Jane and Dorothy

by Marian Veevers

  There may have been no arguments in the family, but that does not mean that injustices were not felt. It would have required the temperament of a saint for a woman not to care at all about her own future poverty – and Jane Austen never pretended to sainthood.

  Nor did she believe that a woman should give up her own opinions in submission to others’ judgement. Elinor sums up the approach of a ‘sensible’ woman when she says, ‘My doctrine has never aimed at the subjection of the understanding. All I have ever attempted to influence has been the behaviour.’16 Jane may have held her tongue, but she could maintain an opinion of her own.

  Another subject on which Jane Austen was noticeably reticent was one which must have made her removal from Steventon particularly painful: that is her love of the countryside. ‘[H]er delight in natural scenery,’ recalled her great niece, ‘was such that she would sometimes say she thought it must form one of the joys of heaven.’

  This same niece was surprised by ‘how little there is in her writings to indicate this taste . . .  there is not what could be called a picturesque description to be found in any one of her novels. No word pictures no elaborate accounts of wind and storm . . . or even of the fair meadows and winding hedgerows . . .  in which her youth was passed . . . ’17

  It is an omission which must strike many readers of the novels. Many of Jane’s characters – most notably Fanny Price of Mansfield Park – share her delight in all things rural; but – apart from a short passage in Persuasion praising the countryside around Lyme – there is nothing like a ‘picturesque’ description. Perhaps she held back from effusions on the subject because she associated them with an over-emotional approach to life. She makes them a characteristic of Marianne Dashwood’s conversation: Marianne can wax lyrical on everything from ‘bold’ hills to dead leaves. But perhaps Jane had heard too many of her contemporaries making a parade of being nature lovers and did not wish – when she spoke in the author’s voice – to give the impression of false enthusiasm.

  However, the ‘sweet retired bay, backed by dark cliffs . . . ’ and ‘green chasms between romantic rocks . . . ’ of the Persuasion passage, give some support to brother Henry’s remark that, ‘At a very early age [Jane] was enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque’18.

  William Gilpin, a clergyman from Cumberland, encouraged travellers to view landscape, not as something to be lived in, but as material which could be formed into pictures. The fashion for touring Britain – encouraged by improvements in roads and the closing off of foreign travel by the wars with France – made his writings very popular during Jane’s girlhood. Tourists travelled between recommended viewpoints, admiring rocks, chasms and waterfalls (the ‘cataracts and mountains’ which William Wordsworth had once damned with faint praise), valuing the countryside for the way it looked rather than for its usefulness.

  Jane Austen certainly knew how to compose a picture (her drawing lessons at Mrs La Tournelle’s school would have taught her that): ‘the prospect from the Drawingroom window . . . is rather picturesque’ she wrote once from lodgings in Bath, ‘as it commands a perspective view of the left side of Brock Street, broken by three Lombardy Poplars in the Garden of the last house . . . ’19 But she does not seem to have been entirely comfortable with Gilpin’s vocabulary. Apart from that uncharacteristic description of Lyme, her most notable use of it is in Sense and Sensibility when Edward Ferrars gently ridicules the jargon, insisting that, ‘I have no knowledge in the picturesque . . .  I shall call hills steep, which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged . . . ’ His ideal countryside does not have ‘crooked, twisted trees’ or ‘ruined tattered cottages’, it simply ‘unites beauty with utility’; it features ‘a snug farmhouse’ and ‘tidy, happy villagers.’20

  Jane may have inclined towards his view. The taste of Fanny Price – her most outspoken enthusiast for the countryside – coincides with Edward’s. On a drive through the country Fanny is entirely practical, finding entertainment in ‘the bearings of the roads, the difference of the soil, the state of the harvest, the cottages, the cattle, the children . . . ’21

  These were perhaps the things which Jane noticed herself on a journey, for she had lived all her life in a farming community, attuned to country matters. While she was living at Steventon her letters conveyed questions about pigs and hay from one farmer (her father) to another (her brother Edward), and, in the years leading up to the removal, she sometimes referred to arrangements on the family’s farm. ‘John Bond,’ she wrote to Cassandra in December 1798, ‘begins to find himself grow old . . . a man is therefore hired to supply his place as to labour, and John himself is to have the care of the sheep.’

