Jane Austen (15 page)

The Leigh-Perrots invited the Austens to stay with them, at least initially, but Jane was determined to be independent. The aunt and uncle were delighted that the Austens were coming to Bath. However, they suspected something must lie behind the precipitate decision, and this was when Jane’s aunt speculated that Jane must be growing attached to William Digweed; but even if it had been so, neither her parents nor William’s would have had reason to object. William was the fourth Digweed son. Some letters over the Christmas period that year seem to be missing. Possibly Jane poured out her grief and rage to Cassandra at this time, for Cassandra was at Godmersham. If so Cassandra suppressed the letters.

Paragon, where the Leigh-Perrots lived, is the eastern side of a curved street on the slope of a steep hill. On the opposite side, called Vineyards, the terraced pavement was raised, to protect pedestrians from the mud and horse manure of the streets. In Jane’s day Paragon had only twenty-one houses, as those at the end of the row were known as Axford Buildings. Not far away is Camden Place, described by a contemporary writer as a ‘superb crescent composed of majestic buildings’. Readers of
Persuasion
will remember that Sir Walter Elliot chose Camden Place to live in when he left Kellynch Hall in Somerset for Bath because it had ‘a lofty and dignified situation, such as became a man of consequence.’

There were three parts of Bath under consideration by the Austens: Westgate Buildings (where Anne Elliot’s widowed friend in
Persuasion
, Mrs Smith, lived in penury); Charles Street; and some of the short streets leading from Laura Place or Pulteney Street. In
Persuasion
Viscountess Dalrymple and her daughter take a house in Laura Place. Mr Austen hankered after Laura Place and its environs but Jane expected, rightly, that the area would be too expensive. She fancied Charles Street as the buildings were new and near the Kingsmead fields. Charles Street led from the Queen Square chapel to the two green park streets. Mrs Austen liked Queen Square, and wanted the corner house in Chapel Row which opened into Prince’s Street, though she knew it only from outside. Jane thought it would be very pleasant to be near Sydney Gardens and have access to the Labyrinth every day. The Labyrinth no longer exists. She guessed that Mrs Leigh-Perrot would want them near her in Axford Buildings but, as Jane put it, the Austens hoped to escape.

Meanwhile their goods had to be disposed of. Most of the pictures, especially the Scriptural ones and a ‘battlepiece’, were to be left at Steventon for James, though Cassandra’s drawings and two paintings on tin would go with her. There was some doubt about the French agricultural prints in the best bedroom, which Mrs Austen said had been given by Edward to her daughters but Jane could not remember: she asked Cassandra whether she or Edward knew anything about them. Perhaps he had brought them home from his Grand Tour. The plan was for Mrs Austen and the girls to go ahead followed by the father about three weeks later. They were taking their beds with them but not the rest of the furniture. Transport costs were too high. They thought of taking the better pieces, the sideboard or the Pembroke table, but Jane decided that it was not worthwhile to take the chests of drawers. They would buy new, and bigger, ones made of deal and have them painted to look neat. The total value of their furniture was estimated at £2 00.

Mrs Austen did not feel her health would permit her to furnish the new home and Jane had promised that Cassandra would see to everything. Jane wanted Cassandra to be with her on the journey but Cassandra was going to the Lloyds. Martha had promised to visit Steventon in March and was more cheerful than she had been. Martha was in her mid-thirties. Her sisters Mary and Eliza were both married and she herself lived with an ailing widowed mother. Acquaintances continued to marry and have children while Martha and the Austen daughters stagnated. Young Lady Bridges was pregnant with her first child: Jane commented that she was ‘in the delicate language of Coulson Wallop,
in for it!'

Jane reported on two forthcoming weddings with forced jocularity. In both cases the brides-to-be were widows. Mrs John Lyford was to ‘put in for being a widow again’ by marrying a Mr Fendall, a banker in Gloucester of very good fortune. Jane cheered herself up though by remembering that Mr Fendall was considerably older than his fiancée and encumbered with three small children. Mrs Lawrell was going to be married to a Mr Hinchman, a rich East Indian. It seemed unfair to Jane that women who had once achieved independence by marriage should be getting second bites at the cherry, and to men of wealth at that, while her own plight was inescapable.

