Jane Austen (20 page)

Also in Bath as a visitor was Jane’s godfather, the Revd Samuel Cooke, vicar of Great Bookham in Surrey, and his wife, Cassandra, cousin to Jane’s mother. Their daughter Mary and son George went with Jane on long walks. George was Very kind and talked sense to me every now and then in the intervals of his more animated fooleries with Miss Bendish, who is very young and rather handsome,’ wrote Jane. She had reached the age when she was too old to be flirted with and had to look on while young girls received all the attention. This got under her skin: ‘there was a monstrous deal of stupid quizzing, and commonplace nonsense talked, but scarcely any wit; - all that bordered on it, or on sense came from my Cousin George, whom altogether I like very well.'

Cousin George had a career at Oxford as tutor at Corpus Christi College, where his students included Thomas Arnold, later headmaster of Rugby School and architect of the reformed nineteenth-century public school system with its cult of moral earnestness. Jane sometimes visited the Cookes, who lived not too far from the famous beauty spot Box Hill, the scene in
Emma
for the heroine’s thoughtless attack on poor Miss Bates. While in Bath Jane Austen started, but did not finish,
The Watsons
, with characters called Tom Musgrave, Emma Watson and a small boy called Charles, who is saved from humiliation when Emma agrees to dance with him. This motif, with the sexes reversed, was used a decade later in
Emma
, when Harriet Smith is rescued by Mr Knightley after Mr Elton has rejected her. Jane Austen knew the misery of being at dances and waiting in vain for a partner.

Although she approved of George (so long as he was not neglecting her to talk frivolously with good-looking young girls) she had less time for his brother, the Revd Theophilus Cooke. When she met him later in London he struck her as having to offer only ‘nothing-meaning, harmless, heartless civility’. We are reminded of Sir Walter Elliot’s eldest daughter Elizabeth in
Persuasion
, expert at saying ‘the proper nothings’ and exemplifying superficial, meaningless politeness. Miss Elliot’s ‘heartless elegance’ gives ‘a general chill’. In a society which valued polished manners, polite insincerity cannot have been rare but must have been useful as a social lubricant, preferable to the rough manners of the earlier part of the century.

Jane reported on visits and being visited: ‘When I tell you that we have been visiting a Countess this morning, you will immediately with great justice, but no truth, guess it to be Lady Roden.’ Lady Roden ‘s relatives, the Ordes, had intermarried with the Hampshire Powletts. Her second son, James-Bligh Jocelyn, then fifteen, was in the navy and Charles, currently first lieutenant of the
Endymion
, had shown kindness to him.

It was not however Lady Roden but Lady Leven. ‘On receiving a message from Lord and Lady Leven through the Mackays declaring their intention of waiting on us, we thought it right to go to them. I hope we have not done too much, but the friends and admirers of Charles must be attended to.’ The well-born but financially constrained Austen women knew the importance to a man’s career of the right contacts. Lord and Lady Leven were ‘very reasonable, good sort of people, very civil, and full of his [Charles’s] praise’.

Jane’s account throws interesting light on the manners of the era:

Marianne had the title ‘Lady’ prefixed to her Christian name because she was the daughter of an earl.

Tom Chute had fallen from his horse and Jane joked that she was waiting to know how it had happened before she started pitying him as she eould not help suspecting it was in consequence of his taking orders; very likely as he was going to do duty or returning from it’. Her jokes were increasingly forced.

In June that year Jane and Cassandra had a respite at Godmersham where they played at school with the children. Cassandra was Miss Teachum the governess, Jane Miss Popham the teacher, Aunt Harriot Bridges Sally the housemaid, Miss Anne Sharp, the Godmersham governess, was the dancing master, the apothecary and the sergeant, while Grandmama Austen played Betty Jones the pie-woman, and the children’s mother, Elizabeth, acted the bathing woman. They all dressed in character, and children and adults alike all enjoyed themselves.

After dessert they acted a play called
Virtue Rewarded
. Fanny was the fairy Serena and her cousin Anna the Duchess of St Albans. All this, followed by a bowl of syllabub in the evening! No wonder the children had happy memories of fun with Aunt Jane. As for Miss Sharp the governess, Jane became her friend. Miss Sharp kept in touch with Mrs Austen and Cassandra until the 1820s.

The children had another jolly day on 30 July. Cassandra, Jane, Fanny and Anna, with Edward’s sons Edward, George, Henry and William, acted
The Spoiled Child
and
Innocence Rewarded
. Dancing followed. Possibly at this time Jane dramatized her favourite novel
Sir Charles Grandison
in collaboration with Anna. Mrs Austen and Anna left Godmersham the next day but Cassandra and Jane stayed on, dining out and attending balls in Canterbury. Henry turned up as well.

In August Jane was writing from Godmersham to Cassandra who was at Goodnestone with Edward’s in-laws. The Godmersham party had visited Eastwell, where they played cribbage. Eastwell was a controversial new house in bastardized classical style by the architect Joseph Bonomi, who is mentioned in
Sense and Sensibility
. Bonomi had been commissioned by the Finch-Hatton family in the 1790s to build them a new house. It has been criticized as deliberately improper, in that its immense portico had five columns instead of the correct four or six, there was no frieze on the entablature, and the Ionic columns supported a ‘coarse Michelangelesque cap’. This was Jane’s first visit.

The Misses Finch had assumed that Cassandra would find it dull at Goodnestone, and Jane wished they could have heard Mr Bridges’s solicitude on the subject and have known all the amusements planned to divert her. Miss Hatton at Eastwell had little to say for herself: her eloquence lay in her fingers, which were ‘most fluently harmonious’.

