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Jane Austen and the Peerage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2021

D. J. Greene
D. J. Greene*
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York 27, N. Y.
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Extract

In a note appended to his novel The Fountain (New York, 1932), Charles Morgan explains why he names certain of his characters as he does. “A novelist,” he says, “may suggest ancient nobility in England by an invented name, but the great aristocracy of Holland is so narrowly restricted arid so well known that any fictitious title would give a false, and probably ridiculous, impression. I have therefore been bound to choose, in van Leyden, the name of a noble family extinct before my own sojourn in Holland. It has the right ring” (p. 450). Certainly few novelists treating of “ancient nobility in England” have allowed themselves to be hampered by any such scruples as Morgan's; and a complete peerage (and baronetage) of British fiction, running from magnates as illustrious as the Pallisers, Dukes of Omnium, and the Tanville-Tankertons, Dukes of Dorset, down to such small fry as Sir Pitt Crawley and Sir Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington, Barts., would be an imposing monument to the exuberance of the story-writer's fertility in the invention of “aristocratic” names and titles. It has not perhaps been sufficiently remarked that Jane Austen's practice in this matter stands in rather striking contrast to that of most of her fellow novelists; that when she creates families with any pretensions to gentle birth, she almost always endows them with names belonging to actual British families, sometimes with an extinct title of nobility, sometimes with a living one.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 68 , Issue 5 , December 1953 , pp. 1017 - 1031
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953

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References

page 1018 note 1 The data in this article come mainly from Arthur Collins, The P of England, “third edition” (London, 1756), and W. and R. A. Austen-Leigh, Jone Austen, Her Life and Lelters (London, 1913), hereafter cited in my text as LL.

page 1018 note 2 The title of the novel was, of course, supplied by a later editor.

page 1019 note 3 Cf., e.g., Lawrence Hanson, The Four Brons, (London, 1949), pp. 16 ff.

page 1019 note 4 She was the second wife (dying 1735) of the first Duke. These who are interested in the Christian names of Jane Austen's won characters might notice that his third Duchess' names were Lydis Catherine.

page 1019 note 5 Letters, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1932), I, 207.

page 1020 note 6 DNB, a.v. “Brydges,” and Egerton Brydges, Autebigoraphy (London, 1834), passim.

page 1020 note 7 The family in Persuasion are, of course, Musgroves, but there are Musgraves in The Watsons.

page 1021 note 8 Jane Austen, Volume the Third, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1951), p. 37.

page 1022 note 9 Vol. ii (1756), Dedication. The material quoted in this paragraph is shaent from the 1779 edition; I have not seen that of 1768.

page 1022 note 10 Vel. v (1756), Addebdam Mm3,1v.

page 1022 note 11 Vel. iv (1756), Dedication.

page 1022 note 12 Vol. iii (1756), Dedication.

page 1024 note 13 In what seems to be Jane Austen's one serious attempt at verse, an elegy on Mrs. Lefroy written 4 years after her death (LL, 1, 32).

page 1025 note 14 The notion that Jane Austen was pretenaturally innocent of the world of affairs still persists and still has to be combatted. It is true that the characters of her novels do not continually talk about the Napoleonic War, any more than the ordinary person removed from the scene of battle continually talked about the Second World War. But the Napoleonic War is there, nevertheless: in Pride and Prejudie, it is the war that brings the militia (and Wickham) to Meryton and makes Lydia's and Kitty's madness over soldiers permissible and calls into being the great camp at Brighton that Lydia goes to visit, with such tremendous consequences. It is also true that Jane Austen is too good a correspondent to bore the readers of her letters—of which we have only a very restricted selection—with recitals of current events. But when she does let something of the kind drop, it is evident that she is well aware of what is going on around her. For instance, in a letter of Jan. 1809 (Letters, i, 244): “We are doing nothing ourselves to write about, and I am therefore quite dependent upon the communications of our friends, or my own wits.... The ‘St. Albans’ [under the command of Francis Austen, engaged in the relief of Sir John Moore's army at Corunna] perhaps may soon be off to help bring home what may remain by this time of our poor army, whose state seems dreadfully critical. The ‘Regency’ seems to have been heard of only here; my most political correspondents make no mention of it (The Prince of Wales' regency did, in fact, come into being the next year.]” Then follows a typically Austenian bit of irony—“Unlucky that I should have wasted so much reflection on the subject.”

page 1027 note 15 G. B. Starn, Benefits Forgot (New York, 1949), pp. 242–243. Miss Stern's only account of its provenance is this: “I recently had a shock when, to tease me (and you may remember I do not take kindly to being teased), I was shown a copy of e letter that had not been destroyed, but is still treasured in a private collection. It was written by Fanny, Jane Austen's niece, confidentially to her sister when, I gather, both were middle-aged married ladiea.” In the lilt of acknowledgments prefaced to Miss Stern's book is one to Lord Brabourne. Sylvia Townsend Warner quotes part of the extract in Jone Aurten, Bibliographical Supplements to British Book News (London, 1951), p. 19.

page 1028 note 16 II, 422. In the list of the 54 “illustrious houses from whom I am by female alliances descended” given by Brydges (ii, 179), there appears that of “Albini, Earl of Arundel”— hence, no doubt, the name of the hero fo his novel Fitsalbini.

page 1030 note 17 Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (Princeton 1952), p. 1.

page 1030 note 18 Same Versions of Pastoral (Londonm 1935), p. 62.

page 1031 note 19 Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh, Personal Aspects of Jane Austen (London, 1920), pp. 28-29.