Austen’s MP: Assembly night at Portsmouth & how not to renovate Thornton Lacey

This is the Assembly night, said William, If I were at Portsmouth, I should be at it perhaps …

I found myself in due time in the very place which I had a curiosity to see. I was suddenly, upon turning the corner of a steepish downy field, in the midst of a retired little village between gently rising hills; a small stream before me to be forded, a church standing on a sort of knoll to my right … not a gentleman or half a gentleman's house to be seen excepting one — to be presumed the Parsonage … (Thursday, Dec 15th, the dinner-and-card party at Dr & Mrs Grant’s Parsonage, a week before the ball, MP II:7).

William is instead at a dinner-card party at the Parsonage during which Henry outlines his plans for renovating Thornton Lacey or at least renting it himself (1983 BBC Mansfield Park, Pt 4)

Dear friends and readers,

I’m still working away on my new calendar for Mansfield Park, paying close attention to Austen’s close attention to time, space & memory in Mansfield Park. I’m not neglecting letters and Tuesdays either.

As I wrote in my previous blog on MP, I have had to revise my use of the terms determinate and indeterminate time. In MP, determinate time is not kept as consistently nor as obsessively as in S&S and P&P; time floats, and passages reflect a feeling of time passing, sometimes longer than the actual time passed in the novel (as when Austen refers to the autumn play-acting time in December in terms that make us feel it was long ago probably because she wrote the play-acting parts long before the aftermath). Following Austen’s art, indeterminate time is time remembered in the past when the characters are in the present. Determinate time are those parts of the novels where (as in P&P and S&S), we can know what months we are in and approximate or nail down securely precise dates in a month and weekdays, and much is compressed within a small amount of time. Indeterminacy brings us back to periods where we cannot know the relationship of the days to one another. There are also sudden unmoored conversations and the novel’s many letters in the Portsmouth section are undated.

And the calender is still showing that parts of the novel thought to be first written (the play-acting, the elopement of Henry and Mary and Portsmouth letters) are indeterminate and/or inconsistent with the rest of the novel, and the parts of the novel thought to be written later, the Sotherton sequence, the lead-in to the ball, the ball, Henry’s courtship of Fanny and her refusal leading to her exile to Portsmouth are clocked carefully in determinate time consistent internally and with the earliest parts of the novel.

Once in the determinate time sequences, I’ve been looking for those remarks which can be used to date the novel’s composition as well as internal calendar. One such remark is William’s on the night of the dinner and card party at the Parsonage (pictured above). William has apparently been enjoying himself mightily at a playfully competitive game of Speculation with Henry and Mary Crawford, Edmund, Lady Bertram, and Fanny, and suddenly says “This is Assembly Night … If I were in Portsmouth, I should be at it perhaps.” Fanny, easily hurt, protests that she hopes he does not wish himself there, and he answers, no, for he would not get a chance to dance, but be snubbed as a mere midshipman. Fanny’s voiced love of dancing and William’s remarks prompt Sir Thomas’s plan for a ball for the brother and sister.

Exquisite high point of ball for Fanny — the 1983 MP the only one to show it: Fanny & Edmund’s 2 dances

I thought to myself, were I to know what was the usual Assembly Night in Portsmouth, especially in or around the year 1808, I could have a s2nd full date for Austen’s MP calender. I asked on C18-l where I could probably find such information in my local research library. I was thinking of going to the Library of Congress. Local newspapers was the reply. But, with Jim’s ability to navigate online websites, I read the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle for the years 1807 -1811 and skimmed yet more looking for material on assembly nights.

I discovered that in fact there were no assembly nights in Portsmouth in 1808 (Thursday Dec 22, 1808 is the one full indisputable and almost wholly stated date in MP) and had not been for a few or several years; that in 1810 they were revived, but that there was no particular assembly night set out (it varied depending on all sorts of things) though Thursdays were preferred,and that it was only by 1827 that there was a regular set-aside Assembly room, with specified patrons (see material cited in comments for quotations).

