Camp Austen_My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan

by Ted Scheinman

  Lefroy soon left the neighborhood—he would eventually become chief justice of Ireland—and we might never know whether he left a chink in Austen’s heart or not, but certainly she sounds a little down on the day of his departure: “At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea.” I’ve always read this passage as archness posing as ambivalence: the tears I take to be real but I also sense a colder element at play, the suggestion that Austen will miss the flirting more than she’ll miss the boy. There will be many people (more than you realize) who disagree with me here, but if Austen was pleased by Lefroy’s ability to match her in flirty games, she was less impressed with his fashion sense. “He has but one fault,” she wrote to Cassandra, “which time will, I trust, entirely remove—it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine, which he did when he was wounded.” You don’t even need to know who Tom Jones is to get the brilliance of that first line. (I’ve always suspected it was a riff on Jonathan Swift—“So our Doctor has every quality and virtue that can make a man amiable or useful; but, alas! he has a sort of slouch in his walk”—but I also don’t know whether Austen had seen Swift’s letters. A classic Janeite conundrum.)

  Pause to savor this moment. Austen is knocking her young admirer for excessive literary enthusiasm, for his overzealous identification with a literary character; but she’s also mocking the way that young people who are new to love will elevate minor weaknesses into terminal character flaws: the sentence indicts young Jane, just as much as it does young Tom. In a subsequent letter, Austen recycles the joke; responding to a hypothetical proposal of marriage, Austen writes: “I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat.”

  It’s true that one comes to love these jokes because they are, at bottom, just delightfully silly. But they are lovable, too, because they are terribly real. I do not believe that Austen was as horrified by Lefroy’s taste in clothes as she endeavors to sound; but I do believe that her joking criticism of his clothes had its basis in real disapproval. It’s fundamentally garish behavior, in other words, to wear a blinding white topcoat just because Tom Jones did, and it’s the same kind of bald affectation that nearly all of Austen’s principal characters would reject, from Marianne Dashwood to Elizabeth Bennet.

  It’s also precisely the same kind of ridiculous and wonderful literary playacting that takes place when Janeites gather, and it remains the very thing about which Austen skeptics will mock Janeites the most: devotees of Tolstoy—or Pynchon, or Woolf—do not make a habit of treating symposia as costume parties, and this threadbare seriousness sets them apart from the lacy zealotry of the Janeites.

  It is petty minds that make such distinctions, and I cannot help but feel that the Tolstoyans and Derrideans and the rest are all missing out on some of the best and cleanest fun available to an academic in the twenty-first century—not to mention the thrill, however illusory, in feeling a very real proximity to Austen’s genius and her age. Such happy dislocations are impossible without the clothing and the company; if you’ve never rolled your eyes at a woman dressed as Miss Bates, how can you possibly expect to know how Emma felt? As Adam would later say to me: “Dressing up and going to a ball is like reading Jane Austen in a way that listening to an analysis of Jane Austen is not.”

  In other words, dressing as Mr. Darcy can have scholarly value, and I hope that soon departments of English across America will do the honorable thing and require one summer of Regency reenactments from any scholar seeking tenure—especially the male ones; there is, after all, still a shortage on the dance floor.

  THREE

  Table Talk

  There are two traits in her character which are pleasing; namely, she admires Camilla, and drinks no cream in her tea.

  —Jane Austen in a letter to Cassandra, January 1796

  The company was seated for dinner on the second night of the camp, and as we discussed the villainous General Tinley from Northanger Abbey, the subject turned quite suddenly to torture.

  “You know, surely,” said the lady in the blue bonnet, “that Jane based the general on a real-life model?” One gentleman at the table made a face to indicate he knew where this was going and had no interest in coming along. Others nodded their heads, and the lady leaned forward, lowering her voice and glancing behind her, as though the general himself might appear at any moment.

