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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER IN A BRAND NEW EDITION 'Enchanting...the most engagingly boffiny book imaginable.' Spectator Does Becky kill Jos at the end of Vanity Fair? Why does no one notice that Hetty is pregnant in Adam Bede? How, exactly, does Victor Frankenstein make his monster? Readers of Victorian fiction often find themselves tripping up on seeming anomalies, enigmas and mysteries in their favourite novels. In Is Heathcliff a Murderer?? John Sutherland investigates 34 conundrums of nineteenth-century fiction, paying homage to the most rewarding of critical activities: close reading and the pleasures of good-natured pedantry
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Praise for earlier editions ofIs Heathcliff a Murderer?
‘34 beautifully chiselled chapters … combin[ing] erudition with bold imaginative speculation. Sutherland is not simply a sleuth, but a sympathetic alternative author: less pedant, in fact, than poet.’
Sunday Times
‘[T[his enchanting little book … Sutherland is an unmatched guide to the detail of 19th-century fiction … as a polemical jeu d’esprit designed to send you back to Adam Bede and Wuthering Heights, this is the most engagingly boffiny book imaginable.’
Spectator
‘A stimulating discussion’
Economist
IS HEATHCLIFF A MURDERER?
Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
JOHN SUTHERLAND
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
‘Since the little puzzle amuses the ladies, it would be a pity to spoil their sport by giving them the key.’
(Charlotte Brontë, about two female correspondents who had written to her publisher inquiring about the fate of Paul Emanuel in Villette)
Personally, I have always thought ‘how many children had Lady Macbeth?’ a perfectly good question. I am also curious about how old Hamlet is, what subjects he studied at the University of Wittenberg, and what grades he got from his teachers there. Is Heathcliff a Murderer? explores that forbidden territory, the hors texte – or, more precisely, that implied and ambiguous world which lies on the other side of the words on the page.
This little book addresses, and joins company with, ‘the common reader’ (as Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf called us). There are millions of common readers and the mass of such readers do not, I suspect, much worry about Deconstruction, New Historicism, or the distinction between extradiegesis and intradiegesis. But they do wonder, in their close-reading way, whether Becky killed Jos, exactly what nationality Melmotte is, what the ‘missile’ is that Arabella Donn pitches at Jude Fawley’s head, what Heathcliff does in the three years which sees him leave Wuthering Heights a stable-boy and return a gentleman, and what Paul Emanuel does in his three years’ sojourn in Guadaloupe.
What follow are literary brain-teasers. In the spirit of those who enjoy such games, I have let my ingenuity rip in places. I would not go to the stake for some of the readings offered here, and I have no doubt that many readers will come up with cleverer and more plausible solutions than mine. But I would argue that however far my solutions are fetched the problems which inspire them are not frivolous. It is worthwhile for readers to be curious where Sir Thomas Bertram’s wealth comes from, or to wonder why The Picture of Dorian Gray is so ‘queerly’ disturbing, or to inquire why George Eliot and Henry James consciously flawed the printed endings to their greatest novels. It is less crucial, but no less thought-provoking, that Henry Esmond – the highly literate creation of a highly literate author – should quote from a work forty years before it will be written. The questions which have provoked this book are, I maintain, good questions.
I have a number of debts to acknowledge. David Lodge (who adapted the novel for television) drew my attention to the striking seasonal anomaly in Martin Chuzzlewit. Rosemary Ashton corrected the Middlemarch chapter radically. Alison Winter helped with the ‘science’ in the Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist chapters. Philip Horne pointed out to me R.H. Hutton’s meddling review of The Portrait of a Lady.
J.S.
A NOTE ON THE TEXTS
One of the great breakthroughs in the reading and study of Victorian fiction has been its new accessibility. I am thinking, principally, of the Project Gutenberg library.
The project was the life’s mission of Michael S. Hart (1947–2011). Recruiting an army of volunteer editor/transcribers, Project Gutenberg.org has made available, at a few key strokes away, thousands of literary titles and a vast mass of Victorian fiction. It is currently adding 50 new e-books a week. The material is available in a variety of differently paginated formats – most pleasing to the eye is ‘epub’, easily adaptable to the tablet app, iBooks (references in the text that follows are, necessarily, to chapters). All the Gutenberg texts are searchable by keyword.
As a grateful acknowledgement to Hart’s donation to lovers of Victorian fiction, and his enlargement of the field, I have used Gutenberg texts throughout in this book. In this respect, as well as in some corrections and updates, the text here differs from that originally published by Oxford University Press in 1996.
Jane Austen Mansfield Park
Where does Sir Thomas’s wealth come from?
