Jersey in 1815, the Quadrille was a shorter version of the earlier cotillions. Figures from individual cotillions were assembled into sets of five or six figures, and the changes were left out, producing much shorter dances. By the late 1810's, it was not uncommon to dance a series of quadrilles during the evening, generally consisting of the same first three figures combined with a variety of different fourth and fifth figures. Jane Austen's niece Fanny danced quadrilles and in their correspondence Jane mentions that she finds them much inferior to the cotillions of her own youth. By the late 1810's, under siege from the Quadrille, dancing masters began to invent "new" forms of country dance…”
So the quadrille was imported to England (by Lady Jersey, who was, by the way, as Nancy and some others of you will already have noticed, one of the Prince Regent’s most notorious mistresses!) precisely at the moment when JA was editing Emma! As Arte Johnson would say, VERRRRRRY interesting!
I just checked Le Faye’s edition of the letters, and found a reference to a card game of quadrille in Letter 57 to CEA dated 10/7-9/08 (“We found ourselves tricked into a thorough party at Mrs. Maitlands, a quadrille & a Commerce Table, & Music in the other room”) but the reference to the quadrille dance that the Jane Austen Centre alluded to was in Letter 151 to Fanny dated 2/20-1/17 (“Much obliged for the Quadrilles, which I am grown to think pretty enough, though of course they are very inferior to the Cotillions of my own day.”)
The above is a cornucopia of hidden meanings embedded in the “courtship” charade---but wait, it’s only half of the story that Wikipedia has to tell us!
QUADRILLE AS POLITICAL METAPHOR
As I suggested above, Wikipedia can be a wickedly useful tool, because look at what else that entry had to say, under the title “Stately Quadrille”:
“The mechanics of the dance, that of constantly shifting partners, led it to be compared to the European political system in the eighteenth century. What became known as the Stately quadrille saw the forming of fresh alliances with different partners in order to maintain the balance of power in Europe.”
A click of the mouse led me to the Wikipedia entry for “Stately Quadrille” which began with the following elaboration of that definition:
“The Stately Quadrille is a term popularly used to describe the constant shifting alliances between the Great Powers of Europe during the 18th century. The ultimate objective was to maintain the Balance of Power in Europe, and to stop any one alliance or country becoming too strong. It takes its name from the Quadrille, a dance where the participants constantly swap partners.”
As some of you already know, there have been numerous scholars (but most notably and expansively, Roger Sales) who have made the argument, in one way or another, that “Highbury” is a representation of the English nation as a whole, an argument that took on even greater force when Colleen Sheehan demonstrated the savage satire on the Prince Regent concealed in the “courtship” charade. I believe the above definition perfectly describes the cat and mouse games of courtship “diplomacy”, “espionage” and “intrigue” that are played by all the characters in the novel. So I would argue, therefore, that Jane Austen was well aware of this latter definition of “quadrille”.
But for those same hardened skeptics who do not find that argument persuasive, I refer you to a poem I discovered this morning, written by John Gay. It appeared in Samuel Johnson’s Works of the English Poets (in the 1810 edition at p. 489), but that identical poem was published as early as 1742 in a collection of writings by Gay, Pope, Swift and Arbuthnot. Some of you may recall that Gay also just happens to be the author of ANOTHER poem, which Mrs. Elton just happens to quote from late in the novel. Here is Gay’s magnum opus:
A BALLAD ON QUADRILLE.
When as corruption hence did go, And left the nation free; When Ay said ay, and No said no, Without or place or fee; Then Satan, thinking things went ill, Sent forth his spirit, call'd Quadrille. Quadrille, quadrille, &c.
Kings, queens, and knaves, made up his pack, And four fair suits he wore; His troops they were with red and black All blotch’d and spotted o'er; And every house, go where you will, Is haunted by this imp Quadrille, &c.
Sure cards he has for every thing, Which well court-cards they name, And, statesman-like, calls in the king, To help out a bad game; But, if the parties manage ill, The king is forc'd to lose codille, &c.
When two and two were met of old, Though they ne'er meant to marry, They were in Cupid's books enroll'd, And call'd a partie quarree, But now, meet when and where you will, A partie quarree is quadrille, &c.
The commoner, and knight, and peer, Men of all ranks and fame, Leave to their wives the only care To propagate their name; And well that duty they fulfil, When the good husband's at quadrille, &c
When patients lie In piteous case, In comes the apothecary; And to the doctor cries, " Alas! Non debes quadrillare:" The patient dies without a pill: For why ?—The doctor's at quadrille, &c.
Should France and Spain again grow loud, The Muscovite grow louder; Britain, to curb her neighbours proud, Would want both ball and powder; Must want both sword and gun to kill: For why ?—The general's at quadrille, &c.
The king of late drew forth his sword, (Thank God, 'twas not in wrath !) And made, of many a 'squire and lord, An unwash'd knight of Bath: What are their feats of arms and skill? They're but nine parties at quadrille, &c.
A party late at Cambray met, Which drew all Europe's eyes; 'Twas call'd in Post-boy and Gazette The Quadruple Allies; But somebody took something ill, So broke this party at quadrille, &c.
And now God save this noble realm, And God save eke Hanover; And God save those who hold the helm, When as the king goes over; But let the king go where he will. His subjects must play at quadrille, Quadrille, quadrille, &c. END OF GAY’S BALLAD
Here are my observations:
The second and third stanzas illustrate that in a deck of cards, the honors, i.e., the king, queen, and jack, are all members of a “court”.
In the third from last stanza, we have a reference to the Order of Bath. The parenthetical (“Thank God, ‘twas not in wrath”) suggests, to me at least, a lewd connotation of what the King might have done with his sword to the anatomy of those ‘squires and lords had he acted in anger. I am distinctly reminded of the modern reference to certain parts of the anatomy that become more interesting when “angry”! That suggests to me that Gay, like JA, saw the possibilities of sexual innuendo in the metaphor of “dance”.
In the penultimate stanza, we have an explicit reference to the political situation described in Wikipedia, which prompted the term “Stately Quadrille”—I wonder whether Gay’s poem was itself the originator of the term, or was his poem a reaction to a term already widely in usage? Either way, it was quite satirical toward George the Second, just as Colleen Sheehan showed that the Chapter 9 charade in Emma is quite satirical toward the Prince Regent, the future George IV.
The phrase “when Ay said ay” in the second stanza reminds me of all of Miss Bates’s archaic “ayes”!
The fourth and fifth stanzas allude pretty broadly to courtship and marital hanky-panky, and there is Cupid, who, as Jill Heydt Stevenson pointed out, makes his appearance in the unquoted portion of Garrick Charade that Mr. Woodhouse has forgotten.
The sixth stanza ‘s references to an apothecary and to a patient dying without a pill—might this connect to Mr. Perry and to the death of Mrs. Churchill?
And finally, and most relevant to the “courtship” charade in Emma, note that the last stanza, which contains an explicit naval motif. It refers to Hanover (the”monarch” of English, who was, in 1742, George the Second, the grandfather of George the Third, who of course was king during JA’s entire lifetime) holding the helm (i.e., the “monarch of the seas” holds the helm of a “ship”), but it is rather caustic, suggesting that George II would go overboard (like Jane Fairfax rescued by Frank), leaving the English people to play quadrille.
I think, all in all, that there is little doubt that JA had Gay’s wickedly clever and complex ballad in front of her, alongside Charles Lamb’s “Triumph of the Whale” (which Colleen identified) and Cruikshank’s caricature “The Prince of Whales or the Fisherman at Anchor” (which I myself identified), and, no doubt, a few more texts as yet unidentified, as she composed the “courtship” charade.
Now, does anyone want to take a crack at the meanings which have been dissolved into Mrs. Bates’s “tea”? ;)
Arnie
P.S.: Circling all the way around back to the mathematics of the “courtship” charade, I thought some more about its mathematical structure, and how I was reminded of game theory in general, and a quick bit of Googling led me to Volume 2 of the Second Edition of a recent book entitled “Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays”, by Elwyn R. Berlekamp, John H. Conway, and Richard K. Guy.
In it we find Chapter 12 entitled “Games Eternal-Games Entailed” with the lead epigraph being, very curiously, Mrs. Bennet’s “If it was not for the entail, I should not mind it”. If you don’t recognize the name, Conway famously invented the cellular automaton for the Game of Life, which is the most famous of the mathematical games in the field of what is commonly called “artificial life”, where seemingly lifelike patterns are created from the repetitive application of purely mathematical formulae.
I mention all this because I would argue that JA, in her own unfathomably brilliant way, created, in Emma, a literary equivalent of artificial life, an imaginary world which yet has a perpetual life of its own, realer than real to those of us who love that world.
Anielka’s analysis of the mathematics of the acrostics in the “courtship” charade in Chapter 9 of Emma is both first-rate and spot-on. Indeed, the probability that such an elaborate structure could have arisen by chance is (less than) zero. But, in my opinion, that certainty was already previously established, given the already understood complexity and aptness of all the hidden meanings of that charade, as they pertain to the novel as a whole. But it is very tasty icing on the cake nonetheless!
As cool as the mathematical aspects of the charade are, the significance of the concept of “quadrille” for our understanding of the shadows of Emma is much greater still. There is a great deal more going on than acrosticking.
