Lona Manning's Blog, page 10

CMP#149 Modern Manners and Mansfield

Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. The opinions are mine, but I don't claim originality.  Click here  for the first in the series. For more about other female writers of Austen's time, click the "Authoresses" tag in the Categories list to the right. CMP#149   Modern Manners, part two: of Meaning and Mansfields English nabob smoking a hookah      In my last post, I gave a synopsis of an 1817 novel, Modern Manners, or a Season at Harrowgate, which featured a big cast of characters, two sets of romantic triangles, a comic subplot, misunderstanding, and moral lessons. Now I'd like to discuss some other features of interest.
      Every time I read one of these forgotten novels of the long 18th century, I make note of any references to slavery and colonialism, women's rights, and other topics of current academic interest. For example, several characters in this book have colonial wealth; most notably, Lord Fitzgerald, who came back from India with a large fortune. He intends to marry his son to an heiress with an East Indian fortune. While Lord Fitzgerald has his faults as a parent, he is not critiqued in the novel for the source of his wealth, though of course it is inferior to inheriting your wealth but a class/rank standpoint. The heiress, Elvina Dorrington, is not faulted for her Indian riches, but for her lack of sound religious principle and her "languid" and sensual character. Turkish princess masquerade costume Slavery and Colonialism
    There is no reference to slavery or plantations in Modern Manners even though the term "slave" is used a number of times. Lord Wimbledon can’t get to sleep because his friends are noisily drinking 'til the wee hours. One of them shouts, “time is made for slaves.” Wimbledon picks up a book the heroine had been reading—it’s Cowper’s poem “The Task,” in which the poet references slavery and Lord Mansfield's Somerset case ("We have no slaves at home --then why abroad?") although this is not mentioned. Cowper is referenced to show that the heroine Emma Osborne is no airhead, and therefore Wimbledon grows ashamed of his own pleasure-seeking, trivial life. 
    Arabian harems were a source of fascination for the Brits, and the wealthy Fitzgeralds dress up in exotic costumes for a masquerade ball. Lady Fitzgerald dresses as a “slave,” Lord Fitzgerald is a sultan, their daughter Julia is a veiled Arab princess. There are no reflections on the irony of dressing up as a slave when the source of your wealth is East Indian exploitation.
      Julia Fitzgerald elopes from the ball with the flashy Captain Farquarson, but when she realizes he's an unprincipled fortune-hunter, she tells him ‘”I am no longer your slave.” Later, she sorrowfully tells Emma: “do not sink me into a mere child, the slave of passion… I have inflicted the wound myself.”
   These examples show us how casually people used the term “slave” at this period to describe any kind of constraint. Slavery was a fact of life, but Arab slavery--that is, seraglios or harems--were sexually titillating and exotic. William Murray, Lord Mansfield (1705 - 1793) The Meaning of Mansfield
     Now I finally come to the reason why I lighted on Modern Manners in the first place: I have been seeking out novels of this era with characters named "Mansfield." "Lord Mansfield" is the secondary romantic hero in this book, who patiently woos and wins the lively Julia Fitzgerald. If we are to argue that the title "Mansfield Park" was recognized by Austen's readers as a reference to the real Lord Mansfield, what does it mean when an author names one of her characters "Lord Mansfield"? Did the name "Lord Mansfield" in a book published three years after Mansfield Park send a message about slavery? (If you don't know about the Lord Mansfield/slavery connection here is a backgrounder).
​     Personally, I don’t think the author of Modern Manners is trying to send an anti-slavery message with the name "Lord Mansfield." I think it’s just another solid English name. More broadly, I'm dubious about the idea that authors of this period introduced highly subtle allusions about social issues in the middle of their love stories. If they wanted to inveigh against slavery or masquerade balls or the depravity of London, they went ahead and inveighed, or had one of their characters do so. Nor, contrary to what you might have been told, was there any danger or difficulty around discussing slavery in a novel at this period.
     There is no biographical similarity between this fictional Lord Mansfield and Lord Mansfield the Chief Justice, who died 24 years before this book was published. But I concede that others might think it is no coincidence that after Julia tells Captain Farquarson, “I am no longer your slave,” the character named Lord Mansfield springs into the garden, sword drawn, ready to rescue her.
​    ​   As for contemporary critics, If the name "Lord Mansfield" raised associations in the readers' minds back in the day, the one reviewer who wrote a lengthy and favourable review of the novel in the Gentlemen's Magazine did not think it worth mentioning. He names and describes four other main characters, but he doesn't discuss Lord Mansfield. Mansfield is dismissed in one sentence with the “the rest of the gallants [who] are all very fine young men—very hopeful specimens indeed.”   The Dangers of Novel Reading
    If novel-readers of the day were not as preoccupied with the horrors of slavery as we think they ought to have been, what were they preoccupied with? Well, female chastity, of course, female education, and whether novel-reading had a tendency to overheat female imaginations. As Jane Austen remarks in a famous passage in Northanger Abbey, novelists were guilty of “degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding.” There is a particularly extended example of this in Modern Manners, in which the secondary heroine Julia (representing "Modern Manners," jousts with some older minor characters who fear that "all fictions are immoral, their very source springing in falsehood, and supported by the extravagant vagaries of fancy." The character of Mr. Seymour is given several soliloquies in the book on various topics, and I think he is the author's alter ego: ​   “And does Miss Fitzgerald ever read novels?” cried a maiden lady, looking very superciliously at Julia as she spoke.
   [An old gentleman asks if “any lady could resist them?”]
   “Resist them?” cried the lady, looking both angrily and haughtily, ‘you must have a very contemptible opinion of the female understanding but I, sir, never read them.”
   “And I, madam,” said Julia, “pity you for a prejudice, which deprives you of a gratification, which works of imagination, when written with taste and feeling, must create.”
   “As works of imagination merely, my dear young lady,’ returned the old gentleman, (whose name was Seymour), “I should not plead for them; no, not even if written with taste and feeling… we folks of the last century will have our opinions, and an obstinate one of mine is, that these weapons are often so bright and dazzling, that the sentiments and morals, are lost amidst their fascination and brilliancy…."
    [He acknowledges there are some excellent authors who are exceptions to the rule. This conversation continues for several pages and then segues into a discussion of female education, which allows Julia to exclaim:] “Surely, Sir...  you are not an advocate for intellectual blindness in the female sex? Are not our powers of mind equal to you lords of the creation? And have we not a right to exercise them? Would you confine us to the grim country mansions of our forefathers, to gain our only knowledge from the tapestry figures, and the housekeeper’s receipt book? Fie, my good Mr. Seymour, I thought you had been more liberal.”
     [the conversation continues until it is interrupted by the sudden entrance of another character who announces that Lord Wimbledon is racing against a famous jockey.] Published by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, London, 1817 About the Author
    The lady who wrote Modern Manners probably had never met a Lord in her life or attended a masquerade ball. One critical reviewer pointed out how incorrect it was for "gentlemen to address ladies by their Christian names on the first day of their acquaintance" as Nevison does with Elvina. The author seems to have lived outside of London, because she apologizes for the number of typographical errors in the book because “the Business of the Press has been conducted at such a Distance as to preclude any Correction.” Perhaps she lived in or near Harrogate, which she spells "Harrowgate."
    If you read my synopsis of this book, you might wonder if the anonymous author has borrowed some of her plot points from Austen, although that is by no means certain, since multi-generational stories, lively girls who fall for cads, or dislike of private theatricals, aren’t unique to Austen. The author appears to admire the writer Jane West, because she emulates her traits of explicit moralizing, winking at her readers about novelistic tropes, and referring to herself as a “spectacled old woman,” à la West’s alter ego of Prudentia Homespun. The character of Mr. Seymour includes “West” in his list of good authors who are worth reading despite being novelists: ‘while we have the works of an  Edgeworth, an Hamilton, a West, and a Moore,* who, by lashing the follies of the times, and making (if I may be allowed the expression) fiction the vehicle of truth; yes, while their lessons exist, shall we quarrel with the mode in which they are conveyed?."
     Alas, "Austen" does not make the list of Mr. Seymour's admirable authors. although by the time Modern Manners was published, four of Austen's novels had been published. Perhaps Austen didn't lash the follies of the times as severely as the anonymous author thought she should.
    Modern Manners received two reviews. The Monthly Review found it "improbable without being fanciful, and in which the observations meant to be moral and religious are… trite and wearisome.” 
     The other review, in the Gentlemen's Magazine, was lengthy and favorable, and the reviewer even surmised about the identity of the writer: “Judging from the internal evidence we should pronounce this to be a juvenile performance, thought the fair author has chosen to represent herself as an elderly spinster. We would not be so impolite as to call a lady’s word in question; but there is a graceful and easy veracity in the narrative, and a spirited versatility in the delineation of the characters, which cannot well be reconciled with the idea of matronly sedateness… In this conclusion we are persuaded that every Reader will concur; it will be quite as natural to him as that which he would form in overhearing from the next apartment a fine song delightfully executed and accompanied; he would never, by any possible range of conjecture, imagine the unseen warbler to be an old lady in spectacles.”
   Despite that one good review, Modern Manners was not picked up by many circulating libraries, only 3 out of 20, according to the invaluable British Fiction website. This is perhaps why we don’t see any further novels from “the author of ‘Modern Manners,’ etc.” 
 
​*The authors Mr. Seymour lists are Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), Elizabeth Hamilton (1756-1816), Jane West (1758–1852), and John Moore (1729–1802), although possibly this is a reference to Hannah More (1745-1833). I reviewed John Moore's Edward: various Views of Human Nature, Taken from Life and Manners, Chiefly in England (1796), in an earlier post.

