I watched the film version of one of my favorite Broadway shows on TV this afternoon--1776, which of course was on TCM to celebrate July 4.
As I watched, I decided to revisit the question of whether JA made any oblique references to the American Revolution in any of her novels, a question that goes back a long way, as scholars in the Seventies first wondered what that "strange business in America" was that Tom Bertram mentions to Dr. Grant. Knowing JA, it has been impossible for me to believe this was "background noise", but I've never before found or heard a compelling claim for a specific discovery in this regard.....till today.
We've had some discussion of the foundational documents of the United States here in the past, beginning, as far as I can tell, with the following in 2005...
Elissa: "Does anyone (hint, perhaps a person surrounded by gently swaying palm trees rather than the frigid blasts of windy snow currently whirling around my backyard) see any connection between the Christian name of the third US President Jefferson (President 1801-1809) and that of Sir Thomas?"
....and most recently last year when the following exchange occurred as an outgrowth of a thread about possible allusive sources of the famous beginning of P&P: "It is a truth universally acknowledged":
Elissa: "Interesting that the words "It is a truth universally acknowledged" are really a more formal way of saying the more blunt and direct "We hold these truths to be self-evident ..."
My response: "Yes, indeed, Elissa, and you also know as surely as I do that the author of Mansfield Park, with its shadowy colonial slave plantation, was fully aware of the sad irony that the document which in the year following her birth changed the world for the better, because it voiced such a noble truth so emphatically, nonetheless contained within it the unintended and tragic irony that the laws of half of those 13 colonies did not match the noble rhetoric in regard to the treatment of black people, and the laws of ALL of those colonies did not match the rhetoric in regard to the treatment of women of all colors. As JA was acutely aware of, and emphasized in her novels, words were very important, especially definitions, such as the definition of "man" in that opening phrase of the Declaration of Independence!"
Well, watching 1776 today inspired me to have another go at JA's novels, to see if I could spot any echoes of the Declaration of Independence in JA's novels, and here is the result, which I think is most apt to be brought forward on July 4:
First, here are the beginning and ending paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, with certain words in all caps:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are CREATED EQUAL, that they are endowed by their CREATOR with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of HAPPINESS. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these STATES. To PROVE this, let facts be SUBMITTED to a candid WORLD.
…We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of THE WORLD for the rectitude of our INTENTIONS, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and DECLARE, that these UNITED colonies are, and of right ought to be free and INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political CONNECTION between them and the STATE of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and INDEPENDENT STATES, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract ALLIANCES, establish commerce, and to do all other ACTS and things which independent STATES may of right do. And for the support of this DECLARATION, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
I have put those particular words in all caps so as to make possible connections to capitalized words in the following passage readily visible.
In Chapter 9 of _Emma_, the following is the key portion of Emma's commentary to Harriet on the significance of the "courtship" charade which Mr. Elton brought to them....
"There is so pointed, and so particular a meaning in this compliment," said she, "that I cannot have a moment's doubt as to Mr. Elton's INTENTIONS. You are his object -- and you will soon receive the completest PROOF of it. I thought it must be so. I thought I could not be so deceived; but now, it is clear; the STATE of his mind is as clear and decided, as my wishes on the subject have been ever since I knew you. Yes, Harriet, just so long have I been wanting the very circumstance to happen which has happened. I could never tell whether an attachment between you and Mr. Elton were most desirable or most natural. Its probability and its eligibility have really so EQUALLED each other! I am very HAPPY. I congratulate you, my dear Harriet, with all my heart. This is an attachment which a woman may well feel pride in CREATING. This is a CONNECTION which offers nothing but good. It will give you every thing that you want -- consideration, INDEPENDENCE, a proper home -- it will fix you in the centre of all your real friends, close to Hartfield and to me, and confirm our intimacy for ever. This, Harriet, is an ALLIANCE which can never raise a blush in either of us."
...and then this description of Harriet's reaction:
"Harriet SUBMITTED, though her mind could hardly separate the parts, so as to feel quite sure that her friend were not writing down a DECLARATION OF. It seemed too precious an offering for any degree of publicity."
I do not believe that this dense cluster of verbal echoes of the Declaration of Independence in a single speech in Emma, together with a short sentence directly connected to it, is coincidental, and my interpretation is that the "courtship" charade is in fact a _parody_ of the Declaration of Independence! Whereas Emma is rhapsodizing to Harriet how great it will be for her to marry Mr. Elton, the reader may well wonder whether Harriet's life with Mr. Elton would have been the paradise that Emma predicts, or more likely the sobering reality of actual English marriage, which in most ways was a subjugation of women, making them wholly dependent on their husbands for every good in their lives--and for a woman like Emma, marriage would literally and legally be a radical shift from total independence to total dependence!
And, to take it one step further, I think JA wanted to hammer home the point that the charade was a parody of Jefferson's (edited) masterpiece, and so she added a wink in the charade itself, to wit, _another_ answer to the charade itself!:
First, for most of recorded human history, a "Declaration" was something _intangible_ that displayed the wealth and pomp of kings as much or more as _tangible_ riches like palaces, crowns, and armies---that's what kings _did_, they issued declarations telling the people what's what---at least, that is, until 1776, when the people of America threw off the yoke of tyranny and _reversed_ that age-old pattern, issuing a declaration _to_ the King of England, telling him that they were no longer taking "whats whats" from him.
And....as to the "monarch of the seas", well, take a look at this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Independence_%281814%29
Although we've all heard of the USS Constitution which defended our country during the War of 1812 and earned the famous name "Ol' Ironsides", apparently the USS _Independence_, constructed in 1812 and deployed to Algiers in 1814, was the _first_ ship of the line in the US Navy, and from what I gather, it played a significant role in projecting American naval power out into the wider world---and therefore it was, in 1814-5, as JA was writing _Emma_ literally (from an American perspective) the "Monarch of the Seas"!
And when these two words are "united" (as in the _United _States!), we have the Declaration of Independence!---and indeed the American _Revolution_ was the mother of all _reversals_ of the status quo in the history of the world!
But...even though I believe the above demonstrates JA's sympathy with the American cause, I believe even more strongly that this is (like the slavery subtext in MP) a metaphor that is subordinated to the fundamental metaphor of the charade, which is the quiet _reversal_ that JA depicted in _Emma_, in which woman declares _her_ independence and freedom from oppression by man, and "woman lovely woman", following the example of the rebellious American colonies, reigns over her own life, alone.
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S. There are, by the way, two other passages in JA's novels which I believe are also veiled echoes of the Declaration of Independence, which I will very briefly touch upon now:
1. Lizzy's revolt against the tyranny of Lady Catherine in the Longbourne wilderness (and wasn't a great deal of America still mostly a _wilderness_ in 1814-5, especially after the addition of the Louisiana Purchase?), in which Lizzy famously says, "
"I am only RESOLVED to ACT in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, CONSTITUTE my HAPPINESS, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly UNCONNECTED with me."
If the American Revolution were going to be summarized in one sentence spoken by all the American colonists to King George III, that sentence would be perfect!
2. Emma's and Knightley's argument about Frank Churchill's _dependency_ on Mrs. Churchill and whether he has the power to do his duty and visit his father in Highbury, including Emma's passionate assertion:
"You are the worst JUDGE IN THE WORLD, Mr. Knightley, of the difficulties of DEPENDENCE. "
P.P.S: None of the above has anything to do with the connection between JA and the United States which I mentioned earlier today which I am trying to get published in the near future--it just happens that these two discoveries came within a few days of each other.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Jane Austen's Letter 32 Potpourri
"Expect a most agreeable letter, for not being overburdened with subject (having nothing at all to say), I shall have no check to my genius from beginning to end. "
I've now learned that whenever JA claims to have "nothing at all to say", I immediately suspect her of having a great deal to say, but covertly. And Letter 33 certainly fits that description, as it is filled with all sorts of veiled anger at the fate of married Englishwomen.
But JA starts out comically. After speaking at length about the letter CEA has recently received from brother Frank about various important events in his naval career, JA then writes:
"Eliza talks of having read in a Newspaper that all the 1st Lieut[enant]s of the Frigates whose captains were to be sent into line-of-battle ships were to be promoted to the rank of commanders. If it be true, Mr. Valentine may afford himself a fine Valentine's knot..."
Don't be confused, that was not Eliza Hancock Austen who read the Newspaper, it was Eliza Lloyd Fowle. The Hubback _Sailor Brothers_ book states that "The "promotion" spoken of in this letter was extensive, and took place on January 1, 1801, on the occasion of the union of Great Britain and Ireland." What caught my eye was JA's reference to "a fine Valentine's knot". I could find no other reference to a "Valentine knot" anywhere in Google Books, but I suspect that JA is referring to something along the lines of the following:
http://books.google.com/books?id=GSQ6HJPncA8C&pg=PA33&dq=Valentine+%22Love+knot%22&hl=en&ei=mVAPTqnGI4fPgAfvntz9DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Valentine%20%22Love%20knot%22&f=false
But what does JA mean by such a reference? Is it that Lieutenant Valentine, upon being promoted to the rank of Commander (which actually did not occur for him, per Le Faye, until 1806), will be a little less poor, and therefore might, as in the case of Captain Wentworth, become a more eligible bachelor capable of attracting a bride to tie a love-know with? Or is there some other plausible meaning that is eluding me?
" We played at vingt-un, which, as Fulwar was unsuccessful, gave him an opportunity of exposing himself as usual."
