Chapter in Bradbrook’S Jane

A FINE FAMILY PIECE: JANE AUSTEN’S PICTURESQUE REPRESENTATIONS

OF CHILDHOOD

A Thesis

Presented to the faculty of the Department of English

California State University, Sacramento

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

English

(Literature)

Kimberly Terry

SPRING 2020

Kimberly Terry

A FINE FAMILY PIECE: JANE AUSTEN’S PICTURESQUE REPRESENTATIONS

OF CHILDHOOD

A Thesis

Kimberly Terry

Approved by:

______, Committee Chair Jonas Cope

______, Second Reader Nancy Sweet

______Date

iii

Student: Kimberly Terry

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and this thesis is suitable for electronic submission to the library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis.

______, Graduate Coordinator______Doug Rice Date

Department of Department of English

Abstract

A FINE FAMILY PIECE: JANE AUSTEN’S PICTURESQUE REPRESENTATIONS

OF CHILDHOOD

Kimberly Terry

In the twenty-first century, there is burgeoning interest in Jane Austen and children. The last decade has seen increasing production of Austen’s fiction for children including various board books for young readers and the Awesomely Austen:

Illustrated and Retold series currently being released. In the last four-year period, at least three Austen biographies were published for children. In 2010, Austen critic and scholar, David Selwyn produced a book-length study aptly titled Jane Austen and

Children. Overall, Selwyn’s book makes use of the “new” historicist methodology using Austen’s work as an entry point in which to explore various socio-cultural aspects of childhood during her period. His work is thoroughly researched and provides an illuminating and comprehensive view of many facets of childhood during

Austen’s time but unfortunately focuses mostly on texts other than Austen’s. Still, it seems that critic and consumer alike see Austen and children as intimately connected.

This is a provocative trend as the majority of critics agree with Christopher Ricks when he wrote that Jane Austen “disliked babies and didn’t blankly like children”

(90). Those critics focus intently on the Austen children who, like the meddlesome

Middleton children in Sense and Sensibility, disrupt all tranquility and behave, to borrow Selwyn’s phrase, like “brute beasts.” This study focuses on a small subset of

Austenian children who, unlike their loud disobedient cousins, are relatively well behaved, are rarely allowed intelligible speech, and slip in virtually unnoticed by the casual reader. Austen writes these children in terms of or alongside allusions to eighteenth-century pictorial arts. By observing how Austen’s “picturesque children” function in her fiction, readers can better understand Austen’s suppressed Romantic reverence toward the concept of childhood and adds critical evidence to the argument that Austen was indeed engaged with the Romantic movement.

______, Committee Chair Jonas Cope

______Date

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Professor Jonas Cope and Professor Nancy Sweet for their generosity, patience, and sage advice; this project would not be possible without their kindness and unwavering support.

To my husband, Dr. Douglas Terry, MD., who convinced me years ago that education is the best salve for a wounded spirit.

Finally, this thesis is dedicated to my nine-year-old daughter, Ivy Terry, who is my foremost teacher and shows me daily that one’s perception of childhood is the greatest metric of the human heart.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page

Acknowledgements ...... vii

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION……………....…………………………………………………………1

2. ROLLING DOWN THE GREEN SLOPE: GEORGE MORLAND AND THE IMAGE

OF CHILDHOOD IN JANE AUSTEN’S NORTHANGER ABBEY ...... 15

3. CAPTIVATING THE IMAGINATION: JOSHUA REYNOLDS’ PORTRAITS OF

CHILDHOOD IN AUSTEN’S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE ...... 36

4. POOR LITTLE INNOCENT: AN AESTHETIC INTERPRETATION OF

FANNY PRICE ...... 53

5. CONCLUSION ...... 68

Works Cited...... 74

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A Fine Family Piece: Jane Austen’s Picturesque Representations of Childhood

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

The cheerfulness of children added a relish to his existence. - Sense and Sensibility

Though not the very happiest being in the world herself, [she] had found enough in … her children, to attach her to life. - Persuasion

The children in Jane Austen’s fiction are elusive creatures indeed. One strains to remember if there are any children at all. The children who do come to mind are ill- behaved and make a great deal of clatter. At worst, the children in her novels have been loud, spoiled, and disobedient. They have displaced widows and have acted as conduits for insipid and superficial conversation among vapid characters. If one recalls an image of children at all, it is surely the meddlesome Middleton brats who make a ruckus and disrupt all tranquility at Barton Park. But these noisy, ill-behaved creatures are only one such representation of children within Austen’s work. There are other children who slip in virtually unnoticed by the casual reader. Rarely allowed intelligible speech, they are often seen in merely a glimmer and are gone as quickly as they arrived. They are, at times, left unnamed, and we are not privy to their interior consciousness, leaving them flat characters. Whether silent or noisy, fixed or in motion, named or unnamed, these

Austenian children are abstract entities – not meant to be characters at all, but instead intended to represent an ideal; as such, they stand apart among Austen’s fictional characters for the mere fact of their “otherness.” What are these flat characters doing in

a work by a novelist who so brilliantly subsumes her own identity to create such vivid and realistic characters? What could Austen mean by incorporating such abstract images into her fiction? How does one begin to make sense of Austenian children considering her real-life adoration of children and their childhood games?1 With the social revolution in family dynamics, the explosion of the “Cult of Childhood,” and the on-going debates on education during the latter part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a reader of Austen may consider just how to situate these fictional depictions of children and her representations of childhood within the context of this social phenomenon. This study initially begins with this question.

Considering the weight and the importance of this major literary and cultural revolution, one which occurred simultaneously alongside Austen’s writing, we must pause momentarily and put aside discussions of Austen’s children and focus on contemporary views of childhood in general. I would be remiss in omitting a review of the social shift surrounding the ways in which children were viewed in the eighteenth- century, as it will inform this study. To be brief, and as a consequence, reductive, we can say that the cultural phenomena began with the debate between John Locke’s Some

Thoughts Concerning Education and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. Locke’s seminal treatise on education, originally published in 1693, famously views the child as a

1 Austen was deeply loved by the children around her. The so-call spinster aunt was the favorite of her nieces and nephews and always joined in their games. Austen’s niece Caroline writes that “her charm to children was great sweetness of manner – she seemed to love you and you loved her naturally in return … Everything she could make amusing to a child … she would tell us the most delightful stories, chiefly of Fairyland, and her Fairies had all characters of their own” (5). According to Caroline, “in addressing a child, she was perfect” (10). Further, Austen was the aunt whom the children “looked [to] for help-She would furnish us with what we wanted from her wardrobe, and she would often be the entertaining visitor in our make believe house-She amused us in various ways” (10).

“tabula rasa,” a blank slate onto which knowledge and morals can be imprinted. Locke believes that “there is no knowledge… no truths cognizable by the mind’s inward light, and grounded on intuitive evidence” (Coveney 39). To Locke, all knowledge is grounded in experience. Furthermore, Locke “seldom considered the nature of the child as a child. Treated as a small adult, the child was to be trained out of his childish ways into the moral and rational perfection of regulated manhood” (Coveney 40-1). To

Locke, reason is the highest good, and children can be reasoned into adulthood.

As a counterpoint to Locke’s treatise, Rousseau published Emile in 1762.

Rousseau states that the child is born innocent and is only corrupted through its contact with society. Instead of being “trained out of his childish ways” and reasoned with as if an adult, Rousseau says that “if children understood reason, they would not need to be raised” (222). His point is that a child is not capable of reasoning like an adult; to

Rousseau, a child is an altogether different creature. He goes on to say that “nature wants children to be children before they are men. If we want to pervert this order, we shall produce precocious fruits which will be immature and insipid and will not be long in rotting” (222). Rousseau’s child is to be educated, not in a school-room, but out in the country air and through their own sensations (208). Rousseau’s treatise was hugely popular, and as a result, Emile was translated into English only a year after its initial publication.

The debate between Locke and Rousseau initiated further discussion on the nature of childhood and the means of education. This phenomenon, widely termed the

“Cult of Childhood,” extends beyond Locke and Rousseau. Beginning before and

continuing after Rousseau’s Emile, we find a cultural and consumerist explosion of toys and literature geared towards children. In The History of Toys, Antonia Fraser says that in the eighteenth-century “one is immediately conscious of a change in atmosphere in the world of toys” (90), and this decade is “a time of fashionable pleasure and elegant frivolity in the way of playthings” (108). She says the nineteenth-century is “marked by a rapid development in the number and variety of toys, which spread far beyond those toys which can strictly be described as educational” (142). John Newbery had already begun specializing in children’s literature in 1744; despite Rousseau’s suggestion that children should not read, writers continued to churn out books aimed at this newfound market (Barbour). Anna Laetitia Barbauld not only wrote the highly successful Lessons for Children in 1778 and Hymns in Prose for Children in 1781, but she also revolutionized how children’s books were printed. She insisted on large and clear print to make reading more suitable for young readers (Zipes 135). Mary Wollstonecraft’s book for children, Original Stories from Real Life, published in 1788, was so successful that the author was “able to live by her pen” (Zipes 2080). Maria and Richard

Edgeworth wrote Practical Education Vol. I in 1798, attempting to combine the theories of Locke with Rousseau. The late eighteenth-century also saw the first attempts to legislate education for the lower classes on a mass scale (Richardson 3). Childhood was finally and permanently viewed as a unique phase of life.

But it is Rousseau’s image of the child, unfettered by what Rousseau termed a

“domestic education,” and his immensely popular treatise, that “laid the foundations for the works of William Blake, [and] William Wordsworth” (Kummerling-Meibauer 184).

It is this image of Rousseau’s “natural child” which gave rise to the retrospectively termed “Romantic child.” This image is typically linked with the natural world, imagination, creativity, divinity, and vitality, but also to “savagery and sensuality”

(187). The writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge, along with other Romantic poets, firmly solidified the child-image as a social force capable of eliciting the emotional response necessary to pass legislation in the highest of courts. Pattison links the Factory

Acts of 1847, which sought to limit children in factories and provide for their education, to the image of the Romantic child put forth by Blake and Wordsworth (71-3).

In short, Wordsworth and Blake, inspired by the competing educational theories of Locke and Rousseau, helped usher in a cultural phenomenon regarding how children are viewed, treated, and represented, and that phenomenon reverberates to this day.

There is no doubt that Austen, a notoriously keen observer of her own society, was acutely aware of this broad social shift. Austen illustrates her knowledge of this cultural movement early in her writing career in Sense and Sensibility when the hyper- fashionable Lucy and Anne Steele arrive in high style at the Middleton estate with a

“whole coach full of playthings for the children” (87). The Steele sisters have no children of their own and use the Middleton children to gain Lady Middleton’s approval; Austen shows us, in satirizing the sycophantic sisters, just how in vogue the

Cult of Childhood really was. Austen is not satirizing the toys themselves as she would have enjoyed a “couch full of playthings.” Still, because the Steele sisters are so fashionable, Austen demonstrates her awareness of the consumerist trend.

In Sense and Sensibility, the Middleton children reciprocate the Steele sisters’

“generosity” by behaving monstrously toward them, and the scene is a prime example of how most readers recall Austen’s treatment of her fictional children (88). It is no surprise then that there has been a critical discussion as to whether Jane Austen actually hated children. Austen’s early biographer and great-niece, Mary Augusta Austen-

Leigh, acknowledged the debate in 1920, stating that it began within “the first half- century that followed her death.” Austen-Leigh calls her aunt’s supposed dislike of children “mistaken rumours” and assumes that “no supposition could have been further from the truth” (111). Even so, this idea persists.

In 1978, David Grylls, who seems somewhat hostile to Austen’s fiction, admits that “[i]t is difficult to extract a ‘philosophy’, a consistent outlook on parents and children, from a writer… so subtle and fine-woven as Jane Austen” (111). Yet he goes on to say that Austen’s children are “pre-romantic, [that Austen] reveals in her fiction little belief in the wisdom or innocence of children and what she prizes most in young people is obedience and respect” (130). In other words, in Grylls’ estimation, Austen feels her fictional children are much better seen and not heard. Similarly, Christopher

Ricks writes in 1996 that “Jane Austen disliked babies and didn’t blankly like children”

(90). Isobel Armstrong writes that Austen’s dislike of children is “violent and intense”

(qtd. in Farnsworth 129), and Farnsworth himself describes Austen’s feelings about children as “open dislike” (125). The myth of Austen as the disgruntled, spinster Aunt continues still.

In the twenty-first-century, a newspaper article published in London’s Financial

Times in December of 2003, “No longer very Jane Austen: Christmas at Home: Our

Homes have become increasingly child-centred,” perpetuates this idea that Austen cared little for children. Times columnist, Caroline McGhie says of the eighteenth century: “it wasn’t very unusual for children to be farmed out – almost given away like spare kittens

… Jane [Austen] herself was placed at birth with a woman in the village” (14). McGhie goes on to quote Austen’s biographer, Claire Tomalin, who writes in Jane Austen, A

Life that “the Austen babies were cared for in the village, fed, washed, encouraged to crawl in a cottage, taking their first steps there and learning their first words from their foster family. When they approached the age of reason and became socially acceptable, they were moved again, back to their original home” (14). The implication is that during

Austen’s time, children weren’t considered acceptable companions until they became reasonable, rational, and well-behaved adults. McGhie implies that Austen would agree.