Previous post:  Modern Manners synopsis

CMP#148 Book Review: Modern Manners

This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws  some occasional shade  at the modern academy. ​The introductory post is here.  My "six simple questions for academics" post is here. CMP#148  Book Review: Modern Manners, or, a Season at Harrowgate (1817) Note: I've included details  that resemble Austen, while leaving it to my clever readers to spot them.​ Harrogate spa well, Wikicommons, detail Synopsis
   Modern Manners, an 1817 novel by an anonymous authoress, starts with the marriages of the parents of our main characters. Amelia has the good luck to captivate Henry Fitzgerald, a “gentleman from the Indies” (aka a man with a colonial fortune) who all the “Mamma’s” of the neighbourhood are angling after. Amelia’s match means she goes off to live in London and mingle with the ton. Her sister Matilda marries Mr. Oswald, a respectable vicar with a small independent fortune. Matilda “sighed at the idea of… her sister [Amelia] being lost in the fashionable vortex of dissipation and vanity."  
   The years pass, the countrified Oswalds have a daughter and the city-dwelling Fitzgeralds have two sons and a daughter. Mr. Fitzgerald becomes an MP and then is elevated to the peerage; now, instead of being the wife of a nouveaux riche Indian nabob, Amelia is Lady Fitzgerald. An easy-going woman of no strong opinions, Amelia is more engaged with her morning visits and playing cards than paying attention to the education and moral upbringing of her daughter Julia.
​     The Fitzgeralds come to visit the Oswalds and their lovely, sensible, daughter Emma. Julia Fitzgerald is a social butterfly and an enthusiast for Rousseau, rugged scenery, and defying whatever it is her parents want her to do. We learn that the oldest son, Frederic, is not very attentive to his fiancée. She is Elvina Dorrington, an Indian heiress. Emma Oswald, our main heroine, is intelligent, virtuous, principled and sincerely devout, and the author struggles to make her as interesting as Elvina and Julia. But Emma is firm as a rock in her principles, while Elvina and Julia don't really have principles...    Romantic triangles   
      When the Fitzgeralds move on from the Oswald’s quiet parsonage for a visit to Harrowgate (a spa town in North Yorkshire), they take Emma with them to give her a taste of high society and a chance to meet some eligible men. Many more characters join the tale. This novel is set amongst the privileged and titled, although it’s quite likely the anonymous author never met a lord in her life. Other surnames in the novel include: Montreville, Wimbledon, Seymour, Nevison, Beaumont, Percival, Farquarson, and Mansfield. 
      Elvina the heiress is frequently described as “indolent,” and “languid,” which was typical for descriptions of people from the East or West Indies. If we had actually met Miss Lambe, “chilly and tender” in Jane Austen’s unfinished Sanditon, she might have been indolent and languid, too. Elvina's languid beauty temporarily attracts the intelligent and gallant Captain Nevison, until he realizes she’s engaged to Frederic Fitzgerald, then he hastily backs off.
     Meanwhile, Julia has fun flirting with the outgoing Captain Farquarson and she ignores another suitor, Lord Mansfield. By the way, this is not THE Lord Mansfield, if you know who Lord Mansfield is. This Lord Mansfield is just an eligible but rather quiet and strait-laced young lord in want of a wife. Mansfield is dazzled by Julia's “beauty and commanding powers.” Yet, some of her beliefs and actions distress him. "Lord Mansfield had a dislike to any thing like private theatricals,” so he is more than merely jealous when Julia acts in dialogues with the flashy Farquarson as part of an evening’s entertainment. Farquarson moves in hard on Julia: he “was almost a constant inmate of the house, and if he sometimes took an opposite view of the subject to Julia, in the end, he always professed himself convinced by her arguments… the more delicate admiration of Lord Mansfield, compared with his, was insipid.”     When the young people make an evening tour of the ruins of the nearby Cistercian Abbey, Emma Oswald and Captain Nevison have a grand old time pondering the mutability of life together.
    Then the young people all go boating on the lake, and Elvina accidentally falls in. Her fiancé can’t be bothered to rescue her, but Captain Nevison promptly dives in and fishes her out, so of course she falls madly in love with him, just as he is realizing he is in love with Emma.
    More complications: Emma has another suitor, a titled Lord no less, Lord Wimbledon. His fashionable friends laugh at him for mooning over a “country parson’s daughter,” but he realizes that she is a superior young woman and the way she conducts her life makes him feel ashamed of how he has trifled away his.
    He proposes, Emma politely turns him down, a refusal which causes consternation and surprise with her fashionable Fitzgerald cousins. Turn down a Lord? She can’t help it, she loves the intelligent and principled Captain Nevison, and although he’s got to go join Wellington in the Peninsula to fight Napoleon, she agrees to an engagement. The same plot point occurs in Jane Porter's Thaddeus of Warsaw Impediments and Spoilers
    Since there are no impediments of class or wealth to create difficulties for our hero and heroine, we must turn to misunderstanding to keep them apart: Elvina Dorrington can’t keep her lust for Nevison under control. She goes to the inn where he’s staying and literally throws herself at him: “'Tis you have made me abhor the rest of mankind, and I loathe their very sight; and yet—and yet—you can seek another!'… she threw herself before him, and embracing his knees, exclaimed, ‘Oh, save me! Save me!' Her bonnet fell, her beautiful hair with the motion escaped, and her tresses floated in wild disorder. ‘Would,’ cried he, with a look of agony, ‘that I could save you from yourself—from the torment of your own reproaches!’"
    (This is similar to a scene in Jane Porter’s wildly popular novel, Thaddeus of Warsaw, down to the discarded bonnet, the loosened hair and hero's reference to the fates of fallen woman to make the girl come to her senses.)
     Unfortunately, the false rumor comes back to the Oswalds that Nevison and Elvina have eloped together, and Emma sorrowfully renounces him:
    “I still love….[but] never will I unite my fate with a libertine, a destroyer of the honour and peace of one of my own sex. It is true I feel, tenderly feel; for had I not reposed my trust, and placed my confidence in his virtue and truth?”
    Nevison, in far-off Portugal, is unable to clear up the mystery for the time being, and the Emma/Nevison plot recedes to the background.  Turkish delights at the Masquerade Fortune-hunting Farquarson
  The Julia/Farquarson/Mansfield love triangle takes center stage. As you'll recall, Lord Mansfield loves the imprudent Julia, “even against his better reason” while Julia is infatuated with Captain Farquarson, unaware that he’s a slimy fortune hunter. (He’s Irish, so what can you expect).
  Madcap Julia elopes with Captain Farquarson from a masquerade ball (never go to a masquerade ball, girls, you are just asking for trouble). Retrieved in the nick of time by her father, the family tries to hush the whole thing up, but Farquarson blackmails Julia for breach of promise money. By an amazing coincidence, Julia meets his impoverished sister, who tells her that she has to find a job because her brother does nothing to help her, or their widowed mother. Julia also learns that he already has a wife!
     And I’m going to mention another subplot which gives the main heroine something to do while she’s nursing her broken heart back at the parsonage. Emma’s friend Harriet Merton comes to visit and meets Mr. Oswald’s new curate, fresh out of university. Mr. Roberts doesn’t know much about women and he ignores Emma while he sits and discusses Greek and the classics with Mr. Oswald. But when he hears Emma discourse on appropriate topics such as moral philosophy, his "curiosity was awakened. He had a vague notion, that the knowledge of women was very circumscribed, that their conversation must be on the topics of the day, dress, or at best on the occupations of domestic life. It is true, his information was merely derived from periodical papers, which lashed the follies of the times, represented the beautiful simpletons, or a disgusting picture of pedantry and affected learning. A new class of beings seemed to rise before him as he beheld Emma Oswald and her friends.”
     Harriet figures that the curate is falling for Emma, but “Emma drew more just conclusions. She saw him surprised and amused with the power of Harriet, and she saw likewise that he was gratified by her never-failing appeal to him on any subject on which she was uninformed.” Yes, Emma is right—the young minister is falling for Harriet.  Actually, that's Thaddeus of Warsaw again, but you get the idea Nice guys finish last
   Back in London, Julia agrees to meet the blackmailing Farquarson secretly in her back garden at night. (Again, ladies, just—don’t do this). She intends to confront him with the fact that he’s already married, so he can stop badgering her for money. Like a proper villain, Farquarson announces he plans to abduct her and compromise her. He sneers, “are you not completely in my power?” Luckily, Lord Mansfield, knowing that Farquarson has been hanging around, has also been watching Julia’s house. He springs in to rescue her.
     Julia is safe, but the shock of the confrontation makes her fall ill with a severe fever, as one does, or at least as one does in novels of the long 18th century. Her illness is serious and prolonged and Emma comes to nurse her because Lady Fitzgerald just isn’t up to it.
     Julia sinks into depression as she reflects with great remorse on her past conduct. She concludes that a good and principled man like Lord Mansfield shouldn't want to have anything to do with her. She sends him away: “'It is all futile.—Shall I be so base as to take advantage of a passion which, when its brilliancy passes off, will see me in a different light, because possessed of opposite opinions to yourself?—No, it can never be.'
     “In vain Lord Mansfield pleaded his devotion, his affection; in vain he declared them unalterable…”
    Meanwhile, over in Portugal, Julia’s brother Edward runs into Captain Nevison, and also into his brother's ex-fiancée Elvina, who has disguised herself as a young cadet in order to get close to Nevison. The misunderstanding is sorted out. Elvina repents her wild conduct and takes ship for England. Coincidentally, Emma and her father witness the shipwreck which brings Elvina, half-dead, to the shores of England and Emma nurses her. Mr. Oswald helps her prepare to meet her maker before she dies.
​     Continued in the next post.... Previous  post: A copy/paste children's book                                             Next post: What do you mean by  "Mansfield"?

CMP#147 An Excursion from London to Dover

This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws  some occasional shade  at the modern academy. ​The introductory post is here.  My "six simple questions for academics" post is here. CMP#147  Book Review: An Excursion from London to Dover     By her own account, Jane Gardiner (1758–1840) was fortunate in her employers when she went to work in her mid-teens as governess for a genteel family with six daughters. Ten years later, she started her own school so she could offer a home to her parents and her invalid sister. By the time she retired at age 78, she had taught over 600 girls and worked for more than sixty years.
     Gardiner also published some children’s books. Her 1806 book, An Excursion from London to Dover, is explained by its subtitle: “Containing some account of the Manufactures, Natural and Artificial Curiosities, History and Antiquities of the Towns and Villages. Interspersed with Historical and Biographical Anecdotes, Natural History, Poetical Extracts, and Tales. Particularly Intended for the Amusement and Instruction of Youth.”
     The book is narrated by Jeanette, who is travelling with her friend Adelina and Adelina's father Mr. A____. It’s like an 1806 version of The Magic Schoolbus but without the magic.
  All of this improving information is roughly tied to something approaching a plot, in which Mr. A_____ encounters several old school-mates or acquaintances on the journey. These additional adults give  impromptu lectures to the children, speaking off-the-cuff about everything from the development of paper to to the anatomy of the snail. Adelina and Jeanette also recite poems from memory, whether the topic under discussion is the ocean, hedgehogs, spiders, war, clouds, cuckoos, etc, and Jeanette has perfect recall of the biographies of eminent rulers, scientists, and statesmen. Gardiner also works in some short moral tales and a backstory or two.
      Writing after her mother’s death, Jane Gardiner’s daughter said of An Excursion: “Though this work does not possess much originality of thought, the reviewers allowed it to evince sound judgment, great taste, and an earnest desire to promote the improvement of the rising generation.”
     “Originality of thought,” is a euphemism for the fact that most of the book was what we today would call plagiarized. Madame Jerome Bonaparte by Gilbert Stuart "Pray, explain metals and semi-metals."
     It turns out Gardiner copied her useful information directly from other people’s travel guides and children’s books, re-phrasing and adapting as necessary for her plot. I’ll come back to that. But first, some observations:Anyone who thinks genteel girls in Jane Austen’s time were not expected to have a good education should crack open some of their school books. The curriculum was broad and extensive, covering history, geography, botany, what we would call today social studies, and children were expected to memorize reams of poetry. How many girls today can “tell the principal rivers in Russia” as young Julia and Maria Bertram can? Their governess Miss Lee could very well have used An Excursion to cover most of the curriculum mentioned in Mansfield Park. It even includes a biography of the Emperor Severus.I like coming across references to, or predictions about, the future in these old books. Mr. A____ and the children are strolling along the beach at Margate while he descants on the metals and semi-metals, but the sighting of a fish “turned the discourse” and he exclaims: “Should man ever be enabled, by any future discovery, to traverse the bottom of the sea, what wonders would be opened to his view! What numberless examples would appear of contrivance and sagacity, directed by the same wisdom that has instructed the bees to gather honey, and the beaver to construct his habitation!”It appears that Jane Gardiner also designed a Trivial Pursuit-type of board game for children, because she plugs it in the book: Jeanette reports that the travelers and their friends relaxed with “Gardiner’s Evening Amusements, a game which I intend to purchase; it is a large flat box, divided into thirteen partitions, containing thirteen packs of cards, with questions on as many different subjects.” “[A] great deal of instruction is to be acquired from this game. Mr. A_____ was much pleased with it.” I haven’t been able to find any other reference to this game.In Volume 2, we encounter a real-life celebrity, Madame Jerome Bonaparte, formerly Betsy Patterson of Baltimore, who must have created a sensation when she arrived in England after being turned away from the continent by Napoleon. “She was dressed with great simplicity and modesty; on her head she wore no ornament but her hair, seeming to trust entirely to that Nature, which had been so bountiful to her.” Napoleon’s younger brother Jerome had married the Baltimore beauty impulsively and incurred the anger of his brother, who refused to recognize the marriage.  Grandma's sight restored by Mr. Bennett, HEA for Simon and Anna Improving stories
     As befits a children’s book from this period, the inset backstories and tales all serve to teach some moral lesson, such as the importance of being charitable. In one of these tales, the “poor but virtuous” Anna refuses to marry Simon, the town’s most eligible working-class bachelor, who has a “very neat cottage on the skirts of the town, a cow, three pigs, etc.” Like Austen’s Emma, Anna “resisted [Simon’s] solicitations to become his wife; and though she acknowledged his merit, and that she esteemed him very much, she would not consent to marry him, because, she said, she should then have household affairs to attend to, and could not take proper care of her grandmother.” (Gardiner herself may have lived by this precept, because she did not marry until after her parents died.) Luckily, Ann's blind grandmother receives a cataract operation from the local surgeon, Mr. Bennett (who happens to be an old acquaintance of Mr. A____), which means she can help look after herself.
     The most dramatic incident in the book is a shipwreck on the coast of Margate, which throws several bodies on the shore, including a “rich planter from Jamaica” and his slave. Another one of Mr. A____’s long lost friends knew the planter and also knew the enslaved man’s backstory: “‘This negro,” said he, ‘was a powerful prince of Congo; and, being at war with the King of Loango, was taken prisoner, and sold by him to Ganna, of Dacard, a noted manstealer, employed as such by the slave-merchants there. Being thus taken, he was brought to Goree, where he was sold to a planter, one of the greatest of tyrants. This poor prince, after suffering unheard-of cruelties inflicted on him by this wretch, in a fit of despair stabbed himself; but the wound not proving mortal, he was again sold to this [new] planter, and now met his death in a watery grave.’
     Adelina is inspired to write a poem commemorating Yanko’s sad life, which in fact is an abridged version of the then-famous poem, The Dying Negro. Interesting that a school teacher has a child plagiarizing a poem, although it’s not presented as plagiarism.
    Yanko is portrayed as a prince, which is typical for narratives of this era, as though a African who wasn't blue-blooded would not merit as much sympathy. We also see the distinction made at this time between the slave-trade and slave-owners. Slave-traders were unequivocally condemned but slave-owners were not. The owner who drowned with Yanko, according to Mr. Mansfield, “was a worthy, humane, man, and, he had no doubt, had ever treated him with lenity.”
     But hold! Stop! Mr. Mansfield, did you say? Mr. A____’s old friend is named Mansfield?  A subtle allusion?
   Is this juxtaposition of the name Mansfield with the story of an enslaved man a subtle reference to Lord Mansfield? (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, click here for a backgrounder, and if you don't care, you can skip this section). 
     Well actually, no, there is no connection intended. For one thing, "subtle" and "early English children's literature" have nothing to do with each other. Yes, many scholars believe, but no-one can prove, that Austen named her novel Mansfield Park after Lord Mansfield. But I can explain why Jane Gardiner chose the name Mr. Mansfield, and it wasn’t in homage to the eminent jurist. She named her character Mr. Mansfield because she copied the character and much of his dialogue from another children’s book, A Visit to a Farm House. (1804).  In "A Visit to a Farmhouse," grandfather Mansfield teaches Charles and Arthur about wheat and how to mill it, while Uncle Mansfield teaches his nephews Charles and Arthur about wheat and how to mill it in "An Excursion." Grandfather Mansfield in "A Visit to a Farmhouse"      ​Excursion covers a much broader range of subjects than Farmhouse, and the shipwreck episode about Yanko does not appear in the source material. Jane Gardiner extended Mr. Mansfield’s role and gave him a backstory (he’s a rich uncle who made a huge fortune in India. He gives his money to his virtuous niece). So Uncle Mansfield is also a colonizer, but Gardiner uses him, and yet another rich uncle later in the narrative, to bestow handy fortunes on the deserving. This is a very common plot device of the era and demonstrates that broadly speaking, people were not inclined to condemn colonial fortunes out of hand.
     The original Farmhouse Mr. Mansfield is a gentleman farmer, not an abolitionist. And I doubt either book had any influence on Austen, even though Gardiner’s version of Mr. Mansfield helps an old family servant named Bertram. Small world, isn’t it? No wonder Mr. A____ keeps running into people he knows as he travels from London to Dover.
    So here we have two books for children, one of which includes an anti-slavery message, both published less than ten years before Mansfield Park, where the name “Mansfield” is just a sturdy old English name. I'll resume my explorations about Lord Mansfield and whether invoking the name "Mansfield" had a particular meaning for Regency readers at a future date. Gardiner acknowledged only some of her sources in her Table of Contents  Intellectual Theft
    I think An Excursion From London to Dover would be interesting for any historians of the evolution of intellectual property laws. It’s clear that Gardiner did not regard her literary borrowings in the same light as we do today. At least one of the authors she cribbed from, John Evans, called her out: “The Proprietor of the Juvenile Tourist has been advised to prosecute, and no doubt can be entertained of damages being awarded to him. The Author, however, has in the mean time thought proper thus to lay this plain statement before the public—leaving Mrs. Jane Gardiner, of Elsham Hall, to the consideration of the eighth commandment, and to her own reflections."
    Gardiner acknowledged some, but not all, of her sources in her table of contents, (which, of course, is not the same as obtaining permission or compensating those writers whose work she used.) For example, she shows where she cribbed her biographies and poems from, but she does not acknowledge her debt to “S.W.,” the author of A Visit to a Farmhouse.   
   I wouldn't be surprised if Gardiner's inset stories (and I didn't even get to the story about the foundling who survived the shipwreck) are also borrowed from other writers. 
  Gardiner and her publisher might have been egregious about their copying, but she obviously didn't view it as being wrong, much less sinful. However, as scholar Benjamin Colbert notes: "Whether coincidentally or otherwise, Gardiner published no more after" Evans complained of her "plagiarisms" in the 1809 edition of his book.
    In a final ironic twist around intellectual property, the author of A Visit to a Farmhouse, Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson, made a living by condensing and abridging dozens of successful novels and selling them as small chapbooks, a sort of early Readers’ Digest Condensed Books.  Hadrian's Wall was once called Severus's Wall. Jeanette's "confused" is more like our "embarrassed." Maria and Julia Bertram studied the Roman Emperors "as low as Severus" in Mansfield Park. Severus was the only Roman Emperor to have died in England. Wilkinson also wrote many gothic novels ​About Jane Arden Gardiner
     Jane Gardiner (1758–1840) published several grammar books, although I couldn't say if they were all her own original work. She was a youthful friend of Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft also worked as a governess (but was fired) and started a girls’ school (which failed). Wollstonecraft's personal life (i.e. becoming an unwed mother) led to widespread condemnation of her ideas after her death. Gardiner preserved some of Wollstonecraft's early letters and later recalled: “She was a very amiable young woman… I must greatly lament, as her friend, that her great talents were misapplied, and that she so grossly degraded herself."
    Gardiner's students and their parents thought well of her. Her daughter published an affectionate brief biography but it has the barest biographical details and page after page of attestations to her piety, and her emphasis on faith before works as the key to salvation. The book includes an extended description of her final illness: “All the support she could occasionally take, was the smallest portion of arrow-root.” Here again her fate differs from Emma's Jane Fairfax's. Gardiner had no Frank Churchill to rescue her.
​
​Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson, (1779–1831) Gardiner’s unacknowledged co-author, was culturally of the middle class but poor all her life. She wrote prolifically, worked as a teacher and as a small shop-owner, but ended up dying in a workhouse. Like many other authors, she applied for and received monies from the Royal Literary Fund.     So far as we know, Jane Austen never considered working as a governess or teacher. After her father's death, she, her sister and mother were dependent on her brothers for an income. Her creation Jane Fairfax gets a fairy-tale ending, but that doesn't mean Austen was insensitive about the problems faced by her countrywomen. In adulthood, she became firm friends with the governess who worked for her brother Edward.