Edward Said’s book Culture and Imperialism1 was well received in the United States, but provoked some bad-tempered responses in the United Kingdom (notably in the TLS). The reason for the bad temper, one might suspect, was that as the imperial power principally targeted in his book’s historical discussions there remained a legacy of colonists’ guilt in Britain. Particular exception was taken by British commentators to Said’s chapter ‘Jane Austen and Empire’, and its triumphant conclusion: ‘Yes, Austen belonged to a slave-owning society’ (p. 115). The central piece of evidence for a meaningful conjunction between the author of Mansfield Park and black men sweating under some sadistic overseer’s whip is Sir Thomas Bertram’s absence for the early stages of the novel in his estate in Antigua, during which period his unsupervised offspring put on a domestic production of Kotzebue’s scandalous (for the time) play, Lovers’ Vows.2 Fanny Price, the waif who has been brought as a penniless young dependant to Mansfield Park, strenuously declines to participate in this godless activity. After various trials of her goodness she eventually wins the heart of the second son (and, given his elder brother’s ruined health, prospective heir to the estate) Edmund, correcting in the process his wayward sense of vocation. (Edmund’s ‘ordination’ as a clergyman was given by Austen in a cryptic remark in a letter as her novel’s principal subject-matter, although there is critical dispute about just what she meant). Finally, after a symbolic rejection of her sordid family home at Portsmouth, Fanny is adopted by Sir Thomas as the presiding spirit of Mansfield Park. Said sees her apotheosis as an installation of world-historical significance:
Like many other novels, Mansfield Park is very precisely about a series of both small and large dislocations and relocations in space that occur before, at the end of the novel, Fanny Price becomes the spiritual mistress of Mansfield Park. And that place itself is located by Austen at the centre of an arc of interests and concerns spanning the hemisphere, two major seas, and four continents. (p. 112)
Miss Fanny Price – one of the most retiring heroines in the history of English fiction – emerges transformed from Said’s analysis as a pre-Victoria, empress (and oppressor) of a dominion over which the sun never sets.
According to Said: ‘The Bertrams could not have been possible without the slave trade, sugar, and the colonial planter class’ (p. 112). But, ‘Sir Thomas’s infrequent trips to Antigua as an absentee plantation owner reflect the diminishment of his class’s power’ (p. 113). Said is here building on two brief comments early in the novel’s action. In Chapter 1 the narrator records that Sir Thomas’s circumstances ‘were rendered less fair than heretofore, by some recent losses on his West India Estate, in addition to his eldest son’s [Tom’s] extravagance’. A little later in the chapter, Mrs Norris observes to Lady Bertram that Sir Thomas’s means ‘will be rather straitened, if the Antigua estate is to make such poor returns’. It is clear, however, that on her part Lady Bertram does not anticipate any serious ‘diminishment’ of her family’s position. ‘Oh! that will soon be settled’, she tells Mrs Norris. And indeed, on his unexpected return, Sir Thomas confirms that he has been able to leave the West Indies early because ‘His business in Antigua had latterly been prosperously rapid’. At the end of the novel, the Bertram estate – with Tom chastened and sober – seems on a sounder footing than ever.
Anyone attempting a historical reading should note that the period in which Mansfield Park’s action is set (between 1805 and February 1811, when Jane Austen began writing) was not the period in which the British Empire fell, but the prelude to its extraordinary rise.3 The year following the novel’s publication, 1815 (Waterloo year), marked the beginning of imperial Britain’s century. If we follow Said, this imperial achievement was a bourgeois rather than an aristocratic thing. The co-opting of middle-class Fanny Price into the previously exclusively aristocratic enclave of Mansfield Park predicts the new bourgeois energies of nineteenth-century British imperialism. The patrician absentee landlord like Sir Thomas will yield to the earnest (and essentially middle-class) district commissioner, missionary, and colonial educator (the class represented most spectacularly by the Arnolds). Fanny Price leads on, inexorably, to that wonderful apostrophe to the battalions of British ‘Tom Browns’ at the opening of Hughes’s novel – ordinary young men and women from ordinary backgrounds, who have helped colour the bulk of the globe red.4
Said’s insights are coolly argued and persuasive. They also supply an attractive way of teaching the novel, and have been adopted in any number of courses on post-coloniality and literature of oppression. Inevitably they will surface as orthodoxy in A level answers (‘“Austen belonged to a slave-owning society”: Discuss.’) There are, however, a number of problems. One obvious objection is that Jane Austen seems to take the Antigua business much less seriously than does Edward Said. Like the French wars (which get only the most incidental references in Persuasion), Austen seems to regard affairs of empire as something well over the horizon of her novel’s interests. So vague is her allusion to what Sir Thomas is actually doing abroad that Said is forced into the awkward speculation, ‘Sir Thomas’s property in the Caribbean would have had to be a sugar plantation maintained by slave labour (not abolished until the 1830s)’ (my italics). Not necessarily. Since Jane Austen says nothing specific on the subject, the Bertrams could have had a farm supplying produce and timber to other plantations. And if, as Said claims, Sir Thomas is doing badly, it could be because he ill-advisedly chose to raise some other crop than sugar, or because he declines to use slave labour as heartlessly as his fellow plantation owners (there is, as we shall see, some evidence for this hypothesis).
