A Summer Syllabus: The Mann Booker Prize: short and short-listed

Emily Mortimer as Florence Green in the meadow contemplating opening her bookshop (2017, Isabel Coixet, The Bookshop)

A Syllabus

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at American University
Day: Four Tuesday afternoons, 1:45 to 3:15 pm,
June 4 to June 24
4801 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington DC 20016
Dr Ellen Moody

Description of Course

We’ll cover two (short) short-listed Bookers, one (short) winner, and watch one movie (outside class) from a screenplay by a Booker winner from an American novel it’s said could have “been in the running” had the prize been opens to Americans at the time. Our novels: Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop; J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country; Julian Barnes’s A Sense of an Ending, and a Merchant-Ivory film, screenplay Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, The City of your Final Destination (from Peter Cameron’s novel). We’ll discuss our prize-obsessed culture, how the Bookers function in the literary marketplace, and their typical themes, techniques, and moods: autobiographical, historical, self-reflexive, witty, post-colonial, mostly melancholy books and films

Required Books & a film (in the order we’ll read & see them):

Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Bookshop. 1978; rpt. NY: Mariner, Houghton Mifflin, 2013 ISBN 978-0-544-48409-2
Carr, J. L. A Month in the Country. 1980: rpt. NY: New York Review of Books, 2000. 0-9040322-47-1
Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending. 2011; rpt. NY: Vintage, 2012.

One film: Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala 2009 The City of Your Final Destination, featuring Anthony Hopkins, Laura Linney, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alexandria Maria Lara, Omar Metwally, Kiroyyuki Sanada. (Please see this on your own outside class by the fourth session.)

Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth as James Moon and Tim Birkin eating lunch amid the tombs (1987 A Month in the Country)

Jim Carter as Mr Ellerbeck offering Birkin an umbrella (ditto)

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion.

June 4: Introduction: The Booker Prize: history and context; begin The Bookshop. I will review James English. “Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art,” New Literary History, 33:1 (Winter, 2002):109-135.

June 11: The Bookshop into A Month in the Country. If time permits, we’ll see a clip from Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop, featuring Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy and Patricia Clarkson.
June 18: A Month in the Country into The Sense of an Ending. On this day if the class decides to, we can come in at 11:15 and see the whole of Patrick O’Connor, Simon Gray 1987 film A Month in the Country, featuring Kenneth Branagh, Colin Firth, Natasha Richardson, Patrick Malahide, Jim Carter. I will send by attachment Rosemarie Gerr, “It’s not all that easy to find your way back to the Middle Ages,” Criticism, 47:3 (2005):353-86.

June 25: The Sense of an Ending; the film adaptation tradition: James Ivory, JPJhabvala 2009 The City of Your Final Destination

Jim Broadbent as Tony Webster (2017, Ritesh Batra, Nick Payne, The Sense of an Ending)

Suggested supplementary reading:

Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. NY: Vintage, 1984. Short-listed for the Booker.
Cameron, Peter. The City of Your Final Destination. New York: Penguin Plume, 2002.
Fitzgerald, Penelope. Offshore. NY: Houghton Mifflin Mariner, 1979. The Booker Prize winner for that year.
Gray, Simon. Old Flames and A Month in the Country. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Contains screenplay for the film adaptation.
Groes, Sebastian & Peter Childs, eds. Julian Barnes (Contemporary Critical Perspectives). London: Continuum, 2011.
Hopkinson, Natalie. “The Booker Prize’s Bad History,” The New York Times, October 17, 2017. Online.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. NY: Vintage, 2005.
Rogers, Byron. The Last Englishman: The Life of J.L. Carr. Bodmin: Quince Tree Press, 2003.
Strongman, Luke. The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire. Netherlands: Rodopi, 2002.
Todd, Richard. Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.

Anthony Hopkins and Kiroyyuki Sanada as Adam Gund and his partner, Pete (City of Your Final Destination)

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Laura Linney as Arden Langden and Caroline Gund (ditto)

Ellen

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Jane Austen and Cornwall

Cassandra’s depiction of Jane Austen, said to be at the seaside, 1804

Kynance Cove, modern photo

Janeite friends.

