chief literary tool in her early works was the art of burlesque.1 In this she was influenced by her brothers’ Oxford literary journal, The Loiterer, which ran for sixty numbers between 1789 and 1790, and made a duty of burlesquing ‘novel slang’ and the absurdities of popular fiction. Henry Austen’s burlesque of the literary conventions of courtship, entitled ‘Peculiar Dangers of Rusticus from the Attacks of a Female Cousin’, is particularly striking.2 In this parody of a sentimental novel, the unlucky hero is besieged by the attentions of his cousin. The hero of Henry’s sentimental tale is lured into seducing his fair cousin: ‘She begged me for the loan of an arm. My arm she accordingly took, and in the course of all her frights and false steps, pinched it so hard and so often, that it is still quite black and blue, through sheer tenderness.’ Following his cousin’s admission of loving ‘cropt Greys to distraction’, he is a lost man:
There was no standing this … I thought she never looked so much like an angel. In short, I know not where my passion might have ended, had not the luckiest accident in the world at once roused me from this rapturous dream of fancied bliss, to all the phlegm of cool reflection and sober reality. A sudden puff of wind carried off two luxuriant tresses from her beautiful Chignon, and left her (unconscious to herself) in a situation truly ridiculous. The delicate thread of sentiment and affection was broken, never to be united.3
Henry Austen’s burlesque technique of juxtaposing a serious and sentimental reflection with a quasi-farcical action is echoed throughout Jane Austen’s Volume the First. Also typical is the taste for absurd detail and witty aphorism. Henry’s tale ends with a description of the hero’s unsuccessful attempts to be rid of his cousin; getting ‘completely cut’ and spilling lemonade over her dress prove fruitless: ‘But she wouldn’t be provoked, for when once a woman is determined to get a husband, I find trifling obstacles will not damp her hopes or sour her temper.’4
The Loiterer was not the only influence on Jane Austen. As has been shown, she was writing burlesque sketches at least two years before its publication, during the time of the Steventon private theatricals.5 James and Henry’s taste for satirical comedies ensured that she was exposed at a very early age to those masters of burlesque plays, Henry Fielding and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Fielding’s Tom Thumb: or The Tragedy of Tragedies (1730) and Sheridan’s The Critic (1779) were two of the most successful examples of eighteenth-century theatrical burlesque. Jane Austen alludes to both plays in her juvenilia.
Fielding had been hailed as a master of political satire after the commercial success of his theatre burlesques, The Author’s Farce, Tom Thumb, Pasquin and The Historical Register. His repeated attacks on the Whig government came to a head in The Historical Register, where he was more openly hostile to Sir Robert Walpole than he had been in his earlier burlesques. The success of this play finally provoked the government into passing the Theatre Licensing Act of 1737, whose long-term repercussions were to include the growth of closet drama and a transfer of creative energy from the theatre to the novel.6 Fielding gave up writing and turned to the law, until the publication of Richardson’s Pamela (1740) provoked him into writing again. Once again he used burlesque to ridicule literary pretension and hypocrisy: Shamela and Joseph Andrews are different burlesques of the same book.
Fielding’s theatre burlesques relied upon a subtle blending of theatrical and political satire. Tom Thumb: or The Tragedy of Tragedies, which the Austens acted at Steventon on 22 March 1788, was chiefly a parody of contemporary tragedy, although Walpole was implicitly satirised in the portrayal of Tom Thumb, ‘the great man’. It was intended to be ludicrous and nonsensical. The original audience was delighted by the incongruity of a ‘tragedy’ designed to make them laugh. Fielding was satirising the way in which modern tragedy was unintentionally absurd.
Set in King Arthur’s Court, Fielding’s travesty ruthlessly caricatured conventional heroic tragedy. The play contains the full panoply of Neoclassical tragedy, but the superhuman giant-killing hero, Thumb – ‘whose soul is as big as a mountain’ – is a midget. The other ‘noble’ personages of the court are just as ridiculous. The royal couple are a quarrelsome pair. The noble King Arthur is bullied by his wife Dollalolla, a queen ‘entirely faultless, saving that she is a little given to drink’, and in love with the captive queen, Glumdalca, a giantess, who is in love with the dwarf, Thumb. The romantic sub-plot common in heroic tragedy is also parodied in the love triangle of the gluttonous Princess Huncamunca and her rivals, Lord Grizzle and Tom Thumb. The King’s loyal courtiers, Noodle, Doodle and Foodle, are foolish and inept, and the play ends with a ludicrous massacre of all the characters.
Burlesque appealed to Austen, for her main concern in her early writings was to excite laughter. She approved of its uncomplicated aim to raise laughter by comic exaggeration and from the sheer absurdity of language and image. But, like Fielding, she was aware that parody acts as a form of criticism, a way of elucidating the absurdities and limitations of a particular art form.
Austen shared Fielding’s irreverence for literary and artistic convention. Her characters are no more heroic than Fielding’s, and often as physically odd or repulsive. In a deliberate echo of Tom Thumb, Austen set her stories in villages called Pammydiddle and Crankhumdunberry. Like Fielding, she took the clichéd situation and rendered it absurd. In ‘Frederick and Elfrida’ she parodied the novelistic convention of depicting two antithetical sisters, one beautiful and foolish, the other ugly and clever. In this topsy-turvy world it is the ugly Rebecca who charms the hero:
Lovely & too charming Fair one, notwithstanding your forbidding Squint, your greazy tresses & your swelling Back, which are more frightful than imagination can paint or pen describe, I cannot refrain from expressing my raptures, at the engaging Qualities of your Mind, which so amply atone for the Horror, with which your first appearance must ever inspire the unwary visitor. (MW, p. 6)
In Tom Thumb, Princess Huncamunca is confounded by the ugliness of Glumdalca: ‘O Heaven, thou art as ugly as the devil.’ Queen Dollalolla, meanwhile, is permanently drunk:
Oh, Dollalolla! do not blame my love;
I hoped the fumes of last night’s punch had laid
Thy lovely eyelids fast.7
Just as Fielding’s heroes are characterised by their unheroic qualities, such as physical ugliness, drunkeness and violence, Austen’s earliest characters are also drunkards, murderers and adulterers. Jealous sisters poison each other, landowners beat their workers with a cudgel on a whim, and children bite off their mother’s fingers. Austen’s letters suggest that she long continued to find physical ugliness, illness and death amusing.8
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