The Real Jane Austen

by Paula Byrne

  Shopping was superb (‘one can step out of doors and get a thing in five minutes’), and she had commissions from family and friends back in Hampshire: stockings for her little niece Anna, shoes for Martha Lloyd, fabric for Cassandra. She told the girls that for modish headwear ‘Flowers are very much worn, and Fruit is still more the thing … I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit. – What do you think on the subject?’18 Cassandra requested a sprig of flowers and Mary a black muslin veil. Jane shopped around for lace to edge a new cloak that she was having made up and drew a picture of its delicate pattern in her letter home: ‘I am very glad You liked my Lace, and so are You and so is Martha. – and we are all glad together.’19 Lace was soon to take on a less happy aspect for the Austen family.

  Jane Austen was not the type of young woman who was prone to hysterics or fainting fits. In the vellum notebooks she satirizes giddy heroines who ‘faint alternately on the sofa’. Yet, according to family tradition, she was greatly distressed – even to the point of fainting – when in early December 1800 she returned from a stay with her friend Martha Lloyd to be told by her mother that the family had made a decision in her absence: they would be leaving Steventon for Bath. According to family legend Jane Austen was greeted by her mother’s shock announcement: ‘Well, girls, it is all settled, we have decided to leave Steventon in such a week and go to Bath.’20

  ‘Here follows the pattern of its lace’: holograph letter from Jane to Cassandra, Bath 1799

  Anna Lefroy thought that the move was because of Mrs Austen’s health. Brother Frank believed that his father ‘felt too incapacitated from age and increasing infirmities to discharge his parochial duties in a manner satisfactory to himself’.21 George Austen would turn seventy in the spring and the children were all grown up. It was time to hand the parsonage over to James. And Bath might provide some better marriage prospects for the two unmarried daughters of advancing age. Jane’s twenty-fifth birthday came a couple of weeks after the unwelcome news.

  But since she had so clearly enjoyed her visits to Bath, why was she so taken aback at the news that the family were to relocate there? Of course it was partly shock at the thought of leaving the home where she had been brought up. But there was something else: Bath had been the location of a major scandal involving the very aunt who had hosted her in Paragon Buildings, a scandal that had come to a head in a nationally reported court case of March 1800.

  Just two months after Jane Austen had returned home following the happy visit to Bath with brother Edward, her aunt Leigh-Perrot was arrested and imprisoned for shoplifting. It was alleged that she had stolen a card of expensive white lace from a millinery shop in Bath Street, just round the corner from Westgate Buildings. The very grand and wealthy Mrs Leigh-Perrot was committed to Ilchester Gaol, remanded in custody pending the Taunton Assizes.

  When the news reached the Austen family in Steventon, Mrs Austen immediately offered to send her daughters to keep her company. It is extraordinary to think of Jane and Cassandra Austen going voluntarily to gaol. But Mrs Leigh-Perrot would not hear of allowing ‘those Elegant young Women [to] be … Inmates in a Prison’.22 Her husband, despite his ill-health, insisted on accompanying her. Thanks to their wealth, they were able to secure accommodation in the gaol-keeper’s own house, so conditions were not so bad as they might have been – though they must have felt a very long way from the elegance and spaciousness of Scarlets.

  There is, unsurprisingly, no mention of the scandal in the Victorian family memoir of Jane Austen, and none of her letters from this period survive. But the trial was published in a pamphlet and Mrs Leigh-Perrot’s letters to a cousin give an account of the horrors she endured.23 Scadding the gaoler and his wife had five small noisy children, and their house was dirty and cramped. Mr Leigh-Perrot, for whom ‘cleanliness has ever been his greatest delight’, was forced to endure a room full of chimney smoke and dirt, and greasy toast laid on his knees by the children who didn’t use plates and spilt their father’s small beer over him. Mrs Scadding’s method of dishwashing was to lick the fried onions from her knife before using it. The details of the dirty children and rooms are similar to the Portsmouth scenes in Mansfield Park. Mrs Leigh-Perrot reported that her worst misery was seeing her husband enduring ‘Vulgarity, Dirt, Noise from Morning to Night’. The Leigh-Perrots lived with this from August to the following March.

