Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  Still, when William Chute succeeded his father as owner of The Vyne in 1790, he was thirty-three, single, and in possession of a decent fortune and estate, and one of the best houses in the district. It is to be supposed that neighbouring families with daughters of marriageable age thought him in want of a wife, and that the matter was talked over from time to time among the ladies of the district in the usual way. At that point Jane Austen was fourteen, old enough to hear what was said and speculate as to which of the young ladies of the district might be lucky enough to be chosen.

  On coming into his estate, William Chute also entered Parliament, in principle establishing himself as one of the most influential as well as the most eligible young men in the county. As it turned out, Parliament failed to engage his interest much; although he voted steadily with the Tories for the next thirty years, he never spoke in the House. His heart was always in Hampshire, where he kept a pack of hounds and a stable of fine horses; politics simply could not compete with hunting. He would sometimes send instructions from the House of Commons for his hounds to be brought out to meet him on his ride home from Westminster—it took him about seven hours—so that he could enjoy a gallop with them over the last stretch. Not surprisingly, he became a noted local character on the hunting field. One day he slipped at a fence while hunting and his horse trod heavily on his thigh. His fellow huntsmen gathered round in alarm, fearing he was badly injured, and when he managed to get up, his friend John Portal said anxiously, “I thought we were going to lose our member.” “Did you?” replied Mr. Chute, rubbing the injured part. “Well, I can tell you I thought I was going to lose mine.”

  He was a robust and cheerful man, did his duty at the Winchester assizes, dined the freeholders when an election was due and attended the Basingstoke Club. In 1793 a marriage was arranged between his sister Mary and the neighbouring squire of Oakley Hall, Wither Bramston. The prospect of losing Mary—who no doubt ran his house for him—may have spurred William to look for a bride. He had no difficulty in finding one, but he disappointed the Hampshire mothers. The Member for Devizes in Wiltshire, Joshua Smith, had four daughters, three of them unmarried, and in April, when they were all in London, he introduced Chute to Elizabeth, a shy, serious girl in her early twenties whom he decided to court. Her diary records the wooing, not quite in the terms of an Elizabeth Bennet. “Mr. Chute to dinner” at the end of April is followed by “Mr. Chute in the morn” on 15 May. On 10 June, “Mr. Chute to dinner. Sopha conversation.” 17 Two days after the sofa conversation she wrote, “Mr. Chute in the morn. Mr. Chute to dinner. Answer.” It was not settled yet, because the next day’s entry goes, “Mr. Chute to dinner. Miss Cunliffe to supper & slept with me. Final decision.” This signalled the engagement. She then set off for Weymouth, where she rode on the sands and read Thomson’s Seasons until Mr. Chute arrived and replaced Thomson with Robertson’s History of America, which he read aloud. Later, at her home in Wiltshire, there were musical evenings and they enjoyed Much Ado about Nothing together. The diary risks nothing about what she felt for Mr. Chute; it merely notes that she spent sixpence on a toothbrush.

  All the Smiths returned to London in October, and Mr. Chute’s visits multiplied, morning, evening, breakfast and dinner, sometimes with his brother Tom. On 6 October the two men went off to Hampshire for their sister’s wedding, returning three days later. Then, on Tuesday, the 15th, Eliza wrote, “I was married at St. Margaret’s at 1⁄2 after 9 set off a quarter before 12 stopped 20 mns at Bagshot & arrived at the Vyne quarter after 5. white frost sunny unclouded sky may it be a happy omen.” She had never seen her new home before, with its beautiful brickwork and Palladian porch, its chapel adorned with Tudor stained glass and wood carving, Gothic rooms, long panelled gallery and exquisite classical hall and staircase installed in 1770. Splendid as it was, she must have found it an ordeal to be faced with so much that was strange, as well as the housekeeper, butler, footmen and maids, all on the evening of her wedding day.

