The Cambridge Edition of the Works of

JANE AUSTEN

MANSFIELD PARK

Cambridge University Press and the General Editor Janet Todd wish to express their gratitude to the University of Glasgow and the University of Aberdeen for providing funding towards the creation of this edition. Their generosity made possible the employment of Antje Blank as research assistant throughout the project.

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of

JANE AUSTEN

Editorial Board

Marilyn Butler, University of Oxford
Alistair Duckworth, University of Florida
Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta
Claudia Johnson, Princeton University
Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
Deirdre Le Faye, independent scholar
Linda Bree, Cambridge University Press

Volumes in this Series:
Juvenilia edited by Peter Sabor
Northanger Abbey edited by Barbara Benedict with Deirdre Le Faye
Sense and Sensibility edited by Edward Copeland
Pride and Prejudice edited by Pat Rogers
Mansfield Park edited by John Wiltshire
Emma edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan
Persuasion edited by Janet Todd and Antje Blank
Later Manuscripts edited by Brian Southam
Jane Austen in Context edited by Janet Todd

Frontispiece: `Fitting out Mastr Willm Blockhead HM Ship Hellfire, West India Station' (1835). Caricature in aquatint by George Cruikshank, reproduced by permission of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

JANE AUSTEN
MANSFIELD PARK

Edited by

John Wiltshire

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521827652

© Cambridge University Press 2005

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and
to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2005

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Austen, Jane, 1775–1817.
Mansfield Park / edited by John Wiltshire.
p. cm. – (The Cambridge edition of the works of Jane Austen)
ISBN-13: 978-0-521-82765-2
ISBN-10: 0-521-82765-5
1. Young women – Fiction. 2. Children of the rich – Fiction. 3. Social classes – Fiction. 4. Country homes – Fiction. 5. Adoptees – Fiction. 6. Cousins – Fiction. 7. England – Fiction. 8. Uncles – Fiction. I. Wiltshire, John. II. Title. III. Series.
PR4034.M3 2005
823′.7 – dc22 2005006336

ISBN-13 978- 0-521-82765-2 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-82765-5 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

Jane Austen wrote to be read and reread. ‘[A]n artist cannot do anything slovenly,’ she remarked to her sister Cassandra. Her subtle, crafted novels repay close and repeated attention to vocabulary, syntax and punctuation as much as to irony and allusion; yet the reader can take immediate and intense delight in their plots and characters. As a result Austen has a unique status among early English novelists – appreciated by the academy and the general public alike. What Henry Crawford remarks about Shakespeare in Mansfield Park has become equally true of its author: she ‘is a part of an Englishman’s constitution. [Her] thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with [her] by instinct.’ This edition of the complete oeuvre of the published novels and manuscript works is testament to Austen’s exceptional cultural and literary position. As well as attempting to establish an accurate and authoritative text, it provides a full contextual placing of the novels.

   The editing of any canonical writer is a practice which has been guided by many conflicting ideologies. In the early twentieth century, editors, often working alone, largely agreed that they were producing definitive editions, although they used eclectic methods and often revised the text at will. Later in the century, fidelity to the author’s creative intentions was paramount, and the emphasis switched to devising an edition that would as far as possible represent the final authorial wishes. By the 1980s, however, the pursuit of the single perfected text had given gave way to the recording of multiple intentions of equal interest. Authors were seen to have changed, revised or recanted, or indeed to have directed various versions of their work towards different audiences. Consequently all states had validity and the text became a process rather than a fixed entity. With this approach came emphasis on the print culture in which the text appeared as well as on the social implications of authorship. Rather than being stages in the evolution of a single work, the various versions existed in their own right, all having something to tell.

   The Cambridge edition describes fully Austen’s early publishing history and provides details of composition, publication and publishers as well as printers and compositors where known. It accepts that many of the decisions concerning spelling, punctuation, capitalising, italicising and paragraphing may well have been the compositors’ rather than Austen’s but that others may represent the author’s own chosen style. For the novels published in Jane Austen’s lifetime the edition takes as its copytext the latest edition to which she might plausibly have made some contribution: that is, the first editions of Pride and Prejudice and Emma and the second editions of Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park. Where a second edition is used, all substantive and accidental changes between editions are shown on the page so that the reader can reconstruct the first edition, and the dominance of either first or second editions is avoided. For the two novels published posthumously together, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, the copytext is the first published edition.

