Emma - Jane Austen [236]
3. letters: Chapman points out that according to family tradition, the word was ‘Pardon’ (Chapman, p. 493).
CHAPTER VI
1. Box Hill: A popular destination for tourists in Surrey, famous for its walks and views. See Introduction.
2. humourist: Mrs Elton presumably means that Knightley is odd and whimsical, but the term may have the further meanings of being witty, and of humouring others.
3. prospect: View. The term is a commonplace of picturesque theory and landscape gardening. Thus Donwell is implicitly contrasted with newer houses or those that had been ‘improved’ according to late eighteenth-century notions of taste (compare the discussions of Sother-ton in Mansfield Park). Mavis Batey has drawn attention to Humphrey Repton’s comment in his Red Book on Stoneleigh Abbey, which Austen visited in 1806, where ‘little attention seems to have been given either to the Prospect or the Aspect’ (Jane Austen and the English Landscape, p. 96). Despite this, Nigel Everett suggests that the descriptions of Donwell should be compared with the Hafod estate in Cardiganshire, developed by Thomas Johnes with the help of Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, and generally regarded as the epitome of picturesque landscape in the early nineteenth century, The Tory View of Landscape (New Haven and London, 1994), p. 195.
4. hautboys … Chili…: Different kinds of strawberry.
5. orchard in blossom: A notorious ‘mistake’, since apple blossom is well over by mid-summer (see W. Austen Leigh and R. Austen Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters: A Family Record, p. 307). Evan Nesbit, however, suggests that Austen’s late-flowering apple trees might reflect the effects of the exceptionally cool spring of 1814 (‘In Retrospect’, Nature (10 July 1997), p. 9). John Sutherland has argued for a more literary explanation, suggesting that the ‘spreading flocks, orchard in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending’ create a montage of the turning seasons, in the tradition of Cowper (see ‘Apple-Blossom in June’, Is Heathcliff a Murderer?, pp. 14–19, and ‘Apple-Blossom in June – again’, Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?, pp. 28–33).
6. expose myself: Attract attention, but with an ironic further meaning of unmasking secret behaviour.
CHAPTER VII
1. Mickleham … and Dorking: Frank Churchill is facing west, since Mickleham is north of Dorking, and Box Hill lies to the east.
2. M. and A.: See the Introduction, note 19. Mr Weston’s riddle carries an unconscious irony, since Francis Hutcheson’smoral formula empha-sizes that ‘the Perfection of Virtue where M = A’ occurs when ‘the Being acts to the utmost of its power for the publick Good’ (An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), p. 172).
3. acrostic: A poem or riddle in which the initial letters of lines or key words spell a new word. Such puzzles were popular and feature regularly in contemporary magazines.
4. Irish car: An unfashionable vehicle, generally used by those who could not afford more elegant modes of transport. The Wordsworths had had to use an Irish car for their tour to Scotland in 1803, and were evidently conscious of its eccentric appearance (see Dorothy Wordsworth, Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland in 1803, ed. Carol K. Walker (New Haven and London, 1997), Introduction).
CHAPTER VIII
1. relief from the parish: Since the sixteenth century, parishes had been required to levy rates from local inhabitants for the support of the poor, which took the form of both pensions and ad hoc payments.
CHAPTER IX
1. suddenly let it go: Bradbrook points out the parallel between this gesture and the scene in Burney’s Camilla, where Edgar Mandelbert receives some letters from Camilla (Bradbrook, pp. 100–101).
2. when lovely woman stoops: From Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wake-field, Ch. XXIV. For a similar sentiment, expressed less caustically, see Austen’s letter of 14 October 1813, on the death of Mrs Holder, ‘Poor woman, she had done the only thing in the World she could possibly do, to make one cease to abuse her’ (Letters, p. 238).