"Pleasure is now, and ought to be, your business": Stealing Sexuality in Jane Austen's Juvenilia[1]

^* I want to offer many thanks to Richard Sha, Anna Brickhouse, Alex Dick, and Mary Favret for their inspiring suggestions as I was writing this essay.
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¹ The quotation in the title is from The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to his Son (Vol. 2, 133, qtd. in Porter and Hall's The Facts of Life 19).
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² Approaches to the literary significance of the Juvenilia and of the relationship between Austen's Juvenilia and her later works vary. My argument contrasts to those below insofar as I see a closer link between the published and the unpublished writings than most critics and I interpret them as more politically charged—indeed, as significantly so—than most other readers. For example, Lord David Cecil called them "squibs and skits of the light literature of the day" (qtd. in Doody xxiii); Doody argues that Austen had to control her exuberance in her later texts: "She could not laugh so loudly in the later works.  She could not be wild as she had been in the notebook Volumes. She had to become genteel, and act like a lady" (xxxviii). Sometimes they are read as insights into Austen's life: biographer Jon Spence argues that the Juvenilia provide a rich source of knowledge about Austen's young life, especially because "there is no conventional source of personal information about her [. . .] between the ages of eleven and twenty" (ix-x). Often critics read them as a precursor, a key, to the published works: "The juvenilia are precocious and sometimes amusing but they are by no means brilliant. . . . They are chiefly interesting in illuminating . . . Austen's first struggles to find a literary voice of her own" (Halperin 30). The Juvenilia Press focuses on the "concept of 'play,'" which "allows one both to avoid the implied teleology of apprenticeship and to approach juvenilia on their own terms" (Robertson 293). My own point of view is closest to that of Claudia Johnson's, especially insofar as she argues that "Austen treats conventions not as sterile devices, but as structures of human possibilities which evolve from specific social and political situations [. . .]" (52). Johnson does not discuss the role of crime in the Juvenilia in the same detail as I do.
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³ Brian Southam argues that in "Lesley Castle," "singly the letters are quite successful, but as a whole the work lacks unity" (32).
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⁴ Margaret A. Doody has written persuasively on the importance of the Juvenilia as texts in themselves and not as the works of an apprentice: "Jane Austen was not a child as a writer when she wrote these early pieces.  She possessed a sophistication rarely matched in viewing and using her own medium [. . . ]" (xxxv).  Juliet McMaster explores how in juvenilia in general the presence of "sexual knowingness in a child, especially a girl" is usually met with "resistance": "[w]riting and doing it are seen as perilously close, although the same assumption would not apply in the case of subjects less loaded" ("Virginal Representations" 304-5, 302).
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⁵ Margaret Drabble finds in them "another Jane Austen, a fiercer, wilder, more outspoken, more ruthless writer, with a dark vision of human motivation [. . .] and a breathless, almost manic energy" (xiv).
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⁶ Juliet McMaster sums it up: "[t]hese females are frankly in pursuit of good male bodies and, by implication, good sex.  The long tendency of sentimental fiction to etherealize the heroine can hardly survive against this gust of earthy comedy" ("Energy"178).
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⁷ As Doody and Douglas Murray point out in their edition of the Juvenilia, the Prince Regent's affairs were well known, including his liaison with Mary Robinson and, in 1785, his well-known, though invalidated marriage to Maria Fitzherbert (295-6).
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⁸ For illegal marriages, see "Henry and Eliza," "Love and Friendship," "Sir William Mountague," and "Letter the second From a Young lady crossed in Love to her friend" from "A Collection of Letters." For "natural" children, see "Love and Friendship" as well as the children conceived by characters in "Henry and Eliza," and "Letter the second From a Young lady crossed in Love to her friend."
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⁹ Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy (six volumes) identifies this as ‘"A Song' in the Comedy call'd the Biter, Set by Mr. John Eccles, and Sung by Mr. Cook" (345).
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¹⁰ In Wit and Mirth, at least sixteen songs alone have either Chloe or Strephon in their title, and these songs are, on the whole, erotic in nature. Here are two examples: in "A Song," Chloe "Kiss'd him up before his Dying, / Kiss'd him up, and eas'd his pain" (I, 329); in "Young Strephon and Phillis," Strephon "clasp'd her so fast: / ‘Till playing and jumbling, / At last they fell tumbling; / [. . . .]'Till furious Love sallying, / At last he fell dallying, / And down, down he got him, But oh! oh how sweet, and how soft at the Bottom" (VI, 221). Wit and Mirth, a facsimile reproduction of the 1876 reprint of the original edition of 1719-1720, clearly remained popular for over 150 years. It would be impossible to determine exactly what songs Austen knew, though she had to have been familiar with a lot of popular music. In The Innocent Diversion: A Study of Music in the Life and Writings of Jane Austen, Patrick Piggot admits as much: "it would be idle to pretend that many of the songs and piano pieces which Jane Austen copied with such care and labour into her books are of a good musical standard. [. . .] ‘Taste' is not very evident in her choice of music, too many of the items in her collection being no more than superficially pretty and sometimes worse than that [. . .]" (153).
