by Jane Austen
206 the Anchor: a popular name for an inn.
Westgate Builgs: Westgate Buildings, towards the lower end of Bath, where the Austen family considered taking lodgings and where Mrs Smith lives in P. Sir Walter Elliot associates the address with ‘low company, paltry rooms, foul air’ (ch. 17).
207 the White horse Inn: like ‘the Anchor’, a popular name for a public house.
[Continuation of Evelyn, by Anna Lefroy]
round-Robin of perpetual peace: ‘A document … having the names of the signatories arranged in a circle so as to disguise the order in which they have signed. Later more generally: any document of this type signed by many people, freq. in alphabetical order to indicate that responsibility is shared’ (OED, ‘round robin’, sense III.8.a). The Austen family may have considered it a nautical term: the ‘round robin’ was apparently invented by sailors. (The modern sense of a letter of news, sent in multiple copies to friends and relatives on a special occasion, seems to begin in the 1870s.)
enjoyment had no End, and calamity no commencement: on JA’s comic alliteration, see ‘Frederic & Elfrida’, note to p. 5; ‘Collection of Letters’, note to p. 134; ‘A Tour through Wales’, note to p. 156.
Did she not dart … gracefully reclined … precipitate herself into his arms?: novelistic cant; cf. JA’s ‘The Mystery’, in which Sir Edward Spangle is ‘reclined in an elegant Attitude’ (p. 51) and ‘Love and Friendship’, in which Augustus ‘gracefully purloined’ a large sum of money from his father (p. 78). See also e.g. The Unfortunate Lovers; A Story Founded on Facts, trans. George Wright (1798)—an abridgement of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther—in which a female ‘stranger to virtue’ is said to be willing to ‘precipitate herself into the arms of another’ (59).
breathe forth as it were by installments: such jokey exchanges of book time with real time are an Austen family idiom; cf. JA’s letter to Cassandra of 5 Sept. 1796: ‘Give my Love to Mary Harrison, & tell her I wish whenever she is attached to a young Man, some respectable Dr Marchmont may keep them apart for five Volumes’ (Letters, 9).
Ah, Who? Vain Echo! vain sympathy!: novelistic cant, hence the vain echo of a vain echo; see e.g. ‘ah! how vain, how still less satisfactory are riches! She made many more reflections of the same nature’ (The History of Miss Pamela Howard, i, 12); ‘Vain, vain delusive hopes, whither, ah! whither are you fled?’ (The History of Miss Melmoth, i, 264, letter 33).
a mahogany ruler: in the early 19th century, most rulers were made of wood; some were carved from bone or (the most expensive kind) from ivory. This is hardly a surprising or fatal item to discover on a writing desk.
a curl paper: ‘A piece of soft paper with which the hair is twisted up for some time, so as to give it a curl when the paper is taken out’ (OED). This example from Lefroy is the earliest included in the OED.
a skein of black sewing silk: a skein is ‘A quantity of thread or yarn, wound to a certain length upon a reel, and usually put up in a kind of loose knot’ (OED); silk could be sold in the form of a thread or twist for sewing.
208 Laudanum: ‘a name for various preparations in which opium was the main ingredient’ (OED); also a staple ingredient of gothic fiction.
‘Tantôt c’est un vide; qui nous Ennuie; tantôt c’est un poids qui nous oppresse’: ‘Sometimes it is a void that wearies us; sometimes it is a weight that oppresses us’. The book in question must be Samuel de Constant’s Laure, ou lettres de quelques personnes de Suisse, 5 vols. (1787). Vol. i includes the following passage, which differs slightly from the quotation given by Lefroy: ‘tantôt c’est un vide qui l’on éprouve, une autre fois c’est un poids qui oppresse’ (3, letter I: ‘sometimes it is felt as a void; at other times it is a weight that oppresses’).
