Jane's Fame

by Claire Harman

  One reviewer failed to revel, and that was Chapman himself, writing anonymously in the TLS, ‘we should be sorry to have been responsible for this publication’. While conceding that there was in Love and Freindship ‘now and then a sentence one would be sorry to have missed’, he thought the act of publishing it amounted to an act of ‘espionage or exhumation’.83 Chapman had read the private correspondence between Austen-Leigh and his sisters about Jane Austen’s ‘betweenities’ and undoubtedly felt he was toeing the family line over their unsuitability for publication, but there was raw professional jealousy in his antipathy too. Chesterton had bested him, and scored a hit with a text he didn’t – at that time – consider part of the official Austen canon. When he tracked down the manuscript of ‘Volume the First’ in 1932, however, and persuaded the Bodleian to buy it, he wasted no time editing that work himself, and eventually published editions of all the juvenilia.

  One of Chapman’s talents was for inspiring awe among his colleagues at the Clarendon Press. Elizabeth Jenkins, a future biographer of Jane Austen, recalled a man ‘so critical and austere that it was an alarming experience to receive his opinions, though a wholesome one’84 and his colleague Bywater remembered the ‘chill glance of recognition and dispraise’ Chapman habitually cast over the wares of Oxford booksellers and antiquarians. John Gore said of Chapman’s Austen editions, ‘They will never be superseded as authorities. He put into them all his scholarship, years of research and a strictness in the sifting of evidence worthy of a Lord Chief Justice.’ Gore made it sound as if Austen ought also to have been a bit in awe of her twentieth-century editor, and grateful for his attentions: ‘I often wonder what [she] would have felt if she could have foreseen that every word of almost every sentence she scribbled down at odd moments on her little desk at Chawton Cottage would one day be examined and tested, as through a microscope, by a great scholar.’

  Chapman’s work has been superseded, though, as all such scholarship will be in time, and has had its critics. David Gilson has very politely pointed out that Chapman recorded ‘by no means all’ the differences between editions of Austen’s books published in her lifetime,85 and Chapman’s bibliography of Jane Austen has been picked out by Richard Howard as an example of selective and prescriptive editing. Howard notes that Chapman omitted from his bibliography the kinds of essays that, in his opinion, Jane Austen would not have understood. Howard characterised the process thus:

  To Chapman, Austen would turn over in her grave if she heard scholars describe her novels in terms alien to her apprehension, the apparatus of literary history and textual scholarship, to say nothing of post-structural interpretation, being regarded as likely to misrepresent her enterprise. To Chapman, Jane Austen is in the canon not because of her social vision or her artistry, but because she had the good fortune to be able and the good taste to be willing to record the elegant manners of her time. Hence with inexorable circularity, Chapman’s edition of Austen creates the author it presumes, and the history it desires, a graceful monument to country life in Regency England, inveterately given to graciousness and tranquillity.86

  Even in the presentation of Austen’s texts by Chapman, the way was paved to full-scale ‘consumption’ of Austen as a multi-faceted literary-historical product. The illustrations to The Novels of Jane Austen – of carriages, dress, dancing steps – introduced quantities of extra information that was generic rather than specific to Austen. There were, of course, no vulgar representations, à la Hugh Thomson, of Elizabeth overhearing Darcy at the Meryton assembly, or Mr Elton proposing in the carriage, no homely pencil drawings of Steventon Rectory derived from a niece’s notebook, but decorous views of the Pump Room and plates from Ackerman’s Repository. Chapman’s editions removed Austen from her own particular life story and attached her to the age she lived in – specifically its genteeler aspects. There was no attempt to illustrate the less attractive clothes, houses or activities within the novels’ scope. Thus the editing carried aspects of the Janeite delusion into criticism by stressing Austen’s difference from other authors – her special case status. No one rushed to copy Chapman’s method for other authors because it wasn’t appropriate. There were no appendices about donkeys or illustrations of orphanages or convict-ships in editions of Dickens. Austen was being treated like a cultural package; educational, in unchallenging ways, and reliably, cleanly, entertaining.