Jane had written to Frank and played battledore
¹
and shuttlecock (an early version of badminton) with Edward’s seven-year-old son William. ‘We have frequently kept it up
three
times and once or twice
six,’
she told her brother.

The ‘two Edwards’ had been to Canterbury to see Mrs Knight, who was cheerful but weak. Edward’s eldest boy, Edward, was unwell. His younger brothers were expected to return to school without him while he went to Worthing with the grown-ups, in case the fashionable cure of sea-bathing should be recommended. Jane had found Cassandra’s white mittens. Jane’s sister-in-law Elizabeth had proposed that Jane should take Cassandra’s place at Goodnestone for a few days and Jane intended to turn up there. If her presence was inconvenient she could return in the carriage with Cassandra.

We learn that Mr Hall the hairdresser charged Elizabeth five shillings to do her hair and five shillings for every lesson to her maid. Jane considered he went off with ‘no inconsiderable booty’, to say nothing of the pleasures of being at Godmersham with food, drink and lodging, the benefit of country air and the company of the servants. He charged Jane only half a crown to cut her hair. Jane commented that he clearly respected either her youth or her poverty, adding that she had been looking into her affairs and was likely to be very poor. She could not afford to tip Sackree, the children’s nurse deputed to look after her as temporary lady’s maid, more than ten shillings. Strictly speaking, on a country house visit she should have distributed about £5 among the servants but this was totally beyond her means. She said wryly that as she was about to meet Cassandra at Canterbury, she need not have mentioned this. ‘It is as well, however, to prepare you for the sight of a sister sunk in poverty, that it may not overcome your spirits.’

When Jane wrote again three days later on 30 August 1805, the sisters had changed places: Cassandra was at Godmersham, Jane at Goodnestone farm with Harriot Bridges. Jane did not want to stay too long, for fear of running out of clothes. She hoped Edward would be able to fetch her on Monday (she was writing on Friday) or Thursday if wet. She was glad young Edward was better.

It was Elizabeth’s unmarried brother Edward Bridges who paid her hospitable attentions, ordering toasted cheese for supper specially to please her, but if he did propose to her, he was refused.

She enjoyed walking over the house and grounds at Rowling. That day the First and Second Grenadier Guards marched from Deal for Chatham, the First Coldstream and First Scots Guards from Chatham for Deal. Edward was nervous that the partridges would be disturbed, as shooting was due to begin on the Monday. Jane thought the ‘evil intentions of the Guards’ were certain. Troop movements on this scale are not surprising. The danger of invasion was only just past, as Napoleon’s orders for the march from Boulogne back to the Danube were not issued till 22 August and the camp at Boulogne was being abandoned on the day Jane Austen was writing. She thanked Cassandra for recommending the Revd Thomas Gisborne’s 
Inquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex
, which she was rather surprised to find she liked.

Early in September Cassandra and Jane stayed with Elizabeth’s sister Sophia, Mrs William Deedes, at Sandling, near Folkestone. Sandling had an unusual feature: one of the sitting rooms was oval in shape, with a bow window at one end. There was a fireplace with a window, the centre window of the bow, exactly over the mantelpiece. William Deedes was Colonel of the South Kent volunteers and from 1807-12 Member of Parliament for Hythe.

By mid-September Godmersham was full again, and the sisters left for Worthing to join Mrs Austen and Martha Lloyd. They bought fish on the beach and Jane won seventeen shillings in a raffle.

Meanwhile Frank on the
Canopus
had won the approval of Admiral Horatio Nelson, who described him as an excellent young man. Frank was involved in the blockade at Cadiz and after Nelson arrived in the
Victory
on 28 September, the
Canopus
was ordered to ‘complete supplies’ at Gibraltar. Then she protected a convoy en route to Malta. Hearing that the enemy fleet was coming out of Cadiz, Frank made haste to rejoin the main British fleet but contrary winds prevented his reaching the battle of Trafalgar, fought on 21 October 1805. Although he did not care for fighting for its own sake he was disappointed. He wrote to Mary Gibson on 27 October:

In January 1806 Mrs Austen, Jane and Martha went to Steventon, where Jane gave her seven-year-old nephew James-Edward
The British Navigator, or, A Collection of Voyages Made in Different Parts of the World
.

Mrs Austen left Steventon for Bath on 29 January, taking Anna with her, and found temporary lodgings in unfashionable Trim Street, meanwhile looking round for something better. Jane and Cassandra spent three weeks at Manydown, and came home to unexpected riches: Mrs Lillingston of Bath, a friend of Mrs Leigh-Perrot, had made Mr Leigh-Perrot her executor and left money to him, his wife and his nieces. Jane and Cassandra received £50 each. Jane’s share was stretched to last her a whole year. Mrs Austen had hoped to find lodgings in St James’s Square, but somebody else was negotiating for the whole house, so she expected disappointment.

Frank came to the rescue. He had been in the action off San Domingo and when he docked at Plymouth early in May he had prize money, a gold medal and a silver vase presented to him in recognition of his achievements. He could now afford to marry, though still not rich. He offered them a share in his home at Southampton, then a fashionable watering place. He would not be far from the dockyard at Portsmouth. Jane would put her knowledge of Portsmouth to good use when she came to write
Mansfield Park
. She left the detested city of Bath with happy feelings of escape.

F
RANK MARRIED MARY GIBSON
at Ramsgate on 24 July 1806 and came to Godmersham for their honeymoon on 26 July Fanny wrote in her diary on Tuesday 29 July 1806, I had a bit of a letter from Aunt Jane with some verses of hers, They read: