The Hancock/Patriot Charade & Shakespearean Brothel subtexts in Emma: Part One

In Austen-L, Diane Reynolds responded to my previous post about the above-captioned stuff, and it prompted me to write two posts clarifying and expanding my initial post, of which this is the first:

Diane: “Arnie, I am not sure I understand the move from Hannah and Patty to Hancock rather than Hanpat…”

Diane, thanks for engaging with me on this, I will briefly recap what  I wrote in my 2010 post about that private Austen family charade which has been attributed to Henry, but which I believe was written by Jane.

Here is the charade (which by the way was an adaptation of a version that did appear in a riddle book):

“I with a Housemaid once was curst,
Whose name when shortened makes my first;
She an ill natured Jade was reckoned,
And in the house oft raised my second,
My whole stands high in lists of fame,
Exalting e’en great Chatham’s name.”

The official answer given by the modern Austen scholar David Selwyn (I don’t recall where he found the answer) is PATRIOT, reached as follows:

“Pat” is the shortened version of the name Patricia, and is (obviously) one Christian name from among a hundred or more that a housemaid of that era could have had. The important point to note is that there’s nothing that makes “Pat” an exclusive answer for the first syllable of the answer. It could logically be any one of that 100+ female names in common usage in that era. What narrows down the possibilities, obviously, is the answer you get for the second syllable.

“Riot” is one good and logical answer for what an “ill natured Jade” would “raise” “in the house” where she worked.

And, obviously, “patriot” is a great answer for something which “stands high in lists of fame” in relation to “great Chatham” who was, of course the Earl of Chatham, William Pitt, prime minister of England. I.e., Pitt would have been considered a great and famous patriot by many Englishfolk.

That takes care of the official answer. Now for the subversive hidden answer

What made me look for a second answer other than “patriot” in (as I recall) 2009 was knowing that the courtship charade in Emma had as plausible answers not only the official answer, “courtship”, but also  “the Prince of Whales” (Colleen Sheehan), “Leviathan” (Anielka), “Crown of Thorns” (myself) and perhaps others.

What made me pick this particular charade out among the numerous ones in Selwyn’s book containing a couple of dozen of Austen family charades, as I recall, was its salacious tone. The word “curst” to describe the housemaid, as well as her being called “an ill natured Jade”, conjured up obvious Shakespearean connotations of a woman of ill repute. Plus, even more in that vein, there was the obvious Freudian phallic imagery of some object being “oft raised” by a woman, an object which would then “stand high”.

I mean, really—could it be more obvious that this is a double wink at the male sexual organ when aroused (raised, standing)?

And it was then that I took a second look at the housemaid named Pat and recalled that Patty was indeed the name of Miss Bates’s housemaid—could this be just a coincidence, especially given that I already was aware of Patty’s very phallic comment to Miss Bates about a chimney wanting sweeping? Of course not!

It was then a very short step for me to extrapolate, and recall that there was indeed a second housemaid who is named in Emma, and her name is “Hannah”—“Han’ for short. Jane Austen published Emma in 1816, presumably many years after this Austen family charade was written—if she did not write it herself, she certainly would have read it. So, it made perfect sense that in the same novel in which she included a two charades and a fragment of a riddle, she would also name her two housemaids after the two answers for that earlier charade!

And then, I was already practically home on the second syllable of that hidden answer, when I asked myself what would be the proper one-syllable choice for an Anglo-Saxon name for a standing penis, which would go with “Han” as the first syllable?

Of course the obvious answer is “Hancock”—and it didn’t take but 2 more seconds for me to realize that Hancock was the married name of JA’s own aunt, Phila Austen, who had worked as a teenaged girl in Covent Garden, etc etc etc.

Now you know why I consider that answer “Hancock” an obvious choice as one that Jane Austen must have had specifically in mind when she wrote Emma.

Diane also wrote: “…and I am doubtful Miss Bates is the mistress of a brothel downstairs from her apartment, especially as I would imagine she would have more money than she does if she was…”

But my explanation is that she is being coerced, she needs to keep herself, her mother, and Jane from starvation---for all that Emma believes her father and Mr. Knightley have always been charitable toward Miss Bates, you also are the one who suggested that Swift’s Modest Proposal was lurking right behind that porker motif in Emma—which of course had to do with widespread starvation in Ireland!

