Jane Austen’s uncommonly virtuosic punning on the word “common” in Pride & Prejudice

[ADDED 09/26/16: I NOTICE THAT THERE HAS BEEN A LARGE SPIKE IN PEOPLE READING THIS PARTICULAR POST OF MINE DURING THE PAST FEW DAYS-- CAN ANYONE SEEING THIS NOTE PLEASE EMAIL ME AT ARNIEPERLSTEIN@GMAIL.COM AND TELL ME WHAT SOURCE IS BRINGING YOU ALL TO THIS PARTICULAR POST?]

In the entirety of Pride & Prejudice, there’s a total of 35 usages of a cluster of 4 related words (common, uncommon, commonly, uncommonly, and commonest). What is most striking about them as a group (a la Homer’s and Conan Doyle’s dogs which do not bark) is that none of them are used explicitly in the sense of a commoner, as opposed to a peer, in this particular novel, in which the outcomes of the two central love stories (Darcy/Elizabeth, Bingley/Jane) so explicitly turn on the bridging of the social chasm between those of high and low birth. Darcy makes this chasm insultingly clear in his botched first proposal, when he so narcissistically describes the struggle between his attraction to Eliza and his  abhorrence of her family connections. And then Lady Catherine waxes rhetorical on the same theme during her memorable verbal joust with Elizabeth in the Longbourn wilderness:

"I will not be interrupted. Hear me in silence. My daughter and my nephew are formed for each other. They are descended, on the maternal side, from the same noble line; and, on the father's, from respectable, honourable, and ancient—though untitled—families. Their fortune on both sides is splendid. They are destined for each other by the voice of every member of their respective houses; and what is to divide them? The upstart pretensions of a young woman without family, connections, or fortune. Is this to be endured! But it must not, shall not be. If you were sensible of your own good, you would not wish to quit the sphere in which you have been brought up."

"In marrying your nephew, I should not consider myself as quitting that sphere. He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal."

"True. You are a gentleman's daughter. But who was your mother? Who are your uncles and aunts? Do not imagine me ignorant of their condition."

"Whatever my connections may be," said Elizabeth, "if your nephew does not object to them, they can be nothing to you."

So, you may ask, why did I mention those 35 “common” usages, if not a single one of them relates to the explicit meaning of “common” as the opposite of high-born? Because, as with Ulysses’s dog Argos, whose silence reveals that he knows his old master as returned, and Sherlock Holmes’s sly allusion to Homer in “Silver Blaze”, the absence of explicit status-based usages of “common” conceals a vast network of punning, implicit “common” usages throughout P&P, and I’ll now show you the highlights:

Chapter 3:   "Come, Darcy," said [Bingley], "I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had much better dance."

"I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am particularly acquainted with my partner. At such an assembly as this it would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to stand up with."

"I would not be so fastidious as you are," cried Mr. Bingley, "for a kingdom! Upon my honour, I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life as I have this evening; and there are several of them you see UNCOMMONLY pretty."

This excellent pun may plausibly be read as intentional on Bingley’s part. In rebuttal to Darcy’s snobby refusal to dance with any of the local girls at the Meryton assembly, because, as far as Darcy knows, they’re all too “common” for him (i.e., by birth), Bingley’s witty riposte refers to several of the girls as “uncommonly” pretty, which decodes as, “Yes, these girls may be common in status, but they are nobly ranked by their looks.

Chapter 5:   "That is very true," replied Elizabeth, "and I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine."

"Pride," observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, "is a very COMMON failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very COMMON indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. ..”

This witty pun by Mary relates to the pride (i.e., status aspirations) of Elizabeth, a commoner, vis a vis the pride (i.e., snobbery) of the highborn Mr. Darcy. Mary drolly notes that those of lower birth, like Eliza, do indeed often aspire to move on up in the world.

Chapter 6: Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty; he had looked at her without admiration at the ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise. But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she hardly had a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered UNCOMMONLY intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. 

…"Did you not think, Mr. Darcy, that I expressed myself UNCOMMONLY well just now, when I was teasing Colonel Forster to give us a ball at Meryton?"

That same punning is here picked up by Darcy in his thoughts, and by Elizabeth (who seems to read Darcy’s mind). Darcy has evidently been influenced by Bingley’s earlier comment at the Meryton assembly, and he begins to see Eliza’s intelligence and beauty as compensating for her lack of status. And Elizabeth’s ESP tells her that her verbal facility and wit have charmed him.

Chapter 8: [Caroline Bingley] “Yes, all of them, I think. They all paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know anyone who cannot do all this, and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was very accomplished."

"Your list of the COMMON extent of accomplishments," said Darcy, "has too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no otherwise than by netting a purse or covering a screen. But I am very far from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I cannot boast of knowing more than half-a-dozen, in the whole range of my acquaintance, that are really accomplished."

Here, Darcy uses the word “common” in regard to accomplishment and education, seeming to thereby hint that it is a petit-bourgeois commoner’s upward-striving notion of female education that looks to the surface rather than to truly substantive accomplishments of the mind.

Chapter 10: [Elizabeth] ”No, no; stay where you are. You are charmingly grouped, and appear to UNCOMMON advantage. The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth. Good-bye."

This usage is my favorite of the whole bunch, because, when fully decoded, we see that Eliza’s punning wit blends two covert satirical themes very artfully.

First, we have the hidden (but for a long while very well recognized) Gilpin allusion—which I discussed in my major Gilpin post last week. Eliza uses Gilpin to mockingly suggest that Darcy and the Bingley sisters are akin to three cows grazing in a picturesque landscape.

Second, we now we also see further evidence of the claim I made previously…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2015/04/eavesdropping-in-netherfield-shrubbery.html

…i.e., that Elizabeth actually overhears (eavesdrops on) Darcy and Miss Bingley while they are strolling in the Netherfield shrubbery, in particular when the following repartee occurs on the theme (what else?) Darcy’s being too highborn for Elizabeth:  "I hope," said [Miss Bingley], as they were walking together in the shrubbery the next day, "you will give your mother-in-law a few hints, when this desirable event takes place, as to the advantage of holding her tongue; and if you can compass it, do cure the younger girls of running after officers. And, if I may mention so delicate a subject, endeavour to check that little something, bordering on conceit and impertinence, which your lady possesses."

"Have you anything else to propose for my domestic felicity?"

"Oh! yes. Do let the portraits of your uncle and aunt Phillips be placed in the gallery at Pemberley. Put them next to your great-uncle the judge. They are in the same profession, you know, only in different lines. As for your Elizabeth's picture, you must not have it taken, for what painter could do justice to those beautiful eyes?"

"It would not be easy, indeed, to catch their expression, but their colour and shape, and the eyelashes, so remarkably fine, might be copied."

At that moment they were met from another walk by Mrs. Hurst and Elizabeth herself.

"I did not know that you intended to walk," said Miss Bingley, in some confusion, lest they had been overheard….”