  The tale begins in farce and ends in tragedy, but the short version is that the Austens’ neighbors in Hampshire included one family of straight-up villains who were deep into torture. The scion of this family was a stammering young man named John Wallop, Third Earl of Portsmouth. From childhood, when he boarded with the Austens as one of George’s pupils, the earl showed signs of idiocy and occasional psychosis—one reason his family engaged trustees to oversee his estate, including the solicitor John Hanson, who was also Byron’s lawyer, and who sometimes hosted Byron for hunting parties in the neighborhood.

  “Of course, the English aristocracy is full of nincompoops,” the lady told the table, “but Wallop was simply a fiend.” As a young man, the earl rejoiced at any chance to inflict pain. He starved his servants, tormented frogs with a fork (here, one woman at the table stopped eating), and would visit slaughterhouses to whip the hogs who were about to die, telling each one in turn: “Serves you right!” Often he beat his oxen about their heads with an axe. His fascination with death was such that he would attend the funerals of strangers and, when there was not a dead stranger at hand, would have his servants stage a mock ceremony so that he could laugh at it. The earl also took to beating his servants. He pursued these pastimes with no appearance of remorse, or understanding of what remorse might mean—a bright-eyed young torture enthusiast. Or, if you join Miss Blue Bonnet’s more sympathetic view, “a silly broken creature without a heart whose father probably broke him in the first place.” (One woman at the table winced at this description of the madman. Another gentleman, who had not been listening, asked me to pass the bread.) When chance provided, the earl would prey on the sick or the convalescing: when one of his coachmen broke his leg in an accident, the earl waited until the doctor had set the leg, then went into the room where the man was recovering and rebroke it. His main erotic pastime involved hiring women-servants of the neighborhood to draw his blood using lancets and then carry it in a basin under their petticoats while he watched; this is also how the earl thought that insemination happened.

  Even though he was almost certainly impotent, the family wanted to make sure the earl had no legitimate offspring, so, when he was thirty-one, they married him to a forty-seven-year-old woman who did her best to keep him in line while the second brother, Newton, waited to succeed to the title. During this period, Jane Austen and her family went to several dinners and balls at the Wallop family seat, and Austen’s letters show no sign that she knew what the earl got up to; in one instance she notes his wife’s new dress, while after another of his balls, she acknowledges that she got carried away with the wine: “I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand to-day.”

  But the earl was soon to go from villain to victim. Upon the death of the earl’s first wife, Hanson, the family lawyer, spirited him to London, where the lawyer then insisted on introducing his three daughters to the earl and told him to pick one. The earl chose Laura, who was deemed the prettiest, but somewhere en route to the chapel, the lawyer pulled a switcheroo, and the earl found himself shortly thereafter reciting the marriage vows not to Laura but to her elder, apparently plainer sister Mary Ann. Byron, whom Hanson engaged as a witness at the wedding, recalls that at the rushed ceremony, the earl recited his vows like a schoolboy doing Cicero—“[Portsmouth] responded as if he had got the whole by heart; and, if anything, was rather before the priest.”

  Byron saw the wedding as just another instance of an idiot
nobleman about to enter a joyless marriage and could hardly have known that Mary Ann rivaled her new husband for sadism. She took to beating him, kept a whip under her pillow, and installed her lover in the house, a man named William Alder, who (so the servants said) would sometimes creep into bed with Mary Ann while the earl snored at her side. At one point, Alder began torturing the earl regularly and keeping him under lock and key. Eventually, the earl regained sovereignty over his own house and banished his wife, along with the three children she had produced with no help from him. In a sensational trial after Austen’s death, the earl was accused and then acquitted of madness. He lived to eighty-four, and in his final years became a sort of crazed faux monarch who called himself the King of Hampshire.

  A few of us had heard the story before, or part of it; the Portsmouth saga appears in Claire Tomalin’s celebrated biography of Austen, but David Nokes’s biography ignores the more lurid aspects, and a lot of Janeites, even if they know about the earl, have little interest—he was just a kook in the neighborhood, of little significance because the families were not close. Others, like the lady in the blue bonnet, think of the tale as a reminder that even in bucolic Hampshire lurked deception, madness, and violence so unimaginable as to verge on comic.

