Jane Austen

by Valerie Grosvenor Myer

‘Do as you like,’ Jane snapped at her sister. ‘I have overcome my desire of your going to Bath with my mother and me.’ When Cassandra’s company no longer seemed desirable to her she was in a bad way. Jane turned instead to Martha, who had come to Steventon early in January. She and Jane were at work sorting Mr Austen’s books, as there were 500 to be got rid of. Jane wanted James to take them at half a guinea each but they were sold at auction. Jane passed on her own children’s books to Edward’s daughter Fanny, now eight.

  James had dined with them and written a letter to Edward, filling three sides, ‘every line inclining too much towards the north-east,’ Jane said critically. The note of impatience with James and Mary continued: ‘This morning he joins his lady in the fields of Elysium and Ibthorpe.’ Even more irritably she wrote to Cassandra, ‘It gives us great pleasure to know that the Chilham ball was so agreeable and that you danced four dances with Mr Kemble… Why did you dance four dances with so stupid a man?’

  Mary wanted Cassandra to bring home from Godmersham a pattern of the jacket and trousers that Elizabeth and Edward’s sons wore. Her own little James-Edward was getting too big for frocks. Mary would really have liked one of their old ones but Jane thought this hardly ‘doable’. As Elizabeth and Edward had four boys by this time jackets and trousers were probably handed down till worn out. Mary thought her son, James-Edward, was not out of doors as often as he ought to be and she was engaging another servant to look after him.

  The Austen parents had a servant problem: Anne Littleworth’s husband did not want her to give up work at a time of high unemployment and although in some ways Jane would have liked to keep her on, it might be better, she thought, if Mrs Littleworth could find something nearer her husband and child than Bath. Perhaps the Henry Rices could employ her? There were not many places, remarked Jane, that she was qualified for.

  Jane comments wickedly on the illness of Edward’s adoptive mother, the widowed Mrs Knight, pretending to disbelieve a rumour that the elderly Mrs Knight had had an illegitimate baby ‘I do not believe she would be betrayed beyond an accident at the most.’ Does Jane mean by ‘accident’ a miscarriage, induced or otherwise? She tended to harp on immoral sexual relations and upon pregnancies. Heartlessly Jane remarks that the Wylmots, of Ashford, Kent, being robbed ‘must be an amusing thing to their acquaintance’. Frustrated at every turn, she took refuge in making sport of her neighbours and in envy of other people’s good fortune, Edward, already rich, had received a legacy of £100!

  Jane would need two new summer dresses and asked Cassandra to buy some of the materials. She wanted two lengths of brown cambric muslin, seven yards for their mother and seven and a half for Jane herself (‘it is for a tall woman’) preferably in different shades of brown. Jane was intending to buy her other new fabric, ‘yellow and white cloud’, when she went to Bath. The weather had been muggy that winter but now late in January there had been snow.

  Between 25 January and 11 February 1801 Jane’s letters are missing. Her next was from Manydown to Cassandra at 24 Upper Berkeley Street, Portman Square, London, where she was staying with Henry and Eliza, Edward having conveyed her there. Only recently had Henry given up his commission in the militia and set up as an army agent and banker. Jane reported that she had received a letter from Charles, who had arrived from Lisbon on the Endymion^ having had a royal passenger, the Duke of Sussex, sixth son of King George III of England. The Duke had asthma and needed to winter in warmer climes than Britain. The sailors found the Duke ‘fat, jolly and affable’ and apparently much attached to his morganatic wife. Lady Augusta Murray, daughter of the Earl of Dunmore. When the letter was written the Endymion was becalmed but Charles had been hoping to reach Portsmouth soon. He had received the letter with the news about leaving Steventon before he left England and was much surprised. He was now reconciled and planned a visit to Steventon while the rectory was still theirs. As an unmarried sailor he regretted the loss of a setded home ashore. Because Cassandra had been to see the exotic animals at Exeter Exchange, one of the sights of London, Jane added playfully that these were all the particulars of Charles’s letter worthy of travelling into ‘the regions of wit, elegance, fashion, elephants and kangaroons [sic]' Australia had only recently been discovered so kangaroos were a novelty.