There is one rather tantalizing reference to slavery in Chapter 21 of Mansfield Park. Fanny tells Edmund that ‘I love to hear my uncle talk of the West Indies. I could listen to him for an hour together’. She continues:
‘I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do. Did not you hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?’
‘I did – and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.’
‘And I longed to do it – but there was such a dead silence!’
Dead silence pretty well describes Mansfield Park’s dealing with Antigua generally. Edward Said gets round this absence of reference by a familiar critical move. Texts, just like their readers, have their repressed memories and their ‘unconscious’. Austen’s not mentioning colonial exploitation betrays neurotic anxiety on the subject. In his stressing absent presences, Said is following a trail flamboyantly blazed by Warren Roberts’s monograph Jane Austen and the French Revolution (London, 1979), a work written at the high tide of theoretic ‘re-reading’ of classic texts. Roberts’s line goes thus: as is well known, Jane Austen never mentions the French Revolution. Therefore it must be a central preoccupation, and its silent pressure can be detected at almost every point of her narratives. In Mansfield Park, Roberts argued for a quite specific time setting of 1805–7, when the French blockade had disastrous implications for the British sugar trade, forcing down the price to the growers from 55s. to 32s. a quintal. It is deduced that this 1805–7 crisis accounts for Sir Thomas’s urgent trip to Antigua.
There is, however, nothing in the novel to confirm this historically significant date. If anything, the date markers which the narrative contains rather contradict 1805–7. There are clear references, for instance, to the Quarterly Review (which was not founded until 1809), Crabbe’s Tales (not published until September 1812), and the imminent 1812 war with America. These suggest a setting exactly contemporaneous with Jane Austen’s writing the novel, 1811–13. On the other hand, references to The Lay of the Last Minstrel (published in 1805) but none of Scott’s subsequent poems, could be thought to confirm a setting of 1805–7. It remains a moot point.5 The strongest argument against an 1805–7 setting is, of course, the Crabbe reference. His Tales were published in September 1812 (by Hatchard, in two volumes). But, if one examines the relevant passage carefully, there is some warrant for thinking that Austen may not have had this specific 1812 publication in mind. Edmund, at the end of Chapter 16, asks Fanny: ‘How does Lord Macartney go on?’ Without waiting for answer he opens up some other volumes on the table which Fanny has apparently been reading: ‘And here are Crabbe’s Tales, and the Idler, at hand to relieve you, if you tire of your great book’. The ‘great book’ is identified as Lord Macartney’s Journal of the Embassy to China (1807), which Fanny is dutifully reading since Sir Thomas is currently also on a trip abroad. It would make sense (from Edmund’s ironic use of the term ‘great’) to assume it is a new book. And if one lower-cased the first letter of the Crabbe reference, so that it read ‘and here are Crabbe’s tales’, it could as well refer to the much-reprinted The Borough or the verse stories in Poems (1807). Austen’s manuscript, as R.W. Chapman reminds us, was not always precise on such details. There is at least sufficient uncertainty in the matter for one to consider carefully Roberts’s 1805–7 hypothesis, and the elaborate superstructure he erects on it.
It remains, however, hypothetical in the extreme, and in passing one may note that Roberts’s book marked a new gulf which had opened between the advanced literary critics of the academic world and the intelligent lay reader for whom, if Jane Austen or any other novelist did not mention something, it was because they did not think that something worth mentioning. Jane Austen and the French Revolution provoked one of the most amusing of New Statesman competitions, asking sportive readers of the magazine to come up with the most unlikely titles for literary critical works they could think of. The winner was the delightful: ‘My Struggle, by Martin Amis.’
