The Biblical Subtexts of Letter 138(D): Jane Austen’s April Fool’s Joke on the Courteous Courtier Clarke

In Austen L & Janeites, Ellen wrote about Jane Austen's Letter 138 to James Stanier Clarke dated April 1, 1816: Her reply [to Clarke] was originally from a religious perspective much harsher than the one she sent. [Eventually, s]he sent this:  

“Under every interesting circumstance which your own Talents & literary Labours have placed you in, or the favour of the Regent bestowed, you have my best wishes. Your recent appointments I hope are a step to something still better. In my opinion, The service of a Court can hardly be too well paid, for immense must be the sacrifice of Time & Feeling required by it.”

…[However, t]he original version points to the continual hypocrisy these positions required: For once LeFaye [by pointing out this alteration] tells us something to the point:

“In my opinion not more surely should They who preach Gospel, live by the Gospel, than they who live by a Court, live by it - & live well by it too; for the sacrifices of Time & Feeling they must make must be immense.”

In other words at a court the central [goal] of religion to be truthful and moral is not possible because you must continually be lying in some way or other so outside the court they had better live by the gospel for real to make up for the Immense sacrifices of time and feeling. Time shows this is a literary thought, for the Bible emphasizes truthful feeling not time. Austen would hate to give up her writing time to be living at that Pavilion….”   END QUOTE FROM ELLEN’S POST

I have quoted from Ellen’s post the part that has to do with the passage in Letter 138(D) which JA originally wrote one way, and then altered in the version she actually sent to Clarke, in order to discuss it in two respects. First, it provides a very interesting window into JA’s writing process, in the same way we glean insight from comparing the canceled chapters of Persuasion to the final published version. But second, I raise this point, because of the gorgeous, satirical Biblical allusions hidden in plain sight in it!

I originally analyzed JA’s second thoughts in rewriting that passage nearly six years ago during a private correspondence with a few sharp Janeite friends. At that time, I wrote to my friends the following comments about JA’s first stab at writing that passage:

“I just looked at Le Faye's edition of the letters, and it's even better, because this was a line that JA specifically worked on! Listen to how this line read in her first draft: [first version quoted by Ellen, above] This is verbose and dangerously close to being detected as overblown mockery, so she then compresses it and sprinkles some fairy dust on it, to come up with the following epigram of pure satirical gold:  "In my opinion, the service of a court can HARDLY be too well paid, for immense must be the sacrifice of time and feeling required by it."
Need we any more proof of how elaborate a game she was playing with Clarke and the Prince Regent? That letter is as much a part of Emma as the words in the actual novel itself. How fitting that emulating Mr Knightley, and avoiding snobbery (intellectual snobbery in this case) is what allows us to see this novel, with its snob heroine, so clearly.”

 At that point, one of my friends responded with this brilliant catch: “The first version of Jane's quote comes from the King James Version of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 9:14  

“Even so hath the Lord ordained that they which preach the gospel should live of the gospel.”  

I replied as follows, and, having just reread it today, I stand by every word I wrote back then. Enjoy! But be sure to keep going after the following long quotation of myself, because I also have some current, fresh insights to add thereafter:

“Bravo! Evidently I knew more than I realized when I wrote about JA's first draft of that line that "This is verbose and dangerously close to being detected as overblown mockery". I shoulda paid attention to the Biblical aura of that line, as you did. It turns out that you've taken us to the heart of JA's subversive artistry, and WHY that line would have been dangerous close to being detected as mockery!! ;)
If we read all of 1 Corinthians, consisting of 27 verses, too quickly, it may at first seem like a defense of the idea that apostles should profit from their apostolic avocation. But, upon careful reading, we readily see (and I quote here from the excellent Harper Collins Bible Commentary, James L. Mays, General Editor) that it "is not so much a defense of Paul's conduct as it is an argument, using Paul as an example, for a RENUNCIATION [my emphasis] of rights and power in free service...It is an elucidation of Paul's apostolic freedom and power for the purpose of stressing his freely chosen self-limitation."

In other words, Paul is saying, "Of course, I COULD assert my right, based on these half dozen Biblical authorities, to demand compensation from those I preach to, but, because I actually am not in this thing for the money, and I do fear I be corrupted, and/or be perceived to be corrupt, if I take compensation, I am not going to, because it might taint my message, which is what REALLY matters!"

A quick look at what JA writes to Clarke immediately before that paraphrase from Corinthians tells us all we need to know about what had passed through JA's mind as she was first composing her letter to him:
"Under every interesting circumstance which your own Talents & literary labours have placed you in, or the favour of the Regent bestowed, you have my best wishes. Your recent appointments I hope are a step toward something still better."

I.e., in Clarke's letter to JA which she has just read [Letter #138(A)], he has just been shamelessly boasting to her that the Prince Regent has "been pleased to appoint me Chaplain and Private English Secretary to the Prince of Cobourg" [of course, as part of the "transaction" by which Princess Charlotte is to marry into that very same Prince of Cobourg!], and has the gall to then ask that JA's NEXT novel be about the House of Cobourg, and dedicated to him.

I.e., Clarke, no doubt egged on by JA, in the letter she sent him enclosing a copy of Emma for the Prince Regent, in that same way that Mr. Bennet eggs Mr. Collins on to further heights of absurdity, has been gulled into identifying her as a fellow toady, and takes the bait!

JA then responds to his greedy boasting (again, shades of Mr. Bennet or Lizzy talking to Mr. Collins) by wishing him still (and Le Faye tells us that JA adds the word "still", which clearly is intended to hammer home the satire!] further emoluments for his efforts on behalf of God!