  On leaving Manydown Jane took satisfaction in the opportunity of travelling back at no expense, as the Bigg family carriage would be taking Catherine Bigg to Basingstoke. Such things as travelling cheaply were a serious consideration to the cash-strapped Jane. The coach fare from London to Southampton, for example, was sixteen shillings. Catherine thought of fetching Cassandra back to Hampshire but if so Cassandra’s visit would have to be stretched. Perhaps Henry could send his carriage a stage or two and Cassandra could be met by a servant. James had offered the use of his carriage but as he had no reason for going to London this would inconvenience him. Probably Cassandra travelled by Henry’s carriage part of the way.

  There were other farewell visits to be paid and received. Jane called on the Revd Henry Dyson, curate of Baughurst, Hampshire. Mrs Dyson as usual looked big’. She was expecting the seventh of their twelve children. Jane was always interested in pregnancies. Their house seemed to have ‘all the comforts of little children, dirt and litter’.

  The Austens were leaving their established friends to live among invalids and the elderly as, by 1801, the smart set were deserting Bath for Brighton. Lady Saye and Sele and her daughter, the ‘adultress’ Mary-Cassandra Twisleton, now divorced, were moving to Bath too. Because Bath was being invaded by the new rich and social climbers like Miss Augusta Hawkins of Bristol in Emma, who met her husband, Mr Elton, at Bath, society people avoided public gatherings and kept to themselves at private parties. The public assemblies which Jane had attended as a girl, and which Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey enjoyed, were no longer smart places to see and be seen.

  Jane decided to make the best of things. ‘The Basingstoke balls are certainly on the decline,' she declared. She found something interesting in the bustle and activity of going away and looked forward to spending summers by the sea or in Wales. There was talk of spending the summer at Sidmouth. The increased mobility she decided was an advantage which she had often thought of 'with envy in the wives of soldiers or sailors’. She had grown restless and told Cassandra she was not, after all, sacrificing a great deal in quitting Hampshire. She was, we suspect, whistling in the dark.

  There are no surviving letters between February and the following May. Jane made herself useful to her father by copying baptisms and burials into the registers at Steventon and Deane. Few parish registers have been recorded by a hand so distinguished.

  11

  Bath, 1801

  ON 4 MAY 1801 Mrs Austen and her daughter Jane set off for Bath in their hackney chaise. Jane at least must have cast several longing, lingering looks behind at the tall elms and sycamores and the meadows full of wild flowers.

  The journey from Steventon in Hampshire to Bath in Somerset, about eighty miles, took all day. They lunched on beef but could only eat a small portion. The second part of the journey from Devizes to Paragon took more than three hours and they arrived at half-past seven. They were kindly received with cups of tea. Hardly had she been in the dining room two minutes when Jane’s uncle interrogated her about the naval careers of Frank and Charles.

  Next day she wrote to Cassandra, who was at Godmersham:

  The first view of Bath in fine weather does not answer my expectations; I think I see more distinctly through rain. The sun was got behind everything, and the appearance of the place from the top of Kingsdown was all vapour, shadow, smoke and confusion.

  All in Bath was noise, dust and busde with numerous dashing equipages, barouches and curricles, passing and repassing, carts and drays, with sedan chairs for invalids, the gouty and ladies with no carriages. Traffic jams were frequent. In the season, on a Sunday in the Crescent, a contemporary was mildly shocked to see young women walking alone or in groups with n
either servants nor chaperones, talking and laughing at street corners, and, worst of all, sometimes walking alone with young men. Street cries of milkmen, muffin men and sellers of newspapers rang out. In wet weather the clatter of pattens could be heard. When it rained people could take their exercise in the Upper or Lower Assembly Rooms with the view from the ballroom of the River Avon winding among green meadows and wooded hills.

  Bath lies about a hundred and twenty miles to the west of London. It is famed for its natural hot springs. According to legend a British prince called Bladud was cured by the waters of leprosy before the Romans set foot on the British Isles. The magnificent Roman bath and two pagan temples near the Abbey churchyard were not excavated till 1871. After the Romans left Britain the Saxons built a new town and their own church, which was rebuilt by the Normans. This building was destroyed by fire in 1137 and the Abbey dates from the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century Queen Elizabeth granted Bath a charter. The city expanded to include Barton Fields to the West and Walcot in the east. Jane Austen’s parents had married at Walcot parish church. It was demolished in the mid 1770s and a new church built.