It will not, of course, do to laugh Edward Said’s carefully laid arguments out of court. But one can question certain aspects of his reading of Mansfield Park. On historical grounds one can question Said’s contention that Sir Thomas’s wealth comes primarily from his colonial possessions and that his social eminence in Britain is entirely dependent on revenues from Antigua. During the Napoleonic War large landholders (as Sir Thomas clearly is) made windfall fortunes from agriculture, sheep-farming, and cattle-farming. (Although, as Marilyn Butler points out, agricultural wages fell during the period, and southern England became ‘a relatively depressed area’.) Walter Scott – who had toyed with the idea of emigrating to the West Indies in 1797 – discovered when he took over a farm at Ashestiel in 1805 that he could enrich himself by raising sheep, and by subletting portions of his rented agricultural land. It was the euphoria engendered by this bonanza that inspired him to go on a farm-buying spree around his ‘cottage’ (later a baronial mansion) at Abbotsford.6 It led to disaster when the value of agricultural land and produce slumped in the postwar period, after 1815. If Mansfield Park is set at some point around 1805–13 (taking the most relaxed line on the question), Sir Thomas may conceivably have been coining it from rented and agent-managed farms on his estate. If so, Mansfield Park itself would have been the main source of his income, and would have compensated for any Caribbean shortfall.
According to Said, the fact that Fanny Price shows so little concern about what goes on in Antigua is a measure of how successful the imperialist ideology was in neutralizing ‘significant opposition or deterrence at home’ (p. 97). This most artificial of economic arrangements – a small, northern island sucking wealth from a Caribbean island by means of workers forcibly expatriated from Africa – was rendered a fact of nature. Something so natural, in fact, that it provoked no more comment than the sun’s rising in the morning and setting at night. It is a beguiling argument. But it can be objected that there was indeed ‘significant opposition’ to the colonial exploitation of slaves in England in the early nineteenth century, and that Fanny Price – particularly as elevated by Sir Thomas’s favour after his return from Antigua – would have been in the forefront of it. It is useful, in making this point, to look at an earlier critical commentary. Interest in the Antigua dimension of Mansfield Park is, as it happens, of fairly long standing. The first detailed reference I have come across is by Stephen Fender (a critic specializing in immigration studies) in 1974, in a conversation recorded for a publisher of educational tapes for British sixth-formers. Fender asked:
Can it be said that Jane Austen is concerned with the ‘real’ social life of her time? The answer is yes. The house, Mansfield Park, no longer fills its ‘ideal’ role, its members no longer fulfil their functions. Tom Bertram’s relationship with the land is occasional and predatory – he only comes home to hunt – and the land no longer supports the house. Its wealth is from Antigua which produced sugar which had been worked by slaves. The Wilberforce anti-slavery movement was at its height when Mansfield Park was written and its contemporary readers would see that the house was, in a sense, ‘alienated’ from its environment. Perhaps in this context it is significant that the moral inheritor of the true values of ‘Mansfield Park’ is Fanny Price, the outsider.7
Fender’s point is that Mansfield Park is as much a novel about the English class system and its resilient modes of regeneration as it is about British imperialism. One should also note that the novel contains clear indications that Fanny Price belongs to the Clapham Sect of evangelical Christianity, which hated plays and light morality only slightly less than it loathed slavery. Her prejudices are centrally aligned with those of the sect’s ‘Reform of Manners’ campaign. These evangelicals were mobilized politically by William Wilberforce, who allied them with the British abolitionist movement. It may well have been Wilberforce’s successful bill for the abolition of slavery in 1807 which inspired Fanny’s artless question to Sir Thomas about slaves. Wilberforce’s bill remained a dead letter until, five years after his death in 1838, slavery in the West Indies was finally abolished. But, it is safe to say, Fanny would have been on the side of the abolitionists from the first – as much a hater of human slavery in 1811 as she was a distruster of domestic theatricals, and from the same evangelical motives.8
If we take the Antigua dimension of Mansfield Park seriously, reading more into it than the slightness of textual references seem to warrant, it is clear that far from buttressing the crumbling imperial edifice Fanny will, once she has power over the estate, join her Clapham brethren in the abolitionist fight. Jane Austen (in 1814) may well, as Edward Said reminds us, have belonged to a slave-owning society. Fanny Price’s creator died in 1817, while slave owning was still a fact of British imperial rule, whatever the Westminster law-books said. Fanny Price, we apprehend, will survive to the 1850s, before dying as Lady Bertram, surrounded with loving grandchildren and a devoted husband, now a bishop with distinctly ‘low’, Proudie-like tendencies. Both of them will take pride in the fact that there is no taint of slave-riches in their wealth – and that England has rid herself of the shameful practice of human bondage a full decade before the French, and no less than thirty years before the Americans. Fanny Price, and her docile husband, will certainly have done their bit to bringing this happy end about.9
Notes
1. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993).
2. Kotzebue’s play, ‘The Natural Son’ was first produced in England, translated as Lovers’ Vows, 1798–1800. Mrs Inchbald’s translation (which is presumably what is used by the amateur troupe at Mansfield Park) is printed as a supplement to R.W. Chapman’s edition of the novel, in The Novels of Jane Austen, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1934). Mansfield Park is Volume 3 in the set.