As I hope to get onto a plane and fly to Cornwall tomorrow evening in order to spend a week there with a Road Scholar group headed by Peter Maxted (naturalist, environmentalist, author of among other good books, The Natural Beauty of Cornwall), I’ve been looking to see if there is any mention or connection by Austen of herself with Cornwall. I found one specific concrete mention, to which a friend has added another in the comments:

In a letter to Cassandra, from Castle Square, Southampton, dated Saturday Oct 1st 1808, Austen writes:

You have used me ill, you have been writing to Martha without telling me of it, & a letter which I sent her on wednesday [sic] to give her information of you, must have been good for nothing, I do not know how to think that something will not still happen to prevent her returning by the 10th — And if it does, I shall not much regard it on my own account, for I am now got into such a way of being alone that I do not wish even for her. — The Marquis [of Lansdowne] has put off being cured for another year; — after waiting some weeks for the return of the Vessel he had agreed for himself by a famous Man in that Country [Cornwall], in which he means to go abroad twelvemonth hence (LeFaye, 4th edition, pp 147-148).

A contemporary print of the high street in Southampton: the Austens rented a house in Castle Square

I feel for Jane: she has been used ill: anyone who does not tell of information or acts they have been getting or about, but leaves their friend to act as if they were not in possession of information vital to both, betrays that friend, makes a fool out of her. Cassandra has done wrong, not a big betrayal, but she has gone behind Jane’s back to do something she hoped Jane would not find out about. I am moved by Austen’s statement that she has “got into such a way of being alone” that she no longer wishes even for Martha Lloyd, whom Jane loved. I have just had such an experience of a “friend” not telling me of information she has had and so in effect misrepresented a situation. But I will no longer be misled.

Of course I also feel for her as a woman “got into such a way of being alone” that she no longer wishes for a beloved presence.

LeFaye’s typically insinuating note tells of John-Henry Petty (1765-1809) who was “widely travelled but rather solitary” who came to Southampton “to indulge his passion for yachting. He bought the ruined castle within the city walls, and enlarged it “into a gothic fantasy,” selling off the father’s library and art collection at Bowood house to pay for this rebuilding. He became Marquis in 1805, married his mistress, Mary Arabella, daughter of Revd Hinton Maddox and widow of Sir Duke Gifford. LeFaye then recounts nasty gossip about how Lady Gifford was “fat,” and as “strange” as the house Lord Lansdowne created, because she, in supposedly eccentric dress, went walking one day with her three daughters in wind, rain, on stony and mud-filled cobbled streets. LeFaye follows this with the more charitable account by James Edward Austen-Leigh, who turns a carriage this woman went round in into a “fairy equipage” (pp 542-43).

But we have had to take several turns to get there.

For the second I am indebted to Diana Birchall and her use of google, a reference in Mansfield Park, the mention is direct, including the word Cornwall.

“To be so near happiness, so near fame, so near the long paragraph in praise of the private theatricals at Ecclesford, the seat of the Right Hon. Lord Ravenshaw, in Cornwall, which would of course have immortalised the whole party for at least a twelvemonth!”

The upper classes in Cornwall behaved the way they did in Northampton: put on private theatricals and then wrote in absurd praise of themselves.

The Mansfield Park players hard “at work” (from the 2007 Mansfield Park, scripted by Maggie Wadey)

Another more speculative literary connection could be Richard Carew’s Survey of Cornwall; an Elizabethan antiquarian, he wrote the first intelligent thorough vivid description of Cornwall and its people; it was valued and reprinted in 1769 and 1811; Davies Gilbert provided an index. It has been reprinted in our era by Halliday.

Austen never mentions it, but it is the kind of book we find her reading: histories, travel books, culture, memoirs, and in good 20th and 21st century accounts of Cornwall’s history and culture and geography Carew is still quoted as an authoritative source. The mid-18th century sees the beginning of archeaological digs and accounts of them in books. I would like to assume she read it, for if she did, she could have known as much about Cornwall and more as most general readers would today.

For a fourth and speculative type, Austen could have read some of the sources Winston Graham used, like reformist exposés of prison conditions. See The History of Bodmin Jail, 1779, compiled by Bill Johnson (2006). We know she visited another prison with her brother and was too appalled to describe what she saw.

She would have known of the Wesleys and clearly knew of the spread of methodism (in its evangelical reactionary phases in Hannah More and elsewhere); but again we are up against mostly silence or no specific evidence.

