In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  JANET TODD: It turns out that Mr Elton is more interested in Emma and her £30,000 and, when the mistake is realised in a very, very funny scene, Mr Elton goes off in high dudgeon and comes back with a wife so ridiculous that she is one of the joys of the book. Mrs Elton and her snobbishness and her apparatus of happiness is, I think to me, a great pleasure.

  There is also Jane Fairfax, a beautiful orphan of great accomplishments whom Emma is jealous of, and Mr Knightley feels she is the friend Emma should have had. Emma tries, but Jane is very reserved for some undisclosed reason and, as a result, Emma, who has a great deal of imagination and spirit, invents a backstory for her that is malicious, and is helped in this by the other visitor to the village, Frank Churchill, a rich young man whom Emma had always thought was dedicated to herself. The plot develops and resolves and it ends with marriages, and they all marry the right people.

  There is a whiff of Waterloo in the background, Janet Todd suggested, an ironic or maybe absolutely sincere patriotism in the story that is very clear about England, versus France and ‘their silly language and their ways’.

  JANET TODD: It’s also about what kind of England is coming into being. It’s an England where things are changing, where people are coming back from the war. The war is over, there’s not going to be another war for a long time. How is it going to work? And the village is close to London; it feels London pushing against it.

  Emma is the only one of Austen’s book titles that features the heroine and, in doing that, Emma Clery said, Austen was highlighting her own daring in creating a heroine who is so unusual. Heroines were usually underdogs who were bereaved or had fallen into poverty or had pursuing villains or seducers, whereas the opening paragraph of Emma sweeps all that aside. Austen does, though, highlight a danger to her heroine in the first chapter.

  EMMA CLERY: She’s facing the ‘danger of intellectual solitude’, [that’s] the phrase that’s used there. And Austen takes that really seriously. That is the driving force of the entire novel, this danger of intellectual solitude, which is really based on the very limited horizons that even a very privileged woman had at that time.

  Melvyn emphasised that Emma is also conceited, snobbish, manipulating, classist, spoiled and cruel, which prompted Emma Clery to assert that she was also intelligent, resourceful, imaginative, funny, witty, compassionate and pragmatic, good features that are simply wasted in her narrow circumstances. To John Mullan, all these qualities were there, but her faults were beside the point.

  JOHN MULLAN: The point about the novel is it’s almost entirely narrated through Emma’s consciousness in incredibly sophisticated and funny ways. We do judge her and we’re expected to judge her, but we also inhabit her, we see the world through her eyes.

  A lot of the plot points pass us by on first reading as we are seeing the world as Emma sees it. Jane Austen invented this technique, John Mullan added, later called ‘free indirect speech’. Meanwhile, Janet Todd did see cruelty in Emma, to the extent that there were times when she found her intolerable. At one point, Harriet, the simple child who is only seventeen, sees the family of the Martins, whose son courted her and she rejected him, at Emma’s prompting, and Harriet narrates this in a very simple straightforward way. Emma is almost moved for a moment and then she says, ‘What can you expect from a silly shallow girl like Harriet?’ This, Janet Todd stressed, was a girl she had taken into her house as supposedly her friend, which made her behaviour almost unforgivable.

  JANET TODD: There is something about Emma, because we’re inside her, that is terribly appealing, as is anybody we’re inside. At the same time, I still think there is a cruelty and something quite disturbing in the centre of all that.

  Making a case for Emma, Emma Clery pointed to the way in which it was made very apparent how constraining her circumstances were, and it was because of the lack of options in her life that she was forced into a fantasist role.

  EMMA CLERY: There’s a real feminist agenda that can be seen through an array of female characters. We’ve got Jane Fairfax who, by rights, really should be the heroine of the novel: she’s an orphan, she has no means, she has no dowry, she’s doomed to life as a governess, and she has this extraordinary outburst where she says the trade in governesses is like the slave trade. She doesn’t say it’s got the same cruelty but that there’s something involuntary and oppressive about it.

