Characters we have met in real life: Mansfield Park

[nineveh_uk]

Tom Bertram on being upbraided by his father for getting into debt to such an extent that his extremely wealthy father can't get him it out of it without selling the living promised to his younger son.

“I blush for you, Tom,” said [Sir Thomas], in his most dignified manner; “I blush for the expedient which I am driven on, and I trust I may pity your feelings as a brother on the occasion. You have robbed Edmund for ten, twenty, thirty years, perhaps for life, of more than half the income which ought to be his. It may hereafter be in my power, or in yours (I hope it will), to procure him better preferment; but it must not be forgotten that no benefit of that sort would have been beyond his natural claims on us, and that nothing can, in fact, be an equivalent for the certain advantage which he is now obliged to forego through the urgency of your debts.”

Tom listened with some shame and some sorrow; but escaping as quickly as possible, could soon with cheerful selfishness reflect, 1st, that he had not been half so much in debt as some of his friends; 2dly, that his father had made a most tiresome piece of work of it; and, 3dly, that the future incumbent, whoever he might be, would, in all probability, die very soon.

We've all met Tom. We've probably all been Tom to some extent, but usually aged more about 5 than 25. Unfortunately, one can think of people who retain this characteristic many decades later in life.

It's also interesting to see the ordinal adverbs not spelt out as "firstly" etc, which one would expect from a modern novel.

Anyway, I have just restarted reading Mansfield Park. It's been well over a decade since I last did, and Austen seemed a good option for my current project of making an effort to read more for relaxation.

Comments

[wellinghall]

I don't have any useful comments to add at present, but I will say hello.

[azdak]

If ever a man deserved to fall on his head, it was Tom Bertram, so I appreciate Austen's willingness facilitate this (horses play a number of very important roles in Mansfield Park, another reason why I appreciate it).

I must admit I'd forgotten quite how much money Tom did Edmund out of. It's greatly to Edmund's credit that he doesn't bear a grudge about this. Luckily for me, I'm the oldest, so would never have found myself in Edmund's position, but if I had, I would have found myself hard-pressed not to agree with Mary Crawford.

[carbonel]

The Project Gutenberg version has the ordinals spelled out.

That bit is also remarkable for being one of the few sections in Austen's works that's from the point of view of a male character.

(Some years ago, I saw a theatrical production of Mansfield Park at the North Light Theatre in Skokie, IL. It "modernized" things by changing the entire slant of the book so that Tom's quarrel with his father was about his slave-owning and Tom being horrified by what he'd learned about the actual conditions on his trip to the plantations. I rolled my eyes a lot.)

[gramarye1971]

I definitely enjoyed Mansfield Park more on a second and third reading than I did on my first, where I didn't appreciate the subtle sketching of Fanny's character until I saw the whole of her story. Edmund, by contrast, I wanted to smack with a rolled-up newspaper in the scene where he's complaining to Fanny about the Crawfords at the end.