    Gardiner's thoughts on Wollstonecraft are quoted in Percy, Carol. "Paradigms for their sex? Women's grammars in late eighteenth-century England." Histoire épistémologie langage 16.2 (1994): 121-141.

     John Wiltshire debunks the search for hidden meanings in Austen's choices of names in "Some Names in Mansfield Park: A Critique of Margaret Anne Doody's Jane Austen's Names: Riddles, Persons, Places," in Persuasions, the journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America, No. 42, 2020.

    When Jerome Bonaparte abandoned his wife in compliance with Napoleon's wishes, she found it very difficult to go back to being just Betsy Paterson of Baltimore. Her brief taste of fame and moving in the highest circles eventually lured her back to Europe and an independent life which shocked her father. Geri Walton tells her story here.

    Thanks to A Visit to a Farmhouse, I learned what Mrs. Norris was talking about in Mansfield Park when she described Dick Jackson “making up to the servants’ hall-door with two bits of deal board in his hand.” Grandfather Mansfield explains that “the wood of the fir, when cut up into timber, is called deal.”​

​​Previous post:     Some lovers of Jane Austen think that borrowing her characters is also a form of intellectual theft, though at least no copyright laws are being violated.
​In my novel A Contrary Wind, Fanny Price runs away from Mansfield Park and takes a job as a governess. The proper education of children was a common theme and topic of discussion in literature of the long 18th century. Considering that girls were largely homeschooled, no wonder this was a preoccupation of the time. Publishers like Tabart specialized in books to help parents teach their children at home. Click here for my series on female education in Regency times. Click here to read more about my novels.

CMP#146 More Chimney-sweeps

This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws  some occasional shade  at the modern academy. ​The introductory post is here.  My "six simple questions for academics" post is here. CMP#146 Chimneysweeps and Cupids, again      Last December, my research into Kitty, a Fair but Frozen Maid (the riddle which Mr. Woodhouse tries to recall in Emma)  was published in  Persuasions  online, the journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America. I also published some pages and blog posts with more background information about Georgian love poetry and riddles.
     My research is intended to refute the theory that the Kitty riddle about a chimney-sweep is actually a very dark and scurrilous poem about venereal disease and deflowering young virgins. So I won't recap all of that here, but I have come across some more riddles about chimney-sweeps, which I want to share because it gives us more context into what people of the long 18th century said about chimney sweeps.
​   As we know, the job of sweeping chimneys was miserable and sometimes fatal. Poorly fed, unwashed, overworked, dressed in rags, they were a daily sight on city streets. Many sympathetic poems and ballads were written about them. 
​   But Georgians, being Georgians, could joke about anything. The blackness of chimney-sweeps was a frequent topic for humor, of course, and the same terms--"sooty," "dusky,"--were used interchangeably for them. Jolly, light-hearted Christmas card     Okay, on to the chimney-sweep riddles. These two riddle-poems appeared in The Ladies' Diary: Or, The Women's Almanack, a long-running magazine for women. The readers affectionately referred to the Ladies' Diary as "Lady Di," and "Lady Dia."  The title page shows Queen Charlotte and praises the "virtue and sense" of "Britain's matchless fair," a reminder that English women considered themselves fortunate  compared to women in other countries. "Justly their charms the astonish'd world admires." 
    The Diary was a collective effort; readers sent in their own poems, enigmas (aka riddles), charades,  general queries, and even algebra problems. Then readers would mail in their answers which the editors would publish in the following issue. Readers sometimes even composed their answers to the riddle-poems in the form of a poem, as we will see.
    It's interesting to see that the hive-mind was not an invention of the internet age.      The following lengthy riddle-poem about a chimney-sweep was first published in 1767 and it gives various hints as to the identity of the speaker which all play on common tropes about sweeps. It starts with a masquerade at the Pantheon--you can learn more about the Pantheon at Regency History.  The poet points out that all ranks and characters of people ("all conditions"), including pensioners (old people living on charity), can mingle in their masquerade disguises. We also have a reference to cross-dressing, for all you historical gender-bending cross-dressing aficionados. ​When the Pantheon rises now complete,
Delighting all the fashionable great;
Where, in fantastic, motley, masquerade,
To Folly’s shrine, devotion’s duly paid;
Where all conditions each disguise admit,
And ignorance assumes the mask of wit;
Where pensioners in masks with peers may vie,
And law puts on the mask of honesty;
Where sex itself is lost in garbs uncouth;
And falsehood wears the sacred form of truth;
Undaunted I appear the group to grace,
All dark disguis’d my person and my face Interior of the Pantheon, Oxford Road, London, Hodges and Pars Leeds Museums & Galleries    By the way, this satirical print "The Return from the Masquerade: a Morning Scene" from 1784 (British Museum) suggests that a chimney-sweep has attended a masquerade dressed as a Turk with a turban and mask. We know he's a chimney-sweep because he's carrying a brush and a bag of soot. Sweeps sold the soot they collected. The lady, who is drunk or asleep, is dressed as a shepherdess with her shepherd's crook. ​
  Genteel men might also dress up as chimney-sweeps for masquerades and there is a record of a man going as "half miller, half sweep," a black and white costume of a miller of flour and a chimney sweep, as the contrast of black and white was endlessly amusing. There's also references to real sweeps going to masquerade balls pretending to be genteel people disguised as sweeps. So going in "blackface" had a different meaning.
​   But, let's get back to our riddle. Next, the riddler goes on to drop hints about rising, as though speaking of rising in a profession: ​By early education taught to please, (a reference to the fact that sweeps started young at 5 or 6 years old)
I rose by slow and regular degrees;
And by much study, and by cunning slight,
Reach’d an exalted, elevated height…. Then the riddler compares clearing the chimneys to a doctor applying a cure. The chimney is compared to intestines and to veins.  ​Still I’ve perfections—be they now proclaim’d;
I’m a physician eminently fam’d;
No common quack, whose med’cines only tease,
Giving, at best, but temporary ease;
Nor one of those whose patent-royal pill,
Or noted nostrum, cannot cure, but kill;
For all my patients, whether rich or poor,
I soon relieve, and never kill, but cure;
And, in the compass of a single hour,
I prove my matchless medicating pow’r:
Like the magicians of remotest days,
With dark, disguis’d, insinuating ways,
Myself into th’infected parts instil,
Then on my patients exercise my skill
Their bowels penetrate, and inmost veins,
Where foul disorder and obstruction reigns,
At once cathartic and emetic prove,
Risking my life, tho; every part I move,
Till all is well, pursue the ailment close,
Myself the doctor and myself the dose. Black and white humor:. A barber covered with white hair powder fights with a chimney-sweep. 1778     Finally, the riddler references the fact that since sweeps were covered in soot, people obviously avoided brushing against them when they walked down the street. Avoiding chimney-sweeps is compared to the respect and reverence given to exalted persons. Similarly, the 1740 essay below right, jokes that chimney-sweeps should become government ministers because everyone "gives way" to them. He returns to the idea of disease, and the last reference in the riddle is to the repeated cry of the chimney-sweep ("sweep, soot, sweep") as he walks down the street. He compares it to an august churchman chanting the church service. The word "suite" in the final line is a play on  "soot." ​When condescending to parade the street,
Respect is paid me from all ranks I meet;
And, whether it proceeds from love or fear,
All clear the way whenever I draw near.
Perhaps from those I cure contagion flows,
Infects my breath, and hangs about my clothes.
Grave and collecting, still I move along,
Bidding defiance to the common throng,
While the attendants of my solemn pace,
All I proclaim, with repetitions, grace;
Monntomy from each salutes the ears,
And thro’ my suite one uniform appears.      The editors of the Ladies' Diary praised the riddle: "This last enigma, and that immediately preceding it, by Tasso [no doubt a pseudonym, and not the Italian poet], appeared both so well deserving to be the prize one, that we fairly determined the chance for that honour between them by lots." "Tasso" apparently sent in a third riddle which the editors didn't use because it was too risqué for a ladies' magazine: "The enigma on a Candlestick is too indelicate for insertion." [Insertion into the magazine, that is, but that sure looks like a pun].
    Of course you can buy scurrilous material in all ages, but this publication is for ladies and there were some lines the editors would not cross. Therefore, the reference to disease and contagion in the chimney-sweep riddle is not necessarily a reference to sexually transmitted diseases; after all, contagious diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis were a daily fact of life.      Many readers figured out the answer to the riddle and sent in their responses, often using pseudonyms. Here are a few of the answers, one of which references Cupid and uses the word "urchin," just like the Kitty riddle, but I am not sure why since the riddle does not play with the theme of love as the Kitty riddle does. Mr. W. Maddick reminds us that the life of a chimney-sweep is actually quite miserable. Mr. Pishey Thompson references the popular ballad, also a proverbial saying,  "A smoky house and a scolding wife are two of the greatest evils in life."  Intermission: here is an example of a crude cartoon  involving a chimney-sweep: "The Black Joke." The caption reads:
​
Sweep-Sweep-soot hoa! Young Sooty cries
And shakes his Bag in Masters eyes,
But when by choleric Tom knock’d down
His head gets under Mamma’s gown,
Sweep saw the Joke with half a peep,
And archly cry’d, Sweep soot hoa! Sweep!
​
Courtesy British Museum and WikiCommons. "His bag" refers to the bag of soot. "Master" is the term of address for a genteel male youth. ​We recall that in those days, women did not routinely wear underwear. Petticoats yes, underwear no. ​Subtle, the Georgians were not.      The Ladies' Diary published another riddle about chimney-sweeps in 1794, by Mr. T.R. Smart, excerpted below. This one more closely resembles the Kitty riddle in its imagery and phrasing. However, in this riddle, the person who summons, but is afraid of the sweep, is a girl. Although afraid, she begs a "cure." "Fair" is basically the word used to refer to females at this time and is used as a noun. This riddle emphasizes the theme of disease and curing illness and also uses the trope of being afraid of being near the sweep, and perhaps also being  afraid that he'll make a big mess with a cloud of soot in the house. Nor rest, nor ease, the weeping fair can know;
The nymph no longer able to endure,
On me she calls, from me she begs a cure,
Yet wond’rous strange! Tho’ I’m the only friend,
On whose kind aid she can for health depend
Her inconsistency of temper’s such,
Dreads my approach, and trembles at my touch!
When I appear, she , who before could rail,
At my neglect, now at my sight turns pale!
Yet why, fair maid, should you thus tim’rous be,
Or tremble at an urchin such as me?
Your faithful servant? Nay, were I inclin’d,
Say what could harm you? Could an elfin blind?
At length she bids: obedient to the fair,
Her flame I quench and upwards mount in air;
And oft the strains I chaunt while swift I rise,
Will reach her ears when far beyond her eyes; Joyful the maid with pain opprest no more,
Deems the worst part of this dread business o’er;
​How weak mortality! Ah! Sanguine dame!
Quick I descend, perhaps relight the flame,
Add sevenfold fuel to the kindling fire,
Enjoy the blaze, and with a smile retire,
Fiercer than erst the gathering ruin grows,
Far brighter flames, and more infuriate glows!
Ye lovely maids to whom the lay belongs.
Who oft have smil’d, and oft approv’d my songs,
Vain the attempt at permanent disguise,
For what to[o] dark to [e]scape your piercing eyes?
Much less the simple tale which now I sing,
A flimsy covering to a noted thing;
Draw off the shade, my name and merits know,
Full soon declare me, for full well ye know.     ​    In the long preamble, there is also a reference  to a "Popinaria,"  which Google tells me means "barkeeper" in Latin, maybe a lady who manages a pub. The riddle also suggests it was common for sweeps to whistle or sing at their work, but who knows. Maybe the acoustics of a chimney are excellent. 
     I submit that a ladies' magazine would not place a riddle that alludes to a fair lady needing a "cure" if the implication was that she needs to be cured from venereal disease. So here we have a riddle that is very similar to the Kitty riddle, but which has an innocent meaning.
     When drawing conclusions about the Kitty riddle, we should study the riddle in the context of its times, not our own. The chimney-sweep walks serenely through a crowded London street because everyone stays away from him. "Grievances of London," 1812, British Museum. Previous post:   Shelley's "singular stories"                                                            

