Jane and Dorothy Read online

  Her scheme seems to have been based on a popular philosophy of the eighteenth century, one which her niece would, more than forty years later, put into the thoughts of Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice: ‘marriage . . . however uncertain of giving happiness must be [a woman’s] pleasantest preservative from want.’21

  In escaping to India, Philadelphia was also avoiding another fate: that of becoming dependent on her brother once he had established himself in life. Her guardians may well have felt that in educating George they were also providing, indirectly, for his sisters. Family duty was a powerful force in Georgian times.

  The tacit expectation that brothers would provide for their unmarried sisters was recognised by the radical writer Mary Wollstonecraft, and she drew attention to the underlying injustice which made such provision necessary. In 1792 she complained that girls ‘are often left by their parents without any provision; and . . . are dependent on . . . the bounty of their brothers. These brothers are, to view the fairest side of the question, good sort of men, and give as a favour, what children of the same parents had an equal right to.’22

  In the uncertain world of the ‘pseudo-gentry’, family resources were often not distributed evenly between the sexes, and the integrity and affection of her brothers could be crucial to a woman’s happiness, particularly if, like Jane and Dorothy, she was not going to embrace that ‘pleasantest preservative from want’.

  Their brothers were to play an important role in both girls’ lives – for good and ill.

  Two

  Little Prattlers Among Men

  With insecurity and the injustices of Georgian family politics all still hidden in the future, Jane and Dorothy’s early years were tranquil. But the little we can trace about their childhoods suggests that they may have already begun to incline towards those opposites of eagerness and prudence.

  The home into which Jane was born was based on a successful and happy marriage. Mrs Austen was a thorough country-woman, writing after a visit to London that the city was ‘ . . . a sad place, I would not live in it on any account: one has not time to do one’s duty to God or Man,’ and turning to the subject of her cows with great enthusiasm: ‘What luck we shall have with those sort of Cows I can’t say. My little Alderney one turns out tolerably.’1 She was well suited to be the wife of a clergyman in a rural parish. News of their farm is prominent in her letters: ‘The wheat promises to be very good this year, but we have had a most sad, wet time getting it in,  . . .  we want dry weather for our peas and oats’2.

  She was a practical, down-to-earth woman, discussing recipes as well as agriculture in her letters; but the character revealed in her correspondence does not suggest that her younger daughter inherited her powers of perception and imagination from the maternal line.

  Mr Austen missed his wife badly in 1770 when she was absent at her sister’s lying-in, complaining, ‘I don’t much like this lonely kind of Life, you know I have not been much used to it . . . ’3

  He was a clever, handsome man who was generally admired: ‘What an excellent & pleasing man he is,’ wrote his niece Eliza, ‘I love him most sincerely’4. And there is about the Austens’ marriage something of that air of shared interests and shared enterprise which their daughter would capture years later in Persuasion’s Admiral and Mrs Croft, who have hardly been apart throughout their married life.

  The Austens’ family of eight was not exceptionally large, judging by the substantial size of surviving Georgian rectories and the remarks of contemporaries such as Jane’s cousin Eliza who believed that ‘a parson cannot fail of having a numerous progeny.’5 However, some of their more cautious relations disapproved as their nursery began to fill up. ‘That my brother and sister Austen are well, I heartily rejoice,’ wrote Tysoe Saul Hancock – the surgeon husband that Mr Austen’s enterprising sister, Philadelphia, had found in India – ‘but I cannot say that the News of the violently rapid increase of their family gives me so much pleasure . . . ’6

  At that point the Austens had only four children, but Mr Hancock had a particular reason to be concerned. He continued: ‘ . . . especially when I consider the case of my godson who must be provided for without the least hope of his being able to assist himself’. This godson was George, the Austens’ second son, born in 1766 (and thus nine years older than Jane); he was six years old when his godfather wrote this letter. Exactly why George was unable to assist himself is not clear. He may have been deaf and he certainly suffered from fits. ‘I am much obliged to you for your wish for George’s improvement . . . ’ wrote Mr Austen to his sister-in-law, when the child was four, ‘but from the best judgement I can form at present, we must not be too sanguine on this Head; be it as it may, we have this comfort, he cannot be a bad or a wicked child.’7 This insistence on the boy’s innocence suggests quite severe learning difficulties.

