Jane Austen

by Valerie Grosvenor Myer

  The landscape around Steventon seemed bland and unimpressive to Mrs Austen, the girl from Henley-on-Thames. The chalk hills where sheep grazed were smooth rather than rugged. The well-watered valleys grew cereals, turnips, sainfoin, peas and beans, the meadows produced hay and clover. Today that landscape is largely unspoiled. Austen country is still agricultural, with gently rolling hills, farm homesteads and picturesque villages with thatched houses. In contrast with the subtopian sprawl characteristic of so much of late twentieth-century England, Jane Austen’s part of Hampshire surprises and delights with its neatness.

  Steventon Rectory, where Jane Austen was born, was a double-fronted house at the edge of the village with a trellised porch and sash windows, and dormer windows above. The square house had been extended at the rear with double wings. On the ground floor were the best parlour and the common parlour, or as we should say living room, where the family ate their meals. There was also a kitchen. Behind them was Mr Austen’s study, with a pleasant view through the bow window of the garden leading to the sundial at the end of it; above were seven bedrooms and three attics. The beams were exposed, then not a picturesque survival but considered a sign of poverty, and the walls met the ceiling without cornices, which later generations of the Austen family thought wretchedly inadequate. They were apologetic about the poor way their brilliant relative had lived.

  When the sisters grew up, a bedroom next to theirs was made into a sitting room for them. It had a patterned carpet on a chocolate ground, with a cupboard and bookshelves painted brown to match, blue wallpaper and blue striped curtains. An oval mirror hung between the windows. Jane preferred it to the parlour downstairs, as being more comfortable and more elegant.

  Behind the living quarters was a washhouse with a pump over a well which supplied the house with pure water. The site was levelled in the 1820s, but the pump is still there, alone in a field. There was the old-fashioned sort of garden in which flowers and vegetables were mingled, and strawberries bordered the grass walk. The east wall was of mud, topped with thatch. There was a green slope of fine turf for the children to roll down, as the young Catherine Morland did in Northanger Abbey. The Revd George Austen and his wife were energetic garden planters and improvers. They created a 'sweep' in the front garden and put in timber and shrubs behind. The house stood in a shallow valley, surrounded by sloping meadows well sprinkled with elm trees. There were a solitary silver fir draped in honeysuckle and a white pole surmounted by a weathercock, which made what the children called a ‘scrooping’ sound as it turned.

  Not far from the church was the Steventon manor house, an early Tudor building, owned by George’s patron, Thomas Knight, but rented by the Digweed family, with whom the Austens were friendly; Jane was concerned when James Digweed’s horse ‘kicked a great hole in his head’. The church and churchyard, where wild violets grow, have Digweed monuments and Digweed graves, together with a plaque inside the church saying that Jane Austen worshipped there. Inside it, too, are marble memorial tablets to her eldest brother James’s first wife, Anne Mathew; to James from his second wife and their children; and to their mother from those children.

  When Jane was twenty-four, she described in a letter to Cassandra:

  an odd kind of crash which startled me - in a moment afterwards it was repeated; I then went to the window, which I reached just in time to see the last of our two highly valued elms descend into the sweep! The other, which had fallen, I suppose, in the first crash, and which was the nearest to the pond, taking a more easterly direction sank among our screen of chestnuts and firs, knocking down one spruce fir, beating off the head of another, and stripping the two corner chestnuts of several branches in its fall. This is not all. One large elm, out of the two on the left-hand side as you enter what I call the elm walk, was likewise blown down; the maple bearing the weathercock was broke in two, and what I regret more than all the rest is, that all three elms which grew in Hall’s meadow and gave such ornament to it, are gone; two were blown down, and the other so much injured that it cannot stand.

  However, she was relieved that the only damage done by the storm was to the trees. Jane wrote playfully to her sister:

  The three Digweeds all came on Tuesday, and we played a pool at Commerce [a card game]. James Digweed left Hampshire today I think he must be in love with you, from his anxiety to have you go to the Faversham balls, and likewise from his supposing that the two elms fell from grief at your absence.