So now we see that Elizabeth deliberately and precisely chooses the verbiage “to uncommon advantage” in order to suggest to Darcy that in contrast to her own fine eyes, the Bingley sisters and he, for all their snobbery toward commoners, still are no better than cattle in a meadow, and so, turning the snobbery tables, she does not deign to be part of that unflattering picture alongside them. Ouch! I.e., what to conventional Austen scholarship appears to be a simple, straightforward satire on Gilpin actually is a complex, multilayered allusion of great depth.

And that verbiage in Chapter 10 also connects right back to Bingley’s witty noodging of Darcy in Chapter 3, and to Elizabeth’s witty repartee with Darcy in Chapter 6, both previously discussed above.

And it also connects right back to Darcy’s reference to “common” in Chapter 8, also discussed above, as to what constitutes true accomplishment in a woman.

In full context, we see that all of these seemingly unconnected, insignificant usages of “common” are actually all about how a combination of uncommon (rare) intelligence and beauty can compensate for a lack of high birth status—and that’s Elizabeth’s allure in Darcy’s eyes—which of course is at the heart of the novel’s love story.

So I hope I’ve already convinced you that JA deliberately avoided using “common” to explicitly refer to status, precisely so that she could hint at this them in every conceivable and ingenious implicit way!

We’ve still got 4/5 of the novel remaining, so here are several more examples in that same rich vein.

Chapter 11:  [Darcy] "You either choose this method of passing the evening because you are in each other's confidence, and have secret affairs to discuss, or because you are conscious that your figures appear to the GREATEST advantage in walking; if the first, I would be completely in your way, and if the second, I can admire you much better as I sit by the fire."

"Oh! shocking!" cried Miss Bingley. "I never heard anything so abominable. How shall we punish him for such a speech?"

"Nothing so easy, if you have but the inclination," said Elizabeth. "We can all plague and punish one another. Tease him—laugh at him. Intimate as you are, you must know how it is to be done."

"But upon my honour, I do not. I do assure you that my intimacy has not yet taught me that. Tease calmness of manner and presence of mind! No, no; I feel he may defy us there. And as to laughter, we will not expose ourselves, if you please, by attempting to laugh without a subject. Mr. Darcy may hug himself."

"Mr. Darcy is not to be laughed at!" cried Elizabeth. "That is an UNCOMMON advantage, and UNCOMMON I hope it will continue, for it would be a great loss to me to have many such acquaintances. I dearly love a laugh."

Here we see Darcy and Eliza engaged in sophisticated wordplay with each other. Darcy first picks up on Eliza’s Gilpinesque joke, when he says Eliza’s and Caroline’s figures appear to “the greatest” (instead of “uncommon”) advantage as they walk, and then Eliza seizes on Caroline’s claim that Darcy is not to be laughed at, and repeats her earlier verbiage in the shrubbery by mocking his “uncommon advantage” of being too great (as opposed to common) a man to be laughed at.

Then in Chapter 16, we get the pun on “common” three times, through the opposite end of the telescope, as it were, in the context of the lowborn Wickham:  “Mr. Wickham was the happy man towards whom almost every female eye was turned, and Elizabeth was the happy woman by whom he finally seated himself; and the agreeable manner in which he immediately fell into conversation, though it was only on its being a wet night, made her feel that the COMMONEST, dullest, most threadbare topic might be rendered interesting by the skill of the speaker.”

We’re back to that same pun from earlier chapters, but this time as to a man of common birth who transcends his low status via his rhetorical gifts. And then later in that same scene, we hear Wickham deploy that same word: "A thorough, determined dislike of me—a dislike which I cannot but attribute in some measure to jealousy. Had the late Mr. Darcy liked me less, his son might have borne with me better; but his father's UNCOMMON attachment to me irritated him, I believe, very early in life. He had not a temper to bear the sort of competition in which we stood—the sort of preference which was often given me."

Here Wickham uses the late elder Mr. Darcy’s “uncommon” attachment to him as a way to hint at his being the illegitimate son of a highborn (i.e., “uncommon”) father.

And Jane gets in on the same pun in Chapter 17: "Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion. My dearest Lizzy, do but consider in what a disgraceful light it places Mr. Darcy, to be treating his father's favourite in such a manner, one whom his father had promised to provide for. It is impossible. No man of COMMON humanity, no man who had any value for his character, could be capable of it. Can his most intimate friends be so excessively deceived in him? Oh! no."

And we stay with the connection of Wickham and commonness in Chapter 25: “To Mrs. Gardiner, Wickham had one means of affording pleasure, unconnected with his general powers. About ten or a dozen years ago, before her marriage, she had spent a considerable time in that very part of Derbyshire to which he belonged. They had, therefore, many acquaintances in COMMON; and though Wickham had been little there since the death of Darcy's father, it was yet in his power to give her fresher intelligence of her former friends than she had been in the way of procuring….”

This suggests to us that Mrs. Gardiner came from the same humble, common stock as Wickham.

Chapter 29: "I am the less surprised at what has happened," replied Sir William, "from that knowledge of what the manners of the great really are, which my situation in life has allowed me to acquire. About the court, such instances of elegant breeding are not UNCOMMON."

Sir William’s pun is very broad, as he explicitly sets the context as the royal court, and then refers to elegant breeding as “not uncommon”, i.e., “common” – a wonderful punny paradox!

Chapter 33: "I know them a little. Their brother is a pleasant gentlemanlike man—he is a great friend of Darcy's."

"Oh! yes," said Elizabeth drily; "Mr. Darcy is UNCOMMONLY kind to Mr. Bingley, and takes a prodigious deal of care of him."

Here Elizabeth mocks Darcy’s haughty condescension toward his “subject” the “commoner” Bingley.

Chapter 40: "There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it."

"I never thought Mr. Darcy so deficient in the appearance of it as you used to do."

"And yet I meant to be UNCOMMONLY clever in taking so decided a dislike to him, without any reason. It is such a spur to one's genius, such an opening for wit, to have a dislike of that kind. One may be continually abusive without saying anything just; but one cannot always be laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty."

Both Darcy and Wickham are under consideration, and Elizabeth, by using “uncommonly”, winks at the previous witty satires on Darcy she made, all involving the word “uncommon”. 

Chapter 44: Nothing had ever suggested it before, but they felt that there was no other way of accounting for such attentions from such a quarter than by supposing a partiality for their niece. While these newly-born notions were passing in their heads, the perturbation of Elizabeth's feelings was at every moment increasing. She was quite amazed at her own discomposure; but amongst other causes of disquiet, she dreaded lest the partiality of the brother should have said too much in her favour; and, more than COMMONLY anxious to please, she naturally suspected that every power of pleasing would fail her.

Now that Elizabeth has been bowled over by Pemberley, after first reading Darcy’s letter which detailed her own family’s deficiencies, her class anxiety is now acute, hence she is “more than commonly” anxious to please the high born Georgiana, whom she is about to meet.

Chapter 45:  “Her teeth are tolerable, but not out of the COMMON way; and as for her eyes, which have sometimes been called so fine, I could never see anything extraordinary in them. “ 

And here we have Caroline taking one last swipe at the much earlier references to Elizabeth’s “uncommon” beauty and wit.