  However, she maintained an air of detachment from these affairs; like housekeeping, farming was something which she could not quite take seriously. She finished this account with: ‘I fancy so at least, but you know my stupidity as to such matters.’22

  Her letters are certainly not like her mother’s, with their enthusiastic discussions of the merits of Alderney cows and the getting in of barley. This same letter ends with a message conveyed on behalf of Mr Austen. ‘My father is glad to hear so good an account of Edward’s pigs, and desires he may be told, as encouragement to his taste for them, that Lord Bolton is particularly curious in his pigs, has had pigstyes of a most elegant construction built for them, and visits them every morning as soon as he rises.’ The eccentricity of the aristocrat may well have interested Jane more than the pigs.

  Mrs Austen, bemused by Jane’s detachment from important farming matters, might almost have agreed with those observers who thought her ‘affected’, and this may have been another subject which distanced mother and daughter. Yet, despite this air of disengagement, Jane was deeply rooted in the country. It was perhaps a connection she did not fully appreciate herself until she was called upon to break the tie, to give up the deep rural rhythms and routines of Steventon for the superficial pleasures of Bath: the ‘littleness of the town’ as she would describe it herself in Persuasion.

  Her niece’s recollections, her hatred of Bath, her joy at her eventual escape from that town, all testify to Jane being, in her heart, a countrywoman. For twenty-five years she had taken a home in the countryside for granted, now, when she was about to lose it, she understood its importance.

  By the time she arrived at her home in Grasmere, Dorothy had experienced both town and country life and was able to make comparisons. While staying with friends in Bristol, after the enforced move from Alfoxton, she wrote, ‘After three years’ residence in retirement a city in feeling, sound, and prospect is hateful.’23

  Yet, oddly, the effect of Dorothy’s urban upbringing seems to have lingered long after she was living in a rural setting. Her six years in a Norfolk village did little to put her at ease with country life. Her 1795 account of her visit to her friends the Hutchinsons at their farm in Yorkshire still betrays the naïve wonder of a born townswoman: ‘It is an excellent house,’ she reported, ‘not at all like a farm-house and they seem to have none of the trouble which I used to think must make farmers always in a bustle . . . ’ Like a student of Gilpin, she was more interested in the scenic aspect of the farm than its utility. ‘It is a grazing estate, and most delightfully pleasant, washed nearly round by the Tees (a noble river,) and stocked with sheep and lambs which look very pretty, and to me give it a very interesting appearance.’24

  Her new home at Grasmere, with its lake, its soaring mountains, its waterfalls, woods and unpredictable weather, was at the very heart of the picturesque landscape Gilpin described. Just thirty miles from her birthplace, Grasmere was still, essentially, a traditional rural community, though it was just beginning to attract tourists and a few big houses had been built by wealthy folk from the industrial towns.

  Curiously, the descriptions Dorothy started to write of the scenes she saw around her at Grasmere seem to be those of an outsider – a woman still feelin
g her way into country life. For example, she described, ‘a little bird with a salmon coloured breast – a white cross or T upon its wings, and a brownish back with faint stripes’,25 which she had seen pecking at dung on the road. This sounds like a male chaffinch, a bird common throughout the British countryside. But Dorothy described the bird as though she had never seen one before, with a sense of wonder at the exquisite beauty of this common little creature. It is this freshness of vision which makes many of her descriptions so arresting. But it is strange that she does not say ‘we saw a chaffinch’ – or give it its local name of skoby. She knew that name. Earlier she had written that ‘the skoby sate quietly in its nest rocked by the winds . . . ’26