Even I do not read this passage as suggesting that Fulwar Fowle was a flasher (I defy anyone to repeat that aloud three times very fast without stumbling over a consonant or two!), but JA seems instead to be rather straightforwardly saying something along the lines of "Fulwar Fowle felt foolish after flaring off at his friends." ;)
Then JA gets down to the "nothing" she really has to say:
"Eliza says she is quite well, but she is thinner than when we saw her last, and not in very good looks. I suppose she has not recovered from the effects of her illness in December. She cuts her hair too short over her forehead, and does not wear her cap far enough upon her head; in spite of these many disadvantages, however, I can still admire her beauty."
In December 1800, my guess is that Eliza Lloyd Fowle, then 32, would have just endured perhaps the tenth pregnancy of her 12 year marriage (Le Faye lists 6 births, one stillborn, but there is a 3 year gap in births from 1795-7, which gap, I strongly and sadly suspect, was not due to separate beds, but to miscarriages, and I suspect the same occurred again in 1800--'illness" indeed!). JA's sadness (and resigned anger) over the way this stoical friend is being worn out physically but this gauntlet of pregnancies is visible to me, just under the surface.
And the death of women is the theme of the next bit as well:
"The neighbourhood have quite recovered the death of Mrs. Rider; so much so, that I think they are rather rejoiced at it now; her things were so very dear! and Mrs. Rogers is to be all that is desirable. Not even death itself can fix the friendship of the world."
Le Faye's footnote identifies Mrs. Rider as the old haberdasher in the neighborhood, and Mrs. Rogers as her successor. There is JA's black humor instantly seizing upon this death, wickedly suggesting that Mrs. Rider is paying a big postmortem price for her having charged too much while alive! And that ironic tone fits hand in glove with the irony of the following much more famous paragraph, which, upon my rereading it now, has me genuinely LOL as if I had never read it before:
"[Mrs. Churchill's sudden death] was felt as such things must be felt. Every body had a degree of gravity and sorrow; tenderness towards the departed, solicitude for the surviving friends; and, in a reasonable time, curiosity to know where she would be buried. Goldsmith tells us, that when lovely woman stoops to folly, she has nothing to do but to die; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill-fame. Mrs. Churchill, after being disliked at least twenty-five years, was now spoken of with compassionate allowances. In one point she was fully justified. She had never been admitted before to be seriously ill. The event acquitted her of all the fancifulness, and all the selfishness of imaginary complaints. "
I just love the addition of the totally subversive afterthought to all the initial pieties: "...and in a reasonable time, curiosity to know where she would be buried". And I love the way JA tweaks Goldsmith for a sardonic laugh. And I love even more the irony which JA enjoys so much, that she actually writes dialog to follow it, which is the way that Mrs. Churchill, in death, earns a reversal of her longstanding "conviction" of having imagined all her illnesses. And the best irony of all is the hidden one, which is that if Frank murdered her, then that would be his perfect revenge on her for all the years she pretended to be sick in order to control his life!
And I see the seeds of all of that in the tale of Mrs. Rider in Letter 33.
Then we come to this whopper:
"I am happy to hear of Mrs. Knight's amendment, whatever might be her complaint. I cannot think so ill of her however, in spite of your insinuations, as to suspect her of having lain-in -- I do not think she would be betrayed beyond an /accident/ at the utmost."
The above is (to paraphrase Saddam Hussein) the mother of all inappropriate jokes in JA's letters, which I have written several times in the past, and which I mention in my JASNA talk, a little fantasy on the theme of the 47 year old Mrs. Knight, adoptive mother of Edward Austen, somehow getting knocked up--but it's okay, because it must have happened by accident!
I think JA is in a particularly free flow of uninhibited spirits as she writes this letter, because she has been away from CEA's restraining influence for several months, _plus_ JA has just enjoyed an evening at Deane where she and Martha, as well as Mr. Holder (he who tells infamous puns), have probably all been egging each other on to more and more outrageous verbalizations. I would not be surprised if the joke about Mrs. Knight arose as part of the general hiliarity of the evening at Deane.
"The Wylmots being robbed must be an amusing thing to their acquaintance, and I hope it is as much their pleasure as it seems their avocation to be subjects of general entertainment."
And, without taking a refill of ink for her quill, there are the sarcasm-filled seeds of Mr. Bennet's famous comments about schadenfreude!
And the last item in my little potpourri of excerpts from Letter 33 is the following, yet _another_ "paean" to serial pregnancy and childbirth:
"Caroline was only brought to bed on the 7th of this month, so that her recovery does seem pretty rapid. I have heard twice from Edward on the occasion, and his letters have each been exactly what they ought to be -- cheerful and amusing. He dares not write otherwise to /me/, but perhaps he might be obliged to purge himself from the guilt of writing nonsense by filling his shoes with whole peas for a week afterwards. Mrs. G. has left him 100/l./, his wife and son 500/l./ each."
The "Edward" who writes to JA is cousin Edward Cooper, the clergyman whom (according to Annette Upfal, and I believe her to be 100% correct) JA and CEA mercilessly satirized in Jane's 1793 History of England, first using a portrait of Edward Cooper's own ugly face to represent Edward IV, and then describing Edward IV in a similarly unflattering way:
http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/manuscripts/blvolsecond/158.html
And Caroline Powys Cooper, in strikingly similar and dire circumstances like Elizabeth Lloyd Fowle, has just given birth to her fifth child in seven years of marriage (she too had a few more to go before her career as "breeding animal" ended). JA's sarcasm is overt here. Edward Cooper is "cheerful and amusing" because he is not the spouse who is bearing and then caring for this large litter of small children, and so JA thinks of a fairy tale sort of karmic punishment for his utter cluelessness and disregard for his wife's well being.
Cheers, ARNIE
I've now learned that whenever JA claims to have "nothing at all to say", I immediately suspect her of having a great deal to say, but covertly. And Letter 33 certainly fits that description, as it is filled with all sorts of veiled anger at the fate of married Englishwomen.
But JA starts out comically. After speaking at length about the letter CEA has recently received from brother Frank about various important events in his naval career, JA then writes:
"Eliza talks of having read in a Newspaper that all the 1st Lieut[enant]s of the Frigates whose captains were to be sent into line-of-battle ships were to be promoted to the rank of commanders. If it be true, Mr. Valentine may afford himself a fine Valentine's knot..."
Don't be confused, that was not Eliza Hancock Austen who read the Newspaper, it was Eliza Lloyd Fowle. The Hubback _Sailor Brothers_ book states that "The "promotion" spoken of in this letter was extensive, and took place on January 1, 1801, on the occasion of the union of Great Britain and Ireland." What caught my eye was JA's reference to "a fine Valentine's knot". I could find no other reference to a "Valentine knot" anywhere in Google Books, but I suspect that JA is referring to something along the lines of the following:
http://books.google.com/books?id=GSQ6HJPncA8C&pg=PA33&dq=Valentine+%22Love+knot%22&hl=en&ei=mVAPTqnGI4fPgAfvntz9DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Valentine%20%22Love%20knot%22&f=false
But what does JA mean by such a reference? Is it that Lieutenant Valentine, upon being promoted to the rank of Commander (which actually did not occur for him, per Le Faye, until 1806), will be a little less poor, and therefore might, as in the case of Captain Wentworth, become a more eligible bachelor capable of attracting a bride to tie a love-know with? Or is there some other plausible meaning that is eluding me?
" We played at vingt-un, which, as Fulwar was unsuccessful, gave him an opportunity of exposing himself as usual."
Even I do not read this passage as suggesting that Fulwar Fowle was a flasher (I defy anyone to repeat that aloud three times very fast without stumbling over a consonant or two!), but JA seems instead to be rather straightforwardly saying something along the lines of "Fulwar Fowle felt foolish after flaring off at his friends." ;)
Then JA gets down to the "nothing" she really has to say:
"Eliza says she is quite well, but she is thinner than when we saw her last, and not in very good looks. I suppose she has not recovered from the effects of her illness in December. She cuts her hair too short over her forehead, and does not wear her cap far enough upon her head; in spite of these many disadvantages, however, I can still admire her beauty."
In December 1800, my guess is that Eliza Lloyd Fowle, then 32, would have just endured perhaps the tenth pregnancy of her 12 year marriage (Le Faye lists 6 births, one stillborn, but there is a 3 year gap in births from 1795-7, which gap, I strongly and sadly suspect, was not due to separate beds, but to miscarriages, and I suspect the same occurred again in 1800--'illness" indeed!). JA's sadness (and resigned anger) over the way this stoical friend is being worn out physically but this gauntlet of pregnancies is visible to me, just under the surface.
And the death of women is the theme of the next bit as well:
"The neighbourhood have quite recovered the death of Mrs. Rider; so much so, that I think they are rather rejoiced at it now; her things were so very dear! and Mrs. Rogers is to be all that is desirable. Not even death itself can fix the friendship of the world."
Le Faye's footnote identifies Mrs. Rider as the old haberdasher in the neighborhood, and Mrs. Rogers as her successor. There is JA's black humor instantly seizing upon this death, wickedly suggesting that Mrs. Rider is paying a big postmortem price for her having charged too much while alive! And that ironic tone fits hand in glove with the irony of the following much more famous paragraph, which, upon my rereading it now, has me genuinely LOL as if I had never read it before:
"[Mrs. Churchill's sudden death] was felt as such things must be felt. Every body had a degree of gravity and sorrow; tenderness towards the departed, solicitude for the surviving friends; and, in a reasonable time, curiosity to know where she would be buried. Goldsmith tells us, that when lovely woman stoops to folly, she has nothing to do but to die; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill-fame. Mrs. Churchill, after being disliked at least twenty-five years, was now spoken of with compassionate allowances. In one point she was fully justified. She had never been admitted before to be seriously ill. The event acquitted her of all the fancifulness, and all the selfishness of imaginary complaints. "
I just love the addition of the totally subversive afterthought to all the initial pieties: "...and in a reasonable time, curiosity to know where she would be buried". And I love the way JA tweaks Goldsmith for a sardonic laugh. And I love even more the irony which JA enjoys so much, that she actually writes dialog to follow it, which is the way that Mrs. Churchill, in death, earns a reversal of her longstanding "conviction" of having imagined all her illnesses. And the best irony of all is the hidden one, which is that if Frank murdered her, then that would be his perfect revenge on her for all the years she pretended to be sick in order to control his life!