To begin…there are those who say that Wikipedia is an unreliable resource, but I think Jane Austen, and one of her alter egos, Mrs. Bates, would have violently disagreed, if they could have read the following, as I did, this morning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrille
QUADRILLE AS DANCE:
Wikipedia first tells us that this word, in Jane Austen's time, not only referred to a card game, it also referred to a dance. And it should be no surprise that the description of that dance provided at Wikipedia (no citation is given, but I would imagine the description is accurate) corresponds uncannily closely to the poetic structure that Anielka so precisely outlined:
“Thus the quadrille was a very intricate dance. The standard form contained five different parts, and the Viennese lengthened it to six different parts. The following table shows what the different parts look like, musically speaking:
• part 1: Pantalon (written in 2/4 or 6/8)
theme A – theme B – theme A – theme C – theme A
• part 2: Été (always written in 2/4)
theme A – theme B – theme B – theme A
• part 3: Poule (always written in 6/8)
theme A – theme B – theme A – theme C – theme A – theme B – theme A
Part 3 always begins with a two-measure-introduction
• part 4: Trénis (always written in 2/4)
theme A – theme B – theme B – theme A
• part 5: Pastourelle (always written in 2/4)
theme A – theme B – theme C – theme B – theme A
• part 6: Finale (always written in 2/4)
theme A – theme A – theme B – theme B – theme A – theme A
Part 6 always begins with a two-measure-introduction
All the themes are 8 measures long.” END OF WIKIPEDIA SECTION RE DANCE
Which means, I would think, unless I am missing something, that JA’s charade, if it were set to music, would function nicely as the LYRICS to a quadrille that could be danced to it! Anyone with a musical bent want to compose the tune of a quadrille? ;)
But what could this mean for understanding the action in the novel itself? The safe and standard interpretation, that would fit beautifully, would be that the novel is a representation of a courtship “dance” in which four couples (the Eltons, Emma and K, Harriet and Robt Martin, and Jane and Frank) go through the motions of courtship and wind up wedded. Mr. Elton’s charade would thus be a diabolically clever representation of that overarching structure of the novel.
A more alarming interpretation I choose to make, however (which relates to what our soon-to-be guest Jill Heydt Stevenson discusses in her chapter on the “Felicities of Rapid Motion”, although, as far as I can see, she did not connect the dots to the “quadrille”), is that the “quadrille” described in the charade is a dance around the maypole, i.e., the “steps” taken by all eight of those participants, as they changed partners repeatedly, were, shall we say, less than chaste.
Still more alarming, though, is the oblique suggestion I perceive, which is that the evenings of ‘tea and quadrille” at Hartfield were perhaps a “whole” lot more lively among Mr. Woodhouse and his three “come-atable” female friends, than might at first have been suspected. In that regard, Diana, as for your lovely fantasy about that redoubtable quartet of worthies, I would not be so wicked as to suspect you of two VERY arch puns when you referred to “sweetbreads” and to things “slipping out” without the awareness of the participants! ;)
Now, if some hardened skeptic raises a demand for evidence that JA was aware of the quadrille as a dance, the Jane Austen Centre website tells us the following:
“First imported from France by Lady Jersey in 1815, the Quadrille was a shorter version of the earlier cotillions. Figures from individual cotillions were assembled into sets of five or six figures, and the changes were left out, producing much shorter dances. By the late 1810's, it was not uncommon to dance a series of quadrilles during the evening, generally consisting of the same first three figures combined with a variety of different fourth and fifth figures. Jane Austen's niece Fanny danced quadrilles and in their correspondence Jane mentions that she finds them much inferior to the cotillions of her own youth. By the late 1810's, under siege from the Quadrille, dancing masters began to invent "new" forms of country dance…”
So the quadrille was imported to England (by Lady Jersey, who was, by the way, as Nancy and some others of you will already have noticed, one of the Prince Regent’s most notorious mistresses!) precisely at the moment when JA was editing Emma! As Arte Johnson would say, VERRRRRRY interesting!
I just checked Le Faye’s edition of the letters, and found a reference to a card game of quadrille in Letter 57 to CEA dated 10/7-9/08 (“We found ourselves tricked into a thorough party at Mrs. Maitlands, a quadrille & a Commerce Table, & Music in the other room”) but the reference to the quadrille dance that the Jane Austen Centre alluded to was in Letter 151 to Fanny dated 2/20-1/17 (“Much obliged for the Quadrilles, which I am grown to think pretty enough, though of course they are very inferior to the Cotillions of my own day.”)
The above is a cornucopia of hidden meanings embedded in the “courtship” charade---but wait, it’s only half of the story that Wikipedia has to tell us!
QUADRILLE AS POLITICAL METAPHOR
As I suggested above, Wikipedia can be a wickedly useful tool, because look at what else that entry had to say, under the title “Stately Quadrille”:
“The mechanics of the dance, that of constantly shifting partners, led it to be compared to the European political system in the eighteenth century. What became known as the Stately quadrille saw the forming of fresh alliances with different partners in order to maintain the balance of power in Europe.”
A click of the mouse led me to the Wikipedia entry for “Stately Quadrille” which began with the following elaboration of that definition:
“The Stately Quadrille is a term popularly used to describe the constant shifting alliances between the Great Powers of Europe during the 18th century. The ultimate objective was to maintain the Balance of Power in Europe, and to stop any one alliance or country becoming too strong. It takes its name from the Quadrille, a dance where the participants constantly swap partners.”
As some of you already know, there have been numerous scholars (but most notably and expansively, Roger Sales) who have made the argument, in one way or another, that “Highbury” is a representation of the English nation as a whole, an argument that took on even greater force when Colleen Sheehan demonstrated the savage satire on the Prince Regent concealed in the “courtship” charade. I believe the above definition perfectly describes the cat and mouse games of courtship “diplomacy”, “espionage” and “intrigue” that are played by all the characters in the novel. So I would argue, therefore, that Jane Austen was well aware of this latter definition of “quadrille”.
But for those same hardened skeptics who do not find that argument persuasive, I refer you to a poem I discovered this morning, written by John Gay. It appeared in Samuel Johnson’s Works of the English Poets (in the 1810 edition at p. 489), but that identical poem was published as early as 1742 in a collection of writings by Gay, Pope, Swift and Arbuthnot. Some of you may recall that Gay also just happens to be the author of ANOTHER poem, which Mrs. Elton just happens to quote from late in the novel. Here is Gay’s magnum opus:
A BALLAD ON QUADRILLE.
When as corruption hence did go, And left the nation free; When Ay said ay, and No said no, Without or place or fee; Then Satan, thinking things went ill, Sent forth his spirit, call'd Quadrille. Quadrille, quadrille, &c.
Kings, queens, and knaves, made up his pack, And four fair suits he wore; His troops they were with red and black All blotch’d and spotted o'er; And every house, go where you will, Is haunted by this imp Quadrille, &c.
Sure cards he has for every thing, Which well court-cards they name, And, statesman-like, calls in the king, To help out a bad game; But, if the parties manage ill, The king is forc'd to lose codille, &c.
When two and two were met of old, Though they ne'er meant to marry, They were in Cupid's books enroll'd, And call'd a partie quarree, But now, meet when and where you will, A partie quarree is quadrille, &c.
The commoner, and knight, and peer, Men of all ranks and fame, Leave to their wives the only care To propagate their name; And well that duty they fulfil, When the good husband's at quadrille, &c
When patients lie In piteous case, In comes the apothecary; And to the doctor cries, " Alas! Non debes quadrillare:" The patient dies without a pill: For why ?—The doctor's at quadrille, &c.
Should France and Spain again grow loud, The Muscovite grow louder; Britain, to curb her neighbours proud, Would want both ball and powder; Must want both sword and gun to kill: For why ?—The general's at quadrille, &c.
The king of late drew forth his sword, (Thank God, 'twas not in wrath !) And made, of many a 'squire and lord, An unwash'd knight of Bath: What are their feats of arms and skill? They're but nine parties at quadrille, &c.
A party late at Cambray met, Which drew all Europe's eyes; 'Twas call'd in Post-boy and Gazette The Quadruple Allies; But somebody took something ill, So broke this party at quadrille, &c.
And now God save this noble realm, And God save eke Hanover; And God save those who hold the helm, When as the king goes over; But let the king go where he will. His subjects must play at quadrille, Quadrille, quadrille, &c. END OF GAY’S BALLAD
Here are my observations:
The second and third stanzas illustrate that in a deck of cards, the honors, i.e., the king, queen, and jack, are all members of a “court”.
In the third from last stanza, we have a reference to the Order of Bath. The parenthetical (“Thank God, ‘twas not in wrath”) suggests, to me at least, a lewd connotation of what the King might have done with his sword to the anatomy of those ‘squires and lords had he acted in anger. I am distinctly reminded of the modern reference to certain parts of the anatomy that become more interesting when “angry”! That suggests to me that Gay, like JA, saw the possibilities of sexual innuendo in the metaphor of “dance”.
In the penultimate stanza, we have an explicit reference to the political situation described in Wikipedia, which prompted the term “Stately Quadrille”—I wonder whether Gay’s poem was itself the originator of the term, or was his poem a reaction to a term already widely in usage? Either way, it was quite satirical toward George the Second, just as Colleen Sheehan showed that the Chapter 9 charade in Emma is quite satirical toward the Prince Regent, the future George IV.
