Was Charles Dickens a Closet Janeite?

An old question has been raised again in another group---could Charles Dickens have been a closet Janeite?

Here's what I wrote about Dickens allusions to Jane Austen in yet another online venue over 5 years ago:

My acquaintance with Dickens is still relatively small, but I became aware last year of a curious bit of textual evidence which I'd like to invite comment on from you all who know Dickens very well.  I wonder whether Dickens had Austen's Mansfield Park very specifically in mind when he wrote the following passage in Martin Chuzzlewit:

Ch. 17: "Another little trait came out, which impressed itself on Martin forcibly. Mr. Bevan told them about Mark and the negro, and then it appeared that all the Norrises were abolitionists. It was a great relief to hear this, and Martin was so much encouraged on finding himself in such company, that he expressed his sympathy with the oppressed and wretched blacks. Now, one of the young ladies--the prettiest and most delicate--was mightily amused at the earnestness with which he spoke; and on his craving leave to ask her why, was quite unable for a time to speak for laughing. As soon however as she could, she told him that the negroes were such a funny people, so excessively ludicrous in their manners and appearance, that it was wholly impossible for those who knew them well, to associate any serious ideas with such a very absurd part of the creation. Mr. Norris the father, and Mrs. Norris the mother, and Miss Norris the sister, and Mr. Norris Junior the brother, and even Mrs. Norris Senior the grandmother, were all of this opinion, and laid it down as an absolute matter of fact. As if there were nothing in suffering and slavery, grim enough to cast a solemn air on any human animal; though it were as ridiculous, physically, as the most grotesque of apes, or morally, as the mildest Nimrod among tuft-hunting republicans!"

Why I ask is because, for those familiar with the slavery subtext of Mansfield Park, Mrs. Norris is a kind of metaphorical overseer tormenting Fanny Price the metaphorical house slave of the novel. So the surname Norris and the institution of slavery is linked in both Martin Chuzzlewit and in Mansfield Park. However, perhaps someone who does not believe this is an allusion by Dickens to Austen will argue that Dickens, like Austen, must have known about the very famous 18th century real life slave ship captain turned abolitionist Robert Norris, and therefore claim that Dickens was alluding only to Robert Norris, not to Austen's Mrs. Norris, in the above passage, and that he had no idea about Jane Austen's covert "spin" on the Norris surname. However, I say that where's smoke, there may be fire, and I find some very thick "smoke" in the following passage from 2 paragraphs later in Martin Chuzzlewit, when Dickens wrote:
"In order that their talk might fall again into its former pleasant channel, Martin dropped the subject, with a shrewd suspicion that it would be a dangerous theme to revive under the best of circumstances".

So we have the narrator referring to an abrupt but tactful termination of the unpleasant subject of slavery and racism. Which reminds me an awful lot of the following passage from Mansfield Park: Edmund Bertram says to Fanny Price: "Your uncle is disposed to be pleased with you in every respect; and I only wish you would talk to him more. You are one of those who are too silent in the evening circle."

And then Fanny replies as follows:   "But I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do. Did not you hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?"

And then Edmund says this:  "I did-and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther."

And then Fanny says this (and this is the "punchline" for my claim of a Dickens allusion to Austen):  "And I longed to do it-but there was such a dead silence! And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like- I thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel."

I think that such a passage in Mansfield Park would have appealed to Dickens's anti-racist idealism, because he'd have realized from it that Jane Austen was in fact very much concerned with slavery and racism, but was extremely covert in her allusions, as opposed to his own forthright allusions.   END QUOTE

As I reread the above for the first time in a few years, I still stand by what I wrote then.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Greasy Chawton and The Lady Bertram of Letter 78

In Janeites and Austen-L yesterday, Diana Birchall wrote the following regarding Jane Austen's Letter 78 written in January, 1813: "Some arch comment on the weather, employing the English flexibility of adjectives ("sloppy", "greasy")..."

I responded as follows:

Here is that arch comment in Letter 78: "It was just greasy here on friday, in consequence of the little snow that had fallen in the night..."

Diana, my sense is that this unusual usage of "greasy" here is JA's own _original_ twisting of English to meet her witty metaphorical demands---she has taken "greasy" out of the kitchen (with MP's Rebecca's "greasy" bread and butter--perhaps she was even writing that passage in MP as she wrote Letter 78?--- and Mr. Woodhouse's grease-free roast pork), and has inserted it into the wintry Hampshire countryside. There it seems clearly  to mean "slippery", referring, I would guess, to the late-January ground having a slick half-ice, half-snow surface that was perilous to walk on.  I checked in Google Books, and I could not find a single usage of "greasy" in any other book from 1700 through 1820 that referred to any sort of landscape.