  Jane Austen.

  Besides, Melvyn said, readers are sympathetic towards Emma as she is ruled over by a tyrant father who is either sick, or pretends to be sick, and won’t let her out of his sight; he even wants her to eat what he wants her to eat. She has never been to London, only 15 miles away, or to the seaside. He is, as John Mullan quoted, a man with ‘habits of gentle selfishness’.

  JOHN MULLAN: He’s hilarious, but the thing about Mr Woodhouse is that he’s the opposite of his daughter. She thinks that she knows what other people are like, and that’s what makes her interesting, but most of the time she’s wrong. He is incapable of thinking that anybody’s different from him.

  Janet Todd suspected that Jane Austen had a soft ironic spot for these ‘vegetable people’ such as Emma’s father, people who can hardly get off the sofa, and she presents Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park with a sort of loving concern. Emma’s mother died when she was five and she needs to be central to somebody; Mr Woodhouse is the centre, however unfortunate that might be for her.

  In Highbury where, as Janet Todd said, ‘nothing happens, yet everything’s happening’, people are always imagining pairings. This, John Mullan added, was the humming heart of Austen’s fiction, where everybody unmarried between the ages of fifteen and forty might marry somebody. Emma is a matchmaker who is making matches in her mind, and this is nearly disastrous. Some of her errors are more obvious on a second reading of the novel, such as those over Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, which is like a detective story.

  JOHN MULLAN: Most people, the first time you read the novel, you absolutely know that Mr Elton is really after Emma and what a fool she is not to see it. And, as he himself says when he proposes and she says, ‘But what about Miss Smith?’: ‘Miss Smith!’ He says one of the most truly evil lines in literature. He says, ‘Some men might not object … everyone has his level.’ Isn’t that fantastic?

  On the first reading, we do not see what Frank Churchill is up to, he is so cunning. Emma has no idea what he is up to and, the first time we read it, nor do we. It is Mr Knightley, Janet Todd said, who is the detective in the book: ‘He’s the good man, except that he’s a bit unimaginative and he doesn’t dance when he should and he doesn’t necessarily use his carriage.’ He has been in love with Emma since she was thirteen, he also knew her as a baby – he is another familial lover in the story. He is looking for clues as he thinks there is something wrong about Frank Churchill.

  With marriages in mind, Miss Bates is in some ways a shadow of Emma. There are people who find her boring, as Emma does, but Janet Todd said she enjoyed her thoroughly, partly as, if you listen to her speech, you find out a lot more about Highbury than you would otherwise know, and she gives away a fair number of clues. She also understands when she is being got at by Emma, at the Box Hill picnic, very quickly.

  JANET TODD: In some ways, she shadows her, after all she is stuck there with an elderly mother. She is a spinster, and one of the times Harriet does catch Emma is where she says, ‘If you don’t marry, as you say you won’t because you’re first in your father’s house and you are everything to your father,’ Harriet says, ‘but you’ll be like Miss Bates.’

  Mrs Elton is another thing altogether, Janet Todd added, with ‘her apparatus of happiness and her music and her accomplishments’, and she is also a shadow of Emma.

  JANET TODD: She’s much stupider and she has no ability, in the way that Emma has, to change and to grow and to learn from her mistakes. At the same time, that snobbishness, that manner of patronising people, of taking them up, of feeling oneself superior, of not understanding that you have to
create a community all the time, that is something that is a bit close to the worse side of Emma.

  Returning to Mr Knightley and his love for Emma, John Mullan picked up on the effect that the mention of Frank Churchill’s name had on him, which was to generate jealousy. Reading the novel from Mr Knightley’s perspective, we can notice how he subtly changes the way he speaks to Emma and how he replies. She does not see it, or is puzzled by it, asking why he is so cross about this man he has not even met.

  JOHN MULLAN: And Mr Knightley’s love (Jane Austen knows exactly what she’s doing), his love for Emma, comes right at the end as a surprise to Emma, but it shouldn’t be a surprise to the reader, because his love story is there, too.

