Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  In the study their father kept his rows and rows of books; one of his bookcases covered sixty-four square feet of wall, and he was always collecting more, not just the classics but new ones, from which he read aloud. 10 He also knew enough science to show them the worlds in miniature revealed by his microscope, the “animalcules” living in a drop of rainwater infused with hay, or the exquisite workmanship of a butterfly’s tongue, an insect’s egg or a fish scale. These were thrilling sights, and proof of the way in which the divine organizer patterned and planned everything in the universe.11 But Mr. Austen’s world was as much the farm as the study. The children often saw him riding about on his horse, and conferring with his bailiff John Bond. He had to worry about the price of wheat, barley, sheep and pigs, take on labourers and lay them off, decide what crops to sow and when to harvest. Then there was his parish business to attend to, and his Sunday services. He wrote some of his own sermons at least, although he was frugal with them; the manuscript of one shows that he preached it seven times at Deane and eight at Steventon. 12 He was a busy man but good-tempered, no doubt prizing domestic life the more for having been an orphan himself. He took to neither drink nor gluttony, the traditional supports of the country clergyman, and managed to be his sons’ schoolmaster without losing their friendship. He accepted that his children’s different temperaments set them off on different paths: James and Henry scholars; Edward not cut out for classical studies but with a more practical turn of mind; and Francis born to be a man of action. All received his kindness and interest. He could be down-to-earth. When he gave advice to Francis as a young man setting off for his first sea voyage, he reminded him to be vigorous not only in saying his prayers but also in brushing his teeth and washing regularly.13 There is something fresh and pleasant about Mr. Austen’s concern for well-brushed teeth.

  Every week rose to a sort of climax on Sunday when Mr. Austen, transformed by his black gown, presided in church. Their mother’s province was the dining parlour, the kitchen, the poultry yard, the dairy and the vegetable garden, with their succession of regular events. Bread was baked, and beer was brewed at home and stored down in the cellars; the parsonage had its own cows to be milked, and the cream churned by the dairy maid for their butter. The washerwoman came once a month to tackle the piles of dirty linen, disrupting everything with steam and suds. In June there was haymaking, when the children were supplied with small hayrakes; in July there was boiling of jams and jellies; in August the harvest; in September you heard shooting. The freedom conferred by good summer weather and long hours of daylight was precious; as the year moved round and candles were lit earlier and earlier, and fires in the parlour and the dining room, the children longed for bright, frosty days that allowed them to get out of the house freely. James Austen wrote of the “female foot” not getting through the lanes in mud, snow and flood, while men and boys could almost always manage on horseback; it was one of the sexual distinctions everyone accepted, and made bad weather a sort of imprisonment for women and girls. Itching chilblains on fingers and toes afflicted almost everyone; and Mrs. Austen caught colds that were worse than anyone else’s. Energetic as she was, she sometimes took to her bed. But there were no epidemics, and no repetition of the tragedy of George Hastings.

  Growing up in a school meant that Jane knew exactly what to expect of boys, and was always at ease with them; boys were her natural environment, and boys’ jokes and boys’ interests were the first she learnt about. This is obvious in what has survived of her earliest writing; although there is none from before the age of twelve, the influence is clear. It is full of boys’ humour, starting with the talk of horses and vehicles, journeys and accidents, all topics young men were as much obsessed with then as modern boys are with motor bikes and cars. There is a lot about drunkenness too, always good for a laugh among boys. There are drunken quarrels, and characters are found “dead drunk,” or actually die of drink.

  Food is another source of jokes, “stinking” fish and game, underdone veal and curry with no seasoning, and other dishes likely to have been unpopular with schoolboys, fried cow-heel and onion, tripe, red herrings, liver and “crow” (i.e., giblets). A man at an inn orders “a whole egg” to be boiled for his and his servants’ dinner. Food is funny in itself, and by association. A girl’s face turns “as White as a Whipt syllabub” when her future husband is killed; another—called Cassandra—devours six ices at a pastry-cook’s shop, refuses to pay for them and knocks down the pastry-cook; a third remains, under provocation, “as cool as a cream cheese.” Of two sisters, one loves drawing pictures, the other drawing pullets: schoolchildren’s word play. And there is a fine boys’ joke about a man jilting his bride because the marriage date coincides with the first day of shooting.