The phrase “when Ay said ay” in the second stanza reminds me of all of Miss Bates’s archaic “ayes”!
The fourth and fifth stanzas allude pretty broadly to courtship and marital hanky-panky, and there is Cupid, who, as Jill Heydt Stevenson pointed out, makes his appearance in the unquoted portion of Garrick Charade that Mr. Woodhouse has forgotten.
The sixth stanza ‘s references to an apothecary and to a patient dying without a pill—might this connect to Mr. Perry and to the death of Mrs. Churchill?
And finally, and most relevant to the “courtship” charade in Emma, note that the last stanza, which contains an explicit naval motif. It refers to Hanover (the”monarch” of English, who was, in 1742, George the Second, the grandfather of George the Third, who of course was king during JA’s entire lifetime) holding the helm (i.e., the “monarch of the seas” holds the helm of a “ship”), but it is rather caustic, suggesting that George II would go overboard (like Jane Fairfax rescued by Frank), leaving the English people to play quadrille.
I think, all in all, that there is little doubt that JA had Gay’s wickedly clever and complex ballad in front of her, alongside Charles Lamb’s “Triumph of the Whale” (which Colleen identified) and Cruikshank’s caricature “The Prince of Whales or the Fisherman at Anchor” (which I myself identified), and, no doubt, a few more texts as yet unidentified, as she composed the “courtship” charade.
Now, does anyone want to take a crack at the meanings which have been dissolved into Mrs. Bates’s “tea”? ;)
Arnie
P.S.: Circling all the way around back to the mathematics of the “courtship” charade, I thought some more about its mathematical structure, and how I was reminded of game theory in general, and a quick bit of Googling led me to Volume 2 of the Second Edition of a recent book entitled “Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays”, by Elwyn R. Berlekamp, John H. Conway, and Richard K. Guy.
In it we find Chapter 12 entitled “Games Eternal-Games Entailed” with the lead epigraph being, very curiously, Mrs. Bennet’s “If it was not for the entail, I should not mind it”. If you don’t recognize the name, Conway famously invented the cellular automaton for the Game of Life, which is the most famous of the mathematical games in the field of what is commonly called “artificial life”, where seemingly lifelike patterns are created from the repetitive application of purely mathematical formulae.
I mention all this because I would argue that JA, in her own unfathomably brilliant way, created, in Emma, a literary equivalent of artificial life, an imaginary world which yet has a perpetual life of its own, realer than real to those of us who love that world.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Answer to "What Color was Washington's White Horse?"
A respondent in another online venue to my little question suggested that it was obvious that Mrs. Elton did not attend the wedding at all, to which I responded as follows:
Not everybody is so careful a reader, especially as it is clear (to me) that JA was having a little fun by being sly about not being explicit about Mrs. Elton not being in attendance, i.e., I think JA laid a gentle trap for her readers who were having the last laugh at Mrs. Elton's last words, and thereby misread.
Just look at the answers [which speculated as to what sort of dress Mrs. Elton did wear] that were given earlier today, by folks who know this novel very well.
I would wager that a large majority of Janeites (including myself, till the other day) do not realize that Mrs. Elton did not attend Emma's wedding. I am too lazy to check the endings of the various film adaptations, but my guess is that most, if not all, of them depict Mrs. Elton as being present.
So I was merely alerting people to pay attention to what those last two paragraphs actually do say, and not to assume they know. Part of the slyness is that normally people don't speak with such an air of certainty in describing an event they did not actually attend in person. But of course, that is prototypical Mrs. Elton, so it's totally in character that she would sound as if she had been there, especially as she would not want to have to admit to her sister that she had not been there!
And it's not just me who found her non-attendance especially noteworthy. Sheila Kaye-Smith (the one who first noticed it in print, as far as I can tell) in 1943, and then Sheldon Sacks (1980), Janet Todd (1983), Dorothy Gannon in Austen-L (1998), Edward Copeland (2004), Peter Leithart (2004), and the late Bruce Stovel (2007), ALL find JA's presentation of this information to be "sly". As I said, many readers are too busy laughing at Mrs. Elton's absurd snobbery, and in that instance it's all too easy to be seduced into not noticing the implication, even though it is, as you suggest, hiding in plain sight.
But, as usual with JA, it's not just a cheap authorial trick on the reader, and it's not just a cheap laugh. It's also very true to character, and has been carefully and cleverly set up in an inobtrusive way. Mrs. Elton is not just being a total snob out of the blue. There is an obvious context, once you think about it. The fact that she was not there is something that upsets and disturbs her, and has to be rationalized in some way. So she is doing just what someone like her would do in such a circumstance--if she was not there, then it must have been a pitiful event not worth attending anyway--the applicable fruit in this instance is not strawberries, but grapes--as in, VERY SOUR GRAPES! ;)
And there's also the foreshadowing of this event in at least two ways, with other humiliations of women.
First we have the progression of Emma's feelings regarding the invitation to the Coles's party. She starts out being a total snob about attending, and runs a whole elaborate fantasy around why she is too elevated a personage to even consider attending a party thrown by vulgar folk like the Coles. Then when the invitation is delayed--when, to paraphrase Knightley, she actually wants the invitation first before she turns it down, but begins to doubt she will get that invitation, she starts to feel the lack of an invitation very acutely. And so when it comes, she is, whether she admits it or not, very relieved.
Second, we have Emma's famous putdown of Miss Bates at Box Hill. Look at how poor Miss Bates scrambles to say something that will hide how painful Emma's insult was.
Now, think about those two situations in relation to what is left to the reader's imagination regarding Mrs. Elton's reaction when she first hears of the wedding, and her not being invited to it.
What is most interesting to me is to speculate how it happened that Mrs. Elton was not in attendance. After all, we are also told that Mr. Elton did the honors as vicar, so she must have become aware of the wedding, if he also knew about it. So, does that mean she was pointedly NOT invited? That is what several of the above commentators conclude, and at first blush, it does seem the most likely explanation. However, what jars me is that it would be a marked departure from Knightley's and Emma's very careful dealings with Mrs. Elton from the moment she arrives in Highbury, always taking great pains not to openly offend her. Recall Emma inwardly fuming at Mrs. Elton's repeated presumptions, yet Emma never voices her anger to Mrs. Elton, and never ceases to be overtly polite to her. Recall Knightley handling Mrs. Elton's meddling with the planning of the Donwell Abbey picnic with such urbane finesse. Despite many temptations to do so, K and Emma never fail to be courteous to Mrs. Elton, and she is invited to all social events that are . I do not recall the reader getting any warning or intimation whatsoever from the text that such a major slight as a non-invitation to Mrs. Elton was in the offing. So isn't this out of character for Knightley and Emma to so blatantly offend Mrs. Elton by excluding her.
Or is it possible that Mrs. Elton received an invitation, but declined to attend? Theoretically possible, sure, but wouldn't it have been in character for her to show up in an outfit designed to upstage Emma? No, I can think of no plausible motivation for Mrs. Elton to decline to attend.
I also wondered for a moment whether the sequence might have been that Mrs. Elton went to visit her sister Selina (who, despite Mrs. Elton's repeated speculations, was like Frank Churchill during the first volume of the novel, and was not likely to be visiting Highbury herself anytime soon!), and it was during that window of her absence that Emma and Knightley chose to quickly announce their wedding, obtain a special license, and tie the knot. The fairy story about the theft of the turkeys could have been invented on a dime in order to provide cover--i.e., Emma and Knightley had to strike while the iron was hot, and before Mr. Woodhouse's fears about turkey thieves loose in the neighborhood abated. So there would not have been any direct insult to Mrs. Elton.
But.....then I noticed that JA, with her incredible attention to the thought processes of the reader, covered that point as well, because JA takes pains to let us know that Mrs. Elton is aware of the details of the wedding but Selina has not yet heard them. So the only way that would fit with Mrs. Elton being at Maple Grove when the wedding occurred would be if Mrs. Elton was indeed at Maple Grove when the wedding was announced and then took place, but...she returned to Highbury BEFORE Mr. Elton could write to her and report on the wedding. A very narrow window indeed, and it strikes me as unlikely.
So, I am undecided at this moment as to the explanation for this curious turn of events.
In closing, I find it a very interesting bookend to the other wedding no-show in Emma, which also has been pointed out in this group and in scholarly writing about Emma. The first occurs in the first chapter of the novel, the second occurs in the last chapter of the novel. Bookends, and, to me, obviously intentional.
Cheers, ARNIE
Not everybody is so careful a reader, especially as it is clear (to me) that JA was having a little fun by being sly about not being explicit about Mrs. Elton not being in attendance, i.e., I think JA laid a gentle trap for her readers who were having the last laugh at Mrs. Elton's last words, and thereby misread.
Just look at the answers [which speculated as to what sort of dress Mrs. Elton did wear] that were given earlier today, by folks who know this novel very well.
I would wager that a large majority of Janeites (including myself, till the other day) do not realize that Mrs. Elton did not attend Emma's wedding. I am too lazy to check the endings of the various film adaptations, but my guess is that most, if not all, of them depict Mrs. Elton as being present.
So I was merely alerting people to pay attention to what those last two paragraphs actually do say, and not to assume they know. Part of the slyness is that normally people don't speak with such an air of certainty in describing an event they did not actually attend in person. But of course, that is prototypical Mrs. Elton, so it's totally in character that she would sound as if she had been there, especially as she would not want to have to admit to her sister that she had not been there!