Chapter 52: "I have heard, indeed, that she is UNCOMMONLY improved within this year or two. When I last saw her, she was not very promising. I am very glad you liked her. I hope she will turn out well."

"I dare say she will; she has got over the most trying age."

And Wickham’s usage of “uncommonly” comes in a speech in which he speaks of personal merit.

Chapter 54: "Well girls," said she, as soon as they were left to themselves, "What say you to the day? I think every thing has passed off UNCOMMONLY well, I assure you. The dinner was as well dressed as any I ever saw. "Well girls," said she, as soon as they were left to themselves, "What say you to the day? I think every thing has passed off UNCOMMONLY well, I assure you. The dinner was as well dressed as any I ever saw. ..”

And Mrs. Bennet uses “uncommonly” twice to refer to bridging of the chasm between Bingley and Jane.

Chapter 55: “It was an evening of no COMMON delight to them all; the satisfaction of Miss Bennet's mind gave a glow of such sweet animation to her face, as made her look handsomer than ever. Kitty simpered and smiled, and hoped her turn was coming soon.”

And there it is again re Jane and Bingley’s engagement.

Chapter 58: Elizabeth, feeling all the more than COMMON awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances.

Here, in the final usage in the novel, the pun is ironic as is fitting to the romantic climax. I.e., now that Elizabeth and Darcy are engaged, the chasm has been bridged, and so Eliza can finally see him as “common” in his awkwardness and anxiety, no longer higher than she on a societal status pedestal.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this picturesque tour of JA’s uncommonly brilliant usage of “common” in P&P!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Essays very dull, moderately clever, & very clever indeed about the Dedication of Emma to the Prince

I recently read the 2015 Cambridge Companion to Emma (edited by Peter Sabor) in search of interesting new insights from the lineup of contributors predictably drawn from the elite of the Austen academic establishment: J. Fergus, B. Tandon, J., R.D. Hume, E. Copeland, L.Bree, J. Wiltshire, J. Barchas, R. Perry, J. Heydt-Stevenson, G. Dow, and D. S. Lynch. The only one of the eleven who reads Austen against the grain in a significant way is Heydt-Stevenson, and this is no surprise. She first blew the roof off of Austen studies nearly 2 decades ago with her groundbreaking discoveries of disturbing sexual subtext in Emma and MP. And her essay in the Companion, while not breaking new ground, was nonetheless excellent—I highly recommend it.

However, I was very disappointed in the other ten essays; I found them too safe, too predicable, indeed clueless, about the clues to the many layers of mystery that Jane Austen wove deeply into the fabric of Emma. And the best illustration of this lack of fresh insight, and clinging to safe old notions of a safe Jane Austen, is the manner in which her dedication of Emma to the Prince Regent was discussed by two of the contributors.

But first, please read the short letter which JA wrote to Court Librarian James Stanier Clarke, which is the prime evidence on this subject:

"Nov. 15, 1815. Sir, I must take the liberty of asking you a question. Among the many flattering attentions which I received from you at Carlton House on Monday last was the information of my being at liberty to dedicate any future work to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent, without the necessity of any solicitation on my part. Such, at least, I believed to be your words; but as I am very anxious to be quite certain of what was intended, I entreat you to have the goodness to inform me how such a permission is to be understood, and whether it is incumbent on me to show my sense of the honour by inscribing the work now in the press to His Royal Highness. I should be equally concerned to appear either presumptuous or ungrateful.””

For over a decade I’ve read the above letter as a total put-on by Jane Austen, part and parcel of all the put-on letters that JA wrote to Clarke about Emma. I.e., I have not wavered in my conviction that JA had somehow worked behind the scenes, via her brother Henry’s extensive London social network, in order to elicit from the gullible Clarke an offer from the P.R. which she could not safely refuse, of dedicating Emma to the PR.

It was while Colleen Sheehan and I were brainstorming on that very topic in early 2006 that she then came up with her remarkable discovery of the “Prince of Whales” second solution to the charade in Emma, which, to me, makes it abundantly clear that JA viewed the Dedication as an opportunity for further covert skewering of the narcissistic Prince—but this time, at his own “invitation”!

With all that as background, now read three takes on the same topic:

First, here is the utterly conventional discussion by Jan Fergus in her essay on “Composition and Publication”:

“Having admired P&P, the Regent directed the librarian at his London residence, James Stanier Clarke, to call on Austen—at which visit Clarke offered to show her the Regent’s library at Carlton House. Austen accepted, but the consequence of this meeting on 13 November was highly annoying to her: Clarke told her that she was ‘at liberty’ to dedicate her next work to the Regent. Because the Regent took no subsequent notice of Austen or Emma, Clarke may well have slightly overstepped his authority here, perhaps having suggested to the Regent the possibility of a dedication, not the other way about. He would readily assume that Austen would be delighted by the prospect of flattering a prince. Austen seems to have suspected that something was amiss: she wrote to Clarke inquiring whether it were ‘incumbent’ on her to ‘shew my sense of the Honour, by inscribing the Work now in the Press, to HRH – I should be equally concerned to appear either presumptuous or Ungrateful’. Austen’s earlier letters show that she had no admiration for the Prince Regent. Although Clarke assured Austen in reply that dedication was not incumbent on her, her family advised that she must consider this permission a command.

Austen was well aware that a dedication would normally be seen as an author’s blatant plea for support, favour or cash. Her joke to Cassandra on 26 November shows both her sense of being forced into this dedication and her awareness that ordinarily she could expect financial reward from it: “I hope you have told Martha of my first resolution of letting nobody know that I might dedicate &c -for fear of being obliged to do it -- & that she is thoroughly convinced of my being influenced now by nothing but the most mercenary motives.’ Many of Austen’s juvenilia had been humorously dedicated to friends and family, and Henry had jokingly responded with a pretended cheque for 100 guineas when Austen dedicated “Lesley Castle” to him, probably in 1792. But Austen clearly was unable to choose hypocrisy over greed: she simply could not write the sort of fulsome dedication to the Regent that might bring her a handsome gift. She or Henry or perhaps John Murray (who informed her that the dedication must appear on a page to itself, not on the title-page) wrote out one page that mentions dedication by permission and includes no compliments. It is almost insulting in its brevity compared to other royal dedications, such as Frances Burney’s to Camilla (1796). Clarke was sent in December a bound copy for the Regent which cost Austen almost two pounds along with incalculable exasperation. He wrote on 21 December that ‘You were very good to send me Emma—which I have in no respect deserved. It is gone to the Prince Regent. I have read only a few Pages which I very much admired’: he seems to conflate the copy Austen mentions sending to him for his own use and the expensive bound copy intended for the Regent. In any case, Clarke did not report any response from the PR until the following March, when ‘thanks’ for ‘the handsome Copy’ are offered, along with a vague mention of praise from ‘many of the Nobility’ staying with the Regent at the Pavilion in Brighton. The Regent may not have read Emma and certainly sent no money. …”