  The table was silent after the tale was concluded. One gentleman had left his seat, and the lady who had put down her fork at the mention of tormented frogs began, tentatively, to eat once more.

  “But could Jane have known?”

  “Jane must certainly have known,” said Miss Blue Bonnet.

  “Jane could not—she writes about him in a letter, I forget which, and mentions nothing of—”

  “But he was at school under Jane’s father! He boarded in their house as a boy—”

  “Exactly—back when he was just a stammering bed-wetter, not the worst villain on the earth.”

  “So you don’t think General Tilney is drawn from the wicked earl?”

  “I should think the general would be much more interesting if Jane had based him on the earl. In the book he’s just a coldhearted grasper.”

  “That’s true, no one mentions him torturing the hogs.”

  “Or torturing the coachman!”

  “Though Catherine does imagine him abusing his wife.”

  I entered the fray. “He does sound like a character who might have appeared in the Juvenilia.”

  Miss Blue Bonnet looked at me as though I’d just saved her family from debtors’ prison. “My dear, exactly! I’ve said it myself. Where else could Jane have got the inspiration for those bloodthirsty villains?”

  I demurred. “Well, Swift, for one.”

  The lady considered. “Yes,” she said, “yes, Swift is there.” She paused to sip her wine. “But you must remember that Cassandra burned a lot of Jane’s letters. It is thoroughly possible”—she turned to the woman who had blanched at the frogs, and repeated—“thoroughly possible that Jane knew of the earl, and wrote all about him.” I gave a half-bow to concede the possibility.

  I was beginning to learn the secret of mealtimes in Austenworld. In some ways they offer the most gossipy and delicious interactions that world has to offer. The shared passion, the disputed biographical details, the disagreements over recipes and interpretations—these bubble during the lectures and panels but wait until a teatime pause to express themselves in full. Meals are also the most democratic part of these gatherings. At the table, one’s manners are on fullest, clearest display (are you a bad listener? do you chew with your mouth open?), but digesting in company is also democratic, a reminder of equality (we are all animals together at the trough). In Austenworld, then, meals are much more about the rank and file than about the elites. Here, conversation goes to the quick, to the bold, and to those who care the most—not to those with credentials or book deals. It’s anarchy, it’s art, it’s where the most interesting conversations happen, and where judgments are discussed, refined, and rendered without mercy.

  Meals are also the moment when Janeites of all stripes—academics, civilians, and those between the two—take time to discuss manners directly, often in reference to Austen’s Juvenilia, which contain some of my favorite scenes of etiquette, and its opposites, in all of literature. The Juvenilia were very much a hot topic at the summer camp. A month or so in advance, James had asked all attendees to read (or reread) the Juvenilia, the better to enjoy the grad students’ theatricals based on these works. They’re ruthless little things, hardly the sort of work we associate with the blushing maiden-aunt in Henry’s biographical note. The sketches, micro-novels, playlets, and epistolary excursions included in the juvenile notebooks are all quite direct in their parodies of literary convention, but in their deepest comedy they depict the barbarities of civilized life, and how the conventions of polite conversation enable and deepen those barbarities. Most people, including a lot of semipro Janeites, have never read them. To come upon the Juvenilia for the first time is a revelation of disturbing hilarity. It’s like discovering that, preparatory to his anatomical sketches, Leonardo da Vinci had dedicated himself to virtuosic cartoons of dismemberment: a primal comedy as prelude to a refined and civilized art. Austen wrote them all between the ages of twelve and sixteen, and for anyone who thinks of Austen as a mere stenographer of good manners, they are a life-giving tonic.

