Jane Austen (24 page)

One of those children, Marianne, born 1801, recalled in old age that her Aunt Jane used to bring her manuscripts with her when she came to Godmersham and shut herself up in one of the bedrooms with her nieces Fanny and Lizzie Knight to read them aloud. Marianne and the younger children, hearing peals of laughter, resented being excluded. She complained in later life that Jane, Cassandra and her sister Fanny, eight years older than herself, had all sorts of secrets together while Marianne and her younger sister Louisa were treated as mere children. But it is Marianne we have to thank for the memory of Jane sitting quietly in the library at Godmersham, her sewing on her lap, saying nothing for a long while. Suddenly Jane would burst out laughing, jump up and run across the room to find pens and paper and write something down. Then she would return to her fireside seat and go on stitching quietly as before. Marianne was only twenty months younger than her sister Lizzie, and might well have enjoyed hearing her aunt read aloud from her masterpieces. Unlike Lizzie, who had fifteen children, Marianne died unmarried. She lived to be ninety-five.

The observant Jane Austen travelled only within her native Britain and as far as is known never went further north than Staffordshire but she made the most of her limited experience and wasted nothing. She put her visits to Lyme Regis and to her relations the Leighs at Stoneleigh in Staffordshire to literary use. Her generation popularized the concept of sightseeing and holidays away from home, reviving the habit of travelling for pleasure, which had declined after the Reformation when religious pilgrimages were outlawed.

Country girl though she was, Jane often passed through London on her journeys to Kent. In 1796 she and Frank made two stops: first at Staines, then in London, where they slept at an inn in Cork Street. She gaily described London to her sister as ‘this scene of dissipation and vice’. She announced facetiously that she began already to find her morals corrupted. Mrs Percival, in the early unfinished narrative
Catharine, or the Bower
, describes London as ‘a hothouse of vice’ but Mrs Percival is an old fool. On her way home from London Jane wrote asking her father to fetch his ‘prodigal daughter’. She was hoping to find a night’s lodging at Greenwich otherwise she would ‘inevitably fall a sacrifice to the arts of some fat woman who would make me drunk with small beer’. Tat woman’ is a reference to the procuress, the notorious Mother Needham, in Hogarth’s series of engraved plates
The Harlot’s Progress
. She entices an innocent country girl, daughter of a Yorkshire clergyman, into a life of prostitution. Mother Needham was a real person and is mentioned in Alexander Pope’s satirical poem
The Dunciad
. London in the eighteenth century was a centre of vice as well as fashion, as Jane was well aware, but the reputed immorality of the city seems to have amused rather than alarmed her.

After 1801 she was able to stay in London with Henry, who had a succession of houses there. While Jane was in London as a girl she went with Henry to Astley’s equestrian theatre, which she used later as setting for the renewal of Harriet Smith’s relationship with Robert Martin in
Emma
.

Most of the coaches from the south and west of England set down their passengers at the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly. This stood near to the entrance of what is now the Burlington Arcade, an elegant and expensive shopping mall. Cork Street was just nearby. Jane found in this area the locations for
Sense and Sensibility:
Sackville Street, where Elinor and Marianne Dashwood were kept waiting at the jeweller’s shop while foolish Robert Ferrars was fussing over the design of a toothpick, is very near. The shop, kept by a Mr Thomas Gray, was a real one, at number 41, and appears in another novel of the period,
The Absentee
by Maria Edgeworth. Not far away is Conduit Street where the Middletons in
Sense and Sensibility
lodged and further north, beyond Oxford Street, leading out of Portman Square is Berkeley Street where Mrs Jennings had a house. The Misses Steele stayed in Holborn, a far less fashionable district. Bartlett’s Buildings, their address, survived into the twentieth century, a quaint alley of dark brick houses with white window frames and doorways with pediments.

After leaving London the Austens travelled across Kent via Sevenoaks, Maidstone and Canterbury. Just short of Sevenoaks they passed through the village of Westerham. The address from which Mr Collins in
Pride and Prejudice
writes is ‘Hunsford, near Westerham, Kent’. The novel was begun a few weeks after the London visit with Frank, in October 1796, though originally titled
First Impressions
.