Fergus has no clue that Jane Austen was actually putting Clarke on with her faux humility and deference. Now, second, here is Janine Barchas in “Setting and Community”, who, it seems to me, is being very very coy. She briefly discusses Sheehan’s groundbreaking article, and then raises the key question of whether the Austen’s family’s cover story might not be true, giving hope she will then land that plane--- only to entirely duck giving her own view:

“…Douglas Murray and Laurie Kaplan are among those who locate strong allusions in this novel to the royal family, finding in its wordplay and story extended satirical portraits of George III and the PR. In addition, Colleen A. Sheehan sees the apposite names of Miss Nash and Miss Prince, two of Mrs. Goddard’s pupils, in conjunction with Mr. Knightley’s ‘idea of moving the path to Langham’, as invoking a royal squabble between the PR and his architect John Nash. The ‘courtship’ charade may have a second solution that ciphers out the clues to arrive at an equally plausible alternative, that is, ‘Prince of Whales’ [fn to Sheehan’s articles]. While local allusions remain the stuff of critical debate, Emma’s official dedication to ‘His Royal Highness, The Prince Regent” unambiguously points to a royal reader. The dedication, a public paratext that welcomes a royal into the novel’s community of readers, packaged Emma as Austen’s most reaching book. Irrespective of whether one believes the family’s insistence that Austen was reluctant to accept the implied royal endorsement (illogical for any struggling author), the dedication enhanced Emma’s status. Provocatively, the publication of Austen’s only novel with a high profile dedicatee prompted Sir Walter Scott’s lone review of her work. Perhaps knowledge of the prominent dedication lubricated John Murray’s request that Scott ‘dash off an article on Emma.”

And now, in contrast to the above, here is what Sheehan actually wrote in 2006 about JA’s Dedication to the PR, with fearless, insightful, and subversive speculations in synch with my own:

“JA’s “Tribute” to the Prince Regent: A Gentleman Riddled with Difficulty” Persuasions Online (2006)

“I’ve often wondered, for example, how Jane Austen could have stomached dedicating Emma to the self-indulgent, profligate, rotund buffoon extraordinaire, George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales and, from 1811 to 1820, Prince Regent, prior to becoming King George IV. We know that Austen “hate[d]” the Prince Regent but could “hardly forgive” his wife, Princess Caroline, “for calling herself ‘attached & affectionate’ to a Man whom she must detest” (16 February 1813).  In an 1814 scathing, personal letter to her husband, which was afterwards made public, Caroline repeatedly addressed her husband as “His Royal Highness.” Whether this was done deferentially or mockingly one can only surmise, but it is interesting to note that in Austen’s short dedication of Emma to the Prince she too employed the title “His Royal Highness” three times.  Exaggerated deference is of course a tool of satire, used to insinuate that something fishy is going on.

 What must Jane Austen have felt when James Stanier Clarke, the Mr. Collins-like royal librarian, conveyed to her His Royal Highness’s “permission” to dedicate her next work to him? Could she have done it with a straight face? I think not, or at least if she did, it must have been because she knew that she, and her attentive readers, would eventually have the last laugh. The conventional wisdom is that Austen tried to squirm out of the tribute to the Prince.  Was it “incumbent on [her] to shew her sense of the Honour” by dedicating her forthcoming novel to His Royal Highness? she asked Clarke.  “It is certainly not incumbent on you” to do so, he responded, “but if you wish to do the Regent that honour either now or at any future period, I am happy to send you that permission which need not require any more trouble or solicitation on your Part” (16 November 1815).  

The entire affair of the dedication seems to have been a matter of chance. Here’s how the episode unfolded:  According to her sister, Cassandra, Austen began writing Emma 21 January 1814 and completed it 29 March 1815. In August or September 1815 she turned the manuscript in to her publisher, John Murray of London.  Revisions (apparently minor) were made in the ensuing months, and the novel was published in December.  Prior to this date, in early October, Austen arrived in London to stay with her brother Henry at his residence in Hans Place.  In mid-October he fell ill, and a doctor was consulted.  Henry’s condition was serious enough to require a second opinion, and another physician, Dr. Baillie, who just happened to be the Prince Regent’s physician, was called in.  During his visit at Hans Place, Dr. Baillie mentioned to Jane Austen that the Prince was a great admirer of her novels and that he had a set of them in each of his lodgings.  The Prince’s librarian, James Stanier Clarke, would call upon her, he said.  Shortly thereafter Clarke invited Jane Austen to the Prince’s august residence at Carlton House.  She paid the visit on 13 November 1815, at which time Clarke told her that she was at liberty to dedicate her next novel to the Prince Regent.  After much apparent hand-wringing and reluctance, Austen decided to dedicate Emma to the Prince Regent.  Since the novel was already in press at this time, she wrote her publisher and added the perfectly proper dedication (Austen-Leigh).  Henry recovered.  There seems to have been no more to the episode than this. 

But, of course, things are not always what they seem, or as others try to make them appear.  Seeking to establish his good repute, the Prince Regent proclaimed himself ‘The First Gentleman of Europe.’

Interestingly, one of the questions explored in Emma is what constitutes a true gentleman. Austen surely laughed at the Prince’s self-appointed title, being well aware of his deserved reputation as a gambler, a glutton, a spendthrift, and an adulterer (reputed to have fathered numerous illegitimate children by a number of women).  As the long-running “king” of the English tabloids, he was ferociously caricatured and skewered throughout his long public career, from the grotesque images of Gillray, like the one shown at the beginning of this article, published in 1792, to the particularly imaginative one by Cruikshank in May 1812. It was a tricky business for the lampooners, though, as Leigh and John Hunt, the editors of the Examiner, discovered when they were prosecuted, heavily fined, and jailed for two years for their public attack on the Prince in March of 1812. 

 I believe that Jane Austen got in on the game too.  But she was careful and cagey and seems not to have in the least aroused the suspicions of the Prince, who continued to admire and bestow his praise on her work after Emma was published.  If he read past the novel’s dedication, he did not take Emma’s warning that “‘such extreme and perpetual cautiousness of word and manner . . . is apt to suggest suspicions of there being something to conceal’”.   

…If Austen made this cheeky but veiled critique of the Prince’s planned scheme for Regent Street prior to any knowledge that she might be invited to dedicate Emma to him, then the encounter with his surgeon, the invitation to Carlton House, and the permission to dedicate the novel to the Prince Regent would seem to constitute an uncanny coincidence at the hands of Fortuna.  One can hardly believe it; it is all too pat. Could it have been the case that she revised the novel after it went to the publishers but before it was printed?  Or could she have somehow orchestrated the invitation for the dedication?  I know of no extant evidence that would solve this riddle. So, for now I must settle with being

suspicious.””