Tremadoc#3: Shelley's "singular stories"

This is the third post in a series about the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his dubious version of an assault that supposedly occurred in February 1818 in the town of Tremadog (formerly Tremadoc) in North Wales. For the first post, click here. Shelley's biographer Richard Holmes believes that an assault did occur. I don't, and here I explain why I don't believe Shelley. Tremadoc, or Tremadog, circa 1865 Shelley's "singular stories"
    The morning after the mysterious attacks, the Shelleys fled to a nearby government official, the solicitor-general, who put them up until Shelley's publisher sent them some money to book passage to Ireland. (That's how broke Shelley was). Shelley was nearly prostrated with nerves. He and Harriet learned of the slanders from Tremadog accusing Shelley of fleeing to avoid his debts and renege on his promises of financial support for the embankment project. Although it was true that Shelley was leaving unpaid debts behind him, including his rent, the Shelleys were highly offended that their veracity was called into question concerning the attacks.
​    As we have seen, it was Harriet who responded to the slur that Shelley had faked the attacks, writing a letter to Shelley’s publisher and to his other close friends, giving Shelley's version of events on his behalf. In her letter, Harriet also named the man Shelley blamed for instigating the attack, the chief labour contractor for the embankment project, Robert Leeson. William Madocks, booster of the Tremadog embankment project, had initially welcomed Shelley's involvement as a well-connected and well-spoken son of a baronet and member of parliament. But as Shelley made himself known to the small community of gentry in the area, they realized how radical his political views were. Leeson thought Shelley would bring discredit to the embankment project. Leeson was a High Tory; during Shelley’s brief stay in Tremadog, political and personal animosity had arisen between them. Harriet boasted that Leeson was refused entry into their house on account of his support for the politicians that Shelley despised. Leeson reciprocated the disdain, and in fact sent a copy of Shelley's printed speech about Irish emancipation to the authorities, to alert them to his radical views (they already knew).
   Would Leeson have hired English-speaking thugs to go up to the house and fire off their pistols at Shelley? He definitely wanted to drive Shelley out of Tremadog, but what would have been the best way of doing it, supposing that Leeson was a man of more than moderate intelligence, which he was? It makes no sense
 I think the entire episode as described by Harriet is melodramatic and improbable.
   It is the hypothetical assailant’s point of view I’m trying to understand here. You pick a miserably wet, moonless night to go up to Shelley’s house on the hill. You enter, with or without taking your shoes off, and, as per the theory of Richard Holmes, Shelley's biographer, you search around in the pitch darkness for samples of Shelley's radical writings to be used to prove that he is a seditious traitor.
   You hear approaching footsteps, or perhaps you hear Shelley's voice calling out, "who's there?" You head for the window. Shelley appears. Instead of legging it, you turn back and fire a shot at Shelley, escalating your crime from housebreaking to attempted murder. ​Did Shelley's assailant wear a mask like these 18th century housebreakers? Notice that they are in their stocking feet. One of the burglars carries a candle, otherwise they wouldn't be able to see anything, and  he's ready to point that pistol if the sleeper wakes up. But this means his hands are occupied. The other man's hands are free so it makes sense for burglars to work in pairs.       If you're in your stocking feet, you've left them behind, though of course Harriet doesn't mention strange boots or footprints. Shelley pursues you--you succeed in knocking him down, but instead of running, you stay and grapple with him on the lawn. He manages to keep hold of his second pistol and he shoots you in the shoulder. You speak, thus giving him a chance to identify you by the sound of your voice. Of course, after this encounter, he could handily identify you as a man with a bullet wound. There were no reports of a wounded man seeking medical help in Tremadog.
      You escape into the darkness. So now you are aware that Shelley has pistols. Why would you return in the dark of night to try a second attack? Do you intend to murder him, after he's had a chance to describe you to everyone in the household? You give up your element of surprise by punching a hole in the window with your pistol or your fist, perhaps because you're unaware that lead bullets fired at close range can pass through glass. You fire at Shelley, and miss. You run away again when Shelley thrusts a sword through the window at you.
     Was all of this necessary? Couldn't the Shelleys have been intimidated into leaving Tremadog with an anonymous threatening letter or two, or maybe a sheep's head thrown on the porch for good measure? At least, wouldn't you start with something like that and then escalate if need be? Regency night attire Forced to make up more lies
    Let's go back to that interval between the first assault which happened at 11:00 pm and the later assault which happened around 4:00 am. Let's suppose that the conversation in the Shelley household came around to the necessity of gathering evidence to present to the local magistrate of the near-deadly assault on Shelley. This catches Shelley off-guard, as he anticipated that everyone would just go pack up their things and get ready to leave town by first light once he told them about the assault. He is used to having his wife believe anything he tells her, but at least one other member of the household, we might surmise, is showing skepticism or wants to investigate and bring the assailant to justice.
​​    Dawn is six hours away and soon the entire household will be assiduously searching inside and out for physical clues in the morning light. If he had lied about the first incident, Shelley would have been in a real quandary at that point.  For the first fabricated incident, he claimed that the assailant shot at him and missed while inside the house, and therefore, his listeners reasoned, that bullet must have lodged somewhere. As his biographer Richard Holmes acknowledges, nobody ever claimed to find a bullet in the billiard room or in the smaller room called "the office." Shelley was therefore compelled to improvise a second act in his drama to amplify the supposed danger and he needed to manufacture some physical evidence.
    Shelley sent all the women to bed, but the loyal Dan Healy insists on staying up to help guard the house, and since he intends to guard Mr. Shelley, he sticks by Mr. Shelley like glue. For three hours, Shelley is chatting with Dan but he's feverishly thinking about how he's doing to stage a second attack with Dan right at his elbow. Finally he thinks of an excuse to send Dan out of the room, and not just to the adjoining room but to do something that will require him to go to the other side of the large villa. As soon as Dan's footsteps fade away, Shelley sprints to a window at one corner of the room. He grabs the window curtain and the skirt of his nightdress, holds them up, and fires his pistol through them, perhaps angled in such a way as to hit the wainscoting on the adjoining wall. When Dan Healy comes running back, alerted by the gunshot, he sees Shelley bashing his sword around a jagged opening in the window. Shelley explains that he was fighting off the intruder. As soon as Harriet arrives, he shows her the physical evidence and says that had he been standing broadside at the window instead of sideways, he surely would have been killed.
      Now Shelley has demonstrated that the household is under attack by determined enemies who won't give up, and he has produced some physical evidence. It was enough to silence any doubts in his household, but not in the wider world. William Godwin (1756 –1836) A man of principle
     I conclude that Shelley staged the entire episode as an excuse to leave Tremadog to get out of his fervent promise to support the embankment project until his last breath, and also because he literally had no way to pay his rent, his servants, or his food and fuel bills--this in a time when creditors could arrest a debtor and send him to jail. Escaping his debts was a lifelong habit with Shelley, and apparently required no justification. But whenever he broke a solemn promise, such as breaking his marriage vows to Harriet, he always managed to persuade himself that it was because he was following a higher principle. In the case of Tremadog, he had impulsively involved himself in the project, then concluded that Madocks didn't deserve his support after all, and Leeson, who was in charge of contracting the labour, was an absolute brute. Therefore, it would have been unprincipled to keep to the commitments he'd made to support the project, no matter how publicly and how fervently he'd made them. And why should he pay rent or pay tradesmen's bills to a community that had betrayed him and turned against him, that refused to find and punish the assassin in their midst? And if they hadn't, literally, sent an assassin to kill him, if he had been compelled to manufacture the assassin, he was doing no more than symbolically illustrating the reality of his estrangement from the town leaders and their hostility to him.
     In the case of ending his first marriage, which fell apart two years later, Shelley was following the higher principle of honesty when he left Harriet, then pregnant with their second child. He had fallen out of love with her, and fallen in love with 16-year-old Mary Godwin, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and his mentor and idol, William Godwin. He explained to his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg that by fulfilling himself with Mary, he was: "deeply persuaded that thus ennobled, [I shall] become... a more useful lover of mankind, a more ardent asserter of truth & virtue." Thus, Mankind would benefit from Shelley's adultery with teenage Mary Godwin. It followed that the obverse case was, if Shelley didn't commit adultery with teenage Mary Godwin, Mankind would pay the price. Thomas Love Peacock (1785 – 1866) ​Shelley and the hat
    Rationalizing your actions is one thing, and Shelley was a master at finding reasons why the self-serving thing he wanted to do was actually a highly principled action. But did Shelley, the apostle of truth and virtue, tell outright lies? His friend Thomas Love Peacock thinks he did. Peacock related an episode which occurred when he visited the poet at his temporary home in Bishopsgate in the early summer of 1816. By this time, Shelley was married to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.
  Mary told Peacock that Shelley had just received a visit from a friend from Tremadog, Madock's trusted overseer John Williams, who had come all the way from Wales to personally warn the poet that his father Timothy Shelley was plotting to “entrap him and lock him up,” that is, have him declared insane and confine him. Once again, Shelley faced a crisis, for which the only thing to do was run and hide, even if it meant leaving behind unpaid bills for furniture, dishes, and the statues he'd ordered to decorate the library with.
    Peacock was unconvinced, and said so. Mary left the room, and soon after, Shelley entered, hat in hand, as though just returning from a walk, and he affirmed that indeed, he had just come back from a long walk with his benefactor Williams. Peacock saw that the hat in Shelley’s hand was not Shelley’s hat, but his own hat, which he had left in the front hall upon entering the house. Peacock told Shelley to put the hat on, and it fell over his eyes, being much too large for Shelley’s notably small head. Shelley, nonplussed, said that he had carried the hat in his hand for the entire walk and so he hadn't noticed that he'd picked up the wrong hat from the front hall.
     Shelley then insisted that Williams was staying at a hotel in London and offered to walk there with Peacock to prove he was telling the truth. Peacock agreed and they set off, but Shelley abandoned the walk half-way there. Opera hat, Metropolitan Museum       A few days later, Shelley claimed he’d received a letter from Williams containing a diamond necklace. He could not show the letter to Peacock, he said, but he could show the necklace. “Surely," said Peacock, "your showing me a diamond necklace will prove nothing but that you have one to show.”
      “Then,” said Shelley, “I will not show it to you.”
​      Mary professed to believe Shelley, Peacock could not.
      A quote from Shelley biographer Richard Holmes is apropos here: "Shelley could be very unscrupulous in adjusting the truth when the need arose. What is most disturbing is that it is difficult to tell how far Shelley really realized — or admitted to himself — what he was doing."
​     Another fact to note is that Shelley had a habit of being suddenly and violently attacked by strangers just prior to removing from one place to another. In January 1811, a year before the events in Tremadog, Shelley and Harriet were living in a cottage in Keswick, near the poet Robert Southey. Shelley claims to have answered the door and been instantly knocked down by a stranger, who disappeared when the landlord, who lived nearby, responded to the commotion. Shelley and Harriet left Keswick for Ireland early the next month. When Shelley was in Italy in May of 1819 and going to the post office to get his letters, he claimed that a tall English officer, upon hearing his name, exclaimed, "What! Are you that damned atheist Shelley?" and knocked him to the ground. Biographer James Bieri adds that Shelley initially said his attacker in the post office was none other than his nemesis from Tremadog, Robert Leeson, and therefore they had to move immediately. Another early biographer, William Michael Rosetti, comments: "This is another of the singular stories told by Shelley, and discredited by most of his hearers or biographers."​  Tremadog aftermath
       No assailant was ever caught. The local officials investigated the crime (remember that in those days there was no such thing as a police force, especially in a small Welsh village, and the local magistrates were the local gentry, often serving in voluntary positions). According to John Cordy Jeaffreson, they concluded that Shelley made the whole thing up and the bullet mark on the wainscot could not have been made by someone firing from outside the window into the house. (Again, others have quibbled over this, but...) Richard Holmes surmises that the authorities in Tremadog thought the best thing for all concerned was to hush up the scandal. Capital always flees from uncertainty, and they wanted the project to go ahead. Despite his private protestations to his friends, Shelley also had good reason for burying the whole thing. But months later, he told Mary Godwin's sister Claire that he was worried about walking the streets of London, for fear Robert Leeson would come up and stab him with a knife. 
​       As Holmes notes, Shelley was personally and impulsively generous but: "one has the impression that he owed rather more than he gave away." Before leaving England for Italy, Shelley did make half-hearted attempts to pay off his Tremadog and other debts. It appears that whatever funds were set aside for paying them was not sufficient. One of his Tremadog creditors wrote that Shelley lied about the extent of the debts he'd left behind in Wales: "he is actually guilty of abundant falsities... did you ever hear of a more ungrateful fellow!" What did Dan Healy see? "Ungrateful and insolent:" the silencing of Dan Healy
         When we ask whether both of these attacks were faked, the circumstantial evidence points away from implicating Healy as the antagonist or a hoaxer, and towards the possibility that he was either a confederate or a dupe of Shelley's. I am leaning towards dupe.
        Shelley appears to have been considerate enough to Dan Healy insofar as while Dan was in prison for following Shelley's instructions, Shelley did not decamp from Tremadog, leaving no forwarding address, which was his usual method of avoiding his creditors. Had Shelley done so in this case, Healy would have been left stranded without a job, without a character reference, and probably with no money. So the day after Healy’s return was the earliest possible date that Shelley could have left Tremadog and still done the decent thing by Healy, and that is when he in fact left.
     There's a saying that the gratitude of princes can't be relied upon and the adage must apply to poetic geniuses as well. The Shelleys discharged Healy sometime later. Harriet wrote to an Irish friend, Catherine Nugent, (who had heard through a mutual friend that Healy was complaining about the Shelleys) that Healy was “ungrateful and insolent.” Harriet did not explain why Healy had cause to be grateful to the Shelleys rather than the other way around, considering he was the one who'd spent six months in jail for the poet, and considering they owed him ten pounds' wages. Ten pounds probably represented at least half a year's salary. Can we imagine that Shelley had promised Healy, just as he had promised his other creditors, that his debts would be discharged soon? That he really intended to make good on those promises until circumstances made it impossible? Then, during their travels in Ireland or else back in London, Healy was discharged and accused of "unprincipled" conduct.
       Clearly Harriet’s aim was to discredit anything the now-angry servant said about the Shelleys. Sadly, Healy disappears from history, so we’ll never know what he thought or knew. A Longbourn-style novel featuring Healy as the protagonist might be interesting.   Using his wives as dupes
       My case against Shelley is based on circumstantial evidence and psychological analysis, but I think my theory fits the known facts. I'm not trying to "cancel" Shelley, just surmising about a fascinating incident in the life of a fascinating man. 
    The final piece of psychological evidence that strikes me as significant is the thing I started with: if Shelley is such a great writer, a compulsive writer, why didn't he write his own version of the Tremadog incident? My answer is: if Shelley had written his own defense, he would have had to commit his falsehoods to paper under his own name. Harriet, on the other hand, could speak earnestly and with all sincerity on his behalf, because she had been duped into trusting him. As Richard Holmes acknowledges, whatever or whoever else we don't believe in this affair, we can believe that Harriet wasn't a liar. And that is why Shelley chose her to be his spokesman. And  he pulled the same stunt  with his second wife a few years later.        The story about the hat can be found in the Delphi Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock. Richard Holmes discounts the accuracy of this detailed anecdote and suggests that Peacock’s memory was failing him when he wrote it. Shelley biographer James Bieri notes the similarities to the Tremadog situation.

