The Annotated Mansfield Park

by Jane Austen

  55. These three professions were, along with clergyman, the ones considered genteel at the time, and thus acceptable for younger sons from elite families. “Soldier” or “sailor” would mean an army or navy officer. “Lawyer” would mean a barrister, the type of lawyer allowed to handle cases in court; attorneys, who did other legal work, especially ordinary property transactions, and who formed the majority of lawyers, were not considered genteel.

  56. It was not unusual, thanks to high death rates, for owners of large estates to have no direct heir, and in such cases they might bequeath the estate to a young male relative who was a younger son and would not be a landowner otherwise.

  57. either: any. “Either” (like “neither”) could refer then to more than two.

  58. Clergy tended to be lower in prestige than members of the other genteel professions. In Sense and Sensibility the main male character faces resistance to his wish to become a clergyman from his wealthy and status-conscious family.

  59. state: power, splendor, grandeur.

  60. fashion: social standing or importance. The term was most commonly used at this time to denote high society and its ways.

  61. ton: fashion, vogue.

  62. Edmund succinctly summarizes the prevailing view of religion, as a matter essential both to the individual’s own soul and eternal salvation and to society as the source of morality and good behavior.

  63. People normally went to both a morning and an evening service on Sunday, and hence would hear two sermons. As Mary’s statement suggests, social norms dictated that everyone attend these services, even those (like her) who had little religious feeling. Hugh Blair, a Scottish minister and professor, was a leading author in eighteenth-century Britain, and among his books were five volumes of sermons. Many clergy used his, or other published sermons, when preaching; there was no general expectation that they must compose their own.

  64. The question of the respective value of city and country life was a frequent subject of debate in Austen’s time and earlier. Advocates for the city lauded it as the source of greater sophistication and opportunities to socialize and gain knowledge of the world, while others condemned it as an encouragement to a host of vices, including greed, concern for status, and sexual misconduct. Jane Austen, in a letter when young, indicates a knowledge of this debate, which was conducted among ordinary people as well as writers, when she jokes, after arriving in London, “Here I am once more in this Scene of Dissipation & vice, and I begin already to find my Morals corrupted” (Aug. 23, 1796). In later writings she approaches the issue more seriously, and generally favors the country side of the debate, though not without complexity and nuance.

  65. The recent rapid growth of London—it had reached a population of more than a million in the recent 1811 census—caused many London parishes to be very populous, which made it impossible for the parish priest to have personal contact with most of his parishioners.

  66. Books of the time about history or current affairs often refer to the “manners” of a people or society, using that as a comprehensive term for customs and habits. The contrast Edmund draws, between external refinement and courtesy and a more profound commitment to good behavior and principles, plays an important role in the novel. At various points the author describes the way that Maria and Julia have been educated well in the former virtues but poorly in the latter, including in the passage above about Julia’s inability to be more than outwardly polite when she ends up unhappily stuck with Mrs. Rushworth. Mary Crawford, though sometimes behaving more sympathetically than Maria or Julia, displays a similar discrepancy in her character, and this feature of all three young ladies will play a critical role in the plot.

  67. Edmund’s emphatic speech could be seen as a reflection of the growing evangelical movement in England, which during the early nineteenth century strove to inspire greater piety within the Church of England, improve religious and moral conduct throughout society, and eliminate certain social evils, such as the slave trade. Its efforts, which had a wide effect, were an important factor in the more earnest and morally strict culture that characterized Victorian England in the mid to late nineteenth century. Jane Austen refers to the movement in two letters, one from 1809 stating, “I do not like the Evangelicals,” and one from 1814 declaring, “I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals” (Jan. 24, 1809; Nov. 18, 1814). The contrast between the two comments may reflect a change in her attitude in the intervening years, one that occurred within many in England at the time, though it may also result merely from different contexts—the first comment occurs when she is expressing her dislike of a moralistic novel by a leading evangelical writer, Hannah More, and the second when she is counseling her niece about the proposal of a man whom her niece worries is too evangelical.

  68. One possible model for Mary Crawford, and her relationship with Edmund, is a cousin of Jane Austen’s, Eliza de Feuillide. Eliza, who had married a Frenchman who was executed during the Reign of Terror, was a woman of great charm, intelligence, and vivacity; she also was flirtatious, hedonistic, and frequently self-centered. Jane’s brother Henry, who had long been enamored of Eliza, married her after her first husband died, and this probably caused him to abandon his plans to become a clergyman and to move later to London, whose fashionable social life Eliza loved.

  69. The law and the navy offered the best opportunities for someone to earn a large fortune and thereby rise socially, but the navy required an officer to begin his career when he was in his teens. In contrast, a man like Edmund with a university degree required only three years of legal education at one of the Inns of Court. Mary may also judge that Edmund would be more suited to a legal career than a military one. Finally, because barristers were always based in London, the wife of one could enjoy the social life of the capital.

  70. The English legal system, which was based on centuries of precedent rather than a comprehensive legislated code and which contained a variety of court systems with often overlapping jurisdiction, was extremely complex and often confusing.