And that is when JA naturally thought about that chapter from Corinthians, as a devastating satire on Clarke's greed, and his utter forgetting of the reason he is supposed to have become a "divine" and why he is supposed to be there at the Court of the most powerful man in Europe, i.e., to perhaps remind the Prince Regent of his moral obligations! So, probably from memory, she quickly converts that Biblical verse to use in the letter.

But then she pauses, rereads what she wrote, and realizes that the first draft is WAY too close to the actual text of Corinthians. JA realizes that even Clarke, phony cleric that he is, may realize it is a Biblical text, or, just as bad, may wonder what JA is talking about, and goes to find someone who actually knows the Bible, and, one way or another, locates it in the Bible, and only then, perhaps, might realize that JA was mocking his greed.

And that is a grave risk, given that it may be opening Pandora's Box, since it just might alert Clarke or (a hundred times worse) the Prince Regent that Miss Austen is of a wickedly satirical bent, and then....what if the Prince Regent looks a little too closely at the second charade of Chapter 9 of Emma. The jig would be up for JA right then and there!

So....she thinks better of it, and alters her language to obliterate the religious context completely, and instead invokes the comparable language she used in P&P to describe Sir William Lucas's obliviousness to Lydia's diss of his daughter Charlotte's marriage to the buffoon Mr. Collins. She moves from the church to the court, which is anyway the proper emphasis in terms of how Clarke obviously sees himself, a courtier first and a churchman a very distant second.

In this way, JA gets to keep the satire (because Clarke is not only Mr. Elton, he is also, when you think about it, a strange and wonderful blending of Mr. Collins AND Sir William Lucas), and need not worry that Clarke might recognize the allusion to P&P, because surely he has not read a word of P&P, or if he has, he probably did not recognize that Mr. Collins was being ridiculed! And so Emma is saved from having all the copies of it seized from Mr. Murray's warehouse and burned!  This just gets better and better!

END QUOTE FROM MY 2008 PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE ABOUT LETTER 138(D)

ANOTHER VEILED BIBLICAL ALLUSION

                                                                                                                       

When I revisited this passage for the first time in 6 years, I immediately noticed another Gospel allusion hiding in plain sight in the altered passage, which JA inserted when she revised her first draft. I.e., when  JA wrote to Clarke “"Under every interesting circumstance which your own TALENTS & literary labours have placed you in…”,  JA was thereby punning on the Biblical meaning of “talent” as a term for a Biblical coin from Jesus’s Palestine, which is evidenced by repeated references to it in the Gospel of Matthew, in what is famously known as “The Parable of the TALENTS”.

This pun of course fits perfectly with the subtext of Letter 138(D) which I have spelled out above, in which JA is subliminally calling out Clarke’s obscenely mercenary greed in every sentence, especially by reference to the veiled allusion to Corinthians that my friend first detected.

But this veiled allusion to this famous parable in Matthew’s Gospel ups the satirical ante tenfold. JA is burlesquing Jesus’s parable, in the most sacrilegious way possible, and in effect is comparing Clarke to the third “unprofitable” servant, the one who, per Jesus, hid his “talents’ in the ground, instead of investing them wisely, and therefore was punished for this by expulsion by his master!

Given what I’ve written about the Prince Regent’s repeated cruel jokes at Clarke’s expense, and how JA wove allusions thereto into Emma, it seems beyond dispute that this veiled allusion to Jesus’s parable is JA’s way, under her breath, of warning Clarke of the unpleasant end that might be awaiting him, when the Prince tires of tormenting him and simply turns him out into the cold world.

And we also see that JA, in her revision of this passage, has not only toned down the obviousness of the veiled allusion to Corinthians, but has simultaneous slipped into an amazingly subtle additional Biblical allusion which complements the first one to a tee.  JA, in short, is invoking the authority of no one less than Jesus himself to let Clarke know what she really thinks about him. And, irony of ironies, it is precisely because Clarke is the epitome of the kind of clergyman who (as per my post earlier yesterday about the newly discovered Scrap written by Jane Austen) indeed repeats prayers without thoroughly understanding or feeling them! 

JA knew that there was no danger of Clarke ever noticing these veiled Biblical allusions, precisely because he had never even begun to absorb the radically subversive message of both Paul and Jesus, warning, in strikingly similar ways, against the poison introduced into the soul by Mammon (i.e., greed).

HARDLY

My final comment pertains to another word that leapt out at me today as I reread JA’s the final version of that passage which she sent to Clarke---and noted that in “The service of a Court can HARDLY be too well paid…”, she had subtly inserted the word “hardly”.

Why was this significant? Because, as I recognized today, with my sensitivity to the nuances of The Jane Austen Code being much improved since 2008, I instantly recalled that JA used the word “hardly” a number of times in her writing as a sharp satirical and ironical weapon.

So I will conclude this post with a sampler of the “best of” those passages in her novels and letters, besides this one in the letter to Clarke, to illustrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that JA was laughing uproariously inside as she imagined Clarke’s taking seriously what she intended as the height of irony:

S&S 2: "I would not wish to do any thing mean," he replied. "One had rather, on such occasions, do too much than too little. No one, at least, can think I have not done enough for them: even themselves, they can HARDLY expect more."

This is my personal favorite, as Fanny’s callous ‘hardly’ precisely mirrors the usage in Letter 138(D).