Looking at the calendar and working back from the night of the ball, and days specified for Edmund’s sending for a chain for the cross, the cross’s late arrival and Fanny’s visit to the Parsonage house to consult on what to wear to find Mary setting out to her house to advise with her, it makes sense that the dinner-and-card party took place a week before, Thursday. Austen was probably thinking back from maybe 1812 when she was writing. She probably didn’t know they didn’t have assembly nights in Portsmouth. An old “county book” I own by Brian Seymour Vesey-Fitzgerald (Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, published by R. Hale in 1949) has also much material on Portsmouth and tells us that Portsmouth has ever operated very differently from other towns in Hampshire; it was very much there as a naval and military base and its connections (the people) not to the local surroundings but the elite establishment running the country for its own benefit as it saw that.

It’s telling to me that repeatedly I find Austen is credited with more omniscient knowledge and exactitude than her texts really have, yet how that they do carry enough to start such assumptions. For example, the finding of tourist spots to advertise and lure tourists and make money through Austen’s name comes much more from where the movies were filmed than where Austen supposedly set them in her books, yet the film-makers did chose their spots based on Austen’s sets of details.

Her conscious mind was filled with such diurnal details as she could turn up to promote literal verisimilitude which then enabled her thoroughly to imagine herself her personage living through her scenes moment by moment. There may be too much fuss made about Fanny’s non-remark about slavery, but there are many references to Antigua (for example the night of the dinner-and-card party Sir Thomas is said to describe the balls at Antigua) and the world outside the country house in this novel.

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A plain parsonage house — only 1 of the 3 MP films made thus far gives us a glimpse of an ordinary Parsonage house, Rozema’s 1999 MP: Fanny happening upon it in “the gloom and dirt of a middle November day,” the rainy one where Dr Grant comes out with an umbrella to make Fanny come in

It’s also telling what is over-emphasized. A great fuss (rightly in this case) is made about the “long hot day in August” spent at Sotherton, but just as detailed and significant thematically is Henry’s description of the improvements and renovations of Thornton Lacey he imagines himself setting afoot to turn this ordinary somewhat run-down Parsonage into a “gentleman’s residence.” If you read carefully, you see that Austen is working out a dream-plan in detail such as Mrs Dashwood casually referred to for Barton cottage, and one that (as Edmund suggests) would probably not even be quite doable even at the great expense it might cost.

These are just some of the particulars: first Henry pretends he just came upon the house; the insinuation is not convincing. Then he outlines what needs to be done: he saw a

“Parsonage … within a stone’s throw of the said knoll and church … [with] work for 5 summers at least before place liveable … house [must be] turned to front the east instead of the north … entrance and rooms must be on that side where the view is really very pretty … what is at present the garden; you must make you a new garden at what is now the back of the house … sloping to the south-east … I rode 10 yards up the lane between the church and the house … The meadows round will be the garden, as well as what is now, sweeping around the lane to the principal road through the village, the north east [includes] very pretty meadows … you must purchase them … [you must remove the] farm-yard … that terrible nuisance … [and result will be] not like a Parsonage house [worth] a few hundreds a year … not a scrambling collection of low rooms … as many roofs as windows … not cramped into vulgar compactness … of a square farm-house … [but a] solid walled roomy mansion-like house … [the kind belonging to a] respectable old country family [ who have lived there] through 200 years at least … now spending from 2-3000 a yea” … a place … [that] will look like [one owned by a] great land-holder … by every creature traveling the road .. . [and that there is] no real squire’s house to dispute the point [will secure this impression].

