Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  Elizabeth Austen was born Elizabeth Weller sometime in the reign of Charles II; she was the daughter of a Tonbridge gentleman, and in 1693 she married John Austen, only son of a rich cloth manufacturer. With money on both sides, they were able to settle in a comfortable manor house in Horsmonden, and in the next ten years she gave birth to seven children, a daughter followed by six sons. The drawback to this idyll was that his health was declining from year to year, and at the same time the debts he had acquired before his marriage were piling up. He did not have to face the results himself because he died when his youngest son was still a baby. The dying man made a will entrusting the education of the children to his wife, but appointing his two sisters’ husbands executors; and on his deathbed he asked his father to look after his children. Old Mr. Austen promised to do so, and also that the household goods should not be sold to pay off his son’s debts; but even before the funeral could take place, relations between father, daughter-in-law, and executors soured. Wills, and the avarice and bad behavior induced by wills in otherwise normal people, are a running theme of comedy, and some blackly comic scenes were now played out.

  Old Mr. Austen “forgot” his promise that her household goods should not be sold. She had to remind him, and under pressure, he said he would give £200 to save them. Just as the money was about to be handed over, he too died suddenly. When his will was read, it showed open hostility to his daughter-in-law. Her eldest son was magnificently provided for as heir to the estate, while the other six were left almost penniless. Mrs. Austen begged her brothers-in-law to remember their father’s spoken promise, but they easily talked themselves into overriding it. “These things I did not well take of them, for I tho’t they did not perform ye promise made me at my father and husband’s death to be kind to me and my children.”

  Indeed: but there was nothing she could do. She was too poor to appeal: “I had no pockett to know ye opinion of my Lord Chancellor.” So over the next few years she sold off her silver, her bed with its hangings and much of her household linen. She had to borrow money to keep the household going, but she did manage to pay off her husband’s debts. Then, as the children grew, she began to worry about their education, because there was no school at Horsmonden.

  Now Elizabeth showed her exceptional spirit. He made inquiries, and was told of a schoolhouse to be let at “Sen’nock” (Sevenoaks). The applicant must be prepared to lodge and look after the Master of the school and take some pupils as boarders: in effect, the headmaster was looking for a housekeeper and matron. She applied and was successful; she also made an agreement with the Master that all her boys should receive free education in return for her work. It was a social step down, but the good far outweighed considerations of that kind: “it seem’d to me, as if I cou’d not do a better thing for my Children’s good, their education being my great care . . . for I always tho’t if they had Learning, they might ye better shift in ye world.” It is the voice of a meritocrat, and a very sensible one she was.

  In June 1708 she took up her work at Sevenoaks. She kept her accounts carefully for eleven years, and saw her daughter married and her sons launched on careers. The eldest son was brought up quite separately by his aunts and uncles, sent to Cambridge, and came into his grandfather’s estates; he showed no disposition to befriend his less fortunate brothers. Elizabeth Austen died in Sevenoaks in 1721, and was buried where she was born, at Tonbridge.3 She cannot have been much more than fifty. Her life had been hard, but also heroic; father, husband, father-in-law, and brothers-in-law had all failed her and her children, and she had saved them single-handed, by a combination of grit and ingenuity. She was Jane Austen’s great-grandmother.

  Her son Francis became a lawyer, settled in Sevenoaks, worked steadily, invested shrewdly in property and became very rich; two astute marriages made him still richer. When her fourth son, William, finished his apprenticeship to a surgeon, he set up practice in Tonbridge and married, in 1727, the widow of another medical man, with one son, William Walter.4 Four more children were born, a girl who died, a second girl, Philadelphia, in 1730, a son George—Jane Austen’s father—in 1731 and another girl, Leonora, a year later; her birth killed the mother. William married a second, much older wife in 1736, only to die himself within a year. His widow felt neither affection nor obligation towards his children, who found themselves turned out into the care of a reluctant Uncle Stephen in London, while their stepmother remained in their father’s house. Orphaned and ejected from the nest, they had a hard time.

