A national hobby during the screening of Downton Abbey was to spot supposed anachronisms in behaviour and language. It drove poor Lord Fellowes into a frenzy. When last week I read Death Comes to Pemberley, P.D. James’s whodunnit set in the world of Pride and Prejudice, I soon found myself tempted to play the Downton game.
It’s not fair, of course. Lady James did not set out to write the book in the language of Jane Austen. At the same time, nor did she wish to produce any such sentences as: ‘“Whatever,” shrugged Darcy.’ In this she succeeded. Yet some items of speech come pretty close, sticking out as anachronistic sore thumbs.
Thus we are told that Mary Bennet ‘was a compulsive reader’. In 1803, when the novel is set, compulsive meant ‘compulsory’. The psychological meaning is first recorded in 1902, in a translation of a work by Emil Kraepelin, the psychiatrist who in 1915 was to identify a compulsive shopping disorder, which he called oniomania.
Psychiatry seems a fatal source of anachronism in Death Comes to Pemberley. Colonel Fitzwilliam (otherwise known as Viscount Hartlep) mentions that a girl who was upset and violently shivering ‘was in shock’. It’s a phrase that I have discussed quite recently, but neither in its surgical nor its psychological senses is it known before 1889. The Colonel, too, talks of instincts that are subconscious. It is true that De Quincey coined sub-conscious in 1834, but there is a hint that the word troubles P.D. James, since on page 68 she uses periphrasis, writing of Wickham that ‘hurtful remarks now rose into his consciousness, beneath which they had lain untroubling for years’. These hurts, we learn on the same page, were ‘made stronger by years of repression’ — a theory first sketched in Sigmund Freud’s Selected Papers on Hysteria and other Psychoneuroses, translated into English in 1909.
A word I found quite jarring in the speech of characters in the novel was lifestyle. It almost comes in the ‘whatever’ category, but there it is, from Sir Selwyn Hardcastle on page 90, and from Darcy’s lips on page 305. Otherwise, it is unknown before 1915 (as life-style), or as one word before 1989. Similarly it is strange to hear Colonel the Viscount Hartlep wanting to be ‘sure Bingley is fully in the picture’, when that colloquial phrase is unrecorded before 1900, being more familiar from the second world war.
One great practical difficulty in the novel is that no regular police force had been established in 1803, so there can be no Adam Dalgliesh investigating the crime. And yet, to my surprise, the police are prominently referred to. In 1803, the only police by that name were the Marine Police, established in the Port of London by private enterprise in 1798. It was not until 1829 that the Metropolitan force was set up, and it was at first often called ‘the New Police’ to distinguish it from the Marine kind. I hardly know whether this counts as an error of fact or of speech, but to me it was as if a traffic warden had suddenly arrived at Pemberley. I am, you may say, being too literal and pedantic. But that is the game.
At an exciting moment in the novel, a judge at the Old Bailey ‘raised his gavel and used it vigorously’. This is not so much an anachronism as a mistake of fact. I know nothing of the law, and my husband follows the Æsculapian arts. But I was struck by a short piece in the Guardian by Marcel Berlins commenting on the television series Garrow’s Law, about an 18th-century advocate. There is apparently much banging of gavels in the drama. ‘English judges have never had gavels,’ Mr Berlins insisted, ‘not in Garrow’s time, not now, not ever.’ Gavel-banging is an American habit.
Very much the same kind of difficulty arises on page 107, where Darcy sets about lighting a row of candles with the ‘taper and matches’ that were to hand. Matches? If by match is meant ‘a short, slender piece of wood, cardboard, or (formerly) wax taper, tipped with a composition which ignites by friction when rubbed against a roughened surface, or (originally) when brought into contact with a chemical reagent’, we are 27 years too early. The word is not used in that sense until 1830, once the thing has been invented. In 1831, a lawsuit was reported between the inventors of the Promethean match and the Lucifer match. Vesta matches are mentioned from 1839.
It is of interest on page 145 to find that, in the Darcys’ village church, St Mary’s, at 11 o’clock on a Sunday morning, there is ‘the singing of a hymn’. I take it that this is at Morning Prayer, unless it was a Communion Sunday. Yet Owen Chadwick, in his excellent history The Victorian Church notes that even by 1827 ‘nearly all high churchmen still refused to allow hymns in their churches’. By ‘high churchmen’, of course, he does not mean Tractarians or advocates of bells and smells, who had not yet come to be. He means upholders of the Tory ideal of Church and State, as no doubt Darcy’s parish incumbent, the Reverend Percival Oliphant, counted himself. Hymns were for dissenters such as Isaac Watts and for rabid Methodists.
It is in this area that one usage so surprised me that I could hardly believe Lady James was responsible for it. She is a patron of the Prayer Book Society and familiar with the conventions for addressing clergy. On page 11, for example, she refers correctly to ‘the Reverend Theodore Hopkins, the rector’. In the next sentence he is quite properly called ‘Mr Hopkins’. The Oxford English Dictionary goes to the trouble of noting that in British English ‘the use of Reverend directly before a surname (without a forename, initial, or other title, as Doctor, Professor, etc.) has typically been considered unacceptable’. By contrast, ‘in American English, this style is widely and uncontroversially attested’. Yet later in the novel, usages such as ‘the Reverend Oliphant’, ‘Reverend Oliphant’ (with no ‘the’), ‘the Reverend Cornbinder’ become commonplace. Might one suspect that some American copy-editor got at the manuscript on its way to the printer?
I am a fan of P.D. James. She is 91, but has lost none of her control over the workings of fiction. So I hope she will not be as irritated by my silly Christmas game as Lord Fellowes appeared to be by the Downton blunder-hunt.
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