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"But Mrs. Rushworth's day of good looks will come; we have cards for her first party on the 28th. - Then she will be in beauty, for she will open one of the best houses in Wimpole Street. I was in it two years ago, when it was Lady Lascelles's, and prefer it to almost any I know in London " (MP 456)
THus Mary Crawford reports to Fanny how the newly married Rushworths will open their first - and last - London season. Mrs. Rushworth's first party will fit into the web of flirting, gambling, and matchmaking that draws the elite from the boredom of their country estates to London houses. That the Rushworths have managed to acquire the Lascelles's house on Wimpole Street is a significant coup - and a costly achievement. But the house is easily affordable for the couple, for Maria Bertram has married into money, and her husband can pay not only for the extensive improvements on the estate at Sotherton but also for the fine house on Wimpole Street. As Edward Copeland points out, Mr. Rushworth's "estate of ,¿£12,000 a year supports a house in an expensive, fashionable part of London" (324). The Lascelles house on Wimpole Street is, indeed, a very fine and fashionable house, but this house is doubly tainted. Not only is the Lascelles name connected with plantations, slavery, and corruption, but the Lascelles family is also obliquely connected - through marriage - with one of the great sexual scandals of the late eighteenth century.
Jane Austen's readers would have recognized the Lascelles name, which had appeared prominently in the news a few years before she began writing Mansfield Park. I propose that it is the Lascelles name, rather than a particular "Lady Lascelles," that makes the connection to this house important to the themes of Mansfield Park. Janine Barchas finds that the names of even the most minor characters in her novels were carefully chosen by Austen "for suggestive combinations" (147), and in the context of this novel, Jane Austen has indeed chosen carefully: the combination of the name "Lascelles" with the place "Wimpole Street" radiates a deeper significance and binds together the moral problems that underlie Mansfield Park. As Markman Ellis reminds us, "[V]...