  In light of the evidence, it seems likely that she was guilty. Mrs LeighPerrot had shopped for a card of lace to edge a new cloak from a haberdasher’s called Smiths in Bath Street. She bought a card of black lace and left the shop to meet her husband. The couple walked past the shop some time later and were apprehended by a shop assistant who accused Mrs Leigh-Perrot of stealing a card of white thread lace, worth twenty shillings (one pound – the equivalent of about £68 or $100 today). Mrs Leigh-Perrot opened her parcel and the card of white lace was retrieved and taken back to the shop. The couple thought no more of it until days later she was arrested for Grand Larceny.

  The issue at stake was the cost of the lace. Because it was worth twenty shillings the theft was a serious offence punishable by death by hanging or at the very least by transportation. Because of Mrs Leigh-Perrot’s standing in the local community the latter was more likely, so the devoted LeighPerrot began to put his affairs in order so that he could accompany his wife to Australia if the worst were to happen. Gossips said that he was dominated by her and his letters to her do indeed suggest that she had much the stronger personality.

  As the trial approached the family rose to Mrs Leigh-Perrot’s support. James Austen had broken a leg in a riding accident so was unable to rush to her side, but once again Mrs Austen offered to send Cassandra and Jane. Mrs Leigh-Perrot once again refused: ‘nor could I accept the Offer of my Nieces – to have two Young Creatures gazed at in a public Court would cut one to the very heart’.24

  Her supporters were convinced that she had been framed by unscrupulous blackmailers, but there were many others convinced that she was guilty. Damningly, her own counsel, Joseph Jekyll, thought that she was guilty. A family member who was in the know wrote privately, ‘Jekyll considered Mrs. L. P. was a kleptomaniac and that she did steal the material and probably meant to.’ Years later another story circulated: that Mrs LeighPerrot had been caught stealing plants from a garden centre.

  The plausibility of her guilt is underlined by the fact that her four defence lawyers did not bring a blackmail charge against the shopkeeper, who had immediately consulted local magistrates. Instead they argued that the assistant had mistakenly put the white lace into the package. And one wonders why Mr Leigh-Perrot made plans for deportation if he thought his wife innocent.

  Her own lawyer called her a ‘smoocher’, someone who could and did steal small things. Kleptomania was first defined in the eighteenth century as a psychological condition that involves ‘recurrent, strong, sudden urges to steal items that one does not need and that can have little value, or that one can afford to purchase’.25 Kleptomaniacs are usually females who, as modern psychology now puts it, experience tension before the theft and then a release of tension following the act. One wonders whether Mrs Norris is merely being greedy or exhibiting symptoms of the condition when, after the debacle of Lovers’ Vows, she ‘contrived to remove one article from [Sir Thomas’s] sight that might have distressed him. The curtain over which she had presided with such talent and such success, went off with her to her cottage, where she happened to be particularly in want of green baize.’26

  After a full day’s hearing at the Taunton Assizes in March 1800, Mrs Leigh-Perrot was – rather against the balance of the evidence – unanimously acquitted by the jury. The couple returned to Bath and a warm reception from all their friends. But mud sticks and, as a prominent figure in the city, Mrs Leigh-Perrot was frequently lampooned. Shortly after the acquittal she received an anonymous letter suggesting that a print had been found and would be published: it was a caricature of
a parrot holding a card of lace in his bill. Furthermore, the two-shilling pamphlet reporting the trial in all its gory detail was readily available at all good booksellers, the editor proclaiming that ‘the general curiosity which has been excited’ by the ‘various and contradictory accounts in the public prints’ made the venture worth while.

