In 1814, Jane Austen wrote a letter to her sister that closed with this head-scratching piece of news: “I have seen nobody in London yet with such a long chin as Dr Syntax” (2–3 March). Today, only specialists and Regency buffs know what she was talking about, but in 1814 everyone would have got the reference. Doctor Syntax was nothing less than the most popular fictional character of the day, hero of the bestselling Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque—and yes, his chin was indeed a projection for the ages.
“Doctor Syntax Setting Out on His Tour to the Lakes,” The Tour of Doctor Syntax, 5th ed. (1813). Courtesy of the Bowes Art and Architecture Library, Stanford University.
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Doctor Syntax premiered in May 1809 in a poem called The Schoolmaster’s Tour. Written by William Combe and illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson, the poem ran in The Poetical Magazine in monthly installments for two years, finally wrapping up in April 1811. The following year, the poem was published as a book, retitled The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque. The plot was simple enough. An impoverished and hard-visaged curate, Doctor Syntax, sets out on a picturesque tour of England, determined to make his fortune as a travel writer. The Doctor has his share of misadventures, often the result of his own absent-mindedness or pomposity, but in the end his good heart and quixotic idealism carry the day, earning him friends and well-wishers almost everywhere he goes. He completes his circuit, writes his book, and earns a cool £300. Shortly after returning home, he is offered a comfortable church living, which puts an end to his money troubles once and for all.
Just how popular were the Doctor and his Tour? We could use several metrics, all of which point to the same conclusion: Doctor Syntax was the great comic hit of the decade. In terms of sales, there were nine editions in the 1810s alone, comprising some 20,000 copies1—a tremendous number for a hand-colored, illustrated book. When you add the three sequels, the number of editions increases to at least fifteen, and the number of copies likely doubles. Then there were the spinoffs written by other authors. Harlan Hamilton, Combe’s biographer, lists no fewer than twelve (318), and we found three more during our research.2 One writer recalled that, upon offering his manuscript to a bookseller, the man’s only question was, “Pray is it in the style of Doctor Syntax, if it is, it may do” (Tarpaulin vi). There was a merchandise boom as well. Specimens survive of Syntax plates, figurines, and other chinaware. Apparently, there were Syntax hats, wigs, coats, and snuffboxes (Hotten xxvii). One source mentions, as a fashionable accessory, a fishing pole that collapsed into a walking stick, topped with an ivory knob bearing Syntax’s memorable mug (“Piscatoribus” 34). Just about everywhere you went in the 1810s, you would find Syntax. The race track? “Doctor Syntax” was one of the winningest thoroughbreds of the Regency. The theater? Syntax pantomimes were all the rage. France or Germany? The roving don had made his way there as well, in the form of translations.
Transferware plate, showing “A Noble Hunting Party,” The Third Tour of Doctor Syntax, in Search of a Wife (1821). Manufactured by Ralph and James Clews, Staffordshire, c. 1830.3
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The Tour of Doctor Syntax matters a great deal to anyone interested in popular culture and the mass market in Austen’s day. But it also matters to our understanding of Austen herself. Austen is sometimes depicted as a writer who simply wrote what she knew, without any angling after popular success. Indeed, this notion was, at times, part of Austen’s own self-presentation. She told James Stanier Clarke, for example, that she was totally incapable of writing a “serious Romance,” no matter how “much more to the purpose of Profit or Popularity,” and that she would therefore have to stick to “such pictures of domestic Life in Country Villages as I deal in” (1 April 1816). The letter is self-deprecating on the surface, but there is an undercurrent of pride: she won’t pander for the sake of sales.4 Her brother Henry places her in a similar light in the “Biographical Notice” that introduced Jane Austen to the public: “She became an authoress entirely from taste and inclination. Neither the hope of fame nor profit mixed with her early motives” (329). His sister, of course, was above all that.
Or was she? Other letters show that Austen took a keen interest in her earnings.5 She carefully recorded opinions of her novels that reached her from various quarters; and she was very pleased when a writer in the Quarterly Review wrote a glowing review of her works.6 This evidence, all well-known, should be sufficient to show that once Austen’s career got rolling, she embraced the business side of it—profits, sales, publicity. In short, popularity mattered to her by that point. But did it matter earlier? Did she embark on her writerly career, as Henry declared, with only the lofty motives of “taste and inclination,” or was she aiming for popular success then as well?