  Ugly and deformed girls provide another source of humour: one is “short, fat and disagreeable,” another has a “forbidding Squint,” “greazy tresses” and a “swelling Back.” Female efforts to improve appearances with red and white cosmetic paint are good for a laugh too. There is a great deal of cheerful violence, including several incidents which might be called fun murders. There is a hanging. There is a steel mantrap that catches a girl by the leg. There are characters driven by hunger to bite off their own fingers.

  Jane Austen was a tough and unsentimental child, drawn to rude, anarchic imaginings and black jokes. She found a good source for this ferocious style of humour in the talk she heard, and doubtless sometimes joined in, among her parents’ pupils, bursting out of childhood into young manhood. If she was sometimes shocked as she listened, she herself was learning how to shock by writing things down.

  At Christmas 1782, when Jane was seven, there was something new for her to listen to. Her brothers put on a play. It was a tragedy called Matilda , and perhaps responsible for Jane’s smart dismissal of another play a few years later, “it is a tragedy and therefore not worth reading.” 14 Matilda may have been chosen because it was the work of a respectable Surrey clergyman, had been premièred by Garrick only seven years before, and needed only five principal actors; but Jane’s judgement was better than Garrick’s. The action is set in the time of William the Conqueror, when Morcar, Earl of Mercia, and his brother Edwin are both in love with Matilda, daughter of a Norman lord. She loves Edwin, but they are held prisoner by Morcar, who decides to have his brother murdered. A trick prevents the foul deed, Morcar repents, and the lovers marry. The writing is an all too familiar sub-Shakespearean:

  Confusion! horror! misery! O heaven!

  Canst thou behold such complicated guilt,

  Such unexampled perfidy, and yet

  Withhold thy vengeance? Let thy lightnings blast

  The base betrayer! O Matilda! false,

  Deceitful, cruel woman! . . .15

  Two sets of brothers, Austens and Fowles, seem to have taken part in this fratricidal play, for which James wrote the epilogue, spoken by Tom Fowle. As to Matilda and her waiting woman, Cassandra and Jane were ten and seven, surely too young, which leaves you to wonder whether Henry, aged eleven, put on one of his mother’s gowns for the occasion. I rather hope so, but it is also possible their cousin Jane Cooper, another eleven-year-old, was allowed to come from Bath to take the part.

  James took his theatricals very seriously, and contributed a prologue as well as an epilogue, contrasting the ancient stage with the modern, and showing off his knowledge of the special weather effects required in Matilda:

  When Thespis first professed the mimic art

  Rude were his Actors, and his stage a cart;

  No scene gay painted, to the eye displayed

  The waving honours of the sylvan glade.

  No canvas Palace pleased the wondering sight,

  Nor rosined lightning flashed its forked light:

  No iron bowl the rolling thunder forms,

  No rattling pease proclaim the driving storms . . .

  And so it goes on for many more couplets: he has done his research, but he cannot quite match his mother’s light touch w
ith verse. One hopes the evening was relieved by unintentional humour at least; Matilda must have made considerable demands on the attention of those friendly neighbours—Digweeds, Portals, Terrys, Lyfords—who were invited to the performance in the Austen barn, even if their sons figured as spear-bearers and attendants. That James had some doubts about the enterprise appears in the opening of the epilogue: “Halloo, good gentlefolks! What, none asleep?” You can be sure that the seven-year-old girl in the audience was wider awake than anyone.16

  4

  School

  One’s heart aches for a dejected Mind of eight years old,” wrote Jane Austen when she was thirty-two, hearing of two small nieces being sent unwillingly away to boarding school. She knew what she was talking about, because she herself was sent away at the age of seven. While the Austen boys were kept at home until they were twelve at least, the two girls were subjected to much tougher treatment. There may have been a financial motive for this brisk decision, their parents reasoning that they could more than cover the cost of the girls’ school fees by using their room for further boy pupils. Mrs. Austen was also surely influenced by loyalty to her sister Cooper, who had decided to send her daughter Jane to school and wanted companions for her there. And there was another point that weighed with the Coopers: the school was set up by Mr. Cooper’s widowed sister, a Mrs. Cawley, and sending her pupils was a piece of family support. No one seems to have worried that Jane Cooper was eleven to Jane Austen’s seven.