  Neo-classical Bath as we have it, Britain’s earliest and arguably most successful example of town planning, was built between 1705 and 1810. During those years the streets were paved and lit. Formerly a small dirty town infested with muggers, then called footpads, Bath rose in importance as a provincial centre of fashion second only to London during the eighteenth century and reached its peak in the 1750s. The novelist Fanny Burney described it as a city of palaces, a town of hills and a hill of towns’. The town was attractive to people in reduced circumstances because living was cheaper there than in London. Jane wrote to Cassandra when she had been three days in Bath that meat was only eightpence a pound, butter twelve pence and cheese nine-pence halfpenny. She was shocked however at the exorbitant’ price of fish: a whole salmon cost two shillings and ninepence. Food in Bath was not as fresh as their own produce had been, and needed ready cash. Bath offered luxury shops, though: England’s first ice-cream parlour was opened there in 1774.

  Bath is beautiful, even today, surrounded by sprawling suburbs. In Jane Austen’s day it nestled among wooded hills and the view from Beechen Cliff, mentioned in Northanger Abbey, must have been glorious. The architect John Wood, who died in 1754, designed Queen Square, the North and South Parades, and the beautiful Circus built by his son of the same name. The Circus, dating from 1754, is a circle of houses with classical columns of the three orders, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, supporting a continuous frieze. The Royal Crescent, Bath, is a neo-classical monument to the age of reason. It was built of local stone, a soft creamy colour, though to Anne Elliot in Persuasion Bath offers merely a ‘white glare’. Jane’s feelings of exile from and nostalgia for the country home where she was born are projected onto her sad and lonely heroine. Anne finds the clatter and yells of Bath exhausting.

  By the time Jane Austen went to Bath to live it was less of a social magnet than a retirement town. It was noticeably inhabited by single people, especially, as a foreign visitor ungallantly put it, ‘superannuated females’. On the other hand, it offered advantages to those with cultivated tastes, with some possibility of congenial society concentrated in a small area instead of widely scattered as in country districts. There were concerts and other entertainments, and a theatre where David Garrick, Sarah Siddons and other great actors had appeared. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals, which had been coldly received in London, was a runaway success in Bath. Kotzebue’s Lovers’ Vows, the play rehearsed but never performed in Mansfield Park, was played six times at the Theatre Royal while Jane Austen was living in Bath. The city offered excellent shops, circulating libraries, a hospital and ‘the waters’. There were numerous inns and ample stabling, as important an amenity then as parking space today. A contemporary writer observed that lodgings in Bath were elegant and plentiful. He suggested that a ten-minute walk was adequate to find somewhere suitable. But the Austens had great difficulty in finding a comfortable place to live. They soon confirmed that the fashionable streets such as the Royal Crescent and the Circus were well beyond their means. The houses in King Street were too small.

  In her first letter from Bath Jane writes of walking with her uncle to the famous Pump Room, where he had to drink a glass of the waters, then believed to be medicinal. On the way they passed down Broad Street and High Street, past the magnificent west front of Bath Abbey, flanked by a pair of Jacob’s ladders, angels ascending and descending, carved in stone. The new Pump Room, built in 1795, and now a restaurant, has four tall fluted pillars crowned with Corinthian capitals supporting a sculptured pediment, and the clock by Thomas Tompiondating from 1709. Inside, the Pump Room is a lofty oblong space with tall windows, and a semicircular arched recess at each end. At the western end the gallery for musicians is still in occasional use today, though nowadays there is a stage where music is played by a trio. In the eastern apse still stands a statue of Beau Nash, arbiter of Bath fashion, which Jane must have seen.