And I see the seeds of all of that in the tale of Mrs. Rider in Letter 33.
Then we come to this whopper:
"I am happy to hear of Mrs. Knight's amendment, whatever might be her complaint. I cannot think so ill of her however, in spite of your insinuations, as to suspect her of having lain-in -- I do not think she would be betrayed beyond an /accident/ at the utmost."
The above is (to paraphrase Saddam Hussein) the mother of all inappropriate jokes in JA's letters, which I have written several times in the past, and which I mention in my JASNA talk, a little fantasy on the theme of the 47 year old Mrs. Knight, adoptive mother of Edward Austen, somehow getting knocked up--but it's okay, because it must have happened by accident!
I think JA is in a particularly free flow of uninhibited spirits as she writes this letter, because she has been away from CEA's restraining influence for several months, _plus_ JA has just enjoyed an evening at Deane where she and Martha, as well as Mr. Holder (he who tells infamous puns), have probably all been egging each other on to more and more outrageous verbalizations. I would not be surprised if the joke about Mrs. Knight arose as part of the general hiliarity of the evening at Deane.
"The Wylmots being robbed must be an amusing thing to their acquaintance, and I hope it is as much their pleasure as it seems their avocation to be subjects of general entertainment."
And, without taking a refill of ink for her quill, there are the sarcasm-filled seeds of Mr. Bennet's famous comments about schadenfreude!
And the last item in my little potpourri of excerpts from Letter 33 is the following, yet _another_ "paean" to serial pregnancy and childbirth:
"Caroline was only brought to bed on the 7th of this month, so that her recovery does seem pretty rapid. I have heard twice from Edward on the occasion, and his letters have each been exactly what they ought to be -- cheerful and amusing. He dares not write otherwise to /me/, but perhaps he might be obliged to purge himself from the guilt of writing nonsense by filling his shoes with whole peas for a week afterwards. Mrs. G. has left him 100/l./, his wife and son 500/l./ each."
The "Edward" who writes to JA is cousin Edward Cooper, the clergyman whom (according to Annette Upfal, and I believe her to be 100% correct) JA and CEA mercilessly satirized in Jane's 1793 History of England, first using a portrait of Edward Cooper's own ugly face to represent Edward IV, and then describing Edward IV in a similarly unflattering way:
http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/manuscripts/blvolsecond/158.html
And Caroline Powys Cooper, in strikingly similar and dire circumstances like Elizabeth Lloyd Fowle, has just given birth to her fifth child in seven years of marriage (she too had a few more to go before her career as "breeding animal" ended). JA's sarcasm is overt here. Edward Cooper is "cheerful and amusing" because he is not the spouse who is bearing and then caring for this large litter of small children, and so JA thinks of a fairy tale sort of karmic punishment for his utter cluelessness and disregard for his wife's well being.
Cheers, ARNIE
Monday, June 27, 2011
Letters 30 & 31: Henry Rice the Prodigal Son?....and Mary Lloyd plays Mrs. Elton to Peter DeBary's Frank Churchill?
_Henry Rice the Prodigal Son?_
"That James Digweed has refused Dean Curacy I suppose he has told you himself-tho' probably the subject has never been mentioned between you.-Mrs. Milles flatters herself falsely; it has never been Mrs. Rice's wish to have her son settled near herself-& there is now a hope entertained of her relenting in favour of Deane.-Mrs. Lefroy & her son in law were here yesterday ; she tries not to be sanguine, but he was in excellent spirits.-I rather wish they may have the Curacy. It will be an amusement to Mary to superintend their Household management, & abuse them for expense, especially as Mrs. L. means to advise them to put their washing out."
At the end of Letter 31, we have JA, above, revisiting, exactly one week later, that same thorny question of who will accept the Dean Curacy (and why, by the way, is it that JA spells it "Dean" when it is an adjective describing the curacy, and "Deane" when it is the village name?--she did this in both Letter 30 and now in Letter 31 as well). Now that the heir apparent, Peter DeBary, has astonished various Austens by refusing the curacy, JA now turns her attention to several other candidates.
JA begins in characteristically fine absurdist form--first supposing that James Digweed has told CEA that he has refused it, even though.....he probably has never mentioned it to CEA! Again, shades of the mangled logic progressions of Lewis Carroll! I doubt that James Digweed ever was interested in the first place, this strikes me as raillery with no factual foundation.
I also have a question--what does Le Faye mean when she writes about James Digweed: "ordained 1797 and became curate of Steventon 1798 but never actually held a benefice"?
Then we move on to another mini-satire--Mrs. Milles of Kent, whom JA is mocking as a silly gossip and long distance match prognosticator, has apparently speculated that Mrs. Rice of Kent would want her son, Henry Rice-- one year younger than JA--to settle near herself in Kent. The point is that Henry Rice was a serious candidates for the Dean Curacy, and in fact Le Faye's Bio Index reveals that Henry Rice _did_ become the Dean Curate in 1801.
Le Faye also informs us that Henry Rice was an eldest son, and "cheerful and amusing but a hopeless spendthrift and gambler, forever expecting his widowed mother to pay the debts he constantly incurred." As we will read in Letter 33, I think JA did not agree with Le Faye's appraisal of the relationship between Henry Rice and his mother. Stay tuned a few weeks on that one....
So far, this is not particularly interesting, but now it gets very interesting:
_Mary Lloyd plays Mrs. Elton to Peter DeBary's Frank Churchill?_
In regard to Peter DeBary's refusal of the Dean Curacy described by JA so elaborately and allusively in Letter 30, I just noticed a subliminal detail in the following sentence in Letter 31, which has completely altered my interpretation of the Peter DeBary saga:
"I feel rather indignant that any possible objection should be raised against so valuable a peice of preferment, so _delightful a situation_!-that Deane should not be universally allowed to be as near the Metropolis as any other country villages."
I previously suggested that in this passage JA was engaged in a put-on, speaking in the voice of her _father_, Reverend George Austen, bewildered at how Peter DeBary could possibly refuse such generous terms (which really are not so generous) to serve as curate in so advantageously situated a village as Deane (which JA hints is somehow similar to Glencoe, site of the famous massacre).
Now the phrase "so delightful a situation" has made me reasonably certain that it is _not_ the voice of Revd. Austen at all that JA is imagining, but that of _Mary_ Lloyd Austen, wife of James Lloyd, who will be the boss of the new Dean curate. Why??? Because of the following passage in Chapter 41 of _Emma_:
"...Jane Fairfax was still at her grandmother's; and as the return of the Campbells from Ireland was again delayed, and August, instead of Midsummer, fixed for it, she was likely to remain there full two months longer, provided at least she were able to defeat Mrs. Elton's activity in her service, and save herself from being hurried into _a delightful situation_ against her will."
It is not merely the exact quotation of "a delightful situation" that makes me so certain of the parallel between Mary Austen and Mrs. Elton. That was the "bread crumb" that alerted me to investigate possible parallels, but once I did, I quickly realized that there were, prima facie, a couple of promising parallels discernible between these two ladies, one fictional, one real: i.e., they are both become the wife of the local clergyman; and they are both officious busybodies (did you think of Mrs. Elton---along with Lady Catherine and Mrs. Norris----as I did, when you read "It will be an amusement to Mary to superintend their Household management, & abuse them for expense"?).
But it was when I considered Mary Lloyd Austen as the bewildered voice channeled by JA in Letter 30, that also provided a satisfying answer to the two questions I addressed in my last post, which it had not initially occurred to me might be related:
first, my inference that "Peter DeBary was the "tall clergyman who came with [the two Miss Ledgers, who, by the way, Le Faye has no idea who _they_ are!], whose name Mary would never have guessed"; and
second, my asking whether "JA [was] playfully hinting that Mary Lloyd (who was apparently not yet an item with the recently widowed James Austen) was interested in Peter DeBary."
How interesting the whole thing becomes if there _was_ this personal history between Mary Lloyd Austen and Peter DeBary, dating back 5 years to 1796. How much does it color our understanding of the little saga of the Dean curacy if Peter DeBary spurned Mary (who, as we know, was very sensitive about her post-smallpox appearance) in 1796 despite her having shown interest in him, leaving Mary to eventually refocus her matrimonial aspirations on James Austen! _That_ would cast the little rant against Peter DeBary which I now attribute to Mary Austen in a more sinister light.
I imagine Peter DeBary looking at the Dean curacy and being conflicted, being in need of a living to support himself now that his long term tutoring gig in Edinburgh has come to an end, but (1) finding the financial terms offered by James Austen and his wife less than satisfactory, and also (2) being very wary of placing himself under the thumb of the very woman whom he had scorned 5 years earlier, and her husband who probably was aware that he was Mary's "consolation prize". This fits perfectly with my previous interpretation of Miss Hawkins as having been scorned by the man she really wanted, Frank Churchill, and having to settle for Mr. Elton, but holding on to bitter resentment for having been scorned.
And I think JA saw all of this, and remembered all of this, when she wrote Emma, and "a delightful situation" was her way of tagging it.
Cheers, ARNIE
"That James Digweed has refused Dean Curacy I suppose he has told you himself-tho' probably the subject has never been mentioned between you.-Mrs. Milles flatters herself falsely; it has never been Mrs. Rice's wish to have her son settled near herself-& there is now a hope entertained of her relenting in favour of Deane.-Mrs. Lefroy & her son in law were here yesterday ; she tries not to be sanguine, but he was in excellent spirits.-I rather wish they may have the Curacy. It will be an amusement to Mary to superintend their Household management, & abuse them for expense, especially as Mrs. L. means to advise them to put their washing out."
