by Jane Austen
cruel Murder of her Brother … 14s: ‘Murder’ implies something other than death by duelling. Although to kill in the course of a duel was formally judged as murder, the courts were generally lax in applying the law. 14s. is an absurdly small amount of money to seek as recompense.
privately married: Sir William is seventeen at the beginning of the tale; it seems unlikely that he has by now reached the age of twenty-one and obtained a licence for a private marriage, in which case the union is invalid (cf. ‘Henry & Eliza’, note to p. 29).
Chariot: ‘Applied in 18th c. to a light four-wheeled carriage with only back seats, and differing from the post-chaise in having a coach-box’ (OED); it seated up to three passengers.
Brook Street: a fashionable London street, running from Hanover Square to Grosvenor Square. Like Portland Place (‘Frederic & Elfrida’, note to p. 6), it often features as a novelistic backdrop; in e.g. The Assignation. A Sentimental Novel, Edmond Harcourt writes: ‘The morning after we arrive in Brook Street is to compose [my] happiness’ (ii, 112).
Mr Clifford
36 Charles John Austen Esqre … noble Family: this ‘unfinished tale’, like the incomplete ‘Sir William Mountague’, was perhaps written in late 1788; ‘patronage’ and ‘yr noble Family’ comically suggest that Charles, a younger sibling of the author, is in a position to offer her financial support.
Coach & Four: a large, closed carriage, drawn by four horses and seating up to six passengers.
Chaise: ‘A carriage for travelling, having a closed body and seated for one to three persons, the driver sitting on one of the horses’ (OED).
Landeau: ‘A four-wheeled carriage, the top of which, being made in two parts, may be closed or thrown open. When open, the rear part is folded back, and the front part entirely removed. Also landau carriage’ (OED). A landeau carried four passengers.
Landeaulet: ‘A small landau; a coupé with a folding top like a landau. Also called demi-landau’ (OED); for two or three passengers. Cf. ‘a very pretty landaulette’ in P, ch. 24.
Phaeton: ‘A type of light four-wheeled open carriage, usually drawn by a pair of horses, and having one or two seats facing forward’ (OED); these vehicles were fast and expensive and driven by the owner.
Gig: ‘A light two-wheeled one-horse carriage’ (OED), fashionable in the 1790s.
Whisky: ‘A kind of light two-wheeled one-horse carriage, used in England and America in the late 18th and early 19th c.’ (OED). Relatively cheap and simple in construction, the whisky was named for its speed in ‘whisking’ past larger carriages.
italian Chair: a light, one-horse carriage without a top, used only for short jaunts.
Buggy: ‘A light one-horse (sometimes two-horse) vehicle, for one or two persons’ (OED).
Curricle: ‘A light two-wheeled carriage, usually drawn by two horses abreast’ (OED), more expensive and genteel than the gig; Henry Tilney in NA, Willoughby in S&S, and Mr Darcy in P&P all drive gigs.
wheel barrow: any sort of light, cheap carriage, or (as now) a small cart with a single wheel at the front, used typically for carrying loads in building work or gardening.
stud: ‘An establishment in which stallions and mares are kept for breeding. Also, the stallions and mares kept in such an establishment’ (OED).
Bays: reddish-brown horses with black manes, tails, ear edges, and lower legs.
poney: a small, inexpensive horse of any breed. JA’s brother Francis apparently bought a pony at the age of seven and later sold him for a profit (Memoir, 36).
Devizes: a Wiltshire market town, about 22 (or ‘no less than nineteen’) miles east of Bath, and a staging post en route to London. In a coach and four Mr Clifford could easily travel the 110 miles from Bath to London in two days, but it takes him eighteen hours to travel just 22 miles.
Overton: a Hampshire town 3 miles from Steventon and a staging post on the main route between London and Exeter; JA’s brother James became the curate there in Apr. 1790. It is about 50 miles from Devizes; Mr Clifford is travelling around 17 miles per day.
37 Five months … celebrated Physician: like everything else he does, Mr Clifford’s recovery takes an absurdly long time. Overton’s apothecary is listed in the Universal British Directory of Trade, Commerce, and Manufacture, 5 vols. (1790–8) as Robert Brookman (iv, 186); he is both ‘celebrated’ and unnamed by JA. She inflates his profession to that of a physician, who would have had a university degree. An apothecary, by contrast, dispensed medicines and learned his trade through an apprenticeship.
