The humility is mock humility and the ‘boast’ is a real one. Jane is playing the game of pretending to be ‘only’ a woman, not clever or accomplished enough to meet Mr Clarke’s requirements. Her real message lies in her subtext, the reminder to him that she is a successful ‘authoress’ whose talent is not at his disposal. But Clarke was as absurdly egocentric as Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice. Undeterred, he persisted, digging himself into an ever deeper hole. He thanked her for the copy of Emma, which despite his professed admiration he had read only a few pages of before passing it on to the Prince Regent, and promised her a copy of a book he had written on King James II. This evidently slightly paranoid man was convinced that many Shylocks were whetting sharp knives to cut ‘more than a pound of flesh from my heart’ when it appeared. He assured Jane that the few pages of Emma which he had managed to read had ‘so much nature - and excellent description of character in everything you describe’. This praise was vague enough not to offend and he soon returned to his real concern, his scheme of instructing the most talented writer of the day in her craft, though he could not be bothered to read her latest book when he held it in his hands. He took her tongue-in-cheek disclaimers literally and urged her:
Pray continue to write, and make all your friends send sketches to help you … Do let us have an English clergyman after your fancy…show dear madam what good would be done if tithes were taken away entirely, and describe him burying his own mother - as I did - because the high priest of the parish in which she died - did not pay her remains the respect he ought to.
This implies that he wanted Jane Austen to write a novel which would be an instrument of revenge on the ‘high priest’. This term is clearly sarcastic, suggesting that the parson concerned was arrogant and overbearing, as the term ‘high priest’ is not in use in the Church of England, and is only used in connection with pagan religions. He confides: ‘I have never recovered from the shock.’ Immediately he returns to the task of urging Jane Austen to write a novel according to his peculiarly personal recipe. ‘Carry your clergyman to sea as the friend of some distinguished naval character about a court…’ Mr Clarke is clearly yearning to appoint himself Jane Austen’s plot consultant, as he reveals he was himself at sea and tells Jane he has arranged to send her some ‘sermons which I wrote and preached on the ocean’.
Jane did not reply to this letter. Mr Clarke had not given up. Writing at the end of the following March to thank her for the Prince’s presentation copies, he implored her to go on writing. Lord St Helens and many of the nobility who had been staying at the Brighton Pavilion had paid the just tribute of their praise. Mr Clarke boasted of his new appointment as chaplain and secretary to Prince Leopold of SaxeCoburg, who was about to marry the Prince Regent’s daughter Princess Charlotte of Wales. ‘Perhaps when you again appear in print you may choose to dedicate your volumes to Prince Leopold: any historical romance illustrative of the history of the august house of Coburg would just now be very interesting/ he nudged.
This was not so foolish as it sounds. The Royal Family was beset by scandal. King George III, whatever the cause of his illness, was mad; the Prince Regent was estranged from his wife, and the royal princes were living with various mistresses, refusing to marry and beget legitimate heirs. The Prince Regent’s sole legitimate daughter, troubled child of a disastrous marriage, was Princess Charlotte. The newspapers were fall of coarse satires on the Royal Family. These seem to have been justified. Princess Charlotte told her father that her mother had left her alone with a cavalryman, Captain Charles Hesse, in Charlotte’s own bedroom and locked them in, saying in French, Tm going now: enjoy yourselves.’ Charlotte suspected that her mother wished to compromise her and promote Charlotte’s illegitimate half-brother.
The Prince Regent decided Charlotte should be married off as soon as possible but when the drunken Prince of Orange was suggested to her she fled in a hackney coach to her mother’s house.
Sense and Sensibility was recommended to Charlotte by one of her 'wicked uncles’, the Duke of York, who was convinced it had been written by the notorious Lady Augusta Paget. Charlotte enjoyed the novel. It certainly is interesting and you feel quite one of the company,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘I think Marianne and me [sic] are very alike in disposition, though certainly I am not so good. The same imprudence, etc, however remain very like.’
