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Able to take an interest in their employment
Hugh Thomson
1905
Photomechanical reproduction of a pen-and-ink drawing
11.4 by 7.5 cm (4 ⅜ by 3 ⅝ inches), vignetted
Jane Austen, Emma, facing page 328.
See below for passage illustrated, and commentary.
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.]
[Frank Churchill] was gone long enough to have had a very comfortable meal, and came back all the better — grown quite cool — and, with good manners, like himself — able to draw a chair close to them, take an interest in their employment; and regret, in a reasonable way, that he should be so late. He was not in his best spirits, but seemed trying to improve them; and, at last, made himself talk nonsense very agreeably. They were looking over views in Swisserland.
“As soon as my aunt gets well, I shall go abroad,” said he. “I shall never be easy till I have seen some of these places. You will have my sketches, some time or other, to look at — or my tour to read — or my poem. I shall do something to expose myself.”
“That may be — but not by sketches in Swisserland. You will never go to Swisserland. Your uncle and aunt will never allow you to leave England.” [Chapter XLII, 328-3300]
Here, Thomson depicts Frank Churchill returning after a brief walk, and rejoining the Woodhouses, who are studying prints of St. Mark's Place, Venice, in Book III, Chapter 6. His weariness with England, despite the wealth and status that he enjoys, may well accord with the spirit of the Regency and Post-Napoleonic Periods, as exemplified by the opening cantos of Lord Byron's popular Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812), in which Childe Harold feels discontented in "his native land" (Canto IV). In other ways too the episode is very much of its age: "Austen's narrative here stages the movement of the eye through the plane of landscape, in a manner reminiscent of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landscape painting" (Bharat Tandon, "Note 25," p. 410). And apparently, Austen here has modelled her spelling of the place name on Maria Edgeworth's "Swizzerland" in the novel Patronage, published just the year before Emma. Frank's yearning for the freedom to travel abroad is natural enough, however, given the possessive nature of his hypochondriacal aunt, who uses her failing health to require that he remain in England.
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 29 May 2026