  Stephen Austen was a bookseller in St. Paul’s Churchyard, with a wife, Elizabeth, and one son. They had no wish to acquire a large family, and, although they agreed to keep little Leonora, Philadelphia was passed on to a maternal aunt, and George to his father’s sister, Aunt Hooper, in Tonbridge. There he did well, attending the school from 1741 for six years, studying some mathematics but mostly the classics, since Greek and Latin texts provided the standard educational fare. He was a hard-working boy, and at sixteen he was awarded a Fellowship reserved for scholars of Tonbridge School to enable him to go to St. John’s College, Oxford. Happy and successful at Oxford, he had no difficulty in taking his degree and decided to remain to study divinity, winning a further Exhibition to do so in 1751.

  Meanwhile his sister Philadelphia had a more difficult time. As soon as she reached her fifteenth birthday in May 1745, she was apprenticed to a Covent Garden milliner, Hester Cole. The apprenticeship records at the Public Records Office show that a sum of £45 was paid for her to spend five years learning how to make and sell hats from Mrs. Cole, widow of Christopher Cole, milliner. So while George was at Oxford on the way to becoming a gentleman, she was in central London serving her apprenticeship to a trade that was only on the border of respectability.5 To be described as a little milliner carried a suggestion of something altogether more dubious. John Cleland’s famous pornographic novel Fanny Hill made good use of this equivocal status when he delivered his heroine Fanny into the care of a Mrs. Cole of Covent Garden, “a middle-aged discreet sort of woman,” ostensibly a milliner, actually a bawd: “In the outer parlor, or rather shop, sat three young women, very demurely employed on millinery work, which was the cover of a traffic in more precious commodities; but three beautifuller creatures could hardly be seen . . . as it happened, I could not have put myself into worse, or into better hands in all London.” The coincidence of names and professions is all the more startling in that Fanny Hill was published in 1748–9, which was exactly the period of Philadelphia’s employment by Hester Cole. Two things may be said about this. First, that it seems unlikely Cleland was unaware of the existence of the real Mrs. Cole—Covent Garden was not a vast area—and that if he intended his allusion to her business purely as a joke, it must have caused some embarrassing moments for Philadelphia and her fellow apprentices, Sarah and Rose. But secondly, even if it was not a joke, and Hester Cole was indeed engaged in more than one type of activity, we are not entitled to conclude anything about Philadelphia from Cleland’s fiction. The two Mrs. Coles of Covent Garden remain no more than a striking coincidence.

  As soon as she had served her time with Hester Cole, Philadelphia, showing some of the same enterprise as her grandmother, gave up all thought of millinery and announced that she was taking off for India. Men went to India to make their fortunes through trade, honest or dishonest, and women went with a somewhat similar object, as everyone knew even if no one said so. Their business was to find a husband, the richer the better, among the Englishmen working there; and they had a fair chance, because Englishwomen were in very short supply. Phila, as she was known in the family, was bright and pretty, but none of this had brought her proposals of marriage in England, where men looked for brides with money as well as charm, and little milliners were not well placed to catch husbands. In India, there was a better hope. It sounds a bleak way of going about things, but for many decades it was quite a standard procedure for young women to be shipped out to British colonial territories in this way.6 It m
ay even be that in her case the whole process was set in motion by her lawyer uncle Francis, acting for a client in the employ of the East India Company who wanted a wife. Still, Phila must have shown some enthusiasm, a great hatred of millinery and a lot of spirit to embark on so risky and uncertain a venture. She had to apply for permission from the Directors of the Company, and give the names of friends in India and sponsors, or “sureties,” in England.

  The apprentice register from the Public Record Office, showing, four lines from the bottom, Philadelphia’s name as “Philadelphia Austin,” a common variant spelling, and a blank for the name of a parent, since she was an orphan. Her apprenticeship is dated from May 9, 1745, almost certainly her fifteenth birthday—she was baptized May 15, 1730—and is to Hester Cole, milliner, Covent Garden.

