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Extracts from Sensibilities
June 2003 - Volume 26

Contents

• Off to Gretna Green - Elopement in Jane Austen’s World - Susannah Fullerton 
• Punctilio and Propriety: Illustrating Frederic & Elfrida - Juliet McMaster, University of Alberta 
• Jane Austen and the Picturesque - Raymond Southall

Off to Gretna Green - Elopement in Jane Austen's World

Susannah Fullerton

'You will laugh when you know where I am gone ... I am going to Gretna Green, and if you cannot guess with who, I shall think you a simpleton, for there is but one man in the world I love, and he is an angel.'

(Pride and Prejudice)

On a Saturday night in July Miss Lydia Bennet and Mr George Wickham run off together from the town of Brighton. Lydia leaves behind her, as a symbol of her lost virginity, a torn gown (with 'a great slit' in it). Wickham leaves gaming debts and many unpaid bills. Lydia believes they are heading for Scotland, but Wickham has a closer destination in mind - London, and its promise of anonymity. Eloping to Gretna Green was an expensive business, certainly too costly for Wickham with his shortage of ready cash. The couple's first halt is the town of Epsom where they hire a chaise and pair for one guinea a mile. This was slower but much cheaper than a coach and four. At Clapham, however, Wickham disregards economy in favour of speed. He and Lydia dismiss the chaise, remove 'into a hackney-coach', and set off on the London road.

Given the character of both elopers, it is highly probable that they break a law en route! In 1698 an act passed by Parliament specifically prohibited 'unlawful commerce between men and women in hackney coaches'. Such a venue was often the only option for couples engaging in illicit sex. In fact, so frequently was this law broken that the commissioners who licensed coaches seriously considered removing the blinds from the windows and the cushions from the seats. As neither Lydia nor Wickham are noted for their patience or restraint, readers may easily imagine 'unlawful commerce' taking place in one or other of the coaches they travel in. Contemporary advice even recommended coaches to gentlemen accompanied by ladies of easy virtue. 

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Punctilio and Propriety: Illustrating Frederic & Elfrida

Juliet McMaster, University of Alberta

'According to the best evidence Jane Austen wrote Frederic & Elfrida when she was eleven or twelve years old,' notes Victoria Kortes-Papp in her preface to the Juvenilia Press edition of this brief and outrageous tale. 'It weighs in at just over two thousand three hundred words' (vii) - that is, about eleven pages in the Chapman edition of the Minor Works, chapter breaks and all: longer than the highly concentrated Beautifull Cassandra, but much shorter than Love & Freindship, Catharine, or even Jack & Alice.

Some might think that a slender tale - slender in size, that is, but not (I assure you) in significant content - calls for minimal illustration. Not I. The slenderer the text, so goes my principle, the larger, not to say obeser, is the illustrator's opportunity: so that my illustrations loom larger in this volume than in any other I have illustrated since The Beautifull Cassandra.

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Jane Austen and the Picturesque

Raymond Southall

A paper presented to the Jane Austen Society of Australia meeting 12 April 2003 

Jane Austen began writing at a time when attitudes towards the natural environment were changing. The growth of middle-class English domestic tourism in the 1790s, stimulated by the appearance of William Gilpin's Tours and necessitated by the war with France, was based on the promotion of natural scenery as the principal object of sightseeing.2 Such tourism tended to diminish the aesthetic appeal of the cultivated countryside, the countryside of pastures, meadows and stands of fine timber, and to enhance that of the wilderness - craggy mountains, hectic waterfalls, gnarled oaks, deserted heaths. It also enlisted a particular mode of feeling, an acute subjectivity that came to be generally accepted as the criterion of true appreciation. In short, it gave rise to a taste for the picturesque. 

According to her brother Henry, in a memoir prefixed to Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen 'was a warm and judicious admirer of landscape, both in nature and on canvas. At a very early age she was enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque; and she seldom changed her opinions of books or men.'

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03 February 2004

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