Headstrong Princess Charlotte had met and fallen in love with Prince Leopold when he came to London with the Russian Czar in 1814 for the celebrations of a peace which turned out to be temporary. A royal romance was going to be good, it was hoped, for the battered image of the House of Hanover. In August 1814 the Princess of Wales, Princess Charlotte’s mother, had sailed to the Continent of Europe, where, lost to all dignity and decorum, she drew attention to herself and revenged herself on her husband by scandalously indiscreet behaviour. It was rumoured that in Italy she had danced naked in public. George IV finally decided to divorce his wife Caroline when he became King in 1820 and she wanted to be recognized as Queen, but she died in 1821 shortly after the coronation. George IV consoled himself with his final mistress, Lady Conyngham, known punningly as the Vice Queen. Jane Austen must once have seen her at a ball, possibly on a visit to Kent, because in 1798 she had written to Cassandra that she had changed the trimmings on her cap and was pleased to say it made her look more like Lady Conyngham than it did before, ‘which is all that one lives for now’.
In 1815 it seemed to Mr Clarke that if that elegant writer, Miss Jane Austen, could be persuaded to romanticize the royal union in fiction by glamorizing the foreign bridegroom’s family in order to provide the war-weary nation with a fairy-tale wedding, it would be a brilliant stroke of public relations. The young couple had been pictured at the opera by the painter George Dawe, and black and white printed copies were distributed. Jane Austen had passed their new home, Claremont Park in Surrey, on her way to London in May 1813.
The house of Saxe-Coburg was unheard of outside Prince Leopold’s native Germany, where princelings were numerous. He was handsome in his cavalry uniform but so poor he lived in rented rooms above a grocer’s shop. The couple married in May 1816 but Princess Charlotte was to die in childbirth in November 1817, four months after Jane Austen herself. Mr Clarke lived until 1834 and the artist J M W Turner went to his funeral.
Prince Leopold’s sister married the Regent’s brother the Duke of Kent, who as King William IV of England was the uncle of Queen Victoria. Victoria’s husband Prince Albert was another Coburg, who brought this family into the direct line of British royal descent.
On 1 April 1816 Jane decided that the nonsensical correspondence with Mr Clarke had gone on long enough. She made polite excuses for answering two letters with one, then came to the point:
I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the house of Saxe-Coburg might be much more to the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in, but I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life, and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never to relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No -1 must keep to my own style and go on in my own way …
She knew her own value and the quality of her work. Jane could not resist incorporating some of Mr Clarke’s more self-serving notions into a satirical ‘plan of a novel’. This would send a clergyman hero to sea as chaplain to a distinguished naval character about the court, burying his own mother (‘heroine’s lamented grandmother’). The plot outlined Mr Clarke’s more absurd suggestions, combined with a melodramatic story. Eventually the ‘poor father, quite worn down, finding his end approaching, throws himself on the ground, and after four or five hours of tender advice and parental admonition to his miserable child, expires in a fine burst of literary enthusiasm, intermingled with invectives against holders of tithes’.
Emma was advertised as forthcoming on 2 December 1815 in the Morning Post, but was not in fact ready till the last week of the year, and the title page said ‘1816’. She wrote to Murray by messenger, ‘As I find that Emma is advertised for publication as early as Saturday next, I think it best to lose no time in settling all that remains to be settled …’ She agreed to leave the terms of trade to him. She wanted the edition cleared rapidly and enclosed the revised copy of Mansfield Park.
Until 16 December, her fortieth birthday, Jane was still in London, but looking forward to going home. She told Cassandra she positively liked the ‘nice, unwholesome, unseasonable, relaxing, close muggy weather,’ enjoying it ‘all over me, from top to toe, from right to left, longitudinally, perpendicularly, diagonally’ and selfishly hoped it would last another twenty-three days till Christmas. She ended her letter of 2 December, ‘Excuse the shortness of this, but I must finish it now, that I may save you twopence.’ She never went to London again.
23
Shipwreck, Bankruptcy and Other Disasters, 1816
JANE RECEIVED WHAT seemed like discriminating praise from Countess Morley, thanking her for a presentation copy of Emma, I am already become intimate in the Woodhouse family and feel that they will not amuse and interest me less than the Bennets, Bertrams, Norrises and all their admirable predecessors. I can give them no higher praise,' wrote the Countess.
