The early nineteenth-century novelists inherited from their Gothic predecessors a sense that, where landscape was concerned, lies were more beautiful than truth and, for that reason, often preferable. In his essay on Mrs Radcliffe in The Lives of the Novelists, Scott notes the pervasive vagueness of her scene-painting, a quality which at its best aligns her worddrawn settings with the imaginary landscapes of Claude:

Some artists are distinguished by precision and correctness of outline, others by the force and vividness of their colouring: and it is to the latter class that this author belongs. The landscapes of Mrs Radcliffe are far from equal in accuracy and truth to those of her contemporary, Mrs Charlotte Smith, whose sketches are so very graphical, that an artist would find little difficulty in actually painting from them. Those of Mrs Radcliffe, on the contrary, while they would supply the most noble and vigorous ideas, for producing a general effect, would leave the task of tracing a distinct and accurate outline to the imagination of the painter. As her story is usually enveloped in mystery, so there is, as it were, a haze over her landscapes, softening indeed the whole, and adding interest and dignity to particular parts, and thereby producing every effect which the author desired, but without communicating any absolutely precise or individual image to the reader. (pp. 118–19)1

For all the realism of his historical analysis and characterization, Scott often found a similar ‘haze’ very useful in his own higher-flying landscape descriptions. It was pointed out to him when embarking on Anne of Geierstein (1829) that it might be a handicap never to have visited the Swiss Alps, where the action is set. Nonsense, Scott replied, he had seen the paintings of Salvator Rosa, and that would do very well, thank-you.2 Radcliffian haze was also very useful to Scott in what remains the most famous anomaly in his fiction, the ‘reversed sunset’ in The Antiquary (1816). In an early big scene in that novel, Sir Arthur Wardour and his daughter Isabella are trapped between the onrushing tide and unscaleable cliffs. The location is identifiably Newport-on-Tay (called in the novel ‘Fair-port’), near Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland. Scott highlights the scene by having it occur while the great disc of the sun sinks into the North Sea – a lurid panorama on which two paragraphs of fine writing is lavished.

The problem is, of course, that in our cosmos the sun does not sink in the east, it sinks in the west, in the Irish Sea. Given the haste with which he wrote his novel it is not surprising, perhaps, that Scott should have perpetrated the error. What is surprising is that he should have retained it in his 1829 revised edition of The Antiquary. The mistake was certainly pointed out to him. Evidently he felt that where land and seascapes were concerned, the novelist’s artistic licence extended to changing the course of the planets through the heavens. Novelists later in the century were more fastidious. Rider Haggard, for instance, rewrote large sections of King Solomon’s Mines in order to correct an error about the eclipse of the sun which is so technical as to be beyond all but the most astronomically expert readers.3 Haggard mistakenly had the solar eclipse occur while the moon was full. In all editions of King Solomon’s Mines after the ‘37th thousand’ he changed it to a lunar eclipse.

This fetishism about scenic detail develops in the 1830s and 1840s. It may well have coincided with more sophistication about the authenticity of theatrical sets, a greater awareness of what foreign parts looked like with the growth of the British tourism industry, and the diffusion of encyclopaedias among the novel-reading classes. Captain Frederick Marryat wrote Masterman Ready, or the Wreck of the Pacific (1841) specifically to correct the travesty of life on a South Seas desert island perpetrated by Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1812, 1826). Marryat, who as a sailor had felt the brine of the seven seas on his cheek, was appalled by such freaks of nature as flying penguins and man-eating boa constrictors.4

Jane Austen’s most lamentable landscape-painting error occurs in the Donwell picnic scene in Emma. The date of the picnic is given to us very precisely ‘It was now the middle of June, and the weather fine’, we are told in Chapter 24. And again, in the same chapter, the excursion is described as taking place ‘under a bright mid-day sun, at almost Midsummer’ (i.e. around 21 June). Strawberries are in prospect, which confirms the June date. During the course of the picnic, Austen indulges (unusually for her) in an extended passage describing a distant view – specifically Abbey-Mill Farm, which lies some half-a-mile distant, ‘with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it’. The narrative continues, weaving the idyllic view into Emma’s tireless matchmaking activities:

It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.

