She had begun writing Emma early in January of the same year. Perhaps it was during this stay that she decided to set one of the most important scenes in the novel, the disastrous picnic when Emma is most unkind to Miss Bates, on nearby Box Hill. This well-known beauty spot was a great attraction then as now and Jane must have joined an ‘exploring party’ (to quote Mrs Elton) to admire its tree-shaded cliffs and stand, as does her Emma, on the open hillside above Dorking in tranquil observation of the beautiful views beneath her.9
The fact that Box Hill is a ‘real’ place, and one known to Jane Austen, however, does not mean that its inclusion is merely an authenticating device, even though it may help to maintain the reader’s belief in the narrative. Emma contains non-fictional and imaginary place names, but the former may be retained as much for some accidental metaphorical significance as for any special biographical reason (Richmond is certainly an appropriate home for Mrs Churchill, while Kingston makes a suitable port of call for those patriotic Englishmen, Robert Martin and George Knightley). Box Hill is itself rich in possibilities, since its name encompasses not only the verbal sparring and considerable damage sustained there by Austen’s characters, but also the sense of claustrophobia – of being boxed in – that is so brilliantly evoked, as the same set of people embark on yet another frivolous excursion. Whether there are further implicit references, for example to the box-tree scene in Twelfth Night (which also extracts rather painful comedy from a situation fraught with in-jokes at the expense of others present), is open to question, but once alert to the persistent mischievous wordplay, anything seems possible, if only momentarily.10
Nor is it the place names alone that seem to blur the real and the metaphorical. Weston, for example, is the name of an old Surrey family and is mentioned in Thomas Fuller’s The Worthies of England, of 1662, while the name Randalls belonged to a house near Leatherhead.11 Knightley, too, may be derived from local history, since a Robert Knightly became Sheriff of Surrey in 1676, while the pulpit of the Leatherhead church was restored by a Mr Knightley in 1761.12 These facts do not, however, diminish the imaginative potential of the names and many readers have attempted to decipher their apparent allegorical meanings.
George Knightley, especially, seems to combine ideas of a chivalric past with the reassuring stability of agriculture, making it a perfect name for the perfect English gentleman. Before assuming too readily that Austen must therefore be promoting a safe, feudal ideal, however, it is worth considering the name’s contemporary associations: ‘Farmer’ George III had been declared insane in 1810, while the lifestyle of his successor, the flamboyant Prince Regent (to whom Emma is dedicated), was hardly stable or conservative.13 The characters of Austen’s own ‘knights’ – Sir Thomas Bertram and Sir Walter Elliott – are also seriously flawed and in both Mansfield Park and Persuasion the baronets contrast unfavourably with the naval officers, whose titles derive from personal merit.14 Even in Emma, with its apparent disdain for the upwardly mobile Mrs Elton, there are hints that Knightley’s influence, though thoroughly English, has less positive aspects. The gypsies’ choice of encampment on the road, for example, which is so alarming to Harriet Smith, may reflect a loss of common land as a result of the continuing enclosures that are suggested by Knightley’s discussions of moving footpaths and rotating crops.15 His charitable gestures, too, though admirable in many ways, are nevertheless dependent on the poverty that is quietly emphasized throughout the book. Even the traditional happy ending, where the heroine is united with her ‘knightley’ suitor, facilitates the absorption of the independent land at Hartfield into the patrimonial acres of the Donwell estate.
The completion of Emma in the year of Waterloo has encouraged the discernment of political meanings in the novel, and again the names have seemed significant to many readers. The obvious association between George Knightley and Englishness (apparently endorsed by the eulogy on Donwell Abbey: ‘It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort’) has led to the opposing equation of Frank Churchill with France, especially in the light of Knightley’s judgement: ‘No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very ‘‘aimable’’, have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people…’16 Given recent events across the Channel, and the importance of class and inheritance in the novel, it is possible to read political allusions into Frank Churchill’s ‘indifference to a confusion of rank’ or his light-hearted desire to become a ‘true citizen of Highbury’. But although ‘Frank’ may have fairly clear associations with France, there is no obvious explanation for either Churchill or his paternal name, Weston. Equally plausible is the possibility that his name is as ironic as ‘George’, since frankness is not one of the more striking aspects of his character.
The names of the principal characters may represent some buried scheme of political, moral, or social significance, which would indicate that the entire text is an elaborate riddle, capable eventually of solution. But if Austen’s names seem to encourage the pursuit of hidden meanings and codes, they also hint that such readings are as absurd as the behaviour that is gently being ridiculed in the novel itself. Margaret Kirkham’s discovery that some of the principal names in Emma (Knightley, Cole, Campbell, Perry) are to be found in the social columns of the Bath Journal, 1801–2, suggests the possibility of accident rather than design, while the knowledge that the same Christian names occur in several different novels, and often appear to have been drawn from her immediate family, makes any consistent allegorizing seem decidedly doubtful.17 And when faced with the anagrammatical excesses of a reader such as Grant Holly, who argues that Emma signifies ‘Am me’, that wood and house are symbols of female sexuality, and that Knightley is both the ‘chivalric knight, and the nightly visitor Emma would house’, it is difficult not to feel as sceptical as intrigued.18
One of the problems about acknowledging the puns in Emma is that there is something distinctly embarrassing about the entire procedure – just as spelling out a joke becomes embarrassing, as the humour evaporates in the explanation. It is simply too heavy-handed to point out that by the end of the novel, both Emma and Knightley have ‘Donwell’. Austen’s narration is characterized by its lightness and speed, so to start labouring over the connotations of a particular word makes the reader seem dull, even in the fleeting moment of self-congratulation that marks the recognition of a pun. To engage in puzzling over the meanings of Knightley or Woodhouse is uncomfortably reminiscent of Harriet Smith struggling with Mr Elton’s charade (‘Can it be Neptune?
Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!
Or a trident? or a mermaid? or a shark?’), while Emma/Emma remains aloof (‘My dear Harriet, what are you thinking of?’).
The wordplay in Emma is essentially understated, and there is no attempt to show off the cleverness of the text. Unlike Mr Weston’s atrocious compliment to Emma, which is overstated in its praise for both the object and the author (‘What two letters of the alphabet are there, that express perfection?… I will tell you. – M and A – Emma – Do you understand?’), the text never pauses to ensure that the reader has grasped the point.19 When Emma is gazing on the gloomy ‘prospect’ of a lonely winter at Hartfield, for example, she picks up the pictorial metaphor of the preceding sentence, which in turn evokes the opening of the novel and Knightley’s first appearance: