George and Philadelphia continued to be devoted to one another. In the summer of 1766 she and her husband visited the Austens in Hampshire; she was there to help with the arrival of their second son, another George, to whom Mr. Hancock stood as godfather. In London he seems to have been introduced to Leonora also, still living in Islington with the Hintons, and took a kindly interest in her. Over the next two years Mr. Austen occasionally borrowed money from Hancock, on one occasion a substantial sum of £228. Then Hancock, realizing he could not hope to maintain his wife and child in the style he had dreamt of without increasing his fortune considerably, decided he must return to India. Leaving them in London, he set off once more in 1768.
In his absence, Hastings gave some financial help to Philadelphia, for which her husband expressed gratitude; he also kept up a correspondence with her, again with the knowledge of Hancock, who sometimes forwarded their letters. The only one that survives from Hastings to Philadelphia is perfectly correct, not a love letter, but warm and full of feeling. He addresses her as “my dear and ever-valued friend,” and asks her to “Kiss my dear Bessy for me, and assure her of my tenderest affection. May the God of goodness bless you both!”17 A few months after this letter was written, Hancock wrote to his wife telling her that Hastings had a new “favorite among the Ladies,” a Mrs. Imhoff, very lively and pretty, with a German husband. This was indeed the woman Hastings married as his second wife, after she obtained a divorce from her husband. Philadelphia’s response to hearing about Mrs. Imhoff was an immediate proposal that she herself should return to India with Betsy, who was now ten. A long answer from her husband forbade her to think of doing any such thing, listing the possible disasters that might befall Betsy, from the deaths of either of her parents, which could leave her stranded, to being debauched by the gallant young men of Calcutta, or simply too early a marriage: “You know very well that no girl, tho’ but fourteen years old, can arrive in India without attracting the notice of every Coxcomb in the Place, of whom there is very great plenty at Calcutta with very good persons & no other recommendation.” He expressed another fear, that she might fall into “false notions of happiness, most probably very Romantick.”18 A few weeks later he wrote again to tell Phila that Mr. Hastings had informed him that he was settling £5,000 on his goddaughter.
The subtext of these letters seems clear: Philadelphia did not want to lose her place, or her daughter’s, in Hastings’s affections, and was prepared to travel to India to try to keep them. Hancock saw the futility of such a move, and pointed out the risks involved in doing so. Phila herself may have written to Hastings asking him to do something tangible for Betsy, to ensure that she was not forgotten now he had a new interest. Dignity was preserved all round, not least that of Hancock.
He was always the prudent and sensible one, as he reminded Philadelphia when he commented on her brother’s situation: “That my brother & sister Austen are well, I heartily rejoice, but I cannot say that the News of the violently rapid increase of their family gives me so much pleasure; especially when I consider the case of my godson who must be provided for without the least hope of his being able to assist himself.”19 It was true that the Austens were breeding fast. Their first three sons were born in three successive years, and the next batch of four children, after they had moved the short distance from Deane to Steventon, in four more years. Mr. Hancock had a point, but he need not have worried overmuch. Despite the death of George Hastings in their care, despite the affliction of their own second son, and despite their singular system of baby rearing, George Austen and Cassandra Leigh were raising a family of clever and ambitious children.
Did the Austen children know they had an Aunt Leonora living in London as well as a dazzling Aunt Philadelphia? In 1769 the woman who had effectively mothered Leonora, Elizabeth Hinton, died, leaving her on the hands of Mr. Hinton. Soon after this, a letter from Hancock mentions “poor Leonora,” the noble behavior of Hinton, and the lack of any legacy from his late wife; Hancock offers to take his share of financial responsibility for his sister-in-law. 20 Clearly, there was no question of her going to her brother’s. Why she was not considered suitable remains guesswork: “poor Leonora” could cover anything from very low intelligence to some moral lapse, easy enough for a motherless girl in London to have fallen into. After Hancock’s reference no more is heard of her. Even her death goes unremarked in any surviving letters. In fact she lived until 1784, when she was fifty, and was buried in Islington on February 4. Her sister Philadelphia was absent in France, and her brother George busy with his family. By then he had eight children. Leonora’s eldest nephew James was already at Oxford, and her niece Jane just eight.21 But in a family in which you had to fight your battles hard to get and keep a good place, it was easy for the unsuccessful to drop out of sight, and one way or another Leonora—plain, dim and poor—had ceased to count.
