by Jane Austen
CHAPTER XII
1. thorough bass: A bass line with figures indicating the harmonies which the player must realize by improvisation in the upper part. The term came also to mean the study of harmony in general.
CHAPTER XIII
1. entailed away from your own children: See note I, vii: 1.
2. preferred: To be granted a parish of ‘living’ (see note I, xv: 2).
3. demean: Austen plays, perhaps, with the two possible meanings recorded by Johnson: ‘1. to behave; to carry one’s self. 2. to lessen; to debase; to undervalue’.
4. se’night: Also ‘se’nnight’. Johnson: ‘the space of seven days and nights; a week’.
CHAPTER XIV
1. aspect: In the sense of Johnson’s second definition: ‘Countenance; look’.
2. quadrille: Card game played by four people with a pack of forty cards. Quadrille is a variation of ombre, which Belinda plays with the Baron in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, and gave way in turn to whist. (See also note I, vi: 4.)
3. phaeton: A four-wheeled open carriage with an elevated seat for the driver and one passenger.
4. presented: To the king and so to the highest society. Mrs Bennet will be working from the Court List rather than personal knowledge.
5. Fordyce’s Sermons: James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women, first published in 1766, was a popular conduct book, frequently reprinted between 1790 and 1810. Like Mr Collins, Fordyce is particularly vehement about the majority of novels: ‘there seem to be very few, in the style of Novel, that you can read with safety, and yet fewer that you can read with advantage. – What shall we say of certain books, which we are assured (for we have not read them) are in their nature so shameful, in their tendency so pestiferous, and contain such rank treason against the royalty of Virtue, such horrible violation of all decorum, that she who can bear to peruse them must in her soul be a prostitute, let her reputation in life be what it will. But can it be true – say, ye chaste stars, that with innumerable eyes inspect the midnight behaviour of mortals – can it be true, that any young woman, pretending to decency, should endure for a moment to look on this infernal brood of futility and lewdness?’ (3rd edition 1766, Vol. I, pp. 148–9). Mary Wollstonecraft attacks Fordyce’s Sermons in Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
CHAPTER XV
1. belonged to one of the universities…necessary terms: It was virtually impossible to be ordained without a degree from either Oxford or Cambridge but increasingly difficult to gain admission to the universities as the practice of giving free board and lodging to poor scholars was becoming less common. Once admitted, getting a degree demanded little more than fulfilling residence requirements, and many young men used university mainly as an opportunity to make useful contacts.
2. living: The benefice, or position and property, of a Church of England clergyman. At the end of the eighteenth century there were 11,600 benefices in England and Wales, over half of which were in the gift of private landowners or the Crown. Livings were often secured through family relationships, and the Church was a useful career (rather than a vocation) for well-born younger sons – as Austen was well aware: her father and two of her brothers were clergymen. A living meant a house and an annual income derived from tithes (see note I, xviii: 1), or from the glebe land belonging to the church, which could vary from £100 to nearer £1,000 a year. Many clergymen held more than one living, and the clergy increasingly acted as a rural managerial class for the landed gentry. The wealthier ones were themselves typical members of the ‘pseudo-gentry’ (see General Note 1, above).
3. one of the largest folios in the collection: A folio is a book printed on large-size paper and therefore expensive.
4. a really new muslin: A fairly new fabric at the time, a product of Britain’s rule in India, muslin was finely woven cotton, came in a variety of textures and patterns and washed well. The end of the eighteenth century saw a shift from stiff and richly coloured silks to light, thin cottons and linens in white or pale colours and to simple, high-waisted dresses inspired by the draperies of classical statues. The muslin in question would be a length of cloth bought to be made up.
5. commission: As an officer. We learn in I, xv that he is a lieutenant, a subaltern officer ranking next below a captain.
6. lottery tickets: ‘A round game at cards, in which prizes are obtained by the holders of certain cards’ (OED). (See also note I, vi: 4.)
CHAPTER XVI
1. chimney-piece: £800 was a fabulous price for a chimney-piece. It must have been commissioned from the great chimney-piece maker Carter, whose clients included the Adam brothers.