At the end of Letter 31, we have JA, above, revisiting, exactly one week later, that same thorny question of who will accept the Dean Curacy (and why, by the way, is it that JA spells it "Dean" when it is an adjective describing the curacy, and "Deane" when it is the village name?--she did this in both Letter 30 and now in Letter 31 as well). Now that the heir apparent, Peter DeBary, has astonished various Austens by refusing the curacy, JA now turns her attention to several other candidates.
JA begins in characteristically fine absurdist form--first supposing that James Digweed has told CEA that he has refused it, even though.....he probably has never mentioned it to CEA! Again, shades of the mangled logic progressions of Lewis Carroll! I doubt that James Digweed ever was interested in the first place, this strikes me as raillery with no factual foundation.
I also have a question--what does Le Faye mean when she writes about James Digweed: "ordained 1797 and became curate of Steventon 1798 but never actually held a benefice"?
Then we move on to another mini-satire--Mrs. Milles of Kent, whom JA is mocking as a silly gossip and long distance match prognosticator, has apparently speculated that Mrs. Rice of Kent would want her son, Henry Rice-- one year younger than JA--to settle near herself in Kent. The point is that Henry Rice was a serious candidates for the Dean Curacy, and in fact Le Faye's Bio Index reveals that Henry Rice _did_ become the Dean Curate in 1801.
Le Faye also informs us that Henry Rice was an eldest son, and "cheerful and amusing but a hopeless spendthrift and gambler, forever expecting his widowed mother to pay the debts he constantly incurred." As we will read in Letter 33, I think JA did not agree with Le Faye's appraisal of the relationship between Henry Rice and his mother. Stay tuned a few weeks on that one....
So far, this is not particularly interesting, but now it gets very interesting:
_Mary Lloyd plays Mrs. Elton to Peter DeBary's Frank Churchill?_
In regard to Peter DeBary's refusal of the Dean Curacy described by JA so elaborately and allusively in Letter 30, I just noticed a subliminal detail in the following sentence in Letter 31, which has completely altered my interpretation of the Peter DeBary saga:
"I feel rather indignant that any possible objection should be raised against so valuable a peice of preferment, so _delightful a situation_!-that Deane should not be universally allowed to be as near the Metropolis as any other country villages."
I previously suggested that in this passage JA was engaged in a put-on, speaking in the voice of her _father_, Reverend George Austen, bewildered at how Peter DeBary could possibly refuse such generous terms (which really are not so generous) to serve as curate in so advantageously situated a village as Deane (which JA hints is somehow similar to Glencoe, site of the famous massacre).
Now the phrase "so delightful a situation" has made me reasonably certain that it is _not_ the voice of Revd. Austen at all that JA is imagining, but that of _Mary_ Lloyd Austen, wife of James Lloyd, who will be the boss of the new Dean curate. Why??? Because of the following passage in Chapter 41 of _Emma_:
"...Jane Fairfax was still at her grandmother's; and as the return of the Campbells from Ireland was again delayed, and August, instead of Midsummer, fixed for it, she was likely to remain there full two months longer, provided at least she were able to defeat Mrs. Elton's activity in her service, and save herself from being hurried into _a delightful situation_ against her will."
It is not merely the exact quotation of "a delightful situation" that makes me so certain of the parallel between Mary Austen and Mrs. Elton. That was the "bread crumb" that alerted me to investigate possible parallels, but once I did, I quickly realized that there were, prima facie, a couple of promising parallels discernible between these two ladies, one fictional, one real: i.e., they are both become the wife of the local clergyman; and they are both officious busybodies (did you think of Mrs. Elton---along with Lady Catherine and Mrs. Norris----as I did, when you read "It will be an amusement to Mary to superintend their Household management, & abuse them for expense"?).
But it was when I considered Mary Lloyd Austen as the bewildered voice channeled by JA in Letter 30, that also provided a satisfying answer to the two questions I addressed in my last post, which it had not initially occurred to me might be related:
first, my inference that "Peter DeBary was the "tall clergyman who came with [the two Miss Ledgers, who, by the way, Le Faye has no idea who _they_ are!], whose name Mary would never have guessed"; and
second, my asking whether "JA [was] playfully hinting that Mary Lloyd (who was apparently not yet an item with the recently widowed James Austen) was interested in Peter DeBary."
How interesting the whole thing becomes if there _was_ this personal history between Mary Lloyd Austen and Peter DeBary, dating back 5 years to 1796. How much does it color our understanding of the little saga of the Dean curacy if Peter DeBary spurned Mary (who, as we know, was very sensitive about her post-smallpox appearance) in 1796 despite her having shown interest in him, leaving Mary to eventually refocus her matrimonial aspirations on James Austen! _That_ would cast the little rant against Peter DeBary which I now attribute to Mary Austen in a more sinister light.
I imagine Peter DeBary looking at the Dean curacy and being conflicted, being in need of a living to support himself now that his long term tutoring gig in Edinburgh has come to an end, but (1) finding the financial terms offered by James Austen and his wife less than satisfactory, and also (2) being very wary of placing himself under the thumb of the very woman whom he had scorned 5 years earlier, and her husband who probably was aware that he was Mary's "consolation prize". This fits perfectly with my previous interpretation of Miss Hawkins as having been scorned by the man she really wanted, Frank Churchill, and having to settle for Mr. Elton, but holding on to bitter resentment for having been scorned.
And I think JA saw all of this, and remembered all of this, when she wrote Emma, and "a delightful situation" was her way of tagging it.
Cheers, ARNIE
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Jane Austen's Allusions to Love's Labour's Lost in _Emma_: Part Three
Elissa Schiff wrote the following in Janeites: “So this was, essentially, a closet play - designed for a small group who would know the references and people referred to. Further, it was almost unactable because of [the] rapidity with which verbiage had to be delivered. So it quickly became one of those plays not, then never put on - and essentially fell out of the Shakespearean canon in people's minds. Remember - there were no great compendia editions of Shakespeare with full explanatory notes until, really the end of the 19th century.”
For another scholarly point of view, here are some excerpts on these very same topics from the Introduction to Love’s Labour’s Lost in the 1988 Bantam Classics edition of “Shakespeare: Three Early Comedies”.
First, re the quality of the play’s structure:
“The unresolved ending, in which no marriages take place and in which the Princess’s territorial claims to Aquitaine are left unsettled, should be regarded not as unfinished but as highly imaginative and indeed indispensable. The title after all assures us that ‘love’s labors” will be lost and the Princess affirms the principle of “form confounded.”
And this is a rebuttal to the theory that LLL was a topical satire:
"Equally inconclusive are theories that the play was a topical satire written for a special audience, or that it was a comparatively late play of Shakespeare’s ‘lyric’ period, 1594-5…..[Bevington then argues for a half page _against_ dating the play after 1589, when the alleged topical references would apply]…”
And now comes a description of LLL vis a vis Shakespeare’s other plays, that sounds as if it could be a description of _Emma_ vis a vis JA’s other novels:
“The world of LLL, as compared with that of most of Shakespeare’s comedies, is not only uneventful but is remarkably unthreatened by danger or evil. The characters themselves are menaced by nothing worse than themselves and stand to lose nothing more serious than their dignity. In such an artificial world, however, the preservation of one’s self-esteems assumes undue importance…”
And here is the scholar’s opinion about _performance_ of LLL:
“Clearly LLL, so daunting in the study, can be one of Shakespeare’s most vital comedies onstage. A character in GB Shaw’s Misalliance observes…,’Yes it reads well, but it doesn’t act well.’ LLL is just the opposite: it may not always read well, but it can work delightfully in the theater. The wordplay, so apt to seem tedious as one reads, becomes charmingly adolescent and zany in performance. The play revels in disguises, in masques, in misdirected letters. It choreographs its big scenes with an eye to stage picture in a way that must have been especially attractive on the scenery free Elizabethan stage….LLL contains what is probably Shakespeare’s first play within a play…Theatrical self-reflexivity encourages Shakespeare’s audience to reflect on levels of illusion and on the issue of what constitutes good dramatic art. LLL’s insistence on its own artifice helps to keep that artifice from cloying the appetite. The play is a confection, one that rewards good acting and never seems to grow old.”
But who wrote this Introduction anyway?
Well, for those who care about such things, David Bevington is “Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus Department of English & Department of Comparative Literature” at the U. of Chicago.And here’s what he says at his webpage: “I have finished updating the 29-volume paperback edition of all of Shakespeare's works that I did for Bantam Books back in 1988.”
Now that is a nice irony, in light of the recent discussion about edition of all of Shakespeare’s works in Jane Austen’s day.
And finally here is Bevington’s latest news:
“I am one of three senior editors of a forthcoming Cambridge edition of The Works of Ben Jonson, scheduled for 2011. I am currently working on a book on the history of Hamlet from sources and original text to modern-day productions and critical reception.”
Cheers, ARNIE
For another scholarly point of view, here are some excerpts on these very same topics from the Introduction to Love’s Labour’s Lost in the 1988 Bantam Classics edition of “Shakespeare: Three Early Comedies”.
First, re the quality of the play’s structure:
“The unresolved ending, in which no marriages take place and in which the Princess’s territorial claims to Aquitaine are left unsettled, should be regarded not as unfinished but as highly imaginative and indeed indispensable. The title after all assures us that ‘love’s labors” will be lost and the Princess affirms the principle of “form confounded.”
