Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  5. I am indebted to Robin Vick for the information about Philadelphia’s apprenticeship, which he discovered in the apprenticeship records at the Public Record Office, and also for pointing out the coincidence of Cleland’s Fanny Hill having a character called Mrs. Cole with a millinery shop in Covent Garden that is a cover for a bawdy house. The records show Philadelphia’s name spelt “Philadelphia Austin,” a common variant spelling, and a blank for the name of a parent, which fits with her having none living. Other girl apprentices appear in the records, Sarah Harris in 1742 and Rose Keene in 1746.

  6. Compare, for instance, Katherine Mansfield’s grandmother, a Lancashire orphan sent off by her aunt alone to New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century.

  7. It has been widely believed that Hancock was born in 1711, but this derives from false information on, or a mistranscription of, his tombstone in India, which apparently gave his age at death in 1775 as sixty-four. Robin Vick has found that he was in fact born on Christmas Day, 1723, and baptized at Sittingbourne, Kent, on 10 Jan. 1724, the son of Revd Thomas Saul Hancock and his wife Elizabeth. Thomas Saul Hancock was rector of the nearby parishes of Wormshill and Hollingbourne. The identification is confirmed by the baptisms of four other children at Hollingbourne, including Olivia (1731) and Colbron (1733), both mentioned in Hancock’s letters (see AP). For the information about Leonora Austen, I am indebted to researches made by Deirdre Le Faye.

  8. Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings (1954), pp. 40–41.

  9. The suggestion was made by Sidney Grier in an article in Temple Bar for May 1905, “A God-Daughter of Warren Hastings.” It has not been substantiated, although both R. A. Austen-Leigh and Deirdre Le Faye tend to accept it.

  10. Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings, p. 40.

  11. Clive’s letter to his wife is cited in Mark Bence-Jones, Clive of India (1974), p. 220.

  12. Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings, p. 51.

  13. Cassandra Leigh’s leaseholds were in Oxford, George Austen’s in Tonbridge, Kent. Some of hers were sold two years after the marriage, the money invested in annuities. Both came into their full inheritances in 1768, when her mother and his stepmother died, after which he too sold off his properties and the whole amount of their inheritances was invested in South Sea annuities. Despite George Austen’s financial difficulties, her South Sea investments were never touched, and when she died they were divided among her surviving children.

  14. Keith Feiling, Warren Hastings, p. 54.

  15. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 29 Oct. 1799, unpublished portion of letter in Hampshire Record Office (hereafter cited as HRO; 23M93/M1).

  16. Deirdre Le Faye conjectures in Jane Austen: A Family Record (1989), p. 15, that Warren Hastings first put his son in the care of members of the Leigh family who were neighbours of his impoverished grandfather at Adlestrop in Gloucestershire; and when, by pure coincidence, a Leigh cousin, Cassandra, married George Austen, she was thought suitable to take over the boy’s care and education. It is convincingly argued, but not proved.

  17. Warren Hastings to Philadelphia Hancock, 31 Jan. 1772, AP, pp. 59–60.

  18. Tysoe Saul Hancock to Philadelphia Hancock, 23 Sept. 1772, AP, pp. 64–5.

  19. Tysoe Saul Hancock to Philadelphia Hancock, 23 Sept. 1772, AP, pp. 65–6.

  20. Tysoe Saul Hancock to Philadelphia Hancock, 17 Jan. 1770, AP, pp. 43–4.

  21. Whether Jane Austen knew anything of the existence of her Aunt Leonora is not known. In fact she lost two aunts in a short space of time. Jane was at home, having been rescued from the boarding school where she caught a near-fatal fever the previous summer; and the same fever killed her maternal aunt, Jane Cooper, in October 1783, four months before Leonora died.

  3

  BOYS

  1. We know this because Mr. Austen’s niece Eliza wrote “my uncle informs us that Midsummer & Christmas are the only seasons when his mansion is sufficiently at liberty to admit of his receiving his friends.” Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 23 May 1786, AP, p. 118.

  2. The packing was James Woodforde’s as he set off for New College in Oct. 1762. You can’t help hoping his college supplied him with a second towel.

  3. Mrs. Sherwood, born Mary Butt in the same year as JA, whose father was also a country clergyman who took pupils, gives this game as a popular entertainment of her youth; see her autobiography, edited by S. Kelly (1854).

