Jane and Dorothy

by Marian Veevers

  It is surprising that she should have failed to shape her words into ‘regular metre’ because, in several places in her journals, Dorothy’s prose seems to fall perfectly naturally into metre. Take this line from the Alfoxton Journal for example: ‘The crooked arm of the old oak tree points upwards to the moon.’ It is an almost perfect two lines of ballad metre.

  Passages like this in Dorothy’s journals raise two possibilities. Firstly, she may have had an accurate ear for the rhythms in words – been, in fact, a natural poet – but she became too anxious, and struggled too hard to achieve poetry when she tried to imitate her brother’s techniques of composition. Secondly, it may be that a larger part of the journals than we suppose is made up of phrases spoken by William and only written down by Dorothy.

  However, Dorothy’s letter reveals a more fundamental reason why there was no body of literature published under her name during her lifetime: something beyond a lack of facility with metre. ‘[L]ooking into my mind’, she wrote, ‘I find nothing there, even if I had the gift of language and numbers, that I could have the vanity to suppose could be of any use beyond our own fireside . . . ’24

  It is possible that Dorothy was confessing to a fear that would certainly have undermined her confidence in her own creativity: the fear that she lacked that ‘shaping spirit of imagination,’ of which Coleridge wrote and which was valued highly by both him and Wordsworth. This rather sad comment raises the question of what Dorothy Wordsworth would have written about in a novel or poetry.

  By contrast, Jane Austen seems to have had no difficulty in believing that her mind contained material which was worth writing about. Even her earliest works are full of ideas that the young girl was burning to express. Her opinions of books and people, as well as her adolescent desire to talk on ‘indelicate’ subjects, developed rapidly into a more mature consideration of the disadvantages under which women like herself (and Dorothy) were placed by their families. There is a strong element of discontent in Jane’s work, though it is smoothed over and rendered relatively inoffensive by the lightness of her style. By the time she was in her teens Jane had discovered that a voice and manner which were ‘winningly mild’ might be used to argue that what was too often perceived as white by her contemporaries, was, in fact, black.

  There was no such burning need to express her own opinions driving Dorothy’s genius, no impetus beyond one which she probably shared with Jane – the wish to make money. There was no urge to make her voice heard, because she believed that all the important truths were being expressed by her brother.

  Also, paradoxically, the suffocating good-manners of the Austens may have driven Jane to take up her pen and create her own worlds in which she could express her ideas. While Dorothy, free to hazard her observations among those with whom she lived, had less motive to write, and would be more tempted to abandon the story that was not turning out quite right, or the verse that would not scan, to put the pen aside and busy herself instead with some task of cooking or sewing for the people she loved, something which seemed more obviously useful.

  Just finding time to write her Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland was not easy for Dorothy. She began work soon after she and William returned from their trip, but she was distracted by Coleridge, who had been full of complaints since he parted from them in Scotland; complaints about his health and about his marriage which was becoming increasingly troubled. Dorothy worried about him. ‘We had,’ she reported anxiously in October, ‘a long letter from poor Coleridge written in the languor of the first moments of ease after suffering the various tortures of tooth-ache, teeth drawing, rheumatism, sickness, pains in the Bowels, Diarrhoea and worst of all, a shortness of breath.’ (Coleridge could rival Mrs Austen herself in the description of colourful ailments.) Dorothy added admiringly that ‘His spirits and strength are yet wonderful.’25

  Believing Coleridge’s tales of ‘Ill tempered speeches sent after me when I went out of the House, ill-tempered Speeches on my returns’ to be a complete and unbiased account of his domestic troubles, Dorothy was anxious that he and Sarah should agree to live apart. ‘Is not it a hopeless case?’ she exclaimed and put the blame entirely on Sarah, describing her as ‘So insensible and so irritable she never can come to good . . . ’26 Dorothy ridiculed Sarah’s opposition to a separation, saying that she ‘urges continually that one argument . . .  that this person, and that person, and everybody will talk.’27

  The talk of this person or that person – or ‘the discussion of the neighbourhood’28 as Jane Austen called it – was an important part of a woman’s life and determined her social credit. Dorothy’s breezy opinion that if the couple separated, ‘there would be a buzz and all would be over,’29 was naive. Sarah understood the influence of gossip all too well – after all it was the Bristol gossips who had hurried on this marriage which was now proving so painful.