  There is sometimes evident in Dorothy’s writing a struggle for names as she looked about her at the natural world. She could, on one occasion, name wild strawberries, geraniums and primroses, but was at a loss over a ‘grassy leaved, Rabbit toothed white flower’27 which was almost certainly the very common stitchwort. ‘Oh that we had a book on botany!’28 she exclaimed. Two years later she was still not able to name all the flowers she saw: ‘The vetches are in abundance . . . ’ she wrote. ‘That pretty little waxy-looking dial like flower, the speedwell, and some others whose names I do not yet know.’29

  She might also have wished for a book on ornithology, for, in the same entry, she described ‘a pair of stone chats’ skimming along the surface of the lake – which stone chats do not do. The behaviour of these birds seems more like that of grey wagtails. Maybe her identification of the skoby rocking in its nest was also inaccurate – though she sounds knowledgeable as she uses the colloquial name.

  However, Dorothy looked for herself. She was not content to do as Marianne Dashwood does sometimes and keep ‘my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning.’30 She would achieve, over the years, a manner of writing about the natural world which was never worn or hackneyed, but always startling and fresh. She seems to have achieved this by coming to the subject as an outsider, without any pre-conceptions, and without adopting anybody else’s prescribed vocabulary. Perhaps sometimes she deliberately avoided names, for a name can be limiting. Once a name is given we can stop looking, in the (perhaps false) belief that we know and understand something entirely.

  There is one other slightly odd aspect to Dorothy’s writing which must strike anyone who knows the Lake District scenery she described: a kind of blindness. It was particularly evident on 16th June 1800 when she and William strolled into one of the area’s most beautiful valleys – and she noted in her journal, ‘The vale of Little Langdale looked bare and unlovely.’ Little Langdale is a glorious example of a Cumbrian valley, with a beck and a tarn cupped by mountains, whose reflections dive deep into its waters; in June, its fields are bright with flowers, its hedges laced with wild roses. Why should Dorothy dismiss this charming place as ‘bare and unlovely’ and say not another word about it?

  A clue to the mystery may lie in the old spoil heaps and overgrown slate quarries that can still be seen in the valley, and in the remains of a forge on its beck. When Dorothy walked there in 1800 there would have been, mixed with the little smallholdings, grazing sheep and fields of oats and hay, scattered quarry-workings and small-scale industries. This seems to have rendered the whole valley unsuitable for inclusion in her journal.

  Yet this would not have been the only place in which Dorothy came across such scenes. There were slate quarries visible even on the fells around Grasmere, and in Ambleside – to which Dorothy walked frequently to collect letters – there were several water mills producing linen and woollen cloth. For centuries the folk of this area had earned their livings in a variety of ways, not just by farming.

  Of all this Dorothy says nothing in her journal. Her Lake District is a rural landscape untouched by industrialisation. She observed closely, but selectively, and her selectivity, together with the detailed, almost exaggerated, reality of the things on which she focused, created a Lake District that she wished to see.31

  The Grasmere house itself – with only three proper rooms on each of its two floors – was very far removed from the grandeur of Racedown and Alfoxton. It had once been an alehouse and it was ‘rather too near the road, and from the smallness and the manner in which it is built noises pass from one part of the house to the other.’32 At the back, the house was half-buried in the hillside. Its downstairs rooms were still panelled with the cheap stained pine of its days as an inn and the place was damp, with cold slate floors.

  It was almost empty when they took it and they were only able to furnish it because Uncle Kitt had recently died and proved his affection for Dorothy with a legacy of £100.33 This little bit of money – one of the very few that Dorothy could call her own – was used to buy the essentials.

  This was certainly a more practical choice of home than Alfoxton, the rent being only £8 a year.