3
Boys
The Austen parents were also running a boys’ school. When the small Jane Austen was brought back to the parsonage, toughened by the life of the mud-floored cottage and unpaved village street, she found herself in a still busier place, full of the clatter of boys, a mixture of brothers and pupils, the eldest of them fourteen and fifteen. Boys’ talk and boys’ interests dominated the breakfast and dinner table, and even from the nursery you could hear the sound of boys’ voices and boyish activities inside and outside the house. There were her four brothers, reasonably familiar, who remained at home all the year round; and the other, stranger boys who came and went as pupils. Twice a year these big creatures arrived, in February and again at the end of August, and twice a year they departed, for the Christmas season, and in June; the school year was divided into two halves at Mr. Austen’s, just as at the great public schools.1
Some were sons of local squires. Other boys, travelling from a distance, might be brought to the parsonage by their parents when they first arrived, and then, once they knew the way, were simply put off the coach that stopped at the Deane Gate Inn on the main road, and walked the last half mile down the hill. Their heavy boxes, full of clothes and perhaps a favourite book and a cake from home, arrived separately, brought to the door on the carrier’s cart, then lugged up two flights of stairs to the top of the house. All these were events to be watched by Jenny and explained by Cass.
A houseful of young men meant noise, the clumping of boots in and out of the doors and up and down the stairs; it meant shouts and laughter from the garret rooms where they slept, and sometimes groans and giggles from the parlour where they sat preparing their lessons. In Mr. Austen’s study they might be allowed to look through the microscope and learn from the large globe, but mostly they were kept busy at their Latin grammar, and reading and translating, with some Greek for the clever ones like Jemmy. Ned and Henry did lessons, but Frank was still too young, and he and Cass learnt their letters in the approved way from counters and cards with their mother; Jenny could easily have picked up hers as younger ones do, without anyone paying much attention except Cass, in her role of little mother.
For Mrs. Austen always had her hands full. As well as the work of the vegetable garden, poultry yard and dairy, she had to supervise the preparation of meals for so many hungry growing boys, and make sure they and their linen remained reasonably clean. Nine shirts, seven pairs of stockings, two of breeches, seven handkerchiefs, two night-caps and just one towel was the packing list of one young contemporary bound for Oxford; he listed neither underwear nor night wear, and the boys may well have done without either, sleeping naked or in their shirts.2 There must have been a good deal of rough and tumble to be controlled at the top of the house.
The number of pupils was small enough for the Austens to run the school as a large family rather than as an institution. When the boys were not at their lessons, they were much like extra elder brothers to the girls, and no doubt they petted and played with them. A favourite country-house game of the time was one in which the girls were sat on a good thick tablecloth at the top
of the stairs, the boys then taking hold of the corners of the cloth and pulling it down to the bottom; you can imagine what fun it was, and the shrieks of laughter as everyone ended in a heap.3 Apple-pie beds were as popular as blind-man’s buff, and there was dancing at Steventon sometimes, when even the youngest could attempt to join in.4 In summer there was cricket on half holidays, in winter the boys might go out to see the hunt meet, and to run a mile or two with it; James sometimes climbed a tree for the huntsmen, to chase down a marten cat that was distracting the hounds from the scent of fox.5
Some of the boys became lifelong friends of the Austen children, among them the four Fowle brothers from Kintbury in Berkshire, sons of an Oxford contemporary of Mr. Austen, all of an age with the older Austen boys: Fulwar-Craven, Tom, William and Charles. You can tell the school was a cheerful place from a poem written by Mrs. Austen and sent to one of the pupils, a Berkshire baronet’s son called Gilbert East, who stayed away from school longer than he should have done after Christmas, enjoying the season of dances at home. She urged him to return to “the Mansion of Learning” where, she wrote, “we study all day, Except when we play”:
Of Dan Virgil, we say
Two lessons each day,
And the story is quite entertaining;
You have lost the best part,
But come, take good heart,
Tho’ we’ve read six, there’s six books remaining . . .
That you dance very well
All beholders can tell
For lightly and nimbly you tread;
But pray, is it meet,
To indulge thus your feet,
And neglect all the while your poor head?
So we send you this letter
In hopes you’ll think better,
And reflect upon what is here said:
And to make us amends
Pray return to your friends,
Fowle, Stewart, Deane, Henry, & Ned.6
A mother who could make magic with words must have caught all her children’s attention. Mrs. Austen’s pen brought Gilbert back; he went on to Oxford, and preserved her poem carefully. It tells us not only what a clever writer she was, but how deeply she involved herself in all the activities of the school.
When Jenny was not quite three, and her mother was thirty-nine, Mrs. Austen found herself pregnant again; and if she and her husband were not delighted, they were both of a temper to resign themselves to the will of God and make the best of the situation. At the end of June 1779 a sixth and last son, Charles, made his appearance; at least he had the grace to arrive during the summer holidays, when the only children around were his brothers and sisters. Two weeks after his birth, James set off with his father to be enrolled as an undergraduate at his old Oxford college, St. John’s. At fourteen he was two years younger than Mr. Austen had been on starting at the university, but he did not have to win his scholarship by any demonstration of intelligence or learning, as his father had done. He was able to claim it through his mother’s family connections.
St. John’s awarded scholarships to those who could prove they were “Founder’s Kin,” that is, related, however distantly, to the Sir Thomas White to whom the college owed its existence. Because the Leighs were such enthusiastic keepers of their family history, James was able to supply the necessary pedigree without difficulty.7 They dined with Mrs. Austen’s formidable uncle, still Master of Balliol at eighty-six and as sharp as ever: when James politely began to remove his newly acquired gown on sitting down at table, he was told, “Young man, you need not strip, we are not going to fight.”8 After enrolling, James came home, but from October he would travel to and fro between Steventon and Oxford as the short university terms dictated. He was beginning to write poetry, like his mother.