"By God, I will be revenged. I will murder your wife. I will ravish your sister." Author Louise Schutz Boas thinks this reported threat is so ridiculous that it must be real: "had Shelley invented it he would have made it more plausible... the preposterousness of the utterance validates it." 

Another fascinating aspect of this fascinating family story is that Shelley had been convinced of the falsity and tyranny of marriage, and the honesty and virtue of Free Love from none other than his new father-in-law, William Godwin. John Cordy Jeaffreson, an early and very skeptical biographer of Shelley, points out that Godwin had brought out his first edition of Political Justice when "Shelley was playing with his corals," ie, playing with his teething-ring, but, he had recanted his extreme Free Love views when he realized that his idealized version of humanity had nothing to do with how people felt and behaved in real life. Godwin was horrified when his daughter ran off with Shelley. 

Although I don't agree with all of Richard Holmes's conclusions about Shelley, his book, Shelley: the Pursuit, is the definitive modern biography of the poet.

​My novella,  Shelley and the Unknown Lady , is an exploration of another one of Shelley's singular stories. He claimed that a beautiful, wealthy, high-born Englishwoman left her husband and followed him through Europe, hoping to become his mate. For more of my blog posts about Shelley, click "Shelley" in the category list on the right-hand side of page. ​

Tremadoc#2 What happened at Tremadog?

     In my previous post, I began an examination of the curious attack allegedly made on the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in late February 1813 in Tremadog, North Wales.  Shelley claimed that a stranger came to his house late at night and fired a pistol at him, then escaped, wounded, into the night. The descriptions referred to below of that night come from a letter written by Shelley's young wife Harriet some days after the event. This post picks up the narrative from after the first attack. What Happened at Tremadog? Healy got in trouble for posting seditious handbills ​     After two hours of anxious watching, and no doubt much discussion, Shelley told his wife, sister-in-law, and the female servants to go to bed. It was about one in the morning. Shelley sat up with his Irish manservant, Daniel Healy, to guard the household. Almost three hours passed.
      Healy (also known as Daniel Healey or Dan Hill) had arrived in Tremadog that very day, after serving six months in prison for posting anonymous handbills in North Devon. It was against the law to post or sell printed material that didn't state the identity of the publisher. But what really bothered the authorities was the critical-- and to their minds, seditious--content of the handbills. Healy had posted the handbills on Shelley’s behalf and at his behest. The authorities had been watching Shelley but couldn’t prove that he authored the handbills, so Shelley was not charged. Healy could have stayed out of prison if he had paid a fine of 200 pounds. Shelley didn't have that kind of money, so Healy went to prison.
      There is no indication that, at this point, Healy resented the fact that he'd spent six months in prison--no doubt in dire conditions--for something Shelley had written. The faithful Irishman made the journey to Wales in miserable weather, and now, after a tiring trip, he was sitting up in the small hours of the morning with his employer, guarding the safety and virtue of the women of the household from the parting threat made by the assailant to murder Shelley's wife and rape his sister-in-law. It is hard to see Healy's behaviour as anything but devoted, and in fact Harriet later described him as being “greatly attached” to them.
    At some time before four a.m., according to Harriet’s account, Shelley “sent Daniel to see what hour it was,” which left Shelley all alone in one of the downstairs rooms. The assailant strikes
   We don’t know where Healy went to check the time. Was there a clock in another room? Did Shelley leave his pocket watch somewhere? In her letter describing the events of that night, Harriet had mentioned that Healy didn't know his way around the large house, but she didn't explain why this was an issue. Was this significant when it came to looking for the grandfather clock or the mantelpiece clock by the light of the single candle he probably carried? The consequence is, we don't know how long he was away from Shelley. In Shelley: The Pursuit, Richard Holmes says it was "a few seconds" but does not explain how he came to that conclusion. Holmes argues that Healy was not out of the room long enough for Shelley to stage a fake second attack, therefore the attack which followed must have been real. He does not explain why a fake attack would take more time than a real attack.
    We are left with the coincidence that (a) the two attacks happened the evening of Healy's arrival and (b) the second attack occurred after Healy stepped out of the room. 
​   The mysterious assailant fired his pistol at Shelley through one of the large windows. In fact, according to Harriet, Shelley "heard a noise at the window. He went there, and a man thrust his arm through the glass and fired at him." Well, that does explain why there was shattered glass on the floor, as opposed to a bullet hole in the glass.
   Though Shelley must have been close to the window, the assailant missed him for the second time that evening. Shelley fired back, but again, his gun misfired. So this time there was only the one gunshot to be heard, as opposed to the earlier encounter, when two gunshots were fired. Artist's rendition of suspect Brave Harriet
     Whether or not Harriet had heard anything during the first fracas, this time we know she heard the shot because she reacted courageously. Pregnant, 17 years old and under the conviction that she herself had been targeted for assassination, Harriet “immediately ran down the stairs” to her husband’s side when she heard the gunshot. By the time she got there, she found Shelley standing near the window in his flannel nightdress with a sword in his hand. 
     Harriet saw with her own eyes a bullet hole in Shelley’s flannel nightdress, a hole in the window curtain, and the broken window. There was also a bullet mark in the wainscoting. (Shelley scholars have wrangled over the location of the bullet mark and the consequent direction or origin of the shot. I will not go over the minutiae of it. Suffice it to say, a bullet had struck the wainscoting.)
     Harriet’s testimony about the second encounter with the mysterious assailant is not clear on whether their servant Dan Healy saw anything more than Shelley energetically swinging a sword around in the hole in the broken window: “The assassin attempted to get the sword from [Shelley], and just as he was pulling it away Dan rushed into the room, when [the assailant] made his escape.”
      Did Healy see a stranger’s arm through the window, grabbing at Shelley’s hand or Shelley’s sword, or did he see Shelley pulling a sword back through the window as though he was involved in a tug of war with someone standing on the other side? Different biographers have interpreted Harriet's description differently.
       The bottom line is, when it comes to sightings of the assailant, Shelley is the only witness on record.
     There is a final bit of physical evidence but it is not dispositive. Somebody, at some point, “trampled and rolled on,” the lawn outside the villa, as was evident the next morning, but the only footprints that were found were next to the house, not leading away from it.
    The Shelleys and Eliza Westbrook decamped from Tremadog the next day. Dan Healy left with them but it seems their three Welsh maid-servants were discharged, paid or not. Servants below stairs (Cruikshank) True?
     So, did the bizarre assaults really happen as Harriet described? Many Shelley biographers and historians have sifted and analyzed the known facts but have come up with different conclusions.
      (1) It might all be true or substantially true. Someone might have tried to frighten or even kill the poet that night.
     (2)  Shelley may have embellished an actual event, so that some things were true and some, like the melodramatic vows of revenge, were not. Shelley biographer Richard Holmes theorizes that someone was trying to harm the radical poet by breaking into his house to find some incriminating anti-government material. But if so, why did the intruder fire his pistol  and risk a charge of murder instead of just fleeing in the darkness when Shelley challenged him? Why did he, or someone else, return for another futile encounter? And did he have to do it on a night when rain was coming down in torrents? Did they imagine that the wind and the rain would serve as a cover for the sounds of their burglary? 
    A related possibility is that the attacks were not intended to be so violent as they became; in other words, they were a prank that got out of hand. William Madocks, the founder of the village of Tremadog, thought that “hoaxters” had played a “contemptible trick” on Shelley “on account of his liberal principles.”[1] Maybe somebody hired a thug to go frighten Shelley and he panicked when he saw Shelley come into the room with a pistol in each hand. Though how anyone saw anything is a bit of a mystery. Was the assailant carrying a lantern and a pistol? Was Shelley holding a candle as well as two pistols? I might mention at this point that candles were expensive, much more expensive than electric light is today, and only the very rich could afford to use them lavishly. I don't think you'd leave unattended candles burning in the billiard room after you had gone up to bed.
    In this respect, some researchers have pointed to (2a) Dan Healy as the secret culprit. The attacks happened, as we've said, the very night he returned after six months in prison. Maybe it was Healy, blundering through the billiard room and, presumably, disguising his Irish accent as he threatened the poet's wife and sister-in-law. As mentioned, Harriet said Healy rushed into the room just as Shelley was struggling with the assailant over the control of the sword. If Healy was the first intruder and if he saw a second intruder, this second man would have to be explained. But Harriet never speaks of there being two different assailants, and she gets her facts from Shelley. 
​   Whether or not the assailant had an identifiable accent, during that first encounter he spoke to Shelley in English, not Welsh, otherwise Shelley wouldn’t have understood what he said. So he could hardly have been an uneducated local man. Richard Holmes notes that the local papers advertised rewards for the apprehension of house-breakers which suggests that there was indeed a problem with roving criminals. But Shelley didn't think the man who assaulted him was a burglar. "I have just escaped an atrocious assassination," he wrote in an hysterical note to his publisher, and he intimated that he believed he was still in danger: "you will perhaps hear of me no more." Artist's rendition of suspect  Partly True?  Or False? 
   Another possibility is that (3) Shelley imagined some of what occurred. Suppose Healy wasn't doing anything sinister, but when the footsteps of a man were heard walking through the billiard room, (in a household of five females plus Shelley), Shelley mistook him for an intruder in the dark, and fired first, later persuading himself that he had been fired upon. Shelley’s closest friends acknowledged that he could persuade himself to believe in things that weren’t true and his biographers provide many examples of this. For example, at one point he became absolutely convinced that he had elephantiasis and was obsessed with examining other people's limbs to see if they were coming down with the disease as well. When he ordered a custom coach from a London carriage maker for over 500 pounds, he believed he could and would pay for it. Even when he took the coach with him to Europe, he still intended to pay for it, so he is not to be conflated with some shabby con artist. The coach maker was still asking to be paid out of Shelley's estate twenty-two years after he died.
   Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock thought the poet hallucinated the Tremadog incident, including the struggle on the lawn and the threats of revenge. Peacock was interested enough in the question to travel to North Wales himself to examine the house and question the locals. But one does not hallucinate bullet-holes and broken glass.
     The final possibility is that (4) Shelley consciously fabricated the whole thing. This was suspected from the outset, as soon as the attacks were reported the next day. The locals, including some influential backers of the land reclamation project, accused Shelley of faking the attacks as an excuse to leave without paying his bills, to say nothing of his £500 pledge toward the embankment project. He who had presented himself as the saviour of the Tremadog embankment was, they jeered, an ineffectual poseur who had staged the 19th-century equivalent of a hate crime hoax. Harriet said this was why nobody would help find the assailant or turn him in: "none of them attempted to do anything towards his discovery."
   Shelley doubted his own abilities as a dramatist, and the events in Tremadog, considered as drama, are certainly overwrought. It was a dark and stormy night. Evil is foreshadowed when Shelley announces to his wife that he has loaded his pistols. Sure enough, there is a sinister noise which the hero investigates. The intruder, instead of fleeing, turns and fires on Shelley. Shelley’s pistol flashes in the pan, he pursues the assailant outside, he is knocked to the ground, but instead of kicking the prostrate poet, or battering him into submission with the butt of his pistol, the assailant gives up his superior position; he throws himself on top of Shelley and they struggle on the ground until Shelley manages to fire his second pistol.
    After Shelley hits his attacker at close range, the villain shrieks, leaps to his feet, clutching his bleeding shoulder, vows to murder and rape two innocent women, twirls his moustache (one must presume) and escapes. Though wounded and bleeding with a big old lead bullet in his shoulder, he returns several hours later, like the bad guy at the end of a thriller movie, breaks a window to alert Shelley to his presence, fires one pistol, but misses. He struggles over a sword, and flees again into the night.   Instead, consider this scenario:  Shelley had two pistols. At 11 pm he went to the little room off the billiard room and fired them one after the other, probably out the window. He then claimed that the intruder had fired once and he, despite having two loaded pistols, only fired one shot because the other pistol failed.
   In the midnight hours after the first assault, when Shelley, his wife, his sister-in-law, and their servants were sitting together in the parlour in their pajamas, a circumstance which must, to some degree, psychologically eliminate the distinction between master and servant, Shelley was surprised when people asked him questions he couldn't answer. Questions like, “why didn’t we hear the pistol shots?” Or "why is your nightdress clean and why is your hair dry if you were struggling outside in the mud?"  Or, if the struggle with the assailant was inside the house, despite Harriet's use of the word "ground" instead of "floor," then surely there would be a trail of blood from the shoulder wound, particularly if the intruder didn't run away until after he'd uttered his malediction. (For the record, I can't say definitely that no-one heard the shots, or that Shelley's nightdress wasn't dirty and wet.  We can only say Harriet doesn't mention these corroborative details. Or, did Shelley have any scrapes or bruises as a result of the desperate struggle? Consider that in later years, Shelley blamed a lingering pain in his side to the injury he sustained when the assailant's knee pressed down on him. Yet there is no mention of bruises arising or torn ligaments in Harriet's letter, and you would think Harriet would mention any piece of corroborative evidence since their version of events had been called into question.)
     Did sister-in-law Eliza, the most pragmatic member of the family, suggest that they search for evidence in the morning—such as muddy footprints in the billiard room and a bullet in the wall? Because of course, the matter should be reported to the authorities, apart from the question of whether they should pack and move immediately.
       Was Shelley taken aback to discover that his word alone was not enough?             .... to be continued Previous post: "The horrors of that night"                                                        [1] Quoted in Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit.

