[Victorian Web Home —> Jane Austen —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Hugh Thomson —> Next]
‘She had never been able to get anything tolerable’
Hugh Thomson
1905
Photomechanical reproduction of a pen-and-ink drawing
12.3 by 8.3 cm (4 ⅝ by 3 ⅜ inches), vignetted
Jane Austen, Emma, facing page 92.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
The gruel came and supplied a great deal to be said — much praise and many comments — undoubting decision of its wholesomeness for every constitution, and pretty severe Philippics upon the many houses where it was never met with tolerably; — but, unfortunately, among the failures which the daughter had to instance, the most recent, and therefore most prominent, was in her own cook at South End, a young woman hired for the time, who never had been able to understand what she meant by a basin of nice smooth gruel, thin, but not too thin. Often as she had wished for and ordered it, she had never been able to get any thing tolerable. Here was a dangerous opening. [Chapter 12, pp. 91-92]
Isabella apparently shares her father's taste for gruel. During a conversation about the benefits of the thin and tasteless soup, Isabella Knightley laments that her novice cook at the seaside town of South End (present-day Southend), depicted here as quite young, was incapable of making the dish to her satisfaction. Mr. Woodhouse, a hypochondriac, uses this gastronomic failure to suggest that his daughter's leaving home to take the sea air was a mistake.
Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. Austin Dobson. With forty pen-and-ink illustrations by Hugh Thomson. The Novels of Jane Austen. London: Macmillan, 1896, rpt. 1905.
Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. R. Brimley Johnson. With coloured illustrations by C. E. Brock. The Novels and Letters of Jane Austen. 2 vols. New York & Philadelphia: Frank S. Holby, 1906.
Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. George Justice. 4th edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.
Austen, Jane. Emma: An Annotated Edition. Ed. Bharat Tandon. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard U. P, 2012.
Last modified 27 April 2026