While that question may never be answered conclusively, The Tour of Doctor Syntax offers a new vantage point. That work—an absolute smash hit—was finished in 1811, the same year Austen published Sense and Sensibility, and its thematic similarities with her novels are extensive. This isn’t to say that Austen witnessed the success of Doctor Syntax and tried to reproduce it: the timing rules out that notion for Sense and Sensibility; as for her later work, Combe’s poem and her novels are too dissimilar in style and genre to trace any direct influence. Still, the subjects of Austen’s novels were, in many cases, the subjects of one of the great fictional sensations of her day. If she were aiming for a broad readership, then her sense of what the market was looking for was quite accurate.
The curate’s lot: Syntax and Sense and Sensibility
Consider, as an initial exhibit, Doctor Syntax’s money woes. Syntax’s poverty is due to the fact that he is a curate. Though he does all the work of the parish, another clergyman, living somewhere else, actually holds the benefice of the living and thus collects the tithes, paying Syntax only a tiny stipend. As Syntax states, “I have never been decreed / To shear the fleeces that I feed”—that is, to collect tithes from his parishioners. Instead, he complains,
No, they enrich the idle dunce
Who never saw his flock but once,
And meanly grudges e’en to spare
My pittance for their weekly fare. (23.23–28)7
But low pay and its consequent privations are not Syntax’s only hardships. Because of his poverty, Syntax endures the constant, chafing sense that he is unable properly to occupy his social role. He is a gentleman, a clergyman, a man of learning, but the world sees only his shabby coat and empty pockets: he struggles to win the respect necessary to lead his parishioners. In short, he belongs to what Norman Sykes called the “despised underclass” of the Anglican church (209).
Austen, too, was familiar with the curate’s lot. In Persuasion, Sir Walter speaks contemptuously of the son of a “‘country curate, without bread to eat’” (22). In Mansfield Park, Mary Crawford invokes a situation like Syntax’s, in which the idle rector, Dr. Grant, lives large while piling work on his curate: “‘His curate does all the work, and the business of his own life is to dine’” (128). In Sense and Sensibility, though, Austen goes further, building the hardships of curacy into the very plot of the novel. Edward Ferrars seems destined for a curacy after he is disowned by his mother for refusing to jilt Lucy Steele. His plan is to become ordained and wait for a living, but the practical Mrs. Jennings, despite wishing the couple well, doesn’t think much of his chances: “‘Wait for . . . a living!—aye, we all know how that will end:—they will wait a twelvemonth, and finding no good comes of it, will set down upon a curacy of fifty pounds a-year, . . . and Lord help ’em! how poor they will be!’” (313–14). What Mrs. Jennings understands is that livings do not simply fall into the laps of hopeful young ordinands. Most livings in England were in the gift of private landowners or bishops, and those patrons did not typically give them out based on merit or need: they bestowed them on their dependents or friends (Collins 24–25). That is why Doctor Syntax has given up hope of a living. His impressive qualifications can’t outweigh his lack of connections: “What have I gain’d by learned lore, / By deeply reading o’er and o’er / . . . No fav’ring patrons have I got, / But just enough to boil the pot” (23.11–18).
In both stories, though, a “fav’ring patron” does come along. Doctor Syntax receives a living in Cumberland from a squire he has met on his tour, and Edward is presented to the living of Delaford by Colonel Brandon. In both cases, contrary to usual practice, the presentation is made entirely on merit. Squire Worthy admires Syntax for his “free-born conduct” (15.150)—that is, his refusal to use flattery to get ahead in the Church. (Squire Worthy, presumably, would not have thought highly of Mr. Collins.) Brandon, meanwhile, approves of Edward’s manners and overall character, but he most esteems him, one suspects, for keeping to his engagement despite family pressure—a degree of steadfastness that he wishes Eliza had been able to summon for his sake so many years before.
“Doctor Syntax Taking Possession of his Living,” The Tour of Doctor Syntax, 1st ed. (1812). Courtesy of the Bowes Art and Architecture Library, Stanford University.
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Edward’s arc, then, resembles, to some extent, the arc of the most popular fictional character of the Regency. British fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often explored mismatches between wealth and social station, but nowhere was that mismatch more glaring or widespread than among the 3,700 curates of the Church of England, who made up more than a third of the parish clergy (Jacob 111). The consequences went beyond the curates themselves: if such a large portion of the clergy was too poor and, consequently, too little respected to carry out its ministry effectively, what would become of the moral and religious character of the nation? The tale of the “good curate who is rewarded in the end”—or, in Edward’s case, the potential curate—both acknowledged and assuaged a major national concern. Austen likely knew, then, as she worked out the details of Edward’s clerical career, that she was speaking to the interests, fears, and hopes of a wide audience. The success of Doctor Syntax suggests that, if she were appealing to such an audience, she was on the right track.
