Pride and Prejudice (60 page)

p. 268, l. 11:
risk?
1st ed.:
risk
. follows the third edition and Chapman.

p. 324, ll. 9–10:
“How hard it is
…
impossible in others!
”: printed as one paragraph in the first, second and third editions. Austen noted the error in a letter to Cassandra (4 February 1813), commenting on her copy of the first editon: ‘The greatest blunder in the Printing that I have met with is in Page 220—Vol. 3 where two speeches are made into one.’
³

p. 330, l. 35:
friends
1st ed.:
friend
follows Chapman. The context makes clear that Elizabeth can have only Darcy in mind.

p. 336, l. 5:
family?
1st ed:
family
! follows third edition and Chapman.

p. 342, l. 25:
had resigned
1st ed.:
has resigned it
follows second and subsequent editions.

p. 351, l. 4:
made her here
1st ed.:
made here
. I have adopted the correction from Cassandra Austen’s copy of the first edition, given the likelihood of a printer’s error due to the repetition of ‘her’ in the previous line. R. W. Chapman’s approval of the correction in his article on Cassandra Austen’s editions is also a persuasive reminder that ‘her here’ would be uncharacteristically inaccurate: ‘Darcy had done nothing so improper as to make a visit to Miss Bennett [
sic
] in her mother’s house.’

p. 353, l. 26:
be be serious
1st ed.:
be serious
. The correction in Cassandra Austen’s copy of the first edition again seems right, given the likelihood of a printer’s error due to the italics, Chapman
⁴
suggests that ‘the repetition might be intended’, but such a repetition would be atypical.

p. 359, l. 26:
know
1st ed.:
knew
follows Chapman. The whole interchange refers to the past.

R. W. Chapman (ed.),
Pride and Prejudice
, Vol. II of
The Novels of Jane Austen
, 5 vols. (1923); 3rd edition (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1965)

Jane Austen’s Letters
, 3rd edition, collected and edited by Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)

Also cited: R. W. Chapman, ‘Jane Austen’s text: authoritative manuscript corrections’,
TLS
, 13 February 1937, p. 116

1
.
Chapman, p. 391.

2
.
Ibid., p. 393.

3
.
Letters
, p. 203.

4
.
Chapman, p. 373.

The previous Penguin edition of
Pride and Prejudice
(1972), edited with an excellent Introduction by Tony Tanner, had only four explanatory notes. Tanner argued that extensive notes were unnecessary since ‘references to topical events or other writers, are almost totally suppressed’, and that this meant that the novel achieved an ‘element of timelessness…even though it unmistakably reflects a certain kind of society at a certain historical moment’ (
Pride and Prejudice
, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, p. 397). But a full enjoyment and understanding of Austen’s ‘timeless’ comedy depends on being able to understand and interpret telling social details, effortlessly familiar to a contemporary audience from that ‘certain kind of society’ – a society which is increasingly unfamiliar and alien to modern readers. The culture in which Austen’s heroines make their choices is one of social aspiration and consumerism, and in which social aspiration and consumerism are themselves live moral and political issues – particularly for women. Reading that culture, and those debates, depends on an alertness to significant details: of language, of behaviour, of dress, of ‘lifestyle’. I have therefore made the explanatory notes to this edition as full as possible in an attempt to give modern readers the opportunity to ‘read’ Austen’s characters and social fabric in the way that (often without realizing it) we are constantly engaged in reading our own social environment.

I should like to acknowledge
The Jane Austen Handbook
, edited by J. David Grey (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), which has been invaluable in preparing the Notes.

It is accurate to describe Jane Austen as writing about the gentry only if that term is being used very loosely. If the term ‘gentry’ is used more precisely, to refer to the class of established, landowning families, then Austen’s main characters come mainly from the very bottom rungs of that class or from its margins. Various commentators have coined terms to refer to this more marginal, heterogeneous group. Nancy Armstrong, for example, writes of a ‘middle-class aristocracy’
¹
; and David Spring adopts Alan Everitt’s useful term ‘pseudo-gentry’
²
to describe a group comprising trade and professions, who aspired to the lifestyle of the traditional rural gentry, and whose growing incomes often meant that they could afford to buy into it by acquiring property – as the Bingleys are seeking to do at the beginning of the novel. As Edward Copeland points out, Austen quotes even land-based wealth such as Darcy’s in terms of annual income: a symptom of a class intensely interested in income as a means to, and sign of, status – and survival. For women, of course, upward social mobility could be achieved only through marriage.

Contemporary commentators were very much aware of shifts in the definitions of the social order, an awareness often made evident through anxious attempts to define a status quo rather than by welcoming change. Clara Reeve, for example, in her
Plans of Education
, published in 1792, described the following hierarchy, arguing that ‘the gradations of rank and fortune’ should be observed in educating children:

The nobility of this land are rich and powerful, but there is a distinction between the different degrees and titles, and also between the old and new nobility, which the old families well understand.

The next order, are the old families of wealth and consequence; some of whom have refused titles that they thought it beneath them to accept; whose families are older, and their fortunes superior to many of the nobility.

In the third class, I would place those who have acquired great wealth by any profession or calling, and whose wealth, however gained, stands in lieu of birth, merit, and accomplishments, to the world, and also to themselves. I mean only those overgrown and enormous fortunes which we have seen in our days;…

Fourthly, I would reckon the inferior gentry, who can only count hundreds, where the above classes number thousands a year. In this class every real blessing and comfort of life is to be found, and those who know how to enjoy
them, with virtue and moderation, are the wisest and happiest of mankind. – But there is a canker-worm which too frequently destroys their fortunes and their happiness; a foolish ambition to imitate their superiors, in manners, in vanity, in experience.