S&S 22: “...You can't think how much I go through in my mind from it altogether. I only wonder that I am alive after what I have suffered for Edward's sake these last four years. Every thing in such suspense and uncertainty; and seeing him so seldom—we can HARDLY meet above twice a-year. I am sure I wonder my heart is not quite broke."

Of course Lucy is an accomplished mistress of irony, as she thrusts the needle into Elinor’s heart with that ‘hardly’.

S&S 34: "There is nobody here but you, that can feel for me.—I declare I can HARDLY stand. Good gracious!--In a moment I shall see the person that all my happiness depends on--that is to be my mother!"

And here again, Lucy zings Elinor with a “hardly”.

P&P 19: “…You can HARDLY doubt the purport of my discourse, however your natural delicacy may lead you to dissemble; my attentions have been too marked to be mistaken. Almost as soon as I entered the house, I singled you out as the companion of my future life.”

Of course, Lizzy and every reader of P&P can readily doubt the sincerity of Mr. Collins’s attentions!

Emma 15: "…I admired your spirit; and I dare say we shall get home very well. Another hour or two's snow can HARDLY make the road impassable; and we are two carriages; if one is blown over in the bleak part of the common field there will be the other at hand. I dare say we shall be all safe at Hartfield before midnight."

And here John Knightley nails Mr. Woodhouse by raising the direst possibilities with his “hardly”.

Emma 35: "Trouble! aye, I know your scruples. You are afraid of giving me trouble; but I assure you, my dear Jane, the Campbells can HARDLY be more interested about you than I am. I shall write to Mrs. Partridge in a day or two, and shall give her a strict charge to be on the look-out for any thing eligible."

And here Mrs. Elton’s “hardly” is just like Lucy’s, in her faux concern for Jane.

Persuasion 5: "So, you are come at last! I began to think I should never see you. I am so ill I can HARDLY speak. I have not seen a creature the whole morning!"

And of course Mary Musgrove is never too ill to complain!

Letter 62 to CEA: “But all this," as my dear Mrs. Piozzi says, "is flight and fancy, and nonsense, for my master has his great casks to mind and I have my little children." It is you, however, in this instance, that have the little children, and I that have the great cask, for we are brewing spruce beer again; but my meaning really is, that I am extremely foolish in writing all this unnecessary stuff when I have so many matters to write about that my paper will HARDLY hold it all. Little matters they are, to be sure, but highly important.”

I have previously noted this passage as one in which JA is saying to CEA, in code, this letter is coded with concealed meanings—pay attention. So the “hardly” fits that code to a tee.

Letter 144 to CEA: “And tell Caroline that I think it is HARDLY fair upon her & myself, to have [JEAL] take up the Novel line…”

This is perhaps most relevant to Letter 138(D), having been written by JA less than six months afterwards.

Letter 151 to Fanny Knight: “It is very, very gratifying to me to know you so intimately. You can HARDLY think what a pleasure it is to me, to have such thorough pictures of your Heart—Oh! What a loss it will be when you are married. You are too agreable in your single state, too agreable as a Neice. I shall hate you when your delicious play of mind is all settled down into conjugal & maternal affections.”

I have always maintained that JA was being totally insincere in this flattery of the Emma-esque Fanny Knight, and so this “hardly” fits perfectly as well!

And I conclude this post by pointing out the most important fact of all, the one which puts all of the above satire in perfect context:

Letter 138(D) WAS DATED ON APRIL FOOL’S DAY!!!!!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S. In The Progress of Maritime Discovery by James Stanier Clarke (1803), Clarke pays repeated attention to the apparently pivotal ancient role of the Corinthians in the course of Mediterranean maritime history. My guess is that JA and/or one of her sailor brothers might have actually been familiar enough with this book by Clarke to have noted that, and, given with her love of irony, she would have recognized, and relished, the additional layer of learned irony, in her making a veiled allusion from Corinthians to the pompous fool who wrote about Corinthians in his own ponderous tome!

More About Jane Austen’s Newly Discovered Scrap

In response to my post yesterday....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/02/jane-austens-radical-critique-of.html

...about the exciting news reports about a new scrap of text handwritten by Jane Austen herself found glued into a copy of her nephew's 1870 Memoir, Nancy Mayer, Diane Reynolds, and Ellen Moody all responded in Janeites & Austen L, and I responded to their  responses as follows:

First, re the authorship of The Scrap, I repeat the game-changing point I made yesterday:  

"The failure of scholarship (in the attribution of the two English articles) I allege is easily demonstrated by the following embarrassing fact ---nobody involved, either at the Museum, the College, or the two newspapers, knew or thought to connect the dots between The Scrap and the 8-line poem Jane Austen wrote in 1807 (as part of a friendly family female poetry competition rhyming every line with the word “rose”), the subject of the second half of which is….the inside story on a rustic parishioner’s tenuous grasp of the meaning of a Sabbath sermon!:

Happy the lab’rer in his Sunday clothes!
In light-drab coat, smart waistcoat, well-darn'd hose,
And hat upon his head, to church he goes;
As oft with conscious pride, he downward throws
A glance upon the ample cabbage rose
Which, stuck in button-hole, regales his nose,
He envies not the gaiest London beaux.
In church he takes his seat among the rows,
Pays to the place the reverence he owes,
LIKES BEST THE PRAYERS WHOSE MEANING LEAST HE KNOWS.
Lists to the sermon in a softening doze,
And rouses joyous at the welcome close.

While seeing the rest of the currently concealed text of The Scrap will hopefully shed further light (and how exciting to experience real suspense in Austen studies, as Janeites await the results of the paper-ungluing process!), my money remains on The Scrap being a revisiting by JA herself of the exact sentiment undeniably expressed by HER in 1807 in the above Rose Poem, a poem written in the exact voice of Mary Crawford!

