Jane and The Wandering Eye

Примечания

1

In Austen’s day, it was the custom to travel about the streets of Bath and other major cities in hired sedan chairs carried by a man fore and aft. — Editor’s note.

2

Eliza de Feuillide was both Jane Austen’s cousin and the wife of her brother Henry, but Jane usually refers to Eliza simply as her sister. It was a convention of the time to address relatives acquired through marriage in the same manner as blood relations. — Editor’s note.

3

Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) was the foremost tragic actress of Austen’s day. With her brother, John Philip Kemble, Siddons dominated the London stage at this time, where it is probable Jane had seen her perform. — Editor’s note.

4

Robert Adam’s renovation of Old Drury Lane Theatre in 1775 featured pale green and pink paint with bronze detailing — which the Dowager Duchess apparently emulated. Old Drury was pulled down and replaced by a newer building in 1794. This building burned to the ground in 1809. — Editor’s note.

5

This was the original Bath theater on Orchard Street, where Jane was a frequent patron. Its company divided performances between Bath and Bristol, playing houses in each city on alternate nights — Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday in Bath; Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in Bristol. — Editor’s note.

6

Elizabeth Farren was a member of the Drury Lane company during the 1780s and the recognized mistress of the Earl of Derby, who made her his second countess at his first wife’s death in 1797. — Editor’s note.

7

James Gillray (1757–1815) was the foremost political caricaturist of Austen’s day. His satiric prints began to make their appearance in the 1780s. The aquatint engravings generally made sport of fashionable scandals or political missteps, much as do present-day political cartoons. — Editor’s note.

8

These were the government’s public funds, one of the few reliable investments in Austen’s day, which generally yielded annuities of four percent per annum. — Editor’s note.

9

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the noted Georgian playwright of The School for Scandal and owner of the Drury Lane Theatre, was also a member of Parliament. Sheridan first came to Jane’s notice in 1787, when he made a four-day speech against her family’s friend Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of Bengal, during Hastings’s seven-year parliamentary trial for impeachment. — Editor’s note.

10

The Pump Room was one of the social centers of Bath. It adjoined the King’s Baths, near the Abbey and Colonnade in the heart of the city, and was frequented by the fashionable every afternoon. There they would congregate to drink a glass of medicinal spring water presented by liveried pump attendants; to promenade among their acquaintance; and to peruse the calf-bound volume in which recent arrivals to the city inscribed their names and local addresses. Austen describes the Pump Room to perfection in Northanger Abbey, in which Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe make the place their second home. — Editor’s note.

11

Jane refers here to the events related in the first volume of her edited journals, Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (New York: Bantam Books, 1996). — Editor’s note.

12

John Philip and Charles Kemble both attended a Roman Catholic college in Douay, Flanders. Their father was Catholic, their mother Protestant, and according to custom the sons were reared in their father’s faith while Sarah Siddons was raised in her mother’s. — Editor’s note.

13

To be “disguised” in Austen’s day was to be quite thoroughly drunk. — Editor’s note.

14

The Vyne, in Sherborne St. John, Hampshire, was the ancestral home of the Chute family and their entailed heirs; Jane’s eldest brother, James Austen, was vicar of the parish from 1791, and frequently hunted with William-John Chute, master of the Vyne foxhounds. — Editor’s note.

15

This opened for the 1805 season, despite Portal’s death. — Editor’s note.

16

Sir William Reynolds, a former schoolmate of Austen’s father at Oxford, was the baffled justice last encountered in Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor. — Editor’s note.

17

Mantua-maker was the eighteenth-century term for dressmaker. Jane betrays her age by employing it here. It derives from the mantua, a loose style of gown common in the second half of the eighteenth century, made of silk from Mantua, Italy. — Editor’s note.

18

Wheelers is a term connoting the horses closest to the carriage wheels — in a team of four, the two harnessed first within the traces. — Editor’s note.