  Even before the school plan was laid, the Coopers, wanting companionship for their daughter, were in the habit of inviting Cassandra to stay in Bath. Jane felt the loss of her sister, signalling it on one occasion, when their father had gone to collect her at Andover on her return from Bath, by setting off with Charles to meet them on the road, to the considerable surprise of Mr. Austen when he saw the two children trudging along so far from home. This powerful dislike of being left behind by Cassandra was enough, perhaps, to make her think she would rather go to school with her than stay at home without her.

  Mrs. Cawley, as well as being Jane Cooper’s aunt, was eminently respectable, as the widow of a Master of Brasenose, and her school was in Oxford, familiar territory to both Austen parents. James was now at St. John’s, and Mrs. Austen’s uncle was still master of Balliol; not perhaps much comfort to two small girls, but in principle able to keep an eye on things. Essentially, Mrs. Austen must have decided she could trust her sister’s choice, and brushed aside any anxiety about sending such a young child as Jane away from home. There is, however, a note of defensiveness about her explanation, decades later, that it was Jane herself who insisted on going: she was “too young to make her going to school at all necessary, but it was her own doing; she would go with Cassandra; ‘if Cassandra’s head had been going to be cut off, Jane would have her’s cut off too.’ ” 1 According to Mrs. Austen’s granddaughter Anna, who is the source of the story, this actually applied to her later departure for another school, when she was nine; if so, it makes the earlier decision even harder to understand.

  It does suggest that Jane, following Cassandra’s absences in Bath, felt that the prospect of losing her again was more than she could bear; and that her sister, sharer of her bedroom and her secrets, represented something she did not find in her ever active mother. But she was too young to grasp what it would really mean to be far from home and consigned to the care of strangers. Other children endured as much, of course, and Mrs. Austen may have feared that Jane would become wild and out of control at home among so many boys. She may have recalled too that her sister-in-law Jane Leigh-Perrot had been packed off from the West Indies at six to be sent to boarding school in England, and survived the experience well enough. In any case she had a house full of boys to look after; and she convinced herself it would be best for all concerned. It was Jane’s second banishment from home.

  Whether Mrs. Austen even met Mrs. Cawley is not on record; one of the Austen parents presumably took their daughters to Oxford in the spring of 1783, but as soon as they were delivered, both parents set off on a holiday trip. It meant they were out of touch for some time. Mrs. Cawley would have taken her pupils into her own house, just as the Austens did; a child used to the countryside must have found the contrast between life at Steventon and life in a town house difficult to cope with. Then, to a seven-year-old who has never thought about time before, a term stretches like a limitless desert ahead; and the sense of loss and powerlessness on finding yourself cut off from home, parents, brothers, familiar faces and familiar places can turn the world into a very bleak place indeed.

  Boarding schools for girls were not hard to find in the 1780s, not least because keeping a school was one of the very few ways in which a woman could hope to earn a respectable living; but accounts of what went on in them make depressing, and sometimes horrifying, reading. At the time the Austen girls were sent to Oxford, a seven-year-old called Elizabeth Ham, daughter of well-to-do parents in the West Country, found herself at “Ma’am Tucker’s Seminary” in Weymouth, where the pupils were fed on the principle “eat the bread and smell the cheese,” and all made to sleep in the drawing room. By day Elizabeth was kept confined in the same unaired room, sewing on a wooden bench for hours at a time until she and her eyes were worn out, Mrs. Tucker occasionally enlivening things by reading aloud from The Pilgrim’s Progress. The child was removed when she was found to have caught the itch, but once recovered she was sent to a far worse school at Tiverton, run by two genteel sisters. Here she was put to share a bed with a girl five years older than herself, thought a suitable friend because both came from Weymouth; but the big girl took to turning the little one out of bed before daybreak so that she could have it to herself; and Elizabeth sat shivering in the early morning cold.2