There were other irritations. Peter Debary of the ‘endless’ Debary family, whose sisters’ bad breath Jane had commented on, had turned down the curacy at Deane under James because it was too far from London. Jane commented sarcastically that he might have said that about Exeter or York, Glencoe or Lake Katrine: but Hampshire? Mr Debary had shown himself ‘a Peter in the blackest sense of the word’. She meant he was ‘black Peter’, a name for the knave of spades, possibly alluding also to St Peter’s denial of Christ. Mr Austen thought of offering the job to James Digweed but he was already earning £75 a year and the Deane curacy was worth only £50.

For once Jane alluded in a letter to public affairs: ‘The threatened Act of Parliament does not seem to give any alarm.’ This was a proposal to peg the price of wheat to ten shillings the bushel as a disastrous harvest the previous autumn was causing hardship. Napoleon had risen to power in 1799 and Britain could not rely on imports to feed itself. The farmers opposed the measure as they stood to lose by it, and it was defeated. Jane added that her father was doing everything he could by raising his tithes and she hoped he would soon have nearly £600 a year. Out of that he would have to pay James for the curacies of Steventon and Deane, maintain four people and pay wages to the servants.

On 5 January 1801 Jane wrote to Cassandra, who was staying at Godmersham, that her mother intended to keep two maids in Bath: ‘a steady cook, and a young and giddy housemaid, with a sedate, middle-aged man, who is to undertake the double office of husband to the former and sweetheart to the latter. No children, of course, to be allowed on either side.’ The word
sweetheart
had a stronger meaning than we would attach to it. We wonder whether the letters Cassandra destroyed included similar naughty jokes. Menservants, adulterous or otherwise, turned out to be beyond the family’s means except temporarily. They generally kept a cook and a housemaid.

Neighbours bought up Mrs Austen’s poultry. Jane hoped the lands her father had farmed would not fall into the hands of Mr Harwood or Farmer Twitchen but would go to a neighbour, Mr Holder. John Bond, now too old to do more than look after sheep, had to be found a job, not too strenuous. John himself was unconcerned, confident of getting another place as a farmer had told him he would take him on if he ever left the Rector’s employ Mr Holder did take over the farm and employ John Bond, who was relieved to keep his home. This did not satisfy Jane, who thought John would have been better off working for Harry Digweed. Harry would probably have supplied him with a more permanent dwelling and kept a horse for him to ride about on.

A visit by Cassandra to London had been put off so she had to forego the opera and miss seeing the celebrated actress Mrs Jordan. Jane told her sister rather tartly that both Cassandra and her mother had chosen to offer advice as to how Jane should dispose of her possessions:’… but as I do not choose to have generosity dictated to me, I shall not resolve on giving my cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own.’ She was growing prickly.

‘Do as you like,’ Jane snapped at her sister. ‘I have overcome my desire of your going to Bath with my mother and me.’ When Cassandra’s company no longer seemed desirable to her she was in a bad way. Jane turned instead to Martha, who had come to Steventon early in January. She and Jane were at work sorting Mr Austen’s books, as there were 500 to be got rid of. Jane wanted James to take them at half a guinea each but they were sold at auction. Jane passed on her own children’s books to Edward’s daughter Fanny, now eight.

James had dined with them and written a letter to Edward, filling three sides, ‘every line inclining too much towards the north-east,’ Jane said critically. The note of impatience with James and Mary continued: ‘This morning he joins his lady in the fields of Elysium and Ibthorpe.’ Even more irritably she wrote to Cassandra, ‘It gives us great pleasure to know that the Chilham ball was so agreeable and that you danced four dances with Mr Kemble… Why did you dance four dances with so stupid a man?’

Mary wanted Cassandra to bring home from Godmersham a pattern of the jacket and trousers that Elizabeth and Edward’s sons wore. Her own little James-Edward was getting too big for frocks. Mary would really have liked one of their old ones but Jane thought this hardly ‘doable’. As Elizabeth and Edward had four boys by this time jackets and trousers were probably handed down till worn out. Mary thought her son, James-Edward, was not out of doors as often as he ought to be and she was engaging another servant to look after him.

The Austen parents had a servant problem: Anne Littleworth’s husband did not want her to give up work at a time of high unemployment and although in some ways Jane would have liked to keep her on, it might be better, she thought, if Mrs Littleworth could find something nearer her husband and child than Bath. Perhaps the Henry Rices could employ her? There were not many places, remarked Jane, that she was qualified for.