The article, written in Austenian satirical mode, begrudges twenty-first-century children who have, (supposedly) unlike those eighteenth-century children, taken

“centre-stage.” She says that “the five-year-old is likely to have chosen the tree (which is why it is too big)… and the young will sprawl on the sofas displaying their enormous feet while the adults pray they are enjoying themselves” (14). While McGhie may be employing historically accurate facts about Jane Austen’s life, she is ignoring Austen’s textual depictions of children. The above “child-centered” scene is an image one could

imagine Austen writing, and therefore McGhie’s current vision of our contemporary

“Christmas at Home” is, in fact, very Jane Austen indeed.

To be sure, as most critics contend, and most readers recall, within Austen’s novels, the children are often depicted as noisy and disruptive, rude, self-involved, and disobedient. It seems most critics assume that these depictions are the result of Austen’s dislike of children. They presume, in an era in which the child was to become a highly romanticized figure of literature, and in which childhood itself was to develop into a widely recognized psycho-social phenomenon, that Austen’s writing is counter to such

Romantic tropes. On the surface, Austen’s attitude does seem to suggest a Lockean need for obedience and discipline.

Other critics explain away Austen’s rough treatment of her literary children.

They instead find the children to be nothing more than a structural necessity. Birgitta

Berglund admits that the concept of childbirth is a concern in all of Austen’s novels and is “much more important ... than might appear at first sight” (84). She goes on to say that while “children are intriguingly elusive presences … one way in which they are particularly interesting and important is within an economic framework, as heirs of estates” (87). While Berglund is correct in her reading - the idea of primogeniture was certainly consistently on Austen’s mind - Berglund is reductive, dismissing children just as readily as pre-eighteenth-century English society. Berglund views Austen’s children as a cog in the patriarchal families’ monetary wheel; they are reduced to monetary values.

In 2010, David Selwyn produced a book-length study on the subject aptly titled

Jane Austen and Children. Selwyn sides with neither camp; he says that by the late eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, children came to be seen as either “an autonomous group capable of rational thought and behavior” or “brute beasts,” and to understand Austen’s view of children it becomes “necessary to negotiate this contradiction” (1). He seems to side with Grylls’ assertion that one cannot “extract a

‘philosophy’” from Austen on children. When it comes to Austen’s children, Selwyn concludes they have but one of three functions: to provide comic relief, to reveal aspects of the adult characters, or to serve basic plot devices. He states that “if any general point can be made about Jane Austen’s expectations of children, it is that if they are not kept under control they will behave in a very disorderly way and make a great deal of noise” (74). While this may sometimes be true, Selwyn’s generalized statement is dismissive of an array of relatively well-behaved, voiceless children that inhabit

Austen’s work.

Overall, Selwyn’s book makes use of the “new” historicist methodology using

Austen’s work as an entry point in which to explore various socio-cultural aspects of childhood during her period. His work is thoroughly researched and provides an illuminating and comprehensive view of many facets of childhood during Austen’s time; however, most of the work focuses on texts other than Austen’s. That an Austen scholar such as Selwyn devotes an entire book to the subject suggests a burgeoning

interest in the area of Austen and children,2 yet the historicist method leaves one desirous for a more text-centered analysis.

Perhaps the most thoughtful and provocative critic concerned with Austenian children is Juliet McMaster, Austen scholar and illustrator of Austen’s juvenilia piece,

The Beautifull Cassandra (1993). In her article, Children in Emma, McMaster suggests that Austen, like Mr. Knightley, “loses her bitterness against spoilt children” (66).

McMaster believes that Austen grew out of her earlier opinion of children. Where

Austen once considered children as small and loud nuisances, she later forms a

Romantic perspective and sees them as blessed creatures. When Frank Churchill and

Jane Fairfax’s engagement is accidentally exposed through the children’s game of alphabet, McMaster says that “in one demonstrable way Jane Austen approaches the

Wordsworthian view of child as close to God, and a source of wisdom” (65). In another article, “Jane Austen’s Children,” McMaster eloquently defends the author’s stance toward children arguing that Austen’s satire is directed toward overly indulgent parents and not the children at all. Furthermore, she states that “children hold a special place in

2 There has been a recent slew of children’s books published on Austen, including two Austen biographies published in 2018. Ordinary, Extraordinary Jane Austen was written by Deborah Hopkinson and illustrated by Qin Leng and Brave Jane Austen: Reader, Writer, Author, Rebel was written by Lisa Pliscou and illustrated by Jen Corace. The first three books in The Awesomely Austen: Illustrated and Retold series (Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion) was published by Hodder Children’s Books and released November 2019. Hodder’s Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility was released April 2nd, 2020. Further, there has been multiple “board books” – books geared toward very young children in which the pages are pasted onto thick cardboard – published in the last decade. The Little Miss Austen series by Jennifer Adams and Alison Oliver published Pride and Prejudice: A Counting Primer in 2011, Sense and Sensibility: An Opposites Primer in 2013, and Emma: An Emotions Primer in 2015. So many children’s books surrounding Austen and her work suggests that Selwyn was not off target; critic and consumer alike see Austen and children as intimately connected.

[Austen’s] fiction, as mediators and peacemakers, as characters in their own right, and as moral tests for the adults around them.” She then goes on to catalogue various occurrences of children within the Austen oeuvre.

While McMaster gives Austen’s textual children more significant consideration than they have previously received, her analysis unfortunately mostly catalogues the instances in which Austen’s children appear, and she completely ignores those children who seemingly do not contribute to the narrative in any substantial way. Most importantly, based upon this study, I disagree with McMaster’s assertion that Austen

“grew” into a Romantic view on children and seek to show that Austen held this opinion from as early as her “Steventon” writing.

In order to do so, it is important to analyze those quiet children who show themselves in merely a glimmer, the ones so easily forgotten. In my opinion, critics are only skirting the surface of these perplexing entities. Instead of attempting to find concrete roles for Austen’s children as McMaster and others have done, roles like

“peacemaker,” “mediator,” or “noise-polluter,” I suggest it be acknowledged that this subset of Austen’s fictional children are indeed highly abstracted entities; they are by no means “characters in their own right.” As abstract beings, they lack rounded, in-depth characterizations that are distinctive of novel-esque realism. We are never privileged with their interior consciousness (except for young Fanny). They often lack names altogether and, unless servilely conveying messages, only occasionally are they allowed intelligible speech. On occasion, Austen catalogues children along with inanimate objects. In such instances, Austen invites us to view those children as part of the

landscape. Finally, and most significantly, Austen’s children are frequently portrayed in terms of or alongside allusions to eighteenth-century pictorial arts, usually that of portraiture or of “fancy pictures.”3 This last point cannot be stressed too strongly as it will become the basis of this study. Because of Austen’s tendency to pair images of childhood with suggestions of the pictorial arts, I will furthermore refer to these images as “Austen’s picturesque child.”

Because of the potential for ambiguity in meaning, it is important to unpack what is meant by “picturesque.” The term was popularized during Austen’s period, but its definition was and is not static. Wark says that “the word ‘picturesque’ has almost as many different shades of meaning in eighteenth-century England as has the term

“nature” (107). Needless to say, this problematic variation in meaning can lead to ambiguities and misunderstandings. To avoid such misunderstandings, it should be noted that I am not using the term to refer to its more specialized meaning regarding aesthetics. The specialized definition, which indicates “an interest in irregularity, ruggedness, rusticity, intricacy, singularity, and chiaroscuro” (Duro), may apply to these images; however, I will be using the generalized meaning. Wark says of this generalized definition: “in its broadest sense it meant simply those qualities in a scene or object that appealed to the eye of a painter, and looked well in a painting” (107).

When using the term “picturesque child,” I refer to the pictorial quality of the Austenian

3 This term was popularized in eighteenth-century England and used to describe contemporary genre pictures in which the artist freely used his imagination as opposed to strict realism. Mannings states that “the usual subjects for fancy pictures are children and young women.”

images. As if Austen had been looking at children through a claude glass,4 these picturesque children are reminiscent of those found in the pictorial arts of the eighteenth-century. The Cult of Childhood made its impact on this popular art form, and throughout this study, we will investigate how those changes made their way into

Austen’s writing.

In Chapter Two, I will examine the image of the heroines’ little brother and sister, George and Harriet, in Northanger Abbey. Chapter Three will investigate the images of the Gardiner children in Pride and Prejudice, as well as the verbal “portrait” of Darcy as a child given by Pemberley housekeeper, Mrs. Reynolds. Chapter Four seeks to find similarities between the image of Austen’s fictionalized Fanny Price and a painting done by Joshua Reynolds of a young girl with the same name. Finally, I will conclude with a brief image – “a fine family piece” - found in Austen’s final completed novel, Persuasion.

We may end this introduction to consider the academic value in such an investigation. What can we expect to find in identifying similarities in abstract, picturesque images of children within Austen’s work? I began examining these images as a means to better understand the author’s perspective toward children and childhood without relying too heavily on letters that may have been written in jest and hoped to vindicate Austen’s image as that disgruntled spinster-aunt. Throughout this study, I found that Austen’s picturesque images of children often act as a way to measure the

4 A somewhat convex dark or coloured hand-mirror, used to concentrate the features of a landscape in subdued tones. Sometimes applied to coloured glasses through which a landscape, etc. is viewed (OED).

emotional growth of her heroines, and they frequently foretell picturesque unions with the heroes. I believe that while Austen writes individual children with her signature ambiguity, at times invoking Locke, sometimes invoking Rousseau, her picturesque children reveal the author’s true, perhaps even subconscious, Romantic reverence toward the abstract concept of childhood itself.

Chapter 2

ROLLING DOWN THE GREEN SLOPE: GEORGE MORLAND AND THE

IMAGE OF CHILDHOOD IN JANE AUSTEN’S NORTHANGER ABBEY

When one considers Jane Austen, one doesn’t immediately think of children; one is more inclined to think of the image of a spinster writer who refused both conventions of marriage and motherhood, but Jane Austen and the children who inhabited her life were intimately attached. As a woman so connected to her siblings’ children and one who writes so convincingly of the world around her, it is no surprise that, if one pays attention, children are ever-present within her fiction. Children litter the pages of Austen’s novels, often setting the tone and driving the action. But the

Austenian children who move the plot forward are of a different nature from those

Austenian children who exist as abstract entities, neither driving the action nor providing commentary on the state of motherhood or the moral character of those around them. There is a virtually unnoticed subset of “picturesque” children who are offered up alongside allusions to, or in terms of, the changing face of pictorial arts in the eighteenth century. Because of a burgeoning interest in the subject of Austen and children, these intriguingly abstract images of children require further consideration.

Austen’s first “Steventon” novel is ostensibly a bildungsroman, or a coming of age story, which centers around a young woman, Catherine Morland. Catherine takes her first trip away from her rural home and family when she reaches the age of sixteen visiting the fashionable resort town of Bath and then venturing to the Tilney household,

Northanger Abbey. Catherine has previously lived a sheltered existence, so her new

experiences with the outside world forces her to mature rapidly. As a result, this coming-of-age tale spans only a short timeframe. By the end of the novel, Catherine is expelled from the Tilney household – through no fault of her own – and returns to her family home, dejected, but no longer the naïve girl she had been. In order to signify

Catherine’s maturity, Austen employs the use of the “picturesque child,” the image of young children at the cottage door, alongside an allusion to one of the most famous painters of the time, George Morland (1763-1804), which calls to mind the doctrines of

Rousseau and adds sentimentality to the scene. Catherine Morland’s younger brother

George appears at a time in which Catherine is at her emotional low point in the novel, and the picturesque image of her little brother and sister welcoming her home provides the emotional relief she requires. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, they signal Catherine’s emotional growth and newfound maturity, and they prophetically foretell Catherine’s picturesque marriage.

Before delving into Northanger Abbey, it is important to establish Austen’s tendency to write in a “painterly” manner and her frequent usage of the language of the pictorial arts. We must also pause to acknowledge that there has been a history of critical commentary on Austen’s interest in and use of the pictorial arts within her fiction. During Austen’s lifetime, her contemporary, the celebrated Walter Scott, wrote in his 1815 review of Emma that “The author’s knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents her characters… remind us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which

delights the reader” (qtd. in Byrne 9). Scott’s point is not to compare Austen’s work with that of particular pictorial images, something which I will do. Scott is merely acknowledging that Austen’s characterizations are truthful representations of reality. He is, of course, not thinking of Austen’s representations of children, but the point is that for Scott, and many critics after him, Austen’s writing conjures up the sister-art of painting.

One possible reason that critics often discuss Austen alongside the pictorial arts is that Austen herself had an amateur interest in the art form. Even before Scott wrote his essay-review of Emma, Austen wrote home about her frequent visits to art galleries in the great metropolis of London. Both critics and biographers discuss Austen’s trip to

London in the spring of 1813 when Austen wrote home to Cassandra about various galleries she attended. On May 24, Austen wrote a letter to Cassandra regarding an exhibition in Spring Gardens; she found a “small portrait of Mrs. Bingley … exactly herself, size, shaped face, features & sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her” (qtd. in Le Faye 212). In the same letter, Austen tells Cassandra of her visit to the exhibition on Pall Mall featuring works from the famous portraitist, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Austen cheekily wrote to her sister Cassandra that she went to the Reynolds exhibit to look for a painting of Mrs. Darcy. Unlike the “Mrs. Bingley,” Austen did not find the likeness of Elizabeth

Darcy (213).