  The trial allegedly cost Mr Leigh-Perrot two thousand pounds, money that James Austen (the Leigh-Perrots’ heir) may well have felt was misused. Nevertheless, family relations remained good. The scandal was not sufficient to make the Austens think twice about the move to Bath, even if it did play some part in their daughter’s reaction to their impulsive departure. Jane herself wrote of her aunt Leigh-Perrot’s delight at the news of their impending arrival: ‘she thinks with the greatest pleasure of our being settled in Bath’.27

  Despite the ‘great distress’ that Jane felt on being uprooted from her family home in Steventon without consultation of any kind, her letters suggest that her mood soon changed. There is a sense of excitement at the prospect of city life: ‘I get more and more reconciled to the idea of our removal,’ she wrote to Cassandra. ‘We have lived long enough in this Neighbourhood, the Basingstoke Balls are certainly on the decline, there is something interesting in the bustle of going away, and the prospect of spending future summers by the Sea or in Wales is very delightful. – For a time we shall now possess many of the advantages which I have often thought of with Envy in the wives of Sailors or Soldiers.’28

  The scene of the crime (Bath Street) and the report of the case

  The family discussed various locations with all the enthusiasm of firsttime city house-hunters: Mrs Austen liked the sound of Queen Square, but her husband preferred Laura Place and Jane thought it would be fun to be near Sydney Gardens so that ‘we might go into the Labyrinth every day’.29 Other matters to be settled were the servant question. Jane joked that ‘We plan having a steady Cook, and a young giddy Housemaid, with a sedate, middle aged Man, who is to undertake the double office of Husband to the former and sweetheart to the latter. – No Children of course to be allowed on either side.’30

  But there were also matters to be settled at Steventon, not least the auction of the furniture. In a letter written on the day of the move Jane mentions the loss of her pianoforte and her own library – a sorry detail given how much her books and her music meant to her. She made no attempt to disguise her chagrin towards her brother James and his wife, whom she suspected had encouraged the retirement plan in her absence and who offered to buy many of the rectory chattels at far below what she considered a fair price: ‘The whole World is in a conspiracy to enrich one part of our family at the expense of another.’31

  Jane Austen and her mother left Steventon to spend a few days househunting before Cassandra and her father arrived. The houses they saw first were damp and unsuitable, but they eventually took a lease of three and a quarter years on 4 Sydney Place, facing Sydney Gardens, where Jane had expressed a preference for living. The plans for the next few years were winters in Bath and summers at the seaside.

  It was a happy time for Jane Austen’s parents. Anna Austen, James’s daughter by his first wife, vividly recollected their contented retirement in Bath and how they ‘seemed to enjoy the cheerfulness of their Town life, and especially perhaps the rest which their advancing years entitled them to … I have always thought that this was the short Holyday of their married life.’32

  There are only five surviving letters from the five years that Jane Austen lived in Bath. This has led to much misunderstanding and speculation. Some biographers have suggested that this period was a dead time for her writing. One much read account suggests that she was ‘disabled as a writer’, falling into silence, if not depression.33 But she had her portable writing desk and nothing was going to stop her from writing. She began a new novel, The Watsons, and she finalized and sold her first Bath novel, ‘Susan’. It was actually advertised as forthcoming in the spring of 1803. She must have believed that she was on her way to being what she wanted to be – an author. With her in Bath were the manuscripts of no fewer than three completed novels, ‘Elinor and Marianne’ (probably rewritten as Sense and Sensibility by this time), ‘First Impressions’ and Lady Susan, all no doubt frequently tinkered with and thought and spoken about.34

  Many twentieth-century readings of Jane Austen were fixated on the assumption that she was immovably attached to village life and deeply suspicious of urban pleasures – the theatre foremost among these. But she herself parodied such a clichéd view when she wrote from London: ‘Here I am once more in this Scene of Dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my Morals corrupted.’35 There is every reason to believe that she enjoyed urban life. In Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland declares her enthusiasm for Bath, observing that ‘there is much more sameness in a country life than in a Bath life. One day in the country is exactly like another.’36 It was just such boredom that Jane Austen was ready to escape.

  She was quick to explore the circulating libraries. There were over ten of them in Bath by the end of the eighteenth century. In the year that she moved, the Bath Journal advertised the opening of a new public library. Its purpose was to benefit both residents and visitors, with a collection of books not commonly met with in the circulating libraries: books of reference, foreign journals, history and mathematics and astronomical tables and so forth. Also in 1801 there was news of a new coffeehouse serving breakfasts, dinners and suppers, on the same plan as in London.

