Emma - Jane Austen [233]
4. different kingdoms … different countries: The United Kingdom had been established in January 1801 when the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland became law. The reference might suggest that Emma is set soon after 1800, but it may equally indicate Miss Bates’s slowness to accept change.
5. Baly-craig: Mr Dixon does not appear to be one of the absentee landlords criticized by Austen’s admired contemporary, Maria Edge-worth, in her Irish novel of 1812, The Absentee.
6. Holyhead: Port in Anglesey, off the coast of north Wales, famous for its traffic with Dublin.
CHAPTER II
1. penance and mortification: Retirement into a convent is a common motif in Romantic novels such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) or The Italian (1797).
CHAPTER III
1. spencer: Close-fitting jacket, named after the 2nd Earl Spencer. Austen refers to her own ‘kerseymere spencer’ in a letter of 30 June 1808 (Letters, p. 136).
2. our lot is cast: Miss Bates quotes loosely from the Book of Common Prayer, Psalm 16: 7, ‘The lot is fallen unto me in a fair ground: yea, I have a goodly heritage.’
3. Ford’s: Since clothes were made by hand, shops dealing with materials were very important. Austen was herself an accomplished needlewoman and her letters are full of references to dressmaking.
4. there she had set: Chapman suggests that the words indicate Harriet’s imperfect English; ‘set’ could also have been intended to read ‘sat’.
5. where, all of a sudden: Chapman amended ‘where’ to ‘when’, but this seems contrary to the more convincing view conveyed in note 4, above.
CHAPTER IV
1. Bristol—merchant: The hesitation may reflect Emma’s disdain for those ‘in trade’, but there is a possible allusion to the slave trade, since Bristol was the main British port involved in slavery until the Act of Abolition came into effect in 1808. See note II, xvii: 2.
CHAPTER V
1. espalier: Fruit tree trained on a lattice or framework.
2. Bath as well as Oxford?: To travel from Oxford to Surrey via Bath would be a somewhat eccentric route and indicates the haziness of Harriet’s topographical knowledge.
CHAPTER VI
1. amor patriæ: Love of country; an ironic use of a military ideal at a time of war. Southam points out the two distinct classical traditions of ‘amor patriae’ – one derived from Ovid who, exiled on the Black Sea, described his love of country as stronger than reason, Epistulæ ex Ponto, I, 3, 29; the other, more politically charged, from Virgil, who describes Brutus placing public good over private feeling as he condemns his own sons to death for their involvement in the plot to restore the tyrant Tarquin, Aeneid, VI, 823. Frank Churchill, demonstrating his desire to be a ‘true citizen of Highbury’, is playing on the Virgilian tradition, but distinguishing himself from Brutus by his emphasis on the importance of private happiness (Jane Austen and the Navy, pp. 248–9). Questions of public and private virtue had been much debated by political writers during the revolutionary decade of the 1790s, and so Frank Churchill’s playful references to citizenship also strengthen his association with France.
CHAPTER VII
1. hair cut: Hair cuts for men had become quite elaborate by the early nineteenth century, when fashionable young men began to wear their own hair rather than wigs (see R. Corson, Fashions in Hair (London, 1965), pp. 398–403).
2. piquet: A card game for two players.
CHAPTER VIII
1. Broadwood’s: John Broadwood (1732–1812) was famous for his pianos. His London firm was based in Great Pulteney St, but he also had an estate at Capel, Dorking, in Surrey (O. Manning and H. Bray, The History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey (3 vols.; London, 1804–14), I, p. 597). The instrument would have cost between 20 and 30 guineas, hence the ‘great astonishment’.
2. travel: Although the Grand Tour had been part of the gentleman’s education throughout the eighteenth century, travel was generally difficult during the Napoleonic Wars, except for the brief peace of 1802. By the time Austen wrote Emma, the defeat of Napoleon’s army meant