Lady Morley, formerly Frances Talbot, was initially suspected by Mary Russell Mitford of having written Pride and Prejudice. Frances was the Earl’s second wife. His first wife, Lady Augusta Paget, was believed by Princess Charlotte to have written Sense and Sensibility. The Earl had divorced Augusta after she ran off with another man. The Earl and Countess owned Saltram House in Devon, used when the film of Sense and Sensibility was made in 1995. However in private the second Lady Morley told her sister-in-law that she actually preferred Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park to Emma.
Jane said that her ladyship’s approbation was gratifying. ‘It encourages me to depend on the same share of general good opinion which Emma’s predecessors have experienced, and to believe that I have not yet - as almost every writer of fancy does sooner or later -overwritten myself.’ Like every creative artist she was afraid of drying up.
Jane’s brother Frank liked Emma enormously. He preferred it to Pride and Prejudice, which might be considered to have more wit, and to Mansfield Park with its higher morality. Emma was like life. Cassandra liked Emma more than Pride and Prejudice, but not as much as she did Mansfield Park. Mrs Austen thought Emma more entertaining than Mansfield Park but not as interesting as Pride and Prejudice. She thought nobody in Emma compared with Lady Catherine and Mr Collins. Edward the farmer teased his sister about a slip in the strawberry-picking scene: ‘Jane, I wish you would tell me where you get those apple trees of yours that come into bloom in June.’ Edward’s daughter Fanny did not like the book as well as Pride and Prejudice or Mansfield Park, because she disliked the heroine. She found Mr Knightley delightful and would have liked to see more of Jane Fairfax.
Jane had not yet met her first great-niece, Anna-Jemima Lefroy, Ben and Anna’s daughter. She sent Anna a note: ‘As I wish very much to see your Jemima, I am sure you will like to see my Emma, and have therefore great pleasure in sending it for your perusal. Keep it as long as you choose…’
Anna’s comment was interesting. Emma was not as brilliant as Pride and Prejudice, nor as ‘equal’ as Mansfield Park, by which she meant ‘consistent’. The characters were admirably well drawn and natural. Her favourites were Mr Knightley, Mrs Elton and Miss Bates. One or two of the conversations were ‘too long’. Anna’s daughter Fanny-Caroline Lefroy said many years later that in the eyes of several people the character of Emma, especially the way she looks, pointed to Anna, if only unintentionally. Indeed, the portrait combined Anna’s appearance with something of her richer cousin Fanny’s situation.
Dear Mrs Digweed said she could never have got through the book if she had not known the author. Maria Edgeworth also received a presentation copy which she did not acknowledge. She thought the book dull and plotless. Susan Ferrier, who had not yet finished writing her novel Marriage, also thought there was no story to Emma, but the characters were true to life and the style piquant: there was no need of mystery and adventure.
The book attracted eight printed reviews. Some people found Miss Bates a bore. John Murray privately thought the book wanted incident and romance but as publisher of the influential Quarterly Review he asked Walter Scott to review it. Scott praised the novel for being lifelike and wrote about Jane’s other books as well but had not heard of Mansfield Park. He quoted, though, as an example of Emma’s quiet though comic dialogue, the conversation between Mr Woodhouse and Isabella in Chapter Twelve. Jane was pleased, saying those were the very characters she had taken most pains with.
Jane’s triumph was qualified by disasters which had struck her brothers. Henry had gone bankrupt at the end of 1815. He had not been able to attend to business while Eliza was dying or during his own protracted illness. The Alton bank of Austen Gray and Vincent, like many small country banks in the difficult postwar period, collapsed first, dragging with it the London bank of Austen Maunde and Tilson. Government contracts dried up. Henry had borrowed £20,000 from Edward, lost at a bad time as Edward was involved in his lawsuit with the Hintons of Chawton and the Baverstocks of Alton over his inheritance from Thomas Brodnax-May-Knight. Jane had only £13 7s in her Henrietta Street account, which she lost, but the £600 profit on her novels was safely invested in navy stock at five per cent.