  Back in the days when Sarah boldly strode about the countryside with her young man, the question of divorce had been discussed: should the ending of unhappy unions be allowed in the Pantisocratic Utopia they were planning? But that was in the wilds of America among like-minded people; it was not in parochial Keswick where the laws and customs of society were rigid and long established. Like Jane Austen, Sarah Coleridge believed in finding happiness as best she could within the boundaries of the community in which she lived. This was an approach to life which Dorothy regarded with suspicion.

  Sarah was not opposed to a separation; she simply wished it to be discreet, for it to appear that work only took her husband away from the marital home. But Dorothy (supported by William and Mary) would not countenance this compromise. She felt that, if the separation was not clear-cut, poor Coleridge would be left with ‘something hanging over him.’

  Even more surprising is Dorothy’s approval and encouragement of Coleridge’s notion that he was now in love with Sara Hutchinson, Mary’s younger sister. He believed he had found in her his ideal supportive woman and expected his wife to accept the situation without question. ‘Permit me, my dear Sara[h]!  . . . to say’ he wrote to his wife, ‘that in sex, acquirements, and in the quantity and quality of natural endowments whether of Feeling or of Intellect, you are the inferior. Therefore . . . I have a right to expect & demand, that you should to a certain degree love, & act kindly to, those whom I deem worthy of my love.’ 30

  Though, in part, Coleridge was attacking his wife on the same grounds Dorothy had cited – a lack of feeling – it is interesting that the first instance of inferiority which he mentions is ‘sex’. A woman’s opinions were intrinsically of less value than his. It is another hint of how he may have regarded Dorothy’s role in the Concern.

  In December 1803, Coleridge arrived for a month’s stay at Dove Cottage; and then even Dorothy’s sympathy for him was tested. She probably began now to suspect that many of his problems were the result of opium addiction. That winter the household was repeatedly woken in the night by his screaming from bad dreams. For carers already suffering disturbed nights with a young baby this would have been extremely trying; and, besides this, he was ‘continually wanting coffee, broth or something.’31

  Towards the end of January Coleridge set off for London on the first stage of a journey which would eventually take him to Malta, having decided that only that nineteenth century panacea-for-all-ills, ‘a warmer climate’, could cure him. But even when he was gone, Dorothy had little leisure in which to resume her writing because, ‘Old Molly . . . is still our sole servant though at present not so well fitted for her place as she was’.32

  Coleridge’s needs must still take precedence over her own composition. By March: ‘We have been engaged, Mary and I, in making a complete copy of William’s Poems for poor Coleridge to be his companions in Italy . . .  There are about eight thousand lines . . . ’ It must have been a monumental task. ‘Judge then how fully we have been employed,’ she continued, ‘what with nursing, and the ordinary business of the house . . . ’33
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br />   Dorothy struggled on, writing her Recollections when she could, but, in August 1804, the birth of William’s second child, (christened Dorothy after her aunt, but usually called Dora), increased her workload. And then, in February 1805, there was a family tragedy. William and Dorothy’s brother John drowned when his ship sank off Portland Bill. ‘I had no power of breaking the force of the shock to Dorothy or to Mary’, wrote William, ‘They are both very ill. Dorothy especially, on whom this loss of her beloved Brother will long take deep hold.’34 The death of John did indeed take a deep hold on his sister. The final pages of the Recollections were written by a grieving Dorothy, seeking solace in her work.

  When the manuscript was finished, it was – in its way – published; bound copies were sent to family and to friends.