  The most obvious and delectable irony of these squibs is the dissonance between the refinement of the form and the soullessness of the acts described. Observe how Austen begins Henry & Eliza:

  As Sir George and Lady Harcourt were superintending the labours of their haymakers, rewarding the industry of some by smiles of approbation, and punishing the idleness of others by a cudgel, they perceived, lying closely concealed beneath the thick foliage of haycock, a beautiful little girl not more than three months old.

  Touched with the enchanting graces of her face, and delighted with the infantine though sprightly answers she returned to their many questions, they resolved to take her home, and having no children of their own, to educate her with care and cost.

  Seldom has a fairy tale about a beautiful changeling begun with such violent tyranny, so coolly described—and this deadpan, vicious sense of fun pervades the Juvenilia, through scenes of blackout drunkenness, gambling addiction, matricide and patricide. Nor should we forget cannibalism. Later on in Henry & Eliza, the heroine hurls her children out a prison window and finds herself suddenly peckish:

  But scarcely was she provided with the above-mentioned necessaries, than she began to find herself rather hungry, and had reason to think, by their biting off two of her fingers, that her children were much in the same situation.

  Whenever someone tells me that Austen is the poet laureate of table manners, I refer them to this passage. Still, it does little good. You cannot argue with someone who is resolved to find Austen anodyne and safe. Austen’s early fictions demonstrate experiments with voice that illuminate the technique of the later novels. In parodying the more tawdry romances of the earlier eighteenth century, Austen began to ventriloquize her own audience, absorbing convention and expectation into a voice that belongs to a sort of unthinking moral majority—the same sense of socially determined certainty that gives the first sentence of Pride & Prejudice its kick. These are the same entrenched norms against which Austen’s heroines must contend in the “mature” novels—think Lizzy Bennet dropping the mic on Lady Catherine in Volume III of Pride & Prejudice. In a sad bit of irony, Austen has become so associated with Empire-waist dresses and arch table talk that for many she now represents a certain set of mindless norms, her novels mere wax museums of the sanitary foibles of the gentry. But Austen’s mannered parrotry has always served a darker purpose, that of exploding apparently harmless social conventions that exist only to ensure the appearance of civility where none is felt, mechanisms that render everyone a hypocrite and sometimes precipitate the irresponsible (and unfashionable!) behavior they are meant to prevent. And yet without ritual, without community and the claustrophobia that comes
with it, we can find ourselves helpless against the ancient animal instincts.

  “We long for an age when people knew the rules of deportment, and followed them,” James said when convening the summer camp. The men and women with whom I ate throughout the camp seemed to accept this broad notion, but a lot of them justly qualified their nostalgia. After all, this was a majority-women conference, ostensibly dedicated to conjuring a period during which few to none of them would have owned property, and many would have been married off to a dullard of a clergyman, or—like one of Austen’s cousins—shipped off as a mail-order bride to an officer in the East Indies. So it makes sense that Janeites gravitate toward the Juvenilia, which seem to hint at this complicated, contradictory nostalgia for “order.” Austen’s juvenile notebooks dramatize a world of rules wherein the logic is broken. A mother notices that her children have gnawed off her fingers, and her response is merely to sigh and to make a deduction. There is a similar dismantling of apparently rational social discourse in Love & Freindship [sic], a thirty-page epistolary novella that parodies the stock melodrama of mid-eighteenth-century fantasy-romance fiction. At its heart, the passage in question is an elaborate knock-knock joke and an exercise in high nonsense that applies very well to modern-day intercourse between academics and lay readers:

  One Evening in December as my Father, my Mother and myself, were arranged in social converse round our Fireside, we were on a sudden greatly astonished, by hearing a violent knocking on the outward door of our rustic Cot.

  My father started—“What noise is that?” said he. “It sounds like a loud rapping at the door,” replied my mother. “It does indeed,” cried I. “I am of your opinion,” said my father, “it certainly does appear to proceed from some uncommon violence exerted against our unoffending door.” “Yes,” exclaimed I, “I cannot help thinking it must be somebody who knocks for admittance.”