  The next day they were called on by the Miss Biggs of Manydown House and their father. Two days later there were a great many morning calls, from James Austen and his father and mother with one of his sisters (“Miss Austin”); and other local families, John Harwood from Deane House, the Revd. Mr. and Mrs. Lefroy from Ashe, and Chute’s sister, Mrs. Bramston from Oakley Hall. The bride returned some of these visits on 13 November, calling at Manydown to see the Miss Biggs, at Ashe on the Lefroys, and at Steventon on the Austens, where again only one daughter put in an appearance. She then dined at Oakley Hall with the Bramstons, staying for supper and playing cards, a version of Snap, which she called “snip snap,” until eleven. The following evening she went to a ball in the Basingstoke Assembly Rooms, where she danced with the Revd. Charles Powlett and with one of the Wallop brothers; and a week later she met Lieutenant Francis Austen, just back from the Far East, at a dinner at the Lefroys.

  The lives of the Chutes and the Austens touched at many points. The Vyne stood within the parish of Sherborne St. John, where James Austen was vicar, and they had him to dinner—without his wife— almost every week; he hunted with the Chute brothers, and he and his wife used Chute’s franks for their letters.18 There are innumerable references to “Mr. Austin” in Eliza Chute’s diaries and a fair number to other “Austins”: she never managed to spell their name as they did. For example, “16 Jan. [1794] Basingstoke ball. I danced six dances with Mr. H. Austin”: Henry’s charm working as usual, for Eliza rarely records dancing more than twice with the same partner. “Tues. 26 March [1799] Dined at Mr. Austins comp [i.e., company]: Mrs. Miss Austins Mr. Digweed & us two.” The “Mrs. Miss Austins” here are Mary, Cassandra and Jane.

  Eliza Chute was exactly the sort of young woman you would expect to become a friend of the Austen sisters, and not only because she formed an immediate bond with their great friends the Biggs. She was gentle and sometimes uncertain of herself, very nervous, for example, about appearing at public balls that first Christmas in Hampshire, when her mother wrote to her, “I am glad for your Sake there are no Minuets at Basingstoke, I know the terror you have in dancing not that you have any occasion for such fears.”19 She had intellectual stamina; she learnt French and Italian well enough to read in both and to write serviceable French. She was, like the Austens, a devourer of novels, Fanny Burney’s, William Godwin’s, Charlotte Smith’s, Gil Blas and Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse; she read Mme de Sévigné, Mme de Maintenon, Clarendon, Voltaire, Johnson’s Rambler and Shakespeare. She enjoyed theatre-going and music, and owned a harpsichord. She painted well: her husband put this talent to use by setting her to make portraits of his foxhounds, on the grounds that they were as deserving as humans. She was a keen gardener, turning the long hall at The Vyne into a conservatory. She responded to the natural world, commenting in her diary on “a falling star,” “glow worms in the lane,” a September evening when she stayed out late because it was “so heavenly & the moon so beautiful”; and the effect of frost on a bright day, “trees in sun uncommonly beautiful in appearance, glittering like glass or diamonds.” A trip to Box Hill in September 1802 inspired her to lyrical praise of its magical slopes, woods and views; she praised it as one of the most beautiful spots in England.20

  But Eliza Chute did not form a friendship with either of the “Miss Austins,” and Jane’s few words about the Chutes suggest she did not care for either of them, much as she liked Tom. In 1796 she notes William’s call at Steventon with “I wonder what he means by being so civil.” Four years later she reports a meeting with Mrs. Chute and her sister-in-law at Deane House: “They had meant to come on to Steventon afterwards, but we knew a trick worth two of that.”21 The note of hostility is so strong that there must have been a reason for it. Perhaps she felt the Chutes condescended from their grand house and superior social position. Perhaps Eliza Chute stole too much of the time and attention of the Lefroys and the Biggs, with whom her diary records regular dinners and joint expeditions. It remains odd, because Eliza Chute need
ed friends. Coming as she did from a merry and comfortable family, she suffered from loneliness at The Vyne, made worse by her husband’s passion for hunting. Many entries in her diary read only “the gentlemen hunted” or “Mr. Chute hunted” or simply “a blank day.” And as the months and years went by, and no children appeared, she became sad.