  4. Mrs. Austen writes about dancing in the poem she sent to an absent pupil, Gilbert East, in 1779. She upbraids him for staying away in order to dance all the time, but her praise of his dancing—“That you dance very well / All beholders can tell / For lightly and nimbly you tread”—suggests she saw him dance at Steventon. My version of the poem is taken from a red calf notebook into which Mrs. Austen’s eldest grandchild, Anna Lefroy, copied various texts. She notes that it was sent to her by the Revd. J. B. Harrison, Rector of Evenley Brackley, Northants, which suggests it was valued and circulated, as well it might be. It is now in the possession of Alwyn Austen.

  5. James Austen recalled chasing marten cats out of trees to his son James-Edward, who records this in Recollections of the Early Days of the Vine Hunt (1865), p. 15: “My father, when a boy, had sometimes climbed the tree for the purpose of shaking or beating it [i.e., a marten cat] down.”

  6. Henry and Ned were the third and fourth Austen sons, and the other three were pupils.

  7. See David Gilson, “The Austens and Oxford: ‘Founder’s Kin,’ ” Jane Austen Society Report (1977), pp. 43–5.

  8. James-Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, pp. 6–7.

  9. John Rowe Townsend has brought to my attention an earlier reference from the Little Pretty Pocket-Book of 1744. Under a picture of three boys playing with a ball on a village green, each standing at a large “stump,” is a verse with the heading ‘BASE-BALL’: “The Ball once struck off,/ Away flies the Boy/ To the next destin’d Post,/ And then Home with Joy.”

  10. The furniture from Mr. Austen’s study was sold when he left Steventon in 1801, and the sale list includes “table and chest of drawers in study, globe, microscope, 8ft by 8ft bookcase, also smaller one; mahogany library table with drawers.” See Robin Vick, “The Sale at Steventon Parsonage,” Jane Austen Society Report (1993), p. 14.

  11. The standard work for microscope owners was Henry Baker’s Employment of the Microscope, first published in 1753 and reissued many times. It gives instructions on preparing slides, and stresses the religious lesson to be learnt from observing “the amazing Power and Goodness of the Creator,” who took as much trouble with the Louse, the Gnat and the Flea as with the Whale, the Elephant and the Lion—providing a lesson for a future novelist too.

  12. George Holbert Tucker, A Goodly Heritage: A History of Jane Austen’s Family (1983), p. 30, citing Emma Austen-Leigh’s Jane Austen and Steventon (1937), in which the annotated manuscript of the sermon is said to be in the possession of descendants.

  13. George Austen to Francis Austen, Dec. 1788, unpublished portion of letter in possession of Alwyn Austen. “Personal cleanliness, in the hot Country you are going to, will be so necessary to your Comfort & Health that I need not recommend it—I shall only therefore beg of you to be particularly careful of your Teeth.”

  14. In her History of England, in the section on Edward IV, she so dismisses “Jane Shore, who has had a play written about her, but it is a tragedy.”

  15. The author of Matilda was Thomas Francklin, and it was produced at Drury Lane in 1775.

  16. First line of the epilogue quoted in G. Sawtell’s “Four Manly Boys,” Jane Austen Society Report (1982), p. 224.

  4

  SCHOOL

  1. Anna Lefroy to James-Edward Austen-Leigh, Dec. 1864, copy of letter printed by Deirdre Le Faye in “Anna Lefroy’s Original Memories of Jane Austen,” Review of English Studies, NS xxxix, 155, Aug. 1988, p. 418.

  2. Bed sharing was common practice, even at the most expensive and famous boys’ public schools. Sir Philip Franci
s, contemplating his son going to Harrow, specified that he must have a bed to himself. Sir Philip Francis, The Francis Letters (2 vols., 1901), Vol. I, p. 321. Philip Francis to D. Godfrey, 16 Sept. 1776, “I insist upon his lying alone. His learning may take its fate . . . but his health and morals require all our care.”

  3. Arthur Young, Autobiography (1898), p. 264.

  4. See Eric Walkely Gillett (ed.), Elizabeth Ham by Herself 1783–1820 (1945).

  5. See Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth (1972), pp. 51–5.

  6. JA to CEA, 8 Apr. 1805; The Watsons in R.W.Chapman’s Minor Works of 1954, p. 318; JA to CEA, 1 Sept. 1796.

  7. Emma, I, 3.

  8. See illustration on p. 40, courtesy of the great-grandsons of Admiral Sir Francis Austen. Photographs of the pages appear in Jane Austen Society Report (1975), p. 257 in bound collection.

  9. Information derived from Mrs. Sherwood’s Autobiography.

  5

  THE FRENCH CONNECTION

  1. George Holbert Tucker, A Goodly Heritage, p. 166, citing Christopher Lloyd, “The Royal Naval Colleges at Portsmouth and Greenwich,” The Mariner’s Mirror (1966).