  Mr Austen, farming parson, used to join with Mr Digweed, James Digweed’s father, in buying twenty or thirty sheep at a time. In order to manage things fairly, when the pen was opened the first half of the number to run out were Mr Austen’s, the rest Mr Digweed’s. One day Mr Austen noticed among his stock a particularly fine specimen. He said to his man John Bond, ‘Well, John, I think we've had the best of the luck with Mr Digweed today, in getting that sheep.’

  John smiled. ‘Maybe not so much in luck as you think, sir. I see’d her the moment I come in and set eyes on the sheep, so when we opened the pen I just gived her a buck with my stick, and out a’ run.’ Scattered through Jane Austen’s letters are references to sheep, pigs, turkeys, ducks, chickens, guinea fowl and bee-keeping. George Austen’s life as practical farmer and man of literary culture is reflected in one of Jane’s letters of November 1798 to her sister when Cassandra was staying at Godmersham with her brother Edward: in one sentence she tells Cassandra that sheep had cost her father twenty-five shillings each and her father wanted news of Edward’s. In the next she mentions buying books.

  In her next letter she reports that her father is glad to hear Edward’s pigs are doing so well and wants Edward to know that Lord Bolton was deeply interested in pigs: he had built them elegantly constructed pigsties and visited them first thing every morning. Pigs had to be killed. One of her father’s pigs, sold to the butcher, weighed twenty-seven and a quarter pounds per quarter. Jane’s sister Cassandra, remembering a happy childhood, wrote later in life that there was so much amusement and so many comforts attaching to a farm in the country that people who had experienced such pleasures did not easily forget them.

  Between the rectory and the church were hedgerows which sheltered primroses, anemones and wild hyacinths. Steventon was remarkable for its hedgerows. In Hampshire at that time a hedgerow was not a mere boundary, but an irregular border of copsewood and timber, often broad enough to have a path inside it. A few of these can be seen today. The elm walk, also called ‘the wood walk’, stretched from the terrace westward, skirting the glebe meadows, and led to a shrubbery on the sunny side. Another hedgerow-lane was known as ‘the church walk’, leading through the wood up the hill to the church. There were sycamores, thorns and lilacs, making a rich habitat for wildlife. Jane Austen writes of such a hedgerow in Persuasion, one whose density makes it possible for Anne Elliot to overhear a conversation about herself between Captain Wentworth and Louisa Musgrove.

  George and Cassandra lived from the start with her mother and a ready-made child. Penniless orphan Philadelphia Austen, George’s sister, had been sent to India at twenty-one to catch herself a husband. This expedient for matching up lonely white businessmen and administrators with British wives was cynically known as ‘the fishing fleet’. The sea voyage took eight months. Philadelphia, slender and elegant, with dark upswept hair and large dark eyes, took just six months more to marry a middle-aged surgeon, Tysoe Saul Hancock. He was punctilious, and her scatterbrained ways sorely tried his great affection for her.

  Saul and Philadelphia Hancock came home from India taking care of a sickly boy called George Hastings, motherless son of the famous Warren Hastings, later Governor-General of Bengal. George Hastings had been sent home, as the custom then was, for his education. The return journey cost Saul Hancock £1,500. He was disappointed to discover that he could not afford to live in Britain at the same standard as he had done in India so went back to make his fortune but got into further difficulties. In 1772 Warren Hastings gave him £5,000, later dou
bled. The pair traded in salt, timber, carpets, rice and opium. An attempt has been made to sensationalise Jane Austen’s father as a drug-dealer, because he helped as an agent to distribute these goods; but opium, though known to be addictive, was used as an everyday painkiller, as easily available as aspirin today. Hancock, a doting father, died in Calcutta, a world away from his wife and daughter Eliza, the month before Jane Austen was born. He was sixty-four. Mrs Hancock was reduced to £600 a year, the income on Hastings’s gift. This was inadequate for life in London, so she settled abroad, first in Germany and Belgium, and then in Paris, where she cut a dash and gave Eliza a polish which later dazzled her Austen cousins.