  Lyrical Ballads had not brought its authors much money, and John Worthen has calculated that – due to bad investments, the expense of the German trip and the necessity of spending rather than investing a large part of the Calvert legacy – ‘The Wordsworths could only be sure of just under £20 a year,’ at the time they settled in Dove Cottage. He concludes that this ‘was really the only kind of place which they could afford; their financial state must have played a considerable role in their decision to go to Grasmere.’34

  Dorothy’s expectations had, perforce, diminished since her first setting up home with William. At Racedown she had not ‘any thing to do in the house’, except at the time of the monthly wash; but her Grasmere Journal with its cooking and mattress-making, its white-washing of walls and ‘nailing-up’ of bed frames, presents a very different life indeed.

  William and Dorothy were now living on the very edge of gentility, poorer even than the marginalised Mrs and Miss Bates whom Jane Austen describes in Emma. They can at least afford one proper servant; in the early days at Dove Cottage Dorothy had only the help of sixty-year-old Molly Fisher. Writing to Coleridge, soon after their arrival at the house, William (who – as far as we know – had never contemplated his friend’s Pantisocratic ideal of shared housework) blithely reported, ‘We do not think it will be necessary for us to keep a servant,’ and described Molly as, ‘a woman who lives in one of the adjoining cottages’ who would for two shillings a week attend ‘two or three hours a day to light the fires wash dishes etc.’ adding generously, ‘We could have had this attendance for eighteen pence a week but we added the sixpence for the sake of the poor woman, who is made happy by it.’35

  Dorothy did not feel diminished or shamed by her poverty as – under similar circumstances – Jane Austen might have done. She did not mourn lost luxuries as Jane did when torn from the ice and French wine of Godmersham, but nor did Dorothy consider herself to be the equal of the cottage-folk who lived around her – though their incomes may not have been dissimilar. Gentry she had been born and gentry she remained.

  During the early days at Grasmere she formed close friendships with other genteel folk, such as the Simpsons – the family of a clergyman living close by – and, most notably, the anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson and his wife Catherine who lived at Eusemere by the side of Ullswater. But there were other neighbours whom she viewed in a different light.

  ‘We are very comfortably situated with respect to neighbours of the lower classes,’ she told Mrs Marshall, ‘they are excellent people . . . attentive to us without servility – if we were sick they would wait upon us night and day.’36

  She may have had too rosy a view of these lower classes. These same ‘excellent’ and ‘attentive’ neighbours were found by the Wordsworths’ friend, Thomas De Quincey (who took over the tenancy of Dove Cottage in 1808) to be ‘particularly gross and uncharitable.’37 The inhabitants of Grasmere were no doubt just human, and the truth lay somewhere between these extremes.

  They would have been rather more ind
ependent folk than the ‘lower classes’ Jane Austen knew. The mountainous terrain of Cumberland and Westmorland had never taken on the social pattern that the more fertile lowland counties of England had known since Norman times: that of the big estate with the ‘Great House’ at its centre and large areas of land owned and controlled by one landlord (such as Jane’s brother Edward). There were some great landowners in the north (John Wordsworth’s employer, James Lowther, for example) but there were also a number of small farmers, owning just enough land to feed their families.

  William Wordsworth celebrated these ‘independent proprietors of land’ in many of his poems such as Michael. But, as they established themselves in their cottage at Grasmere, he and Dorothy heard with dismay the reports of their neighbours: ‘John Fisher . . . talked much about the alteration in the times,’ wrote Dorothy, ‘and observed that in a short time there would be only two ranks of people, the very rich and the very poor, for those who have small estates says he are forced to sell, and all the land goes into one hand.’38

  Down in Hampshire, Jane’s clergyman father was at the heart of an old hierarchy that had its roots deep in the feudal system of medieval days. A large part of his income came from the tithes paid by parishioners, rich and poor, of Steventon; and most of those tithes would continue to be paid to him after he had ceased to live in the parish or conduct services there. Mr Austen was determined to get as much as he could out of this system to fund his retirement. ‘My father is doing all in his power to encrease his Income by raising his tythes etc,’39 wrote Jane in January 1801.

  Mr Austen seems to have felt this was a reasonable thing to do, but when writing Mansfield Park his daughter would make her more sympathetic characters critical of absentee clergymen who live off their parishioners and give little in return.