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Mary kisses Henry upon being told Henry now intends to marry Fanny Price — again only the 1983 MP shows this and Ken Taylor has made his Mary much kinder, more sincere, plainer than Austen or the other two Marys

As to letters and Tuesdays,

While there are many mentions of letters, in effect journal-writing for Fanny especially, the first text of a letter given in this novel occurs in the third volume, Mary’s note to Fanny, assuring Fanny of Mary’s approval of Henry’s love for Fanny; the second is Fanny’s short distracted reply. That is very late in the book. Most of the Sotherton sequence is told in a 3rd person omniscient mode, and the theatrical sequence often reads like a play, with Julia just about “exiting,” and other characters making “entrances, and in one remarkable scene, two characters, Edmund and Mary, acting out their characters, Anhalt and Amelia in front of a third, Fanny.

So, a fundamental difference between S&S and P&P on the one hand, and MP on the other, is that we hear Austen’s takes on her scene which we did not have as much or thoroughly in the first two finished published novels because they were epistolary mostly and MP only becomes epistolary in the concluding portions of the Portsmouth episode. A typical example of Austen’s voice:

Julia, whose happy star no longer prevailed, was obliged to keep by the side of Mrs. Rushworth, and restrain her impatient feet to that lady’s slow pace, while her aunt, having fallen in with the housekeeper, who was come out to feed the pheasants, was lingering behind in gossip with her. Poor Julia, the only one out of the nine not tolerably satisfied with their lot, was now in a state of complete penance, and as different from the Julia of the barouche-box as could well be imagined. The politeness which she had been brought up to practise as a duty made it impossible for her to escape; while the want of that higher species of self-command, that just consideration of others, that knowledge of her own heart, that principle of right, which had not formed any essential part of her education, made her miserable under it.

Austen may be have been intuitively aware of her problems in presenting the implied author directly. She did see that MP was not liked the way P&P and S&S originally written in the epistolary mode had been. The result had was Austen had to step forth as narrator; she had had to do this for the original or first versions of NA and The Watsons. We don’t have the original or first versions of NA. The Watsons has often been linked to MP: one place they are linked is the presence of a narrator. In the first case it’s a desperately depressed voice, and in this second a caustic and at times severely moralistic one. So, her next intuitive solution was to to erase herself through using irony altogether, through presenting a heroine she is utterly at a distance from: Miss Emma Woodhouse.

And this lack of epistolary narrative is somehow connected to this novel’s relatively sparse number of important Tuesdays. I have found four more beyond the evening of Fanny and William’s return to Portsmouth together (February 7th) and the night Henry and Mrs Rushworth again met at Mrs Fraser’s party (March 14th).

Like a couple of the Tuesdays in P&P, none are specifically named Tuesdays, but neither are conjectured; they are clearly in a sequence of days and dates carefully phased through and both are important. So, the 1st Tuesday in MP is January 3rd, the day after Henry comes back from London with the three letters he has procured (he himself tells us it was a Monday), showing that he has gotten William his promotion. What’s special about this day? it’s the day he meant just to go and see Fanny and Lady Bertram for 10 minutes, and stayed an hour an one half, and returned to Mary to announce his astonishing determination actually to marry Fanny Price. The 2nd is January 10th, the day Edmund returns home unexpectedly to find and meet Mary at the Parsonage still (he had hoped to miss her) and admits to himself that he is still irresistibly in love with Mary: “I was within a trifle of staying at Lessingby [another] five or six days more.”

Edmund unexpectedly coming upon Mary and Henry (1983 MP, which seems not to omit any of the book’s crucial moments)

The third is the day Mrs Rushworth opens her house to London, February 28th, a Tuesday, a lavish party. (above Penguin MP III:9, 365-66, Ch 40)

The fourth is the fortnight’s end where Fanny intensely disillusioned, February 14th, her immense disillusionment complete at end of a week (Penguin MP III:8, 360-64, Ch 39)

I am aware it could be said, but are not the two Thursdays much more important, the night of the ball, and January 5th, the long phases of the day Henry comes to ask for Fanny’s hand, Sir Thomas utter his long diatribe in response to Fanny’s refusal, the dinner at which Fanny is scolded by Aunt Norris for daring to walk out without telling the aunt, concluded by Henry himself coming back to insist on his “claim” (recognized by Sir Thomas) to be heard. I admit this.

Ellen