Trade and gentility: Syntax and Pride and Prejudice
Doctor Syntax’s plight—learning without wealth—finds its opposite in the world of trade—wealth without learning. While there are hints of this opposition throughout the poem, it becomes overt in canto 19, when Doctor Syntax goes to the trading city of Liverpool. There he is insulted several times by merchants who suspect him of being a swindler and refuse to cash his check. Syntax protests that he is a Doctor of Divinity, an educated and religious man, and therefore trustworthy, but the merchants only scoff; as one says, “For learned men we do not seek: / And if I may with freedom speak, / I take you for a very Greek”—that is, a deceptive person, with an allusion to Syntax’s classical learning (19.296–98).
“Dr. Syntax at Liverpool,” The Tour of Doctor Syntax, 5th ed. (1813). Courtesy of the Bowes Art and Architecture Library, Stanford University.
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After finishing his tour, Syntax has a similar clash in London as he shops his manuscript. Vellum, the bookseller with whom he deals, has no regard for Doctors of Divinity, nor will he interrupt his dinner “for all the knowledge / Of Oxford or of Cambridge College.” “Apollo and the Muses nine!” cries Syntax, “Must learning wait while tradesmen dine!” (22.312–19). Rowlandson’s illustration of the scene captures this upside-down state of affairs: the author, a gentleman by virtue of his classical education, forced to plead his case to the bookseller, a mere tradesman.
“Doctor Syntax with the Bookseller,” The Tour of Doctor Syntax, 4th ed. (1813). Courtesy of the Bowes Art and Architecture Library, Stanford University.
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Eventually, though, Syntax puts Vellum in his place—thanks to a letter of recommendation from his patron, Lord Carlisle. When Vellum learns that Syntax’s book has been endorsed by a lord—in particular, one who will cover the costs of publication—he is all humility and graciousness. The proper hierarchy (in Combe’s mind) has been restored. That restoration is symbolically ratified in canto 25, during which Syntax dreams a “battle of the books” in the streets of London. In his dream, the Greek and Roman classics clash with the forces of trade, represented by various commercial documents. The classics emerge victorious, leaving Syntax, when he awakes, to reflect with satisfaction that “Learning will give an unmixed pleasure, / Which gold can’t buy, and trade can’t measure” (25.500–01).
“The Doctor’s Dream,” The Tour of Doctor Syntax, 5th ed. (1813). Courtesy of the Bowes Art and Architecture Library, Stanford University.
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Like Combe, Jane Austen explored the relationship between the trading classes and the genteel ones—separated by a social gulf, but increasingly similar in wealth and power. In Pride and Prejudice, the main exemplars of the urban mercantile class are the Gardiners, Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle. The Bingley sisters sneer at the Bennets on account of these “vulgar” relations (overcompensating, perhaps, for the fact that their own father made his fortune in trade). Darcy, while less contemptuous, still thinks this association must “‘materially lessen [the Bennet daughters’] chance of marrying men of any consideration in the world’” (40).
The Gardiners, too, see themselves as belonging to a different world than Darcy and the newly genteel Bingleys. Mrs. Gardiner warns Elizabeth not to hope that Jane’s visit to them will put her in the way of Mr. Bingley: “‘We live in so different a part of town, all our connections are so different, . . . that it is very improbable they should meet at all’” (160). What Mrs. Gardiner sees as a mere social fact, however, Elizabeth sees as insufferable pride on the part of Darcy: “‘Mr. Darcy may perhaps have heard of such a place as Gracechurch Street, but he would hardly think a month’s ablution enough to cleanse him from its impurities, were he once to enter it’” (161). Even after she has begun to warm to Darcy, she clings to the “fact” of his contempt for mercantile folk for assurance that she made the right choice in rejecting him. While touring Pemberley, she indulges, for a moment, in the thought of being its mistress, and of inviting her aunt and uncle as guests, before reminding herself that “‘my uncle and aunt would have been lost to me: I should not have been allowed to invite them’” (272). Neither the testimony of Darcy’s housekeeper nor Darcy’s own changed manners are enough to dislodge this belief: she still assumes that the Gardiners will drive him away—that once he meets them, he will recoil “from such disgraceful companions” (282). Darcy’s “prejudice” against the Gardiners, then, or at least Elizabeth’s belief in it, is one of the most important and longest-lasting barriers between the two.