After all, The Scrap is practically word-for-word identical with the 10^th line of the Rose Poem!  Unless someone wants to go way out on a limb and argue that James Austen read sister Jane’s 1807 satirical poem and chose to plagiarize its punch line in a sermon, what plausible explanation is there for this unmistakable echoing, other than that  Jane was (as she often did in all her writings) echoing herself?

As I laid out in careful detail in my previous post, this scenario being played out right now on the Internet has been played out dozens of times since 1870—here’s the basic “script”: JA wrote something that the preservers of The Myth of Jane Austen find troubling in its implications, but they can’t get away with ignoring (or destroying) this embarrassing evidence of JA’s subversiveness, so they do what they can, and engage in damage control and protest too much about what it “really”means---in this  case, there’s a little of everything--attribution of  the embarrassing text to another family member; ignoring the clear satirical perspective; and ignoring a clear conflict of interest, and motivation to deceive, for the chief obscurer. In short, they minimize, they trivialize, and (as I showed again, above), when all else fails, they just plain ignore any additional textual evidence (from the Rose Poem, from what Mary Crawford says in several different ways) which makes the embarrassing satirical content obvious.

And I must also reiterate my emphasis on motivation to deceive—very specifically in this case, they ignore James Edward Austen Leigh’s proven track record as deceiver in the Memoir—with his “creative editing” of JA’s letters, his distortions of key biographical facts, which I’ve documented numerous times in the past.  Think I am exaggerating? Well, here’s one particularly egregious example of JEAL’s editorial shenanigans, among many:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/01/news-that-really-made-jane-austen_20.html

To paraphrase Edmund Bertram, the (clergy)man who could engage in such blatant deception of his readers would be beyond the reach of MY “sermons” about literary critical deception and cluelessness!

But perhaps the saddest part of the current episode in literary spin doctoring is that I don’t believe any of it is intentionally deceitful or misleading. E.g., I don’t see Deirdre Le Faye barging in and imperiously dismissing claims of JA’s subversiveness by someone like Paula Byrne, unaware of how much she resembled Lady Catherine in such moments. Rather, the Myth of the sanitized, unthreatening Jane Austen is still so deeply engrained in mass consciousness, among Janeites and lay persons alike, that the Bowdlerizing assumptions arise spontaneously—as has been the case among good-faith “experts’ like the fellow trying to unglue the remainder of The Scrap, or the journalists uncritically reporting his blithe assumptions as if they were Gospel truth, or the readers criticizing all this  attention to Jane Austen . It is a banal collaboration that assures no disturbance of the Myth, which sails on undisturbed.

By the way, Diane correctly pointed out that the use of the masculine pronoun two centuries ago was often a kneejerk mechanism for hiding female identity, and so we should not automatically assume that The Scrap is about men only. However, in my reading, I did not automatically assume this, I based my interpretation on the fact that there were no female clergypersons giving sermons during JA’s lifetime. So if I am correct that the Scrap’s satire is directed at clergymen like the fictional Dr. Grant (the selfish gluttonous bon vivant) but also the fictional Edmund Bertram (who spends the entire novel rationalizing away all sorts of moral failures), then “man” really meant “man” in JA’s mind as she wrote The Scrap.

And behind Dr. Grant and Edmund Bertram, her deepest and most embarrassing satire was directed at the real life Reverend James Austen, whose serious moral lapses (e.g., his and his wife Mary also being the primary models for John & Fanny Dashwood—Elllen, that is the sensitive aspect of veiled Austen family biography in S&S that the Austen family wished to ignore and obfuscate, for obvious reasons) were a source of great distress and suffering on JA’s (and niece Anna’s) part over many years. And James Austen, I repeat, was James Edward Austen’s beloved FATHER!

Now, further  addressing Nancy’s suggestion about my trumping up a big controversy. It’s one thing if an unsophisticated laborer dozes in the pew while narcissistically focusing on display in church rather than moral improvement. As Nancy pointed out, that was a commonplace sentiment among the devout, to fret over the common folk not really paying attention in church. But it’s a much more serious (and subversive) satire, if JA’s primary target was-as I say it was--the clergy who were supposed to be the engines of moral improvement for their congregations filled with such laborers. If the shepherds have lost their way, the sheep might indeed be better off finding their own way. That’s not a message the leaders of the Anglican Church would want to be widely disseminated, especially among female readers of JA’s novels who might also be led to question the sexism which saturated every nook and cranny of the Anglican Church JA knew so well, from the inside.

So Nancy, I cannot agree with you that I am generating a false controversy, quite the contrary—this is a very old story of obscuring the true voice of Jane Austen, and even if I am the only voice pointing this out, I will continue to draw upon my own extensive research (which immediately alerted me to the existence of the Rose Poem, that nobody else even was aware of) to illustrate each and every such distortion that pops up, and show that the emperor is still naked.

 That was my first reply, which crossed Diane Reynolds's excellent followup, to which I immediately responded as follows: 

Diane: "Arnie points to the 1807 JA poem with a similar sentiment--no matter who ultimately authored the short quote, it could well be part of an ongoing family discussion, part of the family culture" 

Diane, although I know you don't mean it that way, I am always leery of references to Austen family culture which are usually code for Jane Austen being part of a Borg-like collective, in which she toed a conservative family line. I believe JA was fiercely independent in her thinking from a very young age, and that she pushed back HARD against all attempts by her family to rein her in. So, for all the reasons I have now stated twice, I am extremely confident that she authored The Scrap for her own satirical purposes. 