2. their own indifferent imitations of china: Decorative feminine accomplishments included painting plain crockery with imitations of the designs on fine china.
CHAPTER XVII
1. Interested: In the sense of OED definition 2: ‘influenced by considerations of personal advantage; moved by self-interest’.
2. shrubbery: An increasingly popular feature of garden design, shrubberies provided different walks on gravel paths and allowed privacy while still close to the social world of the house. In Mansfield Park, Fanny praises a new shrubbery as combining utility and ornament (chapter 22). (See also note III, i: 2.)
3. venturing to dance: Though he is sanctimonious, Mr Collins is not of the strict Evangelical persuasion which became increasingly influential within the Church in the early nineteenth century and which would have frowned on dancing and card-playing.
4. shoe-roses: Decorations for dancing shoes.
CHAPTER XVIII
1. tythes: Also spelt ‘tithes’ – a tenth of the gross income from all cultivated land within a parish, to which clergymen were entitled. By the early nineteenth century the negotiation of tithes with landowners and tenant farmers could be a complex and time-consuming business.
2. settlements: Legal agreements granting money or property. Here, arrangements for a wife’s dowry and personal income.
CHAPTER XIX
1. one thousand pounds in the 4 per cents.: The ‘four per cents’ were government funds yielding interest which provided an annual disposable income – in this case of very modest proportions. See Edward Copeland, ‘What is a Competence? Jane Austen, Her Sister Novelists, and the 5%s’, Modern Language Studies 9:3 (1979), 161–8.
2. economy: In the sense of Johnson’s first definition: ‘the management of a family; the government of a household’.
3. rational creature: Cf. Mary Wollstonecraft in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): ‘My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone’ (ed. Miriam Brody, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996, p. 81).
CHAPTER XXI
1. hot pressed paper: Fine, expensive writing paper which had gone through the extra production process of hot pressing to make it smooth.
2. Grosvenor street: Just south of Oxford Street, in the fashionable residential area of London.
3. two full courses: Dinner could be a very elaborate meal. A full course involved not just the main dish but also a large number of ‘removes’ – i.e., dishes which were changed while the rest of the course remained.
CHAPTER XXII
1. coming out: A young girl’s official entry into society and, therefore, marriageability.
Volume Two
CHAPTER II
1. Gracechurch Street: In the City of London, the commercial area about two miles east of the fashionable residential area where the Hursts live.
CHAPTER IV
1. the Lakes: The Lake District in the north-west of England, already a popular tourist destination by the late eighteenth century, and the subject of many picturesque travel guides, most famously William Gilpin’s Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on several parts of England; particularly the Mountains, and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmoreland (1786).
(See notes I, x: 3 and II, xix: 1.)
2. transport: In the sense of Johnson’s third definition: ‘rapture; ecstasy’. Elizabeth’s outburst in favour of nature rather than humanity is, perhaps, a relic of First Impressions, which might have been a more explicitly satirical novel along the lines of Northanger Abbey.
CHAPTER VI
1. placing a screen in the proper direction: To shield her from the direct heat of the fire.
2. you must have been neglected: This exchange between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine alludes to a number of contentious issues in contemporary debates about female education. As befits her class, and in common with many contemporary commentators, Lady Catherine prefers a private education at home to boarding school (see note I, iv: 3) and is alarmed at the prospect of girls being allowed any degree of freedom. Her suggestion that their mother must have been a ‘slave’ to the Bennet girls’ education reflects on both women, however. Cf. J. L. Chirol, An Enquiry into the Best System of Female Education; or, Boarding School and Home Education Attentively Considered (1809): ‘What! is the most sacred duty – a duty imposed upon every mother by nature, religion, society, and private interest – a duty, on the strict performance of which depend the constitution, the temper, the disposition, the happiness of your daughters in this world, and in the world to come – a duty, the performance of which is attended with the most exquisite and permanent pleasure, – is this duty, slavery?’ (p. 157).