“Lampooning the Prince: A Second Solution to the Second Charade in Emma”:   “…We recall that the second charade in chapter 9 of Emma is to be considered a kind of “‘prologue to the play’”. The second solution to this charade is precisely a prologue to the play:  it is a second dedication to HRH, the Prince of Whales.  Moreover, as I have argued in the essay preceding this one, the novel itself includes numerous mischievous plays on the Prince and his exploits, though of course, as Austen expected, he seems never to have picked up on them.”   END QUOTE FROM SHEEHAN ARTICLE

So I conclude by pointing out that we can see from the above, in the bicentennial of Emma, that the (good) news about Jane Austen’s subversive shadows, including her covert but powerful feminist political satire, is slowly wending its way into the periphery of the still-strong current of the orthodox version of JA’s writing and life. But I sure hope we won’t have to wait till the tricentennial for it to reach the mainstream!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Gilpinesque cows & unplucked Periclean Rose of Jane Austen’s erudite juvenilia Evelyn

Jane wrote: "The discussion of Austen and Gilpin came just when I was reading Evelyn. Can anyone find a reference that would have led Austen to have four white Cows which were disposed at equal distances from each other as part of a picturesque scene?"

Jane, it’s that same passage in Gilpin which I referred to last week, regarding Elizabeth Bennet's sly joke about Darcy and the Bingley sisters arranged in the Netherfield shrubbery as if they were cows arranged in a painting. Here is the full quote that JA riffed on in both P&P and in Evelyn:

Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque BEAUTY, Made in the Year 1772  by Gilpin

"…to explain the doctrine of grouping larger cattle. Two will hardly combine. There is indeed no way of forming two into a group, but by them, as they are represented in the former of these prints. If they stand apart, whatever their attitudes, or situation may be, there will be a deficiency. But with three, you are almost sure of a good group, except indeed they all stand in the same attitude, and at equal distances.

They generally however combine the most beautifully, when two are united, and the third a little 

removed. Four introduce a new difficulty in grouping. Separate they would have a bad effect. Two, and two together would be equally bad. The only way, in which they will group well, is to unite three, as represented in the second of these prints, and to remove the fourth."

So that passage in Evelyn is yet more evidence, on top of the Gilpin satire in her satirical History of England, that the 16 year old Jane Austen read Gilpin very closely indeed, and took Gilpin’s ideas in literary directions he never dreamt of. And this also fits with my longstanding impression that Evelyn was one of her juvenilia which JA remembered, and wove into the fabric of P&P 20 years later.

But P&P was not the only Austen novel to revisit the learned subtext of Evelyn. Last spring, I wrote the following comment about the allusion in Evelyn to Shakespeare's late romance Pericles (in which father-daughter incest is the primary theme, Shakespeare’s primary source for Pericles having been the incest-drenched Confessio Amantis by John Gower, Chaucer’s most famous literary contemporary, and therefore, fittingly, the narrator of Shakespeare’s dark, fantastical play):

"the strange character Mr. Gower in JA’s juvenilia Evelyn, who shows up at the home of a young heiress, and is promptly (and absurdly) given both her hand in marriage, and also her parents’ family estate---just like Pericles when he marries Thaisa."

What I realized today upon revisiting this allusion is that Evelyn also tracks Pericles in three other, even more significant ways:

They both involve shipwrecks; and

They both involve a young woman relative of the hero (Marina, Pericles’s daughter, and Rose, Gower’s sister), from whom he is separated, and then is told she is dead, only to find out at a later time that he was deliberately deceived (Pericles by the evil Dionyza, Gower at the direction of Rose herself) and that she did not die when he thought she did; and….

….most telling of all is that, in Evelyn, Gower’s sister’s name “Rose” was surely chosen by the young Jane Austen, because of the following rose imagery which is cynically used by the panderer Boult and the Bawd in the latter part of Pericles, to describe Marina (whom I’ve also claimed is a model for Jane Fairfax in Emma) after she has been captured and forced to work in a brothel in Mytilene.

First we hear Marina compared to an unplucked rose by the panderer Boult, to ignite the jaded Lysimachus’s lechery, so that he will wish to become the unwilling Marina’s first customer:

LYSIMACHUS How now! How a dozen of virginities?

BAWD  Now, the gods to-bless your honour!

BOULT  I am glad to see your honour in good health.

LYSIMACHUS  You may so; 'tis the better for you that your resorters stand upon sound legs. How now! wholesome iniquity have you that a man may deal withal, and defy the surgeon?

BAWD We have here one, sir, if she would--but there never came her like in Mytilene.

LYSIMACHUS  If she'ld do the deed of darkness, thou wouldst say.

BAWD   Your honour knows what 'tis to say well enough.

LYSIMACHUS  Well, call forth, call forth.

BOULT   For flesh and blood, sir, white and red, you shall see a ROSE; and she were a ROSE indeed, if she had but—

LYSIMACHUS  What, prithee?

BOULT  O, sir, I can be modest.

LYSIMACHUS  That dignifies the renown of a bawd, no less than it gives a good report to a number to be chaste.

Exit BOULT

BAWD  Here comes that which grows to the stalk; never plucked yet, I can assure you.

Re-enter BOULT with MARINA

Is she not a fair creature?

LYSIMACHUS

'Faith, she would serve after a long voyage at sea.
Well, there's for you: leave us.

And then, after Marina uses her extraordinary moral and persuasive powers to provoke an epiphany in Lysimachus, that induces him to repent his lechery and leave her be, we hear that same metaphor used by Gower (again, Shakespeare’s narrator, based on the actual John Gower) to describe Marina’s artistic gifts in distinctly rosy terms:

GOWER

Marina thus the brothel 'scapes, and chances
Into an honest house, our story says.
She sings like one immortal, and she dances
As goddess-like to her admired lays;
Deep clerks she dumbs; and with her needle composes
Nature's own shape, of bud, bird, branch, or berry,
That even her art sisters the natural ROSES;
Her inkle, silk, twin with the rubied cherry:
That pupils lacks she none of noble race,
Who pour their bounty on her; and her gain
She gives the cursed bawd. Here we her place;
And to her father turn our thoughts again,
Where we left him, on the sea. We there him lost;
Whence, driven before the winds, he is arrived
Here where his daughter dwells; and on this coast
Suppose him now at anchor. 

So, what did the 16 year old Jane Austen mean by such very specific but veiled allusions to incest and prostitution in Evelyn? Whatever it meant, it continued to have a similar meaning for her 23 years later, when she wrote the character of Jane Fairfax in Emma –where, probably because she was 40 years old, and more adept at hiding disturbing subtext in plain sight, she made it possible for a reader like myself to realize that Mrs. Elton is the “bawd” who (unsuccessfully) tries to force the talented (and secretly pregnant) Jane Fairfax into prostitution. And now I understand for the first time why Jane Austen put the following specific (mis)quotation of the couplet in Gray’s famous Elegy about a flower in Mrs. Elton’s mouth, at the very moment in the story when she’s exerting maximum pressure on Jane:

“We must bring her forward. Such talent as hers must not be suffered to remain unknown.—I dare say you have heard those charming lines of the poet,

        'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

          'And waste its fragrance on the desert air.'

We must not allow them to be verified in sweet Jane Fairfax."

"I cannot think there is any danger of it," was Emma's calm answer—"and when you are better acquainted with Miss Fairfax's situation and understand what her home has been, with Colonel and Mrs. Campbell, I have no idea that you will suppose her talents can be unknown."