Some of these objections were also made by John Cordy Jeaffreson in The Real Shelley: New Views of the Poet’s Life, Volume II, (1885). Jeaffreson thinks the attacks were staged. 

A Different Version
    A different and third-hand version of the first attack was given decades later by the widow of Madock's foreman John Williams, who recalled that her husband told her that Shelley told him he'd seen a face in the window, he had fired his pistol, rushed outside, and saw "the devil learning against a tree." He sketched a picture of the devil he saw, which Mr. Williams preserved. The sketch to the right is a copy of that picture. He recalled that Shelley was in a highly excited state and was not in his right mind.
   This alternate version could be explained as the actions of local pranksters, or to hallucination or self-deception. Shelley does not hear the intruder speak, and he does not make physical contact with it, which means Shelley couldn't have been wounded by a knee pressing into his side. But the second attack with its physical evidence cannot be attributed to mistakes or hallucination. See N.I. White's 1940 biography of Shelley, volume I.

​For my earlier posts about Shelley, click on "Shelley" on the category lists at right.

Shelley at Tremadog: "The horrors of that night"

Just taking an interval from my Jane Austen postings to share some thoughts about Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley appears in my novel A Different Kind of Woman , and his part of the story is also excerpted and expanded in my novella, Shelley and the Unknown Lady . My Shelley story has to do with his time in Italy, but this series will discuss another mysterious episode in his life--the "ghost" assailant in Tremadog, North Wales. “The horrors of that night” PBS, 1792-1822     The written word was the vehicle by which the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley expressed himself. His writing, ignored during his lifetime, has since elevated him to the highest rank of English poets. Writing was the way Shelley processed the experiences of his life. Anyone who writes understands this phenomenon, this urge to write after some dramatic event. If you’re a painter, you paint. If you’re a writer, you write. Apart from transmuting the events of his own life into poetry, Shelley also wrote about social issues and politics so fearlessly, so passionately, that he courted being arrested for sedition.
   But on two occasions when his behaviour was called into question, Shelley fell silent and turned to someone else to speak for him. One occasion, which I’ve already written about, was when his former nursemaid accused him of having sex with his sister-in-law Claire (probably true), of trying to obtain an abortion for her (possibly true), and abandoning the resulting infant in a foundling home (untrue). On that occasion, he turned to his wife Mary Godwin Shelley to defend him, which she did, in a passionate letter.
    Now I want to turn back to his first wife, the tragic Harriet (also spelled Harriett) Westbrook Shelley, and the circumstances which led her to take up her pen to defend her husband. It had to do with his precipitate departure from an isolated Welsh coastal town called Tremadog (then spelled as Tremadoc). The Tremadog embankment under construction in 1810, British Library  Exit stage left
  There was nothing unusual about rapid departures for the Shelley household. Chronically restless, Shelley never stayed anywhere for long, even though he often, when arriving somewhere, declared that it was the perfect spot.
   By the fall of 1812, Harriet and Shelley, though only 17 and 20 years old respectively, had been married for a year and a half. In that brief period they had moved from Edinburgh to York, to the Lake District, to Dublin and Devonshire, with stops in-between in London.
​   Shelley was estranged from his father, who despaired of his son’s radical beliefs, and they lived on monies Shelley borrowed against his majority (that is, money lenders lent him money at high rates because he would one day inherit the family fortune and his grandfather’s baronetcy). In those days, almost every profession was considered a degradation for a well-born oldest son. And after all, Shelley was a poet with every fibre of his being; he could hardly be anything else. Shelley read and wrote voraciously during this period.
    In October of 1812, Shelley threw his support behind an effort to build an embankment across the bay at Tremadog in Wales. The venture was being undertaken by an optimistic entrepreneur named William Madocks (1773–1828). The work had already been completed once but had been washed away in a storm and the ambitious project was about to founder for lack of monies. With characteristic fervour, Shelley “publicly pledge[d] to spend the last shilling of [his] fortune and devote the last breath of [his] life” to help this land reclamation effort.[1] He personally pledged to donate £500 and promised to find other subscribers.
     Shelley, Harriet, and her older sister Eliza moved to Tremadog and took a lovely, spacious, villa called Tan-yr-Allt perched on the hillside overlooking the town and the bay below. Though their finances were precarious and they had left a trail of debts behind them, the Shelleys hired at least three maidservants and lived in the style to which they were accustomed, that is to say, far beyond their means. They were initially enchanted with their new home. Shelley worked on his first magnum opus, Queen Mab, an allegorical poem that laid out Shelley's political and social views, which he'd mostly imbibed from the book Political Justice by William Godwin. He also made some quick trips to London, where he met with William Godwin and first met his young daughter Mary.  
    But by January, Shelley regretted his promise of financial sponsorship. Nor had he succeeded in attracting other investors, as he had so confidently promised Madocks. Originally he thought the men behind the project were visionaries who would stimulate agriculture and trade for the impoverished Welsh people, but by winter he and Harriet reviled the giant earthworks as a blight on the beautiful scenery of the bay.[2] He also felt the labourers on the project were being underpaid and maltreated. Tensions were growing between Shelley and some of the townsfolk, particularly as he had unpaid bills with various merchants.
     In late February of 1813, the Shelleys abruptly left Tremadog after a mysterious, dangerous, episode that occurred in the dead of night, and they never returned. Plas Tan-Yr-Allt, Tremadog, Gwynedd, North Wales, It was a dark and stormy night
   Why did Shelley flee Tremadog? The explanation came, not from Shelley, but from Harriet, who wrote a long letter to their friends about it because she “wish[ed] to spare [her husband], in the present nervous state of his health, every thing that can recall to his mind the horrors of that night...”   The entire letter is here.  And let's take a moment to note that Harriet was 17 and pregnant and tasked with writing this letter while her husband flopped about on the chaise lounge complaining about his nerves and his digestion.
   The night in question was Friday, February 26th, 1813. Shelley made a point of loading his two pistols before he retired for the night, because he anticipated some kind of confrontation with the locals. What, exactly, was Shelley anticipating? His actions imply he thought someone might come to the house. But that particular night was very stormy: “the wind was as loud as thunder, and the rain descended in torrents.” One would have to be extremely motivated indeed, to walk up to Tan yr Walt in such miserable February weather to have a few unpleasant words with Shelley late at night. You'd be soaked and chilled through, and this in an age before Gore-Tex jackets and central heating to warm you up once you got inside.
     Around eleven o’clock, Harriet writes, Shelley heard an intruder in the house (over the noise of the thunderously loud wind) and he “went into the billiard room, where he heard footsteps retreating. He followed into another little room… there [he] saw a man in the act of quitting the room through a [large] glass window which opens into the shrubbery.” The unknown man fired a pistol at Shelley, but missed.
     Shelley returned fire but his pistol flashed in the pan (that is, the gunpowder ignited but did not explode down the chamber and expel the bullet.) “The man then knocked Shelley down,” continued Harriet, and “they struggled on the ground,” until Shelley managed to fire his second pistol, which he believed hit his assailant’s shoulder.
​      By the term "ground," we must assume that Shelley had followed the intruder outside, otherwise Harriet would have written "the floor." It must have been very dark out there. It was a moonless night and there was no such thing as electric porch lights or street lamps. At any rate, Shelley believed he had hit his target because the man shrieked and then exclaimed: “’By God, I will be revenged! I will murder your wife. I will ravish your sister. By God, I will be revenged.’”* He then fled.     Did anyone else in the house—apart from Shelley—hear the break-in, the pistol shots, the “shriek” or the blood-curdling vow of revenge? Did anyone else see the assailant? Harriet does not mention it. She says their servants were getting ready for bed, which means they were awake. They “all assembled in the parlour” after the assailant fled. Were they alerted by the sound of gun shots or by Shelley? Harriet doesn’t say. One would think they heard two gunshots over the sound of the storm.
     We can be sure that once the household was all gathered together, Shelley told them about the assault and the threat of revenge. I surmise that Shelley also announced they would pack up and leave the next day to escape the danger. The stranger’s revenge, after all, was not directed toward Shelley but toward his precious womenfolk.
     But things didn't go as Shelley expected.....               to be continued. Previous post: Stock Characters: the Amazon                                                                         Next post:   William Madocks     Shelley's home in Tremadog, Tan-yr-Allt, is now a boutique hotel. The town of Tremadog is a picturesque planned community. The embankment, or cob, was finally built William Madocks dream was fulfilled but he was financially ruined. The surrounding sheer cliffs are popular with rock climbers.

​     As this website notes, "Shelley antagonised local residents by criticising their production of sheep for consumption [he was a vegetarian], and by running up debts with local merchants. He departed hastily after an alleged attempt on his life by a nocturnal intruder at Tan y yr Allt without paying his rent or contributing to the fund set up to support Madocks."

      Harriet's story is told by Louise Schutz Boas in her book Harriet Shelley: Five Long Years (1962). Mark Twain also wrote sympathetically about her.