For all that JA's writing is supposed to lack physical descriptiveness, I find the opposite to be so. Yes, she is _very_ spartan in her use of physically descriptive adjectives, but I think that's a good thing. Upon examination, they often turn out to be quite evocative--which makes JA's writing poetic in its compression and economy.


Diana  also wrote: "...then some dutiful messages from her mother, and a nasty comment about a Mrs. Bramstone, "the sort of Woman I detest." Deirdre points out this opinion was shared by diarist Hon John Byng, who wrote of this lady as "an artful wordly woman, of a notable self-sufficient capacity."  "

Here's the full quote: "Mrs. Bramstone is the sort of Woman I detest---Mr. Cottrell is worth ten of her. It is better to be given the Lie direct, than to excite no interest..."

There were actually TWO Mrs. Bramstons in Jane Austen's life--one was born Mary Chute and married Wither Bramston, the other was Wither Bramston's elder "dowager" sister. The comment by the diarist Byng quoted by Diana was about the latter, and it might seem that this would be a very straightforward comment about the dowager Mrs. Bramston, who disliked Jane Austen's writing.


However, I believe JA meant that sentence to be ambiguous, and to also work as a joke between her and her actual friend, the married Mrs. Bramston.  That arch, hyperbolic tone should put us on red alert that JA was horsing around, exaggerating for comic effect, and was not at all serious in her purported abhorrence for that "sort of Woman". For starters, had there been a genuine upsetting event as to which a "Lie" had been "given", I don't think JA would have written about it in this playful way.  And there is wit reminiscent of JA's Juvenilia when we read that what is detestable is "to excite no interest". This is pure raillery, teasing fun between friends.

And there is real-life evidence to support my claim that JA did not detest the married Mrs. Bramston (as usual, JA's spelling of proper names is very "greasy"!). First, Mrs. B was apparently an old friend who is mentioned a half dozen times (in pretty benign ways) in letters from the Steventon era.  Check 'em out, you won't find any sign of dislike between JA and Mrs. Bramston--in fact, in Letter 37, we read another passage about Mrs. Bramston, right after JA jokes--surely in a dark way--about the "fire sale" prices being offered for her precious books:

"Ten shillings for Dodsley's Poems, however, please me to the quick, and I do not care how often I sell them for as much. When Mrs. Bramston has read them through I will sell them again."

Whether Mrs. Bramston actually read Dodsley's poems through, who knows, but my point is that Mrs. Bramston is surely not detested by JA.

But second, and more significantly, we actually have the following opinion of MP expressed by the married Mrs. Bramston and recorded by JA, which illuminates our admittedly speculative opinion of _her_ mind and character much further:

"much pleased with it; particularly with the character of Fanny, as being so very natural. THOUGHT LADY BERTRAM LIKE HERSELF. Preferred it to either of the others--but imagined THAT might be her want of Taste--as she does not understand Wit."

Hmm....we know that Fanny Price has a soft spot for Lady Bertram, and vice versa. So it's very interesting to me that Mrs. Bramston is much pleased with Fanny's character in particular, and it's ten times more interesting still that Mrs. Bramston also thinks Lady Bertram is "like herself"! And for all that Mrs Bramston then deprecates her own Taste and understanding of Wit, I have a feeling that Mrs. Bramston herself is teasing about both of these points, that she enjoys good natured raillery every bit as much as JA, and further Mrs. B(RAMston) is showing JA that her taste and wit are actually sophisticated, able to appreciate the subtle ironies of MP, able even to see herself caricatured in the character of Lady B(ertRAM).

And the above is consistent with the following data revealed by Deborah Kaplan in her 1988 Persuasion article about the married Mrs. Bramston:

"Mary Bramston of Oakley Hall, for example, had strikingly broad [reading] preferences, recommending in her letters to a close friend histories, Gothic novels, the works of William Wilberforce, and of Lord Byron.”

No, I don't think JA detested Mrs. Bramston one little bit. And the icing on the cake of that interpretation is that I do believe that Lady Bertram really _was_ JA's _intentional_, but veiled, portrait of her dear old friend, Mrs. Bramston. For starters, as I have already suggested obliquely by my capitalizations---think anagrammatically----the name "Bramstone" (as JA spelled it in Letter 78) includes within its nine letters _six_ of the seven letters of "Bertram" (missing only the second "r")----and _both_ surnames begin with "B" and have the sequence "RAM" in them!