Diane: "I don't know that this means JA took her brother's sermons seriously in the aggregate (she may or may not have) but it does indicate that she took this particular issue seriously. That someone would preserve this particular quote written out by her suggests not only that this was important to her but that someone else knew she took this seriously."

Indeed, with my proviso that I see her as having been particularly sensitive to her brother's hypocrisy in his sermonizing--like Edmund Bertram, talking the talk but not walking the walk, instead rationalizing away all sorts of questionable behavior. 

Diane: "The idea of implicitly condemning rote prayer--what the Quakers would call "professing with possessing" the faith is a non-conformist view and at least hints at a social conscience--to feel fully the full force and meaning of Biblical texts would suggest changing behavior in ways that would help "the least of us." This points to a more radical view of religious faith--that worship and prayer are about more than individual or communal salvation for an afterlife in heaven--ie, about more than magical incantations for personal protection--religion is about enacting faith in the world. That this would be radical, of course, is always surprising to me, but it remains so to this day."

 Brilliantly articulated, Diane, and I agree on all counts. Indeed, JA was keenly aware of the sad irony that her own genuinely compassionate form of Christianity would have been considered "radical" and "Jacobin" in her day, because she dared to see the powers that be in England as corrupt, hypocritical, and selfish - i.e., exactly as Mary Crawford describes Dr. Grant! 

Diane: "I recognize that I project a good deal of myself into this reading of Austen, as we all tend to do, for one of my passions or bugaboos is that people don't actually read what is in front of them--don't thoroughly feel the full force and meaning of words on a page, but I think as well this was at the heart of Austen's project--much of her novelistic sleight at hand is arguably aimed at encouraging people to read in a fully engaged way. " 

Again, brilliantly summarized, and I could not agree more. My interpretation of The Scrap and the Rose Poem are, I claim, perfect examples of actually reading the words on the page that JA wrote, and taking them all very seriously, instead of buying into Bowdlerized, sanitized reframes of those words.

Diane: "As both Arnie and Ellen point out, the new scrap does connect strongly to MP and its exploration of the role of the clergy. While I read Austen's voice as satiric, rather than anticipating mid-Victorian piety--and I agree with Arnie that she identifies more closely with Mary than Fanny on the behavior of the clergy, I would agree Austen does indict using clergy livings as sinecures: It is not by accident that Maria points out the hovels on the outskirts of Sotherton, the site of the conversation in the Sotherton chapel, or that hovels in Emma appear on Vicarage Lane." 

Exactly so once again! As usual, Diane, you reward me for bringing my thoughts to these groups, as you always play a key role in teasing out more and more value from them, and inducing me to refine my stances.

 Cheers,ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Jane Austen’s Radical Critique of the Anglican Clergy in her Newly Discovered 1814 Scrap & Her 1807 Rose Poem: Prayers Repeated By Clergymen Without Thorough Understanding & Feeling

Yesterday in The Telegraph, Sam Marsden reported that:

“[a] newly uncovered manuscript in which Jane Austen writes of men reciting prayers unthinkingly could shed light on the gestation of one of her novels. The scrap of paper features a fragment copied out by the author from a sermon written by her brother, the Rev James Austen...The passage in Austen’s handwriting, dating from 1814, states:

"Men may get into a habit of repeating the words of our Prayers by rote, perhaps WITHOUT THOROUGHLY UNDERSTANDING – CERTAINLY WITHOUT THOROUGHLY FEELING THEIR FULL FORCE & MEANING.” 

This reflects a theme that she wrote about in her novel Mansfield Park, which was published in the same year. The small piece of manuscript is glued into a first edition dating from 1870 of The Memoirs of Jane Austen, by the novelist’s nephew, James Edward Austen Leigh. David Dorning, a conservator at West Dean College…has the job of removing it from the book so the passage on the back can also be seen. “When I initially read it, I thought it was the sort of thing that Jane Austen might write. Then I realised that it was a sermon by her brother. I thought maybe all the Austens felt like that about men,” he joked.”   END QUOTE

Another article by Alison Flood, also about “The Scrap”, ran in The Guardian, and added a comment by the curator of the Jane Austen House Museum: "What especially intrigued us about this fragment is its apparent date, 1814, and the evidence that offers of the cross-currents between Austen's family life and her literary reflections on prayer in Chapter 34 of Mansfield Park, published the same year…” END QUOTE

For reasons I will outline below, the above-quoted newspaper articles epitomize a deep and widespread misunderstanding of Jane Austen’s attitude toward the Anglican clergy---based in part on a failure of competent, thorough scholarship, and in part on the incredible persistence of the Myth of Jane Austen, which still prevails worldwide nearly two centuries after her death. It is an agile myth, which dances on the head of a pin, so as to see this most satirical and individualistic of fiction writers as, nonetheless, a pious, humble, obedient, orthodox believer in patriarchal, Tory, Anglican Church doctrine.  As you’ll see, that Myth obstructs the ordinary Janeite’s understanding of The Scrap, and also of the religious thematics of Mansfield Park!

For starters, these two major English newspapers both unashamedly relied (for the claim that the actual author of The Scrap was not really Jane but instead was her elder clergyman brother James) upon an unfounded, offhand, joking guess by the man charged with the technical task of separating the precious document from the book it was stuck in. This was not a starting point that promised much in terms of leading the reader to genuine insight about this recent discovery, an event of significance to Janeites hungry for even a new sentence of her writing.  And after all, it wasn’t a laundry list dug out of a linen trunk at an abbey, it was an important reflection on the lack of correlation between spoken prayer and felt belief.