  For all his austerity and intimidation of underlings, Chapman’s feelings about his subject were strong, emotional and possessive. His excitability in correspondence with those to whom he felt he could unbend is marked, and he clearly relished his custodianship of the choice items passing in and out of his little safe, as well as things in the Bodleian whose purchase he had overseen (such as ‘Volume the First’, which he kept at home for several months to work on87). He was, in his way, quite an operator, and once cornered the great American collector Pierpont Morgan in the smoking-room of a liner mid-Atlantic and came to an agreement with him by which Chapman gained access to Morgan’s extraordinary holdings of Austen letters in return for first refusal (as if Morgan would refuse!) of any manuscripts that Chapman found for the British Museum which were passed over. That was good enough for the collector. ‘All I ask are the crumbs from the rich man’s table,’ he told Chapman, with distracting simplicity.

  Nor was the unbending scholar immune to sentimentality about Austen. In his bibliography (of all places) he refers to Virginia Woolf’s dictum about Austen not being able to be caught in the act of greatness, the soggiest thing she ever said on the subject, as ‘the golden sentence’.88 And he echoed Woolf’s sentiment, in both senses, in his introduction to the Letters in 1932, claiming a magical element to Austen’s art of characterisation: ‘I cannot be mistaken in the belief that, in their several degrees, [the people in Austen’s Letters] are alive. How they are brought to life, without quotation and almost without description, may be perceived but can hardly be explained.’89 For all his classicism, mandarin airs and unparalleled recall of ‘the lapses of lesser scholars’, R. W. Chapman could be as un-or even anti-critical as the next man.

  Notes - Chapter 5: Divine Jane

  1. ‘Her Life’s One Romance’, Malden, p. 33.

  2. Adams, preface.

  3. Austen-Leigh (1920), pp. 80–81.

  4. Memoir, p. 104.

  5. ibid., pp. 104–5.

  6. CH, vol. 2, p. 215.

  7. Anon., ‘Jane Austen and her biographers’, Church Quarterly Review, p. 356.

  8. Beside his £500 fee, Thomson received a royalty of 7d a copy: see Gilson, p. 267.

  9. CH, vol. 2, p. 218.

  10. ibid., p. 215.

  11. ibid., p. 174.

  12. ibid., p. 62.

  13. ibid., p. 227.

  14. ibid., p. 271.

  15. ibid., p. 202.

  16. ibid., pp. 233–4.

  17. ibid., p. 65.

  18. CR, vol. 1, p. 111.

  19. Bussby, no page numbers.

  20. Carrington, p. 545.

  21. Rhydderch, p. 240.

  22. Emerson, p. 336.

  23. CH, vol. 2, p. 232.

  24. Twain, p. 262.

  25. ibid., p. 266.

  26. Following the Equator, ch. 62, quoted in CH, vol. 2, p. 232.

  27. Twain, p. 280.

  28. CH, vol. 2, p. 232.

  29. ibid., p. 233.

  30. Watt, pp. 10–11.

  31. CH, vol. 2, p. 179.

  32. James, p. 168.

  33. ibid.

  34. CH, vol. 2, p. 189.

  35. ibid., p. 195.

  36. ibid., p. 218.

  37. ibid., p. 39.

  38. ibid., p. 77.

  39. ibid., p. 39.

  40. Showalter, p. 41.

  41. CH, vol. 2, p. 10.

  42. Edlmann, pp. 343–50.

  43. Hill, p. 53.

  44. Mandal and Southam, p. 5.

  45. Halperin, p. 284.

  46. ibid., pp. 289–90.

  4
7. ibid., p. 307.

  48.6 April 1897, quoted in the notes to Claudia Johnson’s essay ‘The Divine Miss Jane’, in Lynch.

  49. Translated by René Varin, CR, vol. 1, p. 143.

  50. Originally a D. Litt. thesis, Sorbonne, Paris, 1915.

  51. Austen-Leigh (1920), p. 96.

  52. CH, vol. 2, p. 79.

  53. Fussell, p. 162.

  54. CR, vol. 4, p. 267.

  55. Lane, TLS, 6 August 1954.

  56. Chapman (1920), pp. 22–3.

  57. ibid., preface and p. 24.

  58. These notes are in Chapman’s ‘Jane Austen Files’ in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  59. See Martin Jarrett-Kerr, letter to TLS, 3 February 1984, p. 111.

  60. Kipling, p. 335.

  61. ibid., p. 337.

  62. ibid, p. 348.

  63. ibid, p. 340.