   Our texts as printed here remain as close to the copytexts as possible: spelling and punctuation have not been modernised and inconsistencies in presentation have not been regularised. The few corrections and emendations made to the texts – beyond replacing dropped or missing letters – occur only when an error is very obvious indeed, and/or where retention might interrupt reading or understanding: for example, missing quotation marks have been supplied, run-on words have been separated and repeated words excised. All changes to the texts, substantive and accidental, have been noted in the final apparatus. Four of the six novels appeared individually in three volumes; we have kept the volume divisions and numbering. In the case of Persuasion, which was first published as volumes 3 and 4 of a four-volume set including Northanger Abbey, the volume division has been retained but volumes 3 and 4 have been relabeled volumes 1 and 2.

   For all these novels the copytext has been set against two other copies of the same edition. Where there have been any substantive differences, further copies have been examined; details of these copies are given in the initial textual notes within each volume, along with information about the printing and publishing context of this particular work. The two volumes of the edition devoted to manuscript writings divide the works between the three juvenile notebooks on the one hand and all the remaining manuscript writings on the other. The juvenile notebooks and Lady Susan have some resemblance to the published works, being fair copies and following some of the conventions of publishing. The other manuscript writings consist in part of fictional works in early drafts, burlesques and autograph and allograph copies of occasional verses and prayers. The possible dating of the manuscript work, as well as the method of editing, is considered in the introductions to the relevant volumes. The cancelled chapters of Persuasion are included in an appendix to the volume Persuasion; they appear both in a transliteration and in facsimile. For all the manuscript works, their features as manuscripts have been respected and all changes and erasures either reproduced or noted.

   In all the volumes superscript numbers in the texts indicate endnotes. Throughout the edition we have provided full annotations to give clear and informative historical and cultural information to the modern reader while largely avoiding critical speculation; we have also indicated words which no longer have currency or have altered in meaning in some way. The introductions give information concerning the genesis and immediate public reception of the text; they also indicate the most significant stylistic and generic features. A chronology of Austen’s life appears in each volume. More information about the life, Austen’s reading, her relationship to publication, the print history of the novels and their critical reception through the centuries, as well as the historical, political, intellectual and religious context in which she wrote is available in the final volume of the edition: Jane Austen in Context.

   I would like to thank Cambridge University Library for supplying the copytexts for the six novels. I am most grateful to Linda Bree at Cambridge University Press for her constant support and unflagging enthusiasm for the edition and to Maartje Scheltens and Alison Powell for their help at every stage of production. I owe the greatest debt to my research assistant Antje Blank for her rare combination of scholarly dedication, editorial skills and critical discernment.

Janet Todd
University of Aberdeen

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Work on this edition of Mansfield Park was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant during 2003–4. I wish to thank the Council for awarding me the grant and the anonymous referees who supported my application. Research was carried out at the La Trobe University Library; the Rare Books room at Fisher Library, University of Sydney; the State Library of Victoria; the Shakespeare Memorial Trust Library, Stratford-upon-Avon; the City of Portsmouth Municipal Library; the Bodleian, Oxford; the University Library, Cambridge; the British Library, London; and at Stoneleigh Abbey, Warwickshire. I thank the staff and librarians at these institutions for their readiness to help, and especially Peggy Cochrane and Sharon Karasmanis of the Interlibrary Loans section of La Trobe University Library.

   Professor Kathryn Sutherland was generous with her time and gave me some vital clues at the beginning of the whole enterprise. I also want to thank Professor Jocelyn Harris for reassurance, advice and comradeship at this stage, as well as much later. The archivist of John Murray Ltd, Mrs Vanessa Murray, kindly sent me photocopies of documents concerning Mansfield Park in the Murray files. In embarking on this project, I had the benefit of advice from Professor Clive Probyn and Dr Bruce Steele.