3. According to Chapman, the composition of Mansfield Park was begun ‘about February 1811’ and finished ‘soon after June 1813’.
4. The Oxford World’s Classics edition of Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, edited by Andrew Sanders, has an informative discussion of these issues.
5. In an appendix on the chronology of the novel, Chapman deduces (from internal evidence) that Austen used almanacs of 1808–9 in order to arrange day-to-day, month-to-month events and episodes in the novel. But she did not necessarily identify the historical period as that year. Chapman sees the question of historical dating as ultimately unfixable: ‘As to the “dramatic” date of the story, the indications are slight. It is probably hopeless to seek to identify the “strange business” in America. Many strange things happened in those years. The Quarterly Review was first published in 1809 (and therefore could not have been read at Sotherton in 1808). Crabbe’s Tales (1812) are mentioned. A state of war is implied throughout, and there is no mention of foreign travel, except Sir Thomas’s perilous voyage’ (p. 556).
6. See Chapter 13 of Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (London, 1836, much reprinted) describing Scott’s removal to the small farm of Ashestiel, and the advantageous economic arrangement it represented.
7.Mansfield Park, Stephen Fender and J.A. Sutherland, Audio Learning Tapes (London, 1974).
8. For the role of evangelicalism in Mansfield Park see Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford, 1975), 219–49; and the same writer’s essay ‘History, Politics, and Religion’ in (ed.) J. David Grey, The Jane Austen Handbook (London, 1986). Professor Butler convincingly argues that the evangelicals of the early nineteenth century are not to be confused with the lower-class evangelicals of the Victorian period; ‘During the war against France and against “revolutionary principles”, pressure for a renewed commitment to religious and moral principle was not so much petit bourgeois as characteristic of the gentry’.
9. The whole business of ‘Slavery and the Chronology of Mansfield Park’ was revived in a lively article by Brian Southam in the TLS (‘The Silence of the Bertrams’), 17 February 1995. The key assumption in Southam’s argument is that the 1812 publication of Crabbe’s Tales and the information that Sir Bertram returns in October enables us to ‘pinpoint the course of events’. The chronology Southam deduces is as follows: ‘Sir Thomas and Tom leave for Antigua about October 1810; Tom returns about September 1811; Sir Thomas writes home, April 1812; Fanny in possession of Crabbe’s Tales, published September 1812; Sir Thomas returns, late October 1812; Edmund turns to Fanny, summer 1813’ (p. 13). Southam correlates this schedule of events with the evolution of the slave trade, following the Abolition Act of 1807. Convincing as Southam’s argument is, I remain somewhat sceptical that Jane Austen would expect her readers to register September 1812 as the publication date of Crabbe’s Tales (much of his poetry has an earlier publication date), and the detail may have been as loosely installed in her mind as in those of the bulk of her readers, who would simply recall the volume as a ‘recent’ publication. It may also be, as I argue above, that ‘Tales’ should be read as the less precisely dateable ‘tales’.
Walter Scott Waverley
How much English blood (if any) does Waverley spill?
Scott, in a much-quoted comment to his friend J.B.S. Morritt, expressed a low opinion of the hero of his first novel. Edward Waverley, the author of Waverley declared, was ‘a sneaking piece of imbecility’.1 One of the more extraordinary aspects of Waverley’s imbecility is that – as far as one can make out from the account given in the narrative – he wanders through the battlefields of the great 1745 Rebellion offering as little danger to his English foe as a dormouse in a tiger’s cage. Take, for instance, the highpoint in Chapter 47 (‘The Conflict’), which describes the Battle of Prestonpans in which the Scottish forces (under whose flag Waverley now fights, although he is still technically an officer of the English crown) won a famous victory, suggesting that they might indeed overrun England and restore the Stuarts to the throne. For the English military, Prestonpans was a chilling reminder of how formidable highlanders were in hand-to-hand engagement. The English commanders fondly thought that the bare-legged barbarians would be so overwhelmed by the novelty of artillery, that they would turn tail in fear when the first shells and cannon-balls exploded among them. Instead, the Scots flanked their static English foe and fell on them with cold steel. As Burton’s History of Scotland records:
A slaughter of a frightful kind thus commenced, for the latent ferocity of the victors was roused, and grew hotter and hotter the more they pursued the bloody work. To men accustomed to the war of the musket and bayonet, the sword-cut slaughter was a restoration of the more savage-looking fields of old, which made even the victorious leaders shudder.2
Waverley’s conduct on the field at Prestonpans is less than bloodthirsty. Observing among the mêlée an English officer ‘of high rank’, he is so struck by ‘his tall martial figure’ that he decides ‘to save him from instant destruction’ (Chapter 47), going so far as to turn the battle-axe of Dugald Mahoney, which is about to descend on Colonel Talbot’s head. Waverley, who evidently has a keen eye for insignia of rank, then perceives another English colonel in trouble. ‘To save this good and brave man became the instant object of Edward’s anxious exertions’. But try as he does, again apparently impeding his own sworn comrades from their business of killing Englishmen, he can only witness the death of his former commander Colonel Gardiner and suffer his withering et tu, Brute? look.