Jane comments wickedly on the illness of Edward’s adoptive mother, the widowed Mrs Knight, pretending to disbelieve a rumour that the elderly Mrs Knight had had an illegitimate baby ‘I do not believe she would be betrayed beyond an
accident
at the most.’ Does Jane mean by ‘accident’ a miscarriage, induced or otherwise? She tended to harp on immoral sexual relations and upon pregnancies. Heartlessly Jane remarks that the Wylmots, of Ashford, Kent, being robbed ‘must be an amusing thing to their acquaintance’. Frustrated at every turn, she took refuge in making sport of her neighbours and in envy of other people’s good fortune, Edward, already rich, had received a legacy of £100!

Jane would need two new summer dresses and asked Cassandra to buy some of the materials. She wanted two lengths of brown cambric muslin, seven yards for their mother and seven and a half for Jane herself (‘it is for a tall woman’) preferably in different shades of brown. Jane was intending to buy her other new fabric, ‘yellow and white cloud’, when she went to Bath. The weather had been muggy that winter but now late in January there had been snow.

Between 25 January and 11 February 1801 Jane’s letters are missing. Her next was from Manydown to Cassandra at 24 Upper Berkeley Street, Portman Square, London, where she was staying with Henry and Eliza, Edward having conveyed her there. Only recently had Henry given up his commission in the militia and set up as an army agent and banker. Jane reported that she had received a letter from Charles, who had arrived from Lisbon on the
Endymion^
having had a royal passenger, the Duke of Sussex, sixth son of King George III of England. The Duke had asthma and needed to winter in warmer climes than Britain. The sailors found the Duke ‘fat, jolly and affable’ and apparently much attached to his morganatic wife. Lady Augusta Murray, daughter of the Earl of Dunmore. When the letter was written the
Endymion
was becalmed but Charles had been hoping to reach Portsmouth soon. He had received the letter with the news about leaving Steventon before he left England and was much surprised. He was now reconciled and planned a visit to Steventon while the rectory was still theirs. As an unmarried sailor he regretted the loss of a setded home ashore. Because Cassandra had been to see the exotic animals at Exeter Exchange, one of the sights of London, Jane added playfully that these were all the particulars of Charles’s letter worthy of travelling into ‘the regions of wit, elegance, fashion, elephants and kangaroons
[sic]'
 Australia had only recently been discovered so kangaroos were a novelty.

On leaving Manydown Jane took satisfaction in the opportunity of travelling back at no expense, as the Bigg family carriage would be taking Catherine Bigg to Basingstoke. Such things as travelling cheaply were a serious consideration to the cash-strapped Jane. The coach fare from London to Southampton, for example, was sixteen shillings. Catherine thought of fetching Cassandra back to Hampshire but if so Cassandra’s visit would have to be stretched. Perhaps Henry could send his carriage a stage or two and Cassandra could be met by a servant. James had offered the use of his carriage but as he had no reason for going to London this would inconvenience him. Probably Cassandra travelled by Henry’s carriage part of the way.

There were other farewell visits to be paid and received. Jane called on the Revd Henry Dyson, curate of Baughurst, Hampshire. Mrs Dyson as usual looked big’. She was expecting the seventh of their twelve children. Jane was always interested in pregnancies. Their house seemed to have ‘all the comforts of little children, dirt and litter’.

The Austens were leaving their established friends to live among invalids and the elderly as, by 1801, the smart set were deserting Bath for Brighton. Lady Saye and Sele and her daughter, the ‘adultress’ Mary-Cassandra Twisleton, now divorced, were moving to Bath too. Because Bath was being invaded by the new rich and social climbers like Miss Augusta Hawkins of Bristol in
Emma
, who met her husband, Mr Elton, at Bath, society people avoided public gatherings and kept to themselves at private parties. The public assemblies which Jane had attended as a girl, and which Catherine Morland in
Northanger Abbey
enjoyed, were no longer smart places to see and be seen.

Jane decided to make the best of things. ‘The Basingstoke balls are certainly on the decline,' she declared. She found something interesting in the bustle and activity of going away and looked forward to spending summers by the sea or in Wales. There was talk of spending the summer at Sidmouth. The increased mobility she decided was an advantage which she had often thought of 'with envy in the wives of soldiers or sailors’. She had grown restless and told Cassandra she was not, after all, sacrificing a great deal in quitting Hampshire. She was, we suspect, whistling in the dark.