Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  The exercise is brilliant. So brilliant, that Austen may have frightened herself, and felt she had written herself into a dangerous corner, and been too clever, too bold, too black. She set the story aside and, although she copied it out a decade or so later, never tried to have it published, and was clearly not encouraged to return to it by anyone in the family. Had she not felt some interest and pride in it, she would not have kept it. The fact that she did not follow it up with anything remotely resembling it suggests that she decided to censor the part of her imagination that interested itself in women’s wickedness, and particularly sexual wickedness. Not until Mansfield Park and Mary Crawford did the spark of Lady Susan take a little fire again: only to be quickly re-extinguished. But the fire was there, however banked down.

  8

  Neighbours

  At home, she read, wrote and followed her own imagination; outside, among the neighbours, she entered another world that sprang its own surprises and dramas. The society in which the young Austens found much of their entertainment was made up of the households of clergymen, squires, aristocrats, Members of Parliament, entrepreneurs, doctors and lawyers, mostly living within a range of about fifteen miles. A steady, backbone-of-England, unchanging rural society is what you expect to find; but the strange fact is that they formed a very unstable group, and that many were what has been called in this century pseudo-gentry, families who aspired to live by the values of the gentry without owning land or inherited wealth of any significance. There were remarkably few Dashwoods or Darcys, Bertrams, Rushworths or Elliots; Bingley’s uncertainty about where he belonged and where he might settle comes much closer to them.

  Far from making up a solidly established network of old families, many were recent arrivals in Hampshire, coming from other counties and countries, often changing their names in the process; few had more roots in the place than the Austens themselves, and some moved on again, either from choice or driven by debt or scandal. The more closely you look at them, the more they appear as a fluid, arbitrary group, families who merely happened to be where they were at that particular time, some floating in on new money, others floating out on their failure to keep hold of old.

  Among the aristocratic families at whose balls Jane put in occasional appearances in the 1790s, the resoundingly named Lord Dorchester of Kempshott Park turns out to be an Irishman of very modest origins. He had worked his way up through the army, carving out a brilliant career for himself in Canada; he then married the daughter of an earl, and was made a baron and awarded a pension of £1,000 a year for life in 1783. He was an honourable man who deserved well of his country for saving Quebec, and he chose a title with a fine English ring to it, but inside it he was Guy Carleton of Strabane, a thorough-going meritocrat without local affiliations; and he merely took a lease on Kempshott for a few years, before moving on to another house near Maidenhead.1

  The Dorchesters’ neighbour at Hackwood Park, Lord Bolton, also sported a brand-new title. He came from Northumbria as simple Thomas Orde, achieving his transformation by marrying, in 1778, one of the illegitimate daughters of the fifth Duke of Bolton; and he took the name of Bolton when she had the good fortune to inherit some of the Bolton estates. This was in 1795, when Jane Austen was twenty; he was created Baron two years later. He aroused Mr. Austen’s interest by building particularly elegant pigsties, which he visited “every morning as soon as he rises,” according to a letter Jane sent her sister. She also told Cassandra she had preferred to sit down “two Dances in preference to having Lord Bolton’s eldest son for my Partner, who danced too ill to be endured”; and in another letter passed comment, not very politely, on Lady Bolton’s improved appearance in a new wig.

  A few years before these Boltons took over Hackwood Park, it had been the childhood home of the Revd. Charles Powlett, a clergyman serving the tiny nearby parish of Winslade when the Austens knew him, and appointed one of the Prince of Wales’s chaplains in 1790, despite never managing to take his degree at Cambridge. He was the son of a naval officer who died young, but more significantly the grandson of the third Duke of Bolton and his long-time mistress (and finally wife), the actress Lavinia Fenton, who played the first Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera. Powlett was something of a character, witty, diminutive in size, and with oddly shaped limbs; and he could be charming, for Jane Austen does not seem to have been too offended by his attempt to kiss her during the Christmas party season in 1796. Two years later she was rather more severe about him when he gave a dance, having by then acquired a wife “discovered to be everything the Neighbourhood could wish her, silly & cross as well as extravagant.” He became a byword for extravagance himself; and his wife appeared “at once expensively & nakedly dress’d” on social occasions, otherwise failing to arouse Jane’s interest. After her death, the Powletts’ spending habits proved their undoing, and they were forced to leave for the Continent, from which they were never able to return. You can easily imagine them as figures in a Thackeray novel, living on remittances in a Brussels boarding house, and sometimes surprising new guests with reminiscences of parish life on the one hand, and the Prince of Wales, dancing at Hackwood and “the Duke my grandfather” on the other.2

