2. The poet is John Milton (1608—74). See Paradise Lost, V, line 19
3. Mary Crawford is asking whether Fanny has yet made her formal entry into adult society.
4. The practice of “improving” estates became increasingly fashionable during the eighteenth century. For a discussion of Jane Austen’s attitude to it, see Alistair Duckworth’s article in The Jane Austen Handbook, listed in the bibliography.
5. Humphry Repton (1752—1818), the successor of Capability Brown, was a celebrated improver who coined the term “landscape gardening.” His Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening was published in 1803.
6. William Cowper (1731—1800), the poet. Fanny’s quotation is taken from The Task, Book i: “The Sofa”, lines 338—40:
Ye fallen avenues! once more I mourn
Your fate unmerited, once more rejoice
That yet a remnant of your race survives.
7. the driver’s seat.
8. A tax levied on houses according to the number of their windows. It was introduced in 1695 and abolished in 1851.
9. Since the chapel was fitted up in James II’s time, this is an anachronism. Mahogany was not used for furniture in England until the eighteenth century.
10. The references are to Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Canto II, X and XII.
11. Hugh Blair (1718—1800) was a Scottish academic and preacher whose five volumes of sermons went through many editions in the late eighteenth century.
12. The reference is to an episode in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768).
13. The most popular of the influential quarterly reviews were the Whig The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802, and the Tory The Quarterly Review, founded in 1809.
14. The play which causes so much trouble was Mrs. Inchbald’s adaptation, published in 1798, of the German dramatist Auguste von Kotzebue’s Das Kind der Liebe (The Child of Love). Its importance in the novel is partly explained by Marilyn Butler’s point that Kotzebue’s play was popularly identified with just the sort of libertarian ideas that Mansfield Park opposes.
15. A character in John Home’s romantic tragedy Douglas (1756). The play was highly esteemed in the second half of the eighteenth century.
16. George, Lord Macartney (1737—1806) whose Plates to his Embassy in China were published in 1796. The Journal of the Embassy itself was published in 1807 in Sir John Barrow’s Selection from the Unpublished Writings of the Earl of Macartney.]
17. George Crabbe’s Tales were published in 1812.
18. A series of papers contributed by Samuel Johnson to the Universal Chronicle, or Weekly Gazette between 1758 and 1760.
19. The reference is to a poem by Browne, “A Pipe of Tobacco: in Imitation of Six Several Authors” (Cibber, Philips, Thomson, Young, Pope, Swift).
20. In Voltaire’s Louis XIV. Asked what he finds most remarkable about Versailles, the Doge replies, “C’est de m’y voir.”
21. R. W. Chapman refers us to one of Jane Austen’s letters, 24 January 1813: “I learn from Sir J. Carr that there is no Government House at Gibraltar; I must alter it to the Commissioner’s.” Austen was referring to Sir John Carr’s Descriptive Travels in the Southern and Eastern Parts of Spain (1811).
22. a card game in which trumps are bought and sold
23. Again Chapman refers us to the letters. On 27 May 1801 Austen writes of her brother Charles spending his prize money on presents for his sisters: “He has been buying gold chains and topaze crosses for us—he must be well scolded.”
24. The reference is again to Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel. See Canto I, XXV.
25. Jane Austen would sometimes give her family additional details about her characters. In his Memoir of Jane Austen her nephew J. E. Austen-Leigh tells us that the sum given to William by Mrs. Norris was one pound.
26. The reference is to Chapter 26 of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759): “Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.”
27. “Tirocinium: or, A Review of Schools”, an attack on the public schools of Cowper’s day, was published in the same volume as John Gilpin and The Task in 1785. See lines 562—5:
Th’ indented stick that loses day by day
Notch after notch, till all are smooth’d away,