The failure of scholarship I allege is easily demonstrated by the following embarrassing fact ---nobody involved, either at the Museum, the College, or the two newspapers, knew or thought to connect the dots between The Scrap and the 8-line poem Jane Austen wrote in 1807 (as part of a friendly family female poetry competition rhyming every line with the word “rose”), the subject of the second half of which is….the inside story on a rustic parishioner’s tenuous grasp of the meaning of a Sabbath sermon!:

Happy the lab’rer in his Sunday clothes!
In light-drab coat, smart waistcoat, well-darn'd hose,
And hat upon his head, to church he goes;
As oft with conscious pride, he downward throws
A glance upon the ample cabbage rose
Which, stuck in button-hole, regales his nose,
He envies not the gaiest London beaux.
In church he takes his seat among the rows,
Pays to the place the reverence he owes,
LIKES BEST THE PRAYERS WHOSE MEANING LEAST HE KNOWS.
Lists to the sermon in a softening doze,
And rouses joyous at the welcome close.

You must notice the almost 100% parallelism between:

ONE: the country laborer who “ [l]ikes best the prayers whose meaning least he knows” in the “Rose Poem”, which has been universally acknowledged, since its first publication in 1884, to have been composed by Jane Austen no later than 1807,  

and

TWO: “"[m]en [who] may get into a habit of repeating the words of our Prayers by rote, perhaps without thoroughly understanding – certainly without thoroughly feeling their full force & meaning”, in The Scrap, composed, so the cited “experts” assert, not by Jane Austen, but by her brother, James, and merely transcribed by Jane, at a time roughly coinciding with her publishing of Mansfield Park in 1814.

The extreme parallelism I cited between ONE and TWO makes it very clear that Jane Austen herself not only wrote but also authored not only the 1807 Rose Poem but also The Scrap (including whatever additional text on the back is eventually recovered, as we all hope it will be). 

In the rest of this post I want to focus on why it fit so much better with the Myth of Jane Austen, for experts to concoct a theory out of thin air that one of the world’s greatest novelists would act as a mere scrivener for one of her clergyman brother’s sermons, rather than to dare to think that she’d have written The Scrap herself. After all, it bears another repetition that THE SCRAP IS IN JANE AUSTEN’S OWN HANDWRITING! So the burden of proof sufficient to shift authorship from her to anyone else should have been heavy, right? And yet, the shift was passed off by all concerned without the slightest hesitation, or even acknowledgment of anything questionable having been done.

This is no accident, no mere carelessness. As you’ll see, beneath the apparent cluelessness is an indictable sleight of hand, born of desire, dating back to the dawn of modern Austen studies, on the part of generations of a determined coterie of conservative Austen scholars, to conceal her true, subversive, radical feminist critique of every aspect of her patriarchal society, and in particular of the Anglican church which, I am certain she felt, was an arch-conspirator in that patriarchy when it ought to have been its strongest critic.

And here’s where the orthodox dogma about Jane Austen’s personal Christianity comes in. Almost all Janeites assume that Jane Austen would never have written an even faintly sacrilegious word about the Anglican church, an ancient institution in which both her father and her eldest brother were clergymen, and her third eldest brother in turn became a clergyman later in his life, and her two sailors and sister were all known for their piety.

Somehow ignored in all of this is the fact that some of the biggest fools, opportunists, and gluttons (all of the deadly sins well represented) in her novels are clergymen—Mr. Collins, Mr. Elton, Dr. Grant—and even some of the “heroes” are clergymen who don’t show a great deal of spine or character in a pinch—Edward Ferrars and Edmund Bertram, to name the two worst clergyweenies.  Only one of the six lead clergymen in her novels is free of any significant bad scent, and is actually heroic--- Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey.  16% is not a percentage that suggests a healthy respect on Jane Austen’s part for the clergy as they actually were, on the ground.

Why am I so focused on clergymen in Austen’s novels? Because The Scrap refers to those who REPEAT the words in prayers without apparent comprehension of their true meaning---well, it would be the men giving the sermons who would be leading the flock in the repetition of those words! And what would the Janeite world think, if word spread that Jane Austen, in a random scrap found in a desk at her death, was being very satirical about clergyman talking the talk, but not walking the walk?  Shocking!  So a great deal is at stake in this seemingly small issue—hence the need to stonewall.

So, e.g., the only two Austen scholars to have ever published commentary on the 1807 Rose Poem I quoted above, David Selwyn & Laura Mooneyham-White, are two of the most conservative of Austen scholars---and no surprise, both of them interpret it as completely vanilla, unthreatening, unsubversive, trivial silliness, a chuckling portrait of country manners which don’t really matter one way or the other.

Whereas, 5 months ago, when I first became aware of the Rose Poem’s existence (nearly a decade into my long, intense research, precisely because this poem was invisible, i.e., it had never been treated as worthy of serious study), it was immediately clear to me that it was actually, under the mask of a trivial bit of mildly satirical wordplay, a wide portal deep into the allusive, subversive depths of Jane Austen’s radical Christianity, as well as further evidence of her virtuosic allusions to Shakespeare.

