“They found at last, on examining their watches, that it was time to be at home” (1995 P&P, scripted Andrew Davies, final walk, P&P 3:17, Ch 59)
Dear friends and readers,
I’ve completed an accurate and fully detailed calendar for P&P, the first ever done in this detailed way: A calendar for P&P. I did it by noting all the mentions of days, months, intervals of time that are almost continually (not quite) to be found on every page of the extant P&P; checking these with the equally careful (if not so frequent) annotations of distance walked, traveled, planned; and noting all novel’s letters quoted whole, in part, paraphrased, summarized, mentioned, referred to significantly, remembered or simply mentioned.
My conclusion is that an ur-Pride and Prejudice (so to speak) can be seen clearly (not just glimpsed) in the summary chapters and placements of material in the present text. First Impressions in the first and subsequent drafts (there was more than one) was wholly or nearly wholly epistolary, much longer, and made Jane and Bingley’s story as prominent as Darcy and Elizabeth’s and used Lydia’s romance as am intrinsic counterpoint for both.
In my previous blog I mentioned the chapters at the close of Volume 2 and opening of Volume 2 where we have the concurrent correspondences of Jane with Elizabeth and Elizabeth with her aunt Gardiner. There are a sequence of chapters that has a similar mix of narrative types in Volume 3 of P&P
Beginning with the insertion of Jane’s two letters to Elizabeth at Lambton (Vol 3:4, Ch 46) and then resuming after Elizabeth comes home and has her conversation with Jane, where there is a break in Chapter 5 and continuing to near the end of Chapter 7 there is a similar mix of whole, partial, and redacted letters set more or less in date order (with new narrative connectives) which tell the story of Lydia’s elopement which occurred concurrently with the story of Elizabeth’s 2 visits to Pemberley, and Darcy’s return visits to the Lambton inn. Andrew Davies intuitively (or consciously) saw in these a coherent story he turned into a flashback in his mini-series. The section as presently constituted includes 5 letters in whole or part from Mr Gardiner, 1 from Mr Collins to Mr Bennet, 1 from Colonel Forster (summarized), 2 from Mr Bennet (quoted and paraphrased, Lydia’s letter (given whole), & 1 from Jane to Mrs Gardiner (now vanished) and of course Mrs Gardiner’s crowning revelatory finale.
I had mentioned the vestigial epistolary feature shown up in the sudden insertion of Mr Collins’s October 15th letter in a chapter which occurs much later in time. Now I’ve found ironic juxtapositions of the kind I found in the present Sense and Sensibility which would come naturally when you write epistolary narrative (and are free to rearrange time and have events occur concurrently by different groups of people) but not have the same effect at all in omniscient narrative. Ironic juxtaposition is one of the satiric strengths of epistolary narrative.
The original novel had two sets of letters around the time of Elizabeth going to Pemberley: Elizabeth’s first visit to Pemberley is on the Tuesday, the same Tuesday (confirmed twice by Jane) that Mr Bennet left Longbourn to chase after Lydia. It would have been very exciting to have these two events run concurrently. Far from being a superfluous back story piggybacked into Pride and Prejudice and irrelevant to its main plot-design, Lydia and Wickham’s stories both were intrinsic.
Wickham and Lydia eloping (95 P&P, Pt 5)
Parallel scene in original book of Elizabeth and Darcy walking together in Pemberley (94 P&P, Pt 4)
From my calendar as taken from the present novel:
Saturday night, August 1st, “an express” “at twelve just as we were all gone to bed.
Saturday, August 1st: early evening: Lydia leaves a letter for Harriet, (now given Elizabeth to read by Jane on Saturday August 8th as Mr Collins’s letter was similarly replaced later in the omniscient narrative):
“They were off Saturday night “about twelve, as is conjectured,” “not missed till yesterday morning at eight.”
Sunday, August 2nd: Colonel Forster upon hearing from Denny that Wickham did not intend marriage, he traced them to “Clapham” but no further”. He tells this to the family at Longbourn on Monday: called “yesterday” in the second half of Jane’s letter written Tuesday.
Monday, August 3rd? “… “within five miles of Lambton” Pemberley was situated … a mile or two out of” their road. Jane writes her first more hopeful letter.
Tuesday, August 4th: “The next morning, the subject revived … To Pemberley, therefore, they were to go. This day also is day Mr Bennet went to London in quest of Lydia. It is not conjectured but stated by Jane: “Yes he went on Tuesday as I wrote you word … ”
And the salient oddity: Austen did not delete from Mrs Gardiner’s letter a description of Jane’s letter written (Mrs Gardiner says) the Wednesday before hers, which sufficiently described to her the shameless behavior of Lydia and Wickham upon their return to Longbourn: Mrs Gardiner would have felt personally insulted by Lydia’s behavior “if I had not perceived, by Jane’s letter last Wednesday, that her conduct on coming home was exactly of a piece with it” (Longman III:10, 276, ch 52). There is no such letter; the sequence has been turned into omniscient narrative.
Again Davies’s 1995 P&P has picked up the psychological perspective: Samantha Harker as Jane is hurt, irritated, even angry and put on edge by her mother’s screeching joy and Lydia’s needling.
As Mrs Bennet launches into lamenting over Lydia marrying in London, her lack of clothes, marital announcement, Jane has clearly (if quietly) had it (95 P&P)
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“The men shan’t come and part us, I am determined. We want none of them, do we? Darcy had walked away to another part of the room. She followed him with her eyes: Mrs Bennet’s Tuesday night party upon Bingley’s return. From the 1979 BBC P&P, scripted by Fay Weldon, the only one of the P&P films to dramatize Darcy & Elizabeth’s thwarting
In my previous blog I catalogued and described 4 important Tuesdays in the present P&P; I have two more and a third patterning with Tuesday whose whack when coupled with another day resembles that of Lady Susan and Sense and Sensibility.