19

Eliza Austen was born Eliza Hancock, the daughter of Philadelphia Austen (the Reverend George Austen’s sister) and Tysoe Saul Hancock, a surgeon with the East India Company. While in India Philadelphia Hancock was rumored to have “abandoned herself to Mr. Hastings.” Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal from 1772 to 1785, served as Eliza’s godfather and placed 10,000 pounds in trust for her; Eliza later named her only son Hastings. It was commonly believed, though never acknowledged, that Eliza was Warren Hastings’s daughter. — Editor’s note.

20

James Leigh-Perrot was Mrs. Austen’s brother. He added the surname Perrot to Leigh in order to inherit the Perrot fortune. Although his principal seat was Scarlets, an estate of his wife’s in Berkshire, he spent half of every year in Paragon Buildings, Bath, for his health. — Editor’s note.

21

Jane refers here to the most celebrated dandy of this period, George Bryan “Beau” Brummell (1778–1840), who set the trend in male dress. — Editor’s note.

22

According to historian Roy Porter, both Maria and Richard Cosway indulged in the vogue for hypnotism, and subscribed to the lectures of John B. de Mainauduc, a pupil of the French Dr. Mesmer (1734–1815), who founded “animal magnetism.” — Editors note.

23

Napoleon’s wholesale confiscation of great works of art throughout Europe, and their assemblage in Paris, had occasioned Maria Cosway’s project of recording for posterity every item in the newly opened Louvre. She embarked on the effort in late 1801. A proficient artist in her own right, Mrs. Cosway was at this time estranged from her husband. She did not return to England until 1817, when Cosway was in his dotage. — Editor’s note.

24

While in Paris in the 1790s, Maria Cosway enchanted no less a personage than Thomas Jefferson, who is thought to have fallen (platonically) in love with her. The two corresponded for years after both had returned to their respective countries. — Editor’s note.

25

The Prince of Wales illegally married the Catholic and twice-widowed Maria Fitzherbert in 1786. Ten years later he married his cousin, Caroline of Brunswick, who became the Princess of Wales. The Waleses were notoriously incompatible, and Mrs. Fitzherbert remained the Prince’s favorite. — Editor’s note.

26

Carlton House was the Prince of Wales’s London residence. It now forms part of the British Museum. — Editor’s note.

27

Astley’s Amphitheatre, which Jane visited on several occasions in the company of her brother Edward and his children, was a London riding arena that specialized in mounted shows, rather like a circus. — Editor’s note.

28

George Engleheart (1750–1829) made a virtual profession of eye portrait painting, and broadened the fashion from the nobility of England down to the gentry and eventually, to the middle class. — Editor’s note.

29

This was (and remains) an exclusive men’s club. — Editor’s note.

30

Eliza refers to the Honourable East India Company. The private trading consortium effectively ruled India throughout the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth centuries. Her birth in India and ties to Warren Hastings, the most influential and effective governor the company had ever appointed, probably account for her knowledge of its trade. — Editor’s note.

31

Elizabeth Billington (1768–1818) was a celebrated soprano of Austen’s day, who usually appeared in Bath at concerts conducted by Vincenzo Rauzzini (died 1810). Despite her disclaimers, Austen attended these concerts often, as is evidenced in her letters. They were generally held on Wednesday evenings, so as not to conflict with the theater on Tuesdays and Thursdays, or the Assemblies on Mondays and Fridays. — Editor’s note.

32

Green Park Buildings was newly built at the time of the Austens’ lease, and known for the high water table at its foundation; Jane herself rejected lodgings here as unsuitable in 1801, when her family first removed to Bath, but the high cost of their first home at No. 4 Sydney Place forced an eventual change. — Editor’s note.

33

Jane’s encounter with Geoffrey Sidmouth is detailed in the second Austen journal, Jane and the Man of the Cloth. (New York: Bantam Books, 1997.) — Editor’s note.

34

Westgate Buildings is best known as the home of Anne Elliot’s school friend, Mrs. Smith, in Persuasion. It was by 1804 considered an unhealthy and dangerous neighborhood, fronting the River Avon; rats, pickpockets, and prostitutes frequented it, and it would be ravaged by cholera in the 1830s. — Editor’s note.

