Jane Austen

by Claire Tomalin

  Eliza went to Godmersham for two weeks, alone; she and Henry were often apart. He had given up his commission and set up as part banker, part army agent, with offices in Cleveland Court, St. James’s; he also opened a branch of his bank at Alton in Hampshire. Some months after the death of his stepson, he wrote to Warren Hastings to solicit financial help, and was politely turned down. “I regard with sensations little short of horror the possibility of appearing to you capable of meanness or rapacity,” explained Henry in a further letter; but that source of patronage was now firmly closed off.10 Another avenue of opportunity opened when the Treaty of Amiens made it possible to travel to the Continent again. Austen family tradition has it that he and Eliza travelled to Gabarret together to try to claim her first husband’s estates, or at any rate what was owing to her and her mother from them; and that they were nearly trapped in France by the ending of the peace, and got back to England thanks only to her near perfect French. French tradition suggests that the English Monsieur “Ostin” was not welcome in the Gers. Jean Capot de Feuillide’s brother and sister had already made their claim to the Marais and taken possession; but no one had the resources to restart the drainage scheme, the land was unproductive, and the money that had been poured into it was lost.

  Another death that struck Jane Austen more nearly came on her twenty-ninth birthday, when her old friend Mrs. Lefroy suffered an accident. She had been riding to Overton to do her shopping, accompanied by a servant. In the village she happened to meet James Austen, and remarked to him on the stupidity and laziness of her horse; but on her way home the same horse bolted. The servant failed to catch the beast, and in trying to dismount she fell on the road. The effects were beyond Mr. Lyford’s skill, and within a few hours she was dead. Jane had hardly time to come to terms with this news when her father was taken ill. He had “oppression in the head, with fever, violent tremulousness, & the greatest degree of Feebleness.” Everything happened very fast, and “being quite insensible of his own state, he was spared all the pain of separation, & he went off almost in his Sleep.”

  This was Jane’s account to her brother Francis in January 1805. She spoke warmly of their father and his “virtuous and happy life,” and with what seems like curious detachment of “the Serenity of the Corpse” being “most delightful!—it preserves the sweet, benevolent smile which always distinguished him.” “The loss of such a Parent must be felt, or we should be Brutes.” Indeed: although this sounds still more detached. If Jane was reliving her childhood memories of her father, thinking over the times she played in the church vestry and he allowed her to write the names of imaginary husbands in the parish register, she kept such thoughts, and her sorrow, firmly to herself. She was, as always, practical and sensible, and she did what she thought best, finding a pocket compass and a pair of scissors that had belonged to their father to send to Frank; and you can be sure she was attentive in every way to her mother, whatever the dryness and coldness about her heart.

  Mr. Austen died in a house in Green Park Buildings East to which they had moved not many weeks before, after the lease on Sydney Place ran out, and now they had to move again. They found modest lodgings at 25 Gay Street, while the Austen brothers worked out how best to support their “dear trio” of women, left with a much diminished income. The Church did nothing for widows and orphans of clergymen, as the Watson sisters knew. Mr. Austen’s livings went to the next incumbent—in this case his son James—and his little annuity ended. Generous Frank wrote at once offering £100 a year, although he had recently become engaged to a Ramsgate girl with no money of her own; but he felt happy, with his pretty nineteen-year-old Mary Gibson promised to him, and rich, because he had just been appointed Flag-Captain of HMS Canopus, a fine French ship carrying eighty guns, captured at the battle of the Nile. It was to be used to chase the French across the Atlantic.

  Mrs. Austen would accept only half his £100. James and Henry each offered a more cautious £50. Henry wrote of his own “present precarious income,” and mentioned Frank’s expectations of £500 a year from the Canopus. Both he and James travelled to Bath to see their mother, and James came away thinking she would be happy to spend her summers “in the country amongst her Relations” and her winters in “comfortable Lodgings in Bath.” He had nothing to say about his sisters; it did not occur to him that they might like, and benefit from, a permanent home.11 Charles was far away patrolling the Atlantic for American ships seeking to trade with France; he could do nothing. Edward was expected to add another £100 a year. Mrs. Austen and Cassandra each possessed a little capital, enough to produce something like £200 more. Jane had nothing.