   I’ve always known that my work was supported by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at La Trobe. I’m lucky, too, to have worked in a friendly and encouraging department and I thank my colleagues for putting up with my endless pestering for obscure pieces of information. My friends Ann Blake, Stephen Clarke, Rachel and Denis Gibbs, Ann Newton, David Rawlinson, Judith Richards, Bryan Reid and Carl Stanyon have also been called upon, as have Jon Spence, and David Fraser of the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. I’m especially grateful to Linda Bree, my editor at Cambridge University Press, and my colleague Iain Topliss, for their comments on my Notes, and to Brian Southam for putting me onto material I would otherwise have missed. I have found in Jane Austen and the Navy a valuable resource.

   I reported on work in progress to the Sydney-based Jane Austen Society of Australia, and to the Jane Austen Society of Melbourne. I should like to thank Susannah Fullerton, Fay Jones and Andrea Richards, the Presidents of the two societies, for arranging these meetings, and the members for their questions, as well as their willingness to act as informal research assistants. My greatest indebtedness however is to Laura Carroll and Brian Lloyd, my research associates at La Trobe University. Laura worked on the Notes with exemplary care and perceptiveness, and contributed important new information. The note on Lovers’ Vows in this edition is her work. Dr Lloyd was in charge of the text, and collated the variants over a long period with great good-humour. I’m grateful also to my niece, Helen Moreno, who found invaluable material in the British Library.

   The latter period of work on this volume has been carried out in rather difficult circumstances, and could not have been completed at all without our children, Ruth and John, and my sisters, Marie Eddy and Roseann Moreno, as well as Judy Goldberg, helping to provide time for me. During these last stages I have read the text aloud several times over with my wife Zaiga, whose memory of her earlier readings of Jane Austen is so vivid that she has raised questions and suggested connections which have decidedly improved this edition. Our collaboration on this has been a great pleasure.

   Copy-editing benefited greatly from the assistance of Laura Carroll and Daniel Vuillermin in Melbourne. I thank them, and my copy-editor in Cambridge, Caroline Howlett, for the care they took over a complex task. Laura and Daniel, together with Max Richards, formed a wonderful proofreading team in Melbourne. I should also like to thank the General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen, Professor Jan Todd, Dr Antje Blank, her research assistant, and the Press’s Editor, Dr Linda Bree, for their intellectual comradeship and encouragement over the long period we have been working together.

   I cannot omit a formal acknowledgement to those previous Jane Austen scholars, foremost among them R. W. Chapman, Jan Fergus, David Gilson, Deirdre Le Faye, Brian Southam and Kathryn Sutherland, without whose work this edition could most certainly not have been undertaken or completed.

CHRONOLOGY
DEIRDRE LE FAYE

INTRODUCTION

Composition and Publication

Mansfield Park, the third of Jane Austen’s novels to be published, appeared in three volumes in May 1814. It was the first to be written, and probably to be conceived, after Austen settled down to write at Chawton in 1809. Her first book, Sense and Sensibility, was accepted by the publisher, Thomas Egerton, by February 1811, and according to her note, Mansfield Park was ‘begun somewhere about Feby 1811 – Finished soon after June 1813’.¹ Yet the approximation of these dates contrasts with the precise ones her sister Cassandra gives for the composition of Emma and Persuasion, Emma taking fourteen months from 21 January 1814 to 29 March 1815, and Persuasion the year from 8 August 1815 to 6 August 1816.² On this dating, Mansfield Park took about twenty-eight months to write, compared to the slightly longer Emma, which took half that time. And though the earlier novel, according to the memorandum, was more or less ‘finished’ in June, it was eight or nine months more before the manuscript was taken to London to be published. Why, on this evidence, Mansfield Park took so long to write, and why it was then held back from publication – if this indeed was the case – are significant questions. It is clear, though, that for Jane Austen this novel’s publication was very important. Explicitly set in the contemporary world, and with several references to current events and controversies, Mansfield Park marked the beginning of a new phase of her writing.