  The Portsmouths of Hurstbourne Park were older and more solidly established aristocrats; but they were struck by tragedy and a long-running and horrific scandal during the period in which the Austens knew them. It is impossible to believe that knowledge of it failed to spread in the district where, to use Jane’s own phrase, every man was “surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies”; although no word of it survives in any Austen letters.3 The Austens had particular reason to be aware of it, because the third Earl was known at Steventon from his childhood when, as Lord Lymington, he was brought to be Mr. Austen’s pupil. This was two years before the birth of Jane, in 1773. The little lord was “between five and six years old, very backward of his age, but good tempered and orderly,” according to Mrs. Austen, and her Jemmy and Neddy were “very happy in their new play-fellow.”4 But after about six months Lord Lymington’s mother removed him, “alarmed at the hesitation in his speech, which certainly grew worse.”5 He was taken to London to be cured by a Mr. Angier; whatever his methods, the stammer remained, and the young lord grew disturbed and eccentric. Outwardly he appeared to live a normal life; in fact the Portsmouth family kept a very strict eye on him. His two younger brothers, Newton and Coulson Wallop, also well known to the Austens, were both sent to Eton.

  In 1799, when Lord Lymington had succeeded to the title and reached the age of thirty-two, his brothers obliged him to marry the Hon. Grace Norton. She was then forty-seven and, whatever her reason for agreeing to the marriage—to become a countess was generally thought to be a sufficient one—the family’s chief reason was to make sure he produced no children, or at any rate no legitimate ones, so as to ensure the succession to the next brother, Newton. The Earl’s knowledge of the process of human generation was so uncertain that he believed it took fifteen months from conception to birth, and he was said to be impotent; still it was thought better to be on the safe side. The family further appointed trustees to superintend his property, one of whom was John Hanson, a London lawyer who was also the young Lord Byron’s man of business.

  One of Lord Portsmouth’s eccentricities was that he took an obsessive interest in funerals (“black jobs”) and slaughterhouses. He would get his servants to stage mock funerals for his amusement, and visit slaughterhouses in order to strike the animals awaiting death with a stick or an axe, saying as he did so, “Serve you right.” It sounds horribly like a compulsive repetition of some punishment received as a child himself, perhaps from Mr. Angier, although that can be no more than a guess. He also enjoyed having his servants and animals beaten, and once, when his coachman was lying in his room recovering from a broken leg which had been set by a surgeon, the Earl visited the injured man and re-broke his leg. Despite these habits, his social façade was kept up, and in November 1800 Jane Austen reports that he spok
e kindly to her at a ball and particularly asked to be remembered to Cassandra in her next letter; she gave no indication that she found his manner in any way out of the ordinary. “Lady Portsmouth had got a different dress on,” she added, indicating that she had seen her recently at another social occasion. The Portsmouths then gave a ball at Hurstbourne, their great mansion in its landscaped park, to which she went with pleasure; no sign of “black jobs” or beatings as the Hampshire gentry went through their paces in the cotillion, although she did report that her hand shook the next day from drinking too much wine at the ball.6 The house was one of James Wyatt’s, built in the 1770s and enormous, with a central block and two wings each as big as the main building; it stood in a grandly landscaped park, with a lake and carefully placed knolls of trees.

