I was doing some research into how the reception of Mansfield Park has changed since it was first published. It is now generally regarded as her least popular novel, and some say, her least successful novel artistically. It's a favourite of mine, obviously, since I wrote an Austenesque trilogy based on it. In my own books, I had to come to terms with the slave trade and the fact that Sir Thomas owns a plantation (called an "estate" in the book) in Antigua. The issue of slavery was not an issue for a critic writing 100 years ago, even though they were not as far removed from the time of slavery.
​   I also had to deal with the widespread perception of the heroine Fanny Price as a prim little prig, or a timid little mouse. The anonymous author of this 1927 review, reproduced below, doesn't like Fanny, Edmund, or the book, but his opinions and the way he phrased them amused me. I think other Janeites would like this too, even Mansfield Park fans. But if you haven't read Mansfield Park, be advised, this review contains spoilers.

​MANSFIELD PARK—JANE AUSTEN’S WORST NOVEL
  Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Jan. 20, 1927
    When new books fail to charm—and there comes a time when they do, and when all one’s favourite modern authors seem to be writing tiresome rubbish—there is no cure so good for the soul as to re-read old ones. We suspect that advancing age has much to do with this failure to find a new book to our taste.
   To anyone suffering from this sad fate, whatever his age and literary preferences, we unhesitatingly recommend a course of Disraeli novels or those of Jane Austen.
    To write of Jane Austen in general is like trying to find something new to say about the weather… Yet there remains, we think, something to be said of Mansfield Park. Perhaps it was because we read it last of all, of perhaps because it really is not so good as the others, that we must admit to finding it a very mediocre performance. Compared with the charming simplicity of Catherine Morland, the robust sense of Elinor Dashwood, the quiet intelligence of Anne Eliot or the satirical wit of Emma Woodhouse, Fanny Price is a dull and extraordinarily priggish heroine. As for Edmund Bertram, he is a prince of prigs indeed.

   I am slowly working my way through a dozen or so novels, all belonging to a tangled attribution chain, with the intent of figuring out whether Mrs. E.G. Bayfield or Mrs. E.M. Foster is the most likely author of The Woman of Colour (1808), a Regency-era book which has drawn much recent scholarly interest. Next up: The Corinna of England, and a Heroine in the Shade (1809), published by Benjamin Crosby and Co. The fact that the author of Corinna of England is credited as being the author of The Woman of Colour right there on the title page to the right is not enough to prove the attribution, because the waters have been considerably muddied along the way.
    At any rate, let’s turn to the novel. No, wait, we can’t do that yet, until we first explain that Corinna of England is a parody of a tremendously successful French novel, Corinne, or, Italy (1807), by the authoress and public intellectual Madame de Stael. 
​    Corinne caused a sensation at the time but also caused a backlash in England because of its feminist heroine. Corinne is a free-spirited poet and artist who entertained men at her home, did not shy away from fame, and openly courted the man she wanted to marry. The plot of de Stael’s novel is of secondary importance, although I will note two things which struck me; one, that de Stael uses a lot of narrative philosophical interludes which put me in mind of George Elliot, and secondly, after introducing her hero, she has him heroically rescue some people from a burning building. In other words, she gives him some hero bona fides, because otherwise he’s just some rich, well-born Englishman moping around Europe. As I have learned, a lot of leading men in these old novels are not heroes in the sense of being heroic, and some in my opinion are quite unheroic.
    So that's Corinne. Now, let's move on to the 1809 parody....

     In my previous post, I looked at two books for children, published by two different authors, both featuring a spoiled young West Indian heiress coming to England and correcting her behaviour after receiving judicious instruction from her host family. These two books are examples of a then-popular genre for children's books, which combined morally improving narratives with inset fables, scientific discourses, dialogue, and history lectures. As I mentioned, a book by Thomas Day, Sandford and Merton, was an outstandingly popular exemplar of this genre. 
​   According to scholar ​Peter Rowland, Sandford and Merton was published in three volumes in 1783, 1786 and 1789 and quickly gained such popularity that “the next instalment was eagerly and impatiently awaited by a legion of small readers.” The book was reprinted for over a hundred years but it is now largely forgotten.
     As Rowland describes the premise, "rebellious Tommy Merton, the spoilt son of a wealthy plantation owner from Jamaica, and his friend Harry Sandford, the poor but worthy son of a local farmer, are patiently educated by the Reverend Mr. Barlow... Master Tommy is brought, by precept and self-discovery, to see the error of this ways. A host of interpolated stories [are included], providing introductions to ancient history, astronomy, biology, science, exploration and geography” to which I would add the book includes moral fables in which kindness is always rewarded and cruelty is punished.
    Rowland points out that Thomas Day based Sandford and Merton on the educational philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; for example, Tommy’s tutor starts teaching him to read only after Tommy himself requests to be taught. Letting the child take the lead seems rather peculiar when we consider that it was routine to beat an education into boys at this time. Reverend Barlow is nothing like the typical switch-wielding schoolmaster, and many school boys must have wished they could have been educated along the lines depicted in Sandford and Merton.

    On my trip to England this past summer, I had the privilege of spending a morning researching some old books at the Weston library at Oxford—books which, so far as I know, are unique, in that Oxford is the only library in the world that has a copy. These particular books are not Gutenberg bibles by any means—they are forgotten publications of the Regency era, the kind of books offered in subscription libraries or at bookstores for the average reading public. There is a quiet pleasure in stepping into the reading room at an Oxford library and being entrusted with a book more than two hundred years old that has been slumbering in an archive for who knows how long, and being allowed to open and read it.
     One of the books I examined was a book for children written by William Helme, the schoolteacher husband of the hard-working author Elizabeth Helme. His book is a typical example of the children’s literature of the day, and that’s why I want to talk about it—because it is so typical. It is a compilation of material plagiarized (as we would call it today) from authors of natural history, strung together with a narrative about some children and the wise adult who instructs them and judiciously corrects their faults. Other examples of children’s literature of this type discussed in this blog can be found here and also here. Authors of this type of book did not hold back on their opinions about social issues, as we will see.