Dean Gate: the entry to Deane, 3 miles east of Overton; this was the location of Deane Gate Inn, at the junction of the lane to Steventon, which lay just over a mile and a quarter away. JA’s brothers and other friends and relatives used this stop when travelling to and from Steventon Rectory.
Basingstoke: the largest and most important town near Steventon, 5½ miles east of Deane; Mr Clifford has taken four days to travel a mere 6 miles.
Clarkengreen … Worting: Clarken Green, a village about 2 miles east of Deane Gate; Worting is another village, about 2 miles closer to Basingstoke.
Mr Robins’s: Thomas Robins was landlord of the Crown Inn and Post House at Basingstoke (Family Record, 63); in the Universal Directory he is listed as ‘Post-master’ and the Crown is described as one of the two ‘best inns’ in town. Universal British Directory, ii, 316, 318.
The beautifull Cassandra
37 Miss Austen: Cassandra Elizabeth Austen (1773–1845), JA’s elder sister and therefore known as ‘Miss Austen’; JA was ‘Miss Jane Austen’. The name Cassandra appears nowhere else in JA’s fiction.
Phoenix: ‘In classical mythology: a bird resembling an eagle but with sumptuous red and gold plumage, which was said to live for five or six hundred years in the deserts of Arabia, before burning itself to ashes on a funeral pyre ignited by the sun and fanned by its own wings, only to rise from its ashes with renewed youth to live through another such cycle’; figuratively, ‘A person or thing of unique excellence or matchless beauty; a paragon’ (OED), and novelistic cant. Cf. All’s Right at Last: or, The History of Miss West, 2 vols. (1774): ‘But she, forsooth, is such a nonpareil, such a phœnix of a woman!’ (ii, 60).
38 Millener in Bond Street: milliners designed, made, and sold caps and hats, trimmings, accessories, and articles of female clothing. They were highly sought-after advisers on and arbiters of fashion, but those who worked in their shops also had a dubious reputation as flirts and gossips, perhaps even prostitutes (see e.g. John Gay’s Trivia; or the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716) (bk 3, ll. 267–84) and Charles Brandoin’s prints ‘A Modern Demi-Rep on the Lookout’ and ‘The Charming Milliner of——Street’ (1771)). Milliners’ shops were located in fashionable areas of London such as Bond Street (Willoughby stays here in S&S, ch. 29; Harriet’s picture is framed here in E, ch. 7).
Pastry-cooks … six ices: the first record of ice-cream in England dates from 1667, but it was not widely available until the second half of the 18th century, popularized by French and Italian confectioners who set up shops in London in the 1760s. Ice-cream and water-ices were sold by pastry cooks, as in NA (ch. 15). They were pricey, due to the expense and complication of making them from ice stored in ice-houses all year round, and the need to keep them cool; in later life, JA boasted ‘I shall eat Ice & drink French wine, & be above Vulgar Economy’ (Letters, 144).
39 Hackney Coach: ‘A four-wheeled coach, drawn by two horses, and seated for six persons, kept for hire’ (OED).
Hampstead: a fashionable village around 4 miles north of Bond Street and with famously beautiful walks and views over London. Some key scenes in Clarissa are set here and their locations were visited by literary tourists. Cassandra, however, does not bother to look around.
demanded his Pay: the fare would have been about 5s. for a round trip of 8 miles.
She placed her bonnet on his head: an act of sheer defiance, but also a form of payment; the bonnet would have cost a great deal more than
the coach fare. Difficulties in paying a coach fare preoccupy Burney’s Cecilia (bk 10, ch. 7).
Bloomsbury Square: laid out in the 1660s and initially known as Southampton Square, this was one of the first London squares and a very fashionable address in 18th-century London. It fell out of favour with the upper classes in the early 19th century.
40 her less window: that is, a window smaller than the widow’s head. Like Sir Godfrey and his Lady in ‘Edgar & Emma’ (see note to p. 24), the widow must be living in one of the cheaper upper-storey rooms of the house: these had narrower windows than the better rooms lower down.
Amelia Webster
41 Mrs Austen: Cassandra Leigh Austen (1739–1827), JA’s mother, a fan of novels, who also wrote comic verse. This may be one of JA’s earliest surviving stories (Family Record, 66).