Rolandi—Berners Street: Pietro Rolandi, an Italian bookseller whose shop at 20 Berners Street, Soho, was a meeting place for the Italian community in London. For his name and business address to be imprinted on the cover of a book is, in view of his profession, far from ‘strange’.
a Bravo or a Monk: a ‘bravo’ is ‘A daring villain, a hired soldier or assassin; “a man who murders for hire” ( Johnson); a reckless desperado’ (OED). Monks were a staple feature of gothic fiction; Lefroy’s continuation of ‘Evelyn’ post-dates Matthew Lewis’s scandalous The Monk: A Romance, 3 vols. (1796) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, or The Confessional of the Black Penitents, 3 vols. (1797).
monitory finger … interdicted speech: Maria’s cautionary gesture is interpreted as prohibiting speech.
only these—Search—Cupboard—Top shelf: here and throughout her continuation of ‘Evelyn’, Lefroy is sending up such gothic novels as Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, 2 vols. (1790); see esp. i, ch. 1, of that novel for a far more protracted version of Lefroy’s terrifying search through a house full of secrets.
the Rush light was expiring in the Socket: candles made from the pith of a rush, dipped in tallow or some other grease, gave off a proverbially weak and feeble light (see OED ‘rush candle’, ‘rush light’). The dim candle, as well as other details of this scene, resemble JA’s gothic parody in NA, chs. 21–2, in which a mysterious trunk, apparently containing a secret manuscript, turns out to yield nothing more exciting than a laundry list and other items relating to household expenditure.
[Continuation of Kitty, or the Bower, by James Edward Austen]
hot house of Vice … wickedness of every description was daily gaining ground: see ‘Love and Friendship’, note to p. 71.
indulge in vicious inclinations: conduct book and novelistic language; typically, a euphemism for sexual misconduct. See e.g. The Accomplish’d Letter-Writer: or the Young Gentlemen and Ladies’ Polite Guide to an Epistolary Correspondence in Business, Friendship, Love, and Marriage (1787): ‘all manner of precepts are useless where the inclinations are vicious’ (32); The Auction: A Modern Novel, 2 vols. (1770): ‘no Man ever professed a greater Love for Variety, nor no one ever gave a more unbounded Scope to his vicious Inclinations’ (i, 86).’
209 Mrs Lascelles: in Catharine and Other Writings (359 n.) it is suggested that the name may derive from the Whig Thomas Lascelles (1670–1751), quartermaster-general during the War of the Spanish Succession. But it features in late 18th-century fiction, too; a Miss Lascelles appears in Sophia Briscoe’s The Fine Lady: A Novel, 2 vols. (1772), i, 18; there is a Lady Lascelles in Fashionable Infidelity, or the Triumph of Patience, 3 vols. (1789), i, 71.
departure of her Brother to Lyons: this picks up on JA’s earlier reference to Lyons, the city in east-central France through which Sterne’s Yorick passes in A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). Earlier in the tale, Stanley says ‘I was in such a devil of a hurry to leave Lyons that I had not time to pack up anything but some linen’ (p. 188).
panegirge: panegyric; an encomium.
many Officers perpetually Quartered there … infested the principal Streets: officers were lodged in private houses (as in P&P), a situation rich in opportunities for pleasure and disaster that is mentioned in e.g. Masquerades; or, What you Will, i, 137; Anna: A Sentimental Novel. In a Series of Letters, 2 vols. (1782), i, 86.
strolling players … Neighbouring Races: cf. the disreputable ‘strolling Company of Players’ in ‘Love and Friendship’ (see note to p. 94); such players often put on shows at race and fair meetings, boisterous occasions of which Mrs Percival would not approve.
necessity of having some Gentleman to attend them: this ‘new difficulty’ is perhaps a hint as to why the text ends here.
APPENDIX
214 Non venit … Ovid: ‘This complaint will not appear to come before its day’ (Ovid, Epistles, no. 2). The use of classical epigraphs as a way to introduce the ensuing essay was common in periodical writing throughout the 18th century.
