Persuasion, James Austen, and James Thomson

Notes and Queries

Volumn 49, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 451-453

  Knox Shaw, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN   (South Africa)

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Indexed keywords

EID: 61249661977     PISSN: 00293970     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/nq/49.4.451     Document Type: Note

References (13)

1. On one occasion in London, Jane expresses her annoyance at having left behind a recent poem by James; see To Cassandra, 18-20 April 1811, Jane Austen's Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford, 1995), 181.
2. James records reading his verse at family gatherings ('Lines written in the Autumn of 1817'); and his daughter Caroline remarks that he 'went frequently to Chawton for one or two nights', and that even after the onset of his illness, 'not many months ever passed without his riding [there], and he gave up this habit very unwillingly'; see Reminiscences of Caroline Austen, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Guildford, 1986), 47, 51.
3. All references to Persuasion are to The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 1933), V; and are given in the text.
4. Two of these are not unlike Coleridge's 'conversation' poems in conception: 'Lines written at Steventon in the Autumn of 1814, after refusing to exchange that Living for Marsh Gibbon', and 'Lines written in the Autumn of 1817 after a recovery from sickness'. Shorter, and of less interest is the wedding-anniversary poem, 'The Autumn Walk: To Mary' (1912).
5. James Austen, 'Autumn', Austen-Leigh Archive, Hampshire Record Office, 60/3/2. Here the poem is dated 1815: a fuller but indistinct date is given in the Chawton copy of James Austen's poetry, probably 7 January 1815. Persuasion was begun on 8 August 1815.
6. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, V. iii. 22-6, ed. Nicholas Brooke (Oxford, 1990), p. 199: I have lived long enough; my way of life Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf, And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have.
7. James Thomson, The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford, 1972),
8. Autumn, lines 988, 707; pp. 116, 108.
9. see David Gilson, A Bibliography of Jane Austen (Winchester, 1997), 445. In this version of the text edited by Patrick Murdoch the lines in question are 992, and 711.
10. See Alan Dugald McKillop, The Background of Thomson's Seasons, chapter 2, 'Description and Science', particularly pp. 63-6;
11. see also James Sambrook, James Thomson 1700-1748: A Life (Oxford, 1991), 102.
12. This verbal echo was noted by R. W. Chapman, see his 'General Index: I, of Literary Allusions', Novels, V, 297.
13. See n. 5 above; and Sense and Sensibility, 92.