What on earth, one wonders, is Waverley doing on this battlefield, scurrying around trying to save enemy officers from being killed? The reader is not helped by Scott’s account of the battle which is remarkably patchy and vague (the event is ‘well known’, the narrator says by way of excuse: Chapter 47). Yet, we later learn, the Chevalier ‘paid [Edward] many compliments on his distinguished bravery’ (Ch. 50). After the battle Fergus informs Edward that ‘your behaviour is praised by every mortal, to the skies, and the Prince is eager to thank you in person; and all our beauties of the White Rose are pulling caps for you’. Captain Waverley is a Scottish hero – what does this mean but that he did great slaughter among the enemy? After the battle, we are told, the field is ‘cumbered with carcases’ (Ch. 48). Fergus, who is a fire-eater and a merciless warrior; would hardly praise Edward for saving his former English comrades from destruction. ‘You know how he fought’ (Ch. 52), Rose later reminds Flora. Would that we did.
From the lustre which attaches to him after the battle, we have to assume Edward did at least a fair share of killing. But Scott’s evasive narrative begs the question: did Waverley kill any Englishmen? Did his sword pierce and skewer English guts? Did he cut English throats or cave in English skulls? Did he so much as draw a drop of English blood? Soldiers on battlefields have only one mission – to kill the enemy. Either Edward Waverley is the most incompetent warrior who ever lived or – still bearing the English king’s commission – he killed the English king’s men.
Scott was clearly in a personal dilemma in this, all-important, aspect of his hero’s military exploits. The king’s commission which he himself held as a captain in the Edinburgh Light Cavalry was the most treasured possession of Scott’s manhood, more dear to him by far than his being laird of Abbotsford or ‘the author of Waverley’.3 When, a few months after his novel’s triumph, he visited Brussels and the field at Waterloo, it was in his cavalry officer’s uniform that Captain Scott chose to be presented to the Tsar of Russia (it led to an unfortunate misunderstanding when the potentate assumed the novelist had been wounded in the recent battle – Scott had, in fact, been lamed from childhood by polio). Scott, the serving officer, would have been nauseated by the idea of Edward’s killing fellow holders of the king’s commission – it would have been a treachery deeper than Judas’s. Other ranks – ‘erks’, ‘PBI (‘poor bloody infantry’), ‘grunts’: they have always attracted names testifying to their subhumanity – were something else altogether. What Scott intimates by highlighting Edward’s stout protection of his fellow (English-Hanoverian) officers in their extremities of danger on the battlefield is that his killing (for which he had his due of fame among the Stuart ladies) was reserved for the English other ranks – those uncommissioned, unregarded, private soldiers and NCOs who have always been treated by their commissioned betters as expendable battle-fodder. In Waverley they are of no more account than the horses who die on the battlefield or the crows who peck at the corpses. Yes, the perceptive reader apprehends, Waverley did indeed spill English blood and a lot of it – but it was not blue blood. Had it been, his head might well have joined Fergus’s on the pikes at Carlisle.
Notes
1.The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. Sir Herbert Grierson (London, 1932–7), iii. 478–9.
2. John Hill Burton, The History of Scotland from the Revolution to the Extinction of the Last Jacobite Insurrection, 1698–1748, 2 vols. (London, 1853), ii. 463.
3. See Chapter 7 of Lockhart’s Life of Scott.
Jane Austen Emma
Apple-blossom in June?
