by Helena Kelly
Where Mansfield Park featured one adopted child, Emma has three – Frank Churchill (or, rather, Frank Weston Churchill, as he signs himself), Jane Fairfax, and Harriet Smith.
Frank is the son of Mr Weston, but at the age of two is taken to live with his maternal uncle and his uncle’s wife, an informal arrangement at first, which later becomes ‘so avowed an adoption as to have him assume the name of Churchill on coming of age’. Jane Fairfax is orphaned ‘at three years old’. From the daughter of an army officer, she becomes the ‘property’ of her impoverished grandmother. Later she undergoes another change; a former colleague of her father undertakes ‘the whole charge of her education … and from that period Jane had belonged to Colonel Campbell’s family, and had lived with them entirely, only visiting her grandmother from time to time’. Harriet Smith is almost infinitely socially malleable, adapting first to the society of Mrs Goddard’s school, then to the Martins, then to Emma and Hartfield. The novel sees the potential of her marrying anybody from Robert Martin to Mr Knightley (Emma acknowledges that the latter marriage is ‘far, very far, from impossible’).
Harriet, so readily accepted by all of Highbury, turns out to be a cuckoo in the nest. Though ‘her allowance is very liberal’, though ‘nothing has ever been grudged for her improvement or comfort’, Harriet is not in fact the ‘gentleman’s daughter’ Emma assumed. Harriet’s father turns out to be a ‘tradesman, rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been hers, and decent enough to have always wished for concealment’. Her illegitimacy is ‘unbleached by nobility or wealth’. Surely the schoolteacher Mrs Goddard has done wrong in forcing her on Emma’s notice as she does? Emma is oddly complacent about the imposition – and it is an imposition: ‘a note was brought from Mrs Goddard, requesting, in most respectful terms, to be allowed to bring Miss Smith with her.’ Isn’t Mrs Goddard an echo of the ‘stout’ gipsy woman, each of them in charge of a crowd of children who aren’t their own, but who bring them money (by begging, by school fees)? Isn’t Mrs Goddard, smuggling Harriet into respectable families under false pretences, almost more like a gipsy than the gipsies are?
Is Harriet, the girl who after all doesn’t belong in society, so dissimilar to the gipsy children who surround her on the Richmond road, Cowper’s ‘wild outcasts of society’? She has no home to call her own. Nor do Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. Frank Churchill has a yen for travel; he is seldom in one place for long. Jane Fairfax can be found ‘wandering about the meadows’, gipsy-like. Are Mr Weston and Mrs Bates, who give up, respectively, son and granddaughter in order for those children to enjoy greater financial security, really any different to storybook gipsies who replace other people’s children with their own?
There are others in Highbury who are still more like the gipsies.
We know by now – we always knew, really – that the conclusions of Jane’s novels are rarely purely comic, but Emma ends on a particularly ominous note. It’s autumn. Summer is over, the harvest gathered in. The couples are all paired up. Harriet and Robert Martin marry in September, Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill are ‘only waiting for November’ (when the approved mourning period for Mrs Churchill will just about be up). Emma and Mr Knightley have ‘fixed … as far as they dared’ on ‘the intermediate month’ – October. Mr Woodhouse, however, is still causing difficulties. Emma ‘could not bear to see him suffering … could not proceed’. We’re at an impasse, until an unlikely solution presents itself:
Mrs Weston’s poultry-house was robbed one night of all her turkeys—evidently by the ingenuity of man. Other poultry-yards in the neighbourhood also suffered.—Pilfering was housebreaking to Mr Woodhouse’s fears.—He was very uneasy … The result of this distress was, that, with a much more voluntary, cheerful consent than his daughter had ever presumed to hope for … she was able to fix her wedding-day.
Readers already have reason to mistrust the purity of Mr Knightley’s motives in wanting to marry Emma. That the marriage itself is made possible only by criminal acts and an elderly man’s terror doesn’t do anything to dispel that lingering sense of unease.