  In a later stage the Portsmouth saga became more diabolical. John Hanson, Lord Portsmouth’s lawyer trustee, “rented” a Portsmouth house and estate for himself at Farleigh, close to Basingstoke; in effect he got it for nothing, the rent being supplied by the legal fees due to him from the Earl. Hanson introduced his daughters to Lord Portsmouth, and entertained shooting parties; Byron came down in August 1805 for some “destruction of the feathered Tribe” in the “Rural Shades and Fertile Fields of Hants,” just before going up to Cambridge, and met some local sporting families, among them the Terrys of Dummer, well known to the Austens.7

  Hanson had a very good reason for installing his family in Hampshire; he made careful plans, and, when Lady Portsmouth died at the end of 1813, acted rapidly. He had Lord Portsmouth brought to London, drew up a marriage settlement between him and his daughter Mary-Ann Hanson, and asked Byron to be a trustee to the settlement, telling him that Portsmouth wanted to marry a young woman and was resisting his brother’s efforts to force him to marry another old one. Neither Lord Portsmouth’s brothers nor any of the other trustees were informed of what was going on.

  Hanson’s son Charles procured a marriage licence with blanks for names, and the ceremony was hurried through at St. George’s, Bloomsbury, in the presence of Byron, who noted in his diary that Portsmouth “responded as if he had got the whole by heart; and, if anything, was rather before the priest.” He also reported him as saying “he had been partial to Miss Hanson from her childhood” on the way to church, then afterwards telling his coachman that he had not expected to have a new wife, and didn’t want the one he had got, but her sister. The younger Hanson sister, Laura, was beautiful; Mary-Ann was not. But Byron “saw her fairly a countess—congratulated the family and groom (bride)—drank a bumper of wine (wholesome sherris) to their felicity, and all that—and came home. Asked to stay to dinner, but could not.”8 He seemed unaware that he had been a party to something sinister.

  The new Countess dismissed all the servants from Hurstbourne Park and instituted a reign of terror, having her husband regularly whipped and installing a barrister friend of her father who tortured and beat him into total submission. This regime continued until 1822, when Portsmouth’s brother Newton began proceedings to have the marriage declared void and Mary-Ann’s three children—one of them named Byron—illegitimate. Byron himself was accused of having been one of Mary-Ann’s lovers but denied it (“my liaison was with the father, in the unsentimental shape of long lawyer’s bills”), and there is no reason to doubt his word. All the Hansons fell into disgrace and poverty, but Lord Portsmouth, rescued from his persecutors, proved remarkably tough and lived on into his eighties.

  This last part of the Portsmouth story happened after Jane Austen’s death. At the time of the marriage, however, she took note of it: she was in London herself, in Henrietta Street with her brother Henry, in March 1814, and wrote with enigmatic brevity to Cassandra, “What cruel weather this is! And here is Lord Portsmouth married to Miss Hanson!” As a tale of horror, it is far beyond the fashionable Gothic fiction she knew and satirized in Northanger Abbey, the novel she began in 1798, worked on and rewrote intermittently over many years, during which the Portsmouth–Hanson story unfolded.9 Even supposing she heard no more than faint rumours of the Earl’s taste for mock funerals, beating and torture of men and animals, some connection between having such a nightmare neighbour at Hurstbourne Park and the second half of Northanger Abbey does come to mind. Catherine Morland was wrong in her fears and suppositions about the goings-on at the Abbey, but she was not wrong in fearing its master, General Tilney, who was indeed both eccentric and cruel. The Portsmouth saga makes Catherine’s dark suspicions of an ill-used and murdered wife in Northanger Abbey seem mild stuff.

  The Terrys, whom Byron met when he stayed in Hampshire in 1805, were an old-established family, with a very handsome small manor house in Dummer, within easy walking distance across the fields from Steventon.10 Thirteen Terrys were born there to the squire and his wife between the mid-1770s and the 1790s, and a good many of them figure in Jane’s letters. As a group, she called them “noisy”; but she was on friendly terms with the girls and danced with the boys, among them Stephen, the eldest son, who joined the North Hants Militia, Robert, who went into the regular army, and Michael, who became a clergyman and was later engaged to Jane’s niece Anna. The second Terry girl in due course read Emma and particularly admired Mrs. Elton; and two of her sisters married neighbouring squires’ sons, one a Digweed at Steventon, the other a Harwood at Deane. But the Harwood family too was in trouble, with an accumulation of debts and mortgages they could not hope to settle. The eldest son felt unable to marry and spent his life paying off his father’s debts, and the younger sank with his Terry wife from land-owner to humble yeoman farmer; they became something like Hampshire Durbeyfields. The Digweeds also had problems, and Jane’s “dear Harry Digweed,” his Terry wife and most of their children ended their days in exile in Paris, more victims of economic decline.