  The whole history of the Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland is a mass of contradictions. It was a journal – and yet it was not a journal. It was, intrinsically, a ‘very uninteresting thing’ – and yet it was worth a remarkable amount of labour, labour which was carried on in spite of emotional interruptions and endless other demands upon its author’s time. It was only of value to friends who were ‘interested in the travellers’ – and yet, some fifteen years later, the poet Samuel Rogers persuaded Dorothy that the work should be published. The scheme never came to anything, but Dorothy must have agreed to it, for she made a revised copy ready for printing. Maybe wider publication had always been her aim.

  She had worked hard on the manuscript. She had deliberately taken up a form of writing that was – unlike her journals – suitable for publication. She seems to have found in her writing a sense of purpose even amid the clamour of William’s new family, even in the depths of her grief. The money that the project might have brought would have been extremely useful. Yet she chose not to attempt publication either at the time of finishing the manuscript, or later when she had gone so far as to prepare it for print.

  There is a hint of what might have been going on. Towards the end of her Scottish Recollections, Dorothy’s prose steps deferentially aside to make way for superior poetry; she omits to describe Neidpath Castle, near Peebles, because ‘William has done it better than I could do in a sonnet which he wrote the same day’.

  The same humility is apparent in the story of another of Dorothy’s schemes to publish her work. In 1821 she would write another travelogue about a tour of the continent and ‘Crabb Robinson, seeing the journal’s market potential, urged her to shorten and publish it.’35 The reason this scheme failed seems to be that the prose was, so to speak, superseded by poetry. ‘William is writing poems to intersperse’36 with the journal, Mary reported, and a few months later, his work had ‘grown to such importance . . . ’ according to Dorothy, ‘that I have long ceased to consider it in connection with my own narrative.’37

  On this occasion the poems were published, but the journal was not. Perhaps a similar thing happened with the Scottish Recollections. Perhaps in that case too Dorothy decided that her own work was but an inferior shadow of her brother’s: ‘Weakness speaks in prose, but pow’r in verse.’

  Twenty-Four

  My Father Cannot Provide for Us

  There are no surviving letters to give us any idea of how long Jane continued to work on The Watsons. It is not until January 1805 that we hear her voice again and, for the modern reader attempting to follow her story, the long silence is broken thus: ‘My dearest Frank, I have melancholy news to relate . . . ’

  Jane was announcing to her brother Francis, the sudden death of their father. He had been carried off after an illness that lasted only a few days. The transition in Cassandra’s censorship from complete blackout to allowing her sister’s voice to be heard again is shockingly abrupt. Is it connected with the event related in the first surviving letter?

  In destroying so many of her sister’s letters, Cassandra was almost certainly trying to obliterate criticism which would have hurt other family members, but the letters which she allowed to survive still show some evidence of Jane’s asperity. In fact, as they stand, Jane’s letters criticise, or evince impatience with, nearly everyone, from her brothers and mother to casual acquaintances. She was deeply unhappy in Bath and this seems to have inclined her to hit out at those around her. Describing Jane’s letters, Claire Tomalin has said ‘mostly you are faced with the hard shell; and sometimes a claw is put out, and a sharp nip is given to whatever offends.’1

  However, the remarkable thing about the few letters allowed to survive between the time that the move to Bath was mooted and January 1805, is that the claw is never extended in Mr Austen’s direction. Yet he was the person responsible for Jane’s misery. His decisions had taken her from the home she loved and placed her in a position where she was unable to write.

  Criticism of a father was particularly shocking to Georgian sensibilities. The duty owed to the head of a household had religious and political overtones, with the family often portrayed as a miniature commonwealth having a divinely appointed ‘king’ at its head. The political philosophy of Edmund Burke (which was respected by moderate Tories such as the Austens) equated the challenging of the head of the household with revolution in the state – maintaining that when one was allowed, then the other must surely follow. If Jane had written anything at all disrespectful of her father, this would have been more than a little disruption of the smooth sunny surface that the Austen family liked to preserve; it would have been a positive dereliction of Christian duty. It could not be allowed to survive.