On religious radical religious movements, emigration and myths and legends associated with or rooted in Cornwall gaining new ground in her period (Arthurian, Druidic), like some sceptical or careful Enlightenment types of her era, she might have shown little interest; like others newly interested in the history of poetry, e.g., Thomas Warton in his History of English Poetry, she would come across Arthur in Chaucer and Spenser. We know she read the poets of the later 18th century.

We can find some specific authors and books from the peripheries (so to speak) where we know for sure she read well-grounded observations, in this case mostly about Scotland: Johnson and Boswell’s twin tours and Anne MacVicar Grant)’s memoirs. Here is one of my favorite of Grant’s poems, from her Poems on Various Subjects, a “familiar epistle” to Anne’s good friend of many years, Beatrice, remembering when they were young and aspired to be poets:

When to part us, loud storms and deep gullies conspir’d,
And sublime meditation to garrats [sic] retir’d;
To the workings of fancy to give a relief,
We sat ourselves down to imagine some grief,
Till we conjur’d up phantoms so solemn and sad,
As, if they had lasted, would make us half mad;
Then in strains so affecting we pour’d the soft ditty,
As mov’d both the rocks and their echoes to pity [but]
The cottage so humble, or sanctified dome,
For the revels of fancy afforded no room;
And the lyre and the garland, were forc’d to give place
To duties domestic … (reprinted in Breen, Women Romantic Poets, 1785-1832, pp 88-93)

In Austen’s active life, she traveled all around the coast of southern and once to western England — once as far as Wales, about which (again) we have some sketch-y knowledge: see Diana Birchall’s Jane Austen at the Seaside.

So we can sort of connect our 18th century Austen with Cornwall: “philosophical” studies, and history; poetry and memoirs of travel-writers and others telling of life in the peripheries at the time, the newly burgeoning genres of survey and archeaological analysis, and her own summer travels.

And we can place her against a backdrop of 17th through 18th century history in Cornwall from our own modern perspective: here we have a cornucopia, and from a virtual library of books I recommend F. E. Halliday, The History of Cornwall, Philip Payton’s Cornwall, Philip Marsden’s Rising Ground; Winston Graham’s Poldark novels and The Groves of Eagles, and DuMaurier’s several novels set in Cornwall, especially Jamaica Inn and The King’s General, grounded in the real doings of the civil war, its aftermath and the Grenville and Rashleigh families, and 17th into 18th century history of Menabilly in Cornwall. I’ll bet Stevenson’s reading of DuMaurier’s novel is absorbing and enjoyable.

And we can go there ourselves.

Ellen

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A Jane Austen Study Day, JASNA-DC: Life in Regency England (2)

Miniatures of Philadelphia and George Austen — Jane Austen’s aunt and father

Five Dancing Positions

Dear Friends,

The second half of the Jane Austen Study DC hosted by JASNA-DC at the American University Library, as “curated” by Mary Mintz. In the morning we listened to excellent papers on some realities and perceptions of religious groups and servants in Austen’s day; the afternoon was taken up with the equivalent of photographs, miniatures, and drawn portraits, and how dance was so enjoyed and a source of female power in the era.

After lunch, Moriah Webster spoke to us about miniatures in the era; her paper’s title “Ivory and Canvas: Naval Miniatures in Portraiture [in the era] and then Austen’s Persuasion.” Moriah began by quoting Austen’s pen portraits in her letters on a visit she paid with Henry Austen to an exhibition in the Spring Gardens in London, where she glimpsed

“a small portrait of Mrs Bingley, excessively like her. I went in hopes of seeing one of her Sister, but there was no Mrs Darcy; — perhaps I may find her in the great exhibition, which we shall go to if we have time. I have no chance of her in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s paintings, which is now showing in Pall Mall, and which we are also to visit. Mrs. Bingley’s is exactly herself -— size, shaped face, features, and sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite color with her. I dare say Mrs. D. will be in yellow… Letter 85, May 24, 1813, to Cassandra, from Sloane Street, Monday)

Samantha Bond as the faithful Mrs Western, next to her Mr Elton, to the back Mr Knightley (Mark Strong) and Emma and Mr Woodhouse (Bernard Hepton), trying to lead a discussion of picture looking to favor Emma’s depiction of Harriet (1996 BBC Emma)

The detail and visual acuity reminded me of many other verbal portraits in Austen’s letters and novels, which I wrote about in my paper on “ekphrastic patterns in Austen,” where I went over the attitudes of mind seen in the way she explained her own and others picturing process, both analysing and imitating the picturesque seriously, and parodying it. She asks how does the way we think about and describe, the language we use and forms we absorb enable and limit what we can see.

Moriah was not interested in the philosophical and linguistic issues (which were the subject of my paper)

“He talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances — side-screens and perspectives — lights and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as unworthy to make part of a landscape (Northanger Abbey, 1:14)

One of the many effective landscapes from Ang Lee and Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility (director and screenplay-writer and Elinor n Miramax 1995 film)

Marianne argues passionately “that admiration of landscape scenery is become a mere jargon. Everybody pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning (S&S, 1:18)

but rather the real miniatures and drawings we know about in Austen’s life as well as how the way drawing is approached distinguishes a character’s traits of personality, and the way pictorial objects function in the plot-designs of her novels.

I offer a few examples of what interested her — though these were not delineated in her paper:

Irene Richards as Elinor Dashwood is a fairly serious artist (1981 BBC Sense and Sensibility) who can be hurt by people’s dismissal of her work

Sylvestre Le Tousel as Fanny Price dreams over her brother’s precious drawings of his ships (1983 BBC Mansfield Park)

For Kate Beckinsale as Emma drawing is a way of manipulating situations, defining her relatives, a vanity she does not work hard enough at (again the 1996 BBC Emma, with Susannah Morton as Harriet)

She did dwell on Persuasion. The novel opens with Anne cataloguing the pictures at Kellynch Hall; and has a comic moment of Admiral Croft critiquing a picture of a ship at sea in a shop window in the same literal spirit as Mr Woodhouse objects to Emma’s depiction of Harriet out of doors without a shawl.

Here I am, you see, staring at a picture. I can never get by this shop without stopping. But what a thing here is, by way of a boat! Do look at it. Did you ever see the like? What queer fellows your fine painters must be, to think that anybody would venture their lives in such a shapeless old cockleshell as that? And yet here are two gentlemen stuck up in it mightily at their ease, and looking about them at the rocks and mountains, as if they were not to be upset the next moment, which they certainly must be. I wonder where that boat was built!” (laughing heartily); “I would not venture over a horsepond in it.” (Persuasion 2:6 or 18)

John Woodvine as Crofts regaling Amanda Root as Anne and us with his reaction to a picture in a shop window (1995 BBC Persuasion)

More crucially we have a cancelled chapter and one about a miniature of someone who Captain Benwick was engaged to and died (Phoebe Harville), and is now prepared to discard and use the framing for a miniature of her substitute (Louisa Musgrove); this becomes the occasion of a melancholy and passionately argued debate over male versus female constancy and prompts Wentworth (listening) finally to write Anne Elliot a letter revealing the state of his loving mind.

What Moriah concentrated on was who had miniatures made of them, for what reasons and how much individual ones cost; how these were made, and who they functioned as social and cultural capital in these specific people’s lives. All the miniatures we have testify to the status of the person pictured, a status (I remark or add) that Austen (apparently) never achieved in the eyes of those around her.

Although she didn’t say this it’s obvious that Austen’s brothers had miniatures made of them because they rose to important positions in the navy; her father was a clergyman; her aunt became the mistress of Warren Hastings.

Francis who became an admiral and Charles in his captain’s uniform

She did imply the irony today of the plain unvarnished sketch of Austen by her sister, located in the National Gallery like a precious relic in a glass case in the National Gallery while all around her on the expensive walls are the richly and expensively painted literary males of her generation.

I regret that my stenography was not up to getting down the sums she cited accurately enough and the differing kinds of materials she said were used to transcribe them here so I have filled out the summary with lovely stills from the film adaptations — it’s easy to find many of these because pictures, landscapes and discussions of them are more frequent in the novels than readers suppose. Miniatures as a subject or topic are in fact rare.

Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth during her tour of Derbyshire with the Gardiners (1995 BBC P&P) is placed in a clearly delineated landscape (1995 A&E P&P scripted by Davies) and is reminiscent of

A William Gilpin depiction of Dovedale

There was some group discussion after this paper, and (as seems to be inevitable) someone brought up her longing for a picture of Austen. She was reminded that we have two, both by Cassandra. But undeterred she insisted these were somehow not good enough, not acceptable. Of course she wanted a picture that made Austen conventionally appealing. At this point others protested against this demand that Austen be made pretty, but she remained unimpressed by the idea that women should not be required to look attractive to be valuable.

It is such an attitude that lies behind the interest people take in Katherine Byrne’s claim a high-status miniature (the woman is very dressed up) that she found in an auction with the name “Jane Austen” written on the back is of Jane Austen. See my blog report and evaluation, “Is this the face I’ve seen seeking?”

**************************************

Dancing in the 2009 BBC Emma: at long last Jonny Lee Miller as Mr Knightley gets to express himself to Emma

The last talk was delightful: Amy Stallings on “Polite Society, Political Society: Dance and Female Power” dwelt on the dances themselves, how accessible they were, the social situations, how they are used in Austen’s books, and finally how in life they were used to project political behavior or views in assemblies and private parties and balls too. Her perspective was the political and social functioning of dancing (reminding me of Lucy Worseley), going well beyond the literary depiction of dance in Austen. She scrutinized ballroom behavior and dance to show that the ballroom floor was a kind of stage on which a woman could find paradoxical freedom to talk with a young man and older women might project political agendas and alliances (especially if she was the hostess).

If we look past the movie and see this scene as filming a group of famous admired actors and actresses we can see the same game of vanity and power played out (everyone will distinguish Colin Firth as Darcy in this still from the 1995 BBC P&P)

Her talk fell into three parts. First, she showed how dance was made accessible to everyone in the class milieu that learned and practiced such social behavior. This part of her talk was about the actual steps you learned, the longways patterning of couples, how it enabled couples to hold hands, made eye contact. Longways dancing is a social leveller, she claimed. I found it very interesting to look at the charts, and see how the couples are configured in the different squares. As today, it was common to see women dancing in the men’s line. People looked at what you were wearing and how well you danced. She quotes Edgeworth in her novel Patronage (which like Austen’s Mansfield Park has both dancing and amateur theatrics). There was pressure to perform in dancing (as well as home theater).

Dancing difficult maneuvers in the 1983 Mansfield Park: Fanny and Edmund

The second part dwelt on dancing in novels of the era. She quoted from Henry Tilney’s wit and power over Catherine in their sequences of dancing:

JJ Feilds as Tilney mesmerizing Felicity Jones as Catherine (2007 ITV Northanger Abbey)

Her partner now drew near, and said, “That gentleman would have put me out of patience, had he stayed with you half a minute longer. He has no business to withdraw the attention of my partner from me. We have entered into a contract of mutual agreeableness for the space of an evening, and all our agreeableness belongs solely to each other for that time. Nobody can fasten themselves on the notice of one, without injuring the rights of the other. I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both; and those men who do not chuse to dance or marry themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their neighbours.”
“But they are such very different things!–”
” –That you think they cannot be compared together.”
“To be sure not. People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour.”
“And such is your definition of matrimony and dancing. Taken in that light certainly, their resemblance is not striking; but I think I could place them in such a view. — You will allow, that in both, man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal; that in both, it is an engagement between man and woman, formed for the advantage of each; and that when once entered into, they belong exclusively to each other till the moment of its dissolution; that it is their duty, each to endeavour to give the other no cause for wishing that he or she had bestowed themselves elsewhere, and their best interest to keep their own imaginations from wandering towards the perfections of their neighbours, or fancying that they should have been better off with any one else. You will allow all this?”
“Yes, to be sure, as you state it, all this sounds very well; but still they are so very different. — I cannot look upon them at all in the same light, nor think the same duties belong to them (Northanger Abbey, I:10.

and alluded to (by contrast) how Darcy will not permit Elizabeth to achieve any power over him through dance or talk; in his downright refusals and more evasive withdrawals he robs her of status and any hold on him. So she becomes grated upon, frustrated. Amy discussed Scott’s Redgauntlet as containing a particularly effective pointed description of a tête-à-tête; the disruption of walking away, walking out and its potential to humiliate is drawn out in this novel.

One of Jane Austen’s most memorable masterly depictions of social humiliation and kindness is in the scene where Mr Elton deliberately sets up Harriet to expect him to ask her to dance, and then when Mrs Weston takes the bait, and asks him to ask Harriet to dance, he can publicly refuse her. I thought of a similarly crestfallen hurt in the dancing scene in the unfinished Watsons where a young boy is carelessly emotionally pained and (as Mr Knightley does here), so Emma Watson there comes in to rescue him at the risk of herself losing social status by dancing in the lead position with a boy.

Mark Strong as Mr Knightley observing what the Eltons are doing

The expression on Samantha Morton’s face as she is drawn up to dance by the most eligible man in the room is invaluably poignant (once again the 1996 BBC Emma)

Amy’s third part was about the politics of the dance floor and particular assemblies in particular localities. First she did insist that Austen’s novels are explicitly political in various places (including Fanny Price’s question on slavery, Eleanor Tilney’s interpretation of Catherine Morland’s description of a gothic novel as about the Gordon riots &c). She then went on to particular periods where politics was especially heated and cared about, often because a war is going on, either nearby or involving the men in the neighborhood. She described assemblies and dances, how people dressed, what songs and dances were chosen, who was invited and who not and how they were alluded to or described in local papers in Scotland and England in the middle 17th century (the civil war, religious conflicts and Jacobitism as subjects), France in the 1790s (the guillotine could be used as an object in a not-so-funny “debate”), and in the American colonies in the 1770s.

Amy went on at length about particular balls given in 1768, December 1769, May 1775, where allusions were made to loyalist or American allegiances, to specific battles and generals. One anecdote was about a refrain “British go home!” While all this might seem petty, in fact loyalists were badly treated after the American colonists won their revolution, and many died or were maimed or lost all in the war. Her argument is that women have involved themselves in higher politics (than personal coterie interactions, which I suppose has been the case since people danced) through dance from the time such social interactions occurred in upper class circles and became formal enough “to be read.” We were way over time by her ending (nearly 4:30 pm) so no questions could be asked, but there was a hearty applause.

Again I wish I could’ve conveyed more particulars here but I don’t want to write down something actually incorrect. I refer the interested reader to Cheryl A Wilson’s Literature and Dance in 19th century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman. The early chapters tell of the many dances known at the time, the culture of dance, and what went on as far as we can tell from newspapers and letters at assemblies, with a long chapter on doings at Almack’s, where Jane Austen just about whistles over Henry her brother’s presence. Frances Burney’s Cecilia, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair are among the novels mined for understanding. Wilson goes over the quadrille (squares) and how this configuration changed the experience of hierarchy and then wild pleasures of the waltz. Here Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? and The Way We Live Now are brought in. Lady Glencora Palliser and Burgo Fitzgerald almost use an evening of reckless dancing as a prologue to elopement and adultery. I imagine it was fun to write this book.

At Lady Monk’s ball Susan Hampshire as Lady Glencora and Barry Justice as Burgo Fitzgerald dance their way into semi-escape

He begs her to go off with him as the true husband of her heart and body

It was certainly good fun to go to the Jane Austen Study Day and be entertained with such well thought out, informative and perceptive papers very well delivered. I wish more Austen events were like this one.

Ellen

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A Jane Austen Study Day, JASNA, DC — Life in Regency England (1)

A statue representing Jane Austen outside Chawton House

I give an account of the whole meeting briefly and then summarize and comment on the first two papers: on religion socially, politically considered, and on the lives of servants, what a huge population, and the way they were represented as opposed to the reality. For now a brief anticipation of the second blog

Dear friends and readers,

This past Saturday, April 27th, the JASNA-DC (which includes people from Northern Virginia, and Maryland just outside of DC), together with members from the southeast and mid-Virginia local groups met at the American University Library to spend a day together. We heard and discussed four papers, had lunch, were told about events at the upcoming JASNA in Williamsburg, Virginia. Organized by Mary Mintz, an English professor at AU, and now regional coordinator for the JASNA-DC, with much help by Amy Stallings (one of those in charge of the upcoming AGM in Williamsburgh), it featured papers of high calibre, entertainingly presented, and covering basic aspects of Austen’s life and writing in brief, religion, servants, portraits, and dancing. This is on the morning’s papers, the first of two blog-reports.