There may – perhaps – be ‘perfect happiness’ waiting for Emma and Knightley, but for Mr Woodhouse, the presence of a new son-in-law is only the lesser of two evils. And what about everybody else; what about all those people Jane has spent time making real for us? What does the future hold for Highbury and Donwell?
Who does rob the local poultry-yards? The obvious answer is the gipsies. Cowper’s gipsies do it (‘cock | purloined from his accustomed perch’). It’s what happens in literature. But in Emma the gipsies are long gone by the time we get to the autumn. They go the same day that Harriet is accosted – ‘the gipsies did not wait for the operations of justice; they took themselves off in a hurry’. And Jane has told us about at least two households in Highbury who might very well be reduced to stealing.
One is the poor cottagers Emma and Harriet visit early in the novel. The other is the Abdys, fast declining through the social ranks; the younger Abdy, we learn, ‘came to talk to Mr Elton about relief from the parish; he is very well to do himself, you know, being head man at the Crown, ostler, and every thing of that sort, but still he cannot keep his father without some help’. Is any help forthcoming? We never discover. What we do discover is that Mr Elton has a great deal of parish business – ‘the magistrates, and overseers, and church wardens, are always wanting his opinion’. What do they want his opinion on? Well, on crime, on dispensing parish relief, and on organising employment for the poor. Mr Elton is busy because there’s more than one set of poor cottagers out there, more than one family like the Abdys. This is what Mr Knightley’s enclosure has done; and this is what will happen more and more, if he succeeds in his plan to obtain an Enclosure Act for Highbury. There are more people who are going to be forced to turn to crime, to become like the gipsies – thieves, beggars, outcasts from a society that no longer has a place for them.
Emma, a novel riddled with word games and anagrams, issues a challenge to its readers – just like the challenge Jane had issued to Crosby six years earlier. Are we paying sufficient attention? Have we noticed that this novel, dedicated to the Prince Regent, places its heroine’s sister in Brunswick Square, a road named in tribute to the Prince’s estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick? That Mr Elton’s contribution to Emma and Harriet’s riddle book could refer to the Prince of W(h)ales almost as easily as it does to courtship?o Are we taking our authoress seriously enough?
Nothing in the book remains a mystery if we read it carefully. Who robs the poultry-houses? The younger Abdy – or one of many others like him. Has Frank really dreamt, during his absence, about the little-known fact that the busy apothecary Mr Perry thought briefly of buying a carriage? Of course not. Jane Fairfax has passed on this snippet of local news in one of her letters; they are writing to each other. We know a little of Harriet Smith’s father, but who is her mother? Someone not altogether unconnected with the Bates family, perhaps. Miss Bates twice refers to her mother calling her Hetty, which can be short for Harriet. Where other characters speak of ‘Harriet Smith’, Miss Bates makes a point of never using Harriet’s first name. Harriet is seventeen to Jane Fairfax’s twenty, and Jane Fairfax’s mother died, we’re told, when Jane was three. It’s not proof, but the indications seem to nudge us in the direction of concluding that Harriet and Jane Fairfax may well be half-sisters.
The answers to a great number – nearly all – of these questions appear hidden in plain sight, in the long, convoluted monologues that Jane gives to Miss Bates. Miss Bates – a middle-aged spinster, one of two daughters of a dead clergyman, living in straitened circumstances with her widowed mother – is the closest to a self-portrait that Jane comes in her novels. Hardly anyone listens to her. A careless reader will skip over half of her speeches. Emma, poor, continually misguided Emma, declares at one point that ‘You will get nothing to the purpose from Miss Bates’. She’s wrong, of course.
Jane, frustrat
ed, perhaps, by the refusal of the critics to acknowledge what she’s trying to do in her novels, is making a point here – you should listen to me; what I have to say is worth hearing.
And in spite of family catastrophes and growing ill-health, this particular middle-aged spinster and clergyman’s daughter was getting ready to grapple with some of the most fundamental questions of the age. Persuasion, set during the false peace of 1814–15 – between Napoleon’s exile to Elba and his return to the French throne, only to be defeated at the Battle of Waterloo – is concerned with world events, with the collapse of dynasties, and with the upending of religious certainties. Poised (perhaps) between epochs, the novel both looks back to the past and forward to a perilous future.