3. well placed out: The position of governess, like that of paid companion, was one of very few jobs available for educated women who needed to support themselves, and it could be very difficult. Within a household, the governess was neither a member of the family nor, strictly, a servant, and she was often poorly paid. Chirol, for example (see previous note), makes a plea for proper remuneration and for the establishing of a seminary for training governesses. Cf. Emma, where Emma’s governess Miss Taylor (Mrs Weston) has been an important positive influence and a close friend but where Jane Fairfax dreads the prospect of becoming a governess.
4. cassino: A card game in which the ten of diamonds (the great cassino) counts for two points and the two of spades (the little cassino) counts one; the aim is to score 11. (See also note I, vi: 4.)
CHAPTER VII
1. gig: An open two-wheeled carriage with a seat for the driver and one passenger and sometimes a groom’s seat behind.
2. commission of the peace: Made up of magistrates (distinct from justices) appointed by special commission from among the rural landed gentry to keep the peace.
CHAPTER XII
1. Ramsgate: A fashionable seaside resort on the south coast of Kent.
CHAPTER XIV
1. Barouche box: The barouche was a four-wheeled carriage with a collapsible top. The box was where the driver sat.
2. travelling post: i.e., in the carriages that carried the mail, changing at designated stations en route.
CHAPTER XVI
1. the sentinel on guard: Another sign of the military presence in southern England in response to the perceived threat of a French invasion.
2. Brighton: A very fashionable move. Brighton was dominated for almost forty years, from 1783 until 1820, by the Prince Regent and his entourage. The reference to the military camp gives a flavour of the late eighteenth century, when the novel was first drafted: in 1793, 1794 and 1795 Brighton was the site of one of the largest militia camps on the south coast.
CHAPTER XVIII
1. exposed herself: Made an exhibition of herself. Cf. Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women (see note I, xiv: 5): ‘The beauty that obtrudes itself, how considerable soever, will either disgust, or at most excite but inferior desires…The retiring graces have been always the most attractive’ (Vol. I, p. 96).
2. peculiar: In the now infrequent sense of ‘particular, individual’.
CHAPTER XIX
1. Matlock, Chatsworth, Dovedale, or the Peak: All described in Gilpin’s Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (see note II, iv: 1). In the ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ prefacing the posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818, Jane Austen’s brother Henry records that ‘at a very early age she was enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque’. But the text here is more interested in personal histories (Mrs Gardiner’s home town and the visit to Pemberley) than in conventional tourist routes, giving the lie to Elizabeth’s earlier Romantic outburst in favour of ‘rocks and mountains’ rather than ‘men’ (II, iv). Gilpin describes Dovedale as ‘a calm, sequestered scene; and yet not wholly the haunt of solitude, and contemplation’ (Vol. II, p. 231).
2. a few petrified spars: Specimens of fossilized wood.
3. teaching them, playing with them, and loving them: Jane’s ‘sense and sweetness of temper’ make her an ideal practitioner of a liberal, Rousseauistic, educational regime balancing learning, play and affection.
4. Oxford, Blenheim, etc.: The Gardiners follow closely Gilpin’s route in Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (see note II, xix: 1), except that from Birmingham he goes north through Manchester and Lancaster to the Lakes, returning via Chatsworth, Matlock and Dovedale.
5. great houses: Far from being a modern phenomenon, tourist visits to ‘stately homes’ became popular in the eighteenth century, and guide books, illustrated with prints and giving details of the owners, were published. See, for example, Seats of the Nobility and Gentry in Great Britain and Wales, Engraved by W. Angus. From Pictures and Drawings by the most Eminent Artists (London, 1787).
Volume Three
CHAPTER I
1. abruptness: Of landscape, ‘roughness, cragginess’ (Johnson).