  The permission was given, and Philadelphia’s story began in earnest. Her years as an apprentice milliner were blotted out, and seem never to have been mentioned in the family. The trip round Africa and through the Indian Ocean took six months, and she was entirely responsible for herself from the moment she stepped aboard the Bombay Castle. Two years before her, the same journey had been made by a clever Westminster boy of eighteen; his headmaster grieved that he was not allowed to go on to the university, but his guardians were convinced he had a better chance in life as a clerk in the East India Company. His name was Warren Hastings, and he and Philadelphia, both poor orphans, both intent on improving their status, already had much in common although they did not meet for some years yet. He went north to Calcutta, while she remained where she landed in August 1752, in Madras. India was in a state of turmoil, violence flaring, the Company uneasily poised between attempts to assume the role of government and concentration on its trading enterprises; and in these it was often fleeced by its own employees, many of whom preferred amassing fortunes privately to performing their official duties.

  One of these employees became the husband of Philadelphia. Six months after her arrival in Madras, in February 1753, she was married to a man named Tysoe Saul Hancock. He was thirty, had been in India for five years, nominally as a surgeon to the East India Company, really with his eye on making a fortune for himself by trading. So far he had done only moderately well, and he was scarcely the husband a young woman dreams of. He was not particularly able, or amusing, or charming; on the other hand, Francis Austen was his lawyer in England, so perhaps the deal had been made in advance. Hancock was very pleased to have a delightful young wife, and eager to treat her well. News of the marriage must have reached George in Oxford by the summer of 1753.

  There was no marriage in prospect for Leonora. She remained with Uncle Stephen and Aunt Elizabeth Austen; he was doing well enough to acquire a house in Islington, where she provided a useful pair of hands. No one put up money to apprentice her to any trade, although it is conceivable she helped out with the bookshop. She and her sister presumably saw one another during Phila’s years in Covent Garden, but just at the time Phila left for India Stephen Austen died, and since no one else wanted Leonora or had anything to offer her, she stayed on with his widow. Elizabeth Austen soon married another bookseller, a Mr. Hinton, who accepted Leonora as an unremarkable fixture of the household.7

  Brother Austen and sister Hancock wrote regularly to one another. The years went by; both approached thirty, but there came no word of any little Hancocks from India, and there seemed no prospect of marriage for George. Then Philadelphia’s life in India changed spectacularly in 1759 when the Hancocks moved north to Bengal and there formed a close friendship with Warren Hastings. By now Hastings, the biggest meritocrat of them all, was advancing on the brilliant path that would make him governor first of Bengal, and then India. He was dedicated to work, and he loved and understood Indian life and literature as no one else in the Company did. He was also an arrogant man, behaving more like an Indian despot, it was said, than a British civil servant; a good master but a bad colleague. Against this, he was lonely and unhappy following the death of his wife in 1759; their infant daughter had lived for a few weeks only, and their small son George was about to be sent back to England for the good of his health and his education. Hastings owned a town house in Calcutta and another with a garden at Belvedere, Alipur; airy, splendid palaces, they must have felt painfully empty.8 It is possible that Philadelphia had known his wife aboard the Bombay Castle; if so, she must have been doubly welcome as a friend. 9

  The two men, Hastings still in his twenties and on a rising wave of success, and Hancock, an undistinguished man in his forties, now appear to have embarked on a private business partnership involving a whole series of trading ventures, “in salt and timber and carpets, Bihar opium, and rice for the Madras market.”10 Money was made, and Hancock felt he had a valuable friend and patron. We do not know how he reacted when, after eight years without children, Phila told him she was expecting one; but he welcomed the baby girl born in December 1761 and conducted himself thereafter as a devoted father. She was christened Elizabeth and known as Betsy or Bessy for the first years of her life; later she became Eliza. Hastings agreed to be her godfather; her name was of course the same as that of his dead daughter.

  Was she Hancock’s child or Hastings’s? Lord Clive asserted that Mrs. Hancock “abandoned herself to Mr. Hastings,” warning his own wife not to keep company with her; and the question is not an unreasonable one to ask even if there is no certain answer.11 On one side of the argument is the fact of Phila’s childlessness for the first eight years of her marriage. Then there is the likelihood that a widower, young, lonely, rich, and handsome, might well become the lover of a pretty and entertaining married woman of his own age whose husband is not very agreeable to her. The other side of the argument is that Hancock was always a fond husband and father. Would he have behaved as he did if he suspected that there was anything wrong? I believe he might. He may simply have decided not to think too closely on the subject; although he was a grumbler, he was an affectionate man, and glad to have a daughter he could claim as his own. Pride too may have decided him to brazen out the situation.