This kind of anagrammatical wordplay is of course JA's forte, and I am certain this was not accidental--indeed, I think that Mrs. Bramston understood the anagram, and _that_ was why she opined about MP as she did!

And....for me the best part of all is that this is not just inconsequential wordplay. I have for several years, for many substantive reasons, been of the firm opinion that Lady Bertram is, along with Harriet Smith, one of the two characters in all of JA's novels who begs to be interpreted topsy turvy from the obvious way of judging her character---i.e., Lady Bertram _seems_ to be little more than a human vegetable, a laudanum-drenched addict who barely moves from her sofa, and barely lifts a finger to protect Fanny.

But...I have known Lady Bertram to be playing possum, and actually to be Fanny's true protector and patroness. So....I say that Mrs. Bramstone is the Lady Bertram of Letter 78, and I defy anyone to accuse me of making a "greasy" interpretation!

ADDED 09/12/12: I thought some more about the relationship between Mrs. _Mary_ Bramston and her unmarried dowager sister in law, Mrs. _Augusta_ Bramston, and I realized that if Mrs. Mary Bramston was represented by Lady Bertram, then it only made perfect sense that her very unpleasant real life unmarried sister in law was represented by Lady Bertram's very unpleasant fictional unmarried sister in law......Mrs. Norris!

And the fact that in real life Mrs. Augusta Bramston was actually the _legal_ mistress of Oakley Hall [by the way, her father's name was _Edmund_!!] makes Mrs. Norris's presumption of the role of unofficial mistress of Mansfield Park--in her bossy domineering way--all the more hilarious as a satirical portrait of the very unpleasant Mrs. Augusta Bramston.

And we might also wonder whether Mrs. Augusta _Elton_ owes any of _her_ bossiness to Mrs. Augusta Bramston as well!

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Fragmented Jane Austen: The OED is a dinosaur

A short while ago, the following blog  post  appeared in my daily Google  robot search for  all news Austenian....

http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/09/jane-or-jones/

....and that post included the following excerpt:

"Jane Austen’s novels and letters are frequently cited in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), putting her work currently as the 253rd most frequently quoted source in the OED, with a total of 1,620 quotations. Of these quotations, 44 currently provide the very first evidence of a particular word, including the adjective ‘fragmented’ (from Northanger Abbey: “In the shape of some fragmented journal, continued to the last gasp”) and “sponge-cake” (from an 1808 letter)....."

Having had occasion several times in the past few years to find usages of words prior to the earliest date shown in the OED, I was curious to know if this might be yet another example, so I went to Google Books and  searched for usages of "fragmented" between 1780 and 1818.

Surprise, surprise, I found three different published sources using "fragmented" prior to Jane Austen:

Anecdotes on the Arts in England or Comparative Remarks on Architecture … by James Dallaway (1800)

ppg. 247-8: "Venus Vestita, a statue......The restorations are very inferior, and the same blunder respecting the hair is repeated. It may be suspected, that the naked appearing in the fragmented part, was the work of Guelfi."

p. 345: "A vase with Bacchanals, fragmented, but the figures of good sculpture."

p. 431: "In the north transept of Christ Church is a fragmented subject of T. a Becket..."

A journal of the most remarkable occurrences that took place in Rome, upon the subversion of the ecclesiastical government, in 1798(1799) by  Richard Duppa

P. 117: "The Fragmented Hercules, called the Torso"

 

The Gentlemen's Magazine, 1788

P. 951: "A.B. the writer of the observations on petrified human  bones...has, in common with others on the same subject, confounded the  bones in the caverns of the rock at Gibraltar, with that part of the rock in which the mass of fragmented animal bones are found..."

So, why bother to go to the OED when you can go to Google Books and get more accurate answers yourself in no time flat? And, to have the fun of finding the answer yourself, instead of relying on someone else's answer?

And, it should also be noted, Jane Austen used the noun "fragment" twice in her novels as well, and the word "fragment" was extremely common in published writings during her lifetime--so the leap from the noun to the adjective hardly seems noting in any event.

But I am glad of all this nonetheless, because what I found most  illuminating was to read JA's usages of "fragment" and "fragmented" in NA....

