Lord George did care for his tenants and, Gaelic scholar as he was, understood their customs and working practices. As far back as the winter of 1835, full of his newfound enthusiasm for Donegal, and encouraging his reluctant brother-in-law Charles to read some Irish history, he had recounted a story from Gweedore, which Charles recorded in his diary:
In the west of Donegal a proprietor wanted a ditch made a year or two ago, & instead of taking 2 or 3 fellows as we should in Kent to employ them for the winter, they got a hundred men & a fiddler & finished it in 9 hours. About 30 worked at a time, then rested, eat [sic] and drank whiskey, & danced to the fiddler whilst the others were working, & so on to the end. That is the way they do things in Ireland.88
Lord George understood the Gweedore way of living so well, that he could recreate the sense of it for the phlegmatic and cautious Charles Knight. In the spirit of Sir Walter Scott, who had expressed the belief in 1825 that the Irish ‘natural condition is turned toward gaiety and happiness’, and of the Census Commissioners who had noted ‘the proverbial gaiety and lightheartedness of the peasant people’, Lord George left another, similar account of the removal of a cabin from one site to another:
The custom on such occasions is for the person who has the work to be done to hire a fiddle, upon which engagement all the neighbours joyously assemble and carry in an incredibly short time the stones and timber upon their backs to the new site; men, women and children alternately dancing and working while daylight lasts, at the termination of which they adjourn to some dwelling where they finish the night, often prolonging the dance to dawn of day.89
The corollary of this seems to be that Lord George, despite his philanthropic commitment to bettering the condition of his tenants, understood more than almost every other landlord the cost to the people of Gweedore of the enormous changes he instituted. He built good roads, and ensured that travellers could traverse previously unnavigable territory; yet, this meant that his tenants were separated from the neighbours who were as close to them as family. ‘Lord George Hill,’ Cecil Woodham-Smith observed, ‘found his tenants in Donegal unwilling to accept a new and better house if it meant separation from their neighbours’.90 Louisa and Fanny may have been baffled at the refusal of the Donegal tenants to accept the changes made to their way of life – whether it was the squaring of farms, the prohibition of illegal distillation, or the Big House monopoly on the grain produced at Bunbeg Mill – but Lord George understood his tenants very well.
After Carlyle’s guided tour through Gweedore in 1849, he and Lord George returned on that chilly August evening to the house at Ballyare. ‘All were glad enough to get within doors to a late cup of Christian tea,’ Carlyle recalled, ‘Lord G. lights fire, too, by a match; very welcome blaze: presents me two pairs of his Gweedore socks. Bed soon and sleep.’ On the next day, before leaving, he visited and despaired of yet another ‘rough peasant farmer ... sluttish, sluttish’, then went back for the last time to Ballyare. One final attempt to remember Louisa’s name reduced Carlyle to attempting an approximation of ‘Augusta’: ‘Lady A. with the children in the garden: a delicate, pious, high and simple lady; sister of Lord G’s former wife.’91 Then, though he had barely noticed Jane Austen’s niece and god-daughter, Carlyle went away with the highest opinion of Lord George Hill: ‘In all Ireland, lately in any other land, I saw no such beautiful soul.’92 Fanny Knight, critical of so many who fell below her standards, had, three years before, unknowingly anticipated Carlyle’s words: ‘I wish all the Irish landlords would follow his example,’ she wrote to Miss Chapman, ‘& the famine wd be more easily met.’93
Fifteen years earlier, Charles Knight had looked at his sister Cassandra on her wedding day and had seen her suddenly, chillingly, as a victim about to be buried alive. In Carlyle’s portrait, it is Louisa who appears buried alive: a distant, pale wraith, scarcely noticeable behind her dynamic husband. Jane Austen’s Captain Wentworth had said a man who loves deeply ‘does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a woman! – He ought not – he does not.’94 Lord George, unlike Captain Wentworth, had risen above his grief and made a new life. For Louisa, his second wife, far from home and all that was familiar – her marriage almost unmarked by her favourite brother, her name unmemorable to the distinguished visitor – life was now lived on the periphery of those of her husband and five children. From the time of her marriage onwards, she could go back to England only as a visitor; and, as a visitor, she would see, but be powerless to prevent, the cataclysmic changes about to take place in her old family home.
Chapter 6: ‘Our Lost Home’
Marianne and Her Brothers
1849–1860
‘Dear, dear Norland,’ said Marianne, as she wandered alone before the house, on the last evening of their being there, ‘when shall I cease to regret you, when learn to feel a home elsewhere?’