Henry returned to his original career plan and wrote to the Bishop of Winchester about becoming a clergyman. He polished up his Greek and was disappointed when the Bishop failed to be impressed by it. However, he was approved and was ordained deacon at Salisbury the next day. He was appointed curate of Chawton at the age of forty-five on a stipend of 52 guineas a year. He became a zealous preacher of Calvinistic doctrine in the Evangelical wing of the Church, later becoming perpetual curate of Bentley, Hampshire. London had become hateful to him but his residence there had been an invaluable asset to his sister.
On 21 February 1816 Charles was shipwrecked off the coast of Smyrna, where he was chasing pirates. His captain’s log reads:
At two pm the ship struck on the rocks astern, it then blowing a gale from the north-east. Hoisted out boats and cut the masts away. Attempted to heave the ship off…rudder broken and washed away… The people immediately began to swim on shore, all the boats being stove. At four pm a Turk, with a message from the Aga, came down opposite the ship and inquired for me, when I landed, sliding down on a top-gallant mast, which reached from the wreck to the shore. Thank God, I found that no life had been lost. Walked to the town with the marine officer and others, distant a long mile, blowing violently, with sleet and rain, and very cold. At the house of Mr Cortovitch we were received most kindly and hospitably, in supplying us with clothes, food and beds. For the crew I got a large store-house with fires, bread and wine. In spite of our misfortune I slept well.
Although Charles was cleared of all blame, this accident for a while did his career no good. Ultimately he triumphed over it, though he suffered from rheumatism and skin eruptions possibly as a result of stress. He had within a few months lost both his wife and his ship.
Jane was starting to feel ill. The catastrophes cannot have helped. Neither Henry nor Frank was able to keep up his contribution of £50 a year on which their mother depended, as Frank’s money had been invested in Henry’s bank, and Edward too was facing ruin.
Jane at the time was writing Persuasion, her last novel, with a sailor hero and several other naval men among the characters. In a letter to her niece Fanny Knight dated 13 March 1816, she said: ‘Miss Catherine is put upon the shelf for the present, and I do not know that she will ever come out; but I have a something ready for publication, which may, perhaps, appear about a twelvemonth hence. It is short - about the length of Catherine. T
his is for yourself alone.’ Jane did not live to see either Persuasion or the other story published. She had changed its name from Susan to Catherine because another novel called Susan had been published in the interim. Catherine was retitled by Henry as North anger Abbey. The two novels were published together in one volume in 1818, with a biographical notice by Henry. This account of his sister was the first whitewash operation performed by her surviving relatives.
Jane saw Fanny for the last time on 21 May 1816 when Edward took his daughter back to Kent.
Elizabeth Leigh, sister to the late Revd Thomas Leigh of Adlestrop and Stoneleigh, died. Jane wrote to her niece Caroline on 21 April, ‘We all feel that we have lost a most valued old friend, but the death of a person at her advanced age, so fit to die, and by her own feelings so ready to die, is not to be regretted.’ She invited Caroline to the fair at Alton to be held on her cousin Mary-Jane’s birthday but domestic chores could not be forgotten:
We are almost ashamed to include your Mama in the invitation, or to ask her to be at the trouble of a long ride for so few days as we shall be having disengaged, for we must wash before the Godmersham party come and therefore Monday would be the last day that our house could be comfortable for her; but if she does feel disposed to pay us a little visit and you could all come, so much the better. We do not like to invite her to come on Wednesday, to be turned out of the house on Monday…
The wash-house at Chawton Cottage is still there. Washday was about once a month and involved backbreaking work. A blanket wash was heavy indeed. Cotton and linen had to be boiled in a copper boiler set in brick over a fire, the water having to be fetched in buckets from the pump and ladled in and out. After washing and rinsing came blueing and starching. The clothes had to be wrung out, either by hand or with an up-to-date mangle. In fine weather, the clothes were pegged out to dry. Then they had to be ironed, either with flat irons heated in the grate, or with hollow box irons filled with hot coals. Both cooled down inconveniently fast.
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