And it's not just me who found her non-attendance especially noteworthy. Sheila Kaye-Smith (the one who first noticed it in print, as far as I can tell) in 1943, and then Sheldon Sacks (1980), Janet Todd (1983), Dorothy Gannon in Austen-L (1998), Edward Copeland (2004), Peter Leithart (2004), and the late Bruce Stovel (2007), ALL find JA's presentation of this information to be "sly". As I said, many readers are too busy laughing at Mrs. Elton's absurd snobbery, and in that instance it's all too easy to be seduced into not noticing the implication, even though it is, as you suggest, hiding in plain sight.
But, as usual with JA, it's not just a cheap authorial trick on the reader, and it's not just a cheap laugh. It's also very true to character, and has been carefully and cleverly set up in an inobtrusive way. Mrs. Elton is not just being a total snob out of the blue. There is an obvious context, once you think about it. The fact that she was not there is something that upsets and disturbs her, and has to be rationalized in some way. So she is doing just what someone like her would do in such a circumstance--if she was not there, then it must have been a pitiful event not worth attending anyway--the applicable fruit in this instance is not strawberries, but grapes--as in, VERY SOUR GRAPES! ;)
And there's also the foreshadowing of this event in at least two ways, with other humiliations of women.
First we have the progression of Emma's feelings regarding the invitation to the Coles's party. She starts out being a total snob about attending, and runs a whole elaborate fantasy around why she is too elevated a personage to even consider attending a party thrown by vulgar folk like the Coles. Then when the invitation is delayed--when, to paraphrase Knightley, she actually wants the invitation first before she turns it down, but begins to doubt she will get that invitation, she starts to feel the lack of an invitation very acutely. And so when it comes, she is, whether she admits it or not, very relieved.
Second, we have Emma's famous putdown of Miss Bates at Box Hill. Look at how poor Miss Bates scrambles to say something that will hide how painful Emma's insult was.
Now, think about those two situations in relation to what is left to the reader's imagination regarding Mrs. Elton's reaction when she first hears of the wedding, and her not being invited to it.
What is most interesting to me is to speculate how it happened that Mrs. Elton was not in attendance. After all, we are also told that Mr. Elton did the honors as vicar, so she must have become aware of the wedding, if he also knew about it. So, does that mean she was pointedly NOT invited? That is what several of the above commentators conclude, and at first blush, it does seem the most likely explanation. However, what jars me is that it would be a marked departure from Knightley's and Emma's very careful dealings with Mrs. Elton from the moment she arrives in Highbury, always taking great pains not to openly offend her. Recall Emma inwardly fuming at Mrs. Elton's repeated presumptions, yet Emma never voices her anger to Mrs. Elton, and never ceases to be overtly polite to her. Recall Knightley handling Mrs. Elton's meddling with the planning of the Donwell Abbey picnic with such urbane finesse. Despite many temptations to do so, K and Emma never fail to be courteous to Mrs. Elton, and she is invited to all social events that are . I do not recall the reader getting any warning or intimation whatsoever from the text that such a major slight as a non-invitation to Mrs. Elton was in the offing. So isn't this out of character for Knightley and Emma to so blatantly offend Mrs. Elton by excluding her.
Or is it possible that Mrs. Elton received an invitation, but declined to attend? Theoretically possible, sure, but wouldn't it have been in character for her to show up in an outfit designed to upstage Emma? No, I can think of no plausible motivation for Mrs. Elton to decline to attend.
I also wondered for a moment whether the sequence might have been that Mrs. Elton went to visit her sister Selina (who, despite Mrs. Elton's repeated speculations, was like Frank Churchill during the first volume of the novel, and was not likely to be visiting Highbury herself anytime soon!), and it was during that window of her absence that Emma and Knightley chose to quickly announce their wedding, obtain a special license, and tie the knot. The fairy story about the theft of the turkeys could have been invented on a dime in order to provide cover--i.e., Emma and Knightley had to strike while the iron was hot, and before Mr. Woodhouse's fears about turkey thieves loose in the neighborhood abated. So there would not have been any direct insult to Mrs. Elton.
But.....then I noticed that JA, with her incredible attention to the thought processes of the reader, covered that point as well, because JA takes pains to let us know that Mrs. Elton is aware of the details of the wedding but Selina has not yet heard them. So the only way that would fit with Mrs. Elton being at Maple Grove when the wedding occurred would be if Mrs. Elton was indeed at Maple Grove when the wedding was announced and then took place, but...she returned to Highbury BEFORE Mr. Elton could write to her and report on the wedding. A very narrow window indeed, and it strikes me as unlikely.
So, I am undecided at this moment as to the explanation for this curious turn of events.
In closing, I find it a very interesting bookend to the other wedding no-show in Emma, which also has been pointed out in this group and in scholarly writing about Emma. The first occurs in the first chapter of the novel, the second occurs in the last chapter of the novel. Bookends, and, to me, obviously intentional.
Cheers, ARNIE
Monday, January 25, 2010
What color was George Washington's White Horse?
I just learned something yesterday (that some of you probably were already aware of) that is very cool, and I thought of a fun way to pass it along.
Just give it your best shot to find the answer to the following question: "How was Mrs. Elton dressed at the wedding of Emma and Mr. Knightley?" ;)
Cheers, ARNIE
Just give it your best shot to find the answer to the following question: "How was Mrs. Elton dressed at the wedding of Emma and Mr. Knightley?" ;)
Cheers, ARNIE
Friday, January 22, 2010
The News that Really Made Jane Austen Sicker MORE......
Diana: "I think Arnie has done some excellent logical work in piecing together JEAL's motives, but perhaps goes a bit too far in demonizing him. What if he
did want to present himself and his family to the public in a pleasant Victorian light, that doesn't make him a monster. The Victorian way of framing a memoir wasn't warts-and-all realism. JEAL couldn't help being his father's heir, and he was fairly hard up at times until he finally got the money, long after JA's death. "
As I have previously argued, I believe that JEAL went far far beyond Victorian proprieties. And apropos warts, I think it's a crucial distinction that it's not JA's warts I am accusing him of intentionally covering up, it's his own, and those of his benighted benefactor.
As for JEAL being hard up at time, that must have been before 1828, when he married Emma Smith, because it is my understanding that Emma Smith was very wealthy, and that meant that after he married her, he was very wealthy too. And he had received a first rate education at Oxford, etc. Or do you have other info I am unaware of?
I think it bears repeating that what I find most noxious about JEAL's presentation of JA's life and works is that he relegates to the dumpster the pervasive message of all of JA's novels and letters, which was the way that women's lives were so constrained as to money, travel, courtship, and family matters. He gets a zero out of 100 in terms of his presentation of that fundamental aspect of JA's worldview, and the icing on the cake is his suppression of the specific way that he PERSONALLY was the biggest winner of that zero-sum game, and JA personally was the biggest loser. The hypocrisy is over the top awful.
"He had a lot of ill health himself and a very numerous family."
And who exactly is responsible for that very numerous family? Do you really think his wife was constantly on his case to make her continuously pregnant for 15 years? If he had illness, it was obviously not so serious as to prevent him from siring all those children!
"Primogeniture was the custom of the land and it meant women and dependents not getting the money. The whole point was keeping the
fortune together, in the hands of the eldest son; if you spread it around to all the sisters and cousins and aunts, it wouldn't be a fortune anymore. "
Isn't there such a thing as a matter of degree? Did I suggest that JEAL should have given his two sisters one third each of his wealth? Sure, that would have been a noble thing to do, but I am talking about much less than that. It seems obvious that whatever he gave to Anna was so little that she was forced to shuttle around in rented housing for a long while. Had he been more generous to her, there would not have been SUCH a large gap between his quality of life and hers during the last 30 years of their lives.
"The "daemon of the piece" was James Leigh Perrot in not making some provision for his widowed sister, and the disappointment certainly didn't help Jane
Austen's declining health any, poor soul. It's perfectly clear, from S & S if nowhere else, what she thought of this system of inheritance. But it
*was* the existing system. Perhaps JEAL felt guilty about it by 1870, which is why he tried to cover it up."
I don't think he felt guilty, in the sense of pangs of conscience, anymore than,e.g., Nixon et al felt guilty about Watergate- JEAL was engaged in a coverup, pure and simple. Had conscience been involved, what better moment to express it, and to come clean, than at the end of his own long life? No, he went to his grave having successfully pulled off that coverup, and everything in that Memoir speaks to his own sense of smug entitlement!
did want to present himself and his family to the public in a pleasant Victorian light, that doesn't make him a monster. The Victorian way of framing a memoir wasn't warts-and-all realism. JEAL couldn't help being his father's heir, and he was fairly hard up at times until he finally got the money, long after JA's death. "
As I have previously argued, I believe that JEAL went far far beyond Victorian proprieties. And apropos warts, I think it's a crucial distinction that it's not JA's warts I am accusing him of intentionally covering up, it's his own, and those of his benighted benefactor.
As for JEAL being hard up at time, that must have been before 1828, when he married Emma Smith, because it is my understanding that Emma Smith was very wealthy, and that meant that after he married her, he was very wealthy too. And he had received a first rate education at Oxford, etc. Or do you have other info I am unaware of?
