FOOTNOTES:
[18] Written in 1798. “Read Dickens’s ‘Hard Times,’ and another book of ‘Pliny’s Letters;’ read ‘Northanger Abbey,’ worth all Dickens and Pliny together, yet it was the work of a girl.”—Macaulay.
[19] Jane Austen may have had in her mind Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines; to whom sketching from nature seems to have come by nature—who were all, as a matter of course, accomplished artists.
[20] Weymouth and Ramsgate, among sea-bathing places, seemed to rise most readily before her mind, though she alluded also to Southend and Cromer—not to say described Lyme—which she made her own.
[21] The fashion was a little absurd in its stateliness. Ladies were wont to wear nodding plumes of ostrich feathers, as at the Queen’s drawing-rooms, standing upright on the head, till they added a foot, at least, to the fair amazons’ height.
[22] Let us echo Henry Tilney’s praise of muslin. Will its simple, elegant, once wide reign never return? The prevalence of calico balls is a poor substitute for its sway.
[23] The old-fashioned term “quiz” was freely applied last century. It was originally associated with the first specimen of eye-glass, through which the short-sighted were supposed to quiz their neighbours. I should suppose Jane Austen must have been called a quiz in her day. The accusation was half coveted, half dreaded, according to the temper of the individual who incurred it.
[24] The remonstrance is still needed.
[25] Since these words were written we have had the whole of the “Waverley Novels,” not to mention more modern gains added to our wealth of excellent English works of fiction.
[26] There is this to be said for the sensational horrors which enchanted the girls of the last century, that these horrors, when founded on the model of Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances, were well principled, and free from inherent moral coarseness and license of tone.
[27] Perhaps the number of jilts in the last century have to do with spontaneous combustion where hearts were concerned.
[28] Some of the beautiful portraits of the last century (one, if I recollect rightly, which represents Mrs. Sheridan and her sister) give an idea how daintily becoming, how perfectly elegant, these muslin costumes could be.
[29] Wood and water always figure largely in Jane Austen’s landscapes.
[30] The furor about the “Mysteries of Udolpho,” in its day, was, indeed, not confined to school-girls. It extended over the whole reading world. It was European, as well as English.
[31] Such was the style of travelling en grand seigneur last century.
[32] What a quaint, pretty picture the young man in his coachman’s great-coat, the girl in her riding-habit and straw bonnet, which she is soon so anxious to protect from the rain, would make, taken as she stepped in or stepped out of Henry’s “curricle!”
[33] Even a good clergyman measured his duties differently last century.
[34] Mrs. Radcliffe, who appears to have been unable to stand a joke on her romances, even from their admirers, and who was much hurt by a laughing reference of Sir Walter Scott’s in “Waverley,” would have looked aghast at this levity.
[35] Revived mediævalism in æsthetics has changed all this, and gone far to banish again the garish light of day from “modern antique” houses.
[36] My impression is that Jane Austen began “Northanger Abbey” with the simple intention of executing, in accordance with an early amusement of hers, a gay parody on romances in general, and on one romance in particular. But her genius proved too much for her; and though she never entirely lost sight of her original design, she departed so far from it, by prolonging the Bath portion of the tale, as to destroy its unity, and make somewhat of a jumble of the whole book. On the other hand, the exercise of her great gifts, in their proper field of real life and character-drawing, has produced for us, instead of a clever burlesque for the amusement of contemporaries, a disjointed work of genius for the edification and enjoyment of succeeding generations.
[37] What a candid admission from a heroine, or from any girl! But to love flowers was not obligatory last century.
[38] Withal, one must be struck by Catherine’s unworldly disinterestedness. She has given her love to a son of the house; but in place of taking the opportunity to ascertain and exult over the Tilneys’ wealth and position, she is occupied with foolish romancing on her own account.
[39] I am able to conjecture, by the help of my own early studies, that Jane Austen is not foreseeing, and casting mockery on some modern sensational novels in this passage. She is simply borrowing from, and holding up to ridicule, a leading incident in the once popular romance of “The Children of the Abbey,” by Elizabeth Helme.
[40] If Jane Austen be right—and she was a great judge of human nature—in the implication that an eager, enthusiastic young reader is impelled to reproduce in personal experience what he or she reads, and if modern sensational novels come to be lived by our young men and women, where shall we look—how shall we answer for the wrong done by our idiotic, noxious, light literature?
[41] A period of time which would now suffice to take a traveller from London to Brussels with ease.
[42] The Morlands were “gentlefolks,” but that did not prevent all the fine stitching required by the family being done as a matter of course by the ladies.
[43] Concerning this gentleman, Jane Austen says, with one of her merry gibes, “I have only to add (aware that the rules of composition forbid the introduction of a character not connected with my fable) that this was the very gentleman whose negligent servant left behind him that collection of washing bills, resulting from a long visit to Northanger, by which my heroine was involved in one of her most alarming adventures.”
[44] But “Northanger Abbey” has another moral—a warning against romance run mad.