*When the assailant threatened to ravish Shelley's "sister," referring to Eliza Westbrook, we should remember it was a common practise to call in-laws by the term "brother" or "sister," not "sister-in-law." The assailant knew that Shelley had a wife and knew that Eliza would be called his sister, even though she was his sister-in-law.  [1] Quoted in Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, Shelley North Wales Gazette, October 1, 1812.
[2] Harriett Shelley to Mrs. Nugent, October 1812 and January 16, 1813.

CMP#145 Stock Character: the Amazon

Clutching My Pearls explores Jane Austen and contrasts her works with the tropes of other novels of the long eighteenth century. Click here for the first in the series. For some forgotten female authors, click "Authoresses" at the right. CMP#145:   18th Century Stock Characters: "a disgusting Amazonian" "A Masculine Doe," 1792 ​    In earlier posts, I wrote about some common 18th century stock characters in novels, such as the saucy sidekick, fops and fools, and the female pedant. Here’s another comic stereotype, played for laughs (that is, for derision), who would have been instantly recognizable to novel-readers of the past: the Amazon. Both Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney created comic Amazon characters but I can’t think of any female character in Austen who is an Amazon.
     Amazons were women with masculine traits. They walked, gestured, and spoke emphatically. They dressed in riding habits. They were obsessed with horses and loved dogs. They are usually anti-intellectual. They prefer male company to female, but in several cases, they the matrimonial dupes of fortune-hunters.
     Amazons looked down their noses at feminine women. Often they are paired with a languid, lazy, woman, both of them serving as a contrast to the heroine. Very often, just as we see in Austen, the heroine is one of the few sane and morally upright people in a novel and she is surrounded by a gallery of fools and freaks.
   Susan Elworth, the heroine of Anne Raikes Harding’s Corrections (1818), is “disgusted” with the entire Williamson family and finds the two daughters of the family “just bearable”: “The youngest, a fair insipid looking tall girl, had a passion for being thought a languid beauty. She closed her eyes, lounged on a sofa, lisped out her words in the softest tone imaginable, smiled with the silliest air in the world, which she mistook for interesting sweetness, [and] was always fatigué.
     “The eldest daughter…. was very different. She would be a dasher! So she talked loud and fast, rode on the dickey with the coachman, hunted with all the gentlemen in the county, laughed loud, [and] talked in knowing terms…”      The best-selling novel A Winter in London (1806) contrasts the beauty of the Duchess of Belgrave with the Duchess of Drinkwater who “was truly masculine in form and feature, coarse in her complexion, and unmeaning in her countenance."
      “The Duchess of Belgrave spoke with the persuasive eloquence of a seraph smile, in a voice sweet as the notes of the nightingale: the Duchess of Drinkwater bellowed her commands with lungs of a boatswain;--the one rode, walked, danced, entered a room, joined company, or retired, always with the elegantly easy dignity of a woman of quality; the other rode like a market-woman, walked like a grenadier, and danced like the witches in Macbeth; she would burst into a parlour with the rudeness of an exciseman into a wine-cellar, break up a conversation by an obtrusive loud horse-laugh; and march away from a party in the middle of a question specially addressed to herself.”
​    Another Amazon in this novel, Lady Jane Johnstone, is the widow of an Irish baronet, devoted to “the turf” and “the field.” Like other Amazons, she is contemptuous of weaker women: “half the insipid things you see mounted on horses ride for parade instead of exercise… Zounds, what’s the use of an animal with blood in it, like this mare of mine, to such poor puppets as those!”
   She challenges some male friends to a race: “What say you to a wager, gentlemen... you perceive there’s nothing showy about this mare; but I’ll gallop her against Lord Barton’s galloway, or the Marquis’s roan gelding, for any sum you’ll name, from a hundred to a thousand!” The Nancy Drew series continued the tradition of contrasting the heroine with an ultra-feminine girl (Bess Marvin) and a tomboy (George Fayne). The Chevalier D'Eon, a famous cross-dresser (1728 – 1810)        Sir Felix protests: “No, hang it, the Suppression of Vice people would then have good cause indeed for endeavoring to shut up the Park entirely, if we were to convert it into a Sunday race course.” Lady Jane goes on to boast of spilling off her horse Meteor while riding to hounds: “and heels over head I went full swing… in the act of performing the somerset [somersault], I contrived to keep hold of the bridle, and in less than a minute and a half, recovered myself, and vaulted myself into the saddle.”
​     Some gentlemen in Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778) declare they want nothing to do either with Amazons or tiresomely intellectual female pedants: “But I am a sad weak creature—don’t you think I am, my Lord?” exclaims Lady Louisa kittenishly as she turns down an offer to go for a walk.
   “O, by no means, [answered Lord Merton], “your Ladyship is merely delicate; --and, devil take me, if ever I had the least passion for an Amazon.”
​   “I have the honour to be quite of your Lordship’s opinion, (said Mr. Lovel, looking maliciously at Mrs. Selwyn); for I have an insuperable aversion to strength, either of body or mind, in a female.”
   “Faith, and so have I, (said Mr. Coverley); for, egad, I’d as soon see a woman chop wood, as to hear her chop logic.”  
​    ​   Amazons and female pedants are contrasted in several novels, including 1831’s Mrs. Armytage. The lovely Rosamund lives with three spinster aunts. One is a female pedant, one is a hypochondriac, and the third is an Amazon. While the pedant aunt scolds Rosamund for neglecting her education and the hypochondriac warns her to never expose herself to the sun or the rain, Mistress Di berates Rosamund for being a coward. “Trotting along the high road to Thoroton on her favourite bay, sixteen hands high, with her straight grey hair escaping from a napless [ie old and threadbare] beaver [hat], she might have been mistaken for Talleyrand in a riding habit." The author, Catherine Gore, also compares Mistress Di, “habited in her usual Amazonian fashion,” to the Chevalier D’Eon.  In Greek stories, Amazons were a legendary race of female warriors     An Amazon can be a young woman or an older widow: Maria Edgeworth features “a dashing, rich, extravagant, fashionable widow” in her cautionary tale Mademoiselle Panache (1813).
    Lady Diana, true to form, has “bold horsemanlike manners… Her look was almost an oath—her language was suitable to her looks—she swore, and dressed to the height of the fashion—she could drive four horses in hand—was a desperate huntress-and so loud in the praises of her dogs and horses, that she intimidated even sportsmen and jockeys.” She can mount her horse without the assistance of a man.
   Lady Di “rode over from Cheltenham” to visit the fashionable young Lady Augusta, lends her favourite horse Spanker for Lady Augusta to ride, and scolds her “for God’s sake not to be such a coward!” But Spanker is skittish and almost throws Lady Augusta off his back. Lady Di beats the horse into submission: “in vain the spectators entreated the angry amazon to spare the whip.” Of the spectators, only Lord George is impressed and gives her “a hearty shake of the hand.” Lady Augusta is too shaken to resume her seat on the now-subdued horse.
​   “How can you talk so like a child;--so like a woman!” cried [Lady Di]. Her “masculine intrepidity and disgusting coarseness” displeases the hero of the tale, Mr. Mountague, who initially finds himself drawn to the delicate and shrinking Lady Augusta, although she is, in fact, putting on a bit of a show for him. A 1786 book about Fanny Davies, “the celebrated Amazon,” may or may not be a true story, but it involves a woman of the town who had many lovers and engaged in various swindles. She also wore men’s clothing and hunted, presumably without the side-saddle.     In Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde, or the Recluse of the Lake (1790), the heroine’s languid sister-in-law is contrasted with her horse-loving cousin MIss Newenden, who has her own estate and income: “Yet neither the person or manners of Miss Newenden were calculated to attract esteem or admiration; her person, without being tall, was hard and masculine; her features, though not large, were sharp and harsh; and from being constantly exposed to the air, her complexion had contracted an unpleasant redness, particularly about her nose and forehead, that gave it a certain coarseness…”
   In a subplot of the novel, Miss Newenden is courted and won by a ne’er do well who burns through her money and abuses her. Abandoned by her husband, she is rescued by her brother, who secures an income to her. 
    Rosalie, the heroine of The Mystic Cottager of Chamoney (1795) is “astonished” to learn that her neighbour Georgina Villars actually “can whistle vastly well,” and “she leaps a five-barred gate better than any woman in England."
​    “To the men [Miss Villars] was a general object of derision—to the women, a disgusting Amazonian."    Miss Villars, like Miss Newenden, makes an unwise matrimonial choice: “the gentlemen amused themselves in commenting on the current report of Miss Villar’s elopement to Scotland, with the little fribble Col. Ardvine, whose profligacy and gaming it was surmised would soon reduce him to the lowest ebb of misery and destruction, as his notorious character was too well known…” A real-life "petticoat duel" in 1792 in Hyde Park     The best-known Amazonian character is Mrs. Freke in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801). Mrs. Freke is the boisterous and eccentric frenemy of the amoral Lady Delacourt. Mrs. Freke likes dressing as a man, fighting duels and playing pranks. She gets her comeuppance when her leg is mauled by a bear trap. Unsurprisingly, modern  academics see her as a subversive character who undermines heteronormative gender roles. As such, she must be regarded today as something of a heroine.
    However, it seems clear that most portrayals of Amazons in the 18th century are intended to hold this type of woman up to ridicule.     I recently discussed another stock character from the novels of Austen's time: the vulgar Bristolian, of whom Mrs. Elton is a brilliant example. Previous post:  Advice from Mrs. Elton  

CMP#144 Advice from Mrs. Elton

Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. 
​ Click here  for the first in the series. CMP#144: Mrs. Elton's Advice, or, Chat GPT writes my blog post for me     Some of you might know more about Chat GPT than I do, and some might know less. I hadn't paid much attention to the whole AI and Chat GPT thing, but recently, I had the idea of writing an advice column on how to be a good conversationalist, as though written by Mrs. Elton from Emma.
​    I thought about the various points I could put in there, such as "the more you talk about yourself, the sooner people will get to know you, and the better they will like you,"  And, "If you have relatives who live in a very grand way, be sure to work them into the conversation as often as you can."
    Then I thought, I wonder if can Chat GPT do this? So I asked it to "write an advice column as if you were Mrs. Elton in Jane Austen's novel Emma, on the topic of being a good conversationalist." Almost immediately, the writing started scrolling across the screen. Here is the result... ​Dear Readers,
    It is with utmost pleasure and delight that I, Mrs. Augusta Elton, take up my pen to offer you my esteemed advice on the art of conversation. As an individual of superior breeding and impeccable social standing, I consider myself an authority on the subject. Allow me to enlighten you on the essential qualities required to become a truly accomplished conversationalist.
   First and foremost, it is imperative to have a deep understanding of one's own importance. Always remember, dear readers, that you are the central figure in any conversation. Your opinions, experiences, and anecdotes are of utmost significance. Ensure that your interlocutors are aware of this fact by confidently sharing your thoughts and stories, sparing no details of your personal triumphs and accomplishments. After all, who can resist the charm of a well-told tale?
    Secondly, it is essential to be well-informed on a wide array of subjects. A true conversationalist must possess a breadth of knowledge that exceeds that of the common masses. Familiarize yourself with the latest fashion trends, political affairs, and cultural events. This will enable you to engage in stimulating discussions, gracefully steering the conversation towards topics in which you excel.    Furthermore, one must possess the art of subtlety when guiding a conversation. Skillfully direct the discourse to subjects that best showcase your wit and intelligence, while avoiding areas in which you might be lacking. Remember, dear readers, it is far better to shine in a few select areas than to risk exposing oneself as an ignoramus.
    Maintaining a superior attitude is also crucial when engaging in conversation. Display your refined taste and impeccable manners at all times. Do not hesitate to offer advice or correction to those less enlightened than yourself.  Polite condescension, delivered with an air of magnanimity, is sure to captivate your audience and establish your superior position as a conversationalist par excellence.
     Lastly, a true master of conversation knows the importance of verbal eloquence. Cultivate a sophisticated vocabulary and employ it liberally, thus impressing upon others your superior intellect and linguistic prowess. Be mindful of your tone, ensuring that it conveys a sense of authority and elegance. Remember, dear readers, eloquence is the hallmark of a refined individual.
   In conclusion, dear readers, to become a truly accomplished conversationalist, one must possess unwavering self-assurance, a broad knowledge base, the art of subtlety, a superior attitude, and impeccable verbal eloquence. By embodying these qualities, you are sure to become the life of any social gathering, captivating all with your engaging discourse.
   Yours sincerely,
   Mrs. Augusta Elton​     I'm gobsmacked at this technology. I'm amazed that Chat GPT "gets" Mrs. Elton. I presume it did this by instantaneously reviewing the novel along with decades of academic commentary on Mrs. Elton. In a matter of seconds, it synthesized all this information. I didn't instruct Chat GPT to write the piece in an ironic style, but it did. It accurately reflects that Mrs. Elton completely lacks self-awareness of how she comes across as condescending and ignorant. Just wow. Interesting but scary, too.  Perhaps I could quibble and say she would sign herself "Mrs. Philip Elton," because that is the more traditional way of referring to a married lady with "Mrs." But perhaps Chat GPT knows that replicating some conventions of the past just confuses modern audiences, like calling your "sister-in-law" your "sister," as people did in Austen's day. What would a modern-day Mrs. Elton do?
​   Mrs. Eltons walk amongst us today. Although it seems that with the younger generation, the surest way to gain distinction amongst your companions is to trade in victimhood, not just brag about your brother-in-law's barouche-landau. Augusta Hawkins circa 2023 would be telling us about the privations, injustices and hardships she has endured growing up in Bristol. Orphaned, presumably, at an early age, and sent to live with an uncle, her entire life could be recast as a tragedy.
     Both the original Mrs. Elton and her modern counterpart do not see social interaction as a give-and-take of ideas and pleasantries, but as an opportunity to talk about themselves. While Austen's Mrs. Elton does the usual humble-bragging and dispenses advice, the modern Mrs. Elton does not see a distinction between a social conversation and a therapeutic one. Without invitation or preamble, she will disclose intimate details of her life and her emotional state in a way that Austen would find shockingly disconcerting and vulgar. She is not especially interested in hearing some kind of reciprocal unburdening of your own hardships and traumas. You are there as her audience, remember.    Mrs. Elton is often discussed nowadays in terms of her connections to Bristol, or more specifically, in terms of her possible connection to the slave trade. I explore this in some detail in a series on portrayals of Bristol merchants and their families. The first post of that series is here.  Mrs. Elton is not held up to scorn in Emma because her dowry derived in whole or in part from the slave trade, but because she was a pretentious social climber. 
   As for Chat GPT, I know that I'll continue writing because it gives me pleasure, but I'll continue to experiment with the capabilities of this new technology, too.