I think it bears repeating that what I find most noxious about JEAL's presentation of JA's life and works is that he relegates to the dumpster the pervasive message of all of JA's novels and letters, which was the way that women's lives were so constrained as to money, travel, courtship, and family matters. He gets a zero out of 100 in terms of his presentation of that fundamental aspect of JA's worldview, and the icing on the cake is his suppression of the specific way that he PERSONALLY was the biggest winner of that zero-sum game, and JA personally was the biggest loser. The hypocrisy is over the top awful.
"He had a lot of ill health himself and a very numerous family."
And who exactly is responsible for that very numerous family? Do you really think his wife was constantly on his case to make her continuously pregnant for 15 years? If he had illness, it was obviously not so serious as to prevent him from siring all those children!
"Primogeniture was the custom of the land and it meant women and dependents not getting the money. The whole point was keeping the
fortune together, in the hands of the eldest son; if you spread it around to all the sisters and cousins and aunts, it wouldn't be a fortune anymore. "
Isn't there such a thing as a matter of degree? Did I suggest that JEAL should have given his two sisters one third each of his wealth? Sure, that would have been a noble thing to do, but I am talking about much less than that. It seems obvious that whatever he gave to Anna was so little that she was forced to shuttle around in rented housing for a long while. Had he been more generous to her, there would not have been SUCH a large gap between his quality of life and hers during the last 30 years of their lives.
"The "daemon of the piece" was James Leigh Perrot in not making some provision for his widowed sister, and the disappointment certainly didn't help Jane
Austen's declining health any, poor soul. It's perfectly clear, from S & S if nowhere else, what she thought of this system of inheritance. But it
*was* the existing system. Perhaps JEAL felt guilty about it by 1870, which is why he tried to cover it up."
I don't think he felt guilty, in the sense of pangs of conscience, anymore than,e.g., Nixon et al felt guilty about Watergate- JEAL was engaged in a coverup, pure and simple. Had conscience been involved, what better moment to express it, and to come clean, than at the end of his own long life? No, he went to his grave having successfully pulled off that coverup, and everything in that Memoir speaks to his own sense of smug entitlement!
Thursday, January 21, 2010
The News that Really Made Jane Austen Sicker: WHY JEAL DID IT
[The conversation continues in Janeites and Austen L]
Nancy: "....makes me more dubious than before that JEAL wrote as he did with a conscious agenda in mind. It seems as though his writing was influenced more by Victorian ideas of propriety and of the past then from any desire to hide or lie."
Nancy, we're not talking about shadow stories here. This stuff is entirely in the bright lights, there is no subtext, it's all text. And as this post will elaborate, I think that JEAL had many very significant reasons for trying to suppress the true meaning of that line from Letter 157. It turns out to be nothing less than the tape on the door at the Watergate Hotel, it's a wormhole through Sir Walter Elliot's looking glass and goes to the heart of JA's real and literary life.
First, I repeat what I have said, i.e., I can see absolutely no other plausible interpretation of JEAL's editorial liberties than a conscious intention to deflect blame for the exacerbation of JA's illness from its true cause, the Leigh Perrot disinheritance, to a phantom alternative cause, the Henry Austen bankruptcy.
The change of "legatees" to "party" alone would suffice to prove he intended to do that, but when it is combined with the deliberate conflation of the bankruptcy with the 1817 letters where JA writes about her illness, which conflation just happens to dovetail with that change of word, it is QUADRUPALLY proved. It is not possible to imagine that he just accidentally did both of these major and interlocking alterations, unless of course you do believe that Seth Grahame Smith was right and there really WERE zombies in 19th century England, and JEAL was one of them!
Edith: "Arnie, you're too harsh on JEAL. Remember that he grew up in the family that had probably long since rationalized its unequal share of the Leigh-Perrot estate. James was like a son to Mrs. P, the sailor brothers were away, Henry evidently didn't rally round as James did...and he was evidently Mr. P's godson, a clever move, and that counted for a lot in those days. JEAL would have absorbed his family's take on the whole thing -- tho I admit, changing "legatees" for "party" is pretty much a smoking gun. No chance, I suppose, that Charles changed it while forwarding a copy of the letter to JEAL...?"
Edith, first I thank you for acknowledging the smoking gun of the word change, and I also compliment the ingenuity of your suggestion about Charles as the creative editor---but the original letter is in the British Museum, and I think somebody would have noticed if there had been an erasure and substitution of such a key word in that sentence!
But I think you're also raising a moot point. You seem to be suggesting that JEAL "inherited" from his parents the point of view that he deserved to inherit the Leigh Perrot fortune. Even if it were so that his parents indoctrinated him thusly, it only adds to my argument that JEAL felt entitled and justified, once he recognized that Charles's letter put a damper on the celebration of his own good fortune, to sanitize the facts! Even Iago had his own reasons!
But back to Nancy's comment about JEAL's Victorian propriety as JEAL's motivation. Does it hold water? Well, yes, there are many other instances in the Memoir where he seems to be concealing certain material, but where he himself would not seem to have a personal stake. In those instances, I would acknowledge that it WOULD be plausible for you to point to "Victorian ideas of propriety" to account for his bowdlerizing, rather than some malevolent personal motivations. BUT...in this instance of the Leigh Perrot disinheritance, where JEAL himself became the principal legatee, it is SUCH an obvious and dramatic conflict of interest, that it is, as JA would have joked, 'beyond every thing". I could not imagine a MORE suspicious and incriminating circumstance! Victorian propriety as a motivating factor pales in comparison to this very personal motivation. And it also fits perfectly with the omission that both Harding and Sutherland both have pointed to at length in their respective Introductions, i.e., the shoplifting case of Mrs. Leigh Perrot.
And so I can see no plausible explanation for JEAL's motivation in undertaking this creative editing other than that he wished to utterly negate JA's explicit statement that the disinheritance made her much sicker. Since he could not negate her statement as she wrote it, since he clearly lacked the power to destroy the letter or prevent its eventual publication, he boldly decided to take the bull by the horns and purport to publish the relevant portion of that letter, but to edit it to say something COMPLETELY different than what JA actually wrote. We're talking major cojones and chutzpah here.
Nancy, your position, as you stated it, is actually contradictory on its face---if JEAL had no desire to hide or lie, then where exactly did Victorian ideas of propriety come into play, if not to hide or lie about a piece of information he considered improper to be described in the Memoir?
DOES IT STILL MATTER TODAY?
But now perhaps for the most important aspect of this subject, which so far I have only addressed in passing. I.e., let's step back a few paces and ask, even if JEAL did these things intentionally and for these reasons, does it really matter? Should we care today? And my answer is, "YES!" Think about it---could there be any subject more important when examining the memoir of a genius author beloved of millions of people around the world today, than to consider events which contributed more than trivially to that author's very premature death? At the very top of the list of regrets that JA's readers would list regarding her, is that she died so young, at the peak of her powers, when she might, given the pace at which she seemed to write, have given the world a half dozen or more masterpieces. It's a sentiment that has been voiced a thousand times in print, and felt by any Janeite who knows her biography at all.
But, curiously, I'd be willing to bet that the only biography written about her which does NOT express that regret at her early death as depriving the world of many masterpieces is....JEAL's Memoir, which I have just looked through, and could not find a single expression of that kind. Very curious, and if I am correct, very revealing.
Regardless, I think JEAL was no fool, and he recognized just how high the stakes were on this troubling point raised by that single sentence in Letter 157. Here he was writing this memoir of his aunt, which was in effect her "coming out" party on the larger stage of English literature, and suddenly he has to put out that fire before it consumes his entire project.
CASSANDRA-ESTEN'S LITTLE SECRET?
Perhaps it happened at a late stage in the process of putting this Memoir together, when he first became aware of the existence of Letter 157, and its damning contents. Perhaps Charles Austen's daughter, Cassandra Esten, who was 9 years old when her father received that letter from his dying sister, but was now 62 in 1870, had never forgotten hearing her father complain bitterly to her mother. Because surely the disinheritance was a heavy blow to Charles himself, and not just to his mother and sisters. Le Faye's footnotes to Letter 157 reveal that "During Mar. 1817 CJA's daughter Harriet-Jane continued to be seriously ill, and in addition his mother- and sister-in-law Mrs. and Miss Harriet Palmer both fell ill; his diary entries reveal his worries in this situation." That disinheritance was potentially a matter of life and death not only for JA but also for the women in Charles's life---Medical care was very expensive in those days! And so that letter (which is the ONLY letter from JA to Charles, among the hundreds that JA must have written, that survives today--suggesting it was of special significance to Charles) perhaps was a symbol to Charles of a family where, as JA famously wrote in another letter, there was a conspiracy by one part of the family to impoverish another part of it. Where the lucky few prospered, while the unlucky men languished in genteel poverty.
And I also just noticed the following very curious factoid in Le Faye's biographical note about Charles's children: "Cassandra-Esten assisted her father in executing CEA's Will in 1845....She was also able TO ASSIST JEAL IN THE COMPOSITION OF HIS MEMOIR." (!!!)