"Oh! but dear Miss Woodhouse, she is now in such retirement, such obscurity, so thrown away.—Whatever advantages she may have enjoyed with the Campbells are so palpably at an end! And I think she feels it. I am sure she does. She is very timid and silent. One can see that she feels the want of encouragement. I like her the better for it. I must confess it is a recommendation to me. I am a great advocate for timidity—and I am sure one does not often meet with it.—But in those who are at all inferior, it is extremely prepossessing. Oh! I assure you, Jane Fairfax is a very delightful character, and interests me more than I can express."

And I also just realized that it’s no accident that Mrs. Elton mentions the Campbells at that very moment, because they are Jane Austen’s version of Dionyza and Cleon, the couple who take Marina in, but then Dionyza tries to have Marina murdered out of jealousy for her own, less attractive & talented daughter.

So, what does this all tell us about Evelyn? I am not sure about the details, which are murky at best in this short, absurdist teenager’s production, but I do now know 100% for sure that Jane Austen intended a very dark subtext about a young woman in sexual danger.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Henry Woodhouse as Henry VIII….and Henry Crawford as Buckingham?

I’ve just gotten the 2015 Cambridge Companion to Emma from the library, and from my quick browse, I find it disappointing, it’s surprisingly thin on fresh insight into JA’s most complex creation. During the next few days, I’ll post about the handful of points that did catch my eye as I went through it, beginning today with a scholarly tidbit that supports two of my earlier claims….

ONE: That Jane Austen gave Mr. Woodhouse the first name “Henry”, because he is, at least in part, her ultra-sly representation of King Henry VIII.

TWO: That JA also alluded to Shakespeare’s Henry VIII in Pride & Prejudice.

…and leads to a third, new insight I’ve hinted at in the second half of my Subject Line, and which I will get to at the end of this post.

First, to briefly set the stage. In 1999, Jill Heydt-Stevenson published her explosive, persuasive speculations about Mr. Woodhouse’s dissolute past. She deduced this primarily from his struggle to recollect the entirety of Garrick’s Riddle, the latter stanza of which contains thinly veiled allusions to the barbaric yet all too common 18^th century European custom of men suffering from syphilis, who contrive to have “curative” sex with young (and very unfortunate) virgins/victims.

I’ve taken JHS’s pioneering work further, suggesting that Mr. Woodhouse is actually the bio father (through sex with several local women, including Miss Bates) of several members of the novel’s younger generation (i.e., not only Emma and Isabella, but also one or more of Harriet, Frank, and Jane as well). This pattern of course fits well with the real-life paternity history of Henry VIII, who sired children on half of his six wives, and whose greatest inheritance, the crown of England, passed to one of his daughters, just as will be the case with Highbury when Mr. Woodhouse’s diet changes to heavenly thin gruel.

I also found in Mr. Woodhouse’s obsession with Garrick’s Riddle further evidence of his being a stand-in for Henry VIII --- given the Riddle’s concern with venereal disease-- in the historical facts about Henry VIII set forth in the following 2011 online essay, which suggest that Henry VIII, like Henry  Woodhouse, was no longer “all there” in the latter stages of his life:

http://www.history.com/news/did-blood-cause-henry-viiis-madness-and-reproductive-woes

“Why did Henry VIII have so many wives and mistresses yet so few children? What caused the Tudor monarch’s descent into mental instability and physical agony in the second half of his life? A rare blood group and a genetic disorder associated with it may provide clues, a new study suggests…The life of England’s King Henry VIII is a royal paradox. A lusty womanizer who married six times and canoodled with countless ladies-in-waiting in an era before reliable birth control, he only fathered four children who survived infancy. Handsome, vigorous and relatively benevolent in the early years of his reign, he ballooned into an ailing 300-pound tyrant whose capriciousness and paranoia sent many heads rolling—including those of two of his wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. A new study chalks these mystifying contradictions up to two related biological factors. Writing in The Historical Journal, bioarchaeologist Catrina Banks Whitley and anthropologist Kyra Kramer argue that Henry’s blood group may have doomed the Tudor monarch to a lifetime of desperately seeking—in the arms of one woman after another—a male heir, a pursuit that famously led him to break with the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s. A disorder that affects members of his suspected blood group, meanwhile, may explain his midlife physical and psychological deterioration. The researchers suggest that Henry’s blood carried the rare Kell antigen—a protein that triggers immune responses—while that of his sexual partners did not, making them poor reproductive matches. In a first pregnancy, a Kell-positive man and a Kell-negative woman can have a healthy Kell-positive baby together. In subsequent pregnancies, however, the antibodies the mother produced during the first pregnancy can cross the placenta and attack a Kell-positive fetus, causing a late-term miscarriage, stillbirth or rapid neonatal death.

While an exact number is hard to determine, it is believed that Henry’s sexual encounters with his various wives and mistresses resulted in at least 11 and possibly more than 13 pregnancies. Records indicate that only four of these yielded healthy babies: the future Mary I, born to Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, after six children were stillborn or died shortly after birth; Henry FitzRoy, the king’s only child with his teenage mistress Bessie Blount; the future Elizabeth I, the first child born to Anne Boleyn, who went on to suffer several miscarriages before her date with the chopping block; and the future Edward VI, Henry’s son by his third wife, Jane Seymour, who died before the couple could try for a second. The survival of the three firstborn children—Henry FitzRoy, Elizabeth and Edward—is consistent with the Kell-positive reproductive pattern. As for Catherine of Aragon, the researchers note, “it is possible that some cases of Kell sensitization affect even the first pregnancy.” And Mary may have survived because she inherited the recessive Kell gene from Henry, making her impervious to her mother’s antibodies.

…The historian David Starkey has written of “two Henrys, the one old, the other young.” The young Henry was handsome, spry and generous, a devoted ruler who loved sports, music and Catherine of Aragon; the old Henry binged on rich foods, undermined his country’s stability to marry his mistress and launched a brutal campaign to eliminate foes both real and imagined. Beginning in middle age, the king also suffered leg pain that made walking nearly impossible….”  END QUOTE

As I reread that article today, it now seems quite likely to me that the well-proven “Prince of Whales” subtext of Emma, which skewers the Prince Regent (and future King Georg IV) during JA’s lifetime, also did double duty for JA, by also skewering Henry VIII----that much earlier, and even more notorious, English royal glutton and rake.

Which brings me back to The Cambridge Companion to Emma. My above prior speculations about Mr. Woodhouse as a darkly comic version of Henry VIII are the reason why I read, with great interest, the following Henry VIII-related speculations in Janine Barchas’s chapter about Emma entitled “Setting and community”, about Nonsuch Park, a real life geographical model for the fictional Highbury, with a royal origin:

“…as Chapman stated, no single spot lies simultaneously 16 miles from London, 9 from Richmond, and 7 from Box Hill. In addition, even if Austen’s measurements demarcate the perimeter of Highbury’s community, no suitable village exists within this generous area of land that the world of Emma, with its fictional ‘parishes of Donwell and Highbury’, would have to occupy. The reason may be that Henry VIII erased just such a village from the map to build a royal palace. Around 1538, after buying the land that included the old village of Cuddington and wiping the slate clean, Henry VIII began construction on a lavish dwelling that would be unrivalled in all the world. Hence its name: NONSUCH Palace. With an army of architects and craftsmen, Henry VIII created two large parklands around the palace, called The Great Park and The Little Park, which, taken together with the palace grounds, amounted to well over 900 acres. The royal holdings of NONSUCH, at about one mile wide and at least 2 ½ miles in length, included much of the land that today lies between Ewell and Cheam along the Kingston/Leatherhead Road to Surrey. Provocatively, then, the original location of Nonsuch lies in the Surrey circle outlined by prior suggestions for Highbury’s supposed model.