That letter to Cassandra sparked a relatively recent web innovation: a virtual museum exhibition of the very same Austen attended in May of 1813. The professor who led the project, Janine Barchas, says “it’s the closest thing to time travel on the

Web” (qtd. in Schuessler np). The website, which went live on the two-hundred anniversary of Austen’s visit to the museum, has reconstructed the exhibition that was the “first commemorative museum show dedicated to a single artist, and perhaps the first modern blockbuster.” Modern-day visitors to the website can wander through the halls of the British Institution and peruse the exhibition virtually looking through the eyes of Jane Austen. Further, they can click on any given painting and discover its history. Three years later, the website added the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery from

1796. The website’s purveyors openly acknowledge that there is no direct evidence that

Austen saw this particular exhibit; however, they assert that “it seems inconceivable that her relatives would not take the budding writer, theatre enthusiast, and devoted

Shakespeare fan to tour the sensational Shakespeare Gallery.” It appears that everyone sees reason to place Austen and the pictorial arts squarely together.

Scott in 1815 and Janine Barchas in 2013 are not the only critics to consider

Austen as connected to the pictorial arts. In 1966, an entire chapter in Bradbrook’s Jane

Austen and Her Predecessors is dedicated to Austen’s knowledge of William Gilpin’s theories of the picturesque. Bradbrook carefully outlines instances in which Austen’s familiarity with Gilpin is particularly obvious, he speculates on how Austen may have extrapolated Gilpin’s theories on painting into her own writing and points out areas in which her knowledge of the picturesque falls short. In a similar move, twenty years

later, John Dixon Hunt provides a chapter titled “The Picturesque” in The Jane Austen

Companion. Both Bradbrook and Hunt cite Henry Austen’s “Biographical Notice” in the posthumous first edition of Persuasion in which Austen’s brother says the author was “enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque” from “a very early age” (qtd in

Bradbook 50; qtd. in Hunt 326). This notice was written on December 20, 1817, just five months after the author’s death. Critics frequently discuss Elizabeth Bennet’s rebuke to Mrs. Hurst, Miss Bingley, and Darcy when asked to join their walk. She says

“No, no: stay where you are. – you are charmingly group’d, and appear to uncommon advantage. The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth” (36). Austen was surely making a joke of Gilpin’s assertion that “[t]wo cows will hardly combine. Three make a good group” (254). The point is that Austen understood contemporary art theory and used it readily within her writing.

Far more recently, we find a slew of articles on Austen’s use of portraiture in

Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma.5 Few critics, however, handle

Austen’s use of the pictorial arts beyond this popular art form, but one provocative article suggests that Austen’s allusion to Gilpin “may encourage us to look for a less likely connection: one between Jane Austen and George Stubbs” (Duckworth 55).

While Stubbs was indeed a portraitist, like many other painters, he also painted rural landscapes. The two possible Austenian allusions Duckworth suggests are of a phaeton,

5 In particular, Jeffrey Nigro’s “Reading Portraits at Pemberley;” Kazuko Hisamori’s “Facing a Portrait of the “Lover:” Frankenstein’s Monster and the Heroines of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice;” Alexander Bove’s “The “Unbearable Realism of a Dream”: On the Subject of Portraits in Austen and Dickens;” and Joe Bray’s “The Language of Portraiture in the Early Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Study in Opie and Austen” and “Belinda, Emma, and the “Likeness” of the Portrait.”

the other of an ox. Duckworth observes that Stubbs’ Phaeton with a Pair of Cream

Ponies and a Stable Lad (c. 1780-85) provides illustration to the Gardiner’s visit to the grounds at Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice (56). He also argues that in Emma, the heroine teases Mr. Knightley about “some famous ox” (326); Duckworth asserts that the ox in question is George Stubbs’ The Lincolnshire Ox (61). Austen’s interest in the pictorial arts is well documented and, although Duckworth admits that his suggestions are speculative, due to its popularity, it is likely that Austen at least saw Stubbs’s The

Lincolnshire Ox. Duckworth does ultimately negate his own assertion:

it may not matter too much whether the speculations of this essay are persuasive.

No proof exists that Austen was thinking of Stubb’s paintings … Stubb’s

paintings of phaetons and of the Lincolnshire Ox nevertheless evoke the

different worlds of Pride and Prejudice and Emma; they help present-day

readers visualize the world of privilege and beauty that Elizabeth Bennet enters

and the rougher and more practical agrarian world in which Emma Woodhouse

finally discovers opportunities for responsible activity. (66)

But what if Austen was thinking of Stubbs? If not Stubbs in particular, perhaps she was thinking of other paintings with similar subject matter. These types of “genre” paintings were hugely popular during Austen’s time, and she surely saw many in her gallery expeditions. The article leads one to question: just as Austen wrote from real life, did she also use her love of and interest in the pictorial arts as another reference point from which to write? Did she do so in particular reference to children, and if so,

why? Does this tell us anything new about Austen’s view, not only of children, but of childhood itself?

In “Artistic Names in Austen’s Fiction: Cameo Appearances by Prominent

Painters,” Barchas begins by stating that “the so-called ‘sister art’” of painting is only softly invoked in Jane Austen’s novels … where [it] augment[s] the author’s literary project with language momentarily borrowed from contemporary painterly discourse”

(145). Barchas states that it is Austen’s “habit of mind” to play with names within her writing, and she “neatly invokes the sister art of painting through an allusive name”

(146). Barchas begins the article with the obvious allusion found in Pride and Prejudice in which Austen names the Pemberley housekeeper after the famous Sir Joshua

Reynolds (which I will discuss in detail in chapter three). She goes on to say that another painterly allusion is found in Northanger Abbey in the form Catherine

Morland’s kid-brother, an eager six-year-old child named George Morland. During

Austen’s time, the real-life George Morland was an immensely prolific painter who

Barchas identifies as a “popular landscape and genre painter” (146). Barrel says of

Morland: “[he] was the most prolific, and therefore probably the most popular, painter of the life of rural England … in the whole history of English painting” (89). Barchas states that Austen’s sister Cassandra made several copies of Morland’s paintings; therefore, it is highly unlikely that Austen’s allusion is accidental. George Morland was famous for his “Cottage Door Paintings” first popularized by Gainsborough (1727-

1788), and Barchas explains that these popular paintings were “domestic scenes of sentiment-laden homecoming and departure acted out on the thresholds of rural

domiciles” (151). It is no coincidence then that Austen uses this sly allusion at the precise moment that Catherine Morland is returning home to her family, and they literally greet her at the cottage door.

Barchas argues that the allusion is more than a joke for the benefit of sister

Cassandra and asserts that Austen uses these “cheeky references … when the particular form of art practiced by the named artist … plays an interpretive role in the fiction”

(146). She states that George Morland’s “name appears in a novel where visual aesthetics, landscape, and the picturesque are expressly discussed” (146), and Barchas suggests that Henry Tilney’s Beechen Cliff lecture on the picturesque is an ironic joke that Morland’s “saccharine” art is as unbelievable as the Gothicism of Radcliff (153).

Furthermore, she states that “Morland’s name may serve as a visual antidote of sorts to the Gothic” (151). The image of Catherine’s snug Fullerton home is the antithesis to both the Gothic Northanger Abbey of Catherine’s imagination and General Tilney’s modernized version. While I certainly agree that Austen was not merely making the allusion as a joke to entertain Cassandra, I do not believe that the reference was used only to highlight the discussion of visual aesthetics within landscape painting. Barchas seems to be more on target with her suggestion that the Morland name acts as a contrast to that of the gothic elements in the novel. But, Barchas is disinterested in children in general and is instead concerned with the broader subject of aesthetics. I believe that

Austen’s pictorial allusions associated with children have greater significance within

Austen’s work overall.

Another way to interpret the Morland allusion in Northanger Abbey is to use it as an entrance point to which we can view many of Austen’s images of children in particular. If we look at multiple images from several novels, novels that span a composition period of roughly twenty years, a pattern emerges. There is a subset of children who are frequently portrayed in terms of pictorial art and are the idealized, sentimentalized images prevalent of the period. The ways in which children were being represented in pictorial form changed rapidly during the period, and Austen had her finger on the pulse of these changes. She demonstrated her understanding of the commercialization of the Cult of Childhood in her novel Sense and Sensibility in a scene which she uses to satirize the Steele sisters,6 but this smaller subset of Austen’s picturesque children indicate another way that Austen’s writing was influenced by the era’s romanticization of the child image. These abstract images of childhood – unlike that other unruly subset of Austenian children - often sentimentalize the scene and provide emotional relief to Austen’s heroines, and the image of little George Morland is perhaps the most important instance of this. These children act as a metric for which the heroine’s emotional growth can be measured, and they also contain a prophetic quality, often foretelling the heroine’s future.

Consider the scene in which Austen names George Morland. The passage begins with a series of visual representations and occurs just after Catherine Morland is thrust out of the Tilney household – otherwise known as Northanger Abbey. Up until this

6 See chapter one (4-5)

time, Catherine had been a most welcome visitor and a good friend to the Tilney daughter. Without explanation, the head of the household, General Tilney, expels her from the home. We later discover that he has learned of Catherine’s family’s true financial and social standing, and he reasons that a poor, rural girl such as Catherine is not suited to associate with his aristocratic family. The General dismisses Catherine from the household without explanation, civility, or dignity, and she returns to her rural home in Fullerton in a rented carriage, something which would have been mortifying for a girl in Catherine’s situation. Austen writes:

I bring back my heroine to her home in solitude and disgrace; and no sweet

elation of spirits can lead me into minuteness. A heroine in a hack-post-chaise,

is such a blow upon sentiment, as no attempt at grandeur or pathos can

withstand. Swiftly therefore shall her post-boy drive through the village, amid

the gaze of Sunday groups. (160)

It is significant that the section begins with the relatively rare Austenian first-person narrator. This narrative intrusion not only allows for Austen’s signature satire, but it is also strategic and effective in taking the focus off Catherine. Instead, the reader is confronted with visual imagery: a hack-post-chaise, a post-boy driving through a village, villagers standing in groups, anything but Catherine. Austen does not make use of free indirect discourse in this passage which would have allowed the reader access to

Catherine’s consciousness. Instead, she uses an unusually strong narrative voice. In doing so, the focus is placed upon the scene that Austen paints for her audience. The passage continues:

The whole family were immediately at the window; and to have it stop at the

sweep-gate was a pleasure to brighten every eye and occupy every fancy – a

pleasure quite unlooked for by all but the two youngest children, a boy and girl

of six and four years old, who expected a brother or sister in every carriage.

Happy the glance that first distinguished Catherine! – Happy the voice that

proclaimed the discovery! – But whether such happiness were the lawful

property of George or Harriet could never be exactly understood.

Her father, mother, Sarah, George, and Harriet, all assembled at the door, To

welcome her with affectionate eagerness, was a sight to awaken the best feelings

of Catherine’s heart … she found herself soothed beyond any thing that she had

believed possible. (160-1)

Both of the above passages emphasize visual experience. First, in the “gaze of the

Sunday groups,” then in the outward gaze of the family at the window, and finally in

Catherine’s view of her family “all assembled at the door.” The pictorial allusion of the

Morland name paired with Austen’s emphasis on visual experience is suggestive. It is the act of being looked at, and the act of looking for others, that Austen quietly highlights. Catherine, we are told by the narrator, comes home in “disgrace” and as a means to ameliorate Catherine’s mortification, the post-boy drives quickly through the village (160). The implication is that Catherine wishes to remain unseen by the townsfolk, and Austen allows her heroine this dispensation; the ensuing passage places the family, not Catherine, as the focal point.

At the center of that focal point are George and Harriet. Their jubilant cries bring the family to stand at the cottage window looking outward, but there is an odd sort of topsy-turvy feeling to this image. As the family looks outward toward Catherine’s carriage, they become the object that we, the reader, and Catherine, view. The grouping of individuals is framed first by the window pane, then by the doorway; as such, they are presented much like a painting and is suggestive of the pictorial arts, particularly, as

Barchas points out, those cottage door paintings made famous by Thomas

Gainsborough and then “wildly popular” by George Morland (Wyburn-Powell 61).

There seems to be a dearth of information specifically on Morland’s cottage door images; therefore, it is useful, perhaps even necessary, to include commentary on

Gainsborough’s “The Cottage Door” as a method to assess the meaning behind

Austen’s cottage door allusion to George Morland.7 Wark acknowledges the relationship between Gainsborough and Morland; he says that Gainsborough’s

“’painterly-picturesque” interest … finds one of its most complete realizations in the work of George Morland” (107), and Barrell says that “the influence of Gainsborough is everywhere apparent in [Morland’s] landscapes” (94).

7 John Barrell argues in The Dark Side of the Landscape that Morland’s art deviates from that of Gainsborough, insisting that Morland’s art depicts hidden, darker themes as a means to highlight the class divide. However even Barrell himself notes that “the bulk of [Morland’s] paintings of rural subjects are indeed sentimental” (128), and the general consensus is that Morland’s works are in line with Gainsborough’s, although not quite as fanciful, and belong squarely to the sentimental genre. It should also be noted that both Jane and Cassandra Austen were most frequently acquainted with the mezzotint engravings of Morland’s paintings and not the originals. Engravers gave figures more sentimentalized expressions in order to boost sales, therefore the Morland prints the Austen sisters saw (and Cassandra copied) were very sentimental and idyllic images of rural, rustic life. See Joseph Burke’s English Art 1714-1800 and Wyburn-Powell’s “George Morland (1763-1804): Beyond Barrell: Re-examining Textual and Visual Sources.”

