Jane's Fame

by Claire Harman

  Susan Cooper thought that the book which her father had taken disgust at, and the one he was supposed to have emulated, were both ‘Mrs Opie’s or one of that school’, but in a study of 1938, Maurice Clavel pointed out the unlikelihood of Cooper seeking to make ‘an elaborate imitation in plot and character’ of a novel he thought too trashy to finish reading. More likely, Clavel argued, he was setting out to better the trashy novel by imitating authors of what, in a review of Lockhart’s Life of Scott, Cooper had categorised as ‘the healthful class of novels’, among whom he counted Edgeworth, Burney, Mrs Opie and Austen.

  George Hastings went further than this, and made a detailed comparison of Precaution and the Austen novel nearest in date (and title) to Cooper’s, Persuasion, which makes a convincing case for Austen being the copied novelist, but not the loathed one. Both books begin with a baronet renting out one property and retiring to another, both baronets have three daughters, and a favourite among them. Both books have heroines who are not the father’s favourite, who have an older female mentor, an admiring brother-in-law and who are courted unsuccessfully by a cousin. And so on … the similarities are ‘so numerous that one has difficulty in believing them all to be accidental’, and Cooper’s book, though twice as long as Persuasion and much more elaborate, ‘repeats almost every detail of situation, setting, character and plot used by Jane Austen’.27

  Cooper thought he had put Precaution behind him when he found fame with his later novels of American frontier life, The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans, but his British publisher and ardent advocate, Richard Bentley, wanted to include it in his Standard Novels series, necessitating a large-scale revision of the book. In an embarrassed preface, Cooper explained that he had never intended Precaution for publication, and once it had been accepted never expected to write another like it. It had ‘many defects in plot, style and arrangement, that were entirely owing to precipitation and inexperience’; ‘its English plot, and, in a measure, the medley of characters … no doubt will appear a mistake in the conception’. The book disappeared from his acknowledged oeuvre, but remains the unlikely springboard from which his later novels – and so much of American national literature – were launched.

  * * *

  If Austen can ever be said to have had a period of obscurity, it was during the 1820s, when her books were out of print, out of demand and almost out of mind. During her lifetime, Austen’s most successful book (in terms of sales) had been Murray’s first edition of Emma, which sold 1,250 copies in its first year. He had printed around 2,000 in 1815, and still had 565 copies unsold in 1818. Two years later, hardly any of these had shifted, and he remaindered the last 535 copies for two shillings a set. The initial price had been 21 shillings. A single copy of this edition sold in 1999 for £8,500.

  Emma was not the only title to be wasted. In 1820, Murray also sold off his stock of Mansfield Park (almost two-thirds of the original 750 copies of the 1816 second edition – a bad failure) and after one more year remaindered Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which had sold 1,400 copies in the first year, then sank to almost no sales at all. Egerton had kept Sense and Sensibility in print for several years, but the small 1813 edition does not seem to have sold out, and he probably remaindered the stock at the same time that he remaindered the third edition of Pride and Prejudice, in 1817. He held the copyright in the latter, so throwing in his hand indicates that he really didn’t think there was any more money to be made out of the title.

  Cassandra and Henry Austen may well have been relieved to hear of these developments, as they had to bear the cost of the losses for four of the five publications. At least, in 1821, they knew where they stood. Cassandra, now aged fifty-one and still living at Chawton with her elderly mother and Martha Lloyd, was modestly well-off, but Henry’s fortunes were declining all the time. He had not recovered from bankruptcy as little scathed as he anticipated, and his career in the Church was proving both demanding and ill-paid. His first appointment after taking Holy Orders in 1816 had been as curate of Chawton, and in 1819, after the death of his elder brother James, he succeeded to the old family living of Steventon. Quite why he didn’t maintain this position in his old home isn’t clear, but perhaps there was a financial advantage to resigning Steventon and taking up the curacy of Farnham, about twenty miles away, in 1822. Henry’s juggling of appointments within the Church seems to have had more to do with his taste for speculation than with parish needs or even private convenience.