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
My dearest Fanny
Nothing — but I must write once more in my life to you at ‘Mersham Hatch’ [sic] So, here I am, beginning — I won’t keep you long, so never mind; and I won’t make you cry, if I can help it, tho’ my heart is crying for you, and has been for a long while. I cannot bear your leaving Hatch, and I want to hide somewhere and see your gd bye tomorrow but I don’t know where or when.1
With these words, Marianne Knight began a compassionate letter to her sister Fanny in July 1849. Fanny had recently been widowed: Sir Edward Knatchbull, having failed, after repeated efforts, to find a cure for his ‘severe bronchial affliction’, had died on 24 May. One daughter, Fanny Elizabeth, had died in February of tuberculosis; another, Alice, had lost her own struggle with the disease as her father entered his last illness.2 Now, as the dowager making way for her stepson and his wife, Fanny was compelled to leave the home she had known for almost thirty years.3 Marianne’s heart was, indeed, breaking for her sister. She felt able to write it for, of all the sisters, Marianne – once rather grudgingly acknowledged by her cousin Caroline to be ‘very like poor Aunt Jane’ – showed herself to be possessed of the most expressive voice in her letters. She was also, unlike either Fanny or Louisa, gifted with a dry sense of humour, and the fortunate ability to remain optimistic in adversity. ‘Well, well, my dear,’ she continued to Fanny, ‘this is the world and t’other’s the country!! and if we were to get there, we shan’t have to turn out, but whoever will come there will be room for all!’ Like Jane Austen, Marianne had attained what her aunt had described as ‘the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth’.4 Marianne’s letters display that same sense of lively immediacy: ‘Tomorrow Johnny sets off,’ she concluded in her letter of commiseration to Fanny:
... and I am very glad of it, tho’ I shall miss him sadly — it will do him good I think, and be a pleasant change for him. He joins his friend Mr Hill in London tomorrow, and the next day they steam off for Dundee. I hope the wind won’t blow as it does now. Papa is having a rest before luncheon. It rains a little every now and then. I hope it won’t be a bad afternoon. Aunt Louisa goes tomorrow to Goodnestone & comes back on the 11th August. Louisa Rice takes her place here tomorrow, so with both the girls, I hope I shall get our pretty peace & if papa is comf. and nicely, he will not mind being awry for 2 weeks.5
Aunt Louisa was Louisa Bridges, their late mother’s sister, and Louisa Rice, Lizzy’s daughter, was now aged twenty-five, and about to join her younger sister Marianne Sophia at Godmersham for the summer. Lizzy’s early marriage in 1818 meant that by 1849 many of her fifteen children were already adults, and it is clear that the Knight sisters had begun to assume the roles once taken by their aunts Cassandra and Jane, providers of refuge and advice to their nieces and nephews. Marianne Sophia would soon reject the unwelcome advances of Fanny’s eldest son, Edward, and Lizzy’s daughter, Fanny Margaretta, would shortly marry the much older George Finch-Hatton, 10th Earl of Winchilsea, who had been a friend of her father.6
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The letters exchanged among the Knight siblings also served to provide, for themselves as often as for their children, much-needed help and comfort. Three of William Knight’s little daughters, aged only five, four and three, died in one day of scarlet fever in 1848, and in the same year Lizzy’s second son Henry Rice, just twenty-seven, died of cholera while serving with the army at Barbados. His brother Cecil Rice, at eighteen, had just joined the same regiment, the 72nd Regiment of Foot (the Duke of Albany’s own Highlanders), as an Ensign. At home, meanwhile, as the generations moved up, the young began to assume their share of responsibility, while the remaining great-uncles and aunts of Jane Austen’s family grew more frail. Henry Austen would die of gastritis in 1850, and Jane’s youngest brother Charles, serving on the Irawaddy River, would die, like Henry Rice, of cholera in 1852. Of Jane Austen’s siblings, only Francis Austen and Edward Knight were left, and Edward, who had turned eighty in 1847, was far from well. He suffered badly from gout, and had grown almost totally dependent on Marianne. Though John Knight, the ever-indulged Johnny, had time and leisure enough to be helpful, he lacked the patience his father’s age and illness required, as Louisa Rice observed:
Morny went to Godmersham to take Uncle Charles’s place with Grandpapa who is well as usual but always getting weaker. Uncle John does not do well for him — he is not good or gentle and next to Uncle Charles he likes to have Morland better than anyone.7
‘Morny’ was John Morland Rice, Lizzy’s son, a quiet, clever young clergyman – with a quick and sometimes acerbic wit – who had assisted his uncle Charles Knight in his parish duties at Chawton and now helped Marianne look after his grandfather.
What no one said, but everyone knew, was that the ultimate fate of the Godmersham household was entirely in the hands of Marianne’s eldest brother, Edward. As early as 1822 his father, feeling himself at only forty-five to be failing in health and likely to die, had made it clear that he expected Edward Jr to look after not just the estate, but also any of his brothers and sisters who needed his help. He hoped and trusted that all his children ‘would find in [Edward] a second Father as well as an affectionate Brother and Friend’. He urged prudence and economy, failing which Edward might find himself without ‘the means of giving that occasional assistance to [his] Brothers and Sisters, which both Affection and Inclination, would otherwise naturally lead [him] to’.8 Edward’s scandalous elopement less than five years later, and his subsequent attachment to Chawton rather than Godmersham, did not shake his father’s faith. Edward Austen Knight made this clear in a careful postscript, added thirteen years after the letter had been written:
Although you are placed in a different situation to that which you were then in, I am unwilling to destroy what I have written, it will show you what my feelings then were and I am not aware that a lapse of a dozen years has made any difference in them, I am sure it has not in any affection for you and those most dear to you, or in my Anxiety to promote and secure as much as may be in my Power the Comfort and happiness of you all, may it long continue.9
Edward Austen Knight, a diplomat at heart, had avoided unpleasantness throughout his long and fortunate life. He was resolute in his refusal to think ill of his son. The question, however, of the younger Edward’s interpretation of his commitment to the house and his siblings remained unaired and unresolved. If his own father’s understanding of the duty to family were to be his example, Edward Jr need not do more than provide a cottage formerly belonging to a servant – a point of view thoroughly and satirically anticipated in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility many years earlier. In the meantime, as Edward Austen Knight’s health genuinely declined with advancing age, it fell to Marianne to maintain the appearance of stability within the family.
