[Victorian Web Home —> Jane Austen —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Hugh Thomson —> Next]

Passage Illustrated: Mr. Knightley calls in haste at Miss Bates's apartment.

“Oh! Mr. Knightley, one moment more; something of consequence — so shocked! —Jane and I are both so shocked about the apples!”

“What is the matter now?”

“To think of your sending us all your store apples. You said you had a great many, and now you have not one left. We really are so shocked! Mrs. Hodges may well be angry. William Larkins mentioned it here. You should not have done it, indeed you should not. Ah! he is off. He never can bear to be thanked. But I thought he would have staid now, and it would have been a pity not to have mentioned —— Well, (returning to the room), I have not been able to succeed. Mr. Knightley cannot stop. He is going to Kingston. He asked me if he could do anything ——”

“Yes,” said Jane, “we heard his kind offers, we heard every thing.”

“Oh! yes, my dear, I dare say you might, because you know, the door was open, and the window was open, and Mr. Knightley spoke loud. You must have heard every thing to be sure. ‘Can I do any thing for you at Kingston?’ said he; so I just mentioned —— Oh! Miss Woodhouse, must you be going? — You seem but just come — so very obliging of you.” [Chapter XXVIII, 219]

Commentary

The reader could well mistake Mr. Knightley here on horseback below Miss Bates's casement window for the dashing and much younger Frank Churchill, especially since the younger man is romantically interested in Jane Fairfax, Mrs. Bates's niece. The passage reinforces the social disparity between a rather youthful-looking Mr. Knightley, a great landowner and magistrate, and the elderly women who have a rented flat above the village bakery.

The close of the chapter makes it clear that the scene occurs the morning after the dance at the Coles’. Frank is already present upstairs, engaged in both repairing Mrs. Bates’s spectacles and supporting one of the piano legs to compensate for the unevenness of the floor. The subject of Miss Bates’s concern is neither the spectacles nor the piano legs, however, but Mr. Knightley's generous gift of the apples from his estate.

Related Material

• "How d'ye do? How d'ye do? Very well I thank you." (page 7) [C. E. Brock's Frontispiece, Vol. II]
• Illustrations of the novel by Charles Edmund Brock (1906)
• A Review-Essay of Film Adaptations of Jane Austen's Novels from 1940 to 1997

Bibliography

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.

---

Victorian
Web

Illus-
tration

Jane
Austen

Hugh
Thomson

Next

Last modified 3 May 2026