  64. CR, vol.1, p. 299.

  65. Bien, p. 43.

  66. Hampshire Record Office, 71M82/PW2/1, Constance Hill to Mrs Robert Mills, 20 May? 1918.

  67. Hill, p. vi.

  68. Daily Telegraph, 19 July 1917.

  69. ibid.

  70. Emma, p. 391.

  71. Daily Telegraph, 19 July 1917.

  72. Cecil (1978), p. 23.

  73. CH, vol. 2, p. 31.

  74. CR, vol. 1, p. 141.

  75. Chapman (1950), p. 11.

  76. ibid.

  77. It may also be worth recording here that the Cambridge classical scholar A. W. Verrall had considered just such an edition of Austen in the 1880s, but never made one.

  78. Lane, TLS, 6 August 1954.

  79. I can only guess that there was some sort of pre-existing agreement for her to do this book.

  80. Chapman (1953), p. 6.

  81. Morgan Library, MS 1034, item 3.

  82. Juvenilia, p. xlviii.

  83. TLS, 15 June 1922, quoted in Juvenilia, p. l.

  84. CR, vol. 1, p. 171.

  85. Gilson, ‘Jane Austen’s Texts’, p. 62.

  86. ‘Jane Austen: Poetry and anti-Poetry’, Howard, p. 295.

  87. See Juvenilia, p. xxxvii.

  88. Chapman (1953), p. 44.

  89. Chapman (1932), vol. 1, p. xi.

  CHAPTER 6

  Canon and Canonisation

  In 1890, Jane Austen’s first professional academic biographer, the historian Goldwin Smith, had shone the light of his scholarly mind on his subject only to report that there was nothing in Austen to illuminate: ‘There is no hidden meaning in her; no philosophy beneath the surface for profound scrutiny to bring to light; nothing calling in any way for elaborate interpretation,’ he wrote.1 Her characters were ‘genteel idlers’ and ‘vapid’, and the books – it was part of their charm – needed no commentary: ‘Some think that they see a difference between the early and the later novels. It is natural to look for such a difference, but for ourselves we must confess we see it not.’ In the same year, the reviewer John Mackinnon Robinson took Smith to task for not appreciating Austen’s modernity and ‘art-concealing art’, but agreed that Austen was hardly a fit subject for a whole critical book, implying that Smith’s own was pretty redundant: ‘It is impossible, indeed, to write a book on Jane Austen: you must not write treatises on miniatures.’2

  So, as it began, Austen criticism made a principled attempt to shut itself down. Pleasure and business don’t mix, and there seemed to be no work to be done on such a delightful author, who wrote so clearly and simply, and who was so small scale. Scale had been the most frequently discussed issue, where Austen had been discussed critically at all; some, like Thomas Carlyle, felt that her refusal to tackle large themes automatically excluded her from the ranks of the great novelists, while advocates such as G. H. Lewes lauded Austen’s careful self-regulation as the means to ‘perfect’ art: ‘She does not touch those profounder and more impassioned chords which vibrate to the heart’s core – never ascends to its grand or heroic movements, nor descends to its deeper throes and agonies; but in all she attempts she is uniformly and completely successful.’3

  As soon as the ‘little bit of ivory’ was inserted into the discourse, no one could get enough of ‘miniature’ and ‘fine brush strokes’ analogies, using them to account for Austen’s skill in terms of control, female niceness and wisdom about her own limits. This view of Austen’s art required nothing of the reader but a willingness to be delighted, as one might be in the presence of a superior conjuror. The manual dexterity which James Edward Austen-Leigh had harped on in the Memoir became intimately associated with Austen’s writing skill, as if she practised the latter as a form of cottage craft. Choosing not to enquire into ‘how she did it’ could thus be made into a compliment to the author, as in this centenary newspaper tribute: ‘so delicate were the touches of the miniaturist that they defy analysis with the same challenge as threads of gossamer’.4 She really had thought of everything!