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¹¹ Whether or not people took coins from each other often depended on how worn the coin appeared. I am very grateful to Alex Dick for his expertise in this point and in the analysis of pawning an undirected letter that follows.
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¹² Many thanks to Mary Favret for her valuable insights into this passage.
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¹³ For further discussion of the associations between this arbor (bower) and disease, see my book, Unbecoming Conjunctions.
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¹⁴ It is funny, then, in a sly, joking sort of way, that Mr. Elton is described as "spruce, black, and smiling" the night Emma finds him "actually making violent love to her" (129). The repetition is significant. According to the OED, when applied to costume, it suggests "a lively air, fashionable dress;" (Chesterfield, 1792), but it also carried connotations of an artificer, as in "Your spruce appearance is a perfect forgery" (Young 1755 Centaur ii. Wks. 1757 IV. 148) The OED cites a chronological range of sources using the word in this way: Ben Jonson refers to " A Neat, spruce, affecting Courtier (1599); Burney to "He'll make himself so spruce, he says, we sha'n't know him (1796 Camilla IV. 163).
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¹⁵ Though Abelson is writing about thefts occurring around 100 years later than Austen, the women she describes sound in many cases like those in the Juvenilia. See When ladies go a-thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store.
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¹⁶ Reynolds does not discuss the Juvenilia.
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¹⁷ This was a commonplace reaction, Bleson argues, among later nineteenth-century offenders: once apprehended, "contrary to all logic and to the evidence, more than one woman rejected any conscious motive and adamantly defended herself with the assertion, ‘I am an honest and respectable woman.' This level of denial was pervasive. [. . .] Aware of the normative distinctions between stealing and not stealing, these women were seemingly incapable of sensing emotionally that their shoplifting was wrong. They told themselves they were innocent, and, however fragile their defenses, they did not think of themselves as thieves" (167-8).
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¹⁸ They are in another way, of course, punished for their selfishness (Sophia, Augustus, and Edward all die and Laura ends up alone). As Patricia Meyer Spacks argues, "[t]he most frequently recurrent plot-generating characteristic of persons in the juvenile fiction is relentless self-interest: what we might call narcissism" (127).
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¹⁹ The story's plot alludes to that of Tom Jones, another orphan who is abandoned by his mother, and who is then "found" and "adopted" into her family only to be later thrown out of the house because of supposed criminal activity. Tom, like Eliza, is of course recognized and rejoins his proper family in the end.
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²⁰ Dating certain pieces from the Juvenilia can only be approximate.  "Henry and Eliza" is found in Volume I, which Chapman and Southam date from 1787-1790, though as Southam points out, this text was dedicated to Miss Cooper, who married on December 11, 1792 (15). Since Austen most likely wouldn't denominate her childhood friend by her maiden name after her marriage, "Henry and Eliza" could have been written up until the wedding date, though it is not clear whether it was written before or after the fall of the Bastille.
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²¹ Linebaugh explains that trial records show that 80 of the 117 prisoners freed from Newgate had committed crimes "against property" (336).
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²² Ellen E. Martin, though arguing that the Juvenilia both "cr[ies] out for interpretation, and resist[s] it thoroughly," nevertheless offers the interesting reading that in Laura's reference to the "indigestible leg of mutton, [she] obtrusively substitut[es] it for the leg of the wrecked hero"; this is "interpretable only by a desperate appeal to the heroine's conflation of culinary and sexual appetites" (84). I do not agree that such an interpretation is a desperate move or that the texts are resistant to interpretation.
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²³ Lewis and Quick were noted actors: William Thomas Lewis—who was in such plays as Inchbald's Everyone Has His Fault and Cowley's Bold Stroke for a Husband—was at Covent Garden for 35 seasons and was the acting manager of Covent Garden between 1782-1893. He was known for parts in comedy of manners and farce. John Quick—who was in the same two plays listed above, started at the Haymarket and moved to Covent Garden; one of the best loved and highest paid actors in the CG Company, he was known for his comedy acting, creating more than 70 original roles. As far as I know there is no evidence that either Lewis or Quick were homosexual; of course, no actor could be labeled a sodomite in a visible way since it was a capital offense—thus, the playwright, Bickerstaffe, fled the country when he was accused of this "crime."  I gather from Fraiman's essay that she is capitalizing on the men's close relationship (they live, travel, and work together) and the fact that even if they are not lovers, they have formed a relationship that is nontraditional by eighteenth-century standards, insofar as it is not defined by marriage. Thanks to Jeffrey N. Cox for his expertise in this matter.
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²⁴ Though the point of coition in Aristotle's Masterpiece is reproduction, this popular medical manual ignored eighteenth-century gender prejudices, and in it "women enjoy parity in sexual desire, and female desire is not viewed as grotesque or psychopathological [. . .]" (Porter, "Secrets" 14-15).
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²⁵ Roy Porter goes on to state that the Romantics rejected "Enlightenment sensuality as gross and materialistic" for the "idealization of love, and particularly of woman" (Facts of Life 32). Although sensibilities do shift throughout the nineteenth century, I believe that Porter's statements here are too sweeping and inclusive.
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