   These memoranda may conceivably suggest that Austen was merely planning the novel in early 1811. Deirdre Le Faye comments that ‘it seems unlikely that the actual writing of this work could have started at so early a date’ as February 1811, since Austen was then busy with both Sense and Sensibility (correcting proofs) and revising Pride and Prejudice.³ She conjectures that Mansfield Park was begun after Pride and Prejudice had been finished, ‘probably in the spring of 1812’, thus reducing the time taken in actual writing to just about the same as Emma. References in Austen’s surviving letters during 1813 have usually been assumed to indicate the progress of the novel’s composition, and might support Le Faye’s suggestion, if we assume that Jane Austen’s requests for information refer to a project that is at that moment on hand. Jane’s letter to Cassandra at Steventon of 24 January 1813, for example, mentions that there is no Government House in Gibraltar, so that ‘I must alter it to the Commissioner’s’. (A speech of William Price in vol. 2, ch. 6 casually refers to the women’s fashions he has seen there.) In the same letter, Austen mentions that the party at the rectory the previous night formed a ‘round Table’: ‘I made my Mother an excuse, & came away; leaving just as many [six] for their round Table, as there were at M^rs Grants.–I wish they might be as agreable a set.’⁴This is a reference to the ‘round game’ played at the parsonage by those characters not occupied with Whist, which occurs in the next chapter of vol. 2.

   But the letter assumes Cassandra’s knowledge of the novel, and the tone of shared familiarity resembles Austen’s references to incidents in other novels like Frances Burney’s: it is therefore possible that Austen’s writing has advanced well beyond this – not half-way – point at this date. The reference to ‘Ordination’ in the next letter of 29 January 1813, in which it appears that Jane has asked Cassandra, at that time staying with their eldest brother James, a cleric, to confirm some information – ‘I am glad to find your enquiries have ended so well. —If you c^d discover whether Northamptonshire is a Country of Hedgerows, I s^d be glad again.—’⁵ – probably refers to Edmund’s visit to his friend near Peterborough, where ‘they were to receive ordination in the course of the Christmas week’ (vol. 2, ch. 8). But it sounds, again, as if this is already written into the text, since Austen is pleased to find from Cassandra that what she has assumed is correct. The reference to hedgerows may point to a moment in vol. 2, ch. 4, when Fanny declares ‘Three years ago, this was nothing but a rough hedgerow’, but R. W. Chapman’s speculation that Austen had some idea of using it as a device to get Fanny to overhear a conversation seems more plausible.⁶ Whatever one concludes, it is notable that, on the sisters’ timetable, it would have taken Austen almost two years, and on Le Faye’s nine or ten months, to reach the twenty-fifth chapter out of forty-eight by this date, leaving the rest of the novel, more than half in length, to be finished within the next six months. This is not impossible, but it might well be that Mansfield Park has been written out by this time, having been begun nearly two years before, and that it is now being revised, or rewritten, or that the author is polishing it up.

   At any rate, work on the novel must have been interrupted, and in part overshadowed, by the ‘long illness’ and inevitable death of Eliza, the wife of Jane Austen’s brother Henry, on 25 April 1813. Jane Austen went to their London home in Henrietta Street on 22 April, coming back to Chawton on 1 May, and returning later. But by mid-year (6 July) she was able to announce – in the postscript to a letter to her brother Frank, then in Sweden – that she has made a nice profit on Sense and Sensibility. With the money she had from selling Pride and Prejudice, she writes, ‘I have now . . . written myself into £250.—which only makes me long for more.— I have something in hand – which I hope on the credit of P. & P. will sell well, tho’ not half so entertaining.’⁷ This ‘something in hand’ evidently involves mentioning ‘two or three’ of Frank’s ‘old Ships’ (which would be in vol. 3, ch. 7) and she asks whether he minds. So the Portsmouth chapters are certainly already written. Having something ‘in hand’ does not necessarily mean, though, ‘completed and ready for publication’. Austen is perhaps as likely to mean something in progress, being dealt with at this moment, or in other words, in the course of being revised.

   Jane Austen might then be still working over the novel at this time, and therefore ‘Finished soon after June 1813’ may not tell the full story of the novel’s completion. Judging from the surviving manuscript of the cancelled chapters of Persuasion, Austen worked on her texts, revised phrasing, rewrote paragraphs (which involved pasting a new version over the original) and inserted substantial additional passages, in the process of revising a text that was itself then further revised, and then largely discarded for a new version. The manuscript of Sanditon, though it is evidently a first draft, also suggests that some intense revision took place as a novel was being put together and also, presumably, at later stages. This may give a clue to the long period of Mansfield Park’s gestation, and also perhaps to the delay, after it was said to be ‘in hand’, in getting the manuscript to the publisher.