And this is a rebuttal to the theory that LLL was a topical satire:
"Equally inconclusive are theories that the play was a topical satire written for a special audience, or that it was a comparatively late play of Shakespeare’s ‘lyric’ period, 1594-5…..[Bevington then argues for a half page _against_ dating the play after 1589, when the alleged topical references would apply]…”
And now comes a description of LLL vis a vis Shakespeare’s other plays, that sounds as if it could be a description of _Emma_ vis a vis JA’s other novels:
“The world of LLL, as compared with that of most of Shakespeare’s comedies, is not only uneventful but is remarkably unthreatened by danger or evil. The characters themselves are menaced by nothing worse than themselves and stand to lose nothing more serious than their dignity. In such an artificial world, however, the preservation of one’s self-esteems assumes undue importance…”
And here is the scholar’s opinion about _performance_ of LLL:
“Clearly LLL, so daunting in the study, can be one of Shakespeare’s most vital comedies onstage. A character in GB Shaw’s Misalliance observes…,’Yes it reads well, but it doesn’t act well.’ LLL is just the opposite: it may not always read well, but it can work delightfully in the theater. The wordplay, so apt to seem tedious as one reads, becomes charmingly adolescent and zany in performance. The play revels in disguises, in masques, in misdirected letters. It choreographs its big scenes with an eye to stage picture in a way that must have been especially attractive on the scenery free Elizabethan stage….LLL contains what is probably Shakespeare’s first play within a play…Theatrical self-reflexivity encourages Shakespeare’s audience to reflect on levels of illusion and on the issue of what constitutes good dramatic art. LLL’s insistence on its own artifice helps to keep that artifice from cloying the appetite. The play is a confection, one that rewards good acting and never seems to grow old.”
But who wrote this Introduction anyway?
Well, for those who care about such things, David Bevington is “Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus Department of English & Department of Comparative Literature” at the U. of Chicago.And here’s what he says at his webpage: “I have finished updating the 29-volume paperback edition of all of Shakespeare's works that I did for Bantam Books back in 1988.”
Now that is a nice irony, in light of the recent discussion about edition of all of Shakespeare’s works in Jane Austen’s day.
And finally here is Bevington’s latest news:
“I am one of three senior editors of a forthcoming Cambridge edition of The Works of Ben Jonson, scheduled for 2011. I am currently working on a book on the history of Hamlet from sources and original text to modern-day productions and critical reception.”
Cheers, ARNIE
Jane Austen's Allusions to Love's Labour's Lost in _Emma_: Part Two
[Elissa wrote the following in Janeites responding to my previous message under the above Subject Line]: "...the play [Love's Labour's Lost] was often not included in nicely bound sets of Shakespeare's individual works...."
I responded as follows:
Google Books showed me _several_ different editions of Shakespeare printed _during_ JA's lifetime which _included_ Love's Labour's Lost. However, my personal favorite, hands down, has got to be the following one:
1788 Edition of Shakespeare's Plays, Volume the Sixth, containing Love's Labour's Lost & A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Dramatick Writings of Will. Shakspere, With the Notes of all the various Commentators; Printed Complete from the Best Editions of Sam. Johnson and Geo. Steevens. London: Printed for, and under the Direction of, John Bell, British Library, Strand, Bookseller to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales
Here is the link:
http://books.google.com/books?id=qXs0AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA3&dq=%22Love%27s+Labour%27s+Lost%22&hl=en&ei=KrIHTqGhAcnegQfrhLy4DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false
So....is it possible to imagine that volumes published by the British Library, Strand, as Bookseller to HRH the Prince of Wales, could be in the category of _not_ nicely bound sets? is it possible that the Prince of Wales---- he who spent (in today's money) untold millions on every imaginable extravagant and wasteful expenditure, a man who considered himself a world leader in aesthetics and culture, a man who, for Pete's sake, presumed, during his amorous youth, to call himself "Florizel"!----might have on display, in Carlton House, numerous _cheesily_ bound sets of Shakespeare?
And, by the way, would Samuel Johnson and George Steevens similarly be in the category of unrecognized commentators on Shakespeare?
In regard to those shleppers, Johnson and Steevens, here is what is printed at the front of this Volume, in oversized letters, right before the text of LLL:
Remarks on the Plot, The Fable, and Construction of Love's Labour's Lost:
"I have not been hitherto so lucky as to discover any novel on which this comedy seems to have been founded, and yet the story of it has most of the features of an ancient romance." Steevens.
"In this play, which all the editors have concurred to censure, and some have rejected as unworthy of our poet, it must be confessed that there are many passages mean, childish, and vulgar; and some which ought not to have been exhibited, as we are told they were, to a maiden queen. But there are scattered through the whole many sparks of genius; nor is there any play that has more evident marks of the hand of Shakspeare." Johnson.
So..... "...."many sparks of genius.....more evident marks of the hand of Shakspere..." What this means is that _even_ Samuel Johnson, he who (as I posted several months ago) absolutely _hated_ Shakespeare's pervasive punning with a furious passion, and did not lack the nerve to tell the world how much he disliked that aspect of Shakespeare's writing---nonetheless even the dour, (at least superficially) conservative Johnson was firmly _opposed_ to those editors who had shown the temerity to exclude LLL "as unworthy of our poet".
And would the Jane Austen _you_ know, upon reading that introduction, have slammed the book shut and raced to get one of those censored editions instead? My Jane Austen would have fought to her last breath to _keep_ , above all others, the edition that included LLL, precisely because my JA not only would not have been offended by any alleged vulgarities, she would have enjoyed them immensely!
And the proof of the "pudding", so to speak, is _Emma_ itself.
And apropos _Emma_ and LLL, I cannot resist to bring forward another spoonful of that allusive pudding.
In all of Jane Austen's fiction and letters, there is only _one_ place where there is a reference to a “saucy look”, and it is in Chapter 53 of Emma, when Mr. Knightley says to Emma: "How often, when you were a girl, have you said to me, with one of your _saucy_ looks -- 'Mr. Knightley, I am going to do so and so; papa says I may...."
In all of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, there is only _one_ place where there is a reference to a "saucy look", and it is in Act 1, Scene 1 of Love's Labour's Lost, when Berowne says "Study is like the heaven's glorious sun, That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks"
Now, in case those lines sound familiar, that may be because those are the very lines which _immediately follow_ the lines I quoted in my previous message, as pointing toward the second charade in Chapter 9 of _Emma_ which I now _re_quote:
As, painfully to pore upon a book,
To seek the light of truth, while truth the while
Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look.
Light seeking light doth light of light beguile:
So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
Study me how to please the eye indeed
By fixing it upon a _fairer eye_,
Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed
And give him light that it was blinded by.
And here's the best part of this---what is Berowne really talking about in this speech? He is arguing, with his usual great skill and casuistry, that book-study will not enlighten a person. Which of course is absurd, as both he, and the author who created him, are both book-learned to an absurdly high degree!
But back to Emma---is it just a coincidence that in Chapter 5 of _Emma_, the only other place (besides the above quoted passage in Chapter 53) where Knightley reminisces about Emma as a girl, we read Knightley saying the following about Emma's book-study habits?:
""Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawing-up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through—and very good lists they were—very well chosen, and very neatly arranged—sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen—I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time; and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding. Where Miss Taylor failed to stimulate, I may safely affirm that Harriet Smith will do nothing.—You never could persuade her to read half so much as you wished.—You know you could not."
Is it a coincidence that "saucy looks" appears in two passages which are so strongly connected to playful challenges to the benefits of book-study? I leave it to you all to decide for yourselves.
Cheers, ARNIE
I responded as follows:
Google Books showed me _several_ different editions of Shakespeare printed _during_ JA's lifetime which _included_ Love's Labour's Lost. However, my personal favorite, hands down, has got to be the following one:
1788 Edition of Shakespeare's Plays, Volume the Sixth, containing Love's Labour's Lost & A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Dramatick Writings of Will. Shakspere, With the Notes of all the various Commentators; Printed Complete from the Best Editions of Sam. Johnson and Geo. Steevens. London: Printed for, and under the Direction of, John Bell, British Library, Strand, Bookseller to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales
Here is the link:
http://books.google.com/books?id=qXs0AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA3&dq=%22Love%27s+Labour%27s+Lost%22&hl=en&ei=KrIHTqGhAcnegQfrhLy4DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false
So....is it possible to imagine that volumes published by the British Library, Strand, as Bookseller to HRH the Prince of Wales, could be in the category of _not_ nicely bound sets? is it possible that the Prince of Wales---- he who spent (in today's money) untold millions on every imaginable extravagant and wasteful expenditure, a man who considered himself a world leader in aesthetics and culture, a man who, for Pete's sake, presumed, during his amorous youth, to call himself "Florizel"!----might have on display, in Carlton House, numerous _cheesily_ bound sets of Shakespeare?
And, by the way, would Samuel Johnson and George Steevens similarly be in the category of unrecognized commentators on Shakespeare?
In regard to those shleppers, Johnson and Steevens, here is what is printed at the front of this Volume, in oversized letters, right before the text of LLL:
Remarks on the Plot, The Fable, and Construction of Love's Labour's Lost:
"I have not been hitherto so lucky as to discover any novel on which this comedy seems to have been founded, and yet the story of it has most of the features of an ancient romance." Steevens.
"In this play, which all the editors have concurred to censure, and some have rejected as unworthy of our poet, it must be confessed that there are many passages mean, childish, and vulgar; and some which ought not to have been exhibited, as we are told they were, to a maiden queen. But there are scattered through the whole many sparks of genius; nor is there any play that has more evident marks of the hand of Shakspeare." Johnson.