  Richard Nash was born in 1674 and died in 1762, thirteen years before Jane was born. But his edicts lingered. In 1705, when the first pump room was built, he became master of the ceremonies at Bath and made it the leading fashionable watering place. He wrote new rules for balls and assemblies, abolished the wearing of swords in places of amusement, forbade duelling, persuaded gentlemen to abandon boots for shoes and stockings, tamed refractory sedan chair men, and laid down a tariff for lodging. On one occasion, when an uncouth country squire attempted to enter the ballroom in boots, Nash asked him disdainfully why he had not brought in his horse as well, since ‘the beast was as well shod as his master’. Nash’s influence was a civilizing one, polishing the rough manners of the provincial gentry.

  Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, drafted originally in the 1790s, goes to public assemblies and is introduced to her partner Henry Tilney by the master of ceremonies, a Mr King. Mr King was a real person, Master of the Ceremonies at the Lower Rooms from 1785 to 1805, when he became Master of the Ceremonies for the Upper Rooms. His regime was as strict as that imposed by Beau Nash.

  Balls at the Assembly Rooms (destroyed by fire in 1820) began at six o’clock and ended at eleven. About nine o’clock the gentlemen were expected to treat their partners to tea and at the end of the evening hand them into the conveyances which were to take them home. Monday’s balls were devoted to country dances. At the 'fancy-ball' on Thursday, when strict evening dress was not required, two cotillions were danced, one before and one after tea. The cotillion was a French dance with elaborate steps, figures and ceremonial. To perform the dance ladies wore shorter skirts than usual with their overdresses picturesquely looped up. Overdresses eventually went out of style when the high-waisted straight-skirted gowns came in. In Jane Austen’s time cotillions were presided over by a French prisoner of war, Monsieur de la Cocardière.

  Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey says a country dance is ‘an emblem of marriage’. Catherine disagrees. She says, ‘People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour.’ Catherine enjoys the gaieties Jane Austen tasted as a teenager. Anne Elliot in Persuasion, unrevised when Jane Austen died in 1817, attends only private parties. The heyday of public mixing was over. Anne finds Bath society as dull and insipid as Jane did, mixing with her uncle and aunt’s elderly friends. For all Jane’s dislike of the town she kept in touch with developments. Persuasion is set in 1814 during the brief lull in the French war. The penultimate chapter of Persuasion takes place partially in Union Street, which was not built till after Jane had left Bath for Chawton. Queen Square had become unfashionable by the time Jane wrote her last novel. Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove look down on it.

  Jane soon noticed the warmer climate in the west of England: she was warmer in Bath without a fire than at Steventon with an excellent one. She hoped to persuade Mrs Lloyd to settle in Bat
h, for this would bring Martha’s companionship and Jane loved Martha. Jane was having her new dress made by Mrs Mussell the seamstress and for once has left a detailed description so we know exactly what it was like. It was to be:

  a round gown, with a jacket and a frock front, like Catherine Bigg’s, to open at the side. The jacket is all in one with the body, and comes as far as the pocket holes; about half a quarter of a yard deep I suppose all the way round, cut off straight at the corners, with a broad hem. No fullness appears either in the body or the flap; the back is quite plain … and the sides equally so. The front is sloped round to the bosom and drawn in - and there is to be a frill of the same to put on occasionally when all one’s handkerchiefs are dirty - which frill must fall back. She is to put two breadths and a half into the tail, and no gores, gores not being so much worn as they were; there is nothing new in the sleeves, they are to be plain, with a fullness of the same falling down and gathered up underneath, just like some of Martha’s - or perhaps a little longer. Low in the back behind, and a belt of the same.

  Cassandra was making Martha a bonnet and Jane asked her to make Martha a cloak of the same materials. ‘They are very much worn here, in different forms - many of them just like her black silk spencer, with a trimming round the armholes instead of sleeves; some are long before, and some long all round like C Bigg’s.’ Later Jane undertook to order a gown for Cassandra but warned that although Mrs Mussell had made the dark gown very well she did not always succeed with lighter colours: ‘My white one I was obliged to alter a great deal.’

  Jane and her mother had ordered a new bonnet apiece, both white straw trimmed with white ribbon. Jane was perhaps relieved to find her bonnets looked very much like other people’s and quite as smart. Cambric muslin bonnets were being worn and some of them were pretty but Jane was not going to buy one till Cassandra turned up. Bath was ‘getting so very empty’ that there was small need to exert herself. She drank tea, played cribbage and walked by the canal.