  George did not grow up with his brothers and sisters; he was sent away to live in a village at some distance, where he survived to the age of seventy-two. After his very early childhood, he was not mentioned in family correspondence and following generations were either misinformed, or else joined in the conspiracy of silence. In her Family History Jane’s great-niece Fanny Caroline reported that Mr and Mrs Austen ‘had six sons and two daughters.’ She then lists these children, beginning: ‘Their sons were James born 1765 . . .  George born 1766 died . . . ’8

  This disappearance of young George Austen is just one of many instances we shall come across, as we follow Jane and Dorothy’s stories, of children who are not where we would expect them to be. Jane’s Aunt Leonora who vanished into lodgings; Dorothy herself who was taken from her family at the age of six; Jane’s brother Edward who was given away to rich relations; poor little Basil Montagu for whom Dorothy cared in Dorset and Somerset. The lives of these two women were to be woven through with the tales of displaced and disappearing children, children who sometimes – as in the cases of George and Leonora Austen – grew into invisible adults.

  Family ties were to be crucial in the lives of both our subjects, but they were not the ties of simple affection that are idealised in the twenty-first century. Affection played its part, naturally, but the Georgian family was a unit of survival in a society with no welfare system. Vulnerable members must be cared for, but they could not be allowed to stand in the way of their brothers and sisters; rich relatives must be placated for the sake of the money they could bestow, the influence they could exert; children must sometimes be put out of the way so that their parents could earn money.

  It is in this context that we should understand an aspect of Austen family life which seems a little odd and callous to us today. Mrs Austen – according to Jane’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh – ‘followed a custom, not unusual in those days . . . of putting out her babies to be nursed in a cottage in the village.’9

  ‘I suckled my little girl [Cassandra] thro’ the first quarter;’ wrote Mrs Austen, ‘she has been wean’d and settled at a good Woman’s at Dean just Eight weeks.’10 The practice was for the children to be visited daily by their parents, and to return to the rectory when they were old enough ‘to run about and talk.’11

  There is no record of Jane being fostered in this way, but it is likely that she was. Biographer Claire Tomalin has suggested that the breaking of the mother-child bond in infancy may have been the cause of ‘the emotional distance between child and mother [which] is obvious throughout [Jane’s] life.’12 This is an interesting theory, and it is certainly impossible to read Jane’s letters without noticing that ‘emotional distance’ from her mother. When, in adult life, she was parted from her mother, she did not write frequently. ‘I am not likely to write there [i.e. to Mrs Austen] again these ten days,’ 13she told her sister, Cassandra – to whom she wrote every two or three days when they were apart. On another occasion, there is this decidedly chilly remark: ‘I suppose my mother will like to have me write to her. I shall try at least.’14

  However,
it is difficult to identify the cause of this coolness. Mrs Austen’s practice of putting her children out to nurse – which was probably an efficient way of running her household – does not suit our twenty-first century ideas of child care, but the children’s experience of it cannot have been very different from that of many middle and upper class children of the time, who, though remaining under the parental roof, were cared for in separate apartments by nurses and nurserymaids.

  Looking back from the mid-Victorian era, Austen-Leigh was himself a little uncomfortable with Mrs Austen’s system which, he said, ‘seems strange to us’. But his concern was not for the removal of the child from its mother, but rather the placing of a genteel infant in a mere cottage, for he reassures his readers thus: ‘It may be that the contrast between the parsonage house and the best class of cottages was not so extreme then as it is now, that the one was somewhat less luxurious, and the other less squalid.’15

  His priorities seem wrong to us, but they are a reminder that the notion of a mother being always a child’s primary carer did not take hold until well into the twentieth century. Austen-Leigh himself – and many of his original readers – would have spent little more time with their mothers as infants than Jane and her siblings did. It may be that the degree of reserve caused by being sent out to nurse was no more than that which was common in a woman of Jane Austen’s time and class, and the roots of that more particular coldness which pervades her letters must be sought later in her life, in differences of opinion and temperament between mother and daughter.

  Mrs Austen was loving and enthusiastic about her children when they were small, urging one friend to visit because ‘I want to show you my Henry & my Cassy, who are both reckoned fine children.’16 But a distance would develop between her and her talented daughter, and it is likely that Jane looked elsewhere for what we would now term ‘role models’ as she grew into a woman.

  Nor could Dorothy’s mother have had very much influence on the woman that her daughter became. Anne Wordsworth (née Cookson) died when her daughter was only six, in March 1778. Anne is a rather shadowy figure, remembered by both William and Dorothy with a kind of unspecific affection such as Dorothy expressed in a letter of 1805: ‘Our Mother, blessed be her Memory! Was taken from us when I was only six years old. From her I know that I received much good that I can trace back to her.’17 She does not give any more detail about the good she received from Anne and though she continued to lament her loss throughout her life, the memory of it was always inextricably mixed with another, more intense grief – the loss of her brothers’ company.

  It is from William, the brother who was just eighteen months older, that we gain our best knowledge of Dorothy’s character as a child.

  In his poem The Sparrow’s Nest he would recall:

  ‘The Sparrow’s dwelling, which, hard by

  My