I have long seen Jane Austen as espousing a radical Christianity, very personal and eccentric to herself,  one which actually took a concern in the weak and the poor as did Jesus himself, and which was a searing critique of every one of the varied forms of patriarchal hypocrisy and self-deception which characterized both the men in the pulpits and the men in the pews with equal sharpness.  Here is my blog post from over 4 months ago, where I spelled out my interpretation of the Rose Poem in great detail:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/09/jane-austen-extreme-rhyming-daughter.html

But today I am focused on The Scrap. What these two newspaper articles also fail to alert the reader to is the presence of a massive conflict of interest in their presentation of the meaning of The Scrap, another factor which dictated the preference for James Austen as casually presumed author thereof, instead of the true author, sister Jane.

To wit: as the two recent newspaper articles both disclose, but without realizing the significance thereof, The Scrap was found glued into a first edition of the 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen’s life and writing, authored by her nephew James Edward Austen Leigh (or JEAL)—who just happened to be the only son of the Reverend James Austen, as well as the sole heir of the fortune of Jane Austen’s Mrs. Norris-like Aunt Leigh-Perrot!

So in effect we have an ageing son ascribing authorship of the skeptical opinion about some men’s sincere feeling for and understanding of Christian doctrine to his own long-dead clergyman father. Whereas, if these lines were authored by Jane Austen herself, then we might wonder whether the “men” whose religious sincerity and comprehension is questioned in The Scrap might include not only the male parishioners sitting in the pews on Sunday, but also the male clergymen—like brother James Austen!!--who delivered the sermons to them! I.e., was this a stinging satire of the shepherds as much or more as of the sheep under their spiritual care?

Well, if the author of The Scrap was himself a “shepherd”, then the implication would be that he was sermonizing, preaching to, and talking only about, the “sheep”. But if the author of Tthe Scrap was a “sheep”—and a female one, at that---then, well, maybe, all bets would be off. Maybe the effectiveness, or relevance, of the “shepherd”’s meaning as he “repeated” spiritual verses in his sermon, might be at fault.

And the conflict of interest is even more salient when I tell you that I have over a period of years  documented numerous other cases in which JEAL, in the 1870 Memoir, whitewashed and bowdlerized facts about Jane Austen and/or her family—especially Jane Austen’s angry veiled critique of her brother James and his and his wife’s treatment of both Jane Austen herself, and also her beloved niece Anna (James’s daughter)….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/04/james-edward-austen-leighs-hyper.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/04/half-years-residence-in-her-family.html

…all in order to propagate the myth of a pious conservative Jane Austen who deeply loved and respected her brother James (again, JEAL’s father)—you can see this is a propaganda campaign that succeeded so well that even almost a century and a half later, the Myth of Jane Austen still rules the ethereal waves of Austen scholarship. And these recent articles are proof of the longevity of that reign.

So I conclude by giving you a quick tour of my alternative vision of Jane Austen, one which does not require closing one’s eyes to obvious meanings in the texts that survive, both Jane Austen’s novels and also her other writings (such as The Scrap), and I direct you, ironically, to the most powerful evidence for the notion that Jane Austen wrote The Scrap as a parody of the kind of hypocrisy exhibited by James Austen himself—and those are the words of the “bad guys”, Mary and Henry Crawford, in Mansfield Park.

The Myth of Jane Austen would have you believe that pious, frightened, strict believer Fanny Price represents Jane Austen’s point of view on religious matters in Mansfield Park, her most overtly religious novel; and that the Crawfords (especially witty, outspoken Mary) represent the fashionable, modern, secularized dismissal of organized religion that Jane Austen supposedly abhorred.  But I suggest to you that it was Mary Crawford who would have written the Rose Poem and The Scrap, and not Fanny Price—see if you agree as you read the following excerpts from Mansfield Park! I’ve given the full passages for maximum context, but have put in ALL CAPS the lines which relate most directly to the Rose Poem and The Scrap. NOTE IN PARTICULAR the repeated expositions of the theme of hypocrisy in the clergy, the apparent lack in most men of the cloth of understanding of and feeling for the meaning of the sermons and prayers they repeat! I.e., The Scrap could easily have been an epigraph for Mansfield Park itself!

Chapter 9: "It is a pity," cried Fanny, "that the custom [of twice daily chapel services] should have been discontinued. It was a valuable part of former times. There is something in a chapel and chaplain so much in character with a great house, with one's ideas of what such a household should be! A whole family assembling regularly for the purpose of prayer is fine!"

"Very fine indeed," said Miss Crawford, laughing. "It must do the heads of the family a great deal of good to force all the poor housemaids and footmen to leave business and pleasure, and SAY THEIR PRAYERS HERE TWICE A DAY, WHILE THEY ARE INVENTING EXCUSES THEMSELVES FOR STAYING AWAY."

"That is hardly Fanny's idea of a family assembling," said Edmund. "If the master and mistress do not attend themselves, there must be more harm than good in the custom."

"At any rate, it is safer to leave people to their own devices on such subjects. Everybody likes to go their own way—to chuse their own time and manner of devotion. The obligation of attendance, the formality, the restraint, the length of time—altogether it is a formidable thing, and what nobody likes; and if the good people who used to kneel and gape in that gallery could have foreseen that the time would ever come when men and women might lie another ten minutes in bed, when they woke with a headache, without danger of reprobation, because chapel was missed, they would have jumped with joy and envy. Cannot you imagine with what unwilling feelings the former belles of the house of Rushworth did many a time repair to this chapel? The young Mrs. Eleanors and Mrs. Bridgets—STARCHED UP INTO SEEMING PIETY, BUT WITH HEADS FULL OF SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT—especially if the poor chaplain were not worth looking at—and, in those days, I fancy parsons were very inferior even to what they are now."