Fortunately for her, and for the large establishment which she was required to run, Marianne was able for the task. She was clearly very bright and capable, qualities her mother had remarked upon before she was six years old. In addition, she was possessed of an essential pragmatism which, with a quick wit untainted by bitterness or resentment, enabled her to overlook, or at least to decline to question the unfairness of the assumption that she would devote her life to the best interests of everyone else. In this, she followed the example of her famous aunt, who left no comment on the unfairness of her brother’s leaving his mother and sisters to live without permanent accommodation for several years, despite his being in possession of two extensive estates. Marianne’s readiness to rise to any occasion, however, endeared her not only to her family but also to their many friends. She maintained so equable a relationship with her rejected suitor of 1822, the Reverend John Billington, that he continued throughout the years to be a regular and welcome visitor at Godmersham; and Louisa’s former suitor, George Oxenden, kept up so fond a correspondence with Marianne during the 1830s, writing not only letters but also poems in her praise, that it seems he may have transferred his affections for a time to this least demanding, yet most open-hearted of the family.10 Her replies have not survived, but it is unlikely that she would by then have contemplated leaving her father, and the responsibilities she had so selflessly undertaken.
When their little group of siblings – the long-ago children left outside on the stairs – May, Charley, Lou, Cass and, sometimes, Johnny, all lived at Godmersham in the late 1820s and early 1830s, it was Marianne who was the still point of the family’s turning wheel. She ran the household quietly in the background, occasionally enlisting the help of the amenable Charles to help her prepare rooms for the visits of the those brothers and sisters who had married and left, more often accompanying her father on activities too old for her or coming home early from celebrations to look after him. In one sense, she was what Emma Woodhouse might have become if Mr Knightley had not realised his love for her; unlike the rich and independent Emma, however, she had no security of tenure. Yet, she was happy in the company of her father, Charles, and the unsettled Johnny, becoming the family’s ‘dearest Aunt May’. They all relied on her, and Charles, in particular, thought her essential to his work.
Once Charles had resigned himself to bachelorhood, sometime in his early thirties, Marianne was his chosen companion. He was close to Louisa, who shared his interest in the scientific, yet as both Louisa and Cassandra spent much of their twenties at once encouraging and fending off suitors, it was to the home-based May that Charles turned when he needed help. When his friend and brother-in-law Lord George Hill accidentally gave away a walking stick Charles had intended for a present to his aunt Louisa Bridges, Charles did not know what to do. It was Marianne who, with Lord George, brought about the practical solution. ‘Marianne and Aunt Louisa went to Canterbury,’ Charles wrote in October 1835. ‘They brought back Aunt Louisa’s stick, which I am to consider as my gift to her from abroad, the original being given by mistake by G. Hill to Crawley, & this being a facsimile made by order of G. Hill to make up for his mistake.’11 Charles, in his own world of scruple, moral debate and the beauties of nature, had not thought of that himself.
Charles’s parish duties, while he lived at Godmersham, involved assisting the incumbent with such outlying parishes as the nearby village of Molash. He took these duties very seriously, however, insisting on battling through unusually deep snow and a freakish storm to take the Christmas morning service, and attending most assiduously to the welfare, both spiritual and physical, of the needy of the parishes under his care. It was here that he turned most often to Marianne, already proven as a calm and capable organiser. She ran the Penny Club, ensuring that the poor received adequate clothing, which she often made herself. There was a custom that the daughters of parishioners who were going into service should be provided with clothes: ‘Mrs Wright of the parsonage and Mrs James Ruck came to Marianne for things for their daughters who are going out to service,’ Charles wrote in October 1835. They were not from a local parish, and Charles, who felt strongly that only those from the parishes to which he ministered should be granted this service, was put out; Mariann
e, however, though quite aware that they did not have the right to ask this of her, nonetheless looked after them. Her action recalls Jane Austen’s last, uncompleted work of 1815, Sanditon, where the officious, interfering Diana Parker tries to prevail upon her good-hearted sister-in-law to apply to the mean and overbearing Lady Denham for charitable offerings to parishes far distant from Sanditon:
If you find her in a giving mood, you might as well speak in favour of another charity which I and a few more, have very much at heart — the establishment of a charitable repository at Burton on Trent.— And then, — there is the family of the poor man who was hung last assizes at York, though we really have raised the sum we wanted for putting them all out, yet if you can get a guinea from her on their account, it may as well be done. —12
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