Emma - Jane Austen [229]
Volume One
CHAPTER I
1. Highbury: Although various Surrey villages and towns have been suggested as models for Highbury, none are 16 miles from London, 9 from Richmond and 7 from Box Hill (Chapman, p. 521). Only the names of real places are glossed hereafter.
2. carriage: Four-wheeled private vehicle drawn by two or more horses. Ownership indicated a considerable degree of wealth and social standing.
3. Brunswick Square: Georgian square in London’s Bloomsbury district.
4. pain … pleasure: A key opposition in eighteenth-century philosophy, following John Locke’s influential theories on the physical basis of intellectual activity.
CHAPTER II
1. militia: Citizen army as distinguished from mercenaries or professional soldiers. Voluntary until 1803. An officer in the militia could be posted within Britain, but not abroad, except voluntarily. Austen’s favourite brother, Henry, joined the Oxford militia in 1793.
2. the child was given up: Frank’s experience may partly reflect that of Austen’s brother Edward, who was ‘given’, as a teenager, to his father’s childless second cousin, Thomas Knight, and his wife in 1783. He adopted the Knight surname in 1812.
3. A complete change of life: Whether Mr Weston’s military career was influenced directly by the war with France (which broke out in 1793) remains unclear because of the uncertain dating of the main story but, since Frank is now twenty-three, a wartime context may be implicit.
4. what was unwholesome: There was little medical agreement over diet at this period. Mr Woodhouse’s suspicion of rich food can be seen in the context of works such as T. Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament (London, 1807), pp. 68–9. See also J. Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body, Ch. 3. Maggie Lane has emphasized the symbolic significance of the numerous references to food in Emma in Jane Austen and Food, Ch. 8.
5. apothecary: Mr Perry is technically a pharmacist but, by 1800, apothecaries had largely assumed the role of general practitioners, especially in rural areas. Between 1812, when the Association of Apothecaries was founded to promote their better education and social standing, and 1815, when the Apothecaries Act was passed, the status of apothecaries was the subject of much discussion. See B. Hamilton, ‘The Medical Professions in the Eighteenth Century’, The Economic History Review, 2nd series IV, no. 2 (1951), 141–69.
CHAPTER III
1. come-at-able: Accessible, obtainable.
2. quadrille: A card game for four players, fashionable in the eighteenth century.
3. Boarding-school: Mrs Goddard’s may be indebted to the Abbey School, Reading, where Austen had been a boarder.
4. fancy-work: Ornamental sewing.
5. prosings: Tedious chatting, gossip.
6. natural daughter: Illegitimate. Contemporary romances often turned on the mysterious parentage of the heroine (see Moler, pp. 157–86). Emma’s interest in Harriet maybe compared with Catherine Morland’s novel-oriented view of life in Northanger Abbey.
7. by character: By repute.
8. gruel: Dish made from oatmeal and water or milk, regarded as especially suitable for invalids.
CHAPTER IV
1. country: County or area.
2. Elegant Extracts: ed. Vicesimus Knox (1789), and frequently reprinted. A collection of verse and prose.
3. The Vicar of Wakefield: (1766), a very popular sentimental novel by Oliver Goldsmith.
4. The Romance of the Forest: (1791), by Ann Radcliffe, and The Children of the Abbey (1798), by Regina Maria Roche, are both Gothic novels of the kind parodied by Austen in Northanger Abbey.
5. Kingston: A small town in Surrey, famous for its market. Now part of the London suburbs.
6. not born to an independence: Compare the influential views of Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) had warned, in Ch. 5, of the dangers of a man marrying ‘with little or no prospect of being able to maintain a family in independence’.
CHAPTER V
1. ‘the picture of health’: Henry Fielding describes his hero, Tom Jones, as ‘one of the handsomest young