Jane Austen and Capability Brown

Hit the road

The 50 miles of good road in Pride and Prejudice, Darcy's 10,000 a year, and the "ha-ha" in Mansfield Park are all features of the times and background for Capability Brown's influence on English gardening. August 30th 2016 marked the tercentenary of the baptism (his date of birth is unrecorded) of Lancelot 'Capability’ Brown (1716-1783). If you were in England this year, you may have seen certain events dedicated to this man who transformed the British landscape with his vision of naturalistic gardens See The genius of Capability Brown. People in Britain  were  even given the opportunity to buy special stamps to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Capability Brown's birth.  I only heard about him on this side of the Atlantic because on one of the tours of Old Westbury Gardens  (which were designed to emulate English estates to appeal to the taste of the owner's British bride) the guide mentioned Capability Brown as the designer. Of course, he couldn't have designed the Long Island estate directly, but his influence came through in the play of lawns, trees, and water to be found even on Long Island. thatched cottage at Old Westbury Gardens Lancelot Capability Brown Curious about the person who shares our last name, my husband looked for books about him in our library system. We only succeeded in obtaining one: Roger Turner's  Capability Brown and the Eighteenth-Century English Landscape. The History Press Rizzoli International Publications, 1985. While Turner frequently quotes the poet Alexander Pope to give some literary background and one time quotes the writer Hannah More, he fails to mention Jane Austen in connection with the transformation of the landscape at all, and this is an omission I intend to rectify here.

In fact, we owe our visions of Mr. Darcy's beautiful estate, Pemberley, to Capability Brown, as well. He set out the design for Chatsworth House. that house was was used as the setting for Pemberley in the  2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.    In Ch. 32 of Pride and Prejudice, Darcy tells Elizabeth,  "`And what is fifty miles of good road? Little more than half a day's journey. Yes, I call it a very easy distance.''  Darcy was particularly appreciative of "good road"  because it was still a relatively recent convenience that made a dramatic difference to travelers.  As Turner writes on p. 17, "During Brown's practising years, 1750-80, the time taken between London and the major towns was halved. Before these improvements bad weather and wintry conditions made travel impossible for wheeled traffic."   Earlier in the book, we have the famous pronouncement about Darcy's wealth amounting to 10,000 a year. That figure is also one that Turner mentions as requisite for an estate owner to really maintain a good figure in society: "At least five or six thousand pounds a year was required to support a great house, to allow for the expenses of the London season and to enable the owner to patronize the arts. More comfortably it required ten thousand a year" (p. 17).  The book named for a park Awareness of garden features gains prominence in Austen's Mansfield Park. In chapter 10, Maria Bertram complains: “Yes, certainly, the sun shines, and the park looks very cheerful. But unluckily that iron gate, that ha-ha, give me a feeling of restraint and hardship. ‘I cannot get out,' as the starling said.” Refusing to remain restrained, she goes through, ignoring Fanny's warning of the danger of slipping into the ha-ha.  Of course, all this foreshadows Maria's breaking through the set boundaries of her marriage and becoming a fallen woman. But there still had to be a physical ha-ha, a type of sunken fence that created a barrier between the extended grounds of the estate where animals could graze and the gardens near the house without obstructing the view. This was not a feature that Brown invented but one that he did use.  Taylor refers to this device and the explanation for its name on p. 29 in  quotes Horace Walpole's 1770 essay On Modern Gardening:  "The capital stroke, the leading step to all that has followed, was (I believe the first thought was Bridgeman's) the destruction of walls for boundaries, and the invention of fosses -- an attempt then deemed so astonishing, that the common people called them Ha! Ha!s to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk." In fact, though, Charles Bridgeman (1680?-1738) could not have been the first to make use of this sunken fence, as it already was in use in Versailles before it appeared in England.  However, it appears to have become increasingly common in England in Jane Austen's time, enough so that she could safely assume her readers would be able to picture the obstruction posed by the ha-ha she references several times in Mansfield Park.  The woman writer Turner does quote, Hannah  More (p. 78) was already quoted by a prior biographer of the master gardener, Dorothy Stroud. She records what the writer said about here"friend Mr. Brown" who "illustrates everything he says about gardening by some literary or grammatical allusion." She said: "He told me he compared his art to literary composition. 'Now there,' pointing a finger, 'I make a comma, and there', pointing to another spot, 'where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon, at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis, now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.'” While Taylor doesn't like the literary take on landscaping, it strikes me as an inverse of what Austen said about her own writing in the expression about her own miniature scale. The quote comes from a letter to her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh: "What should I do with your strong, manly, vigorous sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?" Capability Brown's landscaping took a great deal of labor to produce subtle effects that could be appreciated many years later. The same can be said of Austen's novels.