Footnotes
a Based on Jane Austen’s letter to Cassandra Austen (13th–14th June 1814).
b In the event, it appears that the emperor took a different route, but it was at one point considered a very strong possibility locally.
c In her book Novel Relations (2004), Perry estimates that fuel was worth £4 a year, corn gathered from gleaning about the same, and milk and dairy products from a single cow about £9: £17 or thereabouts, at a time when a labouring man could expect to earn in the region of £20. A Political Enquiry into the Consequences of Enclosing Waste Lands, an anti-enclosure pamphlet of 1785, asserts that the women and their children using the full resources of the common land could contribute more to the family than a man in full employment (p. 43ff.).
d This passage is from the Enclosure Act for the parishes of ‘Gainsburgh’, ‘Bliton’ and Pilham in Lincolnshire, which was passed in 1796.
e This wasn’t what happened. When – as might have been anticipated – the intensification of agriculture eventually produced a glut of corn, Corn Laws were introduced to keep the price artificially high.
f Sir Frederick Morton Eden’s The state of the poor, published in 1797, and Nathaniel Kent’s 1775 Hints to gentlemen of landed property both discuss the potential harm which might result from badly-handled enclosure.
g In his General View of the Agriculture of the County of Hampshire, published in 1813, Charles Vancouver pronounced: ‘[I]t is bad policy to increase temptations to theft; the idle among the poor are already too prone to depredation, and would be still less inclined to work, if every hedge furnished the means of support.’ Hampshire is, of course, the county in which Jane lived for almost all of her 41 years; 1813 when she was starting to work on Mansfield Park.
h The second, revised, edition of 1994 drops the word in passing in the preface, in a sentence referring to landscape gardening, but the word ‘enclosure’ still fails to appear in the book’s index.
i An example is Celia Easton, who claims that ‘the enclosed kitchen garden [i.e. in Northanger Abbey] may be blissfully viewed with no evocation of the losses enclosure effected in rural villages’, and declares that Jane ‘left the political arguments about the enclosure movement behind the doors of rooms where gentlemen gathered after dinner’ (‘Jane Austen and the Enclosure Movement: The Sense and Sensibility of Land Reform’, in Persuasions 24 (2002): 71–89, p. 88.)
j Executions were far less frequent than would be assumed from the enormous number of crimes which carried the death penalty.
k This is a now-outdated form of inheritance also known as co-parceny; basically an inherited and inheritable joint tenancy.
l Both boys and girls could be married at a younger age, but in those circumstances it was possible to revoke the marriage when they were older. See William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws and Constitution of England (1765–69).
m A belief which could and did spill over from novels and poems into real life. In 1754 Mary Squires, a gipsy, had been convicted of kidnapping a young woman called Mary Canning in spite of the evidence of numerous witnesses that she had been miles away at the time.
n Jane had already, in Pride and Prejudice, encouraged her readers to think that she’d grafted some of her fictional characters onto the family tree of the Earls Fitzwilliam who, by the end of the eighteenth century, had come into possession of the great Yorkshire stately pile of Wentworth Woodhouse. We are, perhaps, meant to imagine that the Woodhouses of Hartfield are distant relations. In Persuasion Sir Walter Elliot is disappointed to discover that there are Wentworths who have ‘nothing to do’ with the family.
o For an exhaustive take on the riddle, see Colleen Sheehan’s two articles for Persuasions On-Line (www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/) – ‘Jane Austen’s “Tribute” to the Prince Regent: A Gentleman Riddled with Difficulty’, and ‘Lampooning the Prince: A Second Solution to the Second Charade in Emma’, both V.27, No. 1 (Winter 2006).
CHAPTER 7
Decline and Fall
Persuasion
Lyme Regis, September 1804.a
She could stand and watch the sea for ever. There are no dirty lodgings here, no cook needing to be physicked. There is only air and dazzling light, white foam, the sloping surface of the Cobb beneath her feet, the gulls swooping, the sea rushing and retreating, never gaining, or so it seems, on this shallow coast, until all at once the tide is in. She has been warned against the tides.
She has been warned against the cliffs, too. The cliffs look as solid as anything, but they are apt – suddenly, without warning – to collapse. They have been doing it forever. There are fragments of rocks scattered all over the beaches, too large by far for the sea to have moved them. Beyond the headland, at Pinny, there is a great landslide, the rocks having tumbled where they fell, now covered with thick vegetation, trees even. It must have happened generations ago.
Running footsteps, a thud. Then gasping sobs and, on a gulp of air, a piercing scream, totally unlike a gull. Looking down on to the lower part of the Cobb, she sees that a young girl has tripped and fallen. No one else is attending. Gathering her skirts in her hand, Jane picks her way down the steps which jut out from the wall, takes the child on to her lap, scolds, cajoles. There is no serious injury, only scraped knees and skinned hands. A handkerchief, dipped in the sea water, to wipe away the blood which beads the grubby palms and goose-pimpled legs, the pinafore set to rights, and the girl, still whimpering a little, and growing suspicious of a stranger, now ready to be set on her feet again.
Her feet are bare, and exceedingly dirty.
The girl crouches to gather up some pebbles, and, with great solemnity, presses one of them into Jane’s hand.
Only it isn’t a pebble, Jane realises, when she looks at it and sees the intricate whorls of an animal embedded in the stone. It is what they call a curiosity, here at Lyme. A snakestone. A fossil. An animal from before the Flood, or perhaps from earlier still—
Readers glancing through a newspaper or magazine towards the end of 1812 might, amid the reports of battles and bankruptcies, have come across this paragraph, widely reproduced in the press:
PETRIFACTION OF A CROCODILE. – Immediately after the late high tide, there was discovered under the cliffs between Lyme-Regis and Charmouth, the complete petrifaction of a crocodile, seventeen feet in length, in an imperfect state. It was dug out of the cliffs nearly on a level with the sea, at the depth of one hundred feet below the summit of the cliff.
The ‘crocodile’ was not in fact a crocodile at all but what we call an ichthyosaur, a name coined for it in 1817. The skull of this first specimen had been discovered in 1811. Two local fossil hunters had spent months labouring together with the storms and the autumn tides to reveal the rest of the skeleton; difficult and dangerous work, the more so since one was a boy in his early teens, and the other a girl even younger.
The boy was Joseph Anning, the girl his sister Mary. They’d both been bred to the business of fossils. Before his death in 1810 their father Richard had run a stall selling fossils to tourists, a sideline to his main business, which was cabinet-making. Mary Anning would go on to excavate a vast collection of fossil remains, including the first complete plesiosaur, and the first British example of a pterodactyl. An 1830 engraving
, Duria Antiquior (A more ancient Dorset), shows the variety of her finds. She corresponded with men of science from all over Europe. Georges Cuvier, the pre-eminent anatomist of the day, thought her plesiosaur must be a fake; he was convinced otherwise. She was recognised as a leading authority, and her expertise was eventually rewarded with small annuities collected by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Geological Society, and a donation organised by the prime minister.
Such recognition, for a woman almost entirely self-educated, who came from a non-conformist background, and had been reliant on parish relief, is extraordinary. It’s more extraordinary than the legend that Mary Anning survived being struck by lightning as a baby, perhaps in some ways even more extraordinary than her discoveries. It’s not all that hard to find fossils in Lyme. The town lies in the south-west of England, on the ‘Jurassic coast’ – nearly a hundred miles of Devon and Dorset coastline which was once prehistoric sea-bed. The cliffs around Lyme are composed for the most part of a rock called blue lias; clayey, soft, crumbling, prone to collapse. Blue lias is rich in fossils – abundantly, exuberantly rich. Stepping off the Cobb, the stone harbour, onto the beach, you can find yourself almost tripping over them. Ammonites and belemnites lie in the open, undisguised, or waiting only for a few gentle taps from one of the geological hammers you can buy in every shop to reveal themselves; the twists and coils of ancient sea-creatures, relics of another world entirely.