Edward was also away in the summer of 1779. In May, the Austens were called on by the absentee landlord of Steventon, their distant cousin Thomas Knight, with his newly married wife Catherine; they were on their bridal tour, and they took such a fancy to twelve-year-old Edward that they asked if they might take him with them for the rest of the trip. They may have thought too that Mrs. Austen had a good deal on her hands, and she may have agreed. The idea of inviting a boy of twelve as a honeymoon companion is an unusual one, but Edward was always a sunny and uncomplicated boy, and the plan worked so well that the Knights became deeply attached to him. They maintained their particular interest in him after returning him to his parents, and asked if he might visit them in Kent; and, as they showed no sign of having any children, they began to think of Edward as almost their own.
About this time arrangements must also have been made for George to be settled further from home. Mr. and Mrs. Austen would have consulted with her brother and her sister Jane, now married to another clergyman, Edward Cooper, in Bath, about the care of their handicapped brother Thomas; and a family called Culham was found at Monk Sherborne, a quiet village on the other side of Basingstoke, to look after both Thomas Leigh and George Austen. In Crabbe’s poems you read of idiots endangering themselves by wandering into the paths of fast-travelling coaches, and other accounts of village life mention them falling into wells, so it was important to find reliable people; evidently the Austens and the Leighs did. There is no record of any visits to their afflicted brother and son, but it is reasonable to suppose they took place, if only to pay the Culhams.
A single glimpse of nursery life comes from Jane Austen herself. It is the only direct reminiscence she gave of her early childhood, apart from saying she had been shy, but it is vivid enough to make you feel you are in the room with her and her brother Francis, and hear the Hampshire dialect the children spoke with their nurses. It comes in a poem written for Francis thirty years later, when his eldest son was born, in 1809. She expressed the formal hope that the new baby would resemble him, then turned to the past, when Frank, who had been small for his age, and agile, was the leader of their infant group, given to “saucy words and fiery ways”; in particular, she recalled an occasion when he peeped disobediently round a door, presumably after they had all been put to bed, and explained himself to their nurse with words that imitated her soft speech: “Bet, my be not come to bide.”
My dearest Frank, I wish you joy
Of Mary’s safety with a Boy . . .
In him, in all his ways, may we
Another Francis William see!—
Thy infant days may he inherit,
Thy warmth, nay insolence of spirit . . .
May he revive thy Nursery sin,
Peeping as daringly within,
His curley Locks but just descried,
With “Bet, my be not come to bide.”—
You can see the little sister behind him, half shocked, half admiring; to a four-year-old there is nothing like a hero of five, and Frank was known in the family for his unruliness: “Fearless of danger, braving pain/And threaten’d very oft in vain.”
A girl growing up in a boys’ school is likely to take up boys’ games. This is the best reason for believing Jane made Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey partly in her own image, “fond of all boys’ plays,” and preferring cricket and baseball1 to playing with dolls or keeping a pet dormouse or canary. There was certainly a green slope to roll down at the back of Steventon rectory, as there was behind the Morlands’; and a few years of being “noisy and wild,” hating “confinement and cleanliness” and even running about the country and riding on horseback fit in very well with the fact that Frank managed to buy himself a pony called Squirrel when he was seven, and took himself hunting as soon as he could. His mother made him a red coat, cut down from her wedding clothes, and he would help himself to early breakfast in the kitchen; it is not hard to see six-year-old Jane getting astride Squirrel when he gave her the chance.
Running about the country with her brothers meant sometimes going in the direction of the village, where each cottage was entirely familiar and each face known; any stranger caused a stir, the odd pedlar, or a sailor making his way home across country. Up th
e lane in the other direction the children could walk to their father’s church and the Digweeds’ house among the trees. It was much bigger than the parsonage, with an ancient porch three storeys high, and very dilapidated; and here again there were boys, four of them, keen riders and followers of the hunt, and all of an age with the Austen brothers.
In rainy weather they could play in their own big barn, a great resource for children. They could walk up the hill to Cheesedown Farm beyond the village, where everyone worked for their father; and beyond that was the main road along which the coaches travelled unimaginable distances to and from places whose names gradually became familiar: Winchester, Southampton, Portsmouth, Andover, Reading, Newbury, Bath and London. The coaches carried not only people but letters, which the children might bring home from the Deane Gate Inn where they were left. These were greatly valued by their parents, read, reread and talked over in the parlour, with their news of aunts, uncles and cousins: Aunt Hancock and Cousin Eliza in town; Aunt and Uncle Cooper and their children Jane and Edward in Bath; Aunt and Uncle Leigh-Perrot at Scarlets, in Berkshire; old Uncle Francis Austen in Tonbridge; and many more.
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