The Original of Pemberley
Donald Greene, University of Southern California
Volume 1, no. 1, October 1988
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
The identification of Pemberley with Chatsworth has had a confused and somewhat comic history. After Jane Austen became celebrated as a novelist, tourist publicity, as so often happens, began to capitalize on that celebrity. The story told by these traditionally unreliable publications is conveniently summed up in a notice outside one room in the Rutland Arms Hotel in Bakewell: “In this room in the year 1811, Jane Austen revised the MS of her famous book Pride and Prejudice. It had been written in 1797, but Jane Austen who travelled in Derbyshire in 1811 chose to introduce the beauty spots of the Peak into her novel. The Rutland Arms Hotel was built in 1804, and while staying in this new and comfortable inn we have reason to believe that Jane Austen visited Chatsworth only 3 miles away and was so impressed by its beauty and grandeur that she made it the background for Pemberley, the home of the proud and handsome Mr. Darcy … The small market town of Lambton is easily identifiable as Bakewell, and any visitor driving thence to Chatsworth must be struck by Miss Austen’s faithful portrayal of the scene …” Three (not five) miles east of Bakewell is situated the great country seat of the Cavendishes, Dukes of Devonshire, Chatsworth House, surrounded by its large and magnificently landscaped park, which Forster is surely implying is the “original for Pemberley.”
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Tourism” include:
Jane Austen’s “Excellent Walker”: Pride, Prejudice, and Pedestrianism
by OLIVIA MURPHY (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Visiting Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Historiography
by SEAN R. SILVER (ECF 21.4, Summer 2009)
Impartial Spectator Meets Picturesque Tourist: The Framing of Mansfield Park
by KAREN VALIHORA (ECF 20.1, Fall 2007)
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