‘With a slice of Mrs. Weston's wedding-cake,’ for Jane Austen's "Emma" (1905) by Hugh Thomson (P. 14, Chapter I)

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"With a slice of Mrs. Weston's wedding-cake."

Hugh Thomson

1905

Photomechanical reproduction of a pen-and-ink drawing

13 by 7 cm (5 ⅛ by 2 ¾ inches), vignetted

Jane Austen, Emma, facing page 15.

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Passage Illustrated: Mr. Woodhouse consults Mr. Perry about eating the wedding-cake.

Mr. Perry was an intelligent, gentlemanlike man, whose frequent visits were one of the comforts of Mr. Woodhouse’s life; and upon being applied to, he could not but acknowledge (though it seemed rather against the bias of inclination) that wedding-cake might certainly disagree with many — perhaps with most people, unless taken moderately. With such an opinion, in confirmation of his own, Mr. Woodhouse hoped to influence every visitor of the newly married pair; but still the cake was eaten; and there was no rest for his benevolent nerves till it was all gone.

There was a strange rumour in Highbury of all the little Perrys being seen with a slice of Mrs. Weston’s wedding-cake in their hands: but Mr. Woodhouse would never believe it. [Chapter 2, 15]

Commentary

The scene occurs early in the novel; in the 1906 edition's frontispiece, C. E. Brock draws the reader's attention to a less fortunate aspect of Emma’s father, namely his dietary obsession with avoiding "rich" food, almost amounting to hypocondria. Here, instead, Thomson foregrounds Mr Perry's children very much enjoying the cake that Mr. Woodhouse has rejected and obviously passed on — making them the immediate beneficiaries of Mr. Woodhouse's anxiety about it.

Related Material

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. Austin Dobson. With forty pen-and-ink illustrations by Hugh Thomson. The Novels of Jane Austen. London: Macmillan, 1896, rpt. 1905.

Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. R. Brimley Johnson. With coloured illustrations by C. E. Brock. The Novels and Letters of Jane Austen. New York & Philadelphia: Frank S. Holby, 1906. 2 vols.

Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. George Justice. 4th edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

Austen, Jane. Emma: An Annotated Edition. Ed. Bharat Tandon. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard U. P, 2012.

Created 25 April 2026