  Old money failed and new money took its place. The Portals of Laverstoke were an enterprising Huguenot family from Languedoc who arrived in Southampton in the early years of the century, driven out of France by religious intolerance, and wasted no time making their mark. Henry de Portal was naturalized in 1711, bought a lease on Bere Mill on the River Test in 1712, and began to make paper. He was so successful that he acquired Laverstoke Mill, rebuilt it in 1719, and in 1724 got the contract to make the Bank of England notes; it was his idea to watermark them.

  Henry Portal’s son Joseph became High Sheriff and bought the Laverstoke estate, the next generation prospered further, and by the 1790s the Portals were important Hampshire land-owners. Jane Austen included them in her list of the grandest families at a ball in 1800; they demolished Laverstoke House in 1796 and had it handsomely rebuilt in neoclassical style.11 The brothers of this generation also owned the manor at Freefolk Priors, and Ashe Park House, which they rented out to a bachelor with a West Indian fortune, James Holder, the man whose tendency to lunge at ladies made Jane Austen keep hold of the door handle when she found herself alone with him in his drawing room.12

  Other new money had thoroughly murky origins. Sir Robert Mackreth, who acquired an estate at Ewhurst in 1802, had begun life as a billiard marker at White’s Club, become rich as a bookmaker and unscrupulous money-lender, and been given a pocket borough and then a knighthood for his services to the government without ever losing his unsavoury reputation where financial matters were concerned.13

  The Biggs were also newcomers. They did not appear in Hampshire until 1789, when Lovelace Bigg of Wiltshire inherited Manydown from cousins called Wither, and moved in, a well-to-do widower with five daughters and two sons. To complicate matters, father and sons changed their names to “Bigg-Wither,” while the girls strong-mindedly kept to their simple original “Bigg.” The two elder daughters soon married and the elder son died young in 1794, leaving the three sisters who became the Austen girls’ friends. Their little brother Harris, then thirteen, was a stammerer like Lord Portsmouth; his father had him educated at home by a private tutor, with no bad effects.

  Elizabeth Bigg attracted two serious wooers, one of them Joh
n Harwood, her neighbour at Deane House, the other William Heathcote, a baronet’s son from Hursley Park near Winchester. The Heathcotes were old friends of the Portals, and a highly respectable and conventional family; one son went into the navy, the daughters made comfortable marriages, and William was a fine, fox-hunting clergyman who became a prebendary of Winchester. The portrait of him in his hunting coat, flanked by his father and the Master of the Foxhounds, shows what a good-looking creature he was, with a face that could have modelled for Darcy or Willoughby.14 His elder brother became one of the MPs for Hampshire; they were generally returned unopposed in that Tory county.

  The simple slogan on which the Tories contested Hampshire was “Heathcote and Chute for ever.” William Chute, Heathcote’s fellow Member, was, however, another who grew up somewhere else—in Norfolk—and under another name: he was called William Lobb until he was nearly twenty, when his father inherited The Vyne through a Chute grandmother. The Vyne was (and remains) a large, handsome Tudor house outside Basingstoke, and the inheritance was magnificent enough to warrant a change of name for the whole family, which included a sister Mary and a much younger brother, Thomas, born in 1772. 15 They kept their property in Norfolk, but moved to Hampshire in 1776. Tom Chute was of an age to make friends with the Austen children, and he grew up to hunt with James and Frank, and to dance and play cards with Cassandra and Jane. He was “full of wit and fun,” and it is very possible that the young Chutes, neighbours of just the right age, either joined in or at least were in the audience for the theatricals at Steventon; Tom was particularly close to James, whose friend he remained for life.16

  William Chute was educated at Harrow—where he was the statesman Spencer Perceval’s fag, which may be what propelled him into Parliament—and then Cambridge. He enjoyed a Grand Tour on the Continent and spoke good French. Thomas missed going abroad because of the war, but went straight from Cambridge into one of the cavalry regiments raised in Hampshire in 1792; like Henry Austen, he became an enthusiastic officer, and did a lot of recruiting around Basingstoke. He was also a reader, and almost certainly the more intelligent of the two brothers.