By JA’s time, NONSUCH Park was a sliver of its former self, with only engravings and books to speak for its history. After the interruption of the Commonwealth, NONSUCH’s reign as royal showpiece ended when Charles II gave it to his mistress Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland and Baroness NONSUCH, who demolished the palace by 1683, and sold it off in pieces to pay for her gambling debts. In Emma, a novel by an avid reader of history that features frequent wordplay (including a charade about ‘the wealth and pomp of kings’ displayed in royal palaces), it is fitting that the location large enough to suit the distances recorded in the novel is not only part of England’s royal past but is already a play on words. The horizons of Emma stretch over a large area, with Hartfield ‘a mere sort of notch in the Donwell Abbey estate, to which all the rest of Highbury belonged’….If the world of Emma maps on to the historical lore of NONSUCH, Austen may hint at a strong connection between real and imaginary history, that is, between the larger story of England and her novel. Did Austen walk the actual grounds of the former NONSUCH and use the remaining buildings and farms as an architectural blueprint for her story. Like James Joyce, she may have intended to send her readers scurrying to triangulate distances to make them conclude that, of course, there is NONE SUCH idyll as Highbury, even as they searched inside the former parklands of NONSUCH for her fictional world.” END QUOTE FROM BARCHAS

Following up on Barchas’s intriguing geographical/historical detective work, I believe the following 2 passages in the Donwell Abbey episode of Emma were intended by JA to be very suggestive of the remains of NONSUCH that still existed during JA’s lifetime (It appears to me that Barchas did notice these two passages, but did not wish to explicitly tag the following passages, for some reason or another):

Barchas: “By JA’s time, Nonsuch Park was a sliver of its former self, with only engravings and books to speak for its history”:

Emma, Chapter 42:

“It was hot; and after walking some time over the gardens in a scattered, dispersed way, scarcely any three together, they insensibly followed one another to the delicious shade of a broad short avenue of limes, which stretching beyond the garden at an equal distance from the river, seemed the finish of the pleasure grounds.—It led to nothing; nothing but a view at the end over A LOW STONE WALL WITH HIGH PILLARS, which seemed intended, in their erection, to give the appearance of an approach to THE HOUSE, WHICH NEVER HAD BEEN THERE. Disputable, however, as might be the taste of such a termination, it was in itself a charming walk, and the view which closed it extremely pretty.”

It seems clear that Emma (whose thoughts we are clearly reading in that passage), in her typical leaping to wrong assumptions, believes there had never been a house there, and that the pillars and wall were a sort of Gilpinesque faux addition to the landscape. But doesn’t it seem far more likely that Emma is once again clueless, and that these are ruins, evidence that there once really was a substantial manor there---evidence which fits perfectly with the history of Nonsuch Park outlined by Barchas.

“Mr. Knightley had done all in his power for Mr. Woodhouse's entertainment. BOOKS OF ENGRAVINGS, drawers of medals, cameos, corals, shells, and every other family collection within his cabinets, had been prepared for his old friend, to while away the morning; and the kindness had perfectly answered. Mr. Woodhouse had been exceedingly well amused. Mrs. Weston had been shewing them all to him, and now he would shew them all to Emma;—fortunate in having no other resemblance to a child, than in a total want of taste for what he saw, for he was slow, constant, and methodical.”

And here again, if Mr. Woodhouse stands in for Henry VIII, it is very droll irony indeed to have Mr. Woodhouse be the one who obsesses over the Donwell collection, which appears to be a wink to the collectibles left at Nonsuch Hall after the rest of the estate had been destroyed or sold off.

So, based solely on all of the above, I’d say it was highly likely that Jane Austen did indeed intend to allude to Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Park, renamed as Donwell Abbey (another very old property with a punning name).

However, beyond all of that, there is very strong evidence of the Nonsuch Park allusion in Emma, which Jane Austen hid in plain sight in the text of another of JA’s novels that takes that high likelihood to the level of virtual certainty, as I will now explain.

In the first part of Chapter 34 of Mansfield Park, we find the very famous passage in which Henry Crawford reads aloud speeches by numerous characters from Shakespeare’s late history, Henry VIII, and then we have the often-quoted exchange between Henry and Edmund regarding Henry VIII:

“It will be a favourite, I believe, from this hour,” replied Crawford; “but I do not think I have had a volume of Shakespeare in my hand before since I was fifteen. I once saw Henry the Eighth acted, or I have heard of it from somebody who did, I am not certain which. But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.”

“No doubt one is familiar with Shakespeare in a degree,” said Edmund, “from one’s earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by everybody; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions; but this is totally distinct from giving his sense as you gave it. To know him in bits and scraps is common enough; to know him pretty thoroughly is, perhaps, not uncommon; but to read him well aloud is no everyday talent.”

And now we come to the cream, as Emma would say. Later in that same chapter, we read the following exchange between Henry and Fanny, right after Henry fantasizes about the pleasure of delivering a well-orated sermon, and Fanny shakes her head:

“[Henry] “You shook your head at my acknowledging that I should not like to engage in the duties of a clergyman always for a constancy. Yes, that was the word. Constancy: I am not afraid of the word. I would spell it, read it, write it with anybody. I see nothing alarming in the word. Did you think I ought?”

“Perhaps, sir,” said Fanny, wearied at last into speaking— “perhaps, sir, I thought it was a pity you did not always know yourself as well as you seemed to do at that moment.”

Crawford, delighted to get her to speak at any rate, was determined to keep it up; and poor Fanny, who had hoped to silence him by such an extremity of reproof, found herself sadly mistaken, and that it was only a change from one object of curiosity and one set of words to another. He had always something to entreat the explanation of. The opportunity was too fair. None such had occurred since his seeing her in her uncle’s room, none such might occur again before his leaving Mansfield. Lady Bertram’s being just on the other side of the table was a trifle, for she might always be considered as only half–awake, and Edmund’s advertisements were still of the first utility…..”

So, did you catch in that quoted passage Jane Austen’s broad, double wink at the erstwhile estate of Henry VIII in that passage, a wink which only becomes visible once we know what Barchas has detected in Emma?  

Here it is: “NONE SUCH had occurred since his seeing her in her uncle’s room, NONE SUCH might occur again before his leaving Mansfield.”

Is it just a coincidence that the phrase “none such” appears twice in that one sentence in MP, even though it never appears anywhere else in JA’s writings; and that repetition of “none such” just happens to be used in the very same chapter which contains all of the above explicit and detailed references to Henry VIII?  But wait, there’s even more!

