Part Five looks forward a little to the events of Jane and Dorothy’s later lives. It considers the changes that have taken place in the two women and the legacy they will leave behind. This study focuses on the decisions and aspirations of these two exceptional characters, paying less attention to family and friends than biographies often do. By exploring the different ways in which they responded to the obstacles which Georgian society threw in the way of all intelligent women, it places Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth firmly in the context of their time. It also aims, by establishing the extent of their shared experiences – the experiences common to women of their class and time – to throw into relief the choices that they made, to find a new way of understanding their characters, their achievements and their griefs.
Perhaps Sense and Sensibility cannot be neatly divided. It may be that the two opposites which are set up for examination in Jane Austen’s novel are ideals to which a young woman aspires, rather than absolutes which entirely define her. For sometimes, no matter how tightly it is reined in, emotion will get the better of prudence and, perhaps more significantly, there are circumstances under which the most impulsive, spontaneous woman can find herself forced into heart-breaking silence and restraint.
Part One
One
Gentlemen’s Daughters
In Pride and Prejudice, when Lady Catherine De Bourgh suggests that in marrying Mr Darcy, owner of the vast Pemberley estate, Elizabeth Bennet will be quitting the sphere in which she has been brought up, she gets a sharp reply.
‘I should not consider myself as quitting that sphere,’ says Elizabeth. ‘He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter.’
However, while admitting the truth of this statement, Lady Catherine follows up with a merciless attack on Elizabeth’s family, folk who will, in her memorable phrase, pollute ‘the shades of Pemberley.’1
This dignified skirmish in the little wilderness at Longbourn is one of the book’s most enjoyable passages, and it highlights the very real complexity of Georgian society. The claim to gentility was a broad one, and there was a great deal of room for manoeuvre – and refined insult – within it.
Where would Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth – both indubitably the daughters of gentlemen – have fallen within that general term? If they had lived in the same neighbourhood, would their families have visited one another?
To employ the brisk terminology of Emma’s heroine, ‘what’ the two women were to become is the study of this book, but to establish ‘who’ they were may be attempted straight away.
A comparison of the houses in which they were born is interesting.
Unfortunately the rectory at Steventon in Hampshire – the house in which Jane Austen was born on 16th December 1775 – was demolished not long after her death. But family recollections reveal that it was more than large enough for gentility, consisting of ‘three rooms in front on the ground floor . . . behind these were Mr Austen’s study, the back kitchen, and the stairs; above were seven bedrooms and three attics.’2
With its wide front of nine windows, the house that is now known as ‘Wordsworth House’ in Cockermouth, Cumbria is on a similar scale. When Dorothy was born there on 25th December 1771 it was the grandest house in the main street of the little market town – and it still is. There is a broad facade facing the street and a grand porticoed entrance. In those days this house lay ‘at the outskirts of the Town’, and there was a garden behind it, ‘bordering on the River Derwent . . . ’, with a beautiful hedge where ‘roses and privot (sic) intermingled’3. Nikolaus Pevsner in The Buildings of England describes it as ‘quite a swagger house for such a town’.
Steventon rectory was definitely not a swagger house. Anna Austen’s sketches of 1814 show it to be crowded round by trees, with jutting wings at the back, plain chimneys and irregular roofs: a pleasantly rambling, rather than a grand house. It was not very far removed from the kind of country parsonage which Henry Crawford disparages in Mansfield Park: ‘a scrambling collection of low single rooms, with as many roofs as windows.’4
It was not a place built for show: Jane’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, in his memoir of his aunt, remembered that inside, ‘No cornice marked the junction of wall and ceiling; while the beams which supported the upper floors projected into the rooms below in all their naked simplicity, covered only by a coat of paint or whitewash’.5
In the house on Cockermouth’s main street, elaborate Georgian cornices which would have gladdened the heart of Mr Austen-Leigh still survive in both dining room and drawing room. There is no ‘naked simplicity’ here.
But the houses were alike in the affection with which they were remembered. Dorothy’s brother, William, would write in his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, of how
‘ . . . the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song.’6
Dorothy, in her letters, habitually referred to her first home as ‘my father’s house’ – the biblical term suggesting Christ’s ‘father’s house’ with its many mansions, and lending an air of lost paradise to her recollections.
Jane’s niece Anna wrote fondly of the ‘enclosed garden . . . and terrace walk of turf’ at Steventon and ‘the lower bow window looking so cheerfully into the sunny garden’. And here too there was a sound-track to the memories of childhood. There was not the music of running water, but Anna recalls – ‘How pleasant to childish ears was the scrooping sound of [the] weathercock’.7
The depth of Jane’s attachment to this first home was to be demonstrated when, after twenty-five years, she learned that she must leave it. She was ‘greatly distressed’8 when the news burst upon her and there is even a family tradition that she fainted (the only account of her ever succumbing to such a display of emotion).
