Jane Austen (6 page)

Despite the stigma of being ‘in trade’, rich manufacturers were buying estates, and even if they were not accepted as gentlemen themselves, their sons and grandsons would be. Incomes from estates came from rents and the sale of timber. There were many landowners who ran counties and parishes, served as magistrates and administered poor relief, in conjunction with the Anglican clergy. Some of them were ten times as rich as Mr Darcy, though Darcy’s £10,000 a year is the equivalent of millions today. To compare incomes with those at the end of the twentieth century, it is necessary to multiply by at least 200. Early in the nineteenth century even a modest landholding would bring in some £5,000 a year. To sustain the rank of gentleman, an income of at least £2,000 was necessary; £300 a year was genteel poverty. On that a family could barely afford two maids. A senior servant might earn £80 a year; a junior one, such as scullerymaid, as little as £5, plus food and lodging.

With no electricity and no labour-saving gadgets, household work was heavy and servants a necessity for all but the poorest. Food preparation was time-consuming: chickens, for instance, had to be killed, plucked and drawn before they could be cooked. Jams, pickles and sauces all had to be made at home. Coal fires created dust, which had to be removed every day. Furniture had to be polished with beeswax. Labour was cheap.

Although Mrs Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice
indignantly rejects Mr Collins’s suggestion that one of his cousins might have cooked the dinner, Jane and Cassandra at least supervised work in the kitchen. Their nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh recorded in his
Memoir
that ladies in their day undertook more domestic responsibilities than in his own (he was writing in the late 1860s). It was certainly customary, early in the nineteenth century, for ladies to wash valuable china themselves, for fear of breakages, and to starch their own linen after it had been washed. The Austens employed a cook, but no housekeeper. Meals had to be planned and supplies organised, servants trained. Jane, aged nearly twenty-four, wrote playfully to Cassandra, who was on one of her visits to Godmersham, ‘My mother desires me to tell you that I am a very good housekeeper, which I have no reluctance in doing, because I really think it my peculiar excellence, and for this reason - I always take care to provide such things as please my own appetite, which I consider as the chief merit in housekeeping.’ The recipe book collected and written out by her friend and lodger Martha Lloyd survives. Mrs Austen contributed one in rhyme.

Jane Austen did not do her own housework. In December 1798 she writes of the inconvenience of having been without a maid for a long while, and having to employ casual charwomen. Jane carried the keys of the wine and tea closets when her mother was indisposed and gave orders in the kitchen. But though a lady, she was a poor relation, socially insignificant, all her life and she resented it.

J
ANE’S FATHER BAPTIZED
her himself when she was one day old. Infant mortality was high and the weather was too cold to take so young a child out of doors. Her official christening, with godparents, took place the following spring on 5 April 1776. Her sponsors at the font were the Revd Samuel Cooke, Rector of Cotsford, Oxfordshire, and Vicar of Bookham in Surrey, Mrs Jane Austen, a great-aunt and wife to the rich and generous Great-uncle Francis, and Mrs James Musgrave, wife of the Vicar of Chinnor in Oxfordshire, whose mother was a rich great-aunt of Mrs Austen. Samuel Cooke‘s wife, born another Cassandra Leigh, cousin of Jane’s mother, was a published novelist. Perhaps she smiled on Jane Austen in her cradle.

Seventh child and second daughter among eight children, Jane formed close bonds of affection chiefly with her sister Cassandra and with her brothers, and later with those brothers’ children. She did not always get on so well with her sisters-in-law. In
Persuasion
friction between in-laws is made the subject of wry comedy. It is possible, though unlikely, that Jane never learned the ability to make deep relationships with outsiders. She dismissed an acquaintance, admittedly during an unhappy and unsettled time in her life, as liking people rather too easily Jane wrote in
Mansfield Park
that the link between siblings is unique and stronger even than the marriage tie. The four youngest Austen children, Cassandra, Francis, Jane and Charles, remained specially close emotionally, though physically scattered after the boys joined the navy, all their lives. They may have felt crowded by George’s pupils, the other children in the house, and drawn tighter together as a consequence.