Jane Austen is being savagely ironic here. In the overt story, Miss Bates lives a miraculous life in which her material poverty somehow does not affect her good spirits—this is the mythology that rich people tell themselves when looking at the poor, to assuage any unpleasant guilt feelings that might pop up before they seal themselves away in their wealthy enclaves. But in the shadow story, we see the desperate Sophie’s Choices that the poor confronted no a daily basis.

You really should read Shakespeare’s Pericles—it’s so obvious that Jane Austen did, and that she turned Thaisa into Miss Bates and her daughter Marina into Jane Fairfax. Marina is sold by pirates into sexual slavery at a brothel, and it is only by her amazing singing and rhetoric that she manages to preserve her virginity until she marries a man, Lysimachus, who was originally a customer for her services at the brothel, but whom she has converted to the good.

Diane also wrote: “ but I am inspired by this to examine Patty's role in the novel more closely. We are given a fair amount of information about the Bates's living situation in the novel and Patty has a fairly large role for an Austen servant. And that pork keeps showing up ...”

See the above.  ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The riddle & charade behind Miss Bates's maid Patty’s downstairs search for a salting pan large enough for WHAT????

In my last post, I laid out what I know sounded to many of you as outlandish, scandalous speculations that the downstairs of the house where the Bates women reside might just be a brothel! I compounded my scandalousness by suggesting that Miss Bates had been coerced by severe economic pressure into serving as the madam of that brothel---in desperation so as to pay the rent for her overcrowded walkup apartment, and put a little food on the table for herself, her mother, her (pregnant) niece Jane, and their maid Patty.

The ink was barely dry on my post, metaphorically speaking, when Diane’s following message passed mine in the ether, and Diane’s timing could not have been more fortuitous for me, because, as I will demonstrate below, it provides dramatic unexpected additional substantiation for my claims, by prompting me to make a new connection!

Diane wrote: “The Bates seem to have a kitchen downstairs. I don't know why I assumed they shared it:

"I was only gone down to speak to Patty again about the pork—Jane was standing in the passage—were not you, Jane?—for my mother was so afraid that we had not any salting-pan large enough. So I said I would go down and see, and Jane said, 'Shall I go down instead? for I think you have a little cold, and Patty has been washing the kitchen.'—'Oh! my dear,' said I—well, and just then came the note…."

As recent posts have shown, it is the conventional wisdom and assumption of Janeites, both amateur and scholarly alike, that the Bateses live upstairs, while the downstairs belongs exclusively to a shopkeeper, and never the twain meet. But, as Diane’s sharp eye has detected, we have in the above-quoted passage PROOF that, at a minimum, Patty also washes the downstairs kitchen and prepares food for them all there.

I will now quote another passage that, it now occurs to me, shows that Patty’s duties include other kitchen work downstairs as well, re the chimney and re the baking of apple dumplings:

“At one time Patty came to say she thought the kitchen chimney wanted sweeping. Oh, said I, Patty do not come with your bad news to me. Here is the rivet of your mistress's spectacles out. Then the baked apples came home, Mrs. Wallis sent them by her boy…But about the middle of the day she gets hungry, and there is nothing she likes so well as these baked apples, and they are extremely wholesome…We have apple-dumplings, however, very often. Patty makes an excellent apple-dumpling..."

So, what’s the deal, then, with the downstairs? There must be a very cozy relationship between the Bateses and the occupants of the rest of the downstairs besides the kitchen, since the kitchen is not likely to be completely sealed away from the rest of the downstairs, right?

But who are those other occupants, and why, why, why, do we never hear a single word about them? After all, Miss Bates talks about every single thing that happens to her in her life, indeed, about every person she meets for even two seconds, it seems. And yet, in her torrent of words that Emma ignores, we never do hear a single word I can recall about the rest of the downstairs besides the kitchen, or about any of its occupants.

