Sir Thomas Attends to Business (Ch. 20)

It was a busy morning with him. Conversation with any of them occupied but a small part of it. He had to reinstate himself in all the wonted concerns of his Mansfield life: to see his steward and his bailiff; to examine and compute, and, in the intervals of business, to walk into his stables and his gardens, and nearest plantations; but active and methodical, he had not only done all this before he resumed his seat as master of the house at dinner, he had also set the carpenter to work in pulling down what had been so lately put up in the billiard-room, and given the scene-painter his dismissal long enough to justify the pleasing belief of his being then at least as far off as Northampton. The scene-painter was gone, having spoilt only the floor of one room, ruined all the coachman’s sponges, and made five of the under-servants idle and dissatisfied; and Sir Thomas was in hopes that another day or two would suffice to wipe away every outward memento of what had been, even to the destruction of every unbound copy of Lovers’ Vows in the house, for he was burning all that met his eye. (20.9)

It never struck me before how pointed this passage is. Sir Thomas has returned to discover that he doesn’t really know his children and he responds by clearing away every symptom so that he can forget it as quickly as possible.

What struck me with equal force recently was Alistair Duckworth’s comments on this.

Whatever failings Sir Thomas will reveal in other acts during the novel, his response on discovering the theatre is exemplary. He immediately sets about returning Mansfield to its “proper state” (20.2).

– Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate, p. 56

Although Ipretty sympathetic to Duckworth’s commentary, here I think he makes a revealing misstep. Without a doubt Austen appreciated the value of ‘order’, but an order based on something real. To set about restoring the appearance of order at Mansfield without attending to the causes of the disorder reflects too vividly Sir Thomas’s own reproaches at the end of the novel for this to be so exemplary:

Here had been grievous mismanagement; but, bad as it was, he gradually grew to feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his plan of education. Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. (48.8).