In this walk Emma and Mr Weston found all the others assembled; and towards this view she immediately perceived Mr Knightley and Harriet distinct from the rest, quietly leading the way. Mr Knightley and Harriet! – It was an odd tête-à-tête; but she was glad to see it. – There had been a time when he would have scorned her as a companion, and turned from her with little ceremony. Now they seemed in pleasant conversation. There had been a time also when Emma would have been sorry to see Harriet in a spot so favourable for the Abbey Mill Farm; but now she feared it not. It might be safely viewed with all its appendages of prosperity and beauty, its rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchard in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending. (Chapter 24)

James Kinsley offers a note to ‘in blossom’:

One could defend the anachronistic apple-blossom in the same way that one defends the anastronomical sunset in that other novel of 1816, The Antiquary. Both represent a hangover from the free-and-easy ways of the Gothic novel of the 1790s when such liberties could be taken with artistic impunity. But this is not entirely satisfactory with the author of Northanger Abbey, a novel which hilariously castigates Gothic fiction’s offences against common sense. And, as R.W. Chapman notes (apropos of the apple blossom), such mistakes are ‘very rare’ in Miss Austen’s fiction.6

It was evidently assumed by Jane Austen’s family that no correction was made because the error was ‘not thought of sufficient consequence’. This is unlikely; elsewhere one can find Jane Austen going to some length to authenticate detail in her fiction (she put herself to trouble, for instance, to verify details as to whether there was a governor’s house in Gibraltar, for Mansfield Park).

If the ‘apple-blossom in June’ error were pointed out to her, why then did Jane Austen not change it? ‘Orchards in leaf would have been an economical means of doing so, requiring no major resetting of type. One explanation is that she did not have time – some eighteen months after the publication of Emma Jane Austen died, in July 1817. A more appealing explanation is that it is not an error at all. It was not changed because the author did not believe it was wrong. In order to make this second case one should note that there is not one ‘error’ in the description (blossom in June), but two, and possibly three. Surely, on a sweltering afternoon in June, there would not be smoke rising from the chimney of Abbey-Mill Farm? Why have a fire? And if one were needed for the baking of bread, or the heating of water in a copper for the weekly wash, the boiler would surely be lit before dawn, and extinguished by mid-morning, so as not to make the kitchen (which would also be the family’s dining-room) unbearably hot. The reference to the ascending smoke would seem to be more appropriate to late autumn. And the reference to ‘spreading flocks’ would more plausibly refer to the lambing season, in early spring, when flocks enlarge dramatically. It will help at this point to quote the relevant part of the passage again: ‘It might be safely viewed with all its appendages of prosperity and beauty, its rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchard in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending.’ What this would seem to mean is that now Harriet is so effectively separated from Mr Robert Martin, the occupant of Abbey-Mill Farm, she is immune to its varying attractions over the course of the year – whether in spring, early summer, midsummer or autumn. What Austen offers us in this sentence is not Radcliffian haze, but a precise depiction, in the form of a miniature montage, of the turning seasons.7 Months may come and months may go, but Harriet will not again succumb to a mere farmer.

Notes

1. These essays of Scott’s are conveniently collected in Ioan Williams (ed.), Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction (London, 1968).

2. See Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, 2 vols. (London, 1970), ii. 1084.

3. For convenience use, as I have done, the Oxford World’s Classics edition of King Solomon’s Mines, edited by Dennis Butts, p. 332.

4. For convenience use, as I have done, the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Swiss Family Robinson, edited by John Seelye, pp. 25, 332.

5. Emma, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford World’s Classics, 1990), p. 444.

6. R.W. Chapman (ed.), Emma (London, 1933), 493.

7. Presenting to the mind’s eye a montage of the year’s passing season was a favourite device of William Cowper, a poet Austen is known to have read. See for instance vi. 140–60 of The Task, ‘But let the months go round, a few short months …’