Chevening Park, the seat of the Stanhope family, was on the route to Godmersham. Great-uncle Francis the lawyer had been employed by them and himself owned property nearby. Jane visited him occasionally and between 1792 and 1796, staying with various relatives in Bath and Kent. Chevening Park with its parsonage house (now pulled down) was like Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s estate Rosings in
Pride and Prejudice
in being Veil situated on rising ground’ and a ‘handsome modern building’. Chevening was originally built around 1630 for the thirteenth Lord Dacre but in 1717 was sold to the first Earl Stanhope. It had been extensively renovated late in the eighteenth century. The parsonage house was later to be occupied by the Revd John Austen, a distant cousin of Jane Austen.

The fierce Dowager Lady Stanhope, wife of the second earl and mother of the third, was living in the Dower House. She was the grandmother of Lady Hester Stanhope, the noted traveller and eccentric. Hester was the same age as Jane and a distant relative on her mother’s side. Old Lady Stanhope, whose Christian name was Grizel, was in her seventies, and domineering. Her bossiness provided the model for Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and her mother-in-law’s name was, interestingly, Catherine Burghill. Catherine’s portrait is hung in Chevening Great House.

Travelling, as has been noted previously, held perpetual difficulties for Jane. Her father only briefly kept his own carriage, her widowed mother had none at all, and Jane had to rely on lifts.

Journeys could be eventful. Jane wrote to her sister from the Bull and George at Dartford in Kent describing a near-disaster in 1798. The desk on which she wrote was nearly lost. Jane and her parents were on their way home to Steventon from Godmersham. After a night at the Bull and George it was discovered that Jane’s writing and dressing boxes had accidentally been put on to the wrong post chaise, which was on its way towards Gravesend en route for the West Indies. A man on horseback was immediately dispatched and caught up with the chaise after three miles. In Jane’s writing box was the sum of £7, which she said was all her worldly wealth. At the beginning of the twentieth century the manuscript of her unfinished novel
The Watsons
was kept in the narrow drawer of this desk in her house at Chawton. The desk is now in the possession of the family.

The Austens had to stop on the journey to have the coach wheels greased and their luggage nearly slipped off the vehicle. Mrs Austen suffered from the fatigue of travelling and was a good deal indisposed from that particular kind of evacuation which has generally preceded her illnesses’. Mrs Austen’s bowels were known to give her trouble; she also had gouty swellings of the ankles. She took twelve drops of laudanum and dandelion tea.

Throughout Jane’s letters to Cassandra their mother’s ailments are a running theme. Jane’s tone is one of dry resignation and she hints that Mrs Austen is something of a hypochondriac. When Mrs Austen claimed to have a severe head cold Jane remarked that she could feel small compassion on so-called colds without fever or sore throat. On the other hand Mrs Austen had given birth to eight children, which must have taken its toll, although she lived to be eighty-seven.

When her mother was ill and her sister away Jane took over the housekeeping, choosing things she enjoyed herself: veal stew and haricot mutton, ox-cheek with dumplings, pea soup, spare ribs. The hour for dinner, the main meal, shifted during the eighteenth century from noon until early evening and a new meal, afternoon tea, was invented to fill the gap. The Bingleys in
Pride and Prejudice
dine at six-thirty, later than their country neighbours.

In 1798 Jane wrote to Cassandra who was at Godmersham, We dine now at half after three, and have done dinner I suppose before you begin. We drink tea at half after six. I am afraid you will despise us. My father reads Cowper to us in the evenings, to which I listen when I can. How do you spend your evenings? -1 guess that Elizabeth works, that you read to her and Edward goes to sleep.’ ‘Work’ for ladies meant sewing. Writing from Rowling two years earlier, Jane mentioned how they were all at work making Edward’s shirts and she was proud of being the neatest worker in the party. As for the dinner hour, the Austen household gradually followed the fashion, for ten years later in 1808 Jane wrote from Southampton that the dinner hour was now five.

Jane tells Cassandra in 1808 of a dinner party at White Friars with the widowed Mrs Knight, her brother, Mr Wyndham Knatchbull, and the Moores, Elizabeth Austen’s sister Harriot and her husband, the Revd George Moore. The occasion and company are typical of Jane’s Kent visits, which were sociable, far more so than the quiet household in Southampton. Mr Knatchbull left early and Mr Moore followed him. After their departure ‘we sat quietly working and talking till ten, when he ordered his wife away and we adjourned to the dressing room to eat our tart and jelly’. Next morning Mrs Knight had a ‘sad headache’ (could it have been a hangover?) which kept her in bed. Jane paid a few calls and found her hostess up and recovered.