But there’s more than just that, much more, which makes it now seem to me even more likely that the downstairs of the house where the Bateses live is being used as a brothel. The additional evidence also only occurred to me as I read Diane’s post with its quotation of Mrs. Bates’s little tale of Patty, the pork, and the salting pan. And the explanation hinges, improbably, on Patty, as I will now explain---and it (fittingly) involves both a riddle and a charade!

Some of you will recall that Jill Heydt-Stevenson, in 1999 (picking up on Alice Chandler’s 1975 pioneering article about sex in JA’s novels) specifically took up the mantle of looking at the sexual overtones of Garrick’s Riddle (which Mr. Woodhouse so desperately tries to fully recollect from his youth). JH-S dove in where Chandler only coyly dipped her toe, and asserted that the Riddle was actually meant by JA to be interpreted as integrated into the narrative of Emma as a whole.

JH-S realized what Chandler did not, which is that the horrible sex-with-virgins hidden answer of the Riddle is connected to the flame kindled by frozen maid Kitty. I.e., Garrick’s Riddle documented, in code, a notorious barbaric pseudo-medical practice which, according to the folklore that still circulated even 40 years after Emma was published, was that sex with a virgin female would cure a man’s venereal disease! JH-S also picked up on treatment with mercury while exposing the patient to great heat as being implied by a different sort of ”chimney sweeping”, given that “chimney sweep” was the official, supposedly benign, answer to Garrick’s Riddle.

But Diane’s post has now prompted me, for the first time, to connect the dots between that horrifically sexual answer to Garricks Riddle, and another similar answer to another puzzle---an Austen family charade---and the common denominator for both is, as I said, Patty!  

The first part of my explanation of the Patty connection is easy---as I just explained above, Patty is the “expert” whom Miss Bates quotes for Patty’s opinion about needed chimney sweeping, which means that JA has covertly and specifically associated Patty with the graphic sexual subtext of Garrick’s Riddle.

Now, check out my post from 2010….

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

… in which I first publicly revealed a discovery I had made several years earlier, involving a second answer to the following charade, authorship of which has been attributed (incorrectly, in my opinion) to Henry Austen:

“I with a Housemaid once was curst,
Whose name when shortened makes my first;
She an ill natured Jade was reckoned,
And in the house oft raised my second,
My whole stands high in lists of fame,
Exalting e’en great Chatham’s name.”

As I explained in my 2010 post: “The official answer given by David Selwyn for this charade is "PAT" + "RIOT" = "PATRIOT". However, as with the other charades in Emma, there is a second, secret answer to this charade as well, which is why I believe the actual author of the above charade was not Henry Austen, but his precocious young teenaged sister Jane!

Think about the names of the two housemaids in Emma. Miss Bates's housemaid is Patty, or PAT for short. The Randalls housemaid, daughter of James at Hartfield, is Hannah, or HAN for short. That gives you HAN as the first syllable of the secret answer. And if you give the matter some thought, you will be able to figure out how I derived the second syllable of the secret answer, which I was the first to discover is HANCOCK.”

And so we see that Jane Austen has chosen these two names for the two female servants named in Emma,   Patty and Hannah, precisely so as to refer, in code, to the two answers to the above quoted charade, and to hint at the secret answer of Garrick’s Riddle, respectively. And JA does this precisely so as to hint broadly at the same horrid practice revealed by the answers CHIMNEY SWEEP and HANCOCK, i.e. ,men having sex with virgins forced into prostitution, in order to try to cure those evil men’s venereal diseases!

And there’s one final link in this chain of coded references, which ties it all closely together and perhaps explains why that charade remained a private Austen family relic, and was not included in Emma itself. It was perhaps too explosively close to a very very VERY dirty Austen family secret.

All Janeites familiar with Austen family biography know that the maiden name of JA’s paternal aunt was Philadelphia HANCOCK. And so I also posted in 2010 ….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/12/mrs-cole-direct-connection-between.html

…that it is no coincidence that the young teenaged Philadelphia Hancock was employed in London by a “milliner” (slang for a brothel) named (I could not make this up)…Mrs. COLE! As I suggested in that 2010 post, incredible as it sounds, it appears to me to be no coincidence that Phila Hancock was employed by a real life Mrs. Cole in Covent Garden at practically the same time, 1751, as John Cleland was writing about his fictional Mrs. Cole the brothel madam for Fanny Hill  in London not far from where the teenaged Phila worked!

The mind reels at all of the above, but it took me till today to fully grasp that the center of the wheel of allusions, puzzles, and wordplay about abuse of women forced into sex work are both Miss Bates and Jane Fairfax. Jane Austen wrote Jane Fairfax’ s character so as (as I briefly posted last year) to uncannily resemble Shakespeare’s young heroine Marina in Pericles---a virtuous young woman who loses a mother while very young, and who is exiled and sold into prostitution (through no fault of her own other than being both a gifted singer and beautiful) because she is perceived as a threat in the jealous eyes of the older woman, Dionyza, who was charged byMarina’s father with raising Marina alongside Dionyza’s  much less attractive daughter, whom Marina cannot help but outshine.

Sound familiar?

And so finally, to come full circle, now you can also understand that when Miss Bates—she who is the Cassandra of the novel in that nothing she says is heeded, even though she reveals painful truths--- quotes Patty for the need to find a salting pan large enough to hold the large pork delivered to them by Mr. Woodhouse, this is meant by JA to be understood in all its over the top, obvious Freudian sexual connotations,  just like Patty’s earlier comments about a kitchen chimney needing sweeping.

So there you have it, a half dozen pieces of what appear to superficial inspection to be random trivial background noise having nothing to do with the story of Emma, but which, as I demonstrated above (I know it’s complicated, so please reread it, it will make more sense the second time around), goes to the heart of the shadow story of the novel. And… it ALL fits together like the word jumble that so engrossed the participants at Box Hill---in this case, the secret word is “Patty”!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.: For those who want more, I have another tangent to offer you re the above. In light of my previous post about the casement windows at the Bates residence, I went back into the text of Fanny Hill to see if any  involving windows, look at what I found:

The first is the recounting by the prostitute Harriet of her life story  in Fanny Hill, as she describes a scene where she, like Jane Fairfax, is living in an entirely female household :

"The family had not been down at that seat for years, so that it was neglected, and committed entirely to MY AUNT, and TWO OLD DOMESTICS to take care of it. Thus I had the full range of a spacious lonely house and gardens, situate at about half a mile distance form any other habitation, except, perhaps, a straggling cottage or so.

"Here, in tranquillity and innocence, I grew up without any memorable accident, till one fatal day I had, as I had often done before, left my aunt fast asleep, and secure for some hours, after dinner; and resorting to a kind of ancient summer-house, at some distance from the house, I carried my work with me, and sat over a rivulet, which its door and WINDOW fac'd upon. Here I fell into a gentle breathing slumber, which stole upon my senses, as they fainted under the excessive heat of the season at that hour; a cane couch, with my work-basket for a pillow, were all the conveniencies of my short repose; for I was soon awaked and alarmed by a flounce, and the noise of splashing in the water. I got up to see what was the matter; and what indeed should it be but the son of a neighbouring gentleman, as I afterwards found (for I had never seen him before), who had strayed that way with his gun, and heated by his sport, and the sultriness of the day, had been tempted by the freshness of the clear stream; so that presently stripping, he jump'd into it on the other side, which bordered on a wood, some trees whereof, inclined down to the water, form'd a pleasing shady recess, commodious to undress and leave his clothes under.

"My first emotions at the sight of this youth, naked in the water, were, with all imaginable respect to truth, those of surprise and fear; and, in course, I should immediately have run out, had not my modesty, fatally for itself, interposed the objection of the door and WINDOW being so situated that it was scarce possible to get out, and make my way along the bank to the house, without his seeing me: which I could not bear the thought of, so much ashamed and confounded was I at having seen him. Condemn'd then to stay till his departure should release me, I was greatly embarrassed how to dispose of myself: I kept some time betwixt terror and modesty, even from looking through the WINDOW, which BEING AN OLD-FASHION’D CASEMENT, without any light behind me, could hardly betray any one's being there to him from within; then the door was so secure, that without violence, or my own consent, there was no opening it from without….”