 Previous post: Is Willoughby a "knave or a fool"? Congratulations to Mark Brownlow on the release of "The Hunsford Curse," his third Charlotte (Lucas) Collins mystery! Mark stands out among writers of JAFF for his Austenesque wit. Available at Amazon.

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CMP#143 A Knave or a Fool

This blog explores social attitudes in Jane Austen's time, discusses her novels, reviews forgotten 18th century novels, and throws  some occasional shade  at the modern academy. ​The introductory post is here.  My "six simple questions for academics" post is here. Shocker! “Do you think me most a knave or a fool?” 
    In the previous post I discussed the possibility, floated by Austen expert Robert Morrison, that Marianne Dashwood was hiding a secret pregnancy in Sense and Sensibility. After a careful re-read of the novel, I've concluded that making Marianne pregnant contradicts the central preoccupation of the main characters as reiterated throughout the conclusion of the novel. To explain what I mean, let's start by recapping the set-up for the dramatic scene when Willoughby arrives at Cleveland, the country estate of Mrs. Jenning's daughter, late at night.
    Marianne Dashwood fell seriously ill at Cleveland on her return trip from London. Her hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, leave the house so their baby does not catch Marianne's infection. Their other house guest, Colonel Brandon, hurries off in his carriage to fetch Marianne's mother. That leaves Elinor, Mrs. Jennings, and the servants.
​     Marianne is feverish and delirious, but fortunately she pulls through and falls into a restful sleep. Once she is pronounced out of danger by the apothecary, Mrs. Jennings goes to her own room "to write letters and sleep." Elinor is too happy to sleep, so she is sitting by Marianne's bedside when she hears a carriage arrive. She summons Betsy, Mrs. Jenning's maid, to stay with Marianne and she goes downstairs. To her shock, it's Willoughby, the cad who jilted her sister. He explains he came to Cleveland to persuade Marianne and Elinor to hate him "one degree less" than they surely must "do now."  He exclaims: "Tell me honestly... do you think me most a knave or a fool?”
   Who cares if Willoughby had the opportunity to rehabilitate his character? Who cares if we “hate [him] one degree less than [we] do now”? I know I wouldn't have given him the patient hearing that Elinor did, so I didn't miss the absence of this scene in the 1995 movie. However, as I carefully re-listened to the book, I finally get what Willoughby was driving at... Gratitude Capable of anything
   If Marianne was indeed dying at Cleveland of putrid fever, as Sir John Middleton had informed him, Willoughby was concerned that Marianne would pass away hating him with her last breath. Elinor reassures Willoughby that Marianne is hopefully "out of danger" (but note she does not add, "She just had your child," or "she just miscarried your child."​)  
   Willoughby exclaims, "​What I felt on hearing that your sister was dying, and dying too, believing me the greatest villain upon earth, scorning, hating me in her latest moments—for how could I tell what horrid projects might not have been imputed? One person I was sure would represent me as capable of anything." 
    In other words he has been imagining that Marianne thinks he's a heartless cad who never loved her, who only had the "horrid project" of seducing her. He's been thinking, what have all of you assumed about me? What has Colonel Brandon been telling you? 
   Yes, he admits, he wasn't serious when he first met Marianne, and was only amusing himself by flirting with her, but soon he did fall in love. He was on the point of proposing when his aunt Mrs. Smith learned that he seduced and abandoned Eliza Williams. Cast adrift without his inheritance, he chose money over love. After rushing down the aisle with an heiress, once again financially secure, he is free to regret the love he lost. He might have been a "knave" where Eliza was concerned, but she was of a lower social class anyway, and she didn't deserve his respect because she was willing to be seduced. But now, where Marianne was concerned, Willoughby now thinks himself a "fool" to place love over money. 
     Is this distinction important? It appears to matter a great deal to Austen, otherwise she wouldn’t have given us that whole Willoughby-at-Cleveland scene. The first thing that Elinor pondered when Willoughby publicly jilted Marianne in London was the question of his true intentions. She noticed his air of "embarrassment which seemed to speak a consciousness of his own misconduct, and prevented her from believing him so unprincipled as to have been sporting with the affections of her sister from the first, without any design that would bear investigation."  Just as with Willoughby's term "horrid project," Elinor's reference to a "design" is a delicately stated way of referring to seduction, sex outside of marriage. "[O]nly fickle, very, very fickle.”​  ​
   The distinction between unprincipled cad and fickle suitor is also very important to Marianne, and it is the "one point" she dwells upon. Just what were his intentions toward her? She tells Elinor: ​ "At present, if I could be satisfied on one point, if I could be allowed to think that he was not always acting a part, not always deceiving me; but above all, if I could be assured that he never was so very wicked as my fears have sometimes fancied him, since the story of that unfortunate girl—”
    She stopt. Elinor joyfully treasured her words as she answered,“If you could be assured of that, you think you should be easy.”
    “Yes. My peace of mind is doubly involved in it; for not only is it horrible to suspect a person, who has been what he has been to me, of such designs, but what must it make me appear to myself? What in a situation like mine, but a most shamefully unguarded affection could expose me to—”
   “How then,” asked her sister, “would you account for his behaviour?”
   “I would suppose him,—Oh, how gladly would I suppose him, only fickle, very, very fickle.”​    I think the passage quoted above makes it clear that Marianne was not actually seduced by Willoughby, and is horrified that she could have been another Eliza Williams. Although he is already the acknowledged seducer of Eliza, it would be "horrible"--in the sense of being unjust--to suspect him of wanting to seduce her. Why would she say this to Elinor if her sister was already perfectly aware, after having nursed her at Cleveland, that she did have sex with Willoughby, that she is in fact another Eliza Williams?
   Marianne describes herself as someone who came close to danger, but did not fall. She is horrified to realize how easily, how eagerly, she placed herself in a vulnerable position. “[W]hat must it make me appear to myself? What in a situation like mine, but a most shamefully unguarded affection could expose me to—”  She breaks off here, because it would be indelicate to be more specific.
    Elinor then judges the time is right to tell her about Willoughby's visit to Cleveland. She assures her that Willoughby loved her and did not regard her as another disposable Eliza Williams. This brings Marianne some comfort. She asks Elinor to tell their mother as well.
​    Mrs. Dashwood, likewise, does not regard Willoughby as the seducer, or even the attempted seducer, of her daughter. She condemns him for the seduction of Eliza. She concludes: "Nothing could restore him with a faith unbroken—a character unblemished, to Marianne. Nothing could do away the knowledge of what the latter had suffered through his means, nor remove the guilt of his conduct towards Eliza." Remorse   That offense against virtue... that crime
    As soon as she can bring herself to speak of it, Marianne assures her mother and Elinor “I never could have been happy with him, after knowing, as sooner or later I must have known, all this." Again, it's too painful and indelicate to spell out what "all this" even means, but she does say she's lost all respect for Willoughby. "I should have had no confidence, no esteem. Nothing could have done it away to my feelings.” Is she speaking of mere jealousy, of learning that Willoughby had a lover before her? I don’t think so, because Mrs. Dashwood understands she is speaking of Willoughby’s conduct: “I know it—I know it,” cried her mother. “Happy with a man of libertine practices!—”
​   Elinor moves on to talk about Willoughby’s selfishness and extravagance, then she returns to the subject of his immorality: “all Willoughby’s difficulties have arisen from the first offence against virtue, in his behaviour to Eliza Williams. That crime has been the origin of every lesser one, and of all his present discontents.” If Elinor had known of Marianne's secret pregnancy, she's putting on quite a performance for her mother here, She would be referring to the seduction of her own sister as a "lesser" crime.
 ​  We're told “Marianne assented most feelingly to the remark.” So here she is either agreeing that Willoughby’s seduction of Eliza was unpardonable, or she is lying and hiding her own guilty secret.
    All of the dialogue and passages I've quoted reiterate, again and again, that Willoughby's intentions were honorable until he threw Marianne over for money. None of these statements make any sense if Marianne indeed became Willoughby's lover. Gallant but stern attitudes Colonel Brandon's attitude
    Brandon is very sorry for Eliza but he regards her as partly responsible for her predicament because of her "misconduct." Recollect how strongly Colonel Brandon felt about the fall of Eliza's mother, his own Eliza, his lost love. He was so horrified by her behavior that her death was a release in his eyes.  Death is to be preferred to dishonor, folks.
​      Had Marianne surrendered her virtue, she, just like Eliza Jr., would also have been in a “wretched and hopeless” predicament “with a mind tormented by self-reproach, which must attend her through life.” At least in Brandon's eyes.
    Are Colonel Brandon's rigid moral views about female chastity a reflection of Austen's own views? Or, does she at least respect them, even if she herself would be more forgiving toward fallen women?
    Would a man like Colonel Brandon marry a fallen woman, knowing her to be fallen? If he knew that Marianne had become Willoughby's lover and carried his child, would it make a difference to him? I believe he'd never marry such a woman. But I like to imagine a happier ending for Eliza Jr.. Brandon hides her away, to await the birth of her child, after which she is supposed to spend a lifetime being tortured with remorse. I'd rather assign her a happier fate. Perhaps some widower with children might take her on, especially if Brandon ponies up a good dowry. Perhaps she will meet another Robert Martin, (the intelligent yeoman farmer from Emma).
​      Some modern critics not only find Colonel Brandon to be too old-fashioned and unyielding to be a romantic hero, they turn the novel upside-down and regard him as a villain. He took over the family estate after his brother's death, well aware that Eliza William's money had been absorbed into it. Even though that money had been squandered by the time he inherited the estate, he is complicit in the injustice. They even accuse him of being the father of Eliza Jr. It was he who seduced Eliza Sr, it was his fault that her marriage ended in divorce and she ended up dying of consumption in prison. Not only that, of course, but he's an imperialist who subjugated the natives in India. All this makes Marianne's marriage to him a bitter tragedy, not a happy ending. When we read of Marianne: "at nineteen, submitting to new attachments, entering on new duties, placed in a new home, a wife, the mistress of a family, and the patroness of a village," we are supposed to shudder. When Austen then assures us that "Colonel Brandon was now as happy, as all those who best loved him, believed he deserved to be," we are supposed to understand this is meant ironically. When we are told Marianne's "whole heart became, in time, as much devoted to her husband, as it had once been to Willoughby," we are supposed to flatly disbelieve it. Thus modern critics turn the meaning of the book upside-down to feel comfortable again. This is the only way they can reconcile the iconic Austen novels and characters with their own convictions. 
      My earlier defense of Colonel Brandon  is here.  Conclusion
    So Austen emphasizes, repeatedly, that Willoughby's intentions toward Marianne were honorable; he wasn't trying to seduce and abandon her. It's just that he was too weak to--as Mrs. Jennings advised--economize until he could marry Marianne: "Why don’t he, in such a case, sell his horses, let his house, turn off his servants, and make a thorough reform at once? I warrant you, Miss Marianne would have been ready to wait till matters came round." 
   I suspect this distinction doesn't have the moral or emotional weight today, that it would have had in Austen's time. Yes, young women get upset today when they are wooed and then "ghosted" by a man, as with the case of "West Elm Caleb," who is apparently a young man-about-town who likes to toy with women's affections. But even so, there is no societal expectation in the modern Western world that a man who beds a girl must make an "honest woman" of her by marrying her, as we used to say. As Ben Sexsmith said of "West Elm Caleb": "these are not the 1800s, for better or worse. Welcome to dating in the twenty-first century, ladies. Caleb sounds like a cad but if you want casual dating, don’t be too surprised when people treat you casually as well." 
     In Austen's time, a respectable girl having sex outside of marriage paid a horrible penalty for it, and that penalty might include being dragged to the altar and forced to marry a man she didn't want to marry. People in Austen's time and of her class took the issue of female chastity so seriously that it was the centerpiece of many novels. It's why the best and most desirable possible outcome for Lydia Bennet was for her to marry a wastrel like Wickham. That's why it makes no sense to include a secret pregnancy as a hidden sub-plot with no consequences in Sense and Sensibility.
     It’s a different world now. For the first time since official national record began to be kept, more children were born  out of wedlock than in last year in England (2022).
    
    For more discussions of unfounded theories, see here and here. 

    Eliza Jr. has been made the main character in Austen fan fiction, notably by Joan Aiken. A review of "Eliza's Daughter" is here.

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