  After ten years of marriage, in 1803, she adopted a child. The wife of a cousin of Mr. Chute died, leaving a large family, and three-year-old Caroline Wiggett was brought to The Vyne to cheer Mrs. Chute. All her life Caroline remembered crying for her nurse and her father; but she became the pet of the house, overcame her fear of the tapestries on the walls, and for five years slept in Mrs. Chute’s bedroom. Then she was put into her own room, without a fireplace: these are her reminiscences. She was particularly fond of Uncle Thomas (Chute), who came for three months every winter from Norfolk, bringing his horses, Kicker, Slyboots and Thunderbolt; but nobody thought of letting her visit her family, even when her brothers were at school in Winchester. She was twelve before contact was re-established. There is something here of Fanny Price’s story in Mansfield Park. There are several such parallels between Chute experience and Austen imagination.

  The most stable group of the Austens’ neighbours is very little documented. This was the Steventon village community, among whom all the children had spent their first years. In spite of this, the gulf between the gentry and the lower orders—what James Austen called the “nine parts of all mankind” who were “designed” for labour— remained absolute and unquestioned; both sides believed that God had arranged the system.22 The death of an old family servant, reported in a letter to Eliza Chute from her mother, allows her the grace of neither a first name nor a “Mrs.”: “Poor Old Stevens died the death of the righteous, worn out with length of days she resign[ed] her Spirit without a Groan into the hands of her maker.” It goes on with the formal phrase about her “having performed the duties of the Station of life in which he had pleased to place her in this world,” and ends by wishing her “a better lot hereafter.” 23

  The Austens were a little closer. Many of the names of the Steventon families appear in Jane’s letters. She called the married women with children Dames: there was Dame Staples (Elizabeth) and her many children, Dame Kew (another Elizabeth) with her husband William and four children. Robert and Nanny Hilliard, the Steevens family, Mary Hutchins, Betty Dawkin, the Batts, Matthew and Susannah Tilbury and their four children, and other Tilburys with their four, are all mentioned. So is Daniel Smallbone and his Jane with their eight; and the two farm bailiffs, Corbett and John Bond, who worked for Mr. Austen; and the Littleworths, or Littlewarts. Bet Littleworth emerges as a character because she was remembered by the adult Edward Austen as a childhood playfellow, and is one of the few whose subsequent life can be traced; she became a “rather small and delicate looking” woman who chose to do the work of a man, once walking from Hampshire into Kent and back on an errand, presumably for the Austens.24

  Almost all the men were employed in farm work, at between seven and eight shillings a week; around Steventon the women eked out the family income with home spinning until mills took over in the later years of the century, leaving them poorer. The brighter and luckier village children might find work at the manor houses or rectories. Boys could be employed in the stable or the garden, and if they did well go on to become coachman, gardener or even house servant; and the more presentable girls might become dairymaids, nursemaids, kitchenmaids or housemaids. Jane Austen calls a kitchenmaid an “Under” and a housemaid a “Scrub.” If this sounds impersonal, the differences between their experience and hers must have been almost unbridgeable.25 Few village children learnt to read or write; they went to work as soon as they could be put to watching cattle or sheep, or scaring off crows. By far the best jobs in the district were at the Portal papermills, where men were paid twenty-two shillings a week and women seven pence a day, with “red letter days” allowed as paid holidays; this was quite exceptional.

  Villagers were not expected to behave like their betters in all ways. The Austens’ bailiff, John Bond, gave his sweetheart a child before they married, and no one seems to have minded.26 On the other hand, Mrs. Austen mentions Mr. Digweed discharging his manservant for making a village girl pregnant; the man married the girl, and Digweed was “sorry to part from him as he liked him much—but it was right to do so.”27 Discrepancies of this kind must have been puzzling to the servants. The Austens were capable of real goodness to theirs on occasion; when the Bonds’ cottage burned down in their old age, James Austen took them into his rectory, where they were presumably given a garret room and a place in a corner of the kitchen in which to live out their days. 28 The alternative would have been the workhouse, where the destitute were maintained on two shillings and sixpence a week from the parish rates. There children were separated from parents and set to work winding silk or preparing hemp and flax; and families were known to endure frightful hardship rather than accept such a separation, to the surprise of their betters.