And then much later in the novel, the (in)famous passage in which Fanny plays Peeping Tomasina, if you will, secretly spying on two young men engaging in sex with each other:

“I had, on a visit intended to Harriet, who had taken lodgings at Hampton-court, hired a chariot to go out thither, MRS. COLE having promis'd to accompany me; but some indispensable business intervening to detain her, I was obliged to set out alone; and scarce had I got a third of my way, before the axle-tree broke down, and I was well off to get out, safe and unhurt, into a publick-house of a tolerable handsome appearance, on the road. Here the people told me that the stage would come by in a couple of hours at farthest; upon which, determining to wait for it, sooner than lose the jaunt I had got so far forward on, I was carried into a very clean decent room, up one pair of stairs, which I took possession of for the time I had to stay, in right of calling for sufficient to do the house justice.

Here, whilst I was amusing myself with looking out of the WINDOW, a single horse-chaise stopt at the door, out of which lightly leap'd two gentlemen, for so they seem'd, who came in only as it were to bait and refresh a little, for they gave their horse to be held in readiness against they came out. And presently I heard the door of the next room, where they were let in, and call'd about them briskly; and as soon as they were serv'd, I could just hear that they shut and fastened the door on the inside.

A spirit of curiosity, far from sudden, since I do not know when I was without it, prompted me, without any particular suspicion, or other drift or view, to see what they were, and examine their persons and behaviour. The partition of our rooms was one of those moveable ones that, when taken down, serv'd occasionally to lay them into one, for the conveniency of a large company; and now, my nicest search could not shew me the shadow of a peep-hole, a circumstance which probably had not escap'd the review of the parties on the other side, whom much it stood upon not to be deceived in it; but at length I observed a paper patch of the same colour as the wainscot, which I took to conceal some flaw: but then it was so high, that I was obliged to stand upon a chair to reach it, which I did as softly as possibly, and, with a point of a bodkin, soon pierc'd it. And now, applying my eye close, I commanded the room perfectly, and could see my two young sparks romping and pulling one another about, entirely, to my imagination, in frolic and innocent play.”

And here is the end of that same scene—think about what happens to prevent Fanny from “raising the house” upon the two young gay men, in relation to Miss Bates’s repeated warnings to Mrs. Weston, Emma, and Harriet to watch their step as they enter the Bates residence:

“The criminal scene they acted, I had the patience to see to an end, purely that I might gather more facts and certainly against them in my design to do their deserts instance justice; and accordingly, when they had readjusted themselves, and were preparing to go out, burning as I was with rage and indignation, I jumped down from the chair, in order to raise the house upon them, but with such an unlucky impetuosity, that some nail or ruggedness in the floor caught my foot, and flung me on my face with such violence that I fell senseless on the ground, and must have lain there some time e'er any one came to my relief: so that they, alarmed, I suppose, by the noise of my fall, had more than the necessary time to make a safe retreat. This they effected, as I learnt, with a precipitation nobody could account for, till, when come to myself, and compos'd enough to speak, I acquainted those of the house with the whole transaction I had been evidence to.

When I came home again, and told MRS. COLE this adventure, she very sensibly observ'd to me that there was no doubt of due vengeance one time of other overtaking these miscreants, however they might escape for the present; and that, had I been the temporal instrument of it, I should have been at least put to a great deal more trouble and confusion that I imagined; that, as to the thing itself, the less said of it was the better; but that though she might be suspected of partiality, from its being the common cause of woman-kind, out of whose mouths this practice tended to take something more than bread, yet she protested against any mixture of passion, with a declaration extorted from her by pure regard to truth; which was that whatever effect this infamous passion had in other ages and other countries, it seem'd a peculiar blessing on our air and climate, that there was a plague-spot visibly imprinted on all that are tainted with it, in this nation at least; for that among numbers of that stamp whom she had known, or at least were universally under the scandalous suspicion of it, she would not name an exception hardly of one of them, whose character was not, in all other respects, the most worthless and despicable that could be, stript of all the manly virtues of their own sex, and fill'd up with only the worst vices and follies of ours: that, in fine, they were scarce less execrable than ridiculous in their monstrous inconsistence, of loathing and condemning women, and all at the same time apeing all their manners, air, lips, skuttle, and, in general, all their little modes of affectation, which become them at least better than they do these unsex'd malemisses.