"He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances—side-screens and perspectives—lights and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape. Delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to decline, and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky FRAGMENT and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the enclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence. "

AND

"In the course of this morning's reflections, she came to a resolution of making her next attempt on the forbidden door alone. It would be much better in every respect that Eleanor should know nothing of the matter. To involve her in the danger of a second detection, to court her into an apartment which must wring her heart, could not be the office of a friend. The general's utmost anger could not be to herself what it might be to a daughter; and, besides, she thought the examination itself would be more satisfactory if made without any companion. It would be impossible to explain to Eleanor the suspicions, from which the other had, in all likelihood, been hitherto happily exempt; nor could she therefore, in her presence, search for those proofs of the general's cruelty, which however they might yet have escaped discovery, she felt  confident of somewhere drawing forth, in the shape of some FRAGMENTED  journal, continued to the last gasp. Of the way to the apartment she was  now perfectly mistress; and as she wished to get it over before Henry's  return, who was expected on the morrow, there was no time to be lost. The day was bright, her courage high; at four o'clock, the sun was now  two hours above the horizon, and it would be only her retiring to dress half an hour earlier than usual.

...in light of the above prior usages of "fragmented", most of which had to do with ancient sculptures, and one of which had to do with ancient bones.

In the Beechen Cliff passage, we read about a "piece of rocky fragment"  being described by Henry in an aesthetic sense, like those books about  fragmented sculptures; and in the Abbey passage, we have exactly that  sense of a lost fragmented journal from the past, like those bones in the Gentlemen's Magazine article.

So, perhaps JA got the idea to use the adjective "Fragmented" from  reading it in one of those earlier sources, and she thought, "I would like to invoke the idea of sculpture and bones, so I will use it. Or she just made it up on her own.

And speaking of old bones, as I suggested, the OED is a dinosaur, that Google Books has rendered as outmoded as the beeper and the horse-drawn carriage--we live in an Internet Age when everyone can create his or her own OED, at will!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

My Idiosyncratic Review of Claudia Johnson's New Book

I have now had a chance to browse and read all the way through Claudia Johnson's new book _Jane Austen's Cult and Cultures_ (it's only 188 pages, plus footnotes, and is not unduly jargon-laden), and for the most part I found it very difficult to categorize. As I mentioned in my post the other day about one of Johnson's points...

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/09/jane-austens-last-poem-as-memorial.html

.....Johnson's elegant writing style is a pleasure to read, she's obviously a brilliant scholar, but if I had to pick one word to describe this book, I'd call it "eccentric"---it's a cut above most of the other recent books about Austenmania past and present in terms of the intelligence of the writing, and yet, for the most part, I found myself uninterested in most of what Johnson went to such care to write about so elegantly.  Much elegant and intelligent ado about not too much.

I had to remind myself that Claudia Johnson is the same scholar who wrote the intellectually daring and insightful _Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel_ over two decades ago---the Austenian frontiers that Johnson now explores are badly shrunk from that earlier book---I found myself skimming past the first 100 pages, until I got to Chapter 3, entitled "Jane Austen's World War I", and that, finally, was something to sink yer teeth into, intellectually speaking.

Expanding on an article she had written way back in 1996 entitled "The Divine Miss Jane", Johnson here makes a very insightful analysis of Rudyard Kipling's famous poem "The Janeites" and of Reginald Farrer's writing from the WWI front in which he finds uncanny and disturbing resonance between the "trenches" where mass killing occurred and JA's pastoral tales of "narrow" lives.  If anyone's curiosity is piqued, get the book and read the first half of this chapter (ppg. 99-110), you will find it worth your while, I would not try to summarize her analysis, which I find excellent and compelling.

What I will give you is Johnson's cogent summation of her inferences from comparing Kipling's poem and Farrer's essays to JA's novels:

"How does all of this strike a 21st century reader of JA? In conspicuous distinction to Victorian readings, Janeite allusion is not magically safe and uncomplicated, where the stakes are higher and the dangers keener than we imagined before. Austen's novels are about nothing if not the perils of living in a confined, narrow, profoundly bruising place where experience unfolds under the aegis of ordeal, where vulnerable, deferent young protagonists with next to no autonomy are exposed to adversities so brutal that they cannot be essayed, much less assailed directly. In Austen's world, that narrow place is called a neighbourhood; during WW I it is called a trench, but in both, a premium is placed on behaving well during 'epical instants' of duress. NA, a novel pooh-poohed as a fledgling effort in most academic readings after WWII, sides with the vulnerability of Austen's youngest heroine. It is plangent to imagine how Kipling's Janeites in their trenches, designed by their generals for cannon fodder, might have discussed Catherine Morland's misplaced confidence in General Tilney's intentions: certainly, she reassures herself [like the Tommies in the trenches], 'he could not propose any thing improper for her' (NA, 160). Janeite allusion thus breaks down the false opposition between the arena of war and the arena of domesticity...."

