Emma - Jane Austen [231]
KITTY, a fair but frozen maid,
Kindled a flame I yet deplore;
The hood-wink’d boy I call’d in aid,
Tho’ much of his approach afraid,
So fatal to my suit before.
At length, propitious to my prayer,
The little urchin came;
From earth I saw him mount in air,
And soon he cool’d with dext’rous care,
The relics of my flame.
Say, by what title, or what name,
Must I the youth address?
Cupid and he are not the same,
Tho’ both can raise, or quench a flame—
I’ll kiss you if you guess.
The solution is ‘a chimney-sweeper’.
CHAPTER X
1. ‘… old maid … like Miss Bates!’: Compare Clarissa’s observation in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, V, 28, that ‘she who scorns a man must die a maid’. When Emma was published in December 1815, Jane Austen, having reached her fortieth birthday without marrying, might have been regarded by some as an ‘old maid’.
2. women’s usual occupations: Compare Darcy’s comment on the accomplishments of young ladies in Pride and Prejudice, Ch.8:‘They all paint tables, cover skreens, and net purses.’ Women’s occupations had also been the subject of more serious discussion: see, e.g., Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), Thomas Broadhursts’s Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of the Mind (1808) and Elizabeth Hamilton’s A Series of Popular Essays (1813).
3. stomacher: Ornamental triangular panel filling the front of a dress from breast to stomach.
4. no romantic expectations: Unlike, e.g., Wordsworth, whose poem The Excursion (1814) had celebrated the wisdom of ‘The Wanderer’, who came from‘A virtuous household, though exceeding poor!’, l. 112.
CHAPTER XI
1. Cobham: A small town in Surrey.
CHAPTER XII
1. turnips: Mr Knightley practises crop rotation and thus participates in the agrarian revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The anxiety about food shortages during the prolonged war with France had given the question of efficient production a particular urgency. See M. Lane, Jane Austen’s England, for an account of the contemporary countryside.
2. South End: Then a fashionable watering place on the Thames Estuary in Essex. Austen’s brother, Charles, had taken his family to South End in the summer of 1813 (see Letters, p. 216).
3. Sea-bathing had become increasingly fashionable in the eighteenth century and the medical benefits had been emphasized by numerous theorists. See, for example, J. Currie’s belief that ‘persons immersed in sea water, and especially in saturated brine, for some time together, preserve the lustre of the eye and the ruddiness of the cheek, longer than those in fresh water’ (Medical Reports, on the Effects of Water, Cold and Warm, as a remedy against fever and other diseases (London, 1805), p. 34). Austen was herself an enthusiastic bather (Letters, p. 95), but very contradictory portrayals of the seaside appear in her subsequent novels, Persuasion and Sanditon.
4. Philippics: Bitter attacks or denunciations (from the orations of Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon).
5. Cromer: Seaside resort in north-east Norfolk.
6. See note I, ii: 5. John Knightley’s emphasis on the superiority of Mr Wingfield over Mr Perry may reflect the friction between physicians and apothecaries at this period. See Sales, Jane Austen: Representations of Regency England, for discussion of the changing status of Mr Perry.
CHAPTER XIII
1. What fatigues to-morrow will bring: Emma seems more aware of the duties of a clergyman on Christmas Day than does Mr Elton, whose attention does not seem entirely focused on the birth of the Lord.
2. sweep-gate: The sweep was the curved drive leading to the house.
CHAPTER XV
1. talking nonsense: Carriages often represented danger for the solitary heroine in eighteenth-century fiction–see, for example, Harriet