But, fifthly, the men of genteel professions, law, physic, and divinity; to these may be added, those employed in the public offices under government, and the officers of the army and navy. In this class I would include all merchants of eminence. The character of a British merchant, is one of the most respectable of any in the world…

There are many of this honourable profession who can afford to spend with any of the classes abovementioned; but they are the best and wisest men, who provide for their families, and avoid all useless and impertinent display of their wealth.
³

Austen’s novels are interventions, from a comparable point of view, in this situation of upward mobility and contested hierarchy and, like Reeve, Austen is particularly interested in the responsible professional and merchant class – the new meritocracy represented in
Pride and Prejudice
by the Gardiners.

Armstrong, Nancy,
Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)

Butler, Marilyn, ‘History, Politics, and Religion’, in Grey, pp. 190–208

Copeland, Edward, ‘Jane Austen and the Consumer Revolution’, in Grey, pp. 77–92

Reeve, Clara,
Plans of Education; with Remarks on the Systems of Other Writers
(London, 1792)

Spring, David, ‘Interpreters of Jane Austen’s Social World: Literary Critics and Historians’, in Janet Todd (ed.),
Jane Austen
:
New Perspectives, Women and Literature 3
(New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1983), pp. 53–72

1.
Armstrong, p. 160.

2.
Spring, p. 60.

3.
Reeve, pp. 64–7.

The relationship between
Pride and Prejudice
and other literary texts is broadly, rather than specifically, allusive, so it seems more appropriate to deal with it in a general note (and see also the Introduction on the political resonance of women’s fiction in the period).

Austen wrote to Cassandra in 1798: ‘
our
family…are great Novel-readers & not ashamed of being so’ (18 December 1798),
¹
and, as other letters show, Austen read and re-read a huge amount of contemporary fiction. So although, as Tanner pointed out, Austen does not refer explicitly to other writers in
Pride and Prejudice
(with one exception: see note I, xiv: 5), the novel is steeped in the characters, situations and plot structures of contemporary fiction – particularly the novels of Samuel Richardson and post-Richardsonian fiction by women. The most direct allusion is the title itself, clearly taken from the end of Frances Burney’s
Cecilia
(1782), and Darcy’s first proposal recalls Mortimer Delville’s proposal to the heroine in that novel. Darcy can also be seen as a version of the reformable Mr B. in Richardson’s
Pamela
(1740), as well as being a much more attractive rewriting of the ideal hero in
Sir Charles Grandison
(1753–4) – one of Austen’s favourite novels.

Butler, Marilyn,
Jane Austen and the War of Ideas
(1975; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)

Doody, Margaret Anne, ‘Jane Austen’s Reading’, in Grey, pp. 347–63

Harris, Jocelyn,
Jane Austen’s Art of Memory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)

Johnson, Claudia,
Jane Austen
:
Women, Politics, and the Novel
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988)

Kelly, Gary, ‘Jane Austen and the English Novel of the 1790s’, in Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (eds.),
Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists 1670–1815
(Athens, Ohio and London: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 285–306

Lascelles, Mary, ‘Reading and Response’, in
Jane Austen and Her Art
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), pp. 41–83

Moler, Kenneth L.,
Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion
(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1968)

1
.
Letters
, p. 26.

Shifts in the meanings of words can be one of the main difficulties for a modern reader of Austen. Where changes in meaning made it seem particularly necessary, I have given eighteenth-century definitions of individual words in the notes.

Phillipps, K. C.,
Jane Austen’s English
(London: André Deutsch, 1970) Stokes, Myra,
The Language of Jane Austen
(London: Macmillan, 1991)

1
.
chaise and four
: A four-wheeled closed carriage usually drawn by two or four horses, the chaise was the regular family carriage. It held three people who all faced in the direction of travel. An income of at least £800, and preferably £1,000, a year was needed to keep a carriage. Here the carriage itself, but also the number of horses, are indicators of Bingley’s wealth. (See note I, iv: 2.)

2
.
Michaelmas
: 29 September, the feast of St Michael and a quarter-day.

3
.
parts
: In the now largely obsolete sense of
OED
definition 12: ‘a personal quality or attribute…esp. of an intellectual kind…Abilities, capacities, talents’.

4
.
nervous
: Definitions and cases of ‘nervous’ disorders proliferated during the eighteenth century, due partly to developments in physiological experiment and theory, partly to developments in a vocabulary of sensibility and self-consciousness. They were associated particularly with women, who were believed to be more delicate, and thus more susceptible, emotionally and physically, than men. Austen’s suggestion that Mrs Bennet actually suffers from self-centred hypochondria is a rather unsympathetic version of, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft’s view that women were socially manipulated into thinking of themselves as nervous creatures of sensibility. (See also I, xx.)

1
.
assemblies
: Public balls, funded usually by subscription and held in assembly rooms which were sometimes purpose-built but often, in market towns like Meryton, attached to inns. (See note I, iii: 4.)

2
.
neices
: I have followed R. W. Chapman in retaining Austen’s characteristic spelling of words with ‘ie’ (cf.
Love and Freindship
), when that spelling appears in the first edition of the novel. (See also Note on the Text.)

3
.
forms of introduction
: The strict hierarchical rules which governed social intercourse and stipulated that individuals had to be formally introduced. (Cf. pp. 6, 95, where Mr Collins inappropriately assumes the right to address Darcy; and 332, when Lady Catherine arrives at Longbourn.)