  Sharing a bed was more common than not; Arthur Young’s dearly loved daughter Bobbin fell ill at her fashionable boarding school in London, where she shared a “vile” small bed with a deaf girl who would lie on one side only, forcing Bobbin into excruciating discomfort. Like Jane, she was a country child, used to running about in the fresh air, and this she was no longer allowed at school: running was forbidden, very little time was spent out of doors, and the food was poor and scanty. “She abhorred school,” wrote her father after her early death. “Oh! how I regret putting her there.”3

  Children were often half starved by their schoolmistresses because they were struggling against poverty themselves. This was the case at Elizabeth Ham’s Tiverton school, where breakfast was hot water—the girls could supply their own tea—a dash of milk and a halfpenny roll; dinner, boiled mutton or suet pudding. At tea-time an old woman came round selling biscuits, three for a halfpenny, and there was the same provision of hot water. Supper was bread, cheese and cider. As for their studies, they learnt by rote from the Dictionary, the Grammar and a book of Geography; there were never any questions. They read from the Bible in the morning and the history of England or Rome in the afternoon; a master came to teach writing and arithmetic each morning from eleven to twelve, and the Dancing Master came twice a week. Every now and then there was a half-holiday, when the girls were allowed to visit nearby farms, and able to gorge on fresh bread and clotted cream. They could not complain in their letters home, because these were “corrected” and sealed by their schoolmistresses; and the worst time of all was when Elizabeth was left at school with some other girls over the Christmas holidays, and they had to endure being frozen as well as starved. One night she enterprisingly crept down and stole a leg of roast goose while the teachers were enjoying a party; you feel like cheering the little thief.4

  Not all girls went through such horrors as this, and one hopes Mrs. Cawley at least fed her charges better. Maria Edgeworth, also sent at seven to school in Derby, after the death of her mother and her father’s remarriage, and left there for at least a year without going home, nevertheless remembered the school with affection. She was taught French, Italian, dancing, embroidery and copperplate handwriting, and she entertained her
self and the other girls by telling stories when they were in bed at night. When it was decided to send her on to a smart London boarding school she was much less happy, for there she was made to wear backboards and iron collars to improve her posture. 5

  There are many more examples of the wretchedness of girls’ schools chosen by rich and seemingly well-informed parents. Dr. Johnson’s friend Mrs. Thrale sent her four- and five-year-old daughters, Harriet and Cecilia, to boarding school in 1783; there was a measles epidemic, Harriet died, and Cecilia was only just saved by her mother’s intervention; she was then sent to another boarding school when she was ten. Mary Butt, who became the writer Mrs. Sherwood, and was the same age as Jane Austen, also went through a measles epidemic at her boarding school in which a small girl in her room died, uncomforted by her parents; they probably did not even learn of her illness until it was over.

  Mrs. Cawley’s school narrowly avoided the same thing. First she decided to move her little group from Oxford to Southampton, which the Austen parents either accepted as a fait accompli when they heard of it, or welcomed, since Southampton was closer to home. Unluckily it was also a port where troops returning from abroad were arriving in large numbers, and in the summer of 1783 they brought an infectious fever with them, which spread around the town. Both the Austen girls and their cousin became ill. Mrs. Cawley thought it unnecessary to inform their parents, whether from a belief that she could manage and did not want them disturbed, or out of incompetence and callousness. Most fortunately Jane Cooper ignored her instructions not to write home and managed to send a message to her mother in Bath. It was alarming enough to bring both Mrs. Cooper and Mrs. Austen to Southampton. Jane Austen was by then in danger of her life.

  She was nursed back to health by her mother, and taken home. Cassandra and Jane Cooper also recovered; but Mrs. Cooper had caught the infection and, back in Bath, she died of it in October. Her husband was left grief-stricken and hardly able to cope. After this, Jane Cooper spent more time at Steventon, becoming a part of the family, and a favourite with all her cousins.