Wark says of Gainsborough’s “The Cottage Door” that “much of the appeal of the picture comes from the things represented and the train of associations they arouse”

(102). Furthermore, he says that the cottage door scenes are “in complete harmony with the early romantic feelings about rural life that were widespread in Europe during

Gainsborough’s lifetime. It is a point of view that finds some of its most articulate presentations in the writings of J.J. Rousseau” (101). In other words, the cottage door images bring Rousseau’s doctrines into visual being, and as such, they call to mind the associations one would have when encountering the word “Rousseau.” Wark isn’t the only art critic to find a connection between the cottage door paintings and Rousseau.

John Berger in Permanent Red says of Morland’s scenes of rural life: “These appealed to the current sentimentalization of Rousseau’s doctrines” (177). Steward asserts a deeper connection between Morland and Rousseau when he says that Morland became

“truly engaged in the ongoing dialogue about children and childhood.” He says that

Morland’s painting A Visit to the Child at Nurse (c. 1788), which makes social commentary on the practice of wet nursing, is the first of its kind and is in full engagement with Rousseau’s Emile just twenty-five years after its publication (27). In other words, Morland was not only painting Rousseau’s sentiment on rural life but of his doctrines on childhood as well.

Rousseau wrote about the superiority of rural life in Emile, or On Education, and it is through this text that Rousseau came to be the preeminent pioneer of modern childhood. He made way for poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge whose poetics culminated in the trope of the Romantic child. The cottage door paintings combine the

two essential Rousseauian elements: the countryside and children. Children figure prominently in these paintings. In Gainsborough’s germinal “The Cottage Door,” also known as the Huntington picture, five children and a mother holding an infant are represented; no adult other than the mother appears on the canvas. In the cottage door scenes, children are of the peasant class, often playing in a natural state; They are not associated with social mores or decorum found in the highly mannered society of “the town,” what we (and Rousseau) would refer to as “the city.”

It is significant to Austen’s text to note that the images of childhood in both

Gainsborough’s and Morland’s cottage door paintings are not the same child figure found in the artwork of previous centuries. For Pointon, images of children beginning in the eighteenth-century shift away from those which depict “dynastic culture” (177).

Steward reaffirms this assertion stating “it is difficult to locate substantial works containing other than dynastic interest prior to the eighteenth century” (21). These earlier portraits “serve[d] as reminders of the parents’, particularly the father’s, successful insurance of the family line and title” (Steward 19). But beginning in the eighteenth century, instead of finding images of children who represent a family line, we see images of children who personify the abstract concept of childhood itself

(Pointon 178). The children of the “cottage door” are just such an image and are certainly unbound by problems of upper-class society and the concerns of primogeniture. This brings us back around to Jane Austen’s little George Morland.

Unlike many of Austen’s children, children like Harry Dashwood in Sense and

Sensibility, who are connected to problems of inheritance and estates, little George

Morland is untethered by such cares. Austen often enlists her children to explore this social issue; as an unmarried woman, primogeniture and inheritance were of continual concern for Austen, and it recurs in her writing.8 Little George Morland, however, is one of the class of Austen’s children who are not enlisted to explore this issue, and it should be noted that it is these “un-inheritors” who often fall into the picturesque category. As the six-year-old, youngest son of a country parson, a parson who has at the least three older sons, little George does not share in the rigid social structures of upper-class English society and is relatively untethered by social expectations.

With this in mind, it is interesting to consider what Austen knew about the life of the real-life painter when she made her allusion.9 Just like Austen’s fictitious child, the real-life George Morland was unbound by social decorum. Barrell cites popular stories about Morland’s eccentricities. He says: “Morland had a complete aversion to anything resembling polite society; he had a good claim to a baronetcy, but refused to pursue it, not wishing to incur ‘the disgrace of a title’” (95). Instead, the painter chose to spend time with his social inferiors, often nonsensically dressed as a jockey or

8 Byrne identifies the issue of inheritance (or lack thereof) as a mitigating factor in the author’s early mortality; the news that her family would not receive an expected inheritance put Austen into an ‘Addisonial crisis.’ Austen died two months later (325). 9 While not materially significant to this study, there are some intriguing biographical similarities between Austen and Morland. While Morland was a drunkard and a spendthrift, and Austen certainly not, the two both worked artistically at a very young age; Morland first exhibited at the Royal Academy at the age of ten, and Austen began her Juvenilia at the age of thirteen. More significantly, the pair are described in shockingly similar terms in respect to their treatment of children. Steward says that “George Morland was famous for avoiding polite society, yet… was always popular with children and “delighted to take part in their games, was lavish in his expenditure for them, and never happier than when making them happy” (95). Byrne says of Austen that “what made her very special was her capacity to enter into the world of children” (257), and “she was a most kind and enjoyable person to Children but somewhat stiff and cold to strangers” (259).

coachman (Barrell 95). Like his namesake, little George Morland has not the “disgrace of a title;” he is not a participant in the “dynastic” portraits of the previous centuries. As a relatively newly formed image, that of the child of the cottage door, little George is freed up to be something else, something altogether unlike what tradition had previously demanded him to be. Instead of signifying the familial line, he is freed to embody the abstract concept of childhood itself, a point to which I will return below.

In the scene, Austen pulls her focus off Catherine and narrows it to center upon the two smallest children among the group. No one had been looking for Catherine, except George and Harriet who “expected a brother or sister in every carriage” (160).

We are left to imagine the actions of the rest of the family; they are too busy with the daily stuff of life to spend much time staring out the window. We imagine Catherine’s mother cooking while Sarah mends a pair of stockings, and Catherine’s father sits by the fire writing a sermon for the following Sunday. But George and Harriet stand by the window peering outward expectantly – almost prophetically. When Catherine’s carriage draws up to the gate, the two youngest children are there to see and “proclaim the discovery” (160). It is the eager proclamations of George and Harriet Morland who signal the return of a much-changed Catherine. The two children yell out together in a manner so devoid of decorum that no one can say whether it was George or Harriet who was the first to make the announcement. It is all a wild tumult of chaos and joy.

The reader gets a sense that Austen’s tone is one of whimsical exaggeration and is directed at the Morland children, but there is no sense of malice here. Austen is not commenting on the mismanagement of children at the hands of their mothers (as she

does in several of her novels, Sense and Sensibility in particular). It is noteworthy that the cottage door pictures made no such judgments either; while the children were of the peasant class, they always were portrayed in “blooming good health” (Wark 102).

Austen’s Morland children may be wild and loud, but they are not ill-behaved. There is an ease and playfulness in this passage that is generally uncharacteristic in Austen’s treatment of children. The tone is lightened by Austen’s repetition of the word “happy” which she uses three times in reference to the children. “Happy the glance … Happy the voice … But whether such happiness were the lawful property of George or Harriet could never exactly be understood” (160-1, italics mine).

Through their loud and joyful proclamations, George and Harriet both can exist in the moment in a way in which the rest of the family – with all their industrious laboring - cannot. This idea brings these children into remarkable proximity to that of the Romantic child. Robert Pattison reminds us of Rousseau’s original vision of childhood; in Emile, Rousseau says that “when I picture to myself a boy of ten or twelve, healthy, strong and well built for his age, only pleasant thoughts arise in me… I see him bright, eager, vigorous, carefree, completely absorbed in the present, rejoicing in abounding vitality (53, italics mine). The poets who were to come after Rousseau would follow suit calling attention to this unselfconscious state of the child-experience.

Stroup notes “Wordsworth’s ‘best philosopher’, who… does not yet rely on self- conscious, fallen language” (3), but Stroup is speaking only of the child in infancy.

Halpin alludes to the Romantic child’s unselfconsciousness when he says that Blake’s intention when writing Songs of Innocence is to “liberate the limitations of adult

consciousness through a recovery of the key characteristics of childhood innocence”

(38). Far more succinctly, in reference to the poetry of Hartley Coleridge, Cope states that “the child simply, purely is in a way that becomes impossible for adults” (129).

Little George Morland and his sister are then emblematic of this unselfconscious state; as such, they both lack any self or social awareness and embody the Rousseauian image of “abounding vitality.”

As we recall, Barchas argued that Austen’s pictorial allusions play “interpretive roles in the fiction” and that the Morland allusion underlines the importance of landscape in the novel, but I think there is a deeper theme at stake. It is not merely a coincidence that the image of the cottage door and the Morland children with their

Rousseauian aspect occur when Catherine is returning home from her grand adventure.

Instead of using the Morland allusion to highlight the theme of landscape, I argue that

Austen uses the Morland allusion to invoke the doctrines of Rousseau. Paula Marantz

Cohen contends that while Austen ultimately rejects Rousseau due to his “sexual stereotyping,” she also says that in Northanger Abbey, Austen “was still profoundly imitative of Rousseau” (217), and this seems to hold true in particular for the image of childhood. As Rousseauian images, the little Morlands reveal more about Catherine than about the children themselves. Emblematic of the state of childhood itself, they represent the child Catherine once was and become a metric against which Catherine’s change is measured.

Rousseau famously asserted that “everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man” (161). When

Catherine returns to Fullerton after having been to Bath and Northanger Abbey, she is anything but rejoicing and abounding in vitality. She is neither carefree nor wholly absorbed in the present. Consider Catherine’s meditations just after returning to

Fullerton:

Soon were all her thinking powers swallowed up in the reflection of her own

change of feelings and spirits since last she had trodden that well-known road.

It was not three months ago since, wild with joyful expectation, she had there

run backwards and forwards some ten times a-day, with an heart light, gay, and

independent; looking forward to pleasures untasted and unalloyed, and free from

the apprehension of evil as from the knowledge of it. Three months ago had seen

her all this; and now, how altered a being did she return. (163)

While Catherine was not technically a child three months earlier, her description is reminiscent of the images of little George and Harriet. Three months prior, Catherine was not very different than that of George and Harriet, “wild,” frequently in motion, alive with “abounding vitality” and is, above all else, a picture of Rousseauian innocence. Furthermore, the description of Catherine three months earlier evokes the very first pages of the novel when Catherine was still a child in actuality.

By the second page of the novel, we discover that “at ten years old…

[Catherine] was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house”

(6). Like her little brother and sister, when we see Catherine as a child, she is alive in the moment and untethered by any semblance of social responsibility. Juliet McMaster

says of this moment: “Now that seems to me to be the most perfect fun to be had: giddying motion for its own sake, a pure pleasure that takes no thought for tomorrow, or yesterday either” (Jane Austen’s Children). Who wouldn’t agree? We are again confronted by an image of a child - a wholly unselfconscious being - whose ability to experience the moment without regard to temporality, their past or future, is one of the hallmarks of the Romantic child, that literary trope which found its beginnings in

Rousseau. This corporal being, who experiences the world only through the senses is a

Rousseauian character indeed.

Catherine’s lament upon homecoming comes quite close to a Romantic vision of childhood which looks at it with nostalgic regret. Her response to the image of her youngest siblings triggers a sentimental attitude toward the past. Just as Rousseau predicts, once Catherine has ventured into society, she is changed. Stewart reminds us that, in Rousseau, “the child is to be allowed full individual development in nature, protected from the harmful influences of civilization” (144, italics mine). Catherine’s first venture from home has resulted in those very influences. Now, Catherine is acutely aware that she can no longer roll down the green slope, light-hearted, and “free from the apprehension of evil.” She has learned about the world and can no longer view it through the lens of childhood; she has lost something precious. In many respects,

Catherine’s childlike innocence is gone. The fact that Austen places the focus on

George and Harriet upon Catherine’s return underscores the change Catherine has undergone, and the allusion to George Morland, and those Rousseauian doctrines suggested by his art, work to sentimentalize the whole scene.

When Catherine first sees her family at the window, with George and Harriet as the centerpiece, it is “a sight to awaken the best feelings of Catherine’s heart” (160).

Stewart devotes an entire chapter to the image of the happy family and says that within these domestic portraits that children act “as the epiphany and emblem of domestic bliss” (193). Within that moment, Catherine is soothed by the picturesque sight of domesticity with George and Harriet at its center. It is provocative, however, that while

Catherine is initially “soothed beyond any thing that she had believed possible” (161), throughout the next few pages, we do not see a “soothed” Catherine. Catherine not only laments her own change, but we also find her increasingly agitated as the days pass. It is not until the appearance of Henry Tilney that Catherine’s spirits are fully restored. I think Catherine’s agitation is not merely the heartbreak of a young girl, but also can be traced to Catherine’s psychic movement from childhood to adulthood. Until Henry appears, Catherine is acutely aware that she is no longer a child, but she sees no way to move into adulthood. She finds herself in a liminal space in which she is uncomfortable.

Only when Henry appears can Catherine comprehend a way that she will be integrated into a new family with herself as the mother and children of her own.