The early nineteenth-century novelists inherited from their Gothic predecessors a sense that, where landscape was concerned, lies were more beautiful than truth and, for that reason, often preferable. In his essay on Mrs Radcliffe in The Lives of the Novelists, Scott notes the pervasive vagueness of her scene-painting, a quality which at its best aligns her worddrawn settings with the imaginary landscapes of Claude:
Some artists are distinguished by precision and correctness of outline, others by the force and vividness of their colouring: and it is to the latter class that this author belongs. The landscapes of Mrs Radcliffe are far from equal in accuracy and truth to those of her contemporary, Mrs Charlotte Smith, whose sketches are so very graphical, that an artist would find little difficulty in actually painting from them. Those of Mrs Radcliffe, on the contrary, while they would supply the most noble and vigorous ideas, for producing a general effect, would leave the task of tracing a distinct and accurate outline to the imagination of the painter. As her story is usually enveloped in mystery, so there is, as it were, a haze over her landscapes, softening indeed the whole, and adding interest and dignity to particular parts, and thereby producing every effect which the author desired, but without communicating any absolutely precise or individual image to the reader. (pp. 118–19)1
For all the realism of his historical analysis and characterization, Scott often found a similar ‘haze’ very useful in his own higher-flying landscape descriptions. It was pointed out to him when embarking on Anne of Geierstein (1829) that it might be a handicap never to have visited the Swiss Alps, where the action is set. Nonsense, Scott replied, he had seen the paintings of Salvator Rosa, and that would do very well, thank-you.2 Radcliffian haze was also very useful to Scott in what remains the most famous anomaly in his fiction, the ‘reversed sunset’ in The Antiquary (1816). In an early big scene in that novel, Sir Arthur Wardour and his daughter Isabella are trapped between the onrushing tide and unscaleable cliffs. The location is identifiably Newport-on-Tay (called in the novel ‘Fair-port’), near Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland. Scott highlights the scene by having it occur while the great disc of the sun sinks into the North Sea – a lurid panorama on which two paragraphs of fine writing is lavished.
The problem is, of course, that in our cosmos the sun does not sink in the east, it sinks in the west, in the Irish Sea. Given the haste with which he wrote his novel it is not surprising, perhaps, that Scott should have perpetrated the error. What is surprising is that he should have retained it in his 1829 revised edition of The Antiquary. The mistake was certainly pointed out to him. Evidently he felt that where land and seascapes were concerned, the novelist’s artistic licence extended to changing the course of the planets through the heavens. Novelists later in the century were more fastidious. Rider Haggard, for instance, rewrote large sections of King Solomon’s Mines in order to correct an error about the eclipse of the sun which is so technical as to be beyond all but the most astronomically expert readers.3 Haggard mistakenly had the solar eclipse occur while the moon was full. In all editions of King Solomon’s Mines after the ‘37th thousand’ he changed it to a lunar eclipse.
This fetishism about scenic detail develops in the 1830s and 1840s. It may well have coincided with more sophistication about the authenticity of theatrical sets, a greater awareness of what foreign parts looked like with the growth of the British tourism industry, and the diffusion of encyclopaedias among the novel-reading classes. Captain Frederick Marryat wrote Masterman Ready, or the Wreck of the Pacific (1841) specifically to correct the travesty of life on a South Seas desert island perpetrated by Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1812, 1826). Marryat, who as a sailor had felt the brine of the seven seas on his cheek, was appalled by such freaks of nature as flying penguins and man-eating boa constrictors.4
Jane Austen’s most lamentable landscape-painting error occurs in the Donwell picnic scene in Emma. The date of the picnic is given to us very precisely ‘It was now the middle of June, and the weather fine’, we are told in Chapter 24. And again, in the same chapter, the excursion is described as taking place ‘under a bright mid-day sun, at almost Midsummer’ (i.e. around 21 June). Strawberries are in prospect, which confirms the June date. During the course of the picnic, Austen indulges (unusually for her) in an extended passage describing a distant view – specifically Abbey-Mill Farm, which lies some half-a-mile distant, ‘with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it’. The narrative continues, weaving the idyllic view into Emma’s tireless matchmaking activities:
It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.
In this walk Emma and Mr Weston found all the others assembled; and towards this view she immediately perceived Mr Knightley and Harriet distinct from the rest, quietly leading the way. Mr Knightley and Harriet! – It was an odd tête-à-tête; but she was glad to see it. – There had been a time when he would have scorned her as a companion, and turned from her with little ceremony. Now they seemed in pleasant conversation. There had been a time also when Emma would have been sorry to see Harriet in a spot so favourable for the Abbey Mill Farm; but now she feared it not. It might be safely viewed with all its appendages of prosperity and beauty, its rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchard in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending. (Chapter 24)
James Kinsley offers a note to ‘in blossom’:
The anomaly of an orchard blossoming in the strawberry season was noticed by some of the novel’s first readers. Jane Austen’s niece Caroline wrote to a friend as follows: ‘There is a tradition in the family respecting the apple-blossom as seen from Donwell Abbey on the occasion of the strawberry party and it runs thus – That the first time my uncle … saw his sister after the publication of Emma he said, “Jane, I wish you would tell me where you get those apple-trees of yours that come into bloom in July.” In truth she did make a mistake – there is no denying it – and she was speedily apprised of it by her brother – but I suppose it was not thought of sufficient consequence to call for correction in a later edition.’5
One could defend the anachronistic apple-blossom in the same way that one defends the anastronomical sunset in that other novel of 1816, The Antiquary. Both represent a hangover from the free-and-easy ways of the Gothic novel of the 1790s when such liberties could be taken with artistic impunity. But this is not entirely satisfactory with the author of Northanger Abbey, a novel which hilariously castigates Gothic fiction’s offences against common sense. And, as R.W. Chapman notes (apropos of the apple blossom), such mistakes are ‘very rare’ in Miss Austen’s fiction.6
It was evidently assumed by Jane Austen’s family that no correction was made because the error was ‘not thought of sufficient consequence’. This is unlikely; elsewhere one can find Jane Austen going to some length to authenticate detail in her fiction (she put herself to trouble, for instance, to verify details as to whether there was a governor’s house in Gibraltar, for Mansfield Park).