For a few moments she was unanswered. Fanny coloured and looked at Edmund, but felt too angry for speech; and he needed a little recollection before he could say, "Your lively mind can hardly be serious even on serious subjects. You have given us an amusing sketch, and human nature cannot say it was not so. We must all feel at times THE DIFFICULTY OF FIXING OUR THOUGHTS AS WE COULD WISH; but if you are supposing it a frequent thing, that is to say, a weakness grown into a habit from neglect, what could be expected from the private devotions of such persons? Do you think the minds which are suffered, which are INDULGED IN WANDERINGS IN A CHAPEL, would be more collected in a closet?"

"Yes, very likely. They would have two chances at least in their favour. There would be LESS TO DISTRACT THE ATTENTION FROM WITHOUT, and it would NOT BE TRIED SO LONG."

"The mind which does not struggle against itself under one circumstance, would find objects to distract it in the other, I believe; and the influence of the place and of example may often rouse better feelings than are begun with. The GREATER LENGTH OF THE SERVICE, however, I admit to be sometimes TOO HARD A STRETCH UPON THE MIND. One wishes it were not so; but I have not yet left Oxford long enough to forget what chapel prayers are."

"You assign greater consequence to the clergyman than one has been used to hear given, or than I can quite comprehend. One does not see much of this influence and importance in society, and how can it be acquired where they are so seldom seen themselves? How can TWO SERMONS A WEEK, even supposing them worth hearing, supposing the preacher to have the sense to prefer Blair's to his own, do all that you speak of? GOVERN THE CONDUCT AND FASHION THE MANNERS OF A LARGE CONGREGATION for the rest of the week? One scarcely sees a clergyman out of his pulpit."

"You are speaking of London, I am speaking of the nation at large."

"The metropolis, I imagine, is a pretty fair sample of the rest."

"Not, I should hope, of the proportion of virtue to vice throughout the kingdom. We do not look in great cities for our best morality….

Chapter 11: "I have been so little addicted to take my opinions from my uncle," said Miss Crawford, "that I can hardly suppose—and since you push me so hard, I must observe, that I am not entirely without the means of seeing WHAT CLERGYMEN ARE, being at this present time the guest of my own brother, Dr. Grant. And though Dr. Grant is most kind and obliging to me, and though he is really a gentleman, and, I dare say, a good scholar and clever, and OFTEN PREACHES GOOD SERMONS, and is very respectable, I see him to be AN INDOLENT, SELFISH BON VIVANT, who must have his palate consulted in everything; who will not stir a finger for the convenience of any one; and who, moreover, if the cook makes a blunder, is out of humour with his excellent wife. To own the truth, Henry and I were partly driven out this very evening by a disappointment about a green goose, which he could not get the better of. My poor sister was forced to stay and bear it."

“…A man—a sensible man like Dr. Grant, cannot be in the habit of TEACHING OTHERS THEIR DUTY EVERY WEEK, cannot go to church twice every Sunday, and PREACH SUCH VERY GOOD SERMONS in so good a manner as he does, without BEING THE BETTER FOR IT HIMSELF. It must make him think; and I have no doubt that he oftener endeavours to restrain himself than he would if he had been anything but a clergyman."

"We cannot prove to the contrary, to be sure; but I wish you a better fate, Miss Price, than to be the wife of A MAN WHOSE AMIABLENESS DEPENDS UPON HIS OWN SERMONS; for though HE MAY PREACH HIMSELF INTO A GOOD-HUMOUR EVERY SUNDAY, it will be bad enough to have him quarrelling about green geese from Monday morning till Saturday night."

"I think the man who could often quarrel with Fanny," said Edmund affectionately, "must be beyond the reach of any sermons."

Chapter 34: "A SERMON, WELL DELIVERED, is more uncommon even than PRAYERS WELL READ. A sermon, good in itself, is no rare thing. It is more difficult to speak well than to compose well; that is, the rules and trick of composition are oftener an object of study. A thoroughly good sermon, thoroughly well delivered, is a capital gratification. I can never hear such a one without the greatest admiration and respect, and more than half a mind to take orders and preach myself. There is something in THE ELOQUENCE OF THE PULPIT, when it is really eloquence, which is entitled to the highest praise and honour. The preacher who can TOUCH AND AFFECT such an heterogeneous MASS OF HEARERS, on subjects limited, and long worn threadbare in all common hands; who can say anything new or striking, anything that rouses the attention without offending the taste, or WEARING OUT THE FEELINGS OF HIS HEARERS, is a man whom one could not, in his public capacity, honour enough. I should like to be such a man."

Edmund laughed.

"I should indeed. I never listened to a distinguished preacher in my life without a sort of envy. But then, I must have a London audience. I could not preach but to the educated; to those who were capable of estimating my composition. And I do not know that I should be fond of preaching often; now and then, perhaps once or twice in the spring, after being anxiously expected for half a dozen Sundays together; but not for a constancy; it would not do for a constancy."

Here Fanny, who could not but listen, involuntarily shook her head…”

And here I voluntarily shake MY head, and conclude this post with the hope that I’ve convinced you (a) that the Myth of Jane Austen lives on, continuing to obscures truths like (b) Mary Crawford speaking in the true voice of Jane Austen in these spirited debates about preachers and the disconnect between their own sermonizing and their own adherence to the morals they repeat and preach to others, as Jane Austen remembered both her 1807 Rose Poem and The Scrap as she LOL’ed to herself while writing Mansfield Park.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

ADDED Feb. 5, 2014 at 11 am EST my followup post responding to several responses to my initial post: 

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/02/more-about-jane-austens-newly.html