Chapter 3

CAPTIVATING THE IMAGINATION: JOSHUA REYNOLDS’ PORTRAITS

OF CHILDHOOD IN AUSTEN’S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

The Pemberley episode in Pride and Prejudice is perhaps the most pivotal passage in the whole of Jane Austen’s work, and critics have made use of such a rich and layered scene. Many of those critics have noted the importance of portraiture in the episode.10 Fewer critics mention the allusion to the renowned eighteenth-century painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, by way of its connection to the Pemberley housekeeper,

Mrs. Reynolds. While some critics have analyzed the allusion as a means to discuss portraiture in general, no critic has suggested that it is connected to contemporary pictorial representations of childhood or discussed how those images of children, and the state of childhood in general, function in the Pemberley section or within the novel as a whole. I argue that the Reynolds allusion serves as an early indicator of Austen’s tendency to portray images of “picturesque children” who either occur alongside similar allusions to or are written in terms of eighteenth-century pictorial arts. I will examine the verbal “portrait” given to Elizabeth by the Pemberley housekeeper and several tableaus of the Gardiner children. I argue that Austen “paints” images of children throughout her mature novels and that these painterly images not only relate to contemporary changes occurring in eighteenth-century art but reveal Austen’s Romantic

10 In particular, Jeffrey Nigro’s “Reading Portraits at Pemberley;” Kazuko Hisamori’s “Facing a Portrait of the “Lover:” Frankenstein’s Monster and the Heroines of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice;” Alexander Bove’s “The “Unbearable Realism of a Dream”: On the Subject of Portraits in Austen and Dickens;” and Joe Bray’s “The Language of Portraiture in the Early Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Study in Opie and Austen.”

notions of childhood, if not of children. I also argue that these pictorial or “picturesque” representations of childhood function as a means to, and as a reflection of, her heroine’s consciousness, in this particular instance, Elizabeth Bennet’s. Finally, they suggest a picturesque union between Elizabeth and Darcy.

While Janine Barchas states that “the so-called “sister-art” of painting is only softly invoked in Jane Austen’s novels” (145), she goes on to categorize the instances in which Austen alludes to famous eighteenth-century painters. Barchas states that the

“most overt reference to a contemporary artist may indeed be Mrs. Reynolds” (146).

She is referring to the episode in Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth Bennet and her aunt and uncle visit the Darcy estate, Pemberley. The housekeeper, Mrs. Reynolds, whose name clearly alludes to the famous eighteenth-century painter, shows the visitors family portraits and provides, not only a tour of the home, but a verbal description of

Darcy as well. In doing so, she surprises Elizabeth by describing the often-surly Darcy in glowing terms as both generous and kind. Vivien Jones off-handedly states that the reference is a “jokey allusion to Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great eighteenth-century portrait painter, whose Discourses on Art (1769-90) were extremely influential in the development of aesthetic theory and artistic taste” (396). While Barchas gives the allusion slightly more attention, like most critics, she minimizes its importance. She states that “Austen slyly borrows the authority of the real Reynolds for her fictional housekeeper, whose report, or portrait, of the hero must contradict and override the reigning prejudice against him” (146). What Barchas and other critics fail to address is that the “portrait” given by Mrs. Reynolds is primarily that of Darcy as a child, and

Reynolds was perhaps the most famous painter of children during the period (Wendorf

121). In the hands of the ever-subtle Austen, what does this mean?

In this context, it is provocative to examine the connection between the fictional

Mrs. Reynolds and the real-life Joshua Reynolds in greater detail. Consider the

Pemberley episode. Upon Elizabeth’s arrival, she encounters Mrs. Reynolds, the housekeeper who shows the Pemberley estate. Mrs. Reynolds is described as “a respectable-looking, elderly woman, much less fine, and more civil, than she had any notion of finding her” (159). If we consider this description, Austen’s allusion to the famous painter seems as though it is more intentional than merely a cheeky joke for the benefit of her artistic sister, Cassandra. Austen gives her fictional housekeeper not only the name of Sir Joshua but his description as well. Wendorf observes that, in the world of the eighteenth-century aristocracy, Joshua Reynolds was a “partial outsider: someone who had one foot in the door, someone who was welcome within, but who was not an actual inhabitant” (3). In other words, while Reynolds moved in aristocratic circles, he would always remain an outsider in many respects, like a well-respected and much- loved housekeeper. Wendorf also says that Reynolds was “extolled by so many of his contemporaries as the embodiment of affability and polite behavior” (7) and reminds us that “Boswell dedicated his Life of Johnson to Reynolds … extolling his friend’s “equal and placid temper … variety of conversation … true politeness, by which [he was] so amiable in private society’” (13). Austen’s initial description of the fictional Reynolds, a family servant, respectable and civil, who was at once part of the Darcy family but also an outsider, could easily fit with Wendorf’s characterization of the real-life

Reynolds. Considering Austen’s knowledge of contemporary art, as well as her admiration of Boswell, it is unlikely that the similarities between Austen’s fictional housekeeper and the master painter are insignificant. If Austen gave so much care and attention to this detail, doesn’t this suggest that there is more meaning to be found here?

Of the few critics who do mention the Reynolds allusion, most consider its importance only to highlight portraiture. They say that the viewing of the Pemberley grounds and the grand portrait in the upstairs gallery are what ultimately changes

Elizabeth’s opinion of Darcy. To these critics, the child-Darcy image could have been absented from the narrative, and the plot would remain intact, as long as Mrs. Reynolds praises Darcy in some way. Bray says: “Elizabeth’s earnest viewing, and re-viewing, of the portrait, coupled with Mrs Reynolds’s [sic] praise, leads her finally to her a [sic] re- evaluation of Darcy’s character” (Portrait in Fiction 127). Bray only casually comments on Mrs. Reynolds’ praise, and never mentions children at all, but instead gives the greatest influence to the portrait. In my opinion, the portrait offers Elizabeth no new information in which to re-evaluate her opinion of Darcy; she is already aware of his wealth, social status, and physicality. The portrait does nothing to expand on this knowledge. While the viewing of the portrait may be socio-historically significant to the eighteenth-century, narratively, it merely acts as a mirror for which Elizabeth can view her own changing feelings towards Darcy.

Consider Elizabeth’s self-reported feelings about art and portraiture. Mrs.

Reynolds makes a particular point that the visitors view the portraits and miniatures of the family, including Darcy, Wickham, and Georgiana. Just as one would expect, the

fictional Reynolds willingly converses about the “subject of the pictures” (161). While

Mrs. Reynolds focuses on the artwork itself, Elizabeth finds the art less fathomable.

Austen writes: “Elizabeth knew nothing of art; and from such as had seen been already visible below, she had willingly turned to look at some drawings of Miss Darcy’s, in crayons, whose subjects were usually more interesting, and also more intelligible”

(162). Elizabeth self-reportedly says that she is disinterested in art. Why then does

Austen intentionally invoke the prominent painter only to have her heroine quickly forsake him?

To better understand, it is helpful to examine Reynolds’ relationship to children in particular. While Sir Joshua Reynolds is famous as the first president of the Royal

Academy and as promoting the grand style, he was also one of the early promoters of the Cult of Childhood. In Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, Hugh

Cunningham nearly conflates Reynolds’ art with the ideas of and the movement began by Rousseau. After a lengthy discussion of Rousseau, Cunningham explains: “the depiction of children changed too” (65). He goes on to explain the changes as such:

a more prominent position for children can be seen in … the work of

Gainsborough and Reynolds in England of upper- and middle-class children

enjoying ‘what was and is thought of as a ‘natural’ childhood, surrounded by the

evidence of parental care, fenced off from certain kinds of painful experience, in

an arena of innocence and therefore of happiness. (65-6)

In other words, paintings by Reynolds contain images of a romanticized, Rousseauian vision of childhood. Austen would have been very familiar with these works by

Reynolds. In the Spring of 1813, Austen went to see Reynolds’ exhibition at the British

Institution in London. As re-created by Barchas’ WhatJaneSaw.org, of the one-hundred and forty-three Reynolds paintings on exhibit, fifty-eight of them are of children (three are of unknown subject matter). As if to underscore Reynolds’ affinity for his miniature subjects, quite tellingly, the exhibit closes with an unfinished portrait of a sleeping child. While the original exhibition opened a few months after the initial publication of

Pride and Prejudice, Austen nevertheless would have been familiar with Reynolds’ focus on children and childhood; Reynolds’ mezzotint engravings – “especially those of children” were popular in the market-place (Postle 42). Furthermore, recent evidence suggests that Austen’s infamous cousin, Eliza - a cousin who fascinated Austen as a child - was painted by Reynolds when she too was only a child (Mitchell). Put another way, Austen could not have helped being aware of Reynolds’ association with children.

Reynolds’ vision of childhood wasn’t merely pageantry to appeal to the growing marketplace; he was one of the early financial supporters of London’s very first children’s charity, the Foundling Hospital (Lawrence, de Lisle). Further, Reynolds’ contemporaries cite the painter’s affinity for children. In The Life and Times of Sir

Joshua Reynolds (1865), Leslie and Taylor relay an anecdote from a dinner party in

1775. Leslie writes:

the little girl was placed beside Sir Joshua at the dessert, where he amused her so

much with stories and tricks that she thought him the most charming man in the

world … The next day she was delighted to be taken to his house, where she sat

down with a face full of glee, the expression of which he caught at once and

never lost. (qtd. in Wendorf 121)

Reynolds had a natural ability to relate to the child. Steward states:

Reynolds was also capable of remarkable sensitivity to his numerous juvenile

sitters, a fact that especially struck contemporaries because of the artist’s

childlessness. Reynolds’ Lady Caroline Scott as Winter of about 1777 reveals

the artist’s ability to enter into the world of the child. (20)

Similarly, Steward later states that “Reynolds could successfully paint children by entering into their world” (94). It is noteworthy that this is a nearly verbatim description of Austen. Byrne says of Austen: “what made her very special was her capacity to enter into the world of children” (257), perhaps suggesting why the novelist was drawn to the painter. This ability to relate to the state of childhood is something that Reynolds addresses in his Twelfth Discourse. He says: “instead of supposing ourselves to be perfect patterns of wisdom and virtue, it seems to me more reasonable to treat ourselves

… like humoursome children, whose fancies are often to be indulged in order to keep them in good-humour with themselves and their pursuits (208). Taking into account how Reynolds’ life, art, and philosophical ideals intersected with that of the world of children, it seems obvious – to me - that Austen used Reynolds’ name, not merely to invoke the ideas of portraiture, but more importantly, to emphasize the Romantic, picturesque child.

Consider Mrs. Reynolds’ verbal description of Darcy: “I have never had a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him ever since he was four years old”

(161). This is unexpected information for Elizabeth. Austen writes: “[Elizabeth’s] keenest attention was awakened; she longed to hear more.” Mrs. Reynolds obliges

Elizabeth’s interest and adds to her initial description. Reynolds says: “if I was to go through the world, I could not meet with a better. But I have always observed, that they who are good-natured when children, are good-natured when they grow up; and he was always the sweetest-tempered, most generous-hearted, boy in the world” (161). It is as though Mrs. Reynolds is thinking of Wordsworth’s famous line, “The Child is father of the Man.” Although Elizabeth has previously heard multiple versions of Darcy’s character, it is this one that affects her above all others. What exactly is it about Mrs.

Reynolds’ description which strikes Elizabeth so? Is it simply that it runs so counter to so many other descriptions given on Darcy’s character, or is it something more? After all, Mr. Bingley is a trusted acquaintance, and surely he holds Darcy in high regard.

Perhaps the answer lies in Joshua Reynolds’ theories on art in general.

Joshua Reynolds gave fifteen lectures on art theory during his time as president of the Royal Academy. In many of the discourses, Reynolds goes into detail on how artists should portray their subjects. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who believed the artist's job was strict representation, Reynolds extolled the virtues of imagination.

He says: “instead of endeavoring to amuse mankind with the minute neatness of his imitations, he must endeavor to improve them by the grandeur of his ideas, instead of seeking praise, by deceiving the superficial sense of the spectator, he must strive for fame, by captivating the imagination” (42). Reynolds instead sought to portray “an ideal beauty” unlike that found in nature. In short, Reynolds found nature too flawed and

endeavored to elevate his subjects’ beauty above that which nature bestowed. While

Barchas states that “the name of Mrs. Reynolds supplements the housekeeper’s important verbal portrait of Darcy with a reader’s knowledge of the high-society elegance and realism of canvases by Reynolds” (146), Reynolds’ own theories don’t support this. Strict realism was not the goal of the master artist.

This does explain Mrs. Reynolds’ curious description of Darcy. Mrs. Reynolds’ report sounds not thoroughly unbelievable but slightly hyperbolic. Elizabeth is shocked by so elevated a description. Austen writes: “Elizabeth almost stared at her.- “Can this be Mr. Darcy!” (161). It seems that Darcy too would be surprised by Mrs. Reynolds’ description. Later in the novel, Darcy’s own verbal portrait of his child-self contradicts that of Mrs. Reynolds. Darcy goes into detail on his character as a child. He says:

As a child I was taught what was right, but not taught to correct my temper. I

was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit … I was

spoilt by my parents, who though good themselves, (my father particularly, all

that was benevolent and amiable,) allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be

selfish and overbearing, to care for none beyond my own family circle, to think

meanly of all the rest of the world … Such I was, from eight to eight and twenty.

