Highbury

[kev67]

I was a bit puzzled to read that Emma was set in Highbury. Highbury is in north London. I used to hear it most in connection with Arsenal football club. It is quite a built up area. I wondered whether in Austen's time it was just a village miles away from London. However, I am sure it was not sixteen miles away. Then I watched a YouTube debate on who was greater: Austen or Emily Bronte; and the professor supporting Austen said that in Surrey Mr Elton is what evil looks like. Highbury is definitely not in Surrey. The county borders have not been redrawn that much. I wondered if there was a small village called Highbury in Surrey somewhere, but I have never heard of one. I gather the name is fictional in Emma. I suppose it would have to be as the community is so small. If Austen had situated Emma in a real village or small market town, there would be a temptation to identify characters in the books with real people.

[kiki1982]

Ha, I'd never thought about it as a real place! From genealogical research into my husband's English ancestors, though, I know that Bethnal Green (closer to London than Highbury?) only became really part of the metropolitan area in about the 1820s or so, when it turned from an idyllic country village into a muddy and highly populated area. Terrible apparently. By the 1830s it was kind of hell on earth. Or so said commissioners anyway.

As far as I can recall, there are two clues as to where it is exactly, this fictional Highbury. The Republic of Pemberley seems to point to your idea that it could be the Highbury we know, at that time still to the north of London, now in the north of London. Somehow I always thought it was in Surrey. Churchill rides to London and back in one day, purportedly to get his hair cut, but [SPOILER]actually to buy his secret fiancée Jane a pianoforte[SPOILER OVER]. mma obviously finds this ridiculous. I remember from a documentary with Lucy Worsley that a post chase travelled at the terrible speed of 10 miles per hour on a good road and in good weather, but a single horse with a rider could travel a little faster, I reckon.
Churchill is also summoned to Richmond, now in South London, by his demanding aunt and just hops over, but I seem to recall, stays overnight, though that might rather have to do with the aunt than with himself or the journey. I suppose the journey took about one hour or two, three tops, taking into account that people generally didn't travel in the dark (dusk was the cut-off point), because lack of light made travelling dangerous due to potentially hazardous roads. Normal carriages I imagine travelled more slowly than post chases which were especially designed, drawn by at least two horses that were regularly changed and mostly travelled on properly kept up turnpike/toll roads.

More importantly, though, is the outing to Box Hill which is definitely in Surrey. Let's say if Highbury was located 16 miles to the north of London, they weren't going to travel 30km to the south west of that city for a little picnic, even though it might have been nice weather and it would have been light for long (the Box Hill party was in midsummer). It says they spent two hours exploring Box Hill, which wasn't fictive, because Frank Churchill clearly references Dorking. Then they sat down and the nasty thing happened. They can't have left at 8 am as that's not what upper class people usually did back then, so the drive there can't have been more than 2 hours. Otherwise it wasn't worth it.

The Republic of Pemberley also references a sentence in chapter 12: "Better not move at all, better stay in London altogether than travel forty miles to get into a worse air." Which tells me 40 miles was daunting and something you didn't do for nothing.

I suppose for all those considerations I've always situated Highbury somewhere between Box Hill and Richmond or so in my mind. Otherwise the party can just not flippantly consider going to Box Hill 'tomorrow', whenever the weather's nice.

[kev67]

Interesting map, although west is up on that map, which is quite confusing. Middlesex does not exist as a county any more, although Middlesex County Cricket Club still does. The prevailing wind was from the west and Bethnal Green in towards the east end of London, so any pollution would have been blown that way. Tobias Smollet remarks about air pollution in Humphry Clinker in about 1770 even before the Industrial Revolution had got under way, due to the burning of coal for heat. The Thames, which generally flows east, was a big sewer too. Hence the preference of the rich for the west end. I cannot see the real Highbury on that map, but I think it is between Holloway and Tottenham. It is definitely not sixteen miles from London.