If the ‘apple-blossom in June’ error were pointed out to her, why then did Jane Austen not change it? ‘Orchards in leaf would have been an economical means of doing so, requiring no major resetting of type. One explanation is that she did not have time – some eighteen months after the publication of Emma Jane Austen died, in July 1817. A more appealing explanation is that it is not an error at all. It was not changed because the author did not believe it was wrong. In order to make this second case one should note that there is not one ‘error’ in the description (blossom in June), but two, and possibly three. Surely, on a sweltering afternoon in June, there would not be smoke rising from the chimney of Abbey-Mill Farm? Why have a fire? And if one were needed for the baking of bread, or the heating of water in a copper for the weekly wash, the boiler would surely be lit before dawn, and extinguished by mid-morning, so as not to make the kitchen (which would also be the family’s dining-room) unbearably hot. The reference to the ascending smoke would seem to be more appropriate to late autumn. And the reference to ‘spreading flocks’ would more plausibly refer to the lambing season, in early spring, when flocks enlarge dramatically. It will help at this point to quote the relevant part of the passage again: ‘It might be safely viewed with all its appendages of prosperity and beauty, its rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchard in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending.’ What this would seem to mean is that now Harriet is so effectively separated from Mr Robert Martin, the occupant of Abbey-Mill Farm, she is immune to its varying attractions over the course of the year – whether in spring, early summer, midsummer or autumn. What Austen offers us in this sentence is not Radcliffian haze, but a precise depiction, in the form of a miniature montage, of the turning seasons.7 Months may come and months may go, but Harriet will not again succumb to a mere farmer.
Notes
1. These essays of Scott’s are conveniently collected in Ioan Williams (ed.), Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction (London, 1968).
2. See Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, 2 vols. (London, 1970), ii. 1084.
3. For convenience use, as I have done, the Oxford World’s Classics edition of King Solomon’s Mines, edited by Dennis Butts, p. 332.
4. For convenience use, as I have done, the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Swiss Family Robinson, edited by John Seelye, pp. 25, 332.
5. Emma, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford World’s Classics, 1990), p. 444.
6. R.W. Chapman (ed.), Emma (London, 1933), 493.
7. Presenting to the mind’s eye a montage of the year’s passing season was a favourite device of William Cowper, a poet Austen is known to have read. See for instance vi. 140–60 of The Task, ‘But let the months go round, a few short months …’
Walter Scott The Heart of Midlothian
Effie Deans’s phantom pregnancy
The wonderful plot of The Heart of Midlothian – Jeanie Deans’s refusing to perjure herself in court to save her sister’s life, and her tramp down to London to beg mercy from the queen – originate in the misfortune of Effie’s pregnancy. Yet that misfortune, closely examined, is an extremely problematic thing. Certain improbabilities in it force us to assume either, (1) that Scott found himself trapped in a narrative difficulty which he could not easily write himself out of, or (2) that there is more to the episode than meets the casual reader’s eye.
I prefer the second of these assumptions, although in support of the first it should be said that the law by which Effie is condemned contains some very dubious propositions. Scott outlines the 1690 law (which was repealed in the early nineteenth century) in a note to Chapter 15. A woman was liable to execution for infanticide on the circumstantial grounds ‘that she should have concealed her situation during the whole period of pregnancy; that she should not have called for help at her delivery; and that, combined with these grounds of suspicion, the child should be either found dead or be altogether missing’. What is unlikely is that a woman, in any normal social situation, should be able to disguise her altered physical shape in the last months of pregnancy, or that she should be able to deliver her own child without the assistance of a midwife. Common sense suggests that the ordinance must have been most effective, not against infanticide, but abortion. A woman might well conceal her condition for four or five months and procure an abortion, at the actual climax of which the abortionist might be prudently absent. Women likely to fall foul of the law would not anyway be reliable as to when menstruation stopped, and ‘the whole period of pregnancy’ would be very hard to establish.
In Chapter 10 of The Heart of Midlothian