However, if it had been Jane or Dorothy facing that chilling interrogation in the Longbourn wilderness, Lady Catherine would have cared little for such a trifle as happy memories. While she might have rated the grandeur of the Cockermouth pillars and cornices over the rambling rooms and whitewashed beams of Steventon, she would soon have looked further and asked – as she asks Elizabeth – ‘But who was your mother? Who are your uncles and aunts?’
In the last decades of the eighteenth century everyone was still judged by their ‘connections’, and, though Dorothy might have been born in a grander house, Jane boasted a slightly more prestigious heritage.
Her father, George Austen, the son of a surgeon, had been orphaned as a boy. His father had left him little money but George had retained the status of gentleman through a poor young man’s usual resource: education. He had acquitted himself well at St John’s College Oxford, gained a fellowship and, in 1755, become a priest. Then, through the intervention of more wealthy, powerful relations, he acquired the living, not only of Steventon, but also of the neighbouring parish of Deane.
Jane’s mother – the daughter of another clergyman – brought some prestige to the marriage: her grandmother was sister to the Duke of Chandos. But it was a large family and Mrs Austen (Miss Cassandra Leigh) was not descended from one of the grander or more prosperous branches. According to her marriage settlement, the money she brought to the marriage ‘consisted of some leasehold houses in Oxford and a prospective sum of £1,000 to which she would become entitled, by her father’s will, on the death of her mother.’9
Dorothy’s mother brought only £500 to her marriage and that was got through trade – a damning word in the vocabulary of Lady Catherine and her real-life counterparts. Dorothy’s maternal grandparents were linen drapers, living above their shop in the town of Penrith, thirty miles away.
Dorothy herself occupied a slightly ambiguous position in society, reminiscent of George Wickham’s in Pride and Prejudice. Like Wickham’s father, Dorothy’s father was trained in the respectable profession of the law; but, just as Mr Wickham senior ‘gave up every thing to be of use to the late Mr Darcy, and devoted all his time to the care of the Pemberley
property’10, John Wordsworth had become steward, or law-agent, to a very wealthy man.
His employer was Sir James Lowther, one of the greatest landowners in England, who was to become First Earl of Lonsdale in 1784 and Viscount Lowther in 1797. In fact the ‘swagger house’ was his property and declared to the world the importance of the Lowthers rather than the Wordsworths. The Wordsworth family would certainly have had some status in Cockermouth where John’s position made him Bailiff and Recorder of the borough – but Lady Catherine would have been scornful.
On the death of his stepmother in 1768 Mr Austen inherited property in Tonbridge, Kent, to the value of more than £1,280 to add to his wife’s capital; but the bulk of his income came from his clerical livings and from the farm which had been apportioned to him as his ‘glebe land’. They were poor livings, Steventon yielding about £100 per annum, Deane £110. And in 1800, Jane reported to her sister that their father’s farm ‘cleared £300 last year.’ (Though this may have been a particularly unprofitable year because she described her father’s feelings as ‘not so enviable’ on the occasion.11)
John Wordsworth’s income (which came from his salary and some business interests of his own) was probably comparable, or even slightly larger, since it was sufficient to maintain the smart town house in Cockermouth; and the complement of servants there was large enough to include a nursemaid – as William’s recollections reveal.
When John died he did not leave any money to his children, but that was on account of his affairs being (to borrow a useful Austen phrase) ‘sadly involved’. He had lent money to his employer and James Lowther would not honour the debt – behaviour quite in keeping with the general character of a man who was to earn himself the local title of ‘The Bad Earl’. There was a protracted court case to recover the money and the matter was not settled until after James Lowther’s death in 1802. However, when the final claim was made by the Wordsworth family, it amounted to a total of £10,388 6s 8d12. This sum would have included interest accrued, but it does suggest that, had he died at a more propitious time, John Wordsworth would have left a respectable – though not a large – legacy to his children.
The financial circumstances into which the two girls were born were not dissimilar.
So, if they had been neighbours, would the Austens and Wordsworths have visited each other? On the evidence available, I would tentatively suggest, yes; they might have exchanged morning calls and drunk tea together. They would certainly have met at public assemblies and balls, though the taint of Dorothy’s linen-draper grandparents might have prevented their dining in the same company.
However, one circumstance united these two little girls from the very beginning, a circumstance which was to darken their lives as it did the lives of thousands of women as the eighteenth century drew to a close and the nineteenth century began: chronic insecurity.
The poverty which Dorothy experienced in her early life was, in part, the result of her father having spent his own money on his employer’s business and not having recovered the sum at the time of his death. But in any case, John Wordsworth’s sudden death at the age of forty-two – when Dorothy was just twelve years old – would have been a heavy blow.
Both Dorothy and Jane were born into families which, though wealthy enough to live comfortably, were almost entirely dependent on the income of the head of the household. Families like theirs – a class which has been called the ‘pseudo-gentry’13 – owned no significant landed property and yet aspired to ‘the manners, the education, and the same markers of station as their landed-gentry neighbours’14.