                                                                                Related posts:

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Jane Austen's Heroines
Observations on Jane Austen's Emma
Love and Limerence in Jane Austen
Jane Austen at the Morgan
Three Janes, Two Governesses
Pride and Prejudice in Job Applications

French vs. American Style: the du Pont Estates in Delaware

Wife for sale in literature and real life

I'm currently in the middle of  Jane Austen's England by the husband and wife team of  Roya and Lesley Adkins. It's history made up a mix of documents, letters, and some references to Austen's writings, which is pretty easy to read for nonfiction, though I do sometimes tire of some of the details that seem to be thrown in simply because the documentation for them is on hand.

 While this book refers to a famous author to capture the attention of potential readers,  it ignores another one completely in recounting one way men sought to dissolve marriages without acts of Parliament -- by selling their wives. Though this practice was, in fact, illegal, it happened more than once.

Here's the account on pages. 17-18:

    One way of ending a wretched marriage was for a husband to sell his wife -- regarded as the poor man's divorce. Some sales were by consent of the wife, but at other times they were carried out against her will. Leaving a wife to a public place with a rope tied around her neck and then selling her, like an animal at market, was thought -- wrongly -- to be a legal and binding transaction, transferring the marriage to somebody else. Commentators considered wife-selling a barbaric practice, but it persisted to the late nineteenth century, and John Brand noted: "A remarkable superstition still prevails among the lowest of our Bulgar, that a man may lawfully sell his wife to another, provided he deliver her over with a halter about her neck.It is painful to observe, that instances of this occur frequently in our newspapers."

Two newspaper account of wife sales are cited. The second one also entails the sale of the couple's child in January 1815. It included a copy of the deed of sale:

"I, John Osborn, doth agree to part with my wife, Mary Osboren, and child, to William Sergeant, for the sum of one pound, in consideration of giving up all claim whatever, whereunto I have made my mark as acknowledgement."

What struck me most about these account is that absence of a reference to Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge.  In the novel, some of the guilt that pervades Hardy's work is the realization that the sale does not effectively dissolve the marriage. The shame of it is central to the plot.

In a Victorian Web post on the wife sale in the novel, Hardy's justification for the title character's wife going along with the sale is cited.

It may seem strange to sophisticated minds that a sane young matron could believe in the seriousness of such a transfer; and were there not numerous other instances of the same belief the thing might scarcely be credited. But she was by no means the first or last peasant woman who had religiously adhered to her purchaser, as too many rural records show.

A 1962  Macmillan edition included notes from  editors Andrew A. Orr and Vivian De Sola Pinto that attest to Hardy's having looked into wife sales in newspapers from the early 1800s:

Thomas Hardy had heard of such a case at Portland [not far from Dorchester, on the English Channel], and that it suggested this incident to him. In the "Observer" of March 24, 1833, the following extract from the "Blackburn Gazette" appeared: "Sale of a Wife--A grinder named Calton sold his wife publicly in the market place, Stockport, on Monday week. She was purchased by a shop-mate of the husband for a gallon of beer. The fair one, who had a halter round her neck, seemed quite agreeable."

Keith Wilson cites additional instance in the 1997 Penguin edition (revised in 2003). He observes  that Hardy copied into three such examples into his "Facts from Newspapers, Histories, Biographies, & other chronicles" notebook (now in the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester) One article describes a sale that takes place in the same time period as the sale in the novel:

one of these entries, dated 6 December 1827, is particularly relevant: 'Selling wife. At Buckland, nr. Frome, a labring [sic] man named Charles Pearce sold his wife to a shoemaker named Elton for £5, & delivered her in a halter in the public street. She seemed very willing. Bells rang.' See Christine Winfield, "Factual Sources of Two Episodes in The Mayor of Casterbridge(Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25 [1970], 224-31. (Page 328)

No halter  involved in the sale of The Mayor of Caterbridge.  In fact, the wife throws off her customary meekness in leaving he man who sold her to a complete stranger. She flings her ring off and throws it at him. She also expresses her expectation for a better future for herself and her daughter, having  had "nothing but temper" with her husband.

Related post:
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2013/06/jane-austens-heroines-from-extroverted.html

Happy (early) birthday, Shakespeare

I was wondering about April 23rd really being Shakespeare's birthday, given the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. I found that addressed at bloggingtherenaissance.blogspot.com

In fact, we don't have a record of Shakespeare's birth, though we do have one of his christening on April 26, 1564. The assumption is that he was born 3 days before that.  

However, April 23rd of 1564 was a date based on the Julian calendar. What's the effect of the shift to the Gregorian calendar?

The Julian calendar was made up of 365 1/4 days a year. It defined the dates of Europe from the days of Julius Caesar in 45 BCE through 15821 adding up to ten extra days by that time.  

That changed in 1852 when  Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar, subtracting those ten days with a massive leap forward. That year the day after October 4th was designated October 15th.  Talk about losing time!

England being England, though, and not considering itself subject to Catholic rule, adhered to the Julian calendar for nearly two more centuries. It only adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. 

By then an additon day was added on January 1, 1700. A day was also added 100 years later and 100 years after that. However, there was no additional day added in 2000.

According to the calculations of that blog, Shakespeare's April 23rd birthday actually translates into a May 3rd birthday in the Gregorian calendar.