  Janet Todd noted the cleverness of the novel, where readers can see Emma has been noticing Mr Knightley over and over again, where he stood in a particular time, that he came in his carriage; in mass social scenes, she knows where Mr Knightley is at every moment. He is the best man in the book and Emma says, ‘I deserve the best because I never put up with anything else.’ They find fault in each other, too, and are not afraid to say it, Emma Clery added, making their relationship relatively egalitarian.

  EMMA CLERY: There’s a lovely bit where she teases him about his notion that he’s going to look after his young nephews, who she actually has a responsibility for, because he has more time. Of course, he doesn’t have more time, Emma’s the one with all the time on her hands. And she does it in such a kind of loving but also teasing way, it’s like nothing else, I think, in the fiction up to this point.

  For Janet Todd, Emma is Jane Austen’s masterpiece and it is the last book that she absolutely finished. It is the cleverest, the most subtle, the one in which she thinks about her own artistry, as well as putting artistry into the book. Emma Clery put it first among Austen’s works for artistry, preferring Persuasion for feeling and plot. For John Mullan, it was Austen’s greatest novel, even if lots of her fans find Persuasion the most moving and visceral.

  JOHN MULLAN: With Emma, it’s like reading Twelfth Night, you feel the person who wrote this can do anything they want, they are totally in control. And I think, because of that, it’s also one of the very greatest of all novels in English.

  JANET TODD: We all think it’s brilliant.

  In the studio afterwards, Janet Todd said she thought that perhaps the humour had not been stressed enough. When she was younger, she said, she wanted the passion that is in Persuasion but, now that she is older, Emma shows how to carry on and laugh. John Mullan, in support of the humour, mentioned the comedy of Emma’s attempt to distract Harriet from the knowledge that Mr Elton never loved her by talking about the poor in Highbury … only for Harriet to sigh and say, ‘Mr Elton was so kind to the poor,’ when he was not kind to the poor in the least but a horrible person. Melvyn found his own concern for Harriet, abused by Emma, outweighed the humour in passages such as that. Emma Clery suggested that other authors were remarkably negative about Austen’s work in the nineteenth century, which Janet Todd put down to literary jealousy.

  THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY

  Samuel Johnson, the compiler of his mighty English dictionary, suffered terribly from depression. ‘I inherited a vile melancholy from my father,’ he said, ‘which made me mad all my life.’ Reading offered Dr Johnson some respite and one book in particular helped lift his gloom. Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy was, said Dr Johnson, the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise. It was first published in 1621. The Anatomy of Melancholy is a huge and entertaining work devoted to the causes and treatment of melancholy, a malady that preoccupied many writers of that period. Part medical treatise, part literary anthology, it draws on sources ranging from classical authors to the latest medical authorities, reflecting Burton’s astonishingly broad reading. The book captivated contemporary readers and it has influenced later writers including Milton, Keats and Beckett. It is still in print.

  Robert Burton.

  With Melvyn to discuss The Anatomy of Melancholy were: Julie Sanders, deputy vice-chancellor and professor of English at the University of Newcastle; Mary Ann Lund, associate professor in English at the University of Leicester; and Erin Sullivan, senior lecturer and fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.

  Opening up the discussion, Melvyn suggested that The Anatomy of Melancholy is one of the most unusual books in the English language, which is quite a statement.

  JULIE SANDERS: The Anatomy of Melancholy has been variously described as an encyclopaedia, as a commonplace book, as a mine of quotations, as a medical manual, as a self-help book and, indeed, as one of the messiest books ever written.

  The book is an anatomy, an opening-up, a dissecting of what Robert Burton regarded as an epidemic of melancholy in his own time and, Julie Sanders said, he came at this subject by invoking medical, religious, philosophical, ethical, literary and poetic authorities to try to perform that anatomising. The work is full of long citations and interpretations of writing from the ancients, medieval writers and Italian Renaissance humanists.