But here, washing my hands of them, I re-plunge into the stream of my history, into which I may very properly ingraft a terrible sally of Louisa's, since I had some share in it myself, and have besides engag'd myself to relate it, in point of countenance to poor Emily. It will add, too, one more example to thousands, in confirmation of the maxim that when women get once out of compass, there are no lengths of licentiousness that they are not capable of running.

One morning then, that both Mrs. Cole and Emily were gone out for the day, and only Louisa and I (not to mention the house-maid) were left in charge of the house, whilst we were loitering away the time in looking through the shop windows, the son of a poor woman, who earned very hard bread indeed by mending stockings, in a stall in the neighbourhood, offer'd us some nosegays, ring'd round a small basket; by selling of which the poor boy eked out his mother's maintenance of them both: nor was he fit for any other way of livelihood, since he was not only a perfect changeling, or idiot, but stammer'd so that there was no understanding even those sounds his halfdozen, at most, animal ideas prompted him to utter.

The Bates apartment is upstairs from a shop for sale of WHAT????

In Janeites, the following exchange has just occurred:

Jane Fox: "Now, why would [Knightley] be so active in the Highbury parish? I'm going to guess he owned land in the Highbury parish."

Me:  "Like....the walkup tenement that Miss Bates lived in!"

Nancy Mayer:  "She didn't live in a tenement. She lived in an apartment-- a flat over a shop where the owner probably had lived before buying a separate house. If Knightley owned it, he probably charged a peppercorn rent."

And Nancy’s post prompted me to research and write the following:

You're right, Nancy, I was not careful in my description, and the reality is more interesting and complicated --with Jane Austen it is ALWAYS a good idea to go back to the text to resolve any such question. I hope you enjoy where my followup took me, after walking up a pretty long narrow dark inferential “staircase”……  ;)

First, it's true that the Bateses don't live in a tenement, the kind of multistory building intended (whether from the start or after renovation) for multifamily habitation, as we see in slum areas of many cities. But it's also clear that the neighborhood the Bateses live is not a good one.

Recall my 2013 posts about Miss Bates's solicitude for Emma's and Harriet's shoes after they've walked there from Hartfield, meaning, she’s worried they've gotten poop on their shoes walking through the poor side of Highbury! The house is at a stage of its useful life in which the economic status of the residents is much lower than was the case many years earlier, when it was presumably originally occupied by a single family of means--perhaps a family like the Coles.

We know that the Bates women have no real income to speak of (at most I can imagine Miss Bates making a very small income the way Mrs. Smith did in Persuasion), and therefore they utterly depend on largesse from Hartfield and Donwell Abbey (and maybe also from Mrs. Goddard?) to have enough to eat on an ongoing basis.

The good news is that there must indeed be some personal relationship between them and their unnamed landlord, that has led to their being allowed to live there basically rent-free (as a real estate attorney, I never heard the expression “peppercorn rent”, which Wikipedia tells me is from a 1960 American legal opinion).

But the bad news, again, is that the place must be a dump. And it's noteworthy—and, I think, significant, that Emma seems to have no idea whatsoever who the landlord is—this ignorance arises from the deadly combination of (i) Emma's utter lack of curiosity about the real lives of other people, except when she sees them as dolls she can  make matches for, plus (ii) a calculated decision by those in charge of her education to NOT tell her ANYthing about the wider world which would disrupt her own private fantasy world.

As for the house in which the Bateses live, I believe the following are the only four chapters describing  Emma’s three visits to the Bates residence, and therefore these are the primary descriptions thereof that we have to work with (unless some other passage also obliquely shed light on same?):

Ch. 19: "[Emma and Harriet] were just approaching the house where lived Mrs. and Miss Bates...all the horror of being in danger of falling in with the second-rate and third-rate of Highbury, who were calling on them for ever, and therefore she seldom went near them. But now she made the sudden resolution of not passing their door without going in—observing, as she proposed it to Harriet, that, as well as she could calculate, they were just now quite safe from any letter from Jane Fairfax.
The house belonged to people in business. Mrs. and Miss Bates occupied the drawing-room floor; and there, in the very moderate-sized apartment, which was every thing to them, the visitors were most cordially and even gratefully welcomed; the quiet neat old lady, who with her knitting was seated in the warmest corner, wanting even to give up her place to Miss Woodhouse, and her more active, talking daughter, almost ready to overpower them with care and kindness, thanks for their visit, solicitude for their shoes, anxious inquiries after Mr. Woodhouse's health..."