  The precariousness of Henry’s financial situation makes you wonder what had happened to his wife’s fortune. There was enough of it left, at least, to finance their expensive life in London, where they kept a carriage and a superbly named French chef, Monsieur Halavent, in their house in Upper Berkeley Street, off Portman Square; and Henry needed well-situated offices, choosing them first in St. James’s, later at the Albany. He was able to make frequent visits to Godmersham. In fact he was there when the news of his father’s death came; and he was back again for three weeks in May and June, then briefly in August, and for another month at the end of the year, which suggests that office routines at the bank were not too onerous. No doubt he believed his business depended more on good contacts with rich men prepared to pay high interest rates on what they borrowed than on day-to-day bookkeeping. Up to a point he was right; but banking was a high-risk business.

  Hastings’s nurse, Madame Bigeon, was too closely attached to the family to leave their service after the death of her charge. Her own daughter, Marie Marguerite, was married in the Catholic church in King Street, Portman Square, on 7 June 1805, close to her employers’ house. Henry was at Godmersham, but Eliza must have given her blessing. The bridegroom was a Frenchman, Pierre Frayté or Fraytet, dit Périgord, which suggests he was a soldier from the Perigord district in south-west France; it was a common thing for men in the French army to adopt the name of their place of origin in this way, rather than using their parents’ name. He was thirty-five, and the bride was thirty; as it happens, the same age as Jane Austen.12 The bridegroom disappears from the story again after the wedding, and Madame Perigord, as she always called herself, remained with her mother, childless, and attached to Henry’s and Eliza’s household.

  This same June, Jane left Bath for Godmersham with her mother and sister. On the way they stopped at Steventon to collect Anna. Mary had just given birth to her second child, Caroline, and was naturally very much occupied; this generation of babies was not put out to nurse, and Caroline was not weaned for nine months. In Kent, Edward’s Fanny and James’s Anna enjoyed themselves together; they read romances in the appropriate Gothic seat in the park, fortified with “gypsy” baskets of bread and cheese. Fanny’s diary also noted that her grandmother and aunts played at school with them, and joined in theatrical performances. It was during this visit that Jane made friends with the governess, Anne Sharp, no mean actress herself.

  Wed. 26 June. Aunts & Gmama played at school with us. Aunt C was Mrs. Teachum the Governess Aunt Jane, Miss Popham the Teacher Aunt Harriet, Sally the Housemaid, Miss Sharpe, the Dancing Master the Apothecary & the Serjeant, Grandmama Betty Jones the pie woman & Mama the Bathing woman. They dressed in Character & we had a most delightful day.—After dessert we acted a Play called “Virtue rewarded.” Anna was Duchess St. Albans I was the Fair Serena & Fanny Cage a Shepherdess Flora. We had a Bowl of Syllabub in the evening.13

  In August they put on The Spoiled Child, one of the biggest hits of the London stage, in which Mrs. Jordan triumphed year after year as “Little Pickle,” the naughty boy of the title. Another part for Miss Sharp, perhaps, given her willingness to take on male roles. There was dancing and much merriment. One evening Jane and Elizabeth went to a ball in Canterbury, where Henry had arranged to meet them. Fanny says nothing in her diary about the troop movements in Kent, caused by anoth
er invasion scare, but we know they were worrying her father and his land-owning friends, fearful that their game would be disturbed by the soldiers: a case of weighing up the relative disadvantages of invading Frenchmen and a shortage of pheasants. Fortunately they were not put to the test. This was the last invasion scare of the war, and, at the end of August, Napoleon evacuated the Boulogne camp and turned his attention elsewhere. Edward took Fanny to London to stay with Henry and Eliza; there was a theatre party, and she met Lord Charles Spencer at dinner at the Albany. Then back to Kent, and the whole family, with Mrs. Austen, Jane and Cassandra, was taken to Worthing. It was altogether a busy, cheerful, luxurious life at Godmersham.