  In 1820, seven years after his wife Eliza’s death, Henry got married again, to Eleanor Jackson, the niece of the previous Chawton vicar. Eleanor was a very different character from the late contesse, a pious and studious woman (author herself of An Epitome of the Old Testament in 1831) who encouraged Henry to live much more modestly than before. Retrenchment was absolutely necessary, as the financial repercussions of Henry’s bankruptcy continued to affect all corners of the family. Edward Knight and Uncle James Leigh Perrot had been the largest losers, but the poorer creditors rightly elicited most of Henry’s remorse. ‘I only mourn to see so little chance of my being able to heal those wounds by me inflicted on the property of others – and on you in particular,’ he wrote to his younger brother Charles in 1822. Henry was trying to make some extra money by tutoring boys, and was disappointed not to attract more pupils (the following year, he took on the superintendence of Farnham’s ancient Free Grammar School). Meanwhile, he had been forced to lower the Steventon tithes and couldn’t yet calculate the value of his Farnham curacy, but hoped it would bring in no less than £140 a year, of which they would lose £40 in rent. He was cutting down on all luxuries, he told Charles, had given up shooting (for the duration), dining out (unless with the Bishop) and socialising. But there was still too much work for one person to do ‘without a dangerous degree of exertion’, so Henry had incurred another expense – £40 a year – to employ an even poorer clergyman to take one of his Sunday services.

  This plan clearly wasn’t about saving exertion so much as maximising earning capacity, for Henry was only paying a delegate so that he could set up ‘what is called a Clergyman’s book’ and start an additional, subscribers-only service on Sunday evenings. He must have hoped that his parishioners were snobbish and competitive enough to make this a successful venture, but Farnham was possibly not the best place to try the manoeuvre. At the time he moved there, the town’s best-known son was the radical pamphleteer and soon-to-be parliamentarian William Cobbett, and I wonder if there is not some reflection of Cobbett’s influence in what Henry says to his brother, a little nervously, of his overall performance in the first year at Farnham: ‘I believe that I give on the whole a predominating satisfaction in the Church. There must always be some faultfinders. My predecessor had a strong party among tag rag & radicals – But his influence seems nearly decayed.’28

  Henry didn’t ever flourish as a clergyman, despite everyone’s hopes to the contrary. The cheerful spirits with which he had weathered so many previous difficulties seemed to have abandoned him, and Jane would hardly have recognised the brother who wrote in 1822 of past ‘days of Sunshine – of sunshine never to return as far as regards my worldly circumstances’.29 In a letter to Cassandra from his vicarage in Bentley, he described how hard he found it to concentrate on the job in hand: ‘I have been writing a sermon till my brains are dry. Not a drop of divinity left. But there may be a stream of other matters –’.30 By 1828, he was appealing to his nephew James Edward to defer until after his own death (and that of Eleanor) the £400 debt he still owed his dead brother James’s estate, and ended this difficult and embarrassing letter with the lament, ‘my dreams of affluence, nay of competence are closed …’31

  The family was divided more than ever between the haves and have-nots: despite the expense of maintaining two grand estates and eleven children, Edward couldn’t help but make large amounts of money, and James Edward Austen became a similarly fortunate heir in 1836 when Jane Leigh Perrot finally died and made him the master of her
handsome Berkshire estate, Scarlets, and recipient of the long-discussed Leigh Perrot thousands. Captain Charles Austen’s salary was lowish at best, and very variable, and his ‘little all’ in the 5 per cents had been liquidated.32 Francis had fared better, and was by 1825 living comfortably in Portsdown with a £10,000 settlement from the Leigh Perrot estate. Mrs Austen’s long-nurtured South Sea stock (which she had bought in the early years of her marriage partly with the proceeds of selling property left to her by her father) had fallen in value over the years from £3,350 in 1769 to a mere £2,185 in 1827 – a disastrously bad investment from which her children benefited to the tune of only £437 each after her death in 1827. Edward generously made over his share ‘for the use of my brother George’, the son Mrs Austen had overlooked altogether in her will, who lived on for a further eleven years in whatever cottage or asylum he had been sent to. Perhaps Edward had taken over the support of that all but invisible brother many years before.

  Cassandra had a small income from her Fowle annuity still, £1,000 from the eventual settling of the Leigh Perrot estate, her legacy from her mother and whatever remained of Jane’s bequest to her. This was a comfortable amount for an unmarried woman, trained to expect and require as little as possible for personal maintenance. By 1828, she was living alone at Chawton Cottage, following Martha Lloyd’s late marriage to the widowed Frank Austen and removal to Portsdown. As in her mother’s day, Edward charged no rent on the house and provided plenty of wood from the estate for fuel, so Cassandra’s basic overheads were covered. She managed her affairs far better than Henry, it hardly needs saying.