Ch. 27: "Miss Bates had just done as Patty opened the door; and her visitors walked upstairs without having any regular narration to attend to, pursued only by the sounds of her desultory good-will.
"Pray take care, Mrs. Weston, there is a step at the turning. Pray take care, Miss Woodhouse, ours is rather a dark staircase—rather darker and narrower than one could wish. Miss Smith, pray take care. Miss Woodhouse, I am quite concerned, I am sure you hit your foot. Miss Smith, the step at the turning." ..."

Ch. 28: "[Miss Bates] was in the adjoining chamber while she still spoke, and opening the casement there, immediately called Mr. Knightley's attention, and every syllable of their conversation was as distinctly heard by the others, as if it had passed within the same apartment."

Ch. 44:  "The ladies were all at home." She had never rejoiced at the sound before, nor ever before entered the passage, nor walked up the stairs, with any wish of giving pleasure, but in conferring obligation, or of deriving it, except in subsequent ridicule.
There was a bustle on her approach; a good deal of moving and talking. She heard Miss Bates's voice, something was to be done in a hurry; the maid looked frightened and awkward; hoped she would be pleased to wait a moment, and then ushered her in too soon. The aunt and niece seemed both escaping into the adjoining room. Jane she had a distinct glimpse of, looking extremely ill; and, before the door had shut them out, she heard Miss Bates saying, "Well, my dear, I shall say you are laid down upon the bed, and I am sure you are ill enough."

First of all, I wondered about the precise meaning of a "drawing room apartment", and Wikipedia enlightened me:  "A drawing room is a room in a house where visitors may be entertained. The name is derived from the 16th-century terms withdrawing room and withdrawing chamber....In a large 16th- to early 18th-century English house, a withdrawing room was a room to which the owner of the house, his wife, or a distinguished guest who was occupying one of the main apartments in the house could "withdraw" for more privacy... It was often off the great chamber (or the great chamber's descendant, the state room or salon) and usually led to a formal, or "state" bedroom...In 18th-century London, the royal morning receptions...were called "drawing rooms", with the sense originally that the privileged members of court would gather in the drawing room outside the king's bedroom, where he would make his first formal public appearance of the day."

So....let's see what we can deduce from the skimpy data JA has provided us. Here's what I come up with for starters, I would love it if others would chime in with additional observations:

1. The Bates apartment seems to consist of 2 rooms shared by the three generations of Bates women, plus Patty the maid-which means that there’d have been doubling up of sleeping arrangements in both rooms. Pretty cramped quarters! And would there have been any sort of water closet, or was there a lot of carrying of chamberpots down and up those narrow stairs?

2. The dark staircase leading up to the Bates apartment sounds like a late-stage INTERNAL renovation (if the stairs were outside, they would not be dark). Why would the house have been originally constructed with a dark, narrow staircase leading up to the drawing-room and bedroom?

But what "passage" is it that visitors passed through before reaching the staircase? Can anyone with a better grasp of house architecture than my own suggest a plausible explanation for the construction of  such a passage? Is it a closed-off passage leading off to the side after entering by the front door through the ground floor portion of the house?  Why exactly would it have been closed off? To provide privacy to visitors, by quickly shielding them from public view once they entered it?

Whatever the passage and staircase consist of, they sound to me like they were part of a relatively recent internal renovation of the house, in order to convert what was originally a single-family residence into two sub-units, each with its own private access.

3. Now, here's perhaps the most curious aspect of this house, and it’s in the same vein as the dog that DIDN’T bark. Nancy has inferred that it is a shop, but, unless I've missed something, the occupant of the ground floor unit, and whether it is for residential or commercial use, is NEVER described in the novel!