  Another way to ‘defy’ analysis was to promote Austen as an accidental artist, working unconsciously or instinctively. Henry James, who never liked to see immanence analysed, likened her to ‘the brown thrush who tells his story from the garden bough’.5 ‘The key to Jane Austen’s fortune with posterity’, he wrote, in ‘The Lesson of Balzac’, ‘has been in part the extraordinary grace of her facility, in part of her unconsciousness.’ James went on to picture the author musing over her workbasket while her unconscious did its trick, ‘and her dropped stitches, of these pardonable, of these precious moments, were afterwards picked up as little touches of human truth, little glimpses of steady vision, little master-strokes of imagination’. Little, little, LITTLE. By 1928, Rebecca West had heard enough of such opinions to complain, ‘really, it is time this comic patronage of Jane Austen ceased’.6

  The perception of Austen’s novels existing in a zone beyond literary criticism added hugely to their popular appeal. As Brian Southam has remarked, it was attractive to know that a great writer ‘could be enjoyable, and could be spoken of affectionately as a friend, as well as revered as a genius’. Austen’s adoption by the educational establishment would not have followed very naturally if the academy hadn’t been stuffed with Janeites during the early years of the new century, just as the discipline of English Literature was being introduced to British universities (it had been taught in America for several decades already). George Saintsbury in Edinburgh, A. C. Bradley in Liverpool and Walter Raleigh at Oxford all ensured that as soon as the canon existed, their favourite was not just in it, but held a special position. This was in marked contrast to writers like Walter Scott and Fanny Burney, who hadn’t stood the test of time, or not the test of that time, at any rate.

  There was another reason for Austen’s easy passage into English Literature courses: English was considered a ‘soft’ subject, suitable for the increasing number of women students who aspired to university education (even if they weren’t yet allowed to take degrees), and Austen’s novels were some of the least inappropriate works of fiction for unmarried women to read and discuss with the older men who taught them. As Leslie Stephen had said in detraction, there was nothing in the novels ‘that would prevent them from being given by a clergyman to his daughter as a birthday present’.7 Writing to R. W. Chapman in 1917, Professor Walter Raleigh (formerly the teacher of Katharine Metcalfe) took comfort in what he saw as Austen’s laughable ignorance about worldly matters: ‘She knows a lot, and I believe she knows what she doesn’t know. At least, I shouldn’t like to believe that she thought she knew anything about married people or young men.’8 Raleigh implies that a valuable status quo was thus preserved between the sexes: Austen ‘knows what she doesn’t know’, and, best of all, keeps it to herself. No one wanted wise virgins – whether authors or students – to be too knowing.

  Once Austen began to appear on syllabuses and lecture lists, the comparisons with Shakespeare dried up almost immediately. Macaulay, whom Henry James called Austen’s ‘first slightly ponderous amoroso’,9 had led the way with his startling claim in 1843, ‘Shakspeare [sic] has ha
d neither equal nor second. But among the writers who … have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen.’10 G. H. Lewes followed Macaulay’s lead in 1847 by calling Austen a ‘prose Shakespeare’ on account of her ‘marvellous dramatic power’. Both men, in attempting to give a suitable impression of their admiration for Austen to readers who hardly shared it at all in the 1840s, grabbed at the Bard for emphasis, but the comparison was barely tenable. Those who tried to expand the analogy (including Richard Simpson in 1872 and the Shakespeare scholar A. C. Bradley in 1911) stressed Austen’s ‘Shakespearian’ creation of character and ear for dialogue, though Miss Bates and Mrs Allen – the two characters Bradley singled out – could be just as convincingly described as ‘Chaucerian’, or ‘Burneyan’. A feeble poem by Rudyard Kipling titled ‘Jane’s Marriage’ (which he appended to his story ‘The Janeites’) places Austen in company with Shakespeare and the world’s other great storytellers, but doesn’t take its own compliment to the author very seriously:

  Jane went to Paradise:

  That was only fair.

  Good Sir Walter followed her,

  And armed her up the stair.

  Henry and Tobias,

  And Miguel of Spain

  Stood with Shakespeare at the top

  To welcome Jane.

  The true connection between Austen and Shakespeare lay in their popularity, accessibility and impact on readers’ affections. Leslie Stephen had satirised this in his invention of the term ‘Austenolatry’ in the 1870s, in imitation of ‘Bardolatry’, that commercially led, nationalistically flavoured, anti-intellectual idealisation of the poet that burgeoned in the later eighteenth century, almost entirely at the hands of one man, David Garrick. James Edward Austen-Leigh had been the unlikely impresario of his aunt’s own similarly rocketing fame. Both Shakespeare and Jane Austen had managed to find a popular audience long after their own time, and to appeal to them over the heads of an interpretive elite.