Victorians versus Victorians: Understanding "Dear Aunt Jane" (2008)

WHEN WE CONTEMPLATE Victorian perceptions about Austen, most of us think of sentimental image of Aunt popularized by first sentence of first chapter of James Edward Austen-Leigh's Memoir of his aunt (1871): More than half a century has passed away since I, youngest of mourners, attended funeral of my dear Aunt at Winchester Cathedral (1). Defining his aunt's writing as the intuitive perceptions of genius (27), as opposed to result of deep and broad thought, sharp observation, and rigorous revision, (1) he included as Memoir's frontispiece now familiar Victorian engraving of 1810 Cassandra portrait, softened and beautified for Victorian eyes and Victorian sensibilities (Denman 342). Such images, both verbal and visual, are a far cry from Austen widely recognized today as a satirist and feminist, a writer whose forte is irony and whose humor can vary from subtle to cynical. Moreover, even as Austen was a genius, she was a writer who took her craft, job of work, seriously. Two prominent Victorian commentators on Austen who wrote about her novels before Memoir's appearance, Lord Macaulay and George Lewes, recognized Shakespearean naturalness of Austen's characters and her presentation of them in a dramatic way, like characters in a play who show their personalities by what they say and how they act. But some lesser-known Victorian commentators on Austen further recognized her as a satirist, an ironist, and a prescient feminist, nearly a century before modern critics called these qualities to our attention. Largely shunned in their own day because they countered popular, sentimentalized Jane of Memoir, these commentators especially deserve to be better known for laying groundwork for much modern thinking about Austen. Not that Macaulay and Lewes do not deserve our attention. Nearly thirty years before Memoir's first appearance in 1870, Lord Macaulay in 1843 praised Austen in Shakespearean terms. Calling attention to naturalness of her characters, which Sir Walter Scott observed in his unsigned review of Emma in The Quarterly Review, Macaulay elaborates on Austen's characters in terms of what Dr. Samuel Johnson in famous Preface to his edition of Shakespeare's plays (1765) described as the genuine progeny of common humanity, making the poet of nature; poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life (62). Building on Johnson's well-known commentary on Shakespeare, Macaulay states, has had neither equal nor second. But among writers who, in point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to manner of great master, we have no hesitation in placing Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, common-place, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were most eccentric of human beings. (2.770) To illustrate, Macaulay points to uniqueness of four country clergymen in Austen's fiction, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in kingdom: Revs. Mr. Ferrars, Tilney, Bertram, and Elton, all young men of similar education and profession and all in love. Macaulay asks, Who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No such thing (2.770). Following Macaulay's cue as to Austen's Shakespearean presentation of distinctive, lifelike characters, George Lewes goes further into Austen's art of characterization by pointing out how she conveys her characters' personalities: by showing them dramatically rather than telling about them through narration. 1847, though quibbling about applying oxymoronic phrase Shakespeare to a novelist, Lewes admits, In spite of sense of incongruity which besets us in words prose Shakespeare, we confess greatness of Miss Austen, her marvellous dramatic power, seems . …