I am sure you are right about the fictive Highbury being somewhere between Richmond and Box Hill. The town of Dorking and Box Hill are still quite pretty places. In my earlier middle age I used to participate in a twenty mile orienteering race around there. It was very woody and very hilly. Box Hill is a favourite with cyclists.

I have often wondered how speedy and difficult travel by coach was back then. Charlotte Bronte describes Jane Eyre's journey to Lowood School as being long and tedious. I got the impression it was as comparatively expensive and difficult as air travel. Referring to Humphry Clinker, there was was a risk of being held up by highwaymen. The coachmen in Dickens' Tale of Two Cities were heavily armed against highwaymen. However, those two stories were set about thirty or forty years earlier than Emma. Maybe things had improved by Emma's time.

[kiki1982]

Ah, yes and Richmond was a bath town or somewhere people went for their health (like Churchill's aunt), also to the west (or southwest) of London. I'm sure you've been there. Unfortunately I only had the opportunity to see it from a bus on the way to Hampton Court . Still looked nice though.

The Thames was essentially an open sewer until the Victorians built the London sewer system after the Big Stink in 1835 (?), as they thought it didn't only stink a hell of a lot but it also spread disease. The miasma thing. They had particular problems with several cholera epidemics at the time, I recall, and thought it would go away if only the stink went away . Some of those sewers, if not most of them, are still in use today, so it was pretty good stuff... And the philanthropists stayed obsessed with cleanliness.
I didn't know that the smoke could get so bad, though. Never thought of that aspect, but it must have been pretty bad when there was no wind... I thought my father-in-law was joking when he told stories about not being able to see your hand when you held it in front of your face in London in the 1940s and 1950s. Until I saw images on TV of policemen directing the traffic with flares in the smog. Terrible... OK, in the 19th century a bit better without the cars, but with steam ships and factories burning huge amounts of coals and wood to keep going... It can't have been that much better.

It wasn't by accident that Box Hill featured in the Olympics road race. Definitely pretty enough to show the world.

[kev67]

I have recently been reading Mrs Elton's introduction to Highbury society. She seems to think Highbury is Hicksville and that her neighbours are country bumpkins. Highbury is only sixteen miles from London. It would probably be within the M25 motorway around London these days.

Regarding Highbury in north London, I think in Jane Austen's time, it was only a big house and possibly a park, so maybe Austen had not heard of it. I think the other village in the parish was Donwell, and there is no Donwell in Surrey or London, although there is one in the north of England.

[kev67]

From JANSA

Austen tells us that Mr. Elton rode 16 miles from Highbury into London to take Harriet Smith’s picture to be framed. Robert Chapman says we shouldn’t take that 16-mile distance seriously, even though Austen mentions it five times. He says she set up a geographic impossibility here: no place can be 16 miles from the West End of London, nine miles from Richmond, and seven miles from Box Hill. He was right. I measured road distances on a copy of an 1808 map and found that we need to add five or ten miles to each of those three distances to make Austen’s statement true. Even then, the three routes would converge in an area where in 1808 there was not even a village. Chapman says Austen was probably trying to prevent the reader from identifying Highbury with any real town.

[Jackson Richardson]

In the early C19 Highbury in North London was just an area in the parish of Islington, I seem to remember that Mrs Bardell and her chums in Pickwick Papers go there for a jolly. I believe it tried to establish itself as a downmarket version of Vauxhall.

Jane Austen just uses the name for a Surrey villageas per kev's helpful quote in the last post.

The interesting thing is how big it is. Doesn't Jane call it a village? In which case it is smaller than Reigate or Dorking. It does not have a regular assembly hall, but it does have a decent shop.

(The only time we tried to visit Box Hill it was aswarm with cyclists and horrible. But Surrey can even now in parts seem rural, although being so near to London and with a genteel suburban reputation.

[Jackson Richardson]

PS. The other literary reference to Highbury I know (and I used to live nearby) is John Betjemin's poem St Saviour's Aberdeen Park with its line describing "a sun that's setting in Neasden and saturating us here."