35

The criminal justice system of Austen’s time was somewhat cruder than our own. Defendants charged with capital crimes were presumed guilty until proven innocent. — Editor’s note.

36

Here Jane may be thinking of Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, a clergyman’s daughter much incommoded by a suitor’s swearing; or of Mary Crawford, an admiral’s niece in Mansfield Park, whose glancing familiarity with adultery, naval sodomy, and a sailor’s tongue is designed to shock her less sophisticated country circle. — Editor’s note.

37

The color sapphire, in Austen’s day, referred to pale rather than dark blue. — Editor’s note.

38

Jane’s description of morning may confuse a modern reader. The word afternoon was not commonly in use in 1804, as the morning was considered to run from the hour of waking until the dinner hour, which might begin anywhere from four to seven o’clock. The evening began well after dinner, with tea, and ran until supper, a light repast sometimes taken as late as eleven o’clock. A morning call, then, generally occurred in what we would consider afternoon. — Editor’s note.

39

This ruin has been demolished since Austen’s time. — Editor’s note.

40

Austen may have recalled this metaphoric quality of Camden Place when she made it the temporary home of Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion—a man whose emphasis on personal elevation ignored the fact that his fortune had a somewhat shaky foundation. — Editor’s note.

41

Chairmen waited for patrons in Stall Street in much the fashion that taxis presently do — in “stands,” or queues. The last Bath chairman did not retire until 1949. — Editor’s note.

42

The Gravel Walk bisected the Royal Crescent Grounds, a common parading lawn for the fashionable of Bath; in Persuasion, Austen sends Anne Elliot and her beloved Captain Frederick Wentworth to the Gravel Walk to converse privately. The resting booths Lord Harold describes may still be seen on Queen Place Parade — two small huts with fireplaces that served as shelter for the chairmen. — Editor’s note.

43

Not only mail, but passengers frequently passed between France and England despite the state of war. Letters of safe conduct allowed civilians to cross the Channel on packets that were deliberately ignored by the navies on both sides. — Editor’s note.

44

William-Glanvill Evelyn (1734–1813) was an old friend of the Austen family; he maintained a second home in Queen’s Parade, Bath, and was suspected of adultery. Jane liked him almost as much as his bewitching phaeton, and enjoyed joking about the damage to her reputation sustained from driving out alone with Mr. Evelyn. — Editor’s note.

45

Persons pursued for debt could be seized at any time or place, except in the Liberties of the Savoy, a few square blocks in the heart of London, where debtors were accorded sanctuary. Similarly, a member of Parliament could not be taken up for debt. — Editor’s note.

46

It was the custom in the theater of the time to stage two performances each evening. Lovers’ Vows was produced no less than six times in the years Jane spent in Bath; her dislike of and familiarity with the play, as well as its immense popularity, probably caused her to use it for the Bertram family’s amateur theatricals in Mansfield Park. In that novel, Mary Crawford is Amelia and Edmund Bertram is cajoled into portraying the morose clergyman Anhalt. — Editor’s note.

47

Public hangings in Tyburn (now Marble Arch) were a thing of memory by 1804, with most such executions taking place before the gates of Newgate prison; but Jane refers to the public crush and brawling for seats that hangings had formerly occasioned. — Editor’s note.

48

Dorothy Jordan, a comic actress of great renown, unwillingly shared the stage at Drury Lane with the Kemble family throughout the 1780s and ‘90s. Jordan was the mistress of the Duke of Clarence, George Ill’s third son, and bore him ten children before he abandoned her in her old age. — Editor’s note.

49

The fighting of duels between gentlemen like Colonel Easton and the Earl, although very common in Austen’s day as a means of settling disputes, was nonetheless illegal. If a duelist were mortally wounded, his assailant was liable for murder. A common circumvention of this result was escape to the Continent — although with England at war with France, such havens were dwindling. — Editor’s note.