The following letter … our capacity as authors: female characters and invented female correspondents regularly featured in The Tatler (1709–11) and The Spectator (1st series, 1711–12; 2nd series, 1714); a number of spin-off
journals were written by female contributors. In The Rambler, Johnson did not specifically address women as often or as directly as had his predecessors, a fact that did not go unnoticed by his correspondents (see e.g. Richardson’s Rambler, no. 97), though he, too, regularly adopted female personae. Rambler, no. 62, picking up on similar strains in The Tatler and The Spectator, offers a precedent to Sophia Sentiment’s letter of complaint. An impatient Rhodoclia begs for up-to-date information about ‘the entertainments of the town’ and threatens to stop reading the journal if Mr Rambler does not comply with her demands (The Rambler, ii, 225–33 (at 232–3).
Tatler and Spectator … Microcosm and the Olla Podrida: Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, founders of and chief contributors to The Tatler and The Spectator, were the most ‘celebrated periodical writers’ throughout the 18th century, as JA suggests in a reference to The Spectator in NA (ch. 5). More recent journalistic success had been achieved by schoolboy George Canning and his associates in the Eton journal The Microcosm (1786–7), and by the Olla Podrida (1787). The title of the latter, alluding to a Spanish stew, means ‘A diverse mixture of things or elements’ (OED); it was edited by Thomas Monro of Magdalen College, Oxford, and published in book form in 1788.
a periodical work … not too long: periodical papers were typically no longer than 2,500 words.
215 Eastern Tale … the Loiterer: oriental tales, fables, and allegories were a staple ingredient of 18th-century journals; see e.g. Addison and Steele’s tale of Abdallah and Balsora (The Guardian, no. 167 (1713)); Addison’s ‘Vision of Mirza’ (The Spectator, no. 159 (1711)); and Johnson’s essay on Obidah and the hermit (Rambler, no. 65 (1750)).
dismal chapels … two days afterwards: Fanny Price visits Oxford in ‘the dirty month of February’, but misses out on the typical highlights of the tour as listed here—college chapels, libraries, and halls—and is able to ‘take only a hasty glimpse of Edmund’s college as they passed along’ (MP, ch. 28). ‘Vapours’ are ‘A morbid condition supposed to be caused by the presence of such exhalations; depression of spirits, hypochondria, hysteria, or other nervous disorder’ (OED).
retiring to Yorkshire, he might have fled into France … some great person: the conjunction of Yorkshire retirement with flight to France and a possible affair with a French ‘Paysanne’, or peasant woman, sounds as if the author has Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy in mind. Sterne was a parson in rural Yorkshire, and mentions his retired, out-of-the-way situation in the dedication of Tristram Shandy, i, [10–11].
set fire to a convent … more interesting: Catherine Morland entertains similar hopes of an ‘interesting’ story: ‘she could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun’ (NA, ch. 17).
if you thought, like the Turks, we had no souls: cf. Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Milton’ (1779): ‘His family consisted of women; and there appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferiour beings. That his own daughters might not break the ranks, he suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education. He thought woman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion’. Samuel Johnson, Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, 10 vols. (1779), ii, 144.
215 never conversed with a female, except your bed-maker and laundress: bedmakers and laundresses, unlike most women, were free to come and go on college premises; ‘conversed with’ may be an innuendo in this context, given that many female bedmakers and laundresses were ‘Objects of … Gallantry’ (see Graham Midgley, University Life in Eighteenth-Century Oxford (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 84–6).
no more of … your Homelys and Cockney: ‘H. Homely’ (in no. 8) and ‘Christopher Cockney’ (in no. 3) were two of the identities assumed by The Loiterer’s contributors.
two lovers … just as they were going to church: possibly alluding to Pope’s epitaph ‘On two lovers struck dead by lightning’ (1718), as well as to countless scenes of sentimental love and distress in 18th-century fiction.
a great deal of feeling, and … very pretty names: cf. Mary’s hope for a duel in ‘The three Sisters’ (p. 54); death, running mad, a great deal of feeling, and a stress on pretty names all feature in ‘Love and Friendship’.
216 the pastry-cook’s shop … a bachelor … a maiden sister to keep house for you: cf. the pastry cook in ‘The beautifull Cassandra’ (p. 38); a proverbially dreadful fate for literary works was for them to end up as wrapping paper in a pastry-cook’s shop.
SOPHIA SENTIMENT: this name appears in William Hayley’s The Mausoleum; A Comedy (1784), a copy of which JA owned.