  Whatever the facts, everyone concerned behaved with outward decorum, and it is unlikely that any gossip reached Philadelphia’s brother George in Oxford, although he may have wondered privately. In 1764 Hastings and Hancock were winding up their opium transactions together; Hastings had by now built up a spectacular private fortune, and Hancock had put by what seemed a comfortable sum.12 The whole party was preparing to sail for England together, Hastings, the Hancocks with four-year-old Betsy, and their Indian servants; the trip cost Hancock £1500.

  Meanwhile George Austen’s progress had continued smoothly. At twenty-four he was ordained in Rochester Cathedral. He was now at the age considered by Sir Thomas Bertram as the most suitable for marriage in a young man; but there was no question of marriage for him yet. He had as little fortune as his sisters, and no home; their stepmother was still living in their father’s house in Tonbridge. Yet Kent drew him back. Uncle Francis was there, growing more prosperous from year to year, as were his other uncles and aunt; and George found a position as Second Master at his old school. It gave him a house, and he was able to supplement his earnings by lodging some of the boys, as his grandmother had done; but it was not enough to launch him on a properly independent life. During the school holidays he sensibly returned to Oxford to keep up his contacts, and when after three years his college invited him to be assistant chaplain, he went back gladly. He took another degree in divinity. He was well liked, and was soon appointed Proctor, in charge of discipline among the undergraduates, and known as “the handsome Proctor” for his bright eyes and good looks. By now he had certainly met the niece of the Master of Balliol, Miss Cassandra Leigh, and may have begun to think the life of a bachelor Fellow, however comfortable, had its drawbacks.

  But it was some time yet before he was able to marry, even though he was presented with the living of Steventon in 1761, through the good offices of a second cousin married to a landowner with estates in Kent
and Hampshire. Cassandra Leigh’s father may not have thought such a modest and out-of-the-way parish a good enough prospect for his daughter; at all events, another three years went by, and the death of her father, before George persuaded her that this, together with the small inheritances each expected, did offer a sound enough basis for a life together, and she accepted his proposal.13 A marriage contract was drawn up and signed, and the ceremony took place on April 26, 1764 at the old church of St. Swithin, Walcot, Bath. He was thirty-two, she twenty-four. No other Austens were present; her mother was there, and her brother James Leigh-Perrot and sister Jane were the witnesses. She wore a red riding habit for the occasion, suitable for the journey across Somerset, Wiltshire, and Hampshire. They set off at once, stopped overnight at Devizes, and arrived the following day at the parsonage at Deane, which was to be their first home before the ramshackle rectory at Steventon was put into better order.

  That autumn Philadelphia had news of her brother’s marriage, and in January 1765 left India for England, arriving six months later on June 16.14 The Hancocks took a house in Norfolk Street and Hastings settled near by in Essex Street, off the Strand. On Hastings’s arrival in England he was given the news that his son, George, whom he had not seen since he was four, had died of diphtheria the previous autumn, before they set sail. The death was both upsetting and even embarrassing for Mrs. Hancock, because it happened while the boy was in the care of her newly married brother George and his wife; he can have been with them at most for six months. It looks as though Phila recommended her brother to Hastings as an experienced schoolmaster with a wife and a suitable country residence, with the thought that he would make a kindly foster father, and that the income would be useful to him. There was nothing wrong with the plan; only the child, having already lost his mother, been separated from his father and sent half way across the world to be cared for by strangers, might have fared better without further disturbance. He could even have been more resistant to sickness; as Betsy Hancock said later, “mental & bodily sufferings are ever closely connected.”15 Family tradition says Mrs. Austen loved the boy, and both she and her husband must have been appalled at his death in their care, while she was pregnant with their own first child. 16