  2. Mrs. Cassandra Austen to Philadelphia Walter, 31 Dec. 1786, cited in Deirdre Le Faye, “Three Austen Family Letters,” Notes and Queries, Sept. 1985, pp. 333–4.

  3. All these London experiences are mentioned by Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter in a letter, 9 Apr. 1787, AP, pp. 122–3.

  4. The phrase “his two Mammas” comes in a letter, ibid., p. 123.

  5. All further quotes in the paragraph from Mrs. Austen’s letter to Philadelphia Walter, 31 Dec. 1786, cited in Deirdre Le Faye, “Three Austen Family Letters,” Notes and Queries, Sept. 1985, pp. 333–4.

  6. JA is known to have owned several of the twelve volumes of Berquin in their original French, the first inscribed “J. Austen december 18th 1786,” Vols. II–IX similarly inscribed. In Vol. V another hand has written what seems to read “Pour dear Jane Austen.” Information from David Gilson, A Bibliography of Jane Austen (1982).

  7. The Critic, III, i, where the stage direction reads “They faint alternately in each other’s arms.”

  8. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 26 Oct. 1792, AP, p. 148.

  9. Many are printed in AP; a few more have appeared since its publication in 1942, and some are now held in the HRO on microfilm.

  10. Tysoe Saul Hancock to Philadelphia Hancock, 11 Dec. 1772, AP, p. 68.

  11. Her account with Hoare’s Bank shows many transfers of money to Sir John Lambert during 1778, and Hoare’s Letter-Book refers to a letter of credit on Sir John Lambert at Paris for £200 (letter dated 2 June 1778).

  12. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 27 Mar. 1782, AP, pp. 99–100.

  13. Mrs. Hancock’s account with Hoare’s Bank shows payments totalling £370 to Sir John Lambert between Oct. and Dec. 1778, and more in 1780 (ledger 100, p. 406). Eliza asks Phylly to write to her “au soin de Chevalier Lambert à Paris” in June 1780, AP, p. 92.

  14. Sir John’s father lived on the Isle de Ré, off La Rochelle, at one time, according to Debrett’s Baronetage of England.

  15. E.g., credit entry in Henry Austen’s account with Hoare’s Bank for 1824.

  16. John Woodman to Warren Hastings, 26 Dec. 1781, AP, p. 98; original British Library Add. MSS 29,152, f. 150.

  17. A Jacques Capot was registered Protestant in 1713, his name in the list of those who went to Geneva. Bulletins de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme français, Vol. l, xxvi (1926), p. 240. A Demoiselle Jeanne Capot married in 1683 P. Meulh, the Meulhs being a Protestant family at Nérac. Chaix-d’Est-Ange, G., Dictionnaire des Familles françaises anciennes ou notables à la fin du XIXème siècle, Vol. X (1903–29), p. 441.

  18. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 27 Mar. 1782, AP, p. 100, and 17 Jan. 1786, AP, p. 115: “should a son be in store for M. de Feuillide, he greatly wishes him to be a native of England.”

  19. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 27 Mar. 1782, AP, pp. 104, 100.

  20. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 23 May 1786, AP, p. 119.

  21. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, letter owned by Jane Austen Memorial Trust, cited by Deirdre Le Faye, “Three Austen Family Letters,” Notes and Queries, Sept. 1985.

  22. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 17 Jan. 1786, AP, pp. 114–15. Information on Lord Chesterfield from the DNB.

  23. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 17 Jan. 1786, AP, pp. 114, 115.

  24. Philadelphia Walter to James Walter, 23 July 1788, AP, p. 130.

  25. James’s mixed feelings about France appear in some of his articles in the magazine he started later, The Loiterer. One story is of an aristocratic Frenchwoman who tries to involve a young Englishman in a flirtation, from which he flees.

  26. The Chances was adapted by Garrick from Beaumont and Fletcher.

  27. There is a prologue to Bon Ton among James’s poems, dated this year, HRO 23M93/60/3/2.

  28. This is from James-Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of Jane Austen, p. 26. He goes on to suggest that his Aunt Jane was “an early observer, and it may be reasonably supposed that some of the incidents and feelings which are so vividly painted in the Mansfield Park theatricals are due to her recollection of these entertainments.”