So..... "...."many sparks of genius.....more evident marks of the hand of Shakspere..." What this means is that _even_ Samuel Johnson, he who (as I posted several months ago) absolutely _hated_ Shakespeare's pervasive punning with a furious passion, and did not lack the nerve to tell the world how much he disliked that aspect of Shakespeare's writing---nonetheless even the dour, (at least superficially) conservative Johnson was firmly _opposed_ to those editors who had shown the temerity to exclude LLL "as unworthy of our poet".
And would the Jane Austen _you_ know, upon reading that introduction, have slammed the book shut and raced to get one of those censored editions instead? My Jane Austen would have fought to her last breath to _keep_ , above all others, the edition that included LLL, precisely because my JA not only would not have been offended by any alleged vulgarities, she would have enjoyed them immensely!
And the proof of the "pudding", so to speak, is _Emma_ itself.
And apropos _Emma_ and LLL, I cannot resist to bring forward another spoonful of that allusive pudding.
In all of Jane Austen's fiction and letters, there is only _one_ place where there is a reference to a “saucy look”, and it is in Chapter 53 of Emma, when Mr. Knightley says to Emma: "How often, when you were a girl, have you said to me, with one of your _saucy_ looks -- 'Mr. Knightley, I am going to do so and so; papa says I may...."
In all of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, there is only _one_ place where there is a reference to a "saucy look", and it is in Act 1, Scene 1 of Love's Labour's Lost, when Berowne says "Study is like the heaven's glorious sun, That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks"
Now, in case those lines sound familiar, that may be because those are the very lines which _immediately follow_ the lines I quoted in my previous message, as pointing toward the second charade in Chapter 9 of _Emma_ which I now _re_quote:
As, painfully to pore upon a book,
To seek the light of truth, while truth the while
Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look.
Light seeking light doth light of light beguile:
So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
Study me how to please the eye indeed
By fixing it upon a _fairer eye_,
Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed
And give him light that it was blinded by.
And here's the best part of this---what is Berowne really talking about in this speech? He is arguing, with his usual great skill and casuistry, that book-study will not enlighten a person. Which of course is absurd, as both he, and the author who created him, are both book-learned to an absurdly high degree!
But back to Emma---is it just a coincidence that in Chapter 5 of _Emma_, the only other place (besides the above quoted passage in Chapter 53) where Knightley reminisces about Emma as a girl, we read Knightley saying the following about Emma's book-study habits?:
""Emma has been meaning to read more ever since she was twelve years old. I have seen a great many lists of her drawing-up at various times of books that she meant to read regularly through—and very good lists they were—very well chosen, and very neatly arranged—sometimes alphabetically, and sometimes by some other rule. The list she drew up when only fourteen—I remember thinking it did her judgment so much credit, that I preserved it some time; and I dare say she may have made out a very good list now. But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding. Where Miss Taylor failed to stimulate, I may safely affirm that Harriet Smith will do nothing.—You never could persuade her to read half so much as you wished.—You know you could not."
Is it a coincidence that "saucy looks" appears in two passages which are so strongly connected to playful challenges to the benefits of book-study? I leave it to you all to decide for yourselves.
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S. re Letter 30: Black Peter DeBary & The Massacre of Steventon: “What does he think of Glencoe or Lake Katherine?”
Several hours after I sent my message earlier today under the above Subject Line, it occurred to me that it was very strange that I had only found one contemporary reference to "Lake Katherine" (the 1820 geographical book I quoted from), and that this lake appeared to be worthy of mention in only one book from that entire era. Somehow I felt JA would not have mentioned it if it had not been more than that, a place of greater fame for some reason.
And then it dawned on me that the reason I only found one source was that that the _Scots_ didn't call it "Lake Katherine"!
It did not take me much Googling after that to establish that the Scottish name for Lake Katherine was, and still is, Loch Katrine!
And.. using _that_ name, I quickly found several contemporary sources, and it became immediately clear that Loch Katrine was during JA's lifetime a major tourist destination, located very close to Loch Lomond, and therefore must have been a mandatory stop for English tourists because of the unique picturesque beauty of the lake and its surroundings, that all these sources referred to.
And you'd better believe that the author who created Fanny Price would have found a way to read descriptions like the following from a 1791 book by George Keate, _Sketches from nature_:
"What exquisite pleasures some men miss for want of a higher and purer appreciation of the forms, colours, and harmonies of nature! We all feel, more or less, the emotion awakened by the beautiful, and can recall spots which have made indelible impressions on our minds. For example, how beautiful is the morning light, as it comes with its golden tint through the lattice, and by its gentle potency awakes you from slumber! How sweet to gaze through the mouldering window of an old abbey on a sunny landscape, and with a friend whom we love! How charming to watch the moonbeams shimmering on the sea or falling on a pellucid lake, as Windermere, _LOCH KATRINE_, or Killarney, when memory recalls the past, and hope glances into the future! How pure are the impressions which real beauty makes on the mind!"
If Keate's purple prose begins to sound like JA's greatest (or should I say her worst) uber-Romanticism blowhard, Sir Edward Denham, that is not an accident!
In the 16 years that intervened between JA's writing Letter 30 and JA's writing the fragment of Sanditon, Loch Katrine's greatest claim to fame arose like a fireworks rocket zooming into the night sky. In 1810, 9 years _after_ JA wrote Letter 30, a fellow named Scott (I think his name was "Sir Walter"?) decided to write a poem based on Loch Katrine, and he called it something like......The Lady of the Lake, and apparently it caught on! ;)
So that is why, in 1817, JA chose to have Sir Edward Denham, her greatest (or perhaps we should say her worst) uber-Romanticist, quote the following lines from "Lady of the Lake":
""Some feelings are to mortals given,
With less of earth in them than Heaven."
Sir Edward refers to Lady of the Lake as "that unequalled, unrivalled address to parental affection."
Has anyone reading along here actually read The Lady of the Lake? I have a feeling that Cathy Janofsky has, since she goes by the code name "NimueSprite"!
One way or another, I have a hunch that Sir Edward's description of Lady of the Lake is topsy turvy from what actually occurs, and that in some way the Lady of the Lake can fairly be construed as some sort of dreadful _lapse_ in parental affection---sort of like what happened to JA in January 1801 when she was uprooted from Steventon!
I also note from Wikipedia that one of the three subplots of Lady of the Lake is "a war between the lowland Scots (led by James V) and the highland clans (led by Roderick Dhu of Clan Alpine)." And that sounds suspiciously like what happened at Glencoe in 1689!
So, the point is that JA knew exactly what she was doing when she referred to Lake Katherine, which (according to Google Maps) is really not that far away from Glencoe, both of them being situated to the northwest of Edinburgh, and Glencoe being about 35 miles (as the crow flies) further away.
Cheers, ARNIE
And then it dawned on me that the reason I only found one source was that that the _Scots_ didn't call it "Lake Katherine"!
It did not take me much Googling after that to establish that the Scottish name for Lake Katherine was, and still is, Loch Katrine!
And.. using _that_ name, I quickly found several contemporary sources, and it became immediately clear that Loch Katrine was during JA's lifetime a major tourist destination, located very close to Loch Lomond, and therefore must have been a mandatory stop for English tourists because of the unique picturesque beauty of the lake and its surroundings, that all these sources referred to.
And you'd better believe that the author who created Fanny Price would have found a way to read descriptions like the following from a 1791 book by George Keate, _Sketches from nature_:
"What exquisite pleasures some men miss for want of a higher and purer appreciation of the forms, colours, and harmonies of nature! We all feel, more or less, the emotion awakened by the beautiful, and can recall spots which have made indelible impressions on our minds. For example, how beautiful is the morning light, as it comes with its golden tint through the lattice, and by its gentle potency awakes you from slumber! How sweet to gaze through the mouldering window of an old abbey on a sunny landscape, and with a friend whom we love! How charming to watch the moonbeams shimmering on the sea or falling on a pellucid lake, as Windermere, _LOCH KATRINE_, or Killarney, when memory recalls the past, and hope glances into the future! How pure are the impressions which real beauty makes on the mind!"
If Keate's purple prose begins to sound like JA's greatest (or should I say her worst) uber-Romanticism blowhard, Sir Edward Denham, that is not an accident!
In the 16 years that intervened between JA's writing Letter 30 and JA's writing the fragment of Sanditon, Loch Katrine's greatest claim to fame arose like a fireworks rocket zooming into the night sky. In 1810, 9 years _after_ JA wrote Letter 30, a fellow named Scott (I think his name was "Sir Walter"?) decided to write a poem based on Loch Katrine, and he called it something like......The Lady of the Lake, and apparently it caught on! ;)
So that is why, in 1817, JA chose to have Sir Edward Denham, her greatest (or perhaps we should say her worst) uber-Romanticist, quote the following lines from "Lady of the Lake":
""Some feelings are to mortals given,
With less of earth in them than Heaven."
Sir Edward refers to Lady of the Lake as "that unequalled, unrivalled address to parental affection."
Has anyone reading along here actually read The Lady of the Lake? I have a feeling that Cathy Janofsky has, since she goes by the code name "NimueSprite"!
One way or another, I have a hunch that Sir Edward's description of Lady of the Lake is topsy turvy from what actually occurs, and that in some way the Lady of the Lake can fairly be construed as some sort of dreadful _lapse_ in parental affection---sort of like what happened to JA in January 1801 when she was uprooted from Steventon!
I also note from Wikipedia that one of the three subplots of Lady of the Lake is "a war between the lowland Scots (led by James V) and the highland clans (led by Roderick Dhu of Clan Alpine)." And that sounds suspiciously like what happened at Glencoe in 1689!
So, the point is that JA knew exactly what she was doing when she referred to Lake Katherine, which (according to Google Maps) is really not that far away from Glencoe, both of them being situated to the northwest of Edinburgh, and Glencoe being about 35 miles (as the crow flies) further away.