  Warren Hastings was a hero to the Austen family Jane Austen was gratified with his praise of Pride and Prejudice, which her brother Henry had forwarded to him. Mr Austen sought the help of Warren Hastings to get a promotion for his nautical son Frank. When Hastings was impeached before the House of Lords in 1788 for cruelty and extortion, Jane’s half-cousin, Phila Walter, heard the famous orators, Sheridan, Burke and Fox, at his trial. The dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan spoke so low he could not be heard, Edmund Burke was so hot and hasty he could not be understood, and every word spoken by Charles James Fox (famous leader of the Whig opposition to the Tory Prime Minister William Pitt) was distinct, but offensive to Phila in being hostile to Warren Hastings. Hastings was eventually cleared after a trial lasting seven years.

  Possibly George Austen offered to educate Warren Hastings’s boy himself. Neither the child nor old Mrs Leigh, Cassandra’s mother, survived long. Jane Austen never knew her grandparents. Cassandra grieved as much for little George Hastings, who lived with them for only six months, as if he had been her own child, though she soon became pregnant herself.

  Saul Hancock had predicted accurately that George would ‘find it easier to get a family than provide for them’. George and Cassandra did get a family, almost at the rate of a baby every year, and were soon in debt. His income fluctuated from year to year and was never more than £600. Later he had a small pension but was never well off. George borrowed the then substantial sum of £865 from his rich brother-in-law James Leigh-Perrot four years after his marriage, when he already had three children. George managed to pay back only £20 of the loan because he was helping his sister Philadelphia. In 1772, when there were four children, he borrowed another £300 which he did succeed in paying off, thanks to Uncle Francis.

  Two years before Jane Austen was born Uncle Francis bought him the adjoining parish of Deane, a mile and a half away, worth another £110 a year. George’s combined parishes held only about 300 people. Surprisingly, there were no professed Dissenters or Roman Catholics. The Ashe living, also in the gift of Uncle Francis, was taken by the Revd Dr Richard Russell. Later Uncle Francis sold the presentation of Ashe to another rich kind uncle, Benjamin Langlois, who gave the living to his nephew, the Revd Isaac Peter George Lefroy, whose wife, Anne, became a dear friend of Jane Austen. Mr Austen, like other hard-pressed clergymen in the period, took in boy pupils. Today the parishes of Steventon, Ashe, Deane and North Waltham are combined under one rector who earns a single stipend.

  Although the parishioners were so few, George and his wife were far from being a gentleman and lady of leisure. They had to be largely self-sufficient in feeding themselves, their children and servants. Mrs Austen took charge of the poultry and the dairy, making butter and cheese. Bread was baked and beer brewed at home. When there was honey, the Austens made mead. Sometimes George received rent money from land owned by the Austen family. He was trustee of an estate in Antigua, like the one owned by Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park. There were to be eight children, Jane the seventh.

  The Austens were a devoted couple and George missed his wife sorely when she visited her sister Jane, Mrs Edward Cooper. Mrs Austen’s reaction on getting home was one of relief. She complained that she had been ‘hurried’ while in London. It was a sad place; I would not live in it on any account; one has not time to do one’s duty either to God or to man,’ she wrote later.

  In the same letter she recorded that she was pleased with her little Alderney cow, who made more butter than they could use, and had just bought another. Mrs Austen liked country life and grew her own vegetables, wearing an old green smock frock like a labourer’s, when digging up potatoes. In those days potatoes were something of a luxury in England. A tenant’s wife visiting the parsonage had never seen them before. When Mrs Austen suggested that the visitor should plant them in her own garden, the woman replied, No, no; they are all very well for you gentry, but they must be terribly costly to rear.’ Potatoes did not become a poor man’s crop till the 1820s. The gap between ‘gentry’ and the rest was real Clergymen of the established Church were gentlemen, though Dissenters were not, but many, including the Austens, found it a struggle to maintain anything like a gentry lifestyle.