  I think it is possible that, as her misery deepened during the Bath years, Jane’s acerbic wit occasionally turned against her father. Her unhappiness, boredom and frustration at not being able to continue with the career she had chosen may have overcome her love and sense of duty so far as to necessitate occasionally this outlet in letters which were for her sister’s eyes alone. The loyal Cassandra would not have risked any hint of such a transgression surviving. Perhaps that is why she deemed it safest to destroy all letters for a long period.

  Inadequate and neglectful fathers are common in Jane’s fiction, and all three complete novels written after the Bath period feature heroines with deeply unsatisfactory fathers. Mr Woodhouse of Emma, Mr Price of Mansfield Park and Sir Walter Elliot of Persuasion, all fail their daughters in different ways. They are negligent in their duty to their families, but their daughters never neglect their duty of respect and forbearance. Emma Woodhouse’s patience with her father’s ‘gentle selfishness’ cannot help but win our admiration, even though we might wish she would extend it to other, more deserving, acquaintances. Fanny Price always manages a respectful ‘sir’ for her rum-sodden father, and, when Sir Walter Elliot insults the friend of his long-suffering daughter Anne, ‘she did long to say a little in defence . . . but her sense of personal respect to her father prevented her.’2

  This was clearly the kind of behaviour which Jane believed to be right; she did not expect her protagonists to win her readers’ sympathy without it. But this may have been another point at which she fell short of her own ideals of correct behaviour.

  Dorothy Wordsworth, who was outspoken enough to frequently lament the effects that her father’s decisions had had in separating her from her family, also seems to have maintained a correct degree of respect and never actually blamed her father for the misery he inflicted on her. But all her surviving letters come from the period after his death. It is easier to be respectful and to remember only the good about someone who is dead.

  Jane’s letters written after 21st January 1805 would not have needed to be so severely censored by Cassandra and some of them have been allowed to survive. The natural and dutiful expressions of grief could be preserved. Jane wrote of her father’s ‘worth & constant preparation for another World’3 , of his ‘tenderness as a father’4 and the ‘sweet benevolent smile which always distinguished him.’5 Irritated and hurt by his decisions though she may have been, her grief was undoubtedly sincere.

  His will would have con
tained no surprises. Jane almost certainly knew what to expect from it, for it had been drawn up five years before she was born and had not been altered since. Mr Austen left everything of which he died possessed to his wife. It was little enough. His capital, probably amounting to around £4,000,6 was more or less what he and his wife had brought to the marriage between them, so it was in keeping with the marriage settlement that this amount should now pass to the survivor.

  However, there had been no money saved during the marriage to provide even the smallest dowry for his daughters. The Austens had always ‘lived up to their income’ (to employ another of those useful phrases with which Jane Austen summarises the complex financial affairs of her characters). Their money had all been spent on day to day living and on educating and setting the boys up in the world.7

  Most of the money which had supported the household in Bath came from Mr Austen’s tithes and a small pension which he drew. These ended with his death and there were insufficient funds to support the women he left behind in anything like the comfort they were used to. If he had thought at all about what would happen to his daughters after his death, Mr Austen must have simply assumed that they would – in Mary Wollstonecraft’s terms – live on ‘the bounty of brothers’ for the rest of their lives. And that is what they did.

  The family immediately stepped forward to help Mrs Austen and her daughters. Francis offered to pay his mother £100 a year but she would accept only £50. James and Henry also both offered £50 and Henry wrote that, ‘If Edward does the least he ought, he will certainly insist on her receiving a £100 from him. So . . . ’ He concluded ‘with her own assured property, & Cassandra’s, both producing about £210 per ann., She will be in the receipt of a clear £450 pounds per Ann . . .  I really think that My Mother & Sisters will be to the full as rich as ever.’8