  Of all the leisure facilities that developed in Bath in this period, the two most popular were the public assemblies and the walks. Walking and dancing could be regarded as a form of exercise, but more importantly these pastimes provided for socializing and personal display. Jane Austen loved both activities. In the few extant Bath letters, she lists the long walks she has taken, one lasting for two hours – a trip to Beacon Hill and across the fields to Charlcombe. She also enjoyed promenading the Royal Crescent, and walking by Crescent Fields and Lansdown Hill. Walks to Weston, Lyncombe and Widcombe were other favourites. The squares and circuses were in effect open-air rooms, where people promenaded, flirted and gossiped.

  In Bath, assemblies were divided into the regular assemblies, and ones associated with special occasions, for example the Queen’s birthday ball. The Lower Rooms, according to Anstey’s New Bath Guide, had a fabulous ballroom ninety feet in length and thirty-six feet in breadth with a stucco ceiling and fine views of the river, valley and adjacent hills. Paintings adorned the walls – most prominent was a portrait of Beau Nash – and the rooms were elegantly furnished with chandeliers and girandoles. There were two tea rooms, an apartment devoted to the games of chess and backgammon and a sixty-foot-long card room. The balls, according to the Guide,

  Begin at six o’clock and end at eleven … About nine o’clock the gentlemen treat their partners with tea, and when that is over the company pursue their diversions till the moment comes for closing the ball. Then the Master of the Ceremonies, entering the ballroom, orders the music to cease, and the ladies thereupon resting themselves till they grow cool, their partners complete the ceremonies of the evening by handing them to the chairs in which they are to be conveyed to their respective lodgings.37

  It is at a ball in the Lower Rooms that Henry Tilney is first introduced to Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey: when he is ‘treating his partner to tea’ he laughingly accuses her of keeping a journal in which he fears he should make but a poor figure. ‘“Shall I tell you,” he asks, “what you ought to say? … I danced with a very agreeable young man, introduced by Mr. King; had a great deal of conversation with him – seems a most extraordinary genius.”’38 Mr King was the real-life Master of the Ceremonies at the Lower Rooms, from 1785 to 1805, when he became Master of the Ceremonies for the Upper Rooms, another example of Austen making her novels realistic by introducing details from reality.

  The ballroom was also used during the daytime as a promenade, as its windows commanded extensive views
of the Avon. It was the fashion for the company to invite each other to breakfast at the Lower Rooms after taking their early baths or first glass of spa water.

  The New Assembly Rooms, which had opened in September 1771, were located at the east end of the Circus. They were built by subscription under the direction of John Wood. The ballroom was 105 feet long and 42 feet wide, furnished with Gainsborough portraits and boasting five spectacular chandeliers from its ornate panelled ceiling. At the end of the room were gilt-framed looking glasses. On the way to the concert or tea room one would cross the octagon room, with its elegant domed roof and frieze,

  opening out to the ballroom, the tea room and the card room. The openplan architecture was deliberate: the rooms were built in a roughly circular fashion to encourage the free flow of guests. It is in the octagon room that Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe arrange to meet their brothers for a rendezvous, and this room is also the setting for the scene in the much later Bath novel, Persuasion, between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth when Anne allows herself to hope that he still loves her.

  The Bath assemblies were organized on a subscription basis. Balls and concerts were held at least twice weekly. According to the New Bath Guide there were two dress balls every week, at the New Rooms on Monday and on Friday at the Lower Rooms. Then there were two fancy balls every week, at the Lower Rooms on Tuesday and at the New Rooms on Thursday, subscription half a guinea. Concerts were held on Wednesdays. The Monday dress ball was devoted to country dances only, and at the fancy ball on Tuesdays and Thursdays two cotillions were danced, one before and one after tea. The fancy ball was not a fancy dress or masquerade ball but an occasion when the stringent rules regarding evening dress were relaxed. The ladies wore shorter skirts for the cotillion, with their over-dresses pinned up, as in Northanger Abbey when Isabella and Catherine pin up each other’s train for the dance.