The Question
The ending of Northanger Abbey turns on one question. Why does a man who has courted Catherine Morland for weeks put her in a carriage at seven in the morning, with no servant?
The answer is not murder, and it is not a ghost. It’s a number. This is the ending explained, with full spoilers for the whole book, so if you haven’t finished, go and finish it first.
Where We Left Her
I read the Project Gutenberg text, and I went through the last four chapters, twenty eight to thirty one, in full. Here’s the short version of what leads up to them.
Catherine is seventeen. In Bath she meets the clergyman Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor, and gets a best friend in Isabella Thorpe, who flirts with Captain Tilney until Catherine’s brother James ends their engagement. General Tilney, the Tilneys’ father, invites Catherine to stay at Northanger Abbey. There she decides he murdered his wife, and Henry catches her sneaking around the rooms. She is mortified. And then things get better. The General is friendly and generous, and takes everyone to see Henry’s house at Woodston.
Chapter Twenty Eight
Then the General goes to London for a week. Catherine finds the abbey a happier place without him. She is in her fourth week, so she raises the idea of leaving, and Eleanor talks her into staying.
One night, just after eleven, a carriage pulls up. Eleanor guesses it’s her eldest brother. It’s the General. She comes to Catherine’s room, pale and shaking, and says the family has an engagement at Lord Longtown’s, near Hereford, for a fortnight. And Catherine must be out tomorrow, at seven, in a hired carriage, with no servant. Eleanor says she is only the mistress of the house in name.
Notice what has changed. Catherine isn’t a heroine in a gothic novel anymore. She’s a seventeen year old being sent seventy miles home alone, and the narrator is clear that this fear has a real cause. She lies awake, and the noises in the walls mean nothing to her.
Chapter Twenty Nine
The journey takes about eleven hours. Catherine is too miserable to be frightened. She passes the turning to Woodston and thinks of Henry, so near and so unaware.
Then the narrator breaks in. A different novel would bring its heroine home in triumph, with a long train of carriages. This one brings her home in solitude and disgrace, in a hired post chaise.
Her family are kind, and not very curious. Her mother says it’s a strange business, and that their comfort doesn’t depend on General Tilney. Mrs. Allen says again and again that she hasn’t patience with the General. Catherine writes Eleanor a short letter and sends back the money Eleanor lent her.
Chapter Thirty
The next scene is a few days later. Catherine is restless, and walks round the garden again and again. Then, while her mother is upstairs looking for a book, a visitor arrives, and when Mrs. Morland comes down, Catherine introduces him as Mr. Henry Tilney. He has come to see that she got home safely.
Mrs. Morland welcomes him, and tells him not to say another word about the past. Then he and Catherine walk to the Allens, and on the way he does something out of the usual order. He proposes. Only after that does he tell her that his father has told him to forget her.
Here’s the explanation, and it’s all in this one chapter. General Tilney wasn’t being kind to Catherine. He was being kind to a number.
The Number
It started at the theatre in Bath. The General saw his son paying attention to Catherine, and asked John Thorpe what he knew. Thorpe was delighted to be talking to an important man, and he boasted big. He was expecting James to marry his sister, and he’d decided to marry Catherine himself, so he made the Morlands out to be richer than they were. He doubled the father’s income and tripled his private fortune, and he said Catherine could expect ten or fifteen thousand pounds from her father, on top of what Mr. Allen would leave her.
And some true facts fit the story. The Allens were wealthy and childless, and they treated Catherine like a daughter. So the General decided she was the future heiress of Fullerton, and he told his son to do everything possible to win her.
Then Thorpe’s luck changed. Catherine turned him down, and his attempt to reconcile James and Isabella failed. When the General met him in London, he swung the other way. The Morlands were needy, numerous, and scheming, and the Allen estate was going to someone else. The General didn’t stop to check. He was furious, with almost everybody in the world but himself, and he went home to Northanger and sent her away.
What Henry Did
Henry heard all this from his father, and the conversation was ugly. The General expected obedience. Henry refused to follow his father to Herefordshire, said he was bound in honor to Catherine, and told him he intended to offer her his hand. They parted on bad terms.
Now the narrator admits something. Henry’s affection for Catherine began in nothing better than gratitude. She liked him, and that was what made him think of her. The narrator calls this a new circumstance in romance, and dreadfully derogatory to a heroine’s dignity.
I like that. It makes the ending more honest. He did not fall for a princess. He chose a kind, honest girl, and he stuck with her when his father told him not to.
And notice that Catherine was nearly right about the General. The narrator says that suspecting him of murdering or shutting up his wife was scarcely a sin against his character. He wasn’t a murderer, but he was cruel, and greedy.
Chapter Thirty One
Mr. and Mrs. Morland are pleased, but they won’t allow the engagement while the General forbids it. They don’t ask him to beg for her. They only need the decent appearance of consent. His money is not what they want.
So Henry goes home to the parsonage, to improve his garden for her, and Catherine stays at Fullerton and cries. The narrator suggests there were secret letters, and that her parents looked the other way.
Then the narrator tells you not to worry. Look at the pages left, the narrator says, and you can see we are all hastening to perfect felicity. The only question is how.
How the General Gives In
The answer is Eleanor. In the summer, she marries a man of fortune and consequence. He has just come into a title, and when the General first calls her your ladyship, he loves her better than ever. That puts him in such a good humor that he forgives Henry. The book says Eleanor had liked this man for some time, and that only his lower station had held him back, until he unexpectedly inherited a title and fortune.
And here’s the joke the narrator saves. The new Viscount is the very gentleman whose careless servant left behind the washing bills, the ones Catherine found in the cabinet. The narrator says the rules of composition forbid bringing in a character who has nothing to do with the plot, and then points out that this is the man.
The Viscount and Viscountess also set the General straight about the Morlands. They aren’t poor. Catherine will have three thousand pounds. The General also takes pains to learn that the Fullerton estate is entirely at Mr. Allen’s disposal, so a greedy man can still hope. After Eleanor’s wedding, the General gives his consent, in a page of empty professions.
Loose Ends
A few people never get a proper farewell. Isabella’s last appearance is her letter, and then Thorpe’s failed attempt to bring her and James back together. After that, the book says nothing more about her. James’s mother says he’ll be a wiser man for his foolish first choice. And Captain Tilney, in Henry’s view, never cared about Isabella at all.
That’s how Austen leaves them. The people who treated others as a game don’t get a dramatic punishment. They just drop out of the story.
What It Means
Henry and Catherine marry. It happens within a twelvemonth of their first meeting, when he is twenty six and she is eighteen.
The last paragraph is a joke. The narrator says the General’s meddling may even have helped, by improving their knowledge of each other, and then leaves it to the reader to decide whether the work recommends parental tyranny, or rewards filial disobedience.
Here’s my reading, and it’s an opinion. The ending says the gothic horror was in the wrong place. Catherine imagined a murderer in a castle, and what she got was a man who wanted money for his son. The book doesn’t tell her she was silly to read novels. It tells her to look at the people in front of her and ask what they stand to gain.
I also think the ending is a little cynical, and that’s why it works. The General changes his mind because of a title and a fortune. Nobody changes his heart. The best you can say is that the right people end up together anyway.
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