When little Jane Austen was fetched home from her foster parents’ house, she followed her big sister Cassandra everywhere. Jane loved Cassandra best of all her siblings. They seemed to share a life with each other within the general family life. Except when paying visits, when they were separated, they shared a bedroom all their lives and probably slept in the same bed. A bedroom to oneself, especially in large families, was a luxury except among the very rich until recently and for sisters to share a bed was not unusual even in the mid-twentieth century. As a child Cassandra spent much of her time with her maternal aunt and uncle, the Coopers, in Bath. On one occasion her father had collected her for the last stage of the journey in a hackney chaise. Some distance from home they met Jane, aged six and a half, in the roadway, holding her little brother Charles, then just three, by the hand. Impatient for her sister’s return, Jane had gone to meet her.

Mr Austen educated his boys at home along with his other pupils but in 1782 Cassandra was sent to boarding school at Oxford, with a Mrs Ann Cawley, a sister of Mrs Austen’s brother-in-law, the Revd Edward Cooper, and widow of a former Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford. Cassandra was nine and Jane seven. Jane pined for her sister, so was allowed to join her.

‘If Cassandra’s head had been going to be cut off,’ declared their mother, Jane would have hers cut off too.’

Jane was not happy away from home even though Cassandra was with her. The seven-year-old girl hated being dragged round Oxford by her proud undergraduate brother James on sight-seeing trips through dismal chapels, dusty libraries and greasy halls. They depressed her. All her life she was more interested in people than in museums. She was too young to notice, as her cousin Eliza did on another occasion, how becoming black gowns and square caps, later known colloquially as ‘mortarboards’, were to young men. Oxford and Cambridge university students wore them as a distinctive uniform well into the twentieth century.

Mrs Cawley then took the girls with their cousin Jane Cooper to Southampton where she and the children caught a ‘putrid fever’, the name then current for both typhus fever and diphtheria. Mrs Cawley did not bother to notify the parents but Jane Cooper wrote to her mother who came to fetch her and the Austen girls. Mrs Cooper caught the illness and died. The children narrowly escaped death. Infectious diseases, before modern drugs, could easily and with shocking rapidity prove fatal, especially to children. Another killer disease at the time was ‘putrid sore throat’, or gangrenous pharyngitis, mentioned in Jane Austen’s letters as having killed a boy at Eton. Mrs Cooper’s husband did not remarry. He brought up his son Edward (whom Jane Austen did not like) and daughter Jane alone. He gave Cassandra and Jane mementoes of their dead aunt: Cassandra had an emerald and diamond ring, Jane a headband which she later wore to dances.

The ability to dance was recognized as necessary if a girl was to mix in society, and parents otherwise neglectful of their daughters’ development made sure that the girls never went without dancing lessons. The elaborate routines of country dances, minuets and cotillions had to be memorized and the exercise of dancing would, it was hoped, lead to a graceful carriage. Good deportment was the mark of a lady, who was also expected to play the pianoforte or the harp, and, if she had a good voice, to sing. Accomplishment was supposed to add up to eligibility.

The Austen girls next went with the motherless Jane Cooper to the Abbey School at Reading, which may have been like Mrs Goddard’s school in
Emma
, where girls might ‘scramble themselves into a little education’.

Boys went to grammar or public school and then to Oxford or Cambridge, at that time the only two universities in England, with students numbering only a few hundred. The universities exercised an influence out of all proportion to their size, preparing a social élite for the professions of the Church and the law, or in some cases for a life of gentlemanly leisure. Girls did the best they could. Elizabeth Bridges, a daughter of Sir Brook Bridges, baronet, and who was to marry Jane’s brother Edward, went with her sisters to a grand girls’ boarding school in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London, known as the ladies’ Eton’, where there was heavy emphasis on etiquette and they were required to practise the art of descending gracefully from a carriage. Little else was learned except French, music and dancing.

It was rare for girls to go to school of any kind, as many fathers disapproved. In the late eighteenth century governesses were employed only by the very wealthy and grand, like Lady Catherine de Bourgh in
Pride and Prejudice
, who is surprised that the Bennet girls did not have one. Neither country gentlemen like Mr Bennet nor clergymen like George Austen aspired to employing governesses, though his rich son Edward and his wife, Elizabeth, had governesses for their five daughters while their six sons went to public school. Often children were taught to read by their mothers. It was usual to start with the Psalms. In
Northanger Abbey
Mrs Morland, a clergy wife, teaches her eleven children to read, write and number.