Crofton, St Edmunds, Portsmouth — see RHC Ubsdell, a painter of Austen’s era

Anthony Batterton spoke on “Millenarians, Methodists and Muggletonians Religion in Jane Austen’s England.” He offered a general history and the situation of the differing religious groups of Austen’s England.

Austen’s era was a time of great diversity of opinion, undergoing a transition into fewer sects. At the same time the Anglican church had a very strong powerhold, to attend university, be an MP, to not be barred now and again from holding property, the sect to espouse was the Anglican. Beginning in the reign of Henry VIII, we see a re-branding of Anglican’s Catholicism (no inner change), but then what happened is what meant to be an Anglican swerved wildly. The 1662 Act of Conformity set up the exclusionary rules, against which many stubborn people held out — or were converted to something other than Anglican. There was a new Book of Common Prayer, it softened over the years and in 1689, an act of toleration had made the situation of Catholics and Unitarians clearer. One concrete result of all this is the re-building and decorating of churches in the later 18th century where iconography has been seriously gotten rid of. By mid-Victorian period, Anglican art was re-Catholicized. No one professed to atheism or agnosticism. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer was current into the 1920s.

A way of characterizing the values is enlightenment was to be preferred to enthusiasm (which in the 18th century tended to mean highly excessive and out of control) . In American the situation was quite different: the evangelical and Pentecostal sects met in the open air, encouraged mystic experiences. There had been a “great awakening” in the US, which began the Sunday school movement, and that spread to the UK. The evangelical revival in England in the 1730s, were intensely emulating their masters and mistresses. Austen shows much ambivalence to this new evangelical strictness, proselytizing and overt posturing. But Sunday school movement in both countries from around 1780 offered education for the very poor, reading, writing, math lessons, the start of a conscious effort to provide free primary school education. The abolition movement grows here (there were pro-slavery people too, e.g., Jame Oglethorpe); 1807 slave trade abolished; 1833 finally reached full abolition.

He went over the classes of ministers: rectors, vicars, and curates; that there were two kinds of tithes; gradually vicars became sort of rectors with curates replacing the vicar as a poorly paid worker in the parish. Later in the 19th century the anxiety over taking high Church of England positions and practices had gone: you might say the church was being slowly gentrified, with ministers having an upgraded gentleman’s status. The avowed purpose of Oxford and Cambridge was to train clergymen; churches functioned as the registry offices of the time starting in 1537. Marriage Act of 1753 was meant to control marriages. Ministers were supposed to preach or read sermons each Sunday.

Outside the church of England were all the dissenters, and after the enthusiasms of the civil war and 17th century these began to go into decline. It was so much to someone’s advantage to become Anglican. Still dissenting academies arose to provide an excellent education, and they were quietly supported and protected, and as the century wore on new and politically radical forms of dissension rose or spread: quakers who gradually shrunk, ossified, became inward looking, pietistic, and stopped proselytizing. Millenarism is a belief the end of the world is at hand, God about to overthrow the world’s order. Methodism can be dated back to 1730, John Wesley the crucial man (came back from the US after a failed romance and time in a church). Methodism split into factions with Wesley’s believing in free will and Whitfield’s disciples Calvinist (only successful in Wales). A Swedenborg sect was visionary, from Sweden. Muggletonians were millenarians, except aggressive so they would denounce people (they cursed Walter Scott, their last church destroyed during the Blitz). Unitarians held there was no trinity; nowadays they are not seen as Christian. Presbyterians and congregationalists organized their church so as to give the ordinary person power

Catholics and Jews were excluded from the act of 1689; those who had no property elsewhere and could, moved north. The decriminalizing of Catholicism in 1788 led to the Gordon riots. 1829 came a fuller emancipation. Jews had been expelled under Edward I, brought back publicly under Cromwell, emancipated partly 1753, and more full rights in 1858. No or few permanent Muslim residents can be found in English records; in 1813 a recording of a resoundingly successful Indian restaurant. Did they serve curry?

Now Austen had two brothers and a father who were all clergymen, so the whole profession (Navy too) a deep part of her life, but Mary Crawford exhibits a modern sensibility. You were legally supposed to show up in church once a month; you could be fined if you never showed, but it was social pressure within communities that led to church-going in the 19th century.