Of course, once he meets the Gardiners, that prejudice, to the extent it ever really existed, quickly melts away. Darcy treats them with respect and easily falls into conversation with Mr. Gardiner about fishing and other matters. The two meet frequently in London after Lydia’s elopement with Wickham, working together to solve that particularly thorny problem. So important, in fact, did Austen consider the relationship between Darcy and the Gardiners that she devoted the last sentence of the novel to it: “Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them” (431).
Pride and Prejudice, then, offers a different solution to the merchant–gentleman divide than Combe does. For Combe, the solution was simply to restore the proper hierarchy, to elevate the humble scholar and sink the purse-proud bookseller. In Pride and Prejudice the solution is mutual respect. The fact that Darcy is a landed gentleman with an honorable lineage, while Mr. Gardiner is a simple merchant, does not prevent them from interacting on friendly and largely equal terms. Mr. Gardiner is not awed by Darcy, nor does Darcy expect or wish him to be. Instead, the two find that with respect to taste, education, and character, they have much in common. The Darcy–Gardiner connection seems to point to a new kind of polite society—one defined less by source of income than by shared values and discourse. Readers of Doctor Syntax would have understood the divide between Darcy and the Gardiners—it was the stuff of popular fiction, not to mention real life—but they may have been surprised by its resolution. If, as we contend, Austen was writing for a wide audience, it was partly with the intention of challenging that audience.
The Picturesque: Syntax and Emma
The main subject of The Tour of Doctor Syntax, of course, is the picturesque—the signature aesthetic theory of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Originally, the “picturesque” was a theory of drawing and painting—it sought to define the types of beauty, especially in a landscape, that could be captured in a “picture.” For William Gilpin, chief theorist and popularizer of the picturesque, the essence of the picturesque was roughness: “make it rough,” he once declared, “and you make it also picturesque” (Three Essays 8). Thus, jagged cliffs and rugged mountains were more picturesque than rolling meadows. A wild heath was more picturesque than a well-ordered garden. A ruined castle or abbey was more picturesque than a well-appointed, modern manor house. Underlying this interest in roughness was that desire, so characteristic of the late eighteenth century, to “return to nature,” to escape the stultifying regularity of modern life and tap into something more essential and more free.8
Bandits on a Rocky Coast, by Salvator Rosa (1655–60). The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Almost as popular as the picturesque itself was the literary genre to which it gave rise—the “tour,” a chronicle of a picturesque journey taken with the intention of admiring landscapes, ruins, and other scenic views, usually accompanied by illustrations. In the preface to the first installment of The Schoolmaster’s Tour (the title of the poem during its periodical run), Combe is quite frank about his intention to benefit from the fad: “As Tours are a fashionable article in the literature of the present day, we trust the poetical peregrination of Dr. Syntax will come in for some share, at least, of the public applause” (6). The hero of the poem is no less direct. He doesn’t think much of tours as literature, but he knows they sell. As he says of the tour he intends to write: “I will allow it is but trash, / But then it furnishes the cash” (6.154–55).
Frontispiece, The Tour of Doctor Syntax, 3rd ed. (1813). Courtesy of the Bowes Art and Architecture Library, Stanford University.
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Austen herself was an avid consumer of tours, at least those of the most famous picturesque tourist, William Gilpin. “At a very early age,” her brother Henry wrote, “she was enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque; and she seldom changed her opinions either on books or men” (330). Most of her novels contain direct references to the picturesque, and all six make use of picturesque discourse and ideas.9
Neither Combe nor Austen, however, was a passive transmitter of picturesque theory. Both realized that the picturesque, especially as defined by Gilpin, was ripe for satire and critique. At times, Gilpin took his passion for roughness to bizarre extremes: he praised dead trees over living ones, worn-out carthorses over healthy stallions, and wrinkled old men over beautiful young women.10 Combe has fun with Gilpin’s dictum to “make it rough” throughout the poem. At one point Syntax declares that starving curates like him are far more picturesque than well-fed rectors, in “whose fair form, so fat and round, / No obtuse angle’s to be found” (13.150–51). Warming to his theme, Syntax goes so far as to claim his own angular self, jutting chin and all, as the very apex of the picturesque: “I am myself, without a flaw, / The very picturesque I draw” (13.145–46). We suspect that the Doctor is speaking tongue-in-cheek here, but, whether he is in on the joke or not, Combe’s satire of Gilpin is clear. Edward Ferrars, too, mocks the picturesque obsession with roughness: “‘I like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles. I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if they are tall, straight and flourishing. I do not like ruined, tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles, or thistles, or heath blossoms’” (113).