  Burton was born in 1577 to a Leicestershire gentry family and spent his adult life as an Oxford don, a scholar of divinity, attached to the colleges of Brasenose and then Christ Church. He was also working in the library, feeding his voracious appetite for books and he wrote a play, Philosophaster, which prefigured some of his satirical attacks on society that he was to include in The Anatomy of Melancholy. He was also attached to a rural parish from 1616, but was otherwise, as he put it, a scholar penned up in his study.

  JULIE SANDERS: There are some lost years in the 1590s. Between 1593 and 1599, he seems to temporarily suspend his studies and it’s possible that he’s the Robert Burton who turns up in London in the notebooks of the physician Simon Forman. This man arrives suffering from a mix of psychological and physical ailments and he’s diagnosed with melancholy by Forman. Certainly the age of the patient fits.

  In The Anatomy, Burton presents himself as someone who has experienced melancholy. The medical system that gave rise to this term was thousands of years old, starting in the writings of Hippocrates and developed by others such as Galen, a Roman philosopher and surgeon. The idea, Erin Sullivan explained, was that the body was made up of four liquids or humours – blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.

  ERIN SULLIVAN: ‘Melancholia’ is literally ‘black bile’. The idea of the system [was] that these different humours in your body are what facilitate the functioning of the organs so, when you put food into your body, the humours help process it, help take the nutrients from the food and take them to the parts of the body that need it. Ideally, these four humours are all in balance.

  The idea was that all people had some kind of imbalance, which, if too great, would lead to disease. There were supposed to be preventative steps such as regulating diet, sleep and exercise, or improving the quality of air available, or socialising, or listening to the right kind of music. For more serious cases, there was bloodletting.

  ERIN SULLIVAN: One of the things that’s interesting and perplexing about the humoural system is how long-lasting it is, for 2,000 years almost. There’s a really strong investment in the authority of the past but also a sense that, through experience, we find that some of these things are true. Hot and cold make a difference, you can change where you are; if you’re feeling very cold, then you eat hot foods to try to clear out the phlegm.

  There was a kind of logic to the system perhaps, but it was one that was already being challenged by Burton’s time.

  Within this system, Burton described melancholy as a compound mixed malady. Mary Ann Lund explained that this meant it was a disease that was physically rooted, as well as a mental and spiritual disorder. Burton saw it as an anguish of mind, associated with fear and sorrow without a cause, where melancholy was an excess of black bile, of melancholia.

  MARY ANN LUND: You may be just a thoughtful person prone to solitude, and not ill, but, when melancholy in your
system becomes too much, becomes excessive, then you become diseased through it and you may be unable to seek the company of other people, unable to do anything, rather crippled by this disease.

  That state was known as natural melancholy. There was also unnatural melancholy, where the other humours became corrupted or burnt. People could also be sanguine melancholics, when their blood became corrupted, which was a different kind of disorder.

  MELVYN BRAGG: What happens then?

  MARY ANN LUND: You’re cheerful, but you laugh at more or less everything … perhaps a little hysterically at things. If you’re a choleric melancholic you pick fights all the time, you get very angry with people, but you’re also very brave. They couldn’t quite decide whether phlegmatic melancholic really worked as an idea (Galen thought not). But, in those cases, you tended to seek solitary places but near the water, because phlegm was a watery humour.

  It was a core element of this system that there were such things as psychosomatic diseases, and that mental illness should be taken seriously. We heard that Burton said that you might as well tell a melancholy person not to be melancholy as to tell someone who was wounded, or someone who was in a fever, not to feel pain, or to stop their physical symptoms.

  There was a cult of melancholy around the time of the first publication of Burton’s book, in 1621, which could be traced back to ideas in antiquity and arose from a set of problems ascribed to Aristotle, in which he supposedly asked why it was that people who were outstanding in philosophy, poetry and the arts tended to be melancholic. There was also Dürer’s Melencolia, the famous engraving of female melancholy.