Such families possessed the horses, the servants and the spacious homes that marked them out as gentry but it was a precarious prosperity. The death of the household’s head could plunge his dependents into sudden, life-changing poverty. This was a crisis which Jane and Dorothy would both experience – at different times in their lives. Even the homes that they loved were tied to their fathers’ professions and could be snatched away without warning.
As the two babies lay in their cradles – one with the ‘scrooping’ of the weathercock ringing in her ears, the other with the sound of running water – they were surrounded by brothers. Dorothy had two older brothers, Richard and William, and two more boys, John and Christopher were to be born after her. Jane’s family was larger: she had already five brothers: James, George, Edward, Henry and Francis, as well as her sister, Cassandra, and there was to be another brother, Charles, born three and a half years later.
These brothers, of course, shared the precarious existence of the ‘pseudo-gentry’: they, like their sisters, were ‘exposed to . . . the kind of sudden and irreversible fall in fortune implicit to their station in life’15. But the little girls were particularly vulnerable.
Events in the previous generation of the Austen family illustrate this.
Jane’s father, George Austen, had two sisters: Philadelphia, who was a year older than him, and Leonora, a year younger. When their father, William, died in 1737, his surgeon’s income was lost and the three children – aged seven, six and five respectively – were plunged into a ‘sudden and irreversible fall in fortune’. Their stepmother retained the family home and the children were left, under the terms of their father’s will, to the care of their uncles Francis and Stephen. It was for these uncles to decide how the children should be educated and prepared for the world.
The way in which they carried out this trust is instructive. Leonora was taken into her Uncle Stephen’s home and sank into obscurity. It is doubtful whether her niece, Jane, ever knew of her existence; she is not mentioned in family correspondence. It is possible that she had learning difficulties. She never married and spent the later part of her life in lodgings in London.
George was sent to school at Tonbridge where, ‘The knowledge . . . of his almost destitute circumstances joined to energy of character and very superior abilities, might naturally lead to success.’16 His hard work paid off – he went on to St John’s College, Oxford, gaining a degree and an exhibition which funded seven years study of divinity. When he eventually took holy orders his future was secure.
By contrast, when Philadelphia was fifteen, as her brother studied to regain the life-style of a gentleman, she was apprenticed to a milliner. Forty-five pounds was paid to a Mrs Cole of London to give the teenager five years’ training in the art of making hats.
Stephen and Francis Austen perhaps felt this was the best option available. Higher education, such as her brother was undertaking, was not open to a girl, while, according to Bridget Hill, ‘Throughout the eighteenth century the trades of milliners, mantua-makers, seamstresses and stay-makers continued to carry some prestige.’17 But Philadelphia’s life would have been very different from her brother’s. She would have been labouring long hours and earning her keep from the beginning of her apprenticeship.
Working with her needle in the manufacture of clothing was more or less the only way a young woman could maintain herself, unless she was well-educated enough to become a governess or a teacher in a girls’ school. But not everybody considered the occupation of milliner to be entirely respectable.
Thomas De Quincey (a very observant, though rather gossipy, writer who was to become a close friend of Dorothy Wordsworth) would, in the 1830s, recall Lord Byron’s scornful comment that Samuel Taylor Coleridge had married ‘a milliner’, and go on to say, ‘Everyone knows what is meant to be conveyed in that expression’.18
Considering the vulnerable and unprotected state of many of the women forced into the profession – and the poor living it provided – it would be surprising if some young milliners were not tempted or betrayed into prostitution, as De Quincey’s sly hint suggests. The unkind gossip about the trade was nurtured by such popular fictions as John Cleland’s 1748 bestselling work of pornography, Fanny Hill, which features the madam of a brothel (curiously, another Mrs Cole) masquerading as the head of a millinery establishment.
The job was not financially rewarding e
ither. Milliners were said to ‘give but poor mean wages to every person they employ’ and a wage of between five and ten shillings a week was all that might be expected when the apprenticeship was completed.19 Such an income – of around £20 a year – was comparable with the amount a labouring-man might expect to earn, but was a world away from the gentleman’s income of £500 a year which Philadelphia’s brother would draw from his church livings.
Low paid and barely respectable, millinery left Philadelphia with nothing to look forward to but a life of tedious, unremitting labour. She was, no doubt, as aware of her ‘almost destitute circumstances’ as her brother, but there was no ‘natural’ route to prosperity for her in the career her guardians had chosen.
Perhaps Philadelphia regarded her training as the preparation for marriage which Bridget Hill suggests was often one consideration when girls entered into the more prestigious kind of apprenticeship. For – displaying quite as much ‘energy of character’ as her brother – in 1751 she applied to the British East India Company for permission to sail to India. Though she claimed that her plan was to join ‘friends’ at Fort St David, she almost certainly had matrimony in mind. In the British community in India – with its preponderance of men – ‘no girl, though but fourteen years old, [could arrive] without attracting the notice of every coxcomb in the place.’20 So it would have offered excellent marriage prospects for a poor, pretty girl, providing she kept her wits about her. Philadelphia reached Madras on 4th August 1752, and six months later she was married to a prosperous surgeon.
Jane and Dorothy Page 2