Tea at Trianon: Detecting Jane

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, March 6, 2022

Detecting Jane

From Crime Reads:

In May of 1816, Jane Austen is coming off a rough winter. Her brother Henry’s bank has failed, and her brothers Frank and Edward are on the financial hook to cover a serious amount of Henry’s losses. Edward, the most financially stable of Jane’s five brothers, is being sued for wrongful inheritance by a family in Jane’s Chawton neighborhood. And her beloved younger brother Charles, like Frank a captain in the Royal Navy, has lost his ship in a hurricane—and is being called before an Admiralty Review Board for dereliction of duty. Everyone is stressed. Jane and her brother Cassandra have been entertaining everyone at their small cottage, including Charles’s motherless children, and it’s no wonder Jane’s health is impaired.

She’s feeling, as she might have put it, seedy: her back aching, her stomach and bowels unsettled, her sleep wretched and disturbed. She dips into her savings from the profits of Emma, published the previous January, and carries her sister Cassandra off to Cheltenham Spa for two weeks of rest and relaxation.

Naturally, while there, she stumbles over a mystery and a number of bodies. Cheltenham was a newer, rasher, and less genteel watering-hole in 1816 than neighboring Bath, although the Master of Ceremonies for all the amusements (pump room, balls, and concerts) served both towns. Jane can only afford rooms in a boarding house, where she and Cassandra are at the mercy of their landlady’s food and their fellow-guests. But Cheltenham was also known as the residence of Dr. Edward Jenner—a notable man of Georgian medicine, and an acquaintance of the Austen family. (Read more.)