Pride and Prejudice, 2 sentences

I haven't an answer to your first question, and no inclination to go look i up.

However, with regard to the second sentence, the verb "to go" has no relation to the exclamation "of all things!" The locution, "of all things!" is an intensifier--it expresses the unexpected nature of a circumstance or event. So, for example, i might tell someone i had seen an elephant in my backyard. To suggest that this were an extraordinary circumstance, i might say i had seen something unusual in my backyard--an elephant, of all things! It has no relationship to the verb in use. So the sentence to which you refer simply means that the speaker found it an extraordinary circumstance that Mamma would like to go.

"gdashshire" is incorrect. It was probably G-shire originally, meaning some people whose name begins with G and ends with "shire". The dash indicates an omission of a series of letters, designed to conceal the actual name. This construction is not generally used in modern literature; however, it is often found in books written in the nineteenth century. "--shire" would connote the same thing.

Pride and Prejudice
"Of all things" simply was a late 18th and early 19th century way of saying that Mamma would like it very much. You could read it as "Mamma would like it more than anything."

...and I would definitely go along with Set's explanation regarding "of all things".

Sorry I couldn't find the regiments for the early 1800's, but they wouldn't have changed much.

Tomkitten, your information is very important.

"I'm not sure where you get "gdashshire" from, "-------------- http://www.globusz.com/ebooks/Pride/00000049.htm (I have pasted this link in my post above.)

Thank you all.

Jane Austen's original text simply has a dash, so in the chapter that translatorcz has linked, those phrases read 'the town of - in Hertfordshire' and 'the -shire have left Meryton'. Evidently the symbol '-' has been garbled into 'gdash' during electronic transcription.

As several people have already noted, it was a frequent convention in novels of this period to leave the names of people and places vague, either with a plain dash as Austen did, or with a capital letter plus a dash, e.g. 'Lord B-', or by writing 'The Blankshire Regiment', or 'The Blankshires'.

Thanks for the list of regiments, Lord Ellpus, but actually it isn't relevant, because:
(a) the Cardwell/Childers reforms of 1881 were the biggest-ever reorganisation of the British Army, in which all the old regiments were paired off together, converted into something else and given new names, so none of the 1881 formations existed when Austen was writing:
(b) Austen specifically states in the book that the -shire was a militia regiment, not a regular army regiment. The militia were troops raised for home defence only, not obliged to serve overseas. This is actually one of the jokes in the book, which is mostly missed by modern readers but would have been very clear to Austen's contemporaries; Britain was currently fighting Napoleonic France and the USA in an immense war, in fact the first truly global conflict (the Army was fighting in Spain, Portugal, Canada and the US, and the Navy literally all over the world), and here in Meryton the local girls are being thrilled by the gallantry and romance of a regiment that is by definition going to stay safely at home and not go to fight in it!

It has to be the Gloucestershire then, as that is the only "Shire" in Great Britain beginning with G....(see "Wy" 's earlier observation).

Ok, many thanks.

Ooh thats nextdoor to my home shire, the shire of Worcester... fascinating fact of the day

It is utterly false that militia regiments did not serve overseas--that is only technically correct in that they did not serve, per se in their parent formations. The militia regiments were routinely used to fill out levies for the regiments of the regular establishment serving in the Penninsular War. By the end of that war, more than a quarter of a million men were under arms (if one includes the Indian Army)--regiments of the regular establishment might have more than one battalion. When that were the case, the first battalion of the regiment (or any other numerical designation) would be at home as a cadre, often including invalided officers and other ranks who were intended to return to foreign service and who helped to provide training during their convalescence. Additional battalions would serve with Wellington's army, or replace other battalions on foreign service so that they might serve in Spain. Some regiments of the regular establishment had as many as five or six battalions in service at one time. The necessity of filling the levies for those battalions, in a time when the army competed with a hugely expanded Royal Navy for recruitment, and when naval press gangs reached the summit of their infamy, meant that, with the benevolent blessing of the Duke of York and Parliament, the army routinely levied from militia regiments.

Sorry, Set, not so. Yes, the army relied heavily on men joining the line regiments from the militia, but it recruited them, it didn't draft them. A whole succession of Acts of Parliament were passed permitting militiamen to volunteer for the regular army (i.e. the militia were obliged to release them) and providing for a variety of inducements to volunteer. A cash bounty (10 guineas in 1807 - a lot of money at the time) was the standard sweetener, but there were others; the Act of 1799 included a promise that militiamen who volunteered would not be obliged to serve outside Europe (an important promise, since everyone dreaded service in the West Indies where the death rate from yellow fever was horrendous) and in 1813 volunteers for the 49th Foot, fighting in North America, were actually offered grants of land in North America.

Memoirs of other-ranks soldiers often describe how they were persuaded to join the regular army from the militia by the blandishments of recruiters; for example, Harris and Costello of the 95th and Wheeler of the 51st. George Napier tells a story of recruiting for his regiment (the 52nd) in Ireland along with his brother William, who was recruiting for his regiment (the 43rd); they met ten Limerick militiamen who offered to enlist with whichever of the two officers could beat them in a running and jumping contest! (William won, and they joined the 43rd.)

So my argument stands. Not only were the Blankshires, drilling on Meryton village green, not liable as a body to be sent any closer to the theatre of war than Brighton camp, but none of the men in the regiment could be forced to join a line regiment to go and fight. The fact that any of them could voluntarily transfer to a line regiment, which could be sent on active service, does not invalidate this statement.

By the way, it was the second battalion that normally stayed at home acting as the recruiting and training centre, while the first battalion went on active service. There were plenty of exceptions to this (the British Army of the Napoleonic wars was such a ramshackle and ad hoc beast that there were exceptions to practically everything) but that was the accepted arrangement.