It occurred to me to search “none such” in the text of Shakespeare’s  Henry VIII, wondering whether Shakespeare might also have slipped a sly reference to Henry VIII’s estate into the play. And look what I found. To give you a brief setup, in the play’s first scene, the Duke of Buckingham has been arrested and sent to the Tower, as a result of Wolsey having slandered him to the King as a traitor.

Then, in Act 1 Scene 2, Queen Katharine speaks to her husband the King to defend Buckingham, whereupon Henry, in reply, expresses sadness for having felt it necessary to punish Buckingham, given that Buckingham is such an extraordinarily gifted natural orator—and in that speech, Henry uses words very similar to the description of Fanny’s dazzled reaction to Henry Crawford’s oratorical skills in that same Chapter 34 ---- skills Henry has just used in delivering the speeches of various characters...including Buckingham!

And here’s the capper ---- look at the ALL CAPS words in the third line of Henry’s speech – they are “none” and “such”!:

QUEEN KATHARINE

I am sorry that the Duke of Buckingham
Is run in your displeasure.

KING HENRY VIII

It grieves many:
The gentleman is learn'd, and a most rare speaker;
To nature NONE more bound; his training SUCH,
That he may furnish and instruct great teachers,
And never seek for aid out of himself. Yet see,
When these so noble benefits shall prove
Not well disposed, the mind growing once corrupt,
They turn to vicious forms, ten times more ugly
Than ever they were fair. This man so complete,
Who was enroll'd 'mongst wonders, and when we,
Almost with ravish'd listening, could not find
His hour of speech a minute; he, my lady,
Hath into monstrous habits put the graces
That once were his, and is become as black
As if besmear'd in hell. Sit by us; you shall hear--
This was his gentleman in trust--of him
Things to strike honour sad. Bid him recount
The fore-recited practises; whereof
We cannot feel too little, hear too much.

In the remainder of that scene, Wolsey goes on to sticks the proverbial fork in Buckingham, by bringing forward to the King a witness who (falsely) attests to Buckingham’s murderous treasonous words.

All of which makes me wonder about the problematic ending of Mansfield Park, when we hear, indirectly, about Henry Crawford’s betrayal of Fanny (by running off with Maria) --- can we be certain that we’ve heard the whole truth and nothing but the truth, about the Buckingham-like Henry Crawford?

[ADDED THE FOLLOWING 7/2/2016 at 5:24 pm PST]

I have two points to add to my post yesterday “Austen’s Mr Woodhouse as Henry VIII; & Henry Crawford as Buckingham?” http://tinyurl.com/jx47mfg.

First, I found a 2014 Persuasions Online article by Kathryn Davis which provided a second quotation from Henry VIII which pointed to Henry Crawford as Buckingham:

“Again, when Crawford asks her to ‘advise’ him, she, demurring, famously asserts, ‘We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be’. Through this allusion to conscience as an aid to rational self-government, Fanny both honors and challenges Henry by suggesting that he has the capacity to govern not only his estate in Norfolk but also his own soul. [One might detect an allusion to the opening scene of Henry VIII here. When Buckingham’s anger rises up within him, Norfolk advises, “[T]here is no English soul / More stronger to direct you than yourself, / If with the sap of reason you would quench, / Or but allay, the fire of passion” (1.1.146-48)]”

I can’t tell whether Davis also realized what I did when I read her above analysis—i.e., that Jane Austen named Henry Crawford’s estate “Norfolk” in part in order to point to the character named “Norfolk” who gives Buckingham the above advice to be patient and not run to the King to inform him about Wolsey’s treasons, only to see Buckingham arrested and taken to the Tower before his advice is even entirely out of his mouth!

But I also realized something much larger about the allusion to Henry VIII , even beyond the excellent analyses by Marcia Folsom, Elaine Bander, to which I have previously added my own points. I.e., now I see Jane Austen giving the reader a giant decoder ring, when we read the following very famous passage in MP:

“Crawford took the volume. "Let me have the pleasure of finishing that speech to your ladyship," said he. "I shall find it immediately." And by carefully giving way to the inclination of the leaves, he did find it, or within a page or two, quite near enough to satisfy Lady Bertram, who assured him, as soon as he mentioned the name of Cardinal Wolsey, that he had got the very speech. Not a look or an offer of help had Fanny given; not a syllable for or against. All her attention was for her work. She seemed determined to be interested by nothing else. But taste was too strong in her. She could not abstract her mind five minutes: she was forced to listen; his reading was capital, and her pleasure in good reading extreme. To good reading, however, she had been long used: her uncle read well, her cousins all, Edmund very well, but in Mr. Crawford's reading there was a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met with. The King, the Queen, Buckingham, Wolsey, Cromwell, all were given in turn; for with the happiest knack, the happiest power of jumping and guessing, he could always alight at will on the best scene, or the best speeches of each; and whether it were dignity, or pride, or tenderness, or remorse, or whatever were to be expressed, he could do it with equal beauty. It was truly dramatic. His acting had first taught Fanny what pleasure a play might give, and his reading brought all his acting before her again; nay, perhaps with greater enjoyment, for it came unexpectedly, and with no such drawback as she had been used to suffer in seeing him on the stage with Miss Bertram.”

What I realized today is that Henry Crawford, the charming chameleon, does merely have the knack to find and deliver the best speeches in Henry VIII, as if he were in a play onstage, he goes a quantum leap further than that: during the course of the action in MP, Henry actually applies that gift to his real life (real, of course, in the world of the action of the novel), i.e., at one time he speaks and behaves as if he were the King (when he decides to seduce Fanny, just as Henry VIII decides to seduce Anna Bullen); at another time, he is like Buckingham (when he is advised by Fanny to follow his inner moral voice); yet and at still other times, he is a scheming master manipulator like Wolsey, who in the end fails to get his ultimate prize. He is a true shape shifter.

So, my question then is --- can anyone think of any passage in MP when Henry Crawford is like Queen Katharine? Or like Wolsey’s loyal counselor Cromwell?

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The long-chinned man, the laughing female, the cross-dressed servant, & the bewitched lover

There’s one episode in one of JA’s novels, and one episode in another famous novel written sometime before JA wrote her novels, as to which ALL FIVE of the following specific points are true. This strong parallelism suggests that the episode in JA’s novel was meant by JA to remind her well-read readers of the parallel episode in that earlier novel, for some reason(s).

Based on the following hints, can you name the Austen novel and then name the other author & his/her earlier novel?

There’s a male character with “a long chin”

There’s a transgressive female character who is ready to die of laughter

There’s a young male servant dressed up as a woman, whose disguise is good enough to fool a man

There’s a group of travelers on the road

There’s a “bewitched” man in love with a young woman whose looks are variously described in the novel as either beautiful or coarse in a country way

I’ll provide the answers by tomorrow afternoon, unless someone gives the answers sooner, and in any event I will also explain why I believe Jane Austen made this covert allusion.

Cheers, ARNIE

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