  “Seven years I suppose are enough to change every pore of one’s skin, & every feeling of one’s mind,” wrote Jane to Cassandra this year, thinking back over the drama and upheavals they had gone through. She did not need to say that in seven years she had lost home and father. Nor did she care to spell out that she now had little prospect of marriage; and that she had almost lost hope of getting anything published. It was unnecessary to state that she was penniless, dependent on her brothers, and obliged to accept whatever living arrangements were chosen for her. These were not things you wrote down; if possible you did not allow yourself even to think about them.

  18

  Brotherly Love

  We must not all expect to be individually lucky. The Luck of one member of a Family is Luck to all.” The words are put into the mouth of Emma Watson, trying to make the best of a bad situation; Jane Austen may have wanted to convince herself of their truth, or at any rate to try out the idea. Families can be support systems when the lucky ones pass on their luck to the others, but at bad times they feel more like traps from which you want only to escape. Emma Watson discovers as much. So did Jane, in the years immediately following the death of her father. Whatever individual luck her brothers enjoyed, it was not easily passed on to her, as a glance at their situations shows.

  James first. He had taken over their father’s living at Steventon, and remained comfortably at Steventon rectory with Mary and his three children, Anna by his first marriage, clever, sensitive and unhappy in feeling she was slighted by her father as well as her stepmother; good little James-Edward, and baby Caroline. There were to be no more. James’s time was given to Church duties, to hunting—he bought his son a pony and introduced him to the sport early—and a quiet social round that centred on his regular dinners with the Chutes at The Vyne. He also devoted a good deal of energy to writing poetry, some to amuse his immediate family—there is a very funny account of the family cat Tyger stealing the steak meant for his dinner—and some long, serious, melancholy works; but he had published nothing since The Loiterer. He was gifted, but he could not channel his gifts effectively. His wife ran the house, garden, cow and poultry; she drove her own little chaise and was on good terms with the neighbours. Once or twice a year they might go to see a play put on in Basingstoke, or attend a Basingstoke ball; nothing ambitious. They were always ready to be hospitable to Cassandra and Jane; this did not prevent considerable tensions between brother and younger sister.

  George, the luckless member of the family, his condition unchanged for better or worse, remained at Monk Sherborne; he was approaching forty, and continued to share his life with his Uncle Thomas, who would soon be sixty. James, being so close, was no doubt deputed to keep an eye on their care, and Mrs. Austen could, if she chose, visit her son and brother when she stayed with James. Did George recognize his mother? If he suffered from cerebral palsy, he could well have done so, and other members of his family also. To them, although they made sure he was cared for, he remained unmentionable; another silence in Jane’s life.

  To balance George’s bad luck, Edward enjoyed the spectacularly good. He owned not only Godmersham and all its lands but large estates in Hampshire as well. Chawton House, near Alton, was let out to tenants, and Steventon Manor was still leased to the Digweeds. His wife’s family also possessed fine houses and estates in Kent; and he could expect a further increase in his fortune when his benefactress Mrs. Knight died. He was rich in children too; in 1806 he and Elizabeth already had nine, five sons and four daughters. The bigger boys were at boarding school at Eltham, preparing for Winchester; the girls studied with governesses at home; Miss Sharp, Jane’s friend, left at the beginning of 1806, giving poor health as her reason, although she took another job at once. Edward could afford to take his family for seaside holidays and trips to London, staying at a hotel in Jermyn Street, dining with Henry and Eliza and their grand friends, and going to the theatre. He lacked imagination and was uninterested in books or ideas, but had a good head for business and a kindly, uncomplicated nature. He was fond of his family and his wife’s family, entertained them all freely, and took pleasure in planning expeditions and treats. But his sisters may well have asked themselves how much of Edward’s luck was passed on to them when even the idea of providing a permanent home for them and their mother did not occur to him at the time of his father’s death, although he must have had houses at his disposal. What did occur to Elizabeth with increasing frequency was that Cassandra should help out with her children. Cassandra’s visits to Godmersham may have given her the chance to put the idea of a house into his head; if so, it took some considerable prompting.