Since we see pretty much everything in the novel through Emma's eyes, this must mean that she never notices the rest of the house--which is a little bizarre, even for Emma --this is EXTREME lack of awareness of her surroundings!  How could she fail to register what sort of shop was there, if there was a shop there. Remember, she is the one who prides herself on being an acute observer of the passing parade in Highbury:

“Much could not be hoped from the traffic of even the busiest part of Highbury;—Mr. Perry walking hastily by, Mr. William Cox letting himself in at the office-door, Mr. Cole's carriage-horses returning from exercise, or a stray letter-boy on an obstinate mule, were the liveliest objects she could presume to expect; and when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker's little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.”

And yet, she who is obsessed with curiosity about Jane Fairfax, never never notices what is downstairs from the Bates apartment where Jane lives for 6 months?

Given how sheltered Emma has been for the 21 years of her life, I infer from this lack of awareness on Emma's part that it is more of the same I described above. I.e., she has never been told anything about that other occupant-perhaps deliberately so, because it was information that it was considered undesirable for Emma to know. And she lacks real empathic curiosity about the lives of other people.

And some of you can perhaps now guess from my Subject Line where the above chain of inferences has led me ---- what would be a usage of the ground floor of a residential home that would have little or no foot traffic coming in or going out during daylight hours, but which would come alive at night when Emma was never there to observe?

Of course this would fit perfectly with the notion of the ground floor as a shop for the sale of (as Jane Fairfax so eloquently puts it) “human flesh”---and I don’t mean governessing in the conventional sense!

And…that gives me another idea, even more disturbing than that---what if Miss Bates DOES pay rent for her walkup apartment after all?---not in cash, but in KIND---i.e., by rendering services as…..the madam of the brothel downstairs?

And…given my 2010 posts about the unmistakably allusion in Emma to the “Mrs. Cole” who is a madam in the brothel where Cleland’s Fanny Hill ends up, I now wonder if Miss Bates’s landlords are……Mr. & Mrs. Cole! If it was a profitable brothel—and perhaps one of a chain of them---that would explain their prosperity “in business”!

And I will conclude these speculations on an optimistic note---I believe that after Jane and Frank discreetly break off their sham engagement in November, Jane will do the right thing and sell the Churchill family jewels she received (remember, the ones that Frank said were going to be put in the form of a head ornament), and use the substantial cash proceeds to be expected therefrom, in order to move her aunt and grandmamma to a better part of Highbury where solicitude for their visitors’s shoes and stairway safety will no longer be required, and where Miss Bates would be freed from “slavery” to her landlord!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.: Jane posted the following while I was composing the above post:

Jane: "It was not a tenement, even in the broader sense of the word. Frank describes it as "a brick house, sashed windows below, and casements above."

Jane, that is firstrate stuff that you picked up on the above passage from Frank's Chapter 50 letter, which does indeed dovetail perfectly with the passage from Ch. 27 that I quoted above about Miss Bates opening a "casement" window in order to speak to Mr. Knightley riding by on horseback.

Like so much of this novel about “nothing”, this appears to be only an irrelevant bit of background noise. But those are invariably the most important details when you read the novel, as I do, against the grain, in order to access the shadow story. I believe it is an additional clue as to the history of the house's renovations, given the following explanation by Wikipedia that "in the UK, casement windows were the most common house window before the sash window was introduced."

It sounds to me like we being given an additional hint that at the time the house was divided into two units, the downstairs portion of the house was renovated with the more advanced sash windows, while the upstairs was given its substandard narrow and dangerous staircase, but left with the more antiquated casement windows.

Jane: "Anyway, "The house belonged to people in business." Presumable they ran their business on the ground floor. The Bateses lived on the "parlour floor," which would be one floor up. By the way, I've been told that, in town, the parlour floor was one floor up in purely residential houses (thus the high stoops of Brooklyn brownstones) because this distanced people from the horse manure featured in your earlier posts."

And that falls in the “great minds think alike” category, I had no idea about that fact! And I just noticed the following passage in that same vein in Chapter 45, when Emma attempts to visit Jane, but is intercepted:   “Miss Bates came to the carriage door, all gratitude, and agreeing with her most earnestly in thinking an airing might be of the greatest service….”

“We may read “an AIRING might be of the greatest service” in more than one way!  ;)