Combe and Austen, though, took issue with more than an excessive taste for roughness. They objected to the misanthropic strain in picturesque theory. Celebrating the raw energy and freedom of nature was one thing, but Gilpin and his followers tended to go further—to aestheticize poverty (the “tattered cottages” to which Edward refers), for example, and to denigrate scenes of human thriving (Andrews 59). As Gilpin put it once,
Moral, and picturesque ideas do not always coincide. In a moral light, cultivation, in all it’s parts, is pleasing; the hedge, and the furrow; the waving corn field, and the ripened sheaf. But all these, the picturesque eye, in quest of scenes of grandeur, and beauty, looks at with disgust. It ranges after nature, untamed by art, and bursting into all it’s irregular forms. (Cumberland and Westmoreland 2:44)
Such language was alarming. To appreciate the beauty of a picturesque scene, was it necessary to cultivate a callous indifference to the practical good of real people—especially people less well off than the middle- or upper-class tourist? Did the picturesque observer really have to view fertile fields, providing food for a whole community, with “disgust”?
Combe and Austen preferred a different ideal of the picturesque, one that blended the human and the natural. Combe accomplishes that synthesis in the person of Doctor Syntax himself. Syntax is an aficionado of the picturesque, but he is also, despite his follies, a kind and sociable man, always ready to tell a story or share a laugh. When he remarks on his own picturesque body, in fact, he is enjoying a convivial breakfast at the house of Lord Carlisle. While the content is (ironically) Gilpinesque, the context is just the opposite—all about the joys of human companionship and hospitality, good food and a warm fire. It is the same throughout the tour. Syntax whips out his sketchbook at a moment’s notice when he stumbles upon a view, but he is just as willing to chat about home-brewed ale with a blacksmith’s wife, belt out popular songs with the local squire, or play his fiddle for a group of peasants when their regular fiddler is too drunk to do it. The only people with whom he doesn’t get along are arrogant merchants. Syntax embarks on his tour “in search of the picturesque,” but he mainly finds, and mainly enjoys, what Gilpin was always trying to exclude from the scene: regular people.
“Doctor Syntax, Rural Sport,” The Tour of Doctor Syntax, 1st ed. (1812). Courtesy of the Bowes Art and Architecture Library, Stanford University.
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Austen, meanwhile, expressed her views on the picturesque in a more conventional form: landscape description. Her famous description of Pemberley, possibly written in her teens, is Gilpinesque, for the most part. There are the alternating hills and valleys, one form of picturesque “roughness,” and a river to supply an element of contrasting smoothness. Most important, the view is almost entirely natural, and the few aspects of it that aren’t at least appear to be so: “She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste” (271).11
Gilpin’s influence is also evident in what isn’t included in the scene: people. We know that Darcy is a good landlord, but his grateful tenants, despite being such a credit to Darcy’s character, are not allowed to obtrude themselves and their farms on Elizabeth’s picturesque panorama. Whatever window she looks out of, it is all woods and ridges, grandeur and sublimity. In Emma, though, a more mature Austen defies the mutual exclusion of “moral, and picturesque ideas.” Emma is visiting the estate of Mr. Knightley and happens upon
a view at the end over a low stone wall with high pillars, which seemed intended, in their erection, to give the appearance of an approach to the house, which never had been there. Disputable, however, as might be the taste of such a termination, it was in itself a charming walk, and the view which closed it extremely pretty.—The considerable slope, at nearly the foot of which the Abbey stood, gradually acquired a steeper form beyond its grounds; and at half a mile distant was a bank of considerable abruptness and grandeur, well clothed with wood;—and at the bottom of this bank, favourably placed and sheltered, rose the Abbey-Mill Farm, with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it. (391)
One can still see Gilpin’s influence in this scene: the steep hill, the roughness or “abruptness”12 of the bank, the pleasing contrast of forest and river. There is even something ruin-like about those misplaced pillars. This ideal picturesque view, however, terminates not, as at Pemberley, in a romantic valley that winds its way out of sight—but in that least picturesque of features, a productive farm! Nor is the Abbey-Mill Farm just any farm. It is the home and livelihood of the pragmatic Robert Martin, the man Emma deems an unsuitable match for her protégée, Harriet Smith. In this scene, there is no harsh divide between the beautiful and the useful, the natural and the human-made. The two form a harmonious whole—indeed a national whole. The narrator’s summary of the scene is “English verdure, English culture [i.e., agriculture], English comfort” (391).13
Of course, we can chalk up Austen’s discussions of the picturesque to “taste and inclination” if we wish. She was indeed a lifelong admirer of landscapes, and her juvenilia contains more than a handful of references to Gilpin and his theories. But as she was writing Emma, she would have known that the picturesque was also one of the hot topics of the day. If she had had any doubts about the appetite of the public for picturesque scenes and discussions, and for pushback against picturesque dogma, the success of Doctor Syntax would have been more than sufficient to put them to rest.