Matilda: a name associated with the heroines of Gothic fiction, as in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, A Story (dated 1765 [pub. 1764]) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk: A Romance, 3 vols. (1796). Cf. also the imaginary heroine of Henry Tilney’s Gothic narrative in NA (ch. 20).
Beverley: the surname of the heroine in Burney’s Cecilia and of Captain Absolute in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), a play performed by the Austen family at Steventon in July 1784; it has romantic and pastoral associations.
Maud: an alternative form of Matilda.
two thousand Pounds: a dowry which, assuming the usual 5% rate of interest, would yield £100 per annum. As this is a relatively modest amount, Matilda’s brother is on the defensive and keen to point out that Beverley himself is in line for money from other sources (‘as much as you can get’).
my paper will only permit me to add: like other formulas used in this exchange of letters, the phrasing is trite and banal—made more explicitly so by the fact that the letter is so short.
42 Miss S. Hervey: the initial distinguishes the younger from the elder sister; Matilda would be known as ‘Miss Hervey’.
a very convenient old hollow oak … private Correspondence: hidden repositories for letters, allowing for the covert exchange of messages, were another stock device in 18th-century epistolary fiction, including Pamela and Clarissa. It would be reasonable to assume from this correspondence that Benjamin and Sally are engaged to be married (as the end of the tale reveals); in S&S, Elinor concludes from the fact that Marianne is writing to Willoughby that ‘they must be engaged’ (ch. 26).
my Paper, reminds me of concluding: another hackneyed conclusion to a letter; cf. Lucy Steele in S&S: ‘My paper reminds me to conclude’ (ch. 38).
lovely Fair one … telescope: cf. ‘Lovely and too charming fair one’ in ‘Frederic & Elfrida’. Advances in the design and manufacture of telescopes brought them into popular domestic use in the late 18th century; they were heralded for their educational value and religious application, encouraging young people to admire the scope of divine creation rather than passing strangers of the opposite sex. However, the opportunities for such ogling were obvious and featured in contemporary fiction. In The Summer-House: or, The History of Mr. Morton and Miss Bamsted, 2 vols. (1768), a young gentleman ‘increase[s] the pleasures of vision’ when he trains ‘his uplifted tube’ on the passing Almeria, who in turn ‘could not get the telescope out of her head’ (i, 52–3).
The Visit
44 Revd James Austen: JA’s eldest brother, James (1765–1819), was ordained deacon in Dec. 1787 and a priest in June 1789 (Family Record, 53, 71). From 1782 to 1789 he oversaw the Austen family’s dramatic performances at Steventon, often supplying prologues and epilogues.
‘The school for Jealousy’ and ‘The travelled Man’: the titles recall many 18th-century plays, especially Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777) and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Good-Natur’d Man (1768)—Goldsmith also wrote a philosophical poem The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society (1764), so ‘The travelled Man’ could be splicing the two works as well as referring to James’s recent travels abroad. These two comic dramas may have been written by James Austen or by JA herself for family theatricals at Steventon; in the dedication, JA referred to ‘they’, subsequently altered to ‘it’, when describing the dramatic work ‘composed by your Humble Servant the Author’ (see Textual Notes, p. 224). ‘The school for Jealousy’ could derive from or relate to the libretto of Antonio Salieri’s opera La scola de’ gelosi, performed in London in Mar. 1786.
Curate: ‘A clergyman engaged for a stipend or salary, and licensed by the bishop of the diocese to perform ministerial duties in the parish as a deputy or assistant of the incumbent; an assistant to a parish priest’ (OED); Johnson’s Dictionary defines a curate as ‘a clergyman hired to perform the duties of another’. The reference here is either to James’s curacy at Stoke Charity, near Winchester, which began in July 1788, or to that at Overton (near Steventon), beginning in Apr. 1790.
first composed: the phrasing suggests that the dedication was added after the play’s initial composition.
Cloe: the name of a shepherdess, it originates in the Greek pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloe and became popular in later pastoral and mock-pastoral writing.
you found your Bed too short: alluding to the Greek legend of Procrustes, who offered his bed to strangers and then either lopped or stretched their bodies in order to ensure a good fit.