  71. striking it out: producing it, coming up with it. Edmund will demonstrate this character throughout the novel; in fact, he is the least witty hero in all Austen’s novels (just as Fanny is her most serious heroine). In contrast, Mary Crawford is one of the wittiest characters in all the novels. Jane Austen herself, in addition to displaying tremendous wit in her novels, shows a great love of wit in her letters, and she calls the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, the wittiest of all her characters, “as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print” (Jan. 29, 1813). But Austen also reveals another side. In a letter, the same one mentioned in note 67 above about the man with evangelical tendencies, she cautions her niece against rejecting him for lack of wit, for “Wisdom is certainly better than Wit, & in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side” (Nov. 18, 1814); and in Pride and Prejudice the heroine learns to temper her love of wit after it causes unhappiness to herself and to others. In this novel a central question will be whether Mary Crawford can learn the same lesson.

  72. He may have done this for men who were drunk. Oxford was notorious at this time for the frequent drunkenness of the students; the lax educational standards allowed those attending to neglect studying in favor of other pursuits. In Northanger Abbey a boorish Oxford student expresses contempt for his fellow students because most do not exceed four pints of wine a day (and a pint in England is twenty ounces).

  73. Though it seems Edmund offered his arm purely from concern for her, it becomes an opportunity for him to also make this offer to Mary. Propriety would normally prohibit him from doing so, for physical contact between unmarried and unrelated young people was discouraged, but in this case it can be justified as politeness, since it avoids the possible rudeness of singling out Fanny for courtesy.

  74. lawlessness: licentiousness. The idea is that women are capricious or careless in reckoning time and distance.

  75. great path: large or main path.

&n
bsp; 76. A furlong is 660 feet, or one-eighth of a mile.

  77. within compass: within the bounds of moderation.

  78. He is taking the watch out of his pocket. Watches had become common accessories by this time, but wristwatches were rare.

  79. Watches often were inaccurate then, due to the difficulty of constructing a timekeeping mechanism on a very small scale, but Mary’s objection to them here is probably founded on her own willfulness.

  80. A ha-ha is a sunken fence, or more precisely a narrow trench in which at least one side is held in place by a barrier to prevent the dirt from collapsing into the empty space (the other side can take the form of a slope). Ha-has had been developed in the eighteenth century for the landscaped grounds of grand houses. Livestock grazed these grounds, for they were part of working agricultural estates, and the livestock also kept the grass low. Pictures of such grounds often show cattle or sheep on the grass as well as people strolling—for an example, see this page. These animals needed to be penned in, but the new taste for extensive views over the grounds made the visual interference of fences undesirable. The ha-ha, an effective barrier that was invisible from a distance, solved this problem. It is not certain how the name arose; one theory is that because people could see the trench only when they were almost on top of it, this led to surprised exclamations of “ha-ha!” For a picture see this page.

  81. knocked up: worn out, exhausted.

  82. suffered: allowed.

  83. Edmund is concerned that Fanny rest, but his earnestness probably also results from his wish to be alone with Mary Crawford. It would be improper for two unmarried young people of the opposite sex to go off deliberately on their own, for there was always the fear that this could lead to something untoward, or lead to gossip. But this situation, in which Edmund and Mary were walking with a third person who then needed to rest, presents them with an ideal opportunity for a blameless tête-à-tête.

  VOLUME I, CHAPTER X

  1. The gate and the ha-ha both border the park. Mary Crawford just expressed a wish of looking through the gate into the park, and she and Edmund subsequently walked alongside the ha-ha (rather than passing directly into the park, as the others now intend).

  The layout of a park with a stream and meandering paths.

  [From C. L. Stieglitz and K. A. Siegel, Descriptions pittoresques de jardins du goût le plus moderns (Leipzig, 1802), Plate II]

  2. The implication is that her inclination for going through has increased from learning that Mr. Rushworth must leave to fetch the key. This gives her and Henry Crawford an opportunity to be alone (as Edmund and Mary have just seized a similar opportunity).

  3. He means the older style of landscaping, which Mr. Rushworth wishes to replace on his property.

  4. Maria and Mr. Rushworth are planning to be married by next summer, and Henry flirtatiously expresses his displeasure at the prospect.

  5. “A man of the world” usually means a denizen of high or fashionable society. Her meaning is that such a man would have the sense to adopt the views of society in general on the suitability of her marriage, whatever his true feelings about that event might be.

  6. The man of the world, according to the usual stereotype, has complete command of his feelings. Henry’s avowal of his lack of command, like his previous words about regretting another summer, seems to represent an admission of amorous feelings toward Maria; each statement reduces her to embarrassment or silence. At the same time, by making his admission obliquely he is protecting himself. Current social norms dictated that a man’s direct avowal of his love for a woman was tantamount to a proposal of marriage, from which he could not retreat without suffering social censure and a stain on his honor.

  7. Irish servants were not uncommon in England. In some cases people from Ireland, due to the widespread poverty there, emigrated to England in search of work. In other cases, those with property in Ireland brought their servants with them to England, for there were close ties between the Irish and English upper classes. In Emma the daughter of a wealthy family has recently married an Irishman and gone to live there; in Persuasion the principal family has aristocratic relations living in Ireland.