These 4 were: Mr Collins’s first letter (written Tuesday, October 15th); the first long day & evening Elizabeth spends at Netherfield with a very ill Jane up in the bedroom (Tuesday, Nov 12th, signalled by Mrs Bennet’s letter saying she does not want her daughters to return before they’ve spent a whole week at Netherfield, so not before next Tuesday is done); 3) the day the Bennet girls walk with Mr Collins into Meryton and witness Darcy and Wickham’s strained encounter, leading an already aroused Elizabeth to be suspicious that something untoward needs explanation (Nov 19th, the next day after “Mon, Nov 18th)
As played in the 79 P&P, Wickham is ashamed
:
Darcy mortified
Elizabeth fierce
and 4) the day of the catastrophic Netherfield Ball (Tues, Nov 26th, a day and/or date mentioned several times).
To these I now add:
5) The visit to Netherfield, Tuesday, August 4th, whose importance needs no demonstration, but now it is equally the day that Mr Bennet set out on his futile journey to rescue Lydia and Jane wrote her second distressed letter.
6) Tuesday, September 29th: The word Tuesday mentioned three times. Bingley invited to dine (Longman III:12, 287, Ch 54). This day is built up as important in text but has been overshadowed by Lady Catherine’s visit; its marginalization has been reinforced because it’s usually skipped in the P&P films and has been rarely discussed. It’s the day that Bingley and Jane manage to renew their love, but Darcy and Elizabeth are continually separated. It could be treated as semi-comic anguish and is by Weldon in her film: Darcy and Elizabeth end up seated “almost as far … as the table could divide them,” they are thwarted in their attempts to talk; Darcy is sucked into a card table at the other end of the room.
That Tuesday night Darcy confesses his manipulation intervention and been dishonesty to Wickham: he had kept secret from him Jane’s presence in London for three months (a detail similar to Elinor’s keeping secret for four months from Marianne Edward’s clandestine engagement to Lucy). Bingley is described as very angry, Darcy leaves we must assume much chagrined, and, as he tells Elizabeth after she accepts his proposal, despairing of Elizabeth. His departure of course desolates Elizabeth.
So this is a bad Tuesday.
One less obvious Tuesday which I hesitate to cite as it does not fit my criteria of announcement directly in some way, and happens off-stage, but as it fuels an ugly event I feel I can’t ignore it: it seems to me a bleak kind of joke that the day that Collins received the letter from someone in Hertfordshire regaling him with gossip. This previous day may be a Tuesday and this letter prompted his vicious triumph.
The Bennet girls listen to Mr Collins deliver his “condolances” (how the letter is conveyed in the 95 P&P): again Samantha Harker as Jane conveys a strong sense of the nastiness of his in the rigid lines of her jaw
Perhaps Mr Collins’s letter appeared as an insert in Jane’s to Mrs Gardiner. This is a Richardsonian technique: the insertion of letters within other letters.
In Austen’s Lady Susan and S&S I’ve noticed a pattern of double whacks which include Tuesday: On a Tuesday Lady Susan terrifies her daughter, Fredericka, with demands that Fredericka marry Sir James, and on Wednesday early in the dawn, Fredericka writes her revelatory letter to the hero, Reginald, Lady Susan’s deluded lover whom Fredericka loves; on a Tuesday night Willoughby snubs Marianne Dashwood and on Wednesday early in the dawn, Marianne writes Willoughby, prompting his cruel letter and the return of her letters and lock of hair.
To refer to my calendar: between Wed and Thursday, Aug 12th-13th (but probably Wednesday), Mr Collins’s letter is inserted. It is not necessary for the plot-design, but Austen kept it to expose him & his hypocritical Christianity. It’s in the vein of hard caricature see Longman P&P III:6, 552, Ch 48). He has hurried to tell of the affair to Lady Catherine and her daughter; he conveys Lady Catherine’s withering dismissal of the Bennet girls from here on in as marital choices, and his “augmented satisfaction on a certain event of last November”. We learn someone wrote “by letter” to tell them (Lucases?) yesterday.
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Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth reading Darcy’s long letter to her
We have to stop thinking about this novel as originally dominated by Elizabeth. It originally had an array of correspondents and yes a much wider purvey and perspective therefor. Ironically critics are endlessly writing about what is not explicitly or even implicitly in the extant novel (the politics of war for example) and ignore what’s there: on each and every page Austen’s mind is on literal verisimilitude and psychological time in reading, writing, responding from a variety of characters, among them Mr and Mrs Gardiner:
Joanna David as Mrs Gardiner sitting down to write to Elizabeth (95 P&P)
I’m now going to turn my attention for a couple of days to some books on time, the development of the ability to track small intervals in the era, the genres which grew out of the an awakened consciousness of daily time, and how time works in epistolary fiction and addressing oneself to another intimately in psychological development. Then I’ll turn to Mansfield Park. I’ll put off reading about Mary Queens of Scots until after that.
I’ve chosen beyond Janet Altman’s Epistolarity:
Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785 (good sections on diurnal subjective literary forms in the 18th century);
Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (“Everything I do is planned … “)
Eviastar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (I’m looking forward to this one)
Irvine Schiffer, The Trauma of Time (this may be more relevant to Austen than people might imagine)
I too am a person who follows routs, schedules.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Fantastic P&P calendar, Ellen. What a lot of work that must have taken.I’m still on the Austen list and occasionally read the posts. I’m glad I saw this one. I abandoned my P&P based novel a few years ago but at the time struggled with the dates — and also created some problems for myself by having Bingley and Darcy’s arrival in June……. I deleted the last Austen digest already after I bookmarked your calendar or would have responded to your post via the list.
Tracey