There was not much feeling for the inward experience of religion in the era; rather he thoroughly mapped religion outwardly, how it functioned socially and politically in the time, and how represented by the Anglican establishment.

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This is a portrait by Hogarth of the servants in his household – Janet showed this sympathetic image

Janet Mullany’s topic was “Freedom and Identity: Servant life in Jane Austen’s Time.” We were told she writes for WETA and speaks frequently; that she has a thorough knowledge of the lives of servants, having been studying this topic for years. She was English herself, grew up there. As Carolyn Steedman (whom Mullany quoted) demonstrated, thousands of people worked as servants in all sorts of houses and situations with records coming from the later 17th through early 20th century. Janet had many slides and was very witty. She zeroed in on specific aspects of the servant’s experience.

In the 1960s the BBC interviewed hundreds of servants, seeking reminiscences, and it became apparent many of these people were ashamed of such a background, or bitter. Also that there is a insistent conformity of attitudes projected by everyone (from whatever angle) towards servants. A huge amount of material emerged because so many were in “service.” People just did not live alone much until our own era; it was rare not to have a servant if you were above the subsistence level. One in eight people were servants in 1775; one in four in 1796. 1.4 million women, 60,000 men since the 1890s. They resiliently took on work that was hard; they have been replaced by technology.

So we heard how houses were built differently but from the later 18th century on you find special quarters set up for servants; that they expected “perks” and “Veils” from visitors. They were taxed as if they were objects, different roles different tax. Men servants more expensive and did much less. Mullany showed caricature cartoons. Mullany then moved to registry office entries — inns and taverns were places to exchange information, find position advertised. There were hiring fairs, they bought their specific tools with them. Cook was a major respected role. So too housekeeper. She told us about the rise of a respected chef in Paris. Cookery, cooked vegetables are found in engravings; shoes (precious for servants) found also.

19th century early photograph of a servant — it appears to be Hannah Cullwick

Austen mentions servants now and again with telling comments. Martha Lloyd was the Austen housekeeper (that’s how Mullany explains her presence for long stretches of time at Chawton cottage.) James was a servants during her father’s life. Littlewoods, foster parents. The city of Bristol was a code word for owners of enslaved people — Mrs Elton’s brother-in-law made his money from enslaved workers abroad. She mentioned what other people wrote about servants or the enslaved. Success stories helped gain respect: Ignatius Sancho, born in Africa, painted by Reynolds; some of the stories show the previously enslaved person or people at first making a success (he ended up owning property in Westminster), but the society throws wrenches. White Europeans did better often because they were not so easily cheated; the society would not help the previously enslaved as they didn’t have real respect. I thought of Johnson’s adopted son, Francis Johnson.

Mullany brought in slavery too by imagining from the smallest wisps. She told of the famous decisions: 1772, 1783, seeming to suggest that a person on English ground cannot be enslaved. For servants though newsprint is invaluable. By 1711 it was understood how important were the plantations “abroad” in bringing in needed income. Servants served people thoroughly. Supported musician-servants were 80% male.

Mullany concluded her lecture with “close reading” or deciphering sets of engravings revealing “the life” of the servant — as a patriarchal, hierarchical establishment would condescendingly show these. The popular play, High life below Stairs is not all that far gone from truth. She brought in the famous portrait of Belle from Kenwood House, and told us Belle’s life story in sofar as it is known.  More common as a set of representations:  One set of a “Harlot’s progress:” contrasted with her virtuous sister who gets her ring, holy moment of matrimony.  One amusing James Northcote set of engravings shows a wanton servant ending up a prostitute on the streets, and a virtuous Pamela type becoming the “lady of the house.” (I’ll add these last especially are more about controlling women’s sexuality and identity in men’s and the society’s political eyes than the reality of their existences.)

I suppose the title could make you ask yourself as you listened, How could you know any liberty working from the time you got up to when you went to sleep (and not in your own private space), made such a small salary, had so little time off? And also how could a servant emerge with authentic existence — finding out, and then fulfilling any individual talents and desires she might have had in such a chequered imprisoned silent space.

A delightful Brock illustration — don’t miss the cat ….

There was some brief discussion after each paper, but I didn’t take what was said down. The papers took most of the time allotted to each up and people came up afterwards to talk and ask questions.

E.M.

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