50

In Austen’s day, theaters existed by permission of the monarch. Actors and actresses were still expected, as a result, to perform in court dress, as though in the presence of the king. Although this habit had begun to give way to period costuming in such places as Covent Garden and Drury Lane, it remained the convention. Men who sported the Brutus wore their hair brushed forward along the temples like a Roman of Caesar’s day. — Editor’s note.

51

John Wood (1704–1754) was Bath’s principal architect. He and his son of the same name (died 1782) envisioned and built the city’s principal landmarks, the crescents of houses constructed of similar materials and designed to appear as a single great estate. Laura Place, however, was constructed in 1788, well after Wood’s time, according to plans laid out by Thomas Baldwin. — Editor’s note.

52

Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830) would actually have been closer to thirty-five in 1804. Although Austen describes him as having a fine head, and a surviving self-portrait suggests he was quite handsome, he eventually went bald. — Editor’s note.

53

This description of Sir Egerton Brydges’s Arthur Fitz-Albini is very similar to one Jane gives of the novel in a letter to Cassandra written soon after its publication, in 1798. The Reverend George Austen had purchased the book, and Jane felt a little guilty in reading it, given Madam Lefroy’s poor opinion of the work. See Letter No. 12, Jane Austen’s Letters, Deirdre LeFaye, ed., London: Oxford University Press, 1995. — Editor’s note.

54

Thomas Lawrence’s 1801 portrait of Lady Caroline Upton, coiffed fashionably àla grecque, hangs in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA. — Editor’s note.

55

A man involved in a duel always appointed a “second” who negotiated the terms of the duel with his opponent’s second and, in extreme cases, might be expected to fight on his behalf. — Editor’s note.

56

Beau Nash was Master of Ceremonies for the Bath Assembly up to his death in 1761, and believed himself responsible for the regulation of public conduct. He forced those who frequented the Rooms — duchess and commoner alike — to a rigid standard of etiquette that survived him by fully fifty years. — Editor’s note.

57

This was a riding school located in Montpelier Street, where, for a seasonal subscription, the gentry might receive instruction in riding or hire mounts for their use. — Editor’s note.

58

A man or boy holding aloft a lamp — or “link” — ran before the sedan chair at night, to warn pedestrians and to illuminate the route. — Editor’s note.

59

From their familiarity with the streets and their presence at all hours, chairmen served as almost a police force in Bath, although an unregulated one; they were known to occasionally hold their fares captive, for the extortion of money. — Editor’s note.

60

Readers of Persuasion will be familiar with Molland’s, where Anne Elliot reencounters Captain Frederick Wentworth in a sudden Bath rainstorm. — Editor’s note.

61

The coat-of-arms of the Prince of Wales is a crown surmounted by three ostrich plumes. Both his acknowledged wife — Caroline, Princess of Wales — and Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Catholic to whom he had been previously married by an Anglican priest in 1786, sported the three feathers throughout their households. — Editor’s note.

62

Those respectful of the Sabbath rarely traveled on Sunday in Austen’s time. — Editor’s note.

63

The Crescent refers not to the imposing houses of the Royal Crescent on Brock Street, but to the broad green immediately opposite, where all of fashionable Bath was wont to walk on Sunday afternoons. — Editor’s note.

64

Cassandra Austen was engaged in 1792 to marry the Reverend Thomas Craven Fowle (1765–1797), son of the Austens’ lifelong friends and a protégé of Lord Craven, whose naval expedition to the West Indies in 1795 Fowle felt obligated to join. He died of yellow fever in San Domingo in February 1797. He left Cassandra a legacy of one thousand pounds. — Editor’s note.

65

An Indiaman was a merchant ship transporting cargo from the East Indies. They were usually owned by the Honourable East India Company, but in this case, we may read the term to indicate one of the Earl’s private vessels. — Editor’s note.

66

Since magistrates were appointed by influential patrons, Lord Harold is suggesting that Mr. Elliot’s career might be at risk. — Editor’s note.

67

James Austen’s first wife, Anne Mathew, whom he married in 1792, died suddenly in 1795 — after which he married Mary Lloyd, the sister of Jane’s lifelong friend Martha. Martha would later become Frank Austen’s second wife. — Editor’s note.

