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Harriet was soon assailed
Hugh Thomson
1905
Photomechanical reproduction of a pen-and-ink drawing
13.5 by 8 cm (5 ⅜ by 3 ⅛ inches), vignetted
Jane Austen, Emma, facing page 301.
See below for passage illustrated and commentary.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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About half a mile beyond Highbury, making a sudden turn, and deeply shaded by elms on each side, it became for a considerable stretch very retired; and when the young ladies had advanced some way into it, they had suddenly perceived at a small distance before them, on a broader patch of greensward by the side, a party of gipsies. A child on the watch, came towards them to beg; and Miss Bickerton, excessively frightened, gave a great scream, and calling on Harriet to follow her, ran up a steep bank, cleared a slight hedge at the top, and made the best of her way by a short cut back to Highbury. But poor Harriet could not follow. She had suffered very much from cramp after dancing, and her first attempt to mount the bank brought on such a return of it as made her absolutely powerless — and in this state, and exceedingly terrified, she had been obliged to remain.
How the trampers might have behaved, had the young ladies been more courageous, must be doubtful; but such an invitation for attack could not be resisted; and Harriet was soon assailed by half a dozen children, headed by a stout woman and a great boy, all clamorous, and impertinent in look, though not absolutely in word. — More and more frightened, she immediately promised them money, and taking out her purse, gave them a shilling, and begged them not to want more, or to use her ill. — She was then able to walk, though but slowly, and was moving away — but her terror and her purse were too tempting, and she was followed, or rather surrounded, by the whole gang, demanding more. [Chapter XXXIX, 299]
As the Thomson illustration makes clear, Harriet, separated from her companion, feels genuinely surprised and threatened by the pair of Gypsies who suddenly confront her for alms in the woods near Hartfield. And the illustrator has taken pains to make the bare-headed, adolescent male in the right foreground and the rough-featured elderly female, her petitioning right hand in Harriet's face, larger and more physically impressive than the slight, fashionably dressed English girl. Nevertheless, each of the pair strikes us as earnest rather than truly menacing.
Unlike C. E. Brock in Taking out her purse, she gave them a shilling, and begged them not to want more (1906), Thomson here focuses upon just the three contrasting figures, and does not include the dozen small children mentioned in the text. Thomson's elderly female Gypsy seems less menacing and hard-faced than the tall, commanding figure in Brock's watercolour realisation, in which the still-shocked Harriet is actually giving the alms petitioned as all four reach out to her. However, Thomson has chosen to make the roughly dressed, but hardly "stout" petitioner a mere adolescent, and has omitted entirely "the great boy" in a fur hat. The scene which contrasts the well-dressed Harriet with the pair of roughly dressed Gypsies in the encircling woods (with no road visible, and therefore no ready means of escape) is important in its setting up Frank Churchill as Harriet's deliverer. He quickly escorts the distressed young woman (in our illustration, thin, alarmed, slight, and highly anxious) back to the safety of nearby Hartfield. The incident leads to Emma's believing the two are romantically involved. Thus, she now chooses to ignore her vow to stop interfering with the romances of others as she believes that Harriet and Frank may yet become a couple.
As Bharat Tandon notes, nineteenth-century Gypsies in England were at once regarded as both exotic and familiar, serving as symbols of wildness and yet being indigenous vagrants who posed a perennial problem for local magistrates such as Knightley.
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. New York & Philadelphia: Frank S. Holby, 1906. 2 vols.
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 May 2026