(241)

With Darcy’s very own self-portrait in mind, it seems clear that Mrs. Reynolds too is improving upon nature with her painterly brushstroke. Elizabeth has heard multiple versions of Darcy’s character, but none of those characterizations evoke the image of an angelic child figure. It is just this evocation of the child image which finally penetrates

Elizabeth’s prejudice. If Austen was deliberately attempting a literary child portrait in the style of Joshua Reynolds, then she clearly did so with the purpose of inspiring her heroine’s imagination.

Consider the child image which became so prevalent in the eighteenth-century.

As Steward reminds us, in Reynolds’ art, and eighteenth-century art in general, the child image “is an image intended to appeal to adult sentiment” (21), and the child is “a suitable subject for the rise of sensibility, their appeal residing in their perceived helplessness, their dependence on adult, specifically parental, benevolence and enlightenment” (192). Mrs. Reynolds’ evocation of Darcy as an angelic child, given while in the late Mr. Darcy’s sitting room, gives him a sentimentalized, vulnerable quality not previously available to Elizabeth. It surprises the nearly unflappable

Elizabeth. As noted above, Elizabeth’s response to Mrs. Reynolds’ verbal portrait of child-Darcy is: “can this be Mr. Darcy!” But her response is strange; it is a question but also not a question at the same time. The lack of the question-mark indicates Elizabeth’s firmer understanding of the subject. Like Mrs. Reynolds, Elizabeth is also thinking of

Wordsworth’s famous line here. If the child is a good-natured, sentimentalized, vulnerable creature, she reasons, then so too must be the man. It this line, we see

Elizabeth’s opinion of Darcy shift.

The idea that one can deduce another’s innate “goodness” based upon their child-self is a concept put forth by Edgar Wind in response to Reynolds’ art on children.

He says that there is an “interplay between the two stages of the subject’s life, in which the condition of the grown-up person is projected back into the mind of the child whose

pose and expression prophetically, as it were, hint at her future situation” (qtd. in

Pointon 181). The idea of the prophetic child is intrinsically tied to the Romantic child.

By “seeing” the portrait of Darcy as a child, Elizabeth can deduce Darcy’s innate goodness as an adult, something she has yet been unable to observe on her own.

Immediately after Mrs. Reynolds describes Darcy as “the sweetest-tempered, most generous-hearted, boy in the world,” Mrs. Gardiner states: “His father was an excellent man” (161). This is a reasonable statement at this moment; afterall, the father presumably raised the son, and Mrs. Reynolds responds positively: “Yes, Ma’am, that he was indeed; and his son will be just like him- just as affable to the poor” (italics mine). What is so unusual about this statement is the usage of the past tense - as if

Darcy remains a child still. This suggests a process of “becoming” for Darcy, as if he is not yet finished. The language itself is curious enough to provoke Elizabeth’s active imagination. It is not a far stretch to say that Darcy’s “becoming” would end when

Elizabeth and Darcy are married, and Darcy moves from a vulnerable child state into manhood. In fact, there are two other “tableaus” of childhood that suggest this

“becoming” state for Elizabeth, and they curiously frame the Pemberley episode.

In volume two, chapter four, Elizabeth Bennet leaves home in order to visit her friend Charlotte Lucas in Hunsford. She stops for the evening to spend a night with her aunt and uncle, the Gardiners, where Jane is also staying. She has just arrived at the

Gardiners’ home in London on Gracechurch-street. Austen writes: “on the stairs were a troop of little boys and girls, whose eagerness for their cousin’s appearance would not allow them to wait in the drawing room, and whose shyness, as they had not seen her

for a twelve-month, prevented their coming lower. All was joy and kindness” (102).

These children fall into the picturesque category; they are a “frozen image.” Framed by the stairwell, they suggest portraiture and painting.

The children are motionless, too “eager” to wait in the drawing room for

Elizabeth to enter, yet “too shy” to come down from the stairs to interact with Elizabeth in any way. They never utter a syllable. They do not interact with one another. We do not have names. We only know that they are a mix of genders and that they are both

“shy” and “eager.” It is only later when they are being delivered to Jane prior to the

Gardiners’ trip to the lakes that we discover that the children are two girls, aged six and eight, and “two younger boys” (157). The children stand frozen and, we imagine, gape at their cousin in silent wonder. The Gardiner children could surely have been absented from the narrative and the plot would remain intact, and yet Austen includes them anyway. They are quite different from those memorable Middleton children from

Austen’s preceding novel Sense and Sensibility who make so much violent noise. One marvels at what these children are doing in this scene.

If we are simply to believe critics such as Selwyn and McMaster, we could say that the children’s behavior is primarily used as a venue to display the honorable traits of Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner and that the children’s shy and quiet behavior is an example of good parenting in contrast to that of Lady Middleton’s. We could also say that

Austen was only providing detail to add charm to the scene and is perhaps a touch of realism taken from Austen’s various family visits with her multitude of nieces and

nephews. These are undoubtedly solid readings and valuable insights, but I believe

Austen uses certain child images for a specific purpose throughout her work.

Instead of being reflections of Austen’s biography or of the Gardiners’ good parenting, I suggest that we view these children as members of a subset of Austenian children. I have termed this subset “Austen’s Picturesque Children.” These children are interesting because – precisely as they ask to be casually passed over – they draw attention to themselves due to their difference. These “picturesque children” are written in terms of or alongside allusions to the world of eighteenth-century art and typically reflect the ideas of Rousseau and the Romantic sensibility of the Cult of Childhood. As such, they are highly abstract images and carry symbolic quality.

It is important to note the Gardiner children’s physical location. The children are standing on the staircase. They do not stand with the adults, nor are they entirely absenting themselves. The symbolism inherent to their isolated location speaks to the changing ideas about childhood which were coming into focus at the time of Austen’s writing. Rousseau had not only done away with the idea of the child being born into sin, but according to Boas, he also put forth the “simple truism that the child is a child and not a man… Rousseau seems to have initiated the idea that childhood is something inherently different from manhood” (31). The early Romantics followed Rousseau’s example envisioning the child as a creature unto itself. Plotz tells us that “De Quincey characteristically represents childhood as a world elsewhere” (3). Plotz quotes De

Quincey: “Infancy … is to be viewed, not only as a part of a larger world that waits for its final complement in old age, but also as a separate world of itself; part of a continent,

but also a distinct peninsula” (3). Plotz goes on to say that “in the many imaginary island kingdoms invented by and for nineteenth-century children … the children or their surrogates are emphatically enisled and separated off from the adult world as if the inhabitants belonged to a different species from adults” (3). The artwork of the eighteenth-century reflects these ideas. In previous centuries, portraits of children held dynastic value; children were considered extensions of their patriarchal family.

According to Steward, “it is difficult to locate substantial works containing other than dynastic interest prior to the eighteenth century” (21). That changed in the eighteenth- century when Reynolds, among others, began painting children separate from their families and in their own worlds. Interestingly, the Gardiner children are described as a

“troop.” While this could certainly only refer to the idea that they are huddled together, it suggests that they belong to one another, apart from all others. These children are distinct and separate entities.

Furthermore, they are literally raised above the adults, suggesting a closer proximity to the divine. The motionless Gardiner children raised above the adults is suggestive of the major Romantic tropes set forth by the early Romantic poets, who found some of the characteristics of the Romantic child to be innocence, imagination, transcendence, and a closeness to nature which imbues them with prophetic abilities, as in Wordsworth’s “seer blest.” These Gardiner children do appear to be representative of the prototypical Romantic child and their “fixation” is not only a fact of their physical bodies but works symbolically as well.

These tiny prophets gaze silently at Elizabeth, and as they do, they seem to reflect something back to her. Hisamori suggests that viewing a portrait – and these children certainly function like a portrait - is like holding up a mirror to the viewer (n. pag). As such, the children can be said to act as an emblematic self-portrait.

Significantly, both Gardiner tableaus include the use of free indirect discourse in order to focalize Elizabeth and her perceptions of the world around her. The Gardiner children’s lack of motion and speech suggest hesitancy. It is suggestive of a waiting period and begs the question, on what are they waiting? I suggest that within the context of this tableau they symbolically represent the status of “fixity.” They reflect

Elizabeth’s consciousness at this particular moment in the novel. At this point in time,

Elizabeth is confident in her perception of reality as well as her feelings toward Darcy, whom she “is determined to hate” (62). The next time we see the Gardiner children, we see a much-changed Elizabeth.

The Gardiner children create a “framing device” that encapsulates the

Pemberley episode. The initial introduction of the Gardiner children comes in volume two, chapter four, and we do not see them materially again until volume three, chapter five. When we do see them again, after the “Pemberley episode,” they are again standing on stairs. Austen writes:

The little Gardiners, attracted by the sight of a chaise, were standing on the steps

of the house, as they entered the paddock; and when the carriage drove up to the

door, the joyful surprise that lighted up their faces, and displayed itself over

their whole bodies, in a variety of capers and frisks, was the first pleasing

earnest of their welcome. (185)

These are far different children than those on the stairs on Gracechurch-street. While initially standing again on stairs in a fixed image, they become animated as Elizabeth and the Gardiners’ advance. They move into the paddock, a small outdoor field, and begin skipping, dancing, and frolicking. Again, one can argue that these children are mere reflections of the goodness of the Gardiners in general and that the children are merely delighted at the return of their beloved parents; however, it is more fruitful to consider the emblematic quality of the image. There seems to be a liberation from the children’s previous – quite un-childlike – reserve. If we consider the picturesque features of these images to be indications of Elizabeth’s changing consciousness, then we can say that the Gardiner children’s behavior in this scene is indicative of her ability to perceive the world in a new way. Prior to the “Pemberley episode,” Elizabeth’s prejudice toward Darcy is as fixed as the children on the Gracechurch-street stairs; afterward, she possesses a newfound openness to alternative possibilities, and her own childlike playfulness is extended toward the man against whom she had once been hardened.

Steward has suggested that the new ways in which children are portrayed pictorially in the eighteenth-century indicate that the patriarchal system, or what Ronald

Paulson called “stuffy systems of social order” (qtd. in Steward 103), is in the process of re-ordering. In previous centuries, images of children were used to emphasize the familial hierarchy and dynastic line. Nigro identifies the Darcy family “ancestral portrait gallery” as “clearly an ostentatious display of lineage.” Johnson says that prior

to the seventeenth-century, “the portrait of the child depicted independently from the family and the adult world” was relatively rare (102-3). Beginning in the eighteenth- century however, children began to be portrayed outdoors, in motion, and participating in child-like activities. Steward says these depicting children in this manner “suggest[s] a restructuring within the family” (22). The aristocratic ideals of past centuries were in the process of breaking down. If we look at Austen’s picturesque children in the same way in which we view these “fancy” pictures – paintings meant to inspire the imagination – we see the emergence of a new social order. The new images of the childhood - outdoors, in-motion, and virtually unheard-of centuries earlier - begs the viewer (or reader), like Elizabeth, to consider new, previously un-thought of possibilities.

Wark has said that “a striking feature of [Reynolds’] work… [is] the desire to strike the imagination and enlarge the emotional range” (Discourses xxxii), and Steward has said that Reynolds’ child image “is a symbol of confidence for the future” (21). If we view Austen’s picturesque children in these terms, then we must view both the verbal “portrait” of Darcy and the final tableau of the Gardiner children as signifying new possibilities for the future. Farnsworth has noted that no Austenian heroine has produced children of her own, “either actual or wished” (127), and curiously, Pride and

Prejudice is the most childless novel in all of Austen’s works. If the reader does not dismiss these brief “portraits” of picturesque children, it appears that they are in the strain of those Romantic images of childhood and prophesize a fruitful union between

Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy.

Chapter 4

“POOR LITTLE INNOCENT: AN AESTHETIC INTERPRETATION OF

FANNY PRICE

In the last two chapters, we have seen Austen’s penchant for painting

“picturesque” children. These children are written either in terms of or alongside allusions to eighteenth-century art and offer a sentimentalized vision of childhood. In chapter two, little George and Harriet Morland at the cottage door provided an image of

Rousseauian children, whom Austen uses to measure the heroine’s growth and to offer a nostalgic glimpse back at innocence lost. In chapter three, we saw three other sentimentalized “portraits” of childhood. A “verbal portrait” of Darcy and two “textual tableaus” of the Gardiner children work to suggest the emotional and philosophical growth of Darcy and Elizabeth. In this chapter, I will address the similarities between the fictional Fanny Price and a portrait painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds of a girl of the same name. I will also address the image of the ten-year-old Fanny Price seated in a stairwell at Mansfield Park, as well as the childhood imagery found in Fanny’s “little white attic” and the East room. Again, we find the image of a child – and in this novel, childhood things – used as benchmarks for which to measure our heroine’s growth, but this time, it suggests her stagnation. While Fanny Price does literally mature throughout the novel, I argue that Austen keeps Fanny a metaphorical child. Austen then consistently redirects our attention to the picturesque child-Fanny in an attempt to elicit our sympathies toward the heroine and as a means to underscore her innocence.

At the beginning of volume one, chapter two, we are given a brief description of the young Fanny Price. To relieve her parents from the expense of their excessive child- rearing, Fanny comes to her aunt and uncle Bertram’s home to live permanently. This practice was not unusual for the period; a distant cousin of the Austen family, Thomas

Knight and his wife, Catherine, adopted Austen’s brother in 1783 (Tomalin 40). Of the fictional Fanny, Austen writes:

Fanny Price was at this time just ten years old, and though there might not be

much in her first appearance to captivate, there was, at least nothing to disgust

her relations. She was small of her age, with no glow of complexion, nor any

other striking beauty; exceedingly timid and shy, shrinking from notice; but her

air, though awkward, was not vulgar, her voice was sweet, and when she spoke,

her countenance was pretty. (11)

While there is nothing in this first description of Fanny’s “appearance” to captivate the reader either, critics of Austen may find the sustained interest in the heroine-as-child as something out of place. This is a departure for Austen, something she does only briefly in Northanger Abbey when the narrator takes the space of one lengthy paragraph to describe the heroine, Catherine Morland, as a child. After Fanny Price, the description of heroines as children is a move that Austen would never use again. Austen explains her lack of interest in the childhood of her heroines in a letter to her niece, Anna

Austen; a little over a year after the completion of Mansfield Park, she writes: “[o]ne

does not care for girls till they are grown up.”11 Despite Austen’s assertion, the whole of chapter two in Mansfield Park is devoted to Fanny as a child. While there is no characteristic free indirect discourse for little Fanny, a third-person narrator painfully details the young girl’s emotional state. Austen writes: “The little visitor … was as unhappy a possible. Afraid of every body, ashamed of herself … she knew not how to look up, and could scarcely speak to be heard, or without crying” (11-12). Just a page later, Austen continues: “the rooms were too large for her to move in with ease; whatever she touched she expected to injure, and she crept about in constant terror … often retreating towards her own chamber to cry” (13). Austen’s care in detailing the child, despite her claimed disinterest in childhood, begs the question: why spend so much time on young Fanny? Perhaps the answer lies with Austen’s tendency to write children in terms of eighteenth-century art.

Provocatively, this character sketch of Fanny Price has a pictorial referent. We are aware of Austen’s interest in the art of Sir Joshua Reynolds and know of her famous trip to Pall Mall in 1813 to see the artist’s “one-man show” (chapter three). We also know, thanks to Janine Barchas’ recreation of that exhibition on her website whatjanesaw.org, that there is a painting titled Portrait of Miss Price located on the wall perpendicular to the exhibit’s official starting point, a portrait of King George III.

Barchas identifies the sitter as Sarah Bridget Frances Price, Fanny Price, the daughter of

Chase Price.12 The painting is done less in the style of formal portraiture, but instead is

11 To Anna Austen, 9 - 18 September 1814, Letters, pp. 276. 12 While Austen’s visit to Pall Mall came during the final months of the composition of Mansfield Park, there is no reason to think that Austen would not have already been familiar with this famous painting;

exemplary of Reynolds’ fondness for mixing portraits with that of his “fancy pictures.”

Erna Auerbach describes the painting as such:

Whole-length of a little girl aged three or four, standing facing the spectator with

her hands crossed in front of her. She has dark brown hair and brown eyes, and

wears a pink dress with a blue petticoat and a brown scarf. She is in a park

setting, with a large urn on a pedestal on the right, two lambs are close to her on

the left. (206)

At first glance, there is nothing – besides the name - in the description of the painting to remind one of the Fanny Price of Mansfield Park. The child is much younger than Fanny, and we later find that Fanny has “soft light eyes” (319), yet this is a superficial description. Horace Walpole offers one of the only critical comments on the portrait which may provide a way to read Austen’s Fanny Price. He says that the child in the Reynolds’ painting "expresses at once simplicity, propriety, and fear of her clothes being dirtied, with all the wise gravity of a poor little innocent" (qtd. in Steward

91). This description of the real Fanny Price could quite easily fit with those of the fictional Fanny, whose fear of “injuring” whatever she touches could certainly include her own clothing. We imagine the young girl upbraiding herself for dirtying what must later be laundered by servants. Beyond Walpole’s comment, there is little said of

Reynold’s portrait.

We have discussed Austen’s sister Cassandra’s engagement with popular and readily available mezzotint engravings in chapter two.

To close the gap on this lack of critical commentary, I offer the following: we find that the child stands centrally on the canvas slightly foregrounded. Her expression is mature, yet she is clearly a child. While her dress is not particularly formal, she stands in a rigid pose. The two lambs on the left are emblematic, signifying the child’s innocence. The outdoor environs combined with the presence of the lambs begin to suggest a Rousseauian child, yet the park itself is claustrophobic, gloomy, and painted in dark – almost black – tones. The structure on the left of the canvas is difficult to discern in both painting and engraving. It hints at an adult world and looms ominously at an angle behind the child; it too is dark and foreboding. Of all the images on the canvas, it is the urn which is most ambivalent, and most troubling. While it is indicative of a carefully manicured park setting, it also suggests the child’s feminine vulnerability.

The child – who is alone on the canvas – is in need of protection. Pointon observes similar paintings by Reynolds. She notes that the Age of Innocence functions “by making viewers think of ‘maidenhood threatened and preserved’” (181). She also states that Reynold’s Lady Caroline Scott as Winter “work[s] through the implied exploitation of a powerless child” (192). I believe, the portrait of Sarah Bridget Frances Price functions in similar ways.

Patricia Crowne has said that “the fancy paintings [of Joshua Reynolds] can be seen as art historically transitional in that they begin to locate and define a class of children and an emotional response to that class which had not had conscious configuration before” (162). In other words, they are designed to elicit empathy from adult viewers. In the eighteenth-century, Reynolds – as well as Gainsborough - began

engaging with a different sort of picturesque child. Art historians note that while many fancy pictures are of children immersed in joyful, child-like play, contrasting images occurred simultaneously, many of them somber in tone. Crown says that “at the same time Gainsborough and Reynolds were depicting the confident inhabitants of a carefully constructed juvenile paradise, they painted children who lived in another kind of world”

(159). Johnson describes the phenomena similarly, stating that “sadness and melancholy inform a number of children’s portraits from the late eighteenth-century that depict portrait features and focus on individual personality while at the same time conveying a narrative through a traditional language of emblem and metaphor” (108). While

Reynolds’ portrait is biographical and commemorative of the real Sarah Bridget Frances

Price, it also suggests a narrative concerning the precariousness of childhood innocence and asks the viewer to meditate on the need to protect those most vulnerable.

In her virtual tour of the Reynolds gallery, Barchas informs viewers that “Miss

Price was only 10 years old when her father died, coincidentally the same age as

Austen's fictional Miss Price, the virtual orphan in Mansfield Park” (whatjanesaw.org).

It is the term “coincidentally” which troubles this writer. Barchas takes the time to note that Sarah Bridget Frances Prices’ father, Chase Price, was not only friends with

William Cowper – of whom Austen was famously enamored - but also possibly a member of the nonsense club, an infamous group of eighteenth-century British satirists.

Austen surely would have found this biography of interest. Furthermore, Barchas tells us that Chase Price was the potential author of crude poetry and nearly financially

bankrupt in the years before his death, perhaps reminiscent of the crudeness and financial instability of Fanny’s Portsmouth father.

One finds the narrative elements associated with the fictional Fanny Price readily available in this Reynolds portrait. Perhaps it is precisely the image of this child which gave Austen the creative impetus toward her imagined Fanny Price and is further evidence of how aware Austen was of movements within the eighteenth-century literary and visual art world. If, as Johnson states, these images of melancholic children convey

“a narrative through the traditional language of emblem and metaphor,” then this portrait also provides another way to read the fictional Fanny Price.

With the understanding that these child portraits work emblematically, and that

Austen uses her picturesque children as a means to both measure growth and to provide a well-rounded dose of Romanticism, then it is provocative to examine a startling image of the fictional Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. Austen provides an exceptionally striking visual image of Fanny as a child early in the novel. A week after Fanny has come to Mansfield Park, her cousin Edmund finds her sitting on the staircase which leads to the attic. She is, as usual, crying. There is a decidedly picturesque quality about the positioning of Fanny’s image on the staircase. The child sits motionless and silent

(we can be sure her crying conveys no sound), until she is repeatedly and persistently questioned by Edmund, and she is finally able to eke out her first speaking part in the novel, a nearly silent “no, no – not at all – no, thank you” (13). This is not the first time

Austen has placed children in this manner; both tableaus of the Gardiner children in

Pride and Prejudice are located in stairwells. These stairwells function as literal

framing devices which partition children off from the rest of the world of their respective novels. Fanny is framed and raised above Edmund like a painting on a museum wall. It is easy to imagine this image in the Reynolds gallery in Pall Mall. It is his interaction with Fanny that leads Edmund to find young Fanny “an interesting object” (14). There remains no characteristic Austenian free indirect discourse for the young Fanny Price. At this point in the novel, she is merely an abstraction, an emblem of the type of childhood for which Austen had yet to show interest.

While Austen’s previous picturesque children call up images of the Rousseauian variety, little Fanny Price sitting motionless in the stairwell brings to mind a different sort of sentimental child. Fanny Price is not, of course, poor by any means, after all, she has essentially been adopted by her wealthy uncle. But this does not account for her uncomfortable position within the Bertram household. On the outset of her coming to the park, we find her to be afraid of her uncle, “disheartened” by her aunt Bertram’s inattentiveness, ashamed of the criticism of her female cousins, and even scorned by the servants. Jane Nardin claims that “Jane Austen never permitted herself to have recourse to a device for providing excitement that was greatly favored by sentimental and gothic novelists of her era: the unprotected orphan” (73), but she goes on to say that Fanny

Price was denied emotional security in both her childhood homes (84). Selwyn says that

“Fanny is not formally adopted by Sir Thomas, and she never thinks of him and Lady

Bertram as anything other than her uncle and aunt” (114). It seems to me that Fanny, contrary to Nardin’s claim, fits into the “unprotected orphan” category essentially, if not strictly.

What is so striking about the image of little Fanny sitting lonely, neglected, and terrified on the staircase is its effect on the reader. It is clearly an image meant to appeal to the reader’s sentiment. Patricia Crown reminds us that by the beginning of the nineteenth-century, when Austen was writing Mansfield Park, within the fancy pictures,

“there emerged over and over again … the image of the child as martyr and victim”

(165). It seems that Austen takes full advantage of this new artistic conceit. While

Lionel Trilling famously stated that “nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park” (212), nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to dislike this dejected, little child.

Perhaps one of the problems of Mansfield Park does not lie with the character of

Fanny Price; the problem is our own forgetfulness. As the novel progresses, we – as we do with so many of Austen’s children - forget this child image of Fanny and therefore find her behavior unforgivable. Nina Auerbach famously read Fanny Price as a gothic monster who psychically “feasts” on the vitality of others and places her in company with that of Mary Shelley’s monster and Beowulf’s Grendel (27-8). This seems both unfair and hyperbolic. Austen repeatedly redirects the reader back to Fanny’s child-self, reminding us that Fanny is not to be despised. Instead, she attempts to elicit a desire to protect “a poor little innocent.”

What is provocative about Fanny is that for the vast majority of the novel, she remains a child, if not in fact, but in her own psychological development. Up until the

Portsmouth chapters, Fanny remains quite childlike in behavior, lacking agency and speech alike. In Austen’s time, young women were characterized as either being “in” or

“out.” Being out meant that a woman would be available to accept suitors and are therefore marriageable, in other words, no longer a child. Selwyn suggests that Fanny’s lack of speech is evidence that Fanny is “in.” He says that Fanny behaves “even when dining out, as a young girl would who sits quietly at the table at home when there are guests” (190). Mary Crawford makes this same assumption in chapter five when she is puzzled about Fanny’s status: “Pray, is she out, or is she not” – I am puzzled. – She dined at the Parsonage, with the rest of you, which seemed like being out; and yet she says so little, that I can hardly suppose she is” (36). Austen was all too familiar with the social mores of the time and frequently satirized the concept of “in” or “out” in her novels. Mansfield Park is no exception, and Mary Crawford and the younger Tom

Bertram discuss the practice in detail. At the end of the lengthy discussion on the topic,

Mary Crawford finally decides for us; she says: “then the point is clear. Miss Price is not out” (38).

Critics like Trilling rail against the immobility of the novel, troubled over “its preference for rest over motion… and to live the round of one’s days in the stasis …

[of] an earlier age” (210). Trilling goes so far as to call this impulse “wicked,” but while he may have a point, he perhaps misreads Austen’s intent. While Fanny does literally age and mature, Austen metaphorically keeps her a perpetual child. Sir Thomas laments this early in the novel when he suggests to Fanny that she invite her brother, William, to visit her at the park. Sir Thomas says: “If William does come to Mansfield, I hope you may be able to convince him that the many years which have passed since you parted, have not been spent on your side entirely without improvement – though I fear he must

find his sister at sixteen in some respects too much like his sister at ten” (25). Sir

Thomas hopes Fanny can convince William that she has, in fact, grown out of her childhood. However, he hardly seems convinced himself; instead, he fears that William will find Fanny unchanged. He says that she is “in some respects too much” like a ten- year-old child. The reader can, of course, fill in the blanks; obviously, Fanny has physically matured beyond that of a ten-year-old. It is instead Fanny’s psychological development that Sir Thomas finds stunted, and it is an idea that is affirmed by Fanny’s own behavior; like a child who is called a baby, Fanny cries bitterly.

