#I posted this from the phone with great trouble and vexation and the phone didn't post it

[penig]

“Ah, Harriet, here comes a very sudden trial of our stability in good thoughts.Well” (smiling), “I hope it may be allowed that if compassion has produced exertion and relief to the sufferers, it has done all that is truly important.  if we feel for the wretched enough to do all we can for them, the rest is empty sympathy, only distressing to ourselves.”

The degree to which Emma has a point vs. the degree to which she is patting herself on the back is hard to gauge, particularly to those of us for whom her social situation is foreign and a matter for history. We simply don’t have enough information; and even her contemporaries lacked hard data on some important points, though they were much better able to contextualize what they got.

What do we know? Emma needed no more prompting than hearing that a poor family had illness in it to go and see what she could do for them, and a little later a child will go by (giving Emma a chance to give Harriet and Mr. Elton some alone time) on its way to fetch some broth that Emma promised her cook would provide. She refers to “the wretched,” which seems ruder now than it was considered then - by people of the class who would most likely read this book; what the people it refers to would have thought isn’t, to my knowledge, recorded. That’s it. That’s all our solid information.

At least, it seems, she was neither attempting to scold the poor of the parish into prosperity like Lady Catherine de Burgh nor bossing them around as we can be sure Mrs. Norris would have. Two low gates to get over, but necessary ones. We don’t know whether, or what, she brought with her or left behind or did while she was there, or how much good those things or the broth can be expected to do. Are the people she’s visiting her father’s tenants? Does he employ any of them? What power, direct or indirect, does she have over wages, rents, and maintenance of buildings? (This is Emma, her father’s darling, and her father’s word is presumably law to his estate manager; she has some.) How much and in what ways does she exercise whatever powers she has? We don’t know, and are not in anything like as good a position to guess as her contemporaries were.

Everything else is interpretation, speculation, and headcanon. Yes, even the notion - reasonable as it may be - that her promptness and her choice of family to visit were influenced by their proximity to the Parsonage. We are not in position to judge Emma here.

We will, though.