The plot thickens! I wonder first what Le Faye's sources were for that last statement---is it possible that Cassandra Esten approached JEAL when she learned he was working on the Memoir, and brought Letter 157 to his attention, knowing full well what his reaction would be? Is it possible that her "assistance" in the composition of the Memoir came at a steep pecuniary price, albeit one that JEAL could very well afford? I.e., did JEAL pay off Cassandra Esten not only to allow him to publish that letter, but also for her to look the other way when he changed "legatees" to "party", and reconstructed the context of that letter to point the finger at Henry Austen, who was by then long deceased, leaving no children of his own to defend his memory? and to keep her lips sealed for the rest of her life about this change that she was well aware of. There must be SOME reason why Cassandra Esten apparently never raised an objection to that change of words in the 27 years she survived the first publication of the Memoir, and why Letter 157 did not get sold and published until after her death. Speculation, yes, but reasonable, plausible speculation, based on solid premises.
JEAL'S BIG SECRET
But let's get back to JEAL and his motivations. As he's writing this Memoir, it's about 30+ years after he inherited the fortune of Uncle Leigh Perrot. That inheritance in 1837 not only provided him with a life of gentlemanly ease from that point forward. If you think about it, the expectancy of that inheritance long before Mrs. Leigh Perrot died was surely a powerful tool that JEAL did not hesitate to deploy in inducing Emma Smith, an heiress from the Chute family, to marry him in 1828. So he had the luxury to then sire 10 (count 'em, 10) children in 14 years and to have the serious money at hand right from Day One to raise them in grand style.
And that raises yet another question, on the subject of JEAL's character and morality. As far as I am aware, and please somebody correct me if I am wrong, but JEAL apparently never felt it necessary to share much of his unearned prosperity with his elder widowed half sister Anna. Here's what Le Faye tells us in her bio note about Anna, who was widowed at 36 in 1829 (one year after JEAL married his rich heiress Emma), with seven children to raise, ages 2 to 14: "Following [her husband Ben Lefroy's] early death in 1829, Anna and her children lived in various rented houses in Westham, Oakley, Basingstoke, Winchester, Monk Sherborne, and Reading; she died in Reading 1 September 1872..."
Sounds to me like JEAL was a chip off James Perrot's block, carrying on the proud tradition of a complete lack of generosity toward impecunious female relatives. Even as, in their old age, he solicits Anna's assistance in compiling the Memoir.
So it makes even more sense that JEAL would go to extreme lengths to preserve James Leigh Perrot's reputation, as he himself had by 1870 long since became a kind of replica of his great uncle, repeating and extending his sins of omission unto the fourth generation......
In light of ALL of the above, the very last thing on earth that JEAL wants is to have to explain how his own personal circumstances might fairly be considered relevant to the accuracy and faithfulness of his account of his famous aunt's life and work. And in particular he does not want anyone to ever go through the chain of analysis that I have done in this series of posts, to question how credible his facts and interpretations are. He does not want to deal with the extreme embarrassment of having to explain that he has been living on wealth, the denial of which to JA, her impecunious siblings, and her mother apparently and tragically played a contributing role, we can never know how large, in precipitating JA's early demise.
No wonder he even goes out of his way repeatedly in the Memoir NOT to refer to his own familial ties to JA and the other Austen family members, even when the context begs that he reveal his personal, subjective interest in the matters he describes as if he were an objective disinterested biographer. Of course, he wants to put his readers's critical faculties to sleep at every point.
And it's no accident, and very revealing, that nowhere (unless I have overlooked it) in the Memoir OTHER THAN the veiled allusion to Henry's bankruptcy, does JEAL ever address the issue of wealth and poverty, either in regard to JA's own life, or in regard to any of the novels. Of course the JEAL who was so intent on putting the kibosh on any suggestion that James Leigh Perrot had stiffed the Austens, was not about to talk about any resemblance between such behavior and that of, say, John and Fanny Dashwood. So that raises the stakes even higher in terms of that line from Letter 157--it's not only about JA's death, it's about trying to keep the genie in the bottle, the genie being the savage critique of the financial structure of the English gentility, and the particularly bad deal that women got under it.
It does not get any bigger than that in the realm of biography and family history.
Nancy: "He might even have changed legatee to party because he feared the legal term would not be understood by ladies. "
Nancy, tell me you're teasing, please! In the words of the great sage John McEnroe, "You can't be serious!".
But, in case you are serious.....it's not just one bridge, I am prepared to sell you the entire cache of gold at Fort Knox, at a very very steep discount, if you are still interested. Limited time only, drop me an email---and remember, cash only. I don't take chances, even with good friends! ;)
ARNIE (and I think you might want to consider never serving on a jury in a criminal case, as I believe you would NEVER convict anyone of anything!) ;)
Nancy: "....makes me more dubious than before that JEAL wrote as he did with a conscious agenda in mind. It seems as though his writing was influenced more by Victorian ideas of propriety and of the past then from any desire to hide or lie."
Nancy, we're not talking about shadow stories here. This stuff is entirely in the bright lights, there is no subtext, it's all text. And as this post will elaborate, I think that JEAL had many very significant reasons for trying to suppress the true meaning of that line from Letter 157. It turns out to be nothing less than the tape on the door at the Watergate Hotel, it's a wormhole through Sir Walter Elliot's looking glass and goes to the heart of JA's real and literary life.
First, I repeat what I have said, i.e., I can see absolutely no other plausible interpretation of JEAL's editorial liberties than a conscious intention to deflect blame for the exacerbation of JA's illness from its true cause, the Leigh Perrot disinheritance, to a phantom alternative cause, the Henry Austen bankruptcy.
The change of "legatees" to "party" alone would suffice to prove he intended to do that, but when it is combined with the deliberate conflation of the bankruptcy with the 1817 letters where JA writes about her illness, which conflation just happens to dovetail with that change of word, it is QUADRUPALLY proved. It is not possible to imagine that he just accidentally did both of these major and interlocking alterations, unless of course you do believe that Seth Grahame Smith was right and there really WERE zombies in 19th century England, and JEAL was one of them!
Edith: "Arnie, you're too harsh on JEAL. Remember that he grew up in the family that had probably long since rationalized its unequal share of the Leigh-Perrot estate. James was like a son to Mrs. P, the sailor brothers were away, Henry evidently didn't rally round as James did...and he was evidently Mr. P's godson, a clever move, and that counted for a lot in those days. JEAL would have absorbed his family's take on the whole thing -- tho I admit, changing "legatees" for "party" is pretty much a smoking gun. No chance, I suppose, that Charles changed it while forwarding a copy of the letter to JEAL...?"
Edith, first I thank you for acknowledging the smoking gun of the word change, and I also compliment the ingenuity of your suggestion about Charles as the creative editor---but the original letter is in the British Museum, and I think somebody would have noticed if there had been an erasure and substitution of such a key word in that sentence!
But I think you're also raising a moot point. You seem to be suggesting that JEAL "inherited" from his parents the point of view that he deserved to inherit the Leigh Perrot fortune. Even if it were so that his parents indoctrinated him thusly, it only adds to my argument that JEAL felt entitled and justified, once he recognized that Charles's letter put a damper on the celebration of his own good fortune, to sanitize the facts! Even Iago had his own reasons!
But back to Nancy's comment about JEAL's Victorian propriety as JEAL's motivation. Does it hold water? Well, yes, there are many other instances in the Memoir where he seems to be concealing certain material, but where he himself would not seem to have a personal stake. In those instances, I would acknowledge that it WOULD be plausible for you to point to "Victorian ideas of propriety" to account for his bowdlerizing, rather than some malevolent personal motivations. BUT...in this instance of the Leigh Perrot disinheritance, where JEAL himself became the principal legatee, it is SUCH an obvious and dramatic conflict of interest, that it is, as JA would have joked, 'beyond every thing". I could not imagine a MORE suspicious and incriminating circumstance! Victorian propriety as a motivating factor pales in comparison to this very personal motivation. And it also fits perfectly with the omission that both Harding and Sutherland both have pointed to at length in their respective Introductions, i.e., the shoplifting case of Mrs. Leigh Perrot.
And so I can see no plausible explanation for JEAL's motivation in undertaking this creative editing other than that he wished to utterly negate JA's explicit statement that the disinheritance made her much sicker. Since he could not negate her statement as she wrote it, since he clearly lacked the power to destroy the letter or prevent its eventual publication, he boldly decided to take the bull by the horns and purport to publish the relevant portion of that letter, but to edit it to say something COMPLETELY different than what JA actually wrote. We're talking major cojones and chutzpah here.
Nancy, your position, as you stated it, is actually contradictory on its face---if JEAL had no desire to hide or lie, then where exactly did Victorian ideas of propriety come into play, if not to hide or lie about a piece of information he considered improper to be described in the Memoir?
DOES IT STILL MATTER TODAY?
But now perhaps for the most important aspect of this subject, which so far I have only addressed in passing. I.e., let's step back a few paces and ask, even if JEAL did these things intentionally and for these reasons, does it really matter? Should we care today? And my answer is, "YES!" Think about it---could there be any subject more important when examining the memoir of a genius author beloved of millions of people around the world today, than to consider events which contributed more than trivially to that author's very premature death? At the very top of the list of regrets that JA's readers would list regarding her, is that she died so young, at the peak of her powers, when she might, given the pace at which she seemed to write, have given the world a half dozen or more masterpieces. It's a sentiment that has been voiced a thousand times in print, and felt by any Janeite who knows her biography at all.
But, curiously, I'd be willing to bet that the only biography written about her which does NOT express that regret at her early death as depriving the world of many masterpieces is....JEAL's Memoir, which I have just looked through, and could not find a single expression of that kind. Very curious, and if I am correct, very revealing.
Regardless, I think JEAL was no fool, and he recognized just how high the stakes were on this troubling point raised by that single sentence in Letter 157. Here he was writing this memoir of his aunt, which was in effect her "coming out" party on the larger stage of English literature, and suddenly he has to put out that fire before it consumes his entire project.
CASSANDRA-ESTEN'S LITTLE SECRET?
Perhaps it happened at a late stage in the process of putting this Memoir together, when he first became aware of the existence of Letter 157, and its damning contents. Perhaps Charles Austen's daughter, Cassandra Esten, who was 9 years old when her father received that letter from his dying sister, but was now 62 in 1870, had never forgotten hearing her father complain bitterly to her mother. Because surely the disinheritance was a heavy blow to Charles himself, and not just to his mother and sisters. Le Faye's footnotes to Letter 157 reveal that "During Mar. 1817 CJA's daughter Harriet-Jane continued to be seriously ill, and in addition his mother- and sister-in-law Mrs. and Miss Harriet Palmer both fell ill; his diary entries reveal his worries in this situation." That disinheritance was potentially a matter of life and death not only for JA but also for the women in Charles's life---Medical care was very expensive in those days! And so that letter (which is the ONLY letter from JA to Charles, among the hundreds that JA must have written, that survives today--suggesting it was of special significance to Charles) perhaps was a symbol to Charles of a family where, as JA famously wrote in another letter, there was a conspiracy by one part of the family to impoverish another part of it. Where the lucky few prospered, while the unlucky men languished in genteel poverty.
And I also just noticed the following very curious factoid in Le Faye's biographical note about Charles's children: "Cassandra-Esten assisted her father in executing CEA's Will in 1845....She was also able TO ASSIST JEAL IN THE COMPOSITION OF HIS MEMOIR." (!!!)
The plot thickens! I wonder first what Le Faye's sources were for that last statement---is it possible that Cassandra Esten approached JEAL when she learned he was working on the Memoir, and brought Letter 157 to his attention, knowing full well what his reaction would be? Is it possible that her "assistance" in the composition of the Memoir came at a steep pecuniary price, albeit one that JEAL could very well afford? I.e., did JEAL pay off Cassandra Esten not only to allow him to publish that letter, but also for her to look the other way when he changed "legatees" to "party", and reconstructed the context of that letter to point the finger at Henry Austen, who was by then long deceased, leaving no children of his own to defend his memory? and to keep her lips sealed for the rest of her life about this change that she was well aware of. There must be SOME reason why Cassandra Esten apparently never raised an objection to that change of words in the 27 years she survived the first publication of the Memoir, and why Letter 157 did not get sold and published until after her death. Speculation, yes, but reasonable, plausible speculation, based on solid premises.
JEAL'S BIG SECRET
But let's get back to JEAL and his motivations. As he's writing this Memoir, it's about 30+ years after he inherited the fortune of Uncle Leigh Perrot. That inheritance in 1837 not only provided him with a life of gentlemanly ease from that point forward. If you think about it, the expectancy of that inheritance long before Mrs. Leigh Perrot died was surely a powerful tool that JEAL did not hesitate to deploy in inducing Emma Smith, an heiress from the Chute family, to marry him in 1828. So he had the luxury to then sire 10 (count 'em, 10) children in 14 years and to have the serious money at hand right from Day One to raise them in grand style.
And that raises yet another question, on the subject of JEAL's character and morality. As far as I am aware, and please somebody correct me if I am wrong, but JEAL apparently never felt it necessary to share much of his unearned prosperity with his elder widowed half sister Anna. Here's what Le Faye tells us in her bio note about Anna, who was widowed at 36 in 1829 (one year after JEAL married his rich heiress Emma), with seven children to raise, ages 2 to 14: "Following [her husband Ben Lefroy's] early death in 1829, Anna and her children lived in various rented houses in Westham, Oakley, Basingstoke, Winchester, Monk Sherborne, and Reading; she died in Reading 1 September 1872..."
Sounds to me like JEAL was a chip off James Perrot's block, carrying on the proud tradition of a complete lack of generosity toward impecunious female relatives. Even as, in their old age, he solicits Anna's assistance in compiling the Memoir.
So it makes even more sense that JEAL would go to extreme lengths to preserve James Leigh Perrot's reputation, as he himself had by 1870 long since became a kind of replica of his great uncle, repeating and extending his sins of omission unto the fourth generation......
In light of ALL of the above, the very last thing on earth that JEAL wants is to have to explain how his own personal circumstances might fairly be considered relevant to the accuracy and faithfulness of his account of his famous aunt's life and work. And in particular he does not want anyone to ever go through the chain of analysis that I have done in this series of posts, to question how credible his facts and interpretations are. He does not want to deal with the extreme embarrassment of having to explain that he has been living on wealth, the denial of which to JA, her impecunious siblings, and her mother apparently and tragically played a contributing role, we can never know how large, in precipitating JA's early demise.
No wonder he even goes out of his way repeatedly in the Memoir NOT to refer to his own familial ties to JA and the other Austen family members, even when the context begs that he reveal his personal, subjective interest in the matters he describes as if he were an objective disinterested biographer. Of course, he wants to put his readers's critical faculties to sleep at every point.
And it's no accident, and very revealing, that nowhere (unless I have overlooked it) in the Memoir OTHER THAN the veiled allusion to Henry's bankruptcy, does JEAL ever address the issue of wealth and poverty, either in regard to JA's own life, or in regard to any of the novels. Of course the JEAL who was so intent on putting the kibosh on any suggestion that James Leigh Perrot had stiffed the Austens, was not about to talk about any resemblance between such behavior and that of, say, John and Fanny Dashwood. So that raises the stakes even higher in terms of that line from Letter 157--it's not only about JA's death, it's about trying to keep the genie in the bottle, the genie being the savage critique of the financial structure of the English gentility, and the particularly bad deal that women got under it.
It does not get any bigger than that in the realm of biography and family history.
Nancy: "He might even have changed legatee to party because he feared the legal term would not be understood by ladies. "
Nancy, tell me you're teasing, please! In the words of the great sage John McEnroe, "You can't be serious!".
But, in case you are serious.....it's not just one bridge, I am prepared to sell you the entire cache of gold at Fort Knox, at a very very steep discount, if you are still interested. Limited time only, drop me an email---and remember, cash only. I don't take chances, even with good friends! ;)
ARNIE (and I think you might want to consider never serving on a jury in a criminal case, as I believe you would NEVER convict anyone of anything!) ;)
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
The News that Really Made Jane Austen Sicker LAST INSTALLMENT
PART FOUR:
“To go back to Henry's bankruptcy, the only ones in the family who were directly affected, at least financially, were Edward Knight and Mr. Leigh Perrot, who each lost £10,000 (hence maybe the latter's testamentary hostility to the Austen brood at large?) Or am I missing something?”
Catherine, according to Honan, Nokes, AND Le Faye, Uncle Leigh Perrot lost L10,000 and EAK lost L20,000, as sureties, and Henry’s servants (such as Mme Bigeon) lost all their savings, and Charles Austen lost “hundreds” , as depositors (in a world without FDIC account insurance). According to Le Faye (quoting Caroline Austen), Frank and James each lost “hundreds” as well. So even though the lion’s share of the losses, in actual amounts, were borne by EAK and Uncle Leigh Perrot, it was also a relatively large debacle for the 4 other Austen brothers, too. And, by (the ceasing of ) trickle down, the three Austen women in turn suffered financially as well.
But what I love about your thinking, Catherine, is the suggestion of “testamentary hostility” as a possible factor for Uncle Leigh Perrot having pulled the testamentary plug on pretty much everyone in the Austen family except, ultimately, JEAL himself. Whether it was true or not in terms of Uncle Leigh Perrot’s actual motivations, which he took to the grave with him, it certainly is something that JEAL was clearly thinking about when he wrote that section of Chapter XI.
Now I see another layer to his Iagoish manipulations of reality. It’s almost as if he was giving the reader a second option for letting Uncle Leigh Perrot off the hook for disinheriting the Austens. If the reader didn’t buy that Henry’s bankruptcy was the DIRECT cause of that disinheritance, JEAL seems to be suggesting that it was an INDIRECT cause, in that it provided some moral justification for that disinheritance.
Someone who seems to taken that interpretation and run with it, bigtime, is Richard A Austen Leigh, JEAL’s son (I am pretty sure he was his son), who wrote the following in JA’s Life and Letters in 1913, having had about 40 years to improve on his father’s ingenious lucubrations:
“About the same time another will was causing great disappointment to the Austen family ; and as Jane was affected by anything that affected her nearest relations,
we must probably attribute to it some share in the rapid decay of her bodily strength. Her uncle, Mr. Leigh Perrot, died at Scarlets on March 28. He was childless,
and left a considerable fortune. As he was also a kind-hearted man and had always shown particular favour to the Austens, it was reasonably expected that they
would reap some immediate benefit under his will. Most of the family were in narrow circumstances, and they had lately been crippled by the failure of Henry's
business and the lawsuit about Edward's Hampshire property; a legacy, therefore, would have been very acceptable. Mr. Leigh Perrot, however, was actuated in
making his will by a stronger motive than love to sister and nephews. [We ought not to forget that he had just lost 10,000 in the bankruptcy of his nephew Henry.]