At the end of chapter seven, after a day in which Fanny is neglected by Edmund in favor of the charming and alluring Mary Crawford, and then suffers physically from overexertion at the hands of Mrs. Norris, Austen writes that “Fanny went to bed with her heart as full as on the first evening of her arrival at the park” (54). Here, Austen again asks the reader to recall Fanny-as-child, a child who suffers greatly from “acute” feelings in which “nobody put themselves out of their way” to comfort (12). It is a move, like that of Reynolds’ fancy pictures, meant to appeal to adult sentiment, and while Fanny is technically maturing as the novel progresses, Austen recalls Fanny’s miserable childhood at this moment to remind us of how – to borrow Nina Auerbach’s vernacular - one “ought” to feel about Fanny Price.

Austen’s intent on maintaining Fanny’s persistent state of childhood is notable in her locale; Mrs. Norris places Fanny in what is termed “the little white attic,” which itself, simply by being both “little” and “white,” has a distinctive childlike quality. Mrs.

Norris notes that the place is “near the old nurseries,” that it is near Miss Lee, the girls’

governess, and is close to the family’s other children, Fanny’s young cousins, Maria and

Julia (9). Everything about the little white attic suggests childhood. As she matures,

Fanny remains in the little white attic, but she also takes over the East room as her own.

The East room, which is described as a “nest of comforts … most dear to her” used to be the old schoolroom and remains unchanged since that time when Fanny first came to

Mansfield Park (206-7). Austen writes that Fanny “would not have changed its furniture for the handsomest in the house, though what had been originally plain, had suffered all the ill-usage of children” (106). It is as if the space is imbued with the ghosts of an earlier age. Later, Mary Crawford visits Fanny in the East room and, looking for chairs, declares: “there – very good schoolroom chairs, not made for a theatre, I dare say; much more fitted for little girls to sit and kick their feet against when they are learning a lesson” (118). The room stagnates temporally to an age when little girls pass their days abusing chairs and ignoring their lessons. Fanny finds both solitude and solace in this place, where childhood seems to go on eternally, and after she is asked to act in a family theatrical, a theatrical with very adult subject matter, she walks around the East room

“to try its influence on an agitated, doubting spirit” (107). It is here where Fanny can retreat psychologically to an earlier age. The space exudes childhood innocence. That

Austen situates and maintains Fanny in such a locale is telling.

Perhaps the most overt evidence of Austen’s intent on maintaining Fanny’s metaphorical childhood comes in the very last pages of the novel. There we find that

Edmund has, at last, come to desire Fanny as a wife, Austen writes:

With such a regard for her, indeed, as his had long been, a regard founded on the

most endearing claims of innocence and helplessness, and completed by every

recommendation of growing worth, what could be more natural than the change?

Loving, guiding, protecting her, as he had been doing ever since her being ten

years old, her mind in so great a degree formed by his care, and her comfort

depending on his kindness, an object to him of such close and peculiar interest.

(319).

At the end of the novel, Fanny still resembles something out of one of Reynolds’ fancy paintings of melancholy children who elicit the desire to protect from an adult audience.

Edmund loves Fanny for her most childlike qualities: helplessness and innocence. Here

Austen directs the reader back to Fanny’s childhood, in the second chapter of the novel, when Fanny was just “ten years old,” specifically to the “stairwell passage,” where ten- year-old Fanny is first loved, guided, and protected by Edmund, and in which her comfort first depends on his kindness. That same early passage also features Edmund referring to Fanny as an “interesting object” (14). Three hundred and five pages later, he still finds Fanny to be “an object… of such close and peculiar interest” (319, italics mine). While Fanny has indeed matured into young adulthood, she is viewed still as an

“object” of interest, an image of a child in a stairwell needing both sympathy and protection.

In the end, Sir Thomas’ sentiments are similarly expressed; he too calls to mind

Fanny’s childhood. Austen writes that Sir Thomas’ feelings become “such a contrast with his early opinion on the subject when the poor little girl’s coming had first been

agitated” (320). Austen takes this moment to again return the reader’s focus to Fanny as a child. She reminds us of how melancholy that childhood was. She continues: “He might have made her childhood happier,” but of course, had Sir Thomas done so, Fanny would fail to excite that sentimentalized empathy required to complete the portrait. This is Austen’s last effort to remind the reader of Fanny Price, the child, and that her childhood, even in the shadow of the formidable Mansfield Park, was impoverished and woeful. But this sentence does something more; it circularly harkens back to perhaps the most relevant discussion on the matter: the discussion Sir Thomas has with Mrs.

Norris at the very beginning of the novel, “when the poor little girl’s coming had first been agitated.” The word “agitated” here means having been set into motion, but

Austen uses it purposefully for its double-meaning. When Mrs. Norris makes the initial proposal, Sir Thomas’ immediately objects; he thinks “of his own four children – of his sons – of cousins in love” (7). But Mrs. Norris does away with all of that by saying the realization of such fears would be “morally impossible” if Fanny comes to live at

Mansfield Park. She continues to say that the only way for the young Bertrams to fall in love with their cousin is for her not to live at Mansfield Park. Mrs. Norris paints a portrait of a young girl growing up in poverty. She says: “the very idea of her having been suffered to grow up at a distance from us all in poverty and neglect, would be enough to make either of the dear sweet-tempered boys in love with her” (7-8). Mrs.

Norris is fully aware of those sentimentalized images of poverty-stricken children painted by Reynolds and Gainsborough, and the emotion those images elicited.

As in the beginning, so it is in the end. There is no free indirect discourse in the denouement of the novel for Fanny; like a painting, she remains voiceless and passive.

If we conflate Reynolds’ pictorialized portrait of Sarah Bridget Frances Price with that of the narrativized portrait of Austen’s Fanny Price, a theme emerges, one of innocence threatened and maintained. In Reynolds’ painting, Sarah Bridget Frances Price stands gravely next to an urn while a dark, oppressive home looms ominously behind her.

Similarly, Mansfield Park threatens Fanny’s innocence: during the acting week, again with Henry Crawford, even on the day of the visit to Rushworth’s Sotherton estate; when other Mansfield inhabitants are engaged in morally questionable behavior, Fanny sits quietly – and innocently - observant on a bench. Repeatedly, Fanny is tempted by others to implicate herself in the loss of her own innocence, but stoically, she refuses and maintains her childlike innocence. Some critics have criticized Fanny for her failure to act, but this may very well be a function of her “fixity,” in the metaphorical sense – as a child – and as Austen’s most allegorical heroine. Some have said that Mansfield

Park is where Austen engages most with the topic of education, but perhaps, at its very core, the novel is about the need to protect the innocence of our children.

Chapter 5

CONCLUSION

I began this project because I was both perplexed and intrigued by the smattering of childhood images that ran counter to the more overt child-figures found in

Austen’s fiction, child-figures like the uncontrollable Dashwood children in Sense and

Sensibility. Well hidden in the texts are subtle images of children that seem to be romanticizing childhood. These well-behaved and understated child images seemed to be doing something quite different than their unruly cousins. It begged the question: what are these children doing? As I read previous scholars’ work on Jane Austen and children, I found that Austen was often accused of disliking children, and I felt compelled to vindicate Austen from this accusation. Furthermore, I desperately wanted to pluck these abstract images of children from the text and give them agency and a life of their own. What I found, however, over and over again, was that these child images were images indeed and were curiously tied to the world of eighteenth-century art.

Repeatedly, Austen placed this subset of children in doorways, windows, and hallways framing them like the portraits she so frequently viewed during visits to London. She often alluded to famous painters when these children were present. As such, they are not real characterizations at all but are instead idealized and sentimentalized images reflecting an abstract ideal, and Austen uses these images as a psychological metric for the adults around them. Because of their relation to the eighteenth-century art-world, I came to term these images “Austen’s picturesque child.”

In chapter two, the Morland children from Northanger Abbey were closely tied to Rousseauian doctrines on childhood and gave a metric for which to measure how the heroine, Catherine Morland, had grown into adulthood. The depiction of a carefree child who lacks self-awareness and possesses freedom from decorum acts as a counterpoint to Catherine’s new-found maturity. For Catherine, the image of her youngest siblings triggers a nostalgic attitude toward the past. This nostalgia marks the

Morland children as Romantic era constructs similar to those found in the cottage door images painted by George Morland, who provided the namesake for Catherine’s little brother George. Furthermore, like the trope of the Romantic Child, the Morland children act as prophets; they prophetically suggested a happy union between Catherine and her suitor, Henry Tilney.

In chapter three, in Pride and Prejudice, the verbal child-“portrait” of

Fitzwilliam Darcy given by the Pemberley housemaid, a stand-in for the famous portrait painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, changes the heroine’s opinion of her suitor. That image of childhood, too, is an idealization, proven to be enhanced by the housekeeper’s artistry.

While this romanticized version of Darcy provides Elizabeth the reason to change her mind, the two opposing images of the Gardener children that “frame” the famous

Pemberley episode, reflect Elizabeth’s evolving consciousness. Austen curiously creates these images in a similar style as the Morland children; they act as the urban equivalent of Morland’s cottage door images, and in both tableaus we find them situated in stairwells and doorways. The way the children are positioned in the two tableaus – respectively frozen and in motion, indoors and then without, timid and then carefree –

gives the reader a way in which to see how Elizabeth perceives her world and how that perception changes over time. Functioning as a lens through which we can see

Elizabeth’s evolution, the Gardiner children, too, act as tiny prophets.

Finally, in chapter four, Fanny Price’s child image provides a different sort of picturesque child. Historians note that while many fancy pictures are of children immersed in joyful, child-like play, contrasting images occurred simultaneously, many of them somber in tone. Framed in a stairwell, Fanny’s child image is just one of those somber, melancholy images. Linking the narrativized Fanny Price with a real-life portrait of a girl named Fanny Price, which was painted by Joshua Reynolds, provides insight into how to read Austen’s character. Austen’s persistent reference back to

Fanny’s child-self suggests Fanny’s lack of growth as well as the precariousness of

Fanny’s child-like innocence and the need to protect those most vulnerable.

These were the most observable images of children that fall into the

“picturesque” category, but they certainly are not the only ones found. Others failed to make it into this project. Emma, the most child-laden novel within Austen’s works, includes images such as a “stray letter-boy on an obstinate mule” (161), “a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread” (161), and a curious image of the little Perry children with wedding cake in their hands (15).

In volume one, chapter ten, Emma finds herself walking with a “child from the cottage… with her pitcher” (65), which calls to mind Gainsborough’s famous Cottage

Girl with Dog and Pitcher (ca. 1785). In volume three, chapter three, Harriet is met on a country road by “a party of gipsies” led by a small child (229). She is then “assailed by

half a dozen children.” This brings to mind George Morland’s rustic portraits of gypsy children. These images are rife with scholarly potential, but for time and space constraints won’t be investigated here.

We find one of the most provocative unmined picturesque images in Austen’s final completed novel, Persuasion, when the heroine, Anne Elliot, and her friend, Lady

Russell, comes to the Musgrove’s home at the Christmas holiday. Austen writes:

Immediately surrounding Mrs. Musgrove were the little Harvilles, whom she

was sedulously guarding from the tyranny of the two children from the Cottage,

expressly arrived to amuse them. On one side was a table, occupied by some

chattering girls, cutting up silk and gold paper; and on the other were tressels

and trays, bending under the weight of brawn and cold pies, where riotious boys

were holding high revel; the whole completed by a roaring Christmas fire … It

was a fine family piece. (94-5)

The phrase “family piece” was a popular eighteenth-century term that referred to the fashionable family paintings done by Reynolds, Gainsborough, and their contemporaries. What’s compelling in this section is that the two ladies viewing the

“piece” see it with varying perspectives. Lady Russell – who could easily be a villain of the piece - finds the scene burdensome and tells Anne that she hopes to remember

“not to call at Uppercross in the Christmas holidays” (95). In contrast, Anne finds herself, as they depart in their carriage, looking back at the place “with fond regret, to the bustles of Uppercross” (95). It seems here that the viewer’s perspective marks that viewer’s inner landscape.

Juliet McMaster said that by the time Austen wrote Emma “she too loses her bitterness against spoilt children” (Children in Emma 66). She continues:

In Sense and Sensibility, in her treatment of the Middleton brats, a degree of

bitterness is quite audible, and obedience seems the most desirable trait in a

child. But Emma shows not just a greater tolerance for children, and a developed

sense of childhood culture, but a greater affection, and even some reverence.

(66)

I think, with Austen’s picturesque children in mind, we can counter this argument and come to understand that Austen’s reverence toward childhood was there all along, beginning with Northanger Abbey, however cleverly veiled. I now believe that the reason Austen tied these children to eighteenth-century art lies with Joshua

Reynolds’ doctrines on his grand style. Like Reyolds, Austen wished to raise these tiny subjects above that which nature could bestow, and the fact that these picturesque children sentimentalize childhood suggests that Austen had quite a reverence for childhood itself. Perhaps the best piece of evidence to support this comes not from

Austen’s fiction, but instead from her history; Paula Byrne writes of Austen’s last days:

Jane Austen lived in the age of Rousseau and Wordsworth … She was no

Romantic … but she shared with the Romantics a belief that the inner child

never really leaves us. When she was ill from the slow painful disease from

which she never recovered, she wrote, ‘tell [William] I often play at Nines and

think of him.’ On her deathbed she played cards and wrote comic verses. (265)

Byrne’s point is telling; as the author lay dying, she comforted herself by playing at childhood things. This act indicates Austen’s reverence toward childhood in a way that the Morland and Gardiner children hint at, and no Middleton child can ever negate.

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