  Henry needed little prompting at any point in the conduct of his life. Ambitious and optimistic, he must have envied Edward, to whom everything was given, while he had to struggle and make his own luck entirely by his wits. He is the odd one out among the Austen boys, the one in the middle, quite as adventurous in his way as the brave sailor brothers; and he was the only one of them, George aside, to remain childless. He was always said to be Jane’s favourite as well as their father’s, who lent or gave him more money than any of his brothers; and she remarked more than once in her letters on how agreeable he was, how he never failed to be amusing, how much she enjoyed his company. At the same time there is something indulgent in her tone when she writes of him, as though she favoured him in the way a sweet unreliable boy may be favoured. I have already suggested Wickham has a touch of Henry; I guess she gave some of his wit to Henry Tilney, and to Henry Crawford his play-reading skills and all-purpose flirtatiousness. Crawford’s readiness to be moved by innocent goodness while keeping a taste for dangerous games could owe something to him too. Where Jane and Henry resembled one another was in seeing the possibilities in things: for her, the possibilities presented by her imagination; for him, the possibilities presented by life. An engagement, a career move, a friendship in high places, a possible patron, a new bank branch, even a simple pleasure jaunt would catch his fancy and set him going, alight with enthusiasm.

  In 1806 he was expanding his banking business optimistically; later he took the brother of a friend from the militia into partnership, James Tilson, whom Jane was to know well. He and Eliza had moved to Brompton, then on the outskirts of town, where they continued to lead a somewhat semi-attached existence. He spent the New Year celebrations for 1807 at Godmersham without her, joining in plays and other festivities, and was in Kent in July, en garçon again, for the races; while Eliza stayed in London, with her music and her books. Fanny’s diaries make clear how delightful both she and her mother found him: sociable, entertaining, the perfect house guest.

  Clever too; and yet a faint question mark hangs over Henry. Jane’s letters suggest that the Miss Pearson to whom he was engaged before he married Eliza bore him a grudge for his treatment of her, despite his claim that she jilted him; she may have felt he gave her cause. He strikes you as a shade too eagerly on the make, with his rich friends— not to mention his rich wife—and his sycophantic letters. All that ambition and optimism had to ride on the hectic, ostentatious society for which the Prince of Wales set the standards, and into which Henry had been introduced through his aristocratic fellow officers in the regiment. With his brains, his charm, his taste, his desires, he was a man of his time, and saw no reason why he should not win fo
r himself the rewards and pleasures he could see there for the taking. I do not for a moment believe he gave up a career in the Church because Eliza expressed a preference for a secular husband; it was because he saw better possibilities elsewhere.

  Francis, closest to Jane in the nursery, then away for many years, grew close again, and especially in 1806. What she knew of his experiences in the navy moved her to admiration for his courage, endurance and practical skills; and she was sympathetic when, in the unluckiest moment of his career, he missed the Battle of Trafalgar in October 1805.1 She could have no opinion of what she did not know, of shipboard brutality, of clandestine services to the East India Company, or high-handed dealings with foreign powers; she saw a sober, sensible, well-conducted brother who served his country single-mindedly at sea and deserved a happy life at home. To his impatience to be married in the summer of 1806 she gave her warm support, even without meeting Mary Gibson, the Ramsgate girl he fell in love with while commanding the Sea Fencibles on the North Foreland. He was thirty-two, an age when a man has surely earned the right to a wife. And he could afford to marry; there was prize money, there were formal thanks from the House of Commons, and other rewards coming in after he chased the French across the Atlantic, commanding the Canopus, and contributed to their defeat at the Battle of St. Domingo.