Jane as a child owned
The History of Goody Two-Shoes
and a French textbook,
Fables Choisies
, given her on 5 December 1783, together with an anthology,
Elegant Extracts
, Her brother Edward gave her a copy of Dr Percival's
A Father’s Instructions to his Children, consisting of Tales, Fables and Reflections; designed to promote the love of virtue, a taste for knowledge, and an early acquaintance with the works of Nature
. She also had a copy of Ann Murry’s
Mentoria: or, The Young Ladies’ Instructor
, from which she picked up general knowledge.

The headmistress of the Abbey School was a Miss Sarah Hackett who used as her professional name ‘Mrs Latournelle’ to give authenticity to her credentials as a French teacher, though she knew not a word of that language. She was a stout woman with a wooden leg, who never did any work in the afternoons. Her dress was always the same, with a white muslin kerchief round her neck, a muslin apron, short sleeves, cuffs and ruffles, with a breast bow to match the bow on her cap, both being flat with two notched ends. She may have been a former actress, for her conversation centred on plays and acting, gossip about the private lives of performers and even backstage anecdotes. This must have been more entertaining for schoolgirls than French irregular verbs. She acted as housekeeper, giving out clothes to be washed, ordering dinner and making tea. There was also a Miss Pitts, whose French was fluent and who played and sang well and was an excellent needlewoman. The curriculum comprised writing, spelling, French, needlework, drawing, music and dancing. Jane was happy enough there to write later, I could die of laughter at it, as they used to say at school.’ At this time her cousin Eliza de Feuillide, née Hancock, wrote to her cousin Phila Walter that all Uncle George Austen’s children seemed to be everything their parents could wish.

The school itself was in part of the ancient Abbey building, formerly occupied by Benedictine monks. It consisted of an antique gateway with rooms above its arch and with vast staircases either side, whose balustrades had originally been gilt. Pupils were received in a wainscotted parlour, hung round with chenille representations of tombs and weeping willows. There were several miniatures over the tall mantelshelf. There was a beautiful wild garden, where the girls were allowed to wander under tall trees on hot summer evenings. They could climb the embankment and look down on the Abbey church, begun by King Henry I and consecrated by St Thomas à Becket. As Jane Austen wrote at fifteen in her facetious
History of England
, the abolition by King Henry VIII of religious houses ‘and leaving them to the ruinous depredations of time has been of infinite use to the landscape of England in general’.

In 1785, Jane and Cassandra’s brother Edward and Jane Cooper’s brother Edward called at the school and took their sisters out for a meal at an inn, which shocked their Victorian descendants as most unseemly. Their cousin the Revd Thomas Leigh of Adlestrop called to see the girls and tipped them half a guinea each.

Mr Austen had difficulty paying the school fees and the girls left after two years in 1787. Their stay had cost their father £140, as the fees were the same as he charged for board and tuition, £35 per pupil per year.

Schools at that time offered girls little more than ‘finishing school’ was to do later. In
Sense and Sensibility
the brainless Charlotte Palmer’s landscape in coloured silks is sarcastically described by the narrator as ‘proof of her having spent seven years at a great school in town’. Moralists criticized the fashion for superficial and showy accomplishments but there was little more solid on offer anywhere. Girls’ boarding schools were not widespread until later in the next century and both the universities were closed to women, as were the professions of medicine, the law, the Church, the army and the navy. Argument raged as to the nature and purpose of female education: many people thought that the only education necessary for girls was moral and religious training, which would help young women to sub-due their unruly passions. Some women internalized this ideology and took it on themselves to advise their own sex, insisting that opportunities to become generals, politicians, legislators or advocates would be wasted on mere females. Women were even discouraged from talking politics in mixed company. Jane Austen was interested in politics and read solid books on history. Nonetheless, women were popularly said to be ruled by their hearts, not their heads. Voices were raised against such prejudice, and some people argued that girls needed to be taught to think. Others pleaded for the teaching of English grammar, pointing out that while the French language was a fashionable subject, most young ladies remained grossly ignorant of their own.