Cheers, ARNIE
Letter 30: Black Peter DeBary & The Massacre of Steventon: “What does he think of Glencoe or Lake Katherine?”
I have read all the comments in this thread and have a very different take on the following passage in Letter 30, which I first reproduce in its delicious entirety, below, for ready reference:
“Mr. Peter Debary has declined Dean curacy; he wishes to be settled nearer London. A foolish reason!, as if Deane were not near London in comparison of Exeter or York.-Take the whole world through, & he will find many more places at a greater distance from London than Deane, than he will at a less.-What does he think of Glencoe or Lake Katherine?-I feel rather indignant that any possible objection should be raised against so valuable a peice of preferment, so delightful a situation!-that Deane should not be universally allowed to be as near the Metropolis as any other country villages.-As this is the case however, as Mr. Peter Debary has shewn himself a Peter in the blackest sense of the Word, We are obliged to look elsewhere for an heir; & my father has thought it a necessary compliment to James Digweed to offer the Curacy to him, tho' without considering it as either a desirable or an eligible situation for him.-Unless he is in love with Miss Lyford, I think he had better not be settled exactly in this neighbourhood, & unless he is very much in love with her indeed, he is not likely to think a salary of 50 equal in value or efficacy to one of 75.-Were you indeed to be considered as one of the fixtures of the house!-but you were never actually erected in it either by Mr. Egerton Brydges or Mrs. Lloyd.”
The events relevant to the above which were happening in January 1801 were that because Revd. Austen was moving to Bath, he was giving his clerical position at Steventon to son James, and of course James was therefore moving with his family from Deane to the Steventon rectory. _That_ left a vacancy for a resident curate at Deane, and _that_ is what was what Revd. Austen apparently offered to Peter DeBary. That all is pretty straightforward, and not news to anybody.
I begin my analysis by pointing out that I read this passage as a put-on, with JA, for its duration, assuming the voice of her father. Hyperbolically, she speaks the outraged thoughts she imagines her father to be thinking at this moment, after Peter DeBary has crossed him up (sorta like Sir Thomas’s bewildered reaction when Fanny Price refuses to marry Crawford) and actually said “No, thank you” to what probably was a pretty chintzy offer, from DeBary’s perspective.
And of course Ellen is correct that Le Faye’s footnote (citing Chapman) is wrong, but I go further and say that it is quintessential cock-and-bull. It is not simply obtuse and wrong-headed to suggest a reference to “the knave of spades”, when the Biblical allusion is staring everyone in the face! Anyone can make a mistake, but it is much worse!
What offends me is that the footnote was calculated, written by Le Faye (and probably Chapman as well) for one reason alone—the desire to avoid even the slightest whiff of a suggestion that JA might have sacrilegiously and frivolously alluded to the denial of Jesus by Peter in Scripture—a particularly sacred portion of the Gospels. Which of course is _exactly_ what JA was doing, and, to boot, she was doing it (I cannot resist it) “in spades”!
But that is all prelude to the new perspective on this passage that I have just spent an enjoyable hour researching. Neither Le Faye, nor any other Austen biographer I can detect online, has ever given any attention to _another_ aspect of the question, which is the role of Peter DeBary in particular in JA’s satirical mini-melodrama, one in which JA gave us not one but two rather large hints:
“What does [DeBary] think of Glencoe or Lake Katherine?-
The Jane Austen I have come to know _never_ throws in place names like that without a reason, and so I was intrigued by her reference to these two places, one of which was obviously in Scotland (I dimly remembered the name “Glencoe” from elementary school, but could not recall why).
So I called on my old friends Google and Wikipedia (who get a bad rap from some folks, I think), and look what they told me:
“Early in the morning of 13 February 1692, in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and the Jacobite uprising of 1689, ....an infamous masacre took place in Glen Coe, in the Highlands of Scotland. This incident is referred to as the “Massacre of Glencoe”...Thirty-eight MacDonalds from the Clan MacDonald of Glencoe were killed by the guests who had accepted their hospitality, on the grounds that the MacDonalds had not been prompt in pledging allegiance to the new monarchs, William and Mary.... Under Scots law, …[such] "murder under trust"…was considered to be even more heinous than ordinary murder….The challenge to the inquiry which had been established, was to apportion blame on those responsible for the massacre, and yet the orders which led to it were signed by the King himself, who could not be seen to be responsible. The scandal was further enhanced when the leading Scottish jurist... was, in 1692, offered the post of Lord Advocate but declined it because the condition was attached that he should not prosecute the persons implicated in the Glencoe Massacre ....The conclusion of the commission was to exonerate the King and to place the blame for the massacre upon Secretary Dalrymple. The Scottish Parliament, after reviewing the commission report, declared the execution of the MacDonald men to have been murder...The Glencoe massacre became a propaganda piece for Jacobite sympathies, which were to come to a head in the next generation in the Rising of 1745.....the massacre was romanticised in art and literature, such as Sir Walter Scott's "The Highland Widow". “
The _massacre_ of Glencoe---of course, that was what I had once read about nearly five decades ago!
And then I found the following in Google Books from an 1820geographical book:
“The Forth: This river, the most considerable in Scotland, has its origin from a lake under Ben Lomond, in the western angle of Stirlingshire, and runs Eastward toStirling,near which place it unites with the Teith, and forms_LAKE KATHERINE_. From Stirling it flows west by south, and mixes with the German Ocean by a wide estuary, called the Firth of Forth. From its origin to Berwick, at the mouth of the Firth, its course, exclusive of windings, is seventy-five miles.”
So, two seemingly random names selected by JA as “evidence” in her Through the Looking Glass sort of absurdist logical sequence, and _both_ of them point to places in _Scotland_--what could this mean?
I thought about it a moment, and my first hunch was that in some way known to JA and CEA, but unknown to the world of Janeites, Peter DeBary must have had some personal connection to Scotland.
So I called on my friends Google and Wikipedia _again_, and look what they told me this time, from the 1860 _Memoir of Andrew Dalzel, professor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh_:
Letter from Lord Adam Gordon, 11/2/1796: "Lord Henry Petty, son to Marquis of Lansdown, and MR. DEBARY, being in Edinburgh and to attend the Colleges there, Lord Adam Gordon begs leave to introduce them to Mr. Dalzel, and to request his best attentions to them during their residence in Scotland. Mr. Debary is tutor to Lord Henry Petty, and is a man of very uncommon good character, and well informed. Any attentions to them from Mr. Dalzel will be gratefully acknowledged by his faithful and obedt. humble servant, Ad. Gordon." "Per favour of Lord Henry Petty and Mr. Debary."
I immediately recognized the name “Lansdowne” as having multiple Austen connections.
Le Faye’s Bio Index entry for the Marquis of Lansdowne names him as “John-Henry Petty (1765-1809) a “widely travelled but rather solitary man” who built a Gothic castle in Southampton a la Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, and that is why, I believe, John Thorpe wants to drive Catherine “up Lansdown Hill”.
But…. that is _not_ the same “Lord Henry Petty” mentioned in Lord Adam Gordon’s 1796 letter.
_That_ Mr. Petty is described by Chris Viveash and Le Faye, respectively, as follows:
“... one of Miss Austen's novelsbecame the subject of conversation and praise, especially from Lord Lansdowne, who observed that one of the circumstances of his life which he looked back upon with vexation was that Miss Austen should once have been living some weeks in his neighborhood [when she lived in Southampton] without his knowing it. “
“…Lord Henry Petty, half brother of the 2^nd Marquis. It was this 3^rd Marquis…who admired JA’s works and was ‘grieved and affected’ in 1817 to hear of her death.”
So I think it highly likely that Peter deBary (who was born in 1764 and therefore was an older contemporary of the future 3^rd Marquis of Lansdowne) was that very same “Mr. DeBary” mentioned in Adam Gordon’s 1796 letter, and that he was, at the age of 32, several years after graduating from Cambridge, but still 8 years prior to beginning his career in Hampshire (but _not_ at Deane) as a curate,the tutor to his fellow Hampshireman the future Marquis in Ediburgh!
And _that_ is why, I claim, having reached the end of my own deadly serious chain of logical inferences, that JA, in early 1801, makes these two sly veiled references to Scotland in a passage depicting Peter DeBary as a “black” Peter! And of course CEA (indeed the whole Austen family) would have also been well aware that Peter DeBary had probably only just returned from that stint as tutor in Scotland, and was out of work and looking for a job!
But I think there is even more going on here than all of that. The reference to Lake Katherine would have been just a tag to point to Scotland, but the reference to Glencoe is extremely thematic, because the Massacre of Glencoe was a very famous historical event—so famous that even I, an American schoolboy in the early 1960’s, read about it in some book or another! How much more famous it would havebeen in England way back in 1801, especially to a young woman who at age 16 had written her own satirical (yet very learned) History of England! And it would have been even fresher news to JA, because we also all know that JA loved to espouse the Jacobite cause (Mary Queen of Scots being the most notable example), and Glencoe was a major rallying cry for that very cause, which reached fever pitch in 1746, only thirty years before JA was born, and was a major subtext of Fielding’s _Tom Jones_!
And here is the most important point. The veiled allusion to a massacre fits, in a very dark and very striking way, with the Biblical allusion to Peter and Jesus. Both of them involve fatal betrayals associated with horrific and infamous murders ordered by monarchs who sought to avoid responsibility for their murderous orders (Pontius Pilate and William & Mary, respectively). _Way_ too close for coincidence.
So, what does this suggest JA is saying, in a veiled way, about her father, her brother James (with _his_ “Queen” Mary!) and Peter DeBary? My personal sense is that JA viewed the entire process of the abrupt move to Bath as a kind of “massacre”, a sudden, completely unexpected betrayal of her and CEA by her parents, with brother James as the primary beneficiary of the massacre of JA’s life at Steventon, which indeed “died” very shortly after she wrote Letter 30.
Cheers, ARNIE
“Mr. Peter Debary has declined Dean curacy; he wishes to be settled nearer London. A foolish reason!, as if Deane were not near London in comparison of Exeter or York.-Take the whole world through, & he will find many more places at a greater distance from London than Deane, than he will at a less.-What does he think of Glencoe or Lake Katherine?-I feel rather indignant that any possible objection should be raised against so valuable a peice of preferment, so delightful a situation!-that Deane should not be universally allowed to be as near the Metropolis as any other country villages.-As this is the case however, as Mr. Peter Debary has shewn himself a Peter in the blackest sense of the Word, We are obliged to look elsewhere for an heir; & my father has thought it a necessary compliment to James Digweed to offer the Curacy to him, tho' without considering it as either a desirable or an eligible situation for him.-Unless he is in love with Miss Lyford, I think he had better not be settled exactly in this neighbourhood, & unless he is very much in love with her indeed, he is not likely to think a salary of 50 equal in value or efficacy to one of 75.-Were you indeed to be considered as one of the fixtures of the house!-but you were never actually erected in it either by Mr. Egerton Brydges or Mrs. Lloyd.”
The events relevant to the above which were happening in January 1801 were that because Revd. Austen was moving to Bath, he was giving his clerical position at Steventon to son James, and of course James was therefore moving with his family from Deane to the Steventon rectory. _That_ left a vacancy for a resident curate at Deane, and _that_ is what was what Revd. Austen apparently offered to Peter DeBary. That all is pretty straightforward, and not news to anybody.
I begin my analysis by pointing out that I read this passage as a put-on, with JA, for its duration, assuming the voice of her father. Hyperbolically, she speaks the outraged thoughts she imagines her father to be thinking at this moment, after Peter DeBary has crossed him up (sorta like Sir Thomas’s bewildered reaction when Fanny Price refuses to marry Crawford) and actually said “No, thank you” to what probably was a pretty chintzy offer, from DeBary’s perspective.
And of course Ellen is correct that Le Faye’s footnote (citing Chapman) is wrong, but I go further and say that it is quintessential cock-and-bull. It is not simply obtuse and wrong-headed to suggest a reference to “the knave of spades”, when the Biblical allusion is staring everyone in the face! Anyone can make a mistake, but it is much worse!
What offends me is that the footnote was calculated, written by Le Faye (and probably Chapman as well) for one reason alone—the desire to avoid even the slightest whiff of a suggestion that JA might have sacrilegiously and frivolously alluded to the denial of Jesus by Peter in Scripture—a particularly sacred portion of the Gospels. Which of course is _exactly_ what JA was doing, and, to boot, she was doing it (I cannot resist it) “in spades”!
But that is all prelude to the new perspective on this passage that I have just spent an enjoyable hour researching. Neither Le Faye, nor any other Austen biographer I can detect online, has ever given any attention to _another_ aspect of the question, which is the role of Peter DeBary in particular in JA’s satirical mini-melodrama, one in which JA gave us not one but two rather large hints:
“What does [DeBary] think of Glencoe or Lake Katherine?-
The Jane Austen I have come to know _never_ throws in place names like that without a reason, and so I was intrigued by her reference to these two places, one of which was obviously in Scotland (I dimly remembered the name “Glencoe” from elementary school, but could not recall why).
So I called on my old friends Google and Wikipedia (who get a bad rap from some folks, I think), and look what they told me:
“Early in the morning of 13 February 1692, in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and the Jacobite uprising of 1689, ....an infamous masacre took place in Glen Coe, in the Highlands of Scotland. This incident is referred to as the “Massacre of Glencoe”...Thirty-eight MacDonalds from the Clan MacDonald of Glencoe were killed by the guests who had accepted their hospitality, on the grounds that the MacDonalds had not been prompt in pledging allegiance to the new monarchs, William and Mary.... Under Scots law, …[such] "murder under trust"…was considered to be even more heinous than ordinary murder….The challenge to the inquiry which had been established, was to apportion blame on those responsible for the massacre, and yet the orders which led to it were signed by the King himself, who could not be seen to be responsible. The scandal was further enhanced when the leading Scottish jurist... was, in 1692, offered the post of Lord Advocate but declined it because the condition was attached that he should not prosecute the persons implicated in the Glencoe Massacre ....The conclusion of the commission was to exonerate the King and to place the blame for the massacre upon Secretary Dalrymple. The Scottish Parliament, after reviewing the commission report, declared the execution of the MacDonald men to have been murder...The Glencoe massacre became a propaganda piece for Jacobite sympathies, which were to come to a head in the next generation in the Rising of 1745.....the massacre was romanticised in art and literature, such as Sir Walter Scott's "The Highland Widow". “
The _massacre_ of Glencoe---of course, that was what I had once read about nearly five decades ago!
And then I found the following in Google Books from an 1820geographical book:
“The Forth: This river, the most considerable in Scotland, has its origin from a lake under Ben Lomond, in the western angle of Stirlingshire, and runs Eastward toStirling,near which place it unites with the Teith, and forms_LAKE KATHERINE_. From Stirling it flows west by south, and mixes with the German Ocean by a wide estuary, called the Firth of Forth. From its origin to Berwick, at the mouth of the Firth, its course, exclusive of windings, is seventy-five miles.”
So, two seemingly random names selected by JA as “evidence” in her Through the Looking Glass sort of absurdist logical sequence, and _both_ of them point to places in _Scotland_--what could this mean?
I thought about it a moment, and my first hunch was that in some way known to JA and CEA, but unknown to the world of Janeites, Peter DeBary must have had some personal connection to Scotland.
So I called on my friends Google and Wikipedia _again_, and look what they told me this time, from the 1860 _Memoir of Andrew Dalzel, professor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh_:
Letter from Lord Adam Gordon, 11/2/1796: "Lord Henry Petty, son to Marquis of Lansdown, and MR. DEBARY, being in Edinburgh and to attend the Colleges there, Lord Adam Gordon begs leave to introduce them to Mr. Dalzel, and to request his best attentions to them during their residence in Scotland. Mr. Debary is tutor to Lord Henry Petty, and is a man of very uncommon good character, and well informed. Any attentions to them from Mr. Dalzel will be gratefully acknowledged by his faithful and obedt. humble servant, Ad. Gordon." "Per favour of Lord Henry Petty and Mr. Debary."
I immediately recognized the name “Lansdowne” as having multiple Austen connections.
Le Faye’s Bio Index entry for the Marquis of Lansdowne names him as “John-Henry Petty (1765-1809) a “widely travelled but rather solitary man” who built a Gothic castle in Southampton a la Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, and that is why, I believe, John Thorpe wants to drive Catherine “up Lansdown Hill”.
But…. that is _not_ the same “Lord Henry Petty” mentioned in Lord Adam Gordon’s 1796 letter.
_That_ Mr. Petty is described by Chris Viveash and Le Faye, respectively, as follows:
“... one of Miss Austen's novelsbecame the subject of conversation and praise, especially from Lord Lansdowne, who observed that one of the circumstances of his life which he looked back upon with vexation was that Miss Austen should once have been living some weeks in his neighborhood [when she lived in Southampton] without his knowing it. “
“…Lord Henry Petty, half brother of the 2^nd Marquis. It was this 3^rd Marquis…who admired JA’s works and was ‘grieved and affected’ in 1817 to hear of her death.”
So I think it highly likely that Peter deBary (who was born in 1764 and therefore was an older contemporary of the future 3^rd Marquis of Lansdowne) was that very same “Mr. DeBary” mentioned in Adam Gordon’s 1796 letter, and that he was, at the age of 32, several years after graduating from Cambridge, but still 8 years prior to beginning his career in Hampshire (but _not_ at Deane) as a curate,the tutor to his fellow Hampshireman the future Marquis in Ediburgh!
And _that_ is why, I claim, having reached the end of my own deadly serious chain of logical inferences, that JA, in early 1801, makes these two sly veiled references to Scotland in a passage depicting Peter DeBary as a “black” Peter! And of course CEA (indeed the whole Austen family) would have also been well aware that Peter DeBary had probably only just returned from that stint as tutor in Scotland, and was out of work and looking for a job!
But I think there is even more going on here than all of that. The reference to Lake Katherine would have been just a tag to point to Scotland, but the reference to Glencoe is extremely thematic, because the Massacre of Glencoe was a very famous historical event—so famous that even I, an American schoolboy in the early 1960’s, read about it in some book or another! How much more famous it would havebeen in England way back in 1801, especially to a young woman who at age 16 had written her own satirical (yet very learned) History of England! And it would have been even fresher news to JA, because we also all know that JA loved to espouse the Jacobite cause (Mary Queen of Scots being the most notable example), and Glencoe was a major rallying cry for that very cause, which reached fever pitch in 1746, only thirty years before JA was born, and was a major subtext of Fielding’s _Tom Jones_!
And here is the most important point. The veiled allusion to a massacre fits, in a very dark and very striking way, with the Biblical allusion to Peter and Jesus. Both of them involve fatal betrayals associated with horrific and infamous murders ordered by monarchs who sought to avoid responsibility for their murderous orders (Pontius Pilate and William & Mary, respectively). _Way_ too close for coincidence.
So, what does this suggest JA is saying, in a veiled way, about her father, her brother James (with _his_ “Queen” Mary!) and Peter DeBary? My personal sense is that JA viewed the entire process of the abrupt move to Bath as a kind of “massacre”, a sudden, completely unexpected betrayal of her and CEA by her parents, with brother James as the primary beneficiary of the massacre of JA’s life at Steventon, which indeed “died” very shortly after she wrote Letter 30.
Cheers, ARNIE
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