He was devoted to his wife, and was perhaps anxious to show that his devotion was increased in consequence of the false accusation with which she had been
assailed at Bath in 1799-1800. “
Here have yet another generation of Austen-Leighs making up some high-octane b.s. in order to cover the tracks of ol’ Uncle Leigh Perrot, and having his father’s
penchant for wanting to have his cake and eat it too.
So Column A is that Uncle L-P was a“kind hearted man”—but if you have a little difficulty swallowing the notion that a kind hearted rich man would completely stiff
his widowed aging sister and her two impecunious daughters, one of whom is dying, after leading them all to believe he was going to take care of them one day in his
will, then how about Column B.
Column B is that the old man REALLY loved his wife SO much, and felt SO bad that she had been unjustly (or was it?) accused of shoplifting 17 years earlier that
he just HAD to stiff his widowed aging sister and her two impecunious daughters, one of whom was dying. That’s Column B.
But…if you have a little difficulty swallowing that whopper, then hell, there’s always Column C, which is that those damned Austens deserved to be stiffed, because
after all, one of them, Henry, had cost Uncle Leigh Perrot L20,000, and so, what’s wrong with a little collective punishment? Teach ‘em a lesson they’ll really understand.
I’d love to see the letter that JA wrote to Martha Lloyd after the disinheritance, the letter that surely got destroyed by somebody, in which JA wrote what she REALLY
thought about the whole situation.
“Arnie, I'm fascinated with your discoveries and amazed that JEAL would change a word in a letter in so blatant a way. I wonder if we have originals of all the letters he
quotes in the Memoir, because it would be interesting to compare them to the texts in the book.”
Diane, I am too lazy to go and check and see which of the letters has as its only source JEAL’s Memoir. We already know he is the only source for several statements
he attributes to JA (such as, e.g., what happens to some of her characters after the end of the novels), and I’d say, given his evident willingness on a number of occasions
in the Memoir to bend truth to his own purposes, that he’s about as reliable a source as a $3 bill. And that is probably only the tip of the iceberg.
I had a low opinion about JEAL as a Memoirist before we started this group read, but now it has sunk further than the Dow sank in October, 2008—I mean, LOW!
Thinking about Iago, what would be the capper would be if someone finds a letter one day written by JEAL to Uncle Leigh Perrot in April, 1816, in which he leads off
by sympathizing with the old man for his grievous financial loss from Henry’s bankruptcy; and moves right along to assuring his uncle that the rumor which surely Uncle
had heard, that Mrs. Norris was really a veiled portrait of Mrs. Leigh Perrot, couldn’t possibly be true; and then hit ‘im right between the eyes with the claim that the
small army of folks who all said that Henry really was at fault for the bankruptcy were just a pack of malicious slanderers; and then finish with the philosophical
observation that it was only human nature, and therefore not anything to get bent about, that the Austens were taking bets among themselves as to how much
Uncle Leigh Perrot was going to leave to each of them, although he, JEAL, being a future man of the cloth, would never in a million years think about inheritance
when there was God’s work to be done in the world, etc etc.
I mean, really, I would not put ANY of that past JEAL. He was, as Mrs. Norris might have said, a real piece of work. (and thanks to Henry Fielding for inspiring me
to this little flight of fantasy).
Arnie
P.S. And thank you, EB-T, for your positive response to my ideas
“To go back to Henry's bankruptcy, the only ones in the family who were directly affected, at least financially, were Edward Knight and Mr. Leigh Perrot, who each lost £10,000 (hence maybe the latter's testamentary hostility to the Austen brood at large?) Or am I missing something?”
Catherine, according to Honan, Nokes, AND Le Faye, Uncle Leigh Perrot lost L10,000 and EAK lost L20,000, as sureties, and Henry’s servants (such as Mme Bigeon) lost all their savings, and Charles Austen lost “hundreds” , as depositors (in a world without FDIC account insurance). According to Le Faye (quoting Caroline Austen), Frank and James each lost “hundreds” as well. So even though the lion’s share of the losses, in actual amounts, were borne by EAK and Uncle Leigh Perrot, it was also a relatively large debacle for the 4 other Austen brothers, too. And, by (the ceasing of ) trickle down, the three Austen women in turn suffered financially as well.
But what I love about your thinking, Catherine, is the suggestion of “testamentary hostility” as a possible factor for Uncle Leigh Perrot having pulled the testamentary plug on pretty much everyone in the Austen family except, ultimately, JEAL himself. Whether it was true or not in terms of Uncle Leigh Perrot’s actual motivations, which he took to the grave with him, it certainly is something that JEAL was clearly thinking about when he wrote that section of Chapter XI.
Now I see another layer to his Iagoish manipulations of reality. It’s almost as if he was giving the reader a second option for letting Uncle Leigh Perrot off the hook for disinheriting the Austens. If the reader didn’t buy that Henry’s bankruptcy was the DIRECT cause of that disinheritance, JEAL seems to be suggesting that it was an INDIRECT cause, in that it provided some moral justification for that disinheritance.
Someone who seems to taken that interpretation and run with it, bigtime, is Richard A Austen Leigh, JEAL’s son (I am pretty sure he was his son), who wrote the following in JA’s Life and Letters in 1913, having had about 40 years to improve on his father’s ingenious lucubrations:
“About the same time another will was causing great disappointment to the Austen family ; and as Jane was affected by anything that affected her nearest relations,
we must probably attribute to it some share in the rapid decay of her bodily strength. Her uncle, Mr. Leigh Perrot, died at Scarlets on March 28. He was childless,
and left a considerable fortune. As he was also a kind-hearted man and had always shown particular favour to the Austens, it was reasonably expected that they
would reap some immediate benefit under his will. Most of the family were in narrow circumstances, and they had lately been crippled by the failure of Henry's
business and the lawsuit about Edward's Hampshire property; a legacy, therefore, would have been very acceptable. Mr. Leigh Perrot, however, was actuated in
making his will by a stronger motive than love to sister and nephews. [We ought not to forget that he had just lost 10,000 in the bankruptcy of his nephew Henry.]
He was devoted to his wife, and was perhaps anxious to show that his devotion was increased in consequence of the false accusation with which she had been
assailed at Bath in 1799-1800. “
Here have yet another generation of Austen-Leighs making up some high-octane b.s. in order to cover the tracks of ol’ Uncle Leigh Perrot, and having his father’s
penchant for wanting to have his cake and eat it too.
So Column A is that Uncle L-P was a“kind hearted man”—but if you have a little difficulty swallowing the notion that a kind hearted rich man would completely stiff
his widowed aging sister and her two impecunious daughters, one of whom is dying, after leading them all to believe he was going to take care of them one day in his
will, then how about Column B.
Column B is that the old man REALLY loved his wife SO much, and felt SO bad that she had been unjustly (or was it?) accused of shoplifting 17 years earlier that
he just HAD to stiff his widowed aging sister and her two impecunious daughters, one of whom was dying. That’s Column B.
But…if you have a little difficulty swallowing that whopper, then hell, there’s always Column C, which is that those damned Austens deserved to be stiffed, because
after all, one of them, Henry, had cost Uncle Leigh Perrot L20,000, and so, what’s wrong with a little collective punishment? Teach ‘em a lesson they’ll really understand.
I’d love to see the letter that JA wrote to Martha Lloyd after the disinheritance, the letter that surely got destroyed by somebody, in which JA wrote what she REALLY
thought about the whole situation.
“Arnie, I'm fascinated with your discoveries and amazed that JEAL would change a word in a letter in so blatant a way. I wonder if we have originals of all the letters he
quotes in the Memoir, because it would be interesting to compare them to the texts in the book.”
Diane, I am too lazy to go and check and see which of the letters has as its only source JEAL’s Memoir. We already know he is the only source for several statements
he attributes to JA (such as, e.g., what happens to some of her characters after the end of the novels), and I’d say, given his evident willingness on a number of occasions
in the Memoir to bend truth to his own purposes, that he’s about as reliable a source as a $3 bill. And that is probably only the tip of the iceberg.
I had a low opinion about JEAL as a Memoirist before we started this group read, but now it has sunk further than the Dow sank in October, 2008—I mean, LOW!
Thinking about Iago, what would be the capper would be if someone finds a letter one day written by JEAL to Uncle Leigh Perrot in April, 1816, in which he leads off
by sympathizing with the old man for his grievous financial loss from Henry’s bankruptcy; and moves right along to assuring his uncle that the rumor which surely Uncle
had heard, that Mrs. Norris was really a veiled portrait of Mrs. Leigh Perrot, couldn’t possibly be true; and then hit ‘im right between the eyes with the claim that the
small army of folks who all said that Henry really was at fault for the bankruptcy were just a pack of malicious slanderers; and then finish with the philosophical
observation that it was only human nature, and therefore not anything to get bent about, that the Austens were taking bets among themselves as to how much
Uncle Leigh Perrot was going to leave to each of them, although he, JEAL, being a future man of the cloth, would never in a million years think about inheritance
when there was God’s work to be done in the world, etc etc.
I mean, really, I would not put ANY of that past JEAL. He was, as Mrs. Norris might have said, a real piece of work. (and thanks to Henry Fielding for inspiring me
to this little flight of fantasy).
Arnie
P.S. And thank you, EB-T, for your positive response to my ideas
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