The evidence assembled in this essay is suggestive, not conclusive. It is impossible to say how much of the success of Doctor Syntax was due to its subject matter. And even if we assume that much of it was, that does not mean that Austen’s emphasis on those same subjects was an attempt to anticipate her readers’ interests. She may have simply been writing, as her brother said, from “taste and inclination.” She certainly cared about clerical incomes and the picturesque; maybe it did not matter to her whether the public did.
In our view, it is reasonable to assume that Doctor Syntax was a hit, at least in part, because it dealt with matters that the public cared about—and similarly, that Austen, like most writers, had her readers’ interests in mind as she was writing and revising her novels. If we accept those two premises, then it follows that, throughout her career, Austen was a savvy assessor of the public taste. Like Doctor Syntax, her novels rewarded conscientious clergymen, wrestled with the gentleman/tradesman divide, and reimagined the picturesque. In terms of market appeal, they were, if you will, just what the Doctor ordered.
NOTES
1Because there was no standard number of copies per edition, this estimate is not based on the number of editions sold. Rather, it is based on how many times the copper plates used for the illustrations wore out (Wiebracht et al. xxx n.40).
2For more on these spinoffs, see Wiebracht et al. (xxiv).
3This plate was discovered at a garage sale in Claremont, CA, by Christy Bekendam, mother of Aidan Bekendam, one of the authors of this article. When she saw it, she exclaimed to herself, “Hang on, I know that chin!”
4Of course, it is possible that Austen was being entirely ironic, and that she didn’t think the kind of work Clarke was suggesting—a historical novel about the ancestors of Prince Leopold, soon-to-be member of the royal family—would sell in the first place. But she would have been aware of the success of the Porter sisters and Sir Walter Scott in the genre of the historical novel, so we can probably take her concession about “Profit or Popularity” more or less at face value.
5After Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice both sold well, Austen positively reveled in the money she had made: “I have now therefore written myself into £250.—which only makes me long for more” (3–6 July 1813).
6Austen’s lists of opinions are included in the volume Later Manuscripts, part of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen (230–39). Her response to Sir Walter Scott’s review of Emma in the Quarterly Review can be found in the letter to John Murray dated 1 April 1816.
7Passages from The Tour of Doctor Syntax are cited by canto and line.
8For a thorough study of picturesque aesthetics, see Malcolm Andrews’s The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape, Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain: 1760–1800. For a condensed introduction to the topic, and an enjoyable hour of viewing, see his lecture “English Landscape: The Picturesque,” delivered at Gresham College in 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa8bw_ARgf0.
9For more on the role of picturesque rhetoric in Austen’s novels, see Jill Heydt-Stevenson’s “Liberty, Connection, and Tyranny: The Novels of Jane Austen and the Aesthetic Movement of the Picturesque” and Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s “Looking at the Landscape in Jane Austen.”
10See, respectively, Forest Scenery (8), Three Essays (14), and Three Essays (10).
11For more on the picturesque properties of Pemberley, see A. Walton Litz’s “The Picturesque in Pride and Prejudice.”
12For a more thorough unpacking of this charged picturesque term, which Austen invoked repeatedly in her writing, see Peter Knox-Shaw (83).
13Austen wasn’t the only one to sense a connection between landscape aesthetics and national identity. For more on the political implications of the picturesque in the period, see The Politics of the Picturesque, edited by Stephen Copley and Peter Garside.