  Ladies knew they had a duty to give charity to village families, in the form of blankets, clothes, and children’s and baby things. Such gifts were much relied on, as necessities rather than as luxuries. Mrs. Chute handed out blankets in almost wholesale quantities. Jane Austen also gave Christmas gifts: “I have given a pr of Worsted Stockgs to Mary Hutchins, Dame Kew, Mary Steevens & Dame Staples; a shift to Hannah Staples, & a shawl to Betty Dawkins.” This is from a letter to Cassandra in 1798. Since she had no money beyond the little allowance her parents made her, the six Christmas offerings to women in the village suggest how seriously she took the obligation to help the poorest of her neighbours. One of them, of course, may have been her own nurse.

  The Austens’ neighbours, shifting, diverse, eccentric and sometimes outrageous in their behaviour, look like a great rich slab of raw material for a novelist to work on. In fact their lives were far too rich and heterogeneous for Jane Austen’s adult purposes. She was attentive to them, as her letters show; but military heroes, forced marriages, mad earls and bastard sprigs of the aristocracy make no appearances in her novels; nor do ruined squires, brilliant factory-owners of foreign origin or village girls, foster sisters of the rector’s children, who grow up into enterprising women. What Jane Austen wanted from the life around her, she took and used, finely and tangentially. We can make a few guesses. The noisy, cheerful Terrys may have made their contribution to the Musgroves in Persuasion. William Chute’s arrival in the neighbourhood may have distantly inspired the opening chapters of Pride and Prejudice. Lawyer Hanson’s daughter Mary-Ann could even have suggested Mrs. Clay, daughter of Sir Walter Elliot’s “civil, cautious lawyer,” Mr. Shepherd, with her aspirations to the baronet. Eliza Chute’s enthusiastically described trip to Box Hill may be echoed in Emma, and her adoption of her husband’s sad little niece in Mansfield Park. Some of these may be true links, others not; what is certain is that Austen took precisely the elements she wanted from her neighbours and no more; and that she transposed them to characters and locations which had very little in common with the people and places she knew so well in her Hampshire neighbourhood.

  Page from Eliza Chute’s diary

  9

  Dancing

  Are any of your younger sisters out, Miss Bennet?” asks Lady Catherine of Elizabeth, who answers “Yes, Ma’am, all,” and Lady Catherine is duly shocked, because the youngest is only fifteen. Keeping Lydia Bennet in would have been a hard task even for a determined parent, and, like the Bennets, the Austens took a relaxed view of what it meant to be out. This was the country; the Austen daughters had been joining in country dances at home from their earliest years, and knew all the neighbours’ sons and daughters; children took part in dancing, brothers danced with sisters, girls with one another. Each year there were newly named dances—you can read lists of them printed in ladies’ pocket-books—but they were all made up of the same familiar steps, jumping, setting, forming a ring, linking hands and arms,
moving up and down the sets, clapping, bowing and curtsying: variations on themes everyone knew as well as they knew how to run up and down their own stairs in the dark.

  From dancing at home to dancing at the Lefroys or the Digweeds was a natural and easy progression; to the Terrys at Dummer and the Biggs at Manydown only a slightly bigger one. By the time she was fifteen Jane might have a white muslin dress kept for evening occasions which required any degree of formality, and a special ribbon for her hair, but more often dancing would be impromptu, a matter of someone suggesting, after a neighbourly dinner or tea at half past six, that they might push back the furniture and make up a set with anyone present who felt like joining in. Dancing was the chief evening amusement among the Hampshire families in winter, the music depending mostly on mothers and aunts at the keyboard, or occasionally a servant with a fiddle. Jane could play the piano, but at her age would not be expected to sacrifice herself when there were older fingers to work in the good cause of the young people’s pleasure. Like her cousins Eliza and Phila, “Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it.” 1 She loved it, but she could also mock its social purpose and supposed powers: in Pride and Prejudice, she makes the mothers of Meryton, eager to catch sons-in-law, believe that “to be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.” Mr. Darcy is allowed to voice the reservations of his sex on the subject: “Every savage can dance.” True, but, as it turns out, the mothers are proved right, and even Mr. Darcy grows less rigid and more energetic. And it was to be a dance that brought Jane the one young man we know to have fallen in love with her, and whose love was returned.