That is powerful thinking and writing, and I find it sad and deeply puzzling that this is practically the only passage in Johnson's entire book which makes you sit up and think. Is it that Johnson thought "BTDT" with her great book of two decades earlier? Or is it that she has completely retreated from the brave feminist readings she made so long ago? Incredibly enough, in a 188 page book about Jane Austen's readers, written by a scholar who made JA's feminism her happy hunting ground, the index to this book does not even have an entry for "Feminism" or "Feminist"!

And that is, I think, all the more surprising, given the strong implicit feminism of the above summation---if Johnson is saying, as I think she is, that JA viewed the situation of the young woman of her era as being disturbingly similar to that of the young men dying in WWI trenches along the Somme, then I 100% agree with Johnson on that point.

I have written countless times about the Holocaust of married English gentlewomen dying in childbirth in JA's lifetime, and how JA was most appalled at the deafening silence of her society on that subject, and the danger to a writer who would even dare to raise a hue and cry about that Holocaust in an explicit way. So I think JA would have been nodding approvingly at Kipling, Farrer, and Claudia Johnson on that point.l

But why Johnson hits this scholarly high note for only 10 pages out of 188, I don't get it. But I still recommend her Chapter 3 very highly nonetheless.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Misplaced Confidence of the Literal Mind.

In 1955, in his essay about Jane Austen in his collection entitled "The Opposing Self", the late great literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote the following about Jane Austen's irony:

“...In irony, even in the large derived sense of the word, there is a kind of malice. The ironist has the intention of practicing upon the misplaced confidence of the literal mind, of disappointing comfortable expectation. Jane Austen’s malice of irony is directed not only upon certain of the characters of his novels but also upon the reader himself. We are quick, too quick, to understand that Northanger Abbey invites us into a snug conspiracy to disabuse the little heroine of the errors of her corrupted fancy—Catherine Morland, having become addicted to novels of terror, has accepted their inadmissible premise, she believes that life is violent and unpredictable. And that is exactly what life is shown to be by the events of the story: it is we who must be disabused of our belief that life is sane and orderly. The shock of our surprise at the disappointment of our settled views is of course the more startling because we believe that we have settled our views in conformity with the author’s own. Just when we have concluded in Sense and Sensibility that we ought to prefer Elinor Dashwood’s sense to Marianne Dashwood’s sensibility, Elinor herself yearns toward the anarchic passionateness of sensibility…This interference with our moral and intellectual comfort constitutes, as I say, a malice on the part of the author. And when we respond to Jane Austen with pleasure, we are likely to do so in part because we recognize in her work an analogue with the malice of the experienced universe, with the irony of circumstance, which is always disclosing more than we bargained for....“

I had previously taken passing notice of the above in the course of preparing to give my 2009 JASNA AGM talk about the anti-parody of Northanger Abbey, but I never went back to Trilling's full essay in order to fully appreciate the historical significance of the claim he was making. 

Way back in 1955, aside from the brilliant and prophetic WD Harding, I don't recall (and am not at my usual desk so as to be able to check all my files to verify) that any other Austen critic had ever suggested so clearly as Trilling did, above, that Jane Austen  was engaged in a deliberate and systematic enterprise of (in Trilling's elegant formulation) "practicing upon the misplaced confidence of the literal mind" of her readers. 

That is of course exactly my vision of Jane Austen, and so I am pretty certain that if Trilling could be transported to the present for a day, and I could spend a few hours with him, he'd be astonished, but delighted, to learn that he was so close to "getting" the central mystery of Jane Austen's writing! 

So a tip of the hat, 57 years later, to Lionel Trilling, for his pioneering insights!

Cheers, ARNIE 

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.: We can only wonder whether Trilling intentionally echoed, in a subtly deflating way, the famous poetic line of the infallible Pope: 

"the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind"  

There is strong resonance between the two---Pope's tragic lover yearns for the simple innocence of the vestal virgin who lives in solitary communion with God, untainted by human yearnings and concerns. 

Trilling's (and my) vision of Jane Austen is of a serpent in the garden of Eden, subtly guiding her readers to take a bite out of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of human life, and to accept, embrace, and even celebrate, a complex, contradictory world in which little is certain.