The Annotated Pride and Prejudice
Page 69
The issue of Pride and Prejudice's chronology has sparked differing interpretations, for the dates provided in the novel are not all compatible. The novel mentions three specific dates along with their days: Monday, Nov. 18, Tuesday, Nov. 26, and Monday, Aug. 2 (of the following year). The first two days are compatible; furthermore, since 1811 would have contained both days, and Jane Austen composed the final version of the novel in 1811 and 1812, many have supposed that she followed the calendars for those years when preparing the manuscript. Unfortunately, 1812 did not contain a Monday, August 2, nor would any year that succeeded a year containing a Monday, November 18 and Tuesday, November 26. This has left anyone wishing to date the novel with a dilemma.
The solution adopted by R. W. Chapman in his notes to The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen, the leading scholarly edition of the novels and the one whose chronology is frequently followed here, is to argue that the novel is nonetheless set in 1811-1812. His argument is founded on the correct assertion that Monday, Aug. 2—the date put on the express letter by Mr. Gardiner informing the Bennets of Lydia's engagement—is a mistake; in fact, the letter must have been written approximately two weeks later (see p. 549, note 10). Chapman postulates that Jane Austen confused the date of Mr. Gardiner's letter with the date of the express sent to the Bennets telling them of Lydia's running away, which was on Sunday, Aug. 2 if the novel was aligned with the 1812 calendar.
Chapman's theory, however, suffers from a fatal flaw. One other specific day mentioned in the novel is Easter (p. 316), which occurs at the midpoint of Elizabeth's six-week visit to the Collinses (see above and p. 310). In 1812 Easter fell early, on March 29. This would make Elizabeth's visit last from early March until late April. But when Elizabeth returns home, after she has stayed with the Gardiners in London for “a few days,” it is said to be “the second week of May,” i.e., sometime between May 8 and May 14 (see above and pp. 400 and 402). That would not have been possible if Elizabeth had left in late April. Chapman notices this problem but tries to resolve it by arguing that Jane Austen must have been mistaken in describing the visit to the Gar-diners as lasting a few days. Instead he proposes that the visit lasted approximately three weeks (he does not propose that the statement that Elizabeth returned in the second week of May was mistaken, for a much earlier return would be incompatible with the description of later events).
This attempted solution, in addition to supposing that the normally scrupulous Jane Austen would make such a flagrant error in describing the length of the visit to the Gardiners, runs into other serious problems. The most glaring is that a week before Elizabeth leaves the Collinses Lady Catherine talks of traveling to London herself a month after their departure, and says that will be in early June (p. 390)—such a statement would not make sense if Elizabeth were leaving in late April. In addition, a visit of only a few days to the Gardiners is more logical, for a number of reasons. First, as Chapman himself acknowledges, it is only after Elizabeth has stayed with the Gardiners and returned home that she tells Jane of Darcy's proposal—this subject is described as a secret that “had weighed on her for a fortnight” (pp. 416 and 418). But since Darcy's proposal occurred almost two weeks before Elizabeth left the Collinses, it could not still be a fortnight unless she had stopped for only a brief time at the Gardiners; it is also hard to imagine Elizabeth keeping such important news from Jane over the course of a three-week stay at the Gardiners. Second, Elizabeth is said to have little opportunity to talk to Jane during the visit because of the various engagements Mrs. Gardiner has arranged for them, something far more plausible for a short visit than a long one. Third, it would not really make sense for Jane, who has been staying with the Gardiners for four months, and Elizabeth, who will see them again for an extended vacation in the summer, to remain with the Gardiners for such a long time. It would make even less sense for Maria Lucas—who has no connection with the Gardiners and seems to be close to neither Jane nor Elizabeth—to continue accompanying Elizabeth as she does, rather than returning to her nearby family in Hertfordshire, if Elizabeth were stopping in London for three weeks.
This leaves two possibilities. The first is that Jane Austen did not use calendars at all, or at least not any from a specific pair of years. She could have used an 1811 calendar for the action in the first part of the novel, the part with the most precise sequence of events, and then not bothered with a calendar for the remainder of the action. Or she could have dispensed with calendars altogether: having arbitrarily chosen November 18 as the date of Mr. Collins's Monday arrival at the Bennets, she could easily have calculated the need to make Tuesday of the next week November 26, and she could have then plotted the remaining sequence of days from the first part of the novel without any reference to calendar dates. In either case, she could have planned the rest of the novel with a purely imaginary year in mind, one in which Easter fell in the middle of April, as it often does. As for the remaining exact date of Monday, August 2, since it is certainly wrong it is impossible to know how it was derived.
Supporters of the idea that Jane Austen used specific calendars in this novel have pointed to some evidence that she used one in Mansfield Park, but even for that novel the evidence is not certain, and the other novels do not provide any clear indication of the use of a calendar. In fact, in the case of Persuasion, in which the action is stated to occur in 1814-15, the one exact day indicated—Monday, February 1—is wrong by the calendar.
The second possibility is that Pride and Prejudice, which does involve a more precise sequence of days than in her other novels, is based on the 1811 and 1812 calendars, but that at the time Jane Austen was writing the passages set in the spring, she did not check the date of Easter and see that it was at the end of March. A similar error occurs in Mansfield Park, if in fact it was composed with reference to exact calendars. The one exact date in that novel is Thursday, December 22; it also refers, for the following spring, to a “particularly late” Easter; but any year close to the time Jane Austen was writing Mansfield Park that included a Thursday, December 22 was followed by a year in which Easter was early.
As for the possibility that she could have envisaged another specific pair of years besides 1811-12, a possibility suggested by Jane Austen's having composed an initial version of Pride and Prejudice many years earlier, that is excluded by the days and dates related to Lydia's wedding. As mentioned above, the wedding must have occurred on one of the last days of August; the wedding is also specified as happening on Monday. But a year in which November 26 is a Tuesday is followed by a year in which the last Monday in August is the 25th, unless the second year is a leap year. In that case the last Monday is August 31; this of course would work for the novel, but during Jane Austen's lifetime there were no leap years following a year with a Tuesday, November 26, except for the already discussed 1812.
All this means that no specific year can be identified as the clearly appropriate one for the novel's chronology, and that the safest course, except for the early part of the novel, is to be precise when possible about the sequence of days, without ever assigning specific calendar dates.
References
Andrews,P. B. S., “The Date of Pride and Prejudice,” Notes and Queries 213 (1968): 338-342.
Chapman,R. W., “The Chronology of Pride and Prejudice,” in The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen,Vol. II (Oxford, 1988)
Modert, Jo, “Chronology within the Novels,” in The Jane Austen Companion, ed. J. David Grey (New York, 1986)