  In May 1831, Cassandra received a letter from John Murray, enquiring if he could buy the rights to her sister’s novels. Cassandra replied that she was ‘not disposed to part with the Copyright’ but was interested in seeing new editions after so many years out of print. Even in this first letter to the publisher, Cassandra asked very pertinent questions: had Murray approached Egerton’s heirs about the rights to Pride and Prejudice? How big an edition was he thinking of? How many volumes would there be, and of what size and price? What proportion of the profits would he pay to ‘me or my Agent’?33 But her businesslike approach was wasted, for Murray must have stuck to his request for the copyrights or nothing, and the offer died. Perhaps Cassandra regretted having so quickly discouraged an outright sale. It is quite possible that she didn’t consult Henry in the six days between getting and answering Murray’s letter (thinking that negotiations would go on), for the following year, when the family were approached by the publisher Richard Bentley with a similar offer, Henry accepted quickly on behalf of them both. Murray would have been the better imprint, and would have charged and paid more, so this was clearly something of a collapse. But the siblings must have decided that they had less negotiating power than they imagined, and that if they wanted to see their sister’s works in print again (and make any money whatever) they had better smile on the next comer.

  That was Richard Bentley, and his purchase of the five remaining copyrights went through quickly in 1832, for the bargain price of £210. Bentley was in the process of dissolving a soured partnership with Henry Colburn (the publisher of so many ‘silver-fork’ books) and setting up a sole imprint from offices in New Burlington Street. He was keen to establish a coterie as well as a list, and furnished a comfortable ‘Red Room’ for entertaining his authors, who included Charles Dickens (editor of Bentley’s Wits’ Miscellany) and the poet Thomas Campbell. Bentley’s ambitious business plans (and the lavish Miscellany dinners where ‘all the very haut ton of the literature of the day’ gathered)34 were paid for mostly by his ‘Standard Novels’ series, a pioneering imprint of low-cost, compact productions of which Sense and Sensibility appeared early in 1833 as number 23, followed by Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice. It was a sign of Bentley’s business acumen as well as his literary taste that he persuaded the Austens to sell to him, and then whittled down his initial offer of £250 by the £40 it was going to cost to buy Pride and Prejudice from Egerton. Henry’s disinclination to haggle shows that, on the family’s side, they were glad of whatever they could get. Fifteen years earlier, limited rights to just two of the four titles had fetched £500. Although she was back in print again, Jane Austen’s market worth had dropped very dramatically.

  But Henry enjoyed business of this sort, and did all he could to oblige Bentley. When they met in London before agreeing the contract, Henry had assured the publisher (who had expressed an interest in ‘any biographical relics of the Authoress’) that there was a sketch of his sister somewhere. He had to retract this later, writing, ‘on further enquiry and inspection, I find that [the sketch] was merely the figure and attitude – The countenance was concealed by a veil – nor was there any resemblance of features intended – It was a “Study”.’35 The image he is referring to is generally agreed to be the only authenticated one of Jane Austen, not the full-face sketch now in the National Portrait Gallery (which is almost certainly by Cassandra and of Jane, but which has no signature, date or identification), but the pencil and watercolour drawing, still in the Austen family, showing a back view of Jane seated outdoors on a warm day. It has Cassandra’s initials and the date, 1804, and was fondly remembered many years later by Anna Lefroy as a picture of her aunt,36 but as it shows none of the subject’s face, it would, of course, have been useless to Bentley as an illustration, and he went about getting some steel engravings made of scenes from the novels instead. Each of his Austen volumes appeared with a specially commissioned frontispiece and second-title-page vignette illustrating pivotal episodes from the stories, with hair and clothes all in the styles of the 1830s.

  The ‘veil’ Henry mentions in his letter as concealing Jane’s features is either his way of describing the bonnet in Cassandra’s drawing, or Cassandra’s way of describing the picture to him; in other words, when Henry asked about the available images of Jane, Cassandra may have dismissed them as unusable without producing anything for her brother to view. She doesn’t seem to have reminded him about the full-face drawing, which he might have wanted to use, or at least show to Bentley. What is odd is that in all those years living with Jane, Cassandra had made or kept so few likenesses of her sister. Drawing was meant to be her particular interest, after all, and Jane was her most available model. If she had winnowed down a number of attempts to the two which we know today, it says little for the likely quality of any of the rejected ones, those two are so rough and amateurish.

  It is also rather odd that no images of Jane by other members of the family exist. Like verse-writing and amateur musicianship, drawing was an accomplishment every young person was meant to try their hand at, and the Austen circle was full of competent artists. James had studied painting while he was at Oxford and Henry had been so adept with the pencil that his first employment had been as a drawing master to a family in Kent. Perhaps his expertise inhibited Cassandra in some way. James Edward was also an excellent draughtsman (as Jane herself remarked), and made some extraordinarily good cut-paper pictures of domestic scenes for his children. But no one apart from Cassandra seems to have taken Jane’s likeness.

  Henry provided a new version of his ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ for Bentley’s edition that shows some interesting changes from the one he composed in 1817. Some of them reflected the passage of time and changing tastes – he omitted, for instance, the comparison of his sister’s work with that of ‘a D’Arblay and an Edgeworth’; others validated his sister’s literary credentials with lengthy quotes from the best reviews, as well as the anecdote about Sheridan (who, like the others, is not actually named) and the story of Jane electing not to meet Mme de Staël. The whole of the opening of the original note was scrapped, with its emotional evocation of the author’s hand ‘mouldering in the grave’, and Henry removed the small details of Jane’s drawing skills, musical talent, love of dancing and temper ‘of the happiest kind’. He was asking that the author – now openly referred
to as Miss Austen – should be judged more on her literary merits than her personal virtues. This was a significant change of emphasis.

  Bentley, or one of his employees, added an editorial note after Henry’s which pressed the claims of the author further, pointing out that Miss Austen had founded a school of novelists which included men as well as women, some (he was perhaps thinking of Thomas Lister) ‘of considerable merit’.37 He also paid tribute to Austen’s originality, and special genius ‘in the power by which, without in the slightest degree violating the truth of portraiture, she is able to make the veriest every-day person a character of great interest. This is, indeed, turning lead into gold; but it would be difficult to detect the secret of the process.’ It was a remarkably perceptive and warm appraisal, which when Virginia Woolf echoed it a century later, in her famous dictum about Austen being of all great writers the hardest to catch in the act of greatness, struck people afresh.

  Bentley didn’t coin a very substantial amount of ‘gold’ from his republication of Austen in 1833–4, nor from the four or five reprintings the firm made up till 1854; they sold quietly but steadily in first runs of 2,500–3,000 copies, with small reprints every few years. Emma sold the most copies (by a small margin); Mansfield Park fewest. But publication in ‘Bentley’s Standard Novels’, a pioneering imprint that set out ‘to register the permanent fame of certain novels … not hitherto fittingly reprinted in handy and cheap form’, was significant for Austen.38 Having all her six novels in print the first time, in an accessible and inexpensive uniform edition, kept Austen’s readership steadily growing throughout a period when she received next to no critical attention at all.

  One of Bentley’s pet authors (and the first in his Standard Novels series) was the very same Mr Cooper who had started out as an Austen imitator, but had now moved on to The Pilot, The Spy and Lionel Lincoln, all of which were included in the series. Bentley mentioned his name, and Austen’s, in a letter he wrote in October 1835 to another ‘neglected’ author whose early works he had his eye on, Madame d’Arblay. The venerable authoress was by then eighty-three years old and living alone in Mayfair, a strange relic from the age of Johnson and Thrale. The only work she had published since The Wanderer (not on Bentley’s wants-list) was her Memoirs of Dr Burney in 1832, which had been widely derided for its convoluted language and hagiographical approach to a figure who was of little public interest or relevance in the 1830s. Bentley undoubtedly thought he was doing the author a favour by offering to include Evelina, Cecilia and Camilla on his thriving reprint list, pointing out as an inducement that ‘your fictions will appear with those of Mr Bulwer, Mr Morier, Mr Cooper, Mr Theodore Hook, Miss Austen, etc’.39 It was a strange fate for Burney to survive so long past the next generation, and see her own eclipse. She did not reply to Bentley’s letter, but kept it.