On this day in 1796. . .

One hundred and third in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters.

Every family has its private jokes: incomprehensible to outsiders; not necessarily all that funny, objectively speaking; and yet charged with a wealth of beloved associations. (In my family, it’s “Did you get to the kidnapping?” Someday, I’ll explain.)

In the Austen family, the name “Richard” seems to have constituted one such private joke--or so generations of bewildered readers have surmised upon arriving at the third sentence of Northanger Abbey. As the narrator delineates Catherine Morland’s unfitness for the role of heroine, we learn that her unremarkable family life is a strike against her: “Her father was. . . a very respectable man, though his name was Richard.”

If you were inclined to attribute that mysterious “though” to authorial oversight, the letter Jane Austen started writing to her sister, Cassandra, exactly 229 years ago today (#6 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence) confirms Austen’s low opinion of the name. Amid a spate of neighborhood news, Austen inserts this tidbit: “Mr Richard Harvey’s match is put off, till he has got a Better Christian name, of which he has great Hopes.”

So what’s wrong with “Richard”? Neither the letter nor the novel provides any further clues. Although all six of Austen’s completed novels mention at least one Richard*, none of these unlucky fellows is important enough to merit character development, let alone a more elaborate explanation of the name’s problematic reputation within the Austen family.

The only theory I’ve ever run across is the name’s association with England’s fifteenth-century King Richard III, charged (possibly unjustly) by Shakespeare and posterity with murdering his young nephews to secure his own succession to the throne.

Still, in the History of England that she wrote as a teenager, a few years before starting Northanger Abbey, Austen doesn’t seem all that convinced of Richard III’s guilt: “The Character of this Prince has been in general very severely treated by Historians,” she notes, “but as he was York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a very respectable Man.”

Nope, no clarification there: Whatever the Austen family's Richard thing was, it's lost to history. (Although we are left wondering what to make of Northanger Abbey’s repetition of the History's phrase “a very respectable man” in connection with another Richard. Coincidence, or deliberate echo? Discuss.)

And did poor Richard Harvey ever manage to find a woman who could love him in spite of his unfortunate name? Clearly, Jane Austen never could have.

* The Richards are: a member of the Hughes family of Highbury (Emma, chapter 38); a Price sibling (Mansfield Park, chapter 39); two Morlands, father and son (Northanger Abbey, chapters 1 and 30); the worthless dead Musgrove son (Persuasion, chapters 6 and 8); a servant of the Phillips family (Pride and Prejudice, chapter 14); and a cousin of the Steele sisters (Sense and Sensibility, chapter 38). Mansfield Park also mentions Shakespeare’s Richard III (in chapter 13) and a ten-year-old named Dick Jackson, son of the Mansfield carpenter (in chapter 15).