2. so little counteracted by an awkward taste: Critics have argued about whether Pemberley is meant to suggest Chatsworth, but it seems unlikely, since Chatsworth is listed separately as one of the places visited by the Gardiner party, and Gilpin’s description (see note II, xix: 1) of eighteenth-century Chatsworth is unenthusiastic: ‘Chatsworth was the glory of the last age, when trim parterres, and formal waterworks were in fashion…when we saw it, it’s invirons [sic] had not kept pace with the improvements of the times. Many of the old formalities remained’ (Vol. II, p. 220). After the construction of a water-garden at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the landscape gardening at Chatsworth was carried out largely in the mid-nineteenth century.
But the difference between Chatsworth’s formal gardens and the picturesque garden design, attentive to natural forms, which characterizes Pemberley raises questions more interesting than those of mere factual identification. In describing Pemberley Austen draws on a vast eighteenth-century tradition of moralized landscape design in which an appropriate balance of nature and art, beauty and use is the sign of a properly responsible moral outlook. Significant literary examples include Pope’s fourth Moral Essay, ‘Epistle to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington’ (1731), and Samuel Richardson’s description of Sir Charles’s taste in Sir Charles Grandison (1733–4): ‘he studies situation and convenience; and pretends not to level hills, or to force and distort nature; but to help it, as he finds it, without letting art be seen in his works, where he can possibly avoid it’ (Part 2, Vol. III, Letter XXIII, Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1986, pp. 160–61).
Cf. Mansfield Park, where Fanny is horrified by Mr Rushworth’s plans to ‘improve’ his estate, particularly to cut down an avenue of ancient oak trees, with no sensitivity to nature or history (chapter 6).
3. neither gaudy nor uselessly fine: The taste with which the interior of Pemberley is decorated is in keeping with the grounds, and there might well be another contrast, besides that with Rosings, implicit here: Pemberley’s elegant family interior is very different from the dazzling display of European art treasures, collected by the fifth Duke of Devonshire, which could be seen at Chatsworth.
4. said Mrs Reynolds, pointing to another of the miniatures: The name of Pemberley’s housekeeper, who paints such an important verbal portrait of Darcy, and who shows the family portraits to
the visitors, is perhaps a jokey allusion to Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great eighteenth-century portrait painter, whose Discourses on Art (1769–90) were extremely influential in the development of aesthetic theory and artistic taste.
5. gratitude: Cf. pp. 253, 265. According to John Gregory (see note I, vi: 3), gratitude was the most likely basis of love for a woman: ‘What is commonly called love among you is rather gratitude, and a partiality to the man who prefers you to the rest of your sex;…this gratitude rises into a preference, and this preference perhaps at last advances to some degree of attachment, especially if it meets with crosses and difficulties…If attachment was not excited in your sex in this manner, there is not one of a million of you that could ever marry with any degree of Love’ (A Father’s Legacy, pp. 80–83).
CHAPTER II
1. curricle: Like a gig, an open carriage with two wheels and a seat for the driver and one passenger.
CHAPTER III
1. grapes, nectarines, and peaches: Luxuries which would be grown in greenhouses on the estate.
2. brown and coarse: Pale complexions were most fashionable at this period.
CHAPTER IV
1. an express: ‘A messenger sent on purpose’ (Johnson).
2. to Scotland: i.e., she has eloped to Gretna Green, the first town beyond the Scottish border. Marriage in Scotland was not subject to residence requirements as in England. (See also notes III, iv: 5 and III, xvii: 3.)
3. Clapham: Then a village outside London to the south.
4. no such people had been seen to pass through: Colonel Forster’s attempt to trace Wickham and Lydia through their use of public transport anticipates more extensive narrative uses of such detective tactics in, particularly, nineteenth-century novels. Chaises and hackney coaches could be privately hired, but both would use the ‘post’ stations (usually inns in towns or villages) where horses were changed.
5. married privately: i.e., by securing a bishop’s licence. After ‘Hardwicke’s’ Marriage Act of 1753 marriages were valid only if performed with parental consent for those under the age of twenty-one, and by an ordained Anglican clergyman after the calling of banns or the purchase of a licence from a bishop or his surrogate. In both cases, at least one of the couple had to be resident for at least three weeks in the parish concerned. (See also note III, xvii: 3, and John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 140–42.).