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?”

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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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EC/ASECS at Howard & WAPG at the Library of Congress: Johnson, Modernity & Intertextuality; Swift & biography

A depiction of a party at Joshua Reynolds

nine men around a table set with fruit and decanters, served by a black page; Johnson on the left talking to Edmund Burke, with Boswell, Reynolds, who holds a trumpet to his ear, Garrick, Pasquale Paoli and Charles Burney, sitting and listening; Warton sitting at the end of the table to right, whispering something to Goldsmith; a Japanese screen on the right, curtains, a miniature portrait to left and a portrait bust to left; Reynolds’ pictures of Puck (Mannings 2142) and the Infant Academy (Mannings 2092) hanging on the wall; after James E Doyle; with semi-filled letters. 1848

Friends and readers,

It hasn’t been as long as it feels since I wrote the first of two blogs on the recent EC/ASECS conference at Howard University. A hacking attack on my website intervened, but all’s well for now. I here combine a report on the later afternoon panel of the first day, a session of readings, and the presidential address on the second day with a talk given at the Washington Area Print Group (a book history group) at the library of Congress because the subject (Samuel Johnson) was the same as the panel. I can offer the gist only of most of them.

Opie’s Samuel Johnson

Back to Friday afternoon, November 3rd. The chair was Anthony Lee. The first two speakers emphasized the modernity of Johnson. In “Samuel Johnson and Samuel Beckett: Like-minded masters of existential emptiness,” Thomas Curley suggested that Beckett and Johnson shared a fellow feeling, were intellectual soulmates even though Beckett was an atheist, and Johnson argued forcefully for holding to his Christian faith. While Beckett was at Trinity College, he was helped to find his voice by research into and reading of Johnson’s attachment to Hester Thrale. Beckett explored 23 sources, filled 3 notebooks, altogether 200 pages. In Beckett’s letters he talks of Johnson as madly ineffectually in love with Hester Thrale and insecurity. The 1930s saw ground-breaking psychological studies of Johnson, but, as Beckett conceded, there is no evidence for his specific belief that Johnson was also impotent. Krapp in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape is a Johnsonian character who lives his life by way of tape recordings who looks at himself as a failure in life and is eager to be gone. I thought of David Nokes’s biography of Johnson where Nokes argues that Johnson lived with a deep sense of having failed himself in life.

Samuel Beckett

Greg Clingham’s paper was on Johnson and the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges. Borges had a deep love for English; he read Don Quixote in English, loved Shakespeare, Whitman, Emerson, also Victor Hugo (presumably in English translation?). Gregg discussed how scholars of Borges ignore Borges’s attraction to Johnson and how Johnson’s name appears and re-appears in Borge’s conversations. Maria Kodama, his personal assistant for many years whom he married functions like Boswell, and appears to get in the way of scholarly work. Borges saw so much of himself in Johnson. Borges was especially interested in how impossible it is to fix language, and poetic meditative texts. So is Dictionary Johnson though the language he uses to describe these linguistic phenomena is different (see below).

Jorge Luis Borges

Then Brian Glover spoke a contrarian view while Anthony Lee attempted to find common ground: Glover insisted Johnson is not at all modernist, “not our contemporary.” He began with theories about print culture where it’s suggested that digital communication returns us to silent orality, talk. The famous first Boswell scholar, Frederick Pottle, attempted to make Boswell into a vast publishing venture, turning Boswell’s very contemporary talk style into print, beginning in 1967. Brian told us the familiar stories of the finding of the papers and the early history of book collecting, and presented the men as belonging to a culture of white male homosocial dreams where they were to live life together through building a library.

Formal portrait of James Bowell by George Williams

Anthony Lee’s paper was then about how there has been a slow overturning of stereotypes of Johnson (he’s naive, bigoted) and the various scholars gradually revealed views towards women, colonialism, politics that anticipate the later 20th century. Technology has had an impact. Yet Johnson resists modernity too; like T.S. Eliot he might be seen as an Anglican high culture modernist and connect to what is found in Bloomsbury writers and artists. Tony quoted passages from Idler No 60, Leslie Stephen, and Boswell: in the first Johnson is satirizing literary criticism of the close reading type (Dick Minim), in the second Stephen shows Johnson in his chair talking consciously happy and enjoying himself like some Socrates providing more deep thought than many many printed passages; in the last Beauclerk’s curious denial that Johnson was religious: Johnson seldom went to church and when he did, he appeared not to pay attention to most that was happening or said (like Hogarth’s Idle Apprentice).

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Kate Winslett as Marianne in a scene from the 1995 Sense and Sensibility (not in the book at all)

Mid-Saturday morning was to have been a keynote address; the speaker was ill, and three people talked from published books in her stead. Juliette Wells has written a book on Austen which includes a section on how early American readers felt about her through what Wells finds in their marginalia. Basically it seems Austen’s novels did not appeal to these ordinary readers. One reader was very glad when she finished Emma; another called Emma a silly book; readers are responding to a character in the book without any sense of the author’s presence or irony or stance towards the character. Mr Knightley is “tolerable” but Emma “intolerable. Frank is a “sneak;” Mrs Elton a “vulgar common woman.” Wells suggested that the earliest readers of Austen did not care for her books.

In a discussion afterwards, her assertion that Austen wasn’t liked by her earliest readers was questioned. She immediately backtracked and said of course British readers liked Austen; she is just talking about Americans; then questioned on her assertion about Americans in general, she backtracked again. It is hard to prove anything by the marginalia of a few chance comments in books by readers who are not thinking in any clear way about what they are reading. Listening to her I recognize what I often see in on-line groups’ postings about how they read books. I’m also not surprised that Austen’s satire was not appreciated by these few readers. There is a desire to sentimentalize Austen — seen in today’s movies: that urge has played a large role in popular Janeite re-vamping and reversing of the core meanings of Austen’s texts.

Beth Lambert and Eugene Hammond returned us to reading John Radner’s book on Johnson and Boswell’s friendship. Beth showed us how by careful analysis of key interactions in small seemingly unimportant uncrucial documents about and between Boswell and Johnson over a period of time, John pulled out a truthful depiction of a complex relationship. Eugene picked passages from Johnson’s letters to Hester Thrale, which he used to discuss the art of biography. How can one go deep into a personality and re-create a living presence in a book.

Jonathan Swift by James Bovard

After lunch Eugene got up again to give the presidential address, which was on his books and years of research on Jonathan Swift. His perspective was our own time of 2017 and the (now so clearly seen) dangerous decline of serious studies in the humanities, in academic subjects which teach people about their history, their culture, the political and art worlds they live in. We need to teach what counts as documentary evidence, how to use it, and how we live today in an international community. First he told about his career, and how in high schools he found how necessary it was to teach students to go outside narrowly framed issues and texts. He studied Swift’s texts and life and worlds for 25 years. That nowadays we are confronted with disrespect for a life thus lived. He then in effect overturned many stereotypes of Swift (as an embittered misanthrope, a social isolate &c); I wish I could have stayed for Eugene’s paper later in the afternoon asking whether Swift hated his relatives. Early on Eugene discovered Swift’s fundamental mistrust of religion used in the public sphere, his strong anti-colonialist streak. At the end of the talk Eugene described Swift’s specific milieus, the people he was surrounded by in Ireland. As a boy he was cut off from his nuclear family, and persuaded Esther Johnson to come to Ireland to live near him. Eugene then went through Swift’s works: A Tale of a Tub (the outsider perspective), Gulliver’s Travels, his attempts to persuade the English gov’t to give money to rebuild churches; once in Ireland the Draper’s Letters objecting to the English ruthless exploitation of Catholic Irish people. Swift founded a hospital. Most delightful of all was the way Eugene went over the Journal to Stella: a wonderful misnamed diary where we find how very particular acts and laws influence Swift’s and his friends’ lives intimately. Swift had many friends who left poems dedicated to him, one wrote a life. Eugene ended on a story told by Swift of his grandmother.

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Mary Melliner as Jenny Diver and Roger Daltry as Macheath (1987 BBC Beggar’s Opera, directed by Jonathan Miller)

As I wrote in my first blog, I was unhappily not able to stay for the later afternoon sessions of this second day. I was a member of the Molin panel (for the literary prize for fine graduate students’ papers) and would have listened to Courtnee Fenner’s “My dear pretty Jenny:” The Blackening of Jenny Diver in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Polly: an Opera, as she was one of those who submitted a proposal to hand in her paper for the context. I particularly regretted not being able to attend the panel on Defoe. At lunch I had sat next to Joseph Rudman who gave one of the Defoe papers. He told me he remembered Jim and about conversation he had had with Jim at another luncheon about physics and Richard Feynman. Joseph worked as a physicist and professor for many years before turning to literature. His paper was on “the Rothman Group’s stylistic study of Defoe’s contribution to Robert Drury’s Journal.” He also told me about how he was reviewing one of the volumes of the new Cambridge edition of Shakespeare: like those for Richardson and Austen, enormously over-annotated sumptuously produced volumes. It seems large amounts of annotation do not necessarily produce a lucidly-presented work. Also that the latest fashion in Shakespeare scholarship is dissolving his canon and now 18 works hitherto attributed to Shakespeare are being contested as only partly by him or not at all. Joseph said it was clear some of these people had not gone back to the original studies of the printing of the Folio. What he had to say was more interesting and suggestive about our profession today than many papers. He was very witty and I enjoyed talking about Jim with him.

But this lacuna gives me room to end this second report with another paper given by Tony Lee at the Washington Area Print Group on a later Friday afternoon, November 17th (a couple of weeks later). He spoke on paratexts and intertextuality in Rambler No 2 and Johnson’s Dictionary. As I wrote in my blog-essay for Sarah Emsley’s Jane Austen series on Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, “For there is nothing lost, that may not be found: Charlotte Smith in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Tony’s paper was suggestive about intertextuality (you need only have tiny texts to bring in wide layered meaning); here I go over how this relates in his view to mentorship (we can be mentored by texts) and paratexts (the prefaces).

Tony first said in his view Johnson’s Rambler (208 periodical essays) constitutes his greatest wholistic literary single literary work. Rambler No 2 looks at the dangers of looking into futurity using classical mottoes from Addison and Steele. The translation by Elphinstone in the essay suggests that “fond fleeting hope” is destroyed by looking ahead with anxiety; we are “defeated” before we try to fly. Meditations on mottoes like these led Johnson to read Pope out of their perspective in his own (Johnson’s) superior poetry. In the same way Dryden can be said to have mentored Pope as Pope studied Dryden in his original and translation writing. Dryden was also an important person for Johnson who quoted Dryden 157 times in his Dictionary. Tony then traced densely saturated quotations (mottoes) to allusive sources.

One example of genealogy: Johnson did not like John Gay’s Rural Sports(1713) and uses lines from it to define words (despeople) hostilely so that if you are diligent enough to search out the source texts, you can begin to read Johnson’s dictionary as a repository of Johnson’s creative life and thinking.

Oil painting on canvas, River Landscape, with Fisherman, and distant Ruins of an Abbey, manner of George Smith of Chichester (Chichester 1714 – Chichester 1776) and John Smith (Chichester 1717 – Chichester 1764).Tall tree in foreground; river runs across the centre of the picture. A fanciful ruin of slender Gothic arches on an eminence at right. A fisherman seated on near bank.

After a while all literature begins to become entangled. Tony said Pope may be said to have been mentored by Statius, a Silver Age poet. Johnson himself is thus deeply grounded in the past as he contemplates how to look at the future. Tony then quoted the familiar statement of T.S. Eliot on how tradition is central to the development of an individual talent to its highest degree and ended by quoting Herman Meyer (from The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel) that “the charm of quotation emanates from a unique tension between assimilation and dissimilation.” The writer may make the other person’s texts their own in their book and link these to a new environment but these quotations remain detached and hold onto original meaning too. In my blog I suggested that Austen entangles Smith’s texts and her very life into Persuasion, but remains detached from these (as she does from the quotations from Byron and Scott, which themselves don’t change). Tony believes that Johnson was aware of these intertextual relationships as he read, though he would not use the language we do so not have quite the same concept.

This theory is particularly appealing to me who have lived much of my life apart from social groups and feel I was mentored by texts too, especially in my 20 years of translating poetry. I didn’t use the word, mentorship, but it’s what I meant when I described how I came to my theory of translation as I was translating the poetry of Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara. See my on-line essay on translating.

As this is an Austen blog, I should add I think Austen was “mentored” by many authors this way — how else could she reach them, and several are strongly influential on her work, e.g., Shakespeare, Johnson, Cowper, Burney, Radcliffe, Smith, the French memorists. She never probably never met any of these people and yet their thoughts and attitudes taught her much.  The point is so often made how Austen chose not to go to a party where Madame de Stael was said to be. Austen didn’t need to. She had Delphine and Corinne on her shelves, and then in her mind. What could she have gotten by a social interaction in such an environment that could compare to communing with these books.

So ends my conference and lecture reports for the year 2017.

Ellen

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