68

This description of Anne Lefroy’s death accords quite closely with that contained in the family memoir Jane Austen: A Family Record (by William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, revised by Deirdre LeFaye, London: The British Library, 1989). — Editor’s note.

69

Jane ascribes similar feelings, in virtually the same language, to Anne Elliot of Persuasion—a woman who, at twenty-seven, regrets the advice of her older friend, Lady Russell, who discouraged her attachment eight years previously to a young sailor without prospects. Jane allowed Anne Elliot to be eventually reunited with Captain Frederick Wentworth. — Editor’s note.

70

Women rarely attended funerals in Austen’s day, it being considered the province of a family’s male members to follow the body to both chapel and cemetery. The best a bereaved woman might do was to read Divine Service in the privacy of her home. — Editors note.

71

In August 1799, Jane Leigh-Perrot was accused by a shopkeeper in Bath Street of stealing a card of white lace, which was found wrapped with some black lace she had purchased in the establishment. She denied the theft — and was probably framed by the shopkeeper, who knew that the monetary value of the stolen lace — in excess of twelve pence — made the theft a capital crime, punishable by death or transportation to Australia. Blackmail was probably the object, and when the Leigh-Perrots refused to pay for silence, they were imprisoned together at Ilchester gaol for seven months before Mrs. Leigh-Perrot’s trial and acquittal. Austen scholar Park Honan points out, however, that Mrs. Leigh-Perrot’s defense attorney thought she was a kleptomaniac who got off. — Editor’s note.

72

Charades formed a part of Christmas revels in England throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. They took two forms — the recitation of a riddle, the first part of which defined the first syllable of a word, and the second its ending; or the presentation of a short play, designed to illustrate each syllable and the word as a whole. Several charades thought to be composed by James Leigh-Perrot and Jane Austen can be found in Jane Austen: Collected Poems and Verse of the Austen Family (David Selwyn, ed., U.K.: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1996). Mr. Leigh-Perrot’s are sweet but obvious, while Jane’s are brief and fiendishly clever. — Editor’s note.

73

The Waits were a group of carolers often paid by the mayor of a town to sing at public functions or holidays. Over time, the term evolved to mean any group of Christmas carolers who performed for tips. — Editor’s note.

74

Maria Cosway and Thomas Lawrence collaborated on the 1801 portrait of the Princess of Wales and her daughter, with Mrs. Cosway completing much of the portrait’s ground, and Lawrence working on the principals’ faces. — Editor’s note.

75

Angerstein’s extraordinary collection was purchased by the nation following his death, and formed the basis of the National Gallery in the structure newly built for that purpose in Trafalgar Square. The Lawrence portrait of Angerstein — a friend and patron of many years’ duration — was painted between 1790 and 1795. It hangs in the National Gallery, London. — Editor’s note.

76

The portrait of Isabella Wolff, begun in 1802, is patterned after the pose of the Erythraean Sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. — Editor’s note.

77

The details of the Siddons girls’ love affairs with Thomas Lawrence, and their untimely ends — as well as the supposition that he sought them both out of a thwarted desire for their mother — can be found in The Kemble Era: John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and the London Stage, by Linda Kelly (New York: Random House, 1980). — Editor’s note.

78

The Upper Rooms, as they were called in Austen’s time to distinguish them from those in the lower part of town, are now called the Assembly Rooms. — Editor’s note.

79

This charade has long been attributed to Austen’s pen, but we learn here it was actually created by Lord Harold. — Editor’s note.

80

Henry Rice, Madam Lefroy’s son-in-law, although the curate of Ashe, was a confirmed gamester who ended his days in flight to the Continent, pursued for debt. — Editor’s note.

81

James Austen refers here to the death of Anne Lefroy’s second son, Anthony Brydges Lefroy, who was injured in a fall from a horse at the age of fourteen, and endured a lingering decline of some two years before dying in 1800. — Editor’s note.