Emma - Jane Austen [232]
CHAPTER XVI
1. William Cox: The 1816 text has Coxe, but this is clearly the same character who appears on pp. 217 and 308, and presumably part of the same family as Mr Cox, p. 200, Miss Anne Cox, p. 216, and ‘the second young Cox’, p. 231.
CHAPTER XVII
1. Bath: The most frequented spa of the eighteenth century, by now somewhat declining in fashion though still famous for its medicinal waters. Austen lived there between 1801 and 1806. Her unhappiness there is described by Claire Tomalin in Jane Austen: A Life, Ch. 16.
2. repressing imagination all the rest of her life: Emma’s active imagination places her in a line of heroines from Charlotte Lennox’s memorable Arabella, in The Female Quixote (1752), which Austen read in January 1807, to Eaton Stannard Barrett’s Cherubina, in The Heroine (1813), which Austen read and ‘was very much amused’ by on 2–3 March 1814, when she had begun writing Emma (Letters, p. 255).
CHAPTER XVIII
1. proud, luxurious, and selfish too: The eighteenth-century interest in the effects of upbringing and education on the developing character continued to provoke debate – see Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge, 1994), for discussion of contemporary attitudes and ideas on education.
2. Weymouth: Resort on the south coast which became very fashionable after George III began to patronize it in 1789. It was seen by many as the resort of ‘the giddy and the gay’ (see Roy Porter, In Sickness and in Health (London, 1988), p. 197); Austen commented on 14 September 1804, ‘Weymouth is altogether a shocking place, I perceive, without recommendation of any kind, & worthy only of being frequented by the inhabitants of Gloucester’ (Letters, p. 92).
3. manœuvring and finessing: Southam notes that ‘manœuvring’ had come into the English language in the 1780s to describe the tactical movements of troops and ships, but was soon adapted to the social battlefield. Maria Edgeworth had used the term as a title in her Tales of Fashionable Life (1809); ‘finessing’, meaning artfulness and deception, was another French loan word. (See Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy, p. 243.)
4. aimable: Friendly disposition, which causes one to be liked. Lord Chesterfield, whose Letters to His Son were regarded as a manual of good breeding by many upwardly mobile eighteenth-century readers, but by Dr Johnson as teaching ‘the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master’, placed great stress on that which ‘the French call l’aimable’, and which could only be acquired through ‘Great usage of the world, great attention, and a great desire of pleasing’, Letters to His Son, 6 July 1749, and 12 November 1750 (see Bradbrook, pp. 32–3). The English term, amiability, was in contrast a much warmer expression of approval than it is today. Francis Hutcheson had observed that ‘when we find in an honest Trader, the kind Friend, the faithful, prudent Adviser, the charitable and hospitable Neighbour, the tender Husband, and affectionate Parent, the sedate yet cheerful Companion, the generous Assistant of Merit, the cautious Allayer of Contention and Debate, the Promoter of Love and good Understanding among Acquaintances, this character is truly as amiable as those whose external Splendour dazzles an injudicious World’ (An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725), p. 178).
Volume Two
CHAPTER I
1. beaufet: Sideboard where guests help themselves to food.
2. huswife: ‘Housewife’, a small case for needles and thread.
3. crosses half: As letters were expensive to send, those who needed to economize would turn their completed page and write across the lines of writing, often making their words hard to decipher. Postal charges were at their height in 1812, when the cost of a letter, which was paid by the recipient, was calculated by the distance it was being sent, and the number of sheets of paper. See Jo Modert, ‘Post/Mail’, The Jane Austen Handbook, ed. J. David Grey, pp. 345