45 ‘The more free, the more Wellcome’: probably alluding to a moment in James Townley’s farce High Life Below Stairs (1759), performed by the Austen family in winter 1788. Kitty declares: ‘Lady Charlotte, pray be free; the more free, the more welcome, as they say in my Country’ (act 2); the aristocratic characters then announce their enthusiasm for the type of coarse food normally eaten by the poor. But the saying must also have been proverbial, judging by its use in the very different context of W. A. Clarke’s meditative religious text A Bed of Sweet Flowers; or, Jewels for Hephzi-Bah (1778): ‘You never need to apologize to me for your freedom; “the more free, the more welcome,” you know, is my old motto amongst the friends of the Bridegroom’ (125).
discovered: that is, ‘revealed’; a stage direction indicating that the characters are already in place on stage when the curtain opens. The same word appears in ‘The Mystery’ (p. 50).
Truth: JA here deleted two more sentences in which Miss Fitzgerald praises her brother more lavishly (see Textual Notes, p. 224).
Exeunt Severally: a stage direction, indicating that characters leave the stage by different exits rather than together as one group.
46 Chairs … row: this arrangement suggests an old-fashioned and formal household, an impression compromised by the foreshortened beds, insufficient number of chairs, and vulgar food.
ought to be 8 Chairs … pretty well: cf. ‘Frederic & Elfrida’ (p. 6), which has a similar joke about chairs and men sitting in ladies’ laps, alluding to The Vicar of Wakefield.
cherub … seraph: the seraphim are the highest, and the cherubim the second, of the nine orders or ‘choirs’ of angels. Cherubs were said to excel in knowledge, seraphs in love.
47 Miss Fitzgerald at top. Lord Fitzgerald at bottom.: the female and male hosts sit, as would have been expected, at the head and foot of the dinner table, with their guests seated according to rank (the highest closest to the hosts, the lowest furthest away).
47 fried Cow heel & Onion: arrestingly coarse food to serve at a smart dinner party, this was the fare of those who could not afford any better (cow-heel or trotters would more usually be stewed to make jelly). In Thomas Bridges’ Homer Travestie: Being a New Translation of the Four First Books of the Iliad (1762), the author recalls: ‘I went on swimmingly, with hot tripe for dinner one day, and cold the next; hot cow-heel the third day, and cold cow-heel the fourth; and so on, with a fine pease-soup on Sundays, and a red herring boiled in it to give it a flavour’ (30). Tripe, cow-heel, and pudding figure in subsequent, expanded versions of this comically degraded epic. At the Fitzgeralds’ dinner party, JA reverses the premiss of High Life Below Stairs, in which servants impersona
te aristocrats; here, as in ‘Edgar & Emma’, the wealthy live a comically straitened existence.
toss off a bumper: down a full glass of wine in one go, rather than sip it gradually.
Elder wine or Mead: inexpensive home-made alternatives to French wines, using elderberries in the first case and a fermented mixture of honey and water in the second. JA’s family made their own wine.
warm ale … nutmeg: a drink for an invalid rather than for the young and vital Sophy Hampton, and in any case not to be served at a dinner party.
red herrings: herrings turn red when cured by smoking; they were considered less valuable than white or fresh herring. Red herrings were supposedly used by fugitives to put bloodhounds off their scent, hence the metaphoric sense of a false lead, which seems to date from the 1780s.
Tripe: ‘The first or second stomach of a ruminant, esp. of the ox, prepared as food; formerly including also the entrails of swine and fish’ (OED). Food eaten by the poor.
Crow: giblets (rather than crow, the carrion bird which was not eaten in England), typically fried with liver. Food eaten by the poor.
Suet pudding: a homely pudding made of flour and suet (animal fat), usually boiled in a cloth.
48 Desert: dessert, fruit and nuts, served after the pudding.
Hothouse: ‘A greenhouse kept artificially heated for the cultivation of plants from warmer climates, and of native flowers and fruits out of season’ (OED); here, grapes, oranges, and pineapples could be grown. In NA, General Tilney has ‘a village of hot-houses’ (ch. 22).
Come Girls, let us circulate the Bottle: a gender reversal. The women are hearty drinkers and pass the wine (probably claret, as favoured by Alice in ‘Jack & Alice’, note to p. 15) around the table, as men would normally have been expected to do after dinner, when the women had adjourned to the drawing room. Neither Stanly nor Arthur ‘touches wine’ in JA’s playlet.