   Given Jane Austen’s keenness to publish, and to make money, this slowness is intriguing. In September 1813 Jane was at Henry’s again, but only for a brief three-day visit. Frank had evidently pointed out that if she used the genuine names of his ships in the novel her authorship would soon be out. ‘I was previously aware’, she writes in her letter to him of 25 September 1813, ‘of what I sh^d be laying myself open to—but the truth is that the Secret has spread so far as to be scarcely the Shadow of a secret now—& that I beleive whenever the 3^d appears, I shall not even attempt to tell Lies about it.—I shall rather try to make all the Money than all the Mystery I can of it.’⁸ Austen could easily have used fictional names for the ships: she is thus in this novel implicitly throwing off the mantle of anonymity. One explanation for Mansfield Park’s being held back is that Egerton, Austen’s publisher, may have wanted to delay it. In a postscript to her letter she told Frank ‘There is to be a 2^d Edition of S. & S. Egerton advises it.’⁹ She revised that novel, and it was published, together with Egerton’s (unrevised) second edition of Pride and Prejudice at the end of October 1813.¹⁰ The publisher, reasonably, may have wanted to make as much as possible out of the earlier novels, before their share of the market was contested by the appearance of a new novel by the same author, and Austen, who was risking money by bringing out a second edition of Sense and Sensibility, might have felt disinclined to risk even more on Mansfield Park till she saw how well the second edition of the earlier novel sold. During September and October of this year she was on a long visit to Godmersham Park, her second brother Edward’s house in Kent, from whence he took her to London on 13 November. She stayed with Henry for a fortnight.¹¹ It might have been on this visit that Henry negotiated the acceptance of Mansfield Park by Egerton, or it might have been on another, in January 1814. At this stage Henry had certainly not read the new novel. Did Egerton agree to publish the book also without reading it? (He was to praise its ‘Morality’ and its lack of ‘weak parts’.) But then, why another delay, between mid November and early March – three-and-a-half months – before the manuscript was delivered? Perhaps it was just the weather that impeded Jane Austen from taking it to London before March – it was very cold and foggy that winter – or perhaps she was not quite happy with her text.

   An agreement certainly was reached with Egerton either late in 1813 or early in 1814 that this novel would be published, like Sense and Sensibility, ‘on commission’. This meant that Egerton would undertake all the industrial side of the publishing venture – purchasing paper at the best price, arranging printers and distribution, etc; whilst Henry and Jane would see to the editorial side, and be responsible for proof-reading and corrections. For his work, and risking his initial outlay, the publisher would charge the author a commission of 10 per cent on sales.¹² Jane Austen would retain the copyright. In fact it seems likely that the Austens took a very active role in the novel’s publication process. Travelling together in the carriage from Chawton to London in early March, Jane and Henry read the fair copy of the novel – the manuscript ready for the printers. Then Egerton, following the usual practice of farming copy out to different printers, sent the first and the third volumes in Jane Austen’s fair copy to G. Sidney, of Northumberland Street, off the Strand, whom he had previously used for the second and third volumes of Pride and Prejudice, and the second volume to Charles Roworth of Bell Yard, Temple Bar.

   Jane’s being in London at this time, coupled with her eagerness for profit, suggest some speculations. A tantalising fragment of a letter written from Henry’s address on 21 March, meaning that Jane had been in London for three weeks, a long visit, contains the phrases ‘and only just time enough for what is to be done. And all this, with very few acquaintance in Town & going to no Parties & living very quietly!’ With no parties, and few acquaintance, what is Miss Jane Austen (if she is speaking of herself and not of Henry) occupying herself with in town? It seems plausible that she is working on the proof sheets as they arrive from the two printers. She adds ‘Perhaps before the end of April, Mansfield Park by the author of S & S.—P. & P. may be in the World.’¹³ This estimate, not so far off the mark, contrasts with her pessimistic estimate of the progress of Sense and Sensibility in 1811, when on 25 April she had said ‘I have scarcely a hope of its being out in June’ and had actually to wait till November, despite, as she writes, Henry’s hurrying the printer. It suggests that the Austens (both of them on the spot for the whole printing process this time) really now have the novel ‘in hand’, that they are working actively and energetically with the publisher and printers to get this one out, and possibly making up for lost time. The book was advertised as ‘this day . . . published’ in the Star on 9 May 1814, which, it seems, was correct.¹⁴