Abstract
Mansfield Park begins with a sum, a piece of marriage algebra:
About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income. All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match, and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it. (I p. 1)
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Notes
Charles Haskell Hinnant, ‘The Erotics of the Gift’, in Linda Zionkowski and Cynthia Klekar, eds, The Culture of the Gift in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 143–58, p. 152.
Kenneth L. Moler, ‘Miss Price All Alone: Metaphors of Distance in Mansfield Park’, Studies in the Novel 17 (Summer 1985), 189–92, 190.
Julia Prewitt Brown, The Bourgeois Interior (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), pp. 48, 42.
Published in Sir John Barrow, Some Account of the Public Life and a Selection of the Unpublished Writings of the Earl of Macartney (1807). Peter Knox-Shaw compares the tough stance of George Macartney in China, his refusal to wear Chinese dress and to kowtow, to Fanny’s attempts to hold out against the theatricals and her refusal to oblige Sir Thomas by accepting Henry Crawford. Edmund’s apparently random selection of the work to browse highlights his own weakness in capitulating. See Peter Knox-Shaw, ‘Fanny Price Refuses to Kowtow’, Review of English Studies 17 (1996), 212–17.
Letter to the Earl of Bute, quoted in Christopher Hibberd, George III (London: Viking, 1998), p. 31.
Letter from Frances Burney, dated 7 July 1786, in Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, ed. Charlotte Barrett (Teddington, Middlesex: Echo, 2006), I p. 218.
For a discussion of the relationships with Mary Robinson, Maria Fitzherbert and others, see Christopher Hibberd, George IV (London: Penguin, 1976), pp. 44–67. For an account of the relationship and marriage to Maria Fitzherbert,
see Alan Palmer, ‘Wife to the Prince of Wales’, British History Illustrated II (1975), 48–57. For the marriage to Caroline of Brunswick,
see Anna Clark, ‘Queen Caroline and the Sexual Politics of Popular Culture in London, 1820’, Representations 31 (Summer 1990), 47–68, 49.
For a contemporary description see The Letters of Thomas Moore 1793–1823, ed. Wilfred Sellars Dowden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), I pp. 152–3.
See J.F. Hayward, English Cutlery: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century (London: Victoria and Albert Museum; HM Stationery Office, 1957).
Jill Heydt-Stevenson, ‘“Slipping into the Ha-Ha”: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen’s Novels’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 55:3 (December 2000), 309–39, 309.
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© 2014 Sandie Byrne
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Byrne, S. (2014). Mansfield Park: Everything has its Price. In: Jane Austen’s Possessions and Dispossessions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137406316_5
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