  3

  Siblings and Society

  THE ELDEST AUSTEN son was James, born 13 February 1765. He became a clergyman like his father, and it was James’s son by his second wife, the Revd James-Edward Austen-Leigh, who published his Memoir of his aunt Jane Austen in 1869, when he was the oldest living person to remember her. He had been the youngest mourner at her funeral in 1817.

  The second Austen son, George, was hardly ever mentioned, and the Memoir leaves him out. He was handicapped, and suffered from fits. His mother wrote sadly when he was four, ‘My poor little George is come to see me to-day, he seems pretty well, tho’ he had a fit lately, it was near a twelvemonth since he had one before, so was in hopes they had left him, but must not flatter myself so now.’ It is believed he was deaf and dumb, as Jane knew how to ‘talk on her fingers’. He did not live at home. His father drew comfort from the reflection that he cannot be a bad or wicked child’.

  The third son, Edward, born 7 October 1767, was luckier. At the age of sixteen he was adopted by his father’s patron, rich and childless Thomas Knight II, and inherited Godmersham Park, a fine estate in Kent. Thomas Knight’s father had been born Thomas Brodnax, but changed his name to May when he inherited an estate. This was not an unusual condition at the time but changing one’s name required an Act of Parliament. Thomas May found it worth his while to change once more, to Knight, when a distant cousin, Mrs Elizabeth Knight, bequeathed him her estates at Steventon and Chawton in Hampshire. His rapid changes of name provoked one Member of Parliament to comment, ‘This gentleman gives us so much trouble that the best way would be to pass an Act for him to use whatever name he pleases/ Thomas was generous to his various relatives, presenting those in Holy Orders with livings in his gift. Edward was a special favourite with the son (also Thomas Knight) and spent a lot of time at Godmersham. When Thomas Knight II proposed to adopt the boy Mrs Austen advised her husband to accept the offer. Edward and his wife and children are usually written of as ‘Knight’, although they were called Austen until Edward changed his name in 1812 when old Mrs Knight died.

  Mrs Austen wrote after James’s early death that Edward was ‘quite a man of business’, while James had ‘classical knowledge, literary taste and the power of elegant composition’. Both, she added, were equally good, amiable and sweet-tempered. Their mother recognized and accepted that Edward was not as academically gifted as James or Henry.

  A silhouette group shows Edward’s father presenting the boy to his wealthy patrons. Edward, in tight-fitting coat and knee-breeches, stretches out his hands towards them, his back towards his father, while Mrs Knight looks up coolly from the game of chess she is playing with another lady. Mr Knight stands at the extreme right of the picture. The women wear stays and high coiffures with beribboned caps, while the grown men wear wigs tied behind. Edward’s hair is his own, and hangs long at the back.

  Edward missed out on Oxford but was more than compensated by the opportunity of the Grand Tour. He visited Switzerland, Dresden and Rome, staying in Dresden for about a year. But his family ties were strong and he was always specially close to Cassandra, while the
re was a strong bond of intellectual compatibility between Jane and the fourth son, Henry.

  Henry, born 8 June 1771, was brilliant and charming, but seems to have been the least stable among the brothers, although, in his father’s opinion, Henry was the ‘most talented’ of the children. He was generally considered the handsomest of the young Austens, though to modern eyes and in the opinion of their friend Mrs Lefroy the best-looking among the lot was the baby of the family, Charles. Henry was agreed to be a wonderful conversationalist. Jane delighted in his companionship. He had an optimistic outlook, which was just as well, as his career, unlike those of his brothers, was chequered. He followed his elder brother James to Oxford, where their mother’s aristocratic connections entitled them to financial concessions as ‘Founder’s Kin’. The statutes provided for the maintenance of six scholars who could prove their relationship to Leighs, Walkers, Perrots or Whites. They became Fellows on entering the college and could remain so until they followed the usual route to Holy Orders. They were not Fellows in the modern sense, as their erudite father was, but rather privileged scholarship holders. This custom of giving preference to descendants of founders of colleges was peculiar to Oxford and was discontinued during the nineteenth century.