‘But early as it was - only twelve o’clock - we had scarcely taken off our bonnets before company came - Lady Knatchbull and her mother; and after them succeeded Mrs White, Mrs Hughes, and her two children, Mr Moore, Harriot and Louisa, and John Bridges.’ The intervals between callers were so short that Jane and Mrs Knight had little time for comfortable talk yet they had time to say a little of everything. Edward came to dinner and at eight o’clock he and Jane ‘got into the chair’, and the pleasures of her visit concluded with a ‘delightful drive home.’ A ride in a carriage was a treat.

F
RANK AND MARY
moved in September 1808 to Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight. By October Jane was back in Southampton and Cassandra was once more at Godmersham. Edward’s sixth son, Brook-John, had been born on 28 September and the child’s aunts rejoiced. Jane was relieved the birth had been over before Cassandra arrived. Mr Lyford the medical man had been with Jane and recommended cotton moistened with oil of sweet almonds for her earache, a remedy which proved successful. Jane had finished hemming a handkerchief for James’s wife Mary and was expecting James to arrive and receive it on Mary’s behalf. ‘Mrs JA’ had heard that Catherine Bigg was to be married in a fortnight. Such was Jane’s life, concerned with family, friends and news.

Mrs Austen had hopes of getting away from Southampton and settling in Alton where Henry’s bank had a branch. She was reconciled to the idea of buying furniture and talked of the trouble involved without considering the expense. ‘Although Sunday, my mother begins it without any ailment,’ wrote Jane sarcastically. Martha was away and Jane complained of being ‘alone’ although she had plenty of visitors. Her mother’s company did not count. Jane had a mischievous running joke that there was a love affair between Martha and the Revd Dr Mant, rector of All Saints’ Church. Dr Mant had been highly successful as Master of King Edward’s Free Grammar School in the city from 1770 to 1795, and had ten children of his own.

A week later Jane wrote to say how pleased they were that Elizabeth was recovering so well from the birth of her latest child, and wished Edward a happy forty-first birthday The chimney at Southampton was in a tumbledown state and being repaired by masons. The late Thomas Knight’s sister had died, and Mrs Austen, unable to afford new mourning black, had picked an old silk pelisse to pieces, intending to have it made into a dress and dyed. Unfortunately their usual tailor had moved on. Jane asked Cassandra anxiously, ‘How is your blue gown? Mine is all to pieces. I think there must have been something wrong in the dye, for in places it divided with a touch.’ Jane seriously regretted the four shillings thrown away. It was settled that Cassandra’s gown, too, was to be unpicked. Though it was the custom for very few mourners to be present at the burial, even distant connections were expected to go into black.

Jane had played Commerce with the Maitlands but she could risk only one game as the stake was three shillings and she could not afford to lose six. The Misses Maitland had been a^ civil and as silly as usual’. Jane was in a trap of poverty and boredom. Martha was about to come back, and spruce beer had been brewed to welcome her.

Life lacked excitement though not incident. There had been a fire at the local pastrycook’s and a back room had been destroyed. The flames appeared as near as those at Lyme had been. Valuable china had been taken out of the house and thrown down anyhow. The house next door, a toyshop, was equally damaged and Mr Hibbs, whose house came next, was so scared out of his senses that he was giving away all his goods, including valuable laces, to anybody who would take them.

Jane was delighted to hear from Godmersham that Fanny was growing up so charming. Jane looked on this niece as almost another sister. ‘[I] could not have supposed that a niece could ever have been so much to me. She is quite after one’s own heart; give her my best love, and tell her I always think of her with pleasure,’ wrote the maiden aunt.

Martha brought back several good things for the larder and the Mr Grays of Alton had sent a pheasant and a hare. Jane suspected Henry’s connivance. Martha had stopped in Winchester an hour and a half with Edward’s three schoolboy sons. She admired young Edward’s manners, and saw in George a likeness to his handsome Uncle Henry.