Jane and His Lordship's Legacy - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Stephanie Barron (ч. notes)

Примечания

1

The manor of Chawton, which included the Great House and the whole of the village, was deeded to Jane’s third brother, Edward, in 1797 as part of his inheritance from distant cousins, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Knight of Kent, a childless couple who adopted Edward as their heir. Edward enjoyed the freehold of more than thirty cottages and gardens in Chawton, as well as the Great House, farm, and Chawton Park. The entire estate, including the village holdings, was gradually sold off in the twentieth century by Knight family heirs. — Editor’s note.

2

To be in the commission of the peace for the county, as Jane phrases it, was to be appointed a justice of the peace, or magistrate. Deputy lieutenant was a post appointed at the pleasure of the lord lieutenant of the county, usually the county’s ranking peer, and carried with it certain administrative duties. — Editor’s note.

3

Lincoln’s Inn is one of the four Inns of Court, formed in the Middle Ages to provide lodgings for young men studying law. It sits roughly half a mile from Covent Garden in the center of London, and in Jane Austen’s day was a common locus of solicitors’ and barristers’ chambers, as it remains today. — Editor’s note.

4

It was customary, in Jane Austen’s day, to refer to the spouse of a sibling as one’s sister or brother. The term in-law often referred to step-relations. — Editor’s note.

5

At this time, country branches of London banks were authorized to print notes backed by currency held in their London branches. For a full description of Henry Austen’s banking activities, see “Jane Austen’s Banker Brother: Henry Thomas Austen of Austen & Co., 1801–1816,” by Dr. Clive Caplan; Persuasions (Jane Austen Society of North America), No. 20, 1998, pp. 69–90. — Editor’s note.

6

Miss Benn is held to be the original from which the character of Miss Bates was drawn in Emma. — Editor’s note.

7

To “live on tick” was to live on credit. — Editor’s note.

8

Jane makes a similar observation of her character Mrs. Musgrove, in Persuasion, who has lost a troublesome son in the navy. — Editor’s note.

9

Anatomization, or the dissection of a corpse, was a fate usually reserved for hanged felons. Autopsy was regarded in Austen’s time as a violation of a God-given body, abhorred and reviled by all but those familiar with medical interests. — Editor’s note.

10

Robin Hood Butts was an area of open land between Chawton and Alton that served as the site of Alton’s April Fair. — Editor’s note.

11

According to the practice of primogeniture, only the ﬁrst-born son and heir of a peer was considered ennobled at birth; the rest of the Duke of Wilborough’s children, like Lord Harold, were considered commoners, and accorded courtesy titles of lord or lady only during their lifetimes. Their children, in turn, were plain Mr. or Miss. — Editor’s note.

12

We are to assume from Lord Harold’s oblique reference that Frederick Vansittart acceded to his elder brother’s earldom sometime in 1785, and that for this reason he returned to England aboard the Punjab with the governor-general’s party. — Editor’s note.

13

The Lewkenor Carpet is a tapestry roughly sixteen feet by seven feet, executed in the mid-sixteenth century in France and now in the possession of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. — Editor’s note.

14

The Vyne, or Vine — ancestral home of the Chute family at Sherborne St. John a few miles beyond Basingstoke just north of Chawton — was the site of one of the more famous hunting groups in southern England. William Chute (1757–1824), the patriarch in Jane Austen’s time, was both Master of the Vyne Hunt and a Member of Parliament for his borough. — Editor’s note.

15

The term Corinthian is derived from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I: “a Corinthian, a lad of mettle.” and connoted a gentleman practiced in such manly sports as boxing, fencing, cocking, horse-racing, gambling, hunting, and carriage-driving. — Editor’s note.

16

The Battle of Chandernagar refers to the English East India Company’s assault, under the direction of Robert Clive, of the French Compagnie des Indes Fort d’Orléans in Chandernagar, India, in 1757. At the cost of signiﬁcant casualties among Royal Navy troops brought in to ﬁght against the French, the British decisively established control of Bengal for commercial trading. — Editor’s note.

17

Thomas Coutts (1735–1822), a cautious Scot who became the chief banker and ﬁnancial support of the most fashionable people in London during the late Georgian period, was known for having privately ﬂoated the Prince of Wales, Charles James Fox, and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, whose fatal habit was gambling away a fortune. — Editor’s note.

18

The sweep, in Austen’s day, was the term for a driveway. — Editor’s note.

19

A person’s “vowels” were his or her I.O.U. — a signed note promising repayment of a debt of honor that could not be immediately settled. — Editor’s note.

20

Hoby’s establishment sat at the corner of St. James’s and Piccadilly, and was considered the most elegant gentlemen’s bootmaker of the period. Hessians were a style introduced in the early part of the nineteenth century, worn outside the trousers and curving under the knee, with a leather tassel dangling from the center front. — Editor’s note.

21

Lewis Wyatt was one of a family of architects who, collectively, were responsible for some of the most signiﬁcant buildings of the late Georgian and Regency periods. — Editor’s note.

22

“Caky” was the Austen-Knight children’s name for Susannah Sackree, nursemaid at Godmersham from 1793 to 1851. — Editor’s note.

23

Henry Pearce, a prizeﬁghter known as the Game Chicken, was named champion of England in 1805. — Editor’s note.

24

Gin. — Editor’s note.

25

The Season, a period of intense social activity among the Upper Ten Thousand of London society, ran generally for twelve weeks — from Easter through June, when the wealthy of Austen’s period departed for their country houses or Brighton. — Editor’s note.

26

The rapidity and frequency of mail delivery during Austen’s era, despite the relatively bad quality of the roads, is astonishing compared to the infrequent but predictable service of the present day. Sunday mail service, such as Austen describes here, was expected. — Editor’s note.