  29. William Cowper, much admired by JA, had been at Westminster School with Hastings, and wrote the following lines at this time:

  Hastings! I knew thee young, and of a mind

  While young humane, conversable, and kind;

  Nor can I well believe thee, gentle then,

  Now grown a villain, and the worst of men.

  But rather some suspect, who have oppressed

  And worried thee, as not themselves the best.

  30. Elizabeth de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 22 Aug. 1788, AP , p. 133.

  31. Philadelphia Walter to James Walter, 23 July 1788, AP, p. 130, and Elizabeth de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 11 Feb. 1789, pp. 137–8.

  32. Philadelphia Hancock to John Woodman, 5 Feb. 1789, AP, pp. 135–6.

  6

  BAD BEHAVIOUR

  1. Philadelphia Walter to Eliza de Feuillide, 23 July 1788, AP, p. 131.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 22 Aug. 1788, AP, p. 132.

  4. George Austen to Francis Austen, Dec. 1788. Letter in possession of Alwyn Austen.

  5. These early stories are commonly described as burlesques on whatever Jane was reading at the time, but it is hard to know what this might have been in relation to Jack and Alice: nothing in Sir Charles Grandison (in which there is a drunken woman, but her intoxication takes place offstage). Tom Thumb comes closer, and Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline may have inspired the two interpolated “life stories,” though nothing else. The tone is entirely Austen’s, and the grinning at death points forward to the joke in the letters about the dead baby, and the mockery of a fat mother grieving for her dead son in Persuasion—two passages many people find upsetting.

  6. James, Edward and Henry each possessed a game duty certificate in 1785 (when Henry was fourteen), acquired from the Clerk of the Peace for three guineas. Mr. Austen did not have one; he presumably had never learnt to shoot. See Robin Vick, “The Sale at Steventon Parsonage,” Jane Austen Society Report (1993).

  7. The Sultan by Isaac Bickerstaffe was an enormously popular vehicle for stars like Mrs. Jordan, and High Life Below Stairs by James Townley equally so: Kitty Clive and Mrs. Abington both excelled in playing Kitty, the ladies’ maid who aspires to high culture: “Shikspur. Did you never read Shikspur?” (Kitty) “Shikspur! Shikspur! Who wrote it? No, I never read Shikspur.” “Then you have an immense pleasure to come.” (Kitty) “Well then, I’ll read it over one afternoon or another.” Less attractive is the crude stereotyping of two black servants. It is no good suggesting the Austens were ahead of their time in this respect; Henry was also perfectly happy to play a “Jew” in later charades at Godmersham.<
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  8. Eliza de Feuillide to Philadelphia Walter, 11 Feb. 1789, AP, p. 138.

  9. Mrs. Austen always had a high opinion of him as a writer, praising his “Literary Taste and the Power of Elegant Composition” after his death. Mrs. Cassandra Austen to James Leigh-Perrot, 4 Jan. 1820, AP, p. 265.

  10. Zachary Cope first suggested that JA was Sophia Sentiment, in the Book Collector in 1966; his arguments were summarized in the Jane Austen Society Report for the same year. He claimed that “Sophia’s” letter could not have been written by James or Henry, on the grounds of style; and that the suggestions for improving The Loiterer “read like a burlesque of the morbid sentiment prevalent in novels of that period, a type of writing at that very time being satirized in JA’s Love and Freindship .” He did, however, conclude that it may have been written in collusion with Henry, which seems to me much more likely than that it was her unaided work. The fact that she used the name Sophia for the heroine of Love and Freindship more than a year later could indicate that there was a running family joke; on the other hand, Sophia was a very common name. One of the royal princesses, born in 1777, was a Sophia; and the Austens knew their Fielding. Elizabeth Jenkins points out that the phrase “bitter philippic” occurs in a Loiterer essay (no. 58) and in Sense and Sensibility , convincing evidence that Jane read her brother’s periodical. It would have been strange if she did not, but she did not always use phrases in the same sense as James, for cara sposa appears twice quite unsatirically in The Loiterer, whereas she gave it to Mrs. Elton as a piece of ridiculous affectation. Admittedly, fifteen years had passed. JA’s satirical use of caro sposo in Emma has made everyone alert to earlier uses of the phrase; Garrick also used caro sposo in his epilogue to Mrs. Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem in 1780.

  11. These early stories are sometimes taken as little more than parodies of current fiction, and were so described first by James-Edward Austen-Leigh, in his Memoir of 1870, which speaks of nonsense stories and satires on “sundry silly romances.” There were many sentimental, violent and absurd novels circulating in the 1770s and 1780s, and JA must have read some, but it seems unlikely there would have been many available at Steventon.