  8. Irish anecdotes, meaning funny or ridiculous stories about Irish people, were very popular in England. At this time, the Irish were regarded by the English as a humorous and amusing people (later in the century, as Ireland was the scene of increasing rebellion, sometimes violent, against British rule, a nastier, more brutish stereotype developed). The Irishman was a stock character in English drama, usually introduced for comic relief. Some of the comedy derived from stereotypical Irish customs that were regarded as strange, some from verbal malapropisms committed by the Irish characters, who were regarded as particularly prone to such mishaps, commonly described as Irish “bulls” (or blunders). In 1802 Maria Edgeworth, a leading novelist of the time (admired by Jane Austen) who was from Ireland, wrote, along with her father, Essay on Irish Bulls in order to refute this notion; one of her main points was that since English was a foreign language to most Irish people, those who came to England would naturally struggle to speak it correctly.

  9. He is playing on two meanings of “prospect”: prospect regarding a future event (as in today’s English) and view of the surrounding landscape. Henry has now advanced to testing Maria’s views, by in effect asking if she truly regards favorably the prospect of marriage.

  10. Maria, grasping his two meanings, responds to both: one prospect (the view) is good, while the other (her engagement) makes her feel trapped. But she, like he, is careful to avoid explicitness, so she cleverly suggests that it is the gate and ha-ha that create the trapped feeling. Direct avowals of affection would be considered improperly forward of a woman, and since he has not declared himself openly, prudence would dictate care in revealing too much herself. She is being imprudent, however, in even implying that she wishes to escape her engagement.

  11. She here alludes to a famous passage from Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). This novel, which helped popularize the word “sentimental,” played an important role in the rise of the sentimental novel, the dominant type of novel in the late eighteenth century and the object of Jane Austen’s satire in many of her youthful works. It recounts the narrator’s desultory wanderings and adventures, as well as his strong emotional reactions. Maria refers to an episode in which, alarmed by the possibility of being sent to the Bastille for lacking a passport, he perceives a starling in a cage and seems to hear it saying repeatedly, “I can’t get out.” This magnifies his anguish and dread regarding his situation, a reaction similar to Maria’s before the gate. Sterne’s narrator also compares his situation to “the millions of my fellow-creatures born to no inheritance but slavery,” which could be seen as an allusion to the issue of slavery raised elsewhere in this novel.

  12. Her words continue to suggest her strong feelings. In contrast, Henry, while claiming he is overcome by feeling, continues to speak calmly.

  13. Henry has presented her with the temptation of escaping the constraints placed on her by her fiancé, and thus figuratively by the engagement itself, and she has accepted his offer. This passage is a rare example in Austen’s novels of clear use of symbolism.

  14. It is a surprising feature that this dialogue, filled with such pointed allusions, occurs in the presence of Fanny. Both Henry and Maria know they are bordering on impropriety and would be unlikely to do so in the presence of a third person. This possible solecism may suggest a clue to one of the mysteries surrounding this novel. In a letter to her sister written during the period of composition, Jane Austen states, “If you cd discover whether Northamptonshire is a Country of Hedgerows, I shd be glad again” (Jan. 29, 1813). The answer she received was presumably negative, for there are only two passing and insignificant references to hedgerows or hedges in Mansfield Park (see this page and this page). But in fact Northamptonshire was full of hedgerows then: it, along with many other counties in the Midlands, h
ad recently experienced a wave of enclosures that had converted most of the land into pasture for livestock, and creating vast numbers of hedgerows was fundamental to this process. Moreover, Austen’s query itself seems odd, for hedgerows were a basic feature of the landscape through most of England, and it is not clear how they would figure importantly enough into the story to make them worth a special inquiry.

  The oddity disappears, however, if one supposes that she actually meant a specific, less common type of hedgerow, namely the one that her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, in his A Memoir of Jane Austen, identifies as a common feature of the countryside around her childhood home, “an irregular border of copse-wood and timber, often wide enough to contain within it a winding footpath, or a rough cart track.” In Persuasion, written a few years later, the hero and a woman he is wooing walk down the middle path of a hedgerow; they cannot see that the heroine is sitting just outside it, and thus, they exchange crucial information and opinions regarding her within her hearing. Austen may have envisioned a similar scene for Mansfield Park. If so, this is probably that scene, and she intended Fanny to overhear Henry and Maria unobserved (giving Fanny an even stronger reason not to reveal later the contents of Maria and Henry’s conversation). If Austen then learned that Northamptonshire’s continuous expanses of pasture did not typically contain this type of hedgerow, she may have changed her plans, being always a stickler for strict accuracy. Since this dialogue and Fanny’s hearing it are critical to the plot, she has Henry and Maria talk in front of her, figuring perhaps that their perception of Fanny’s insignificance renders it at least somewhat plausible.

  15. This passage suggests that the gate exists at a break in the ha-ha. Henry and Maria have carefully stepped around the gate, which is why he just spoke of passing “with little difficulty…round the edge” and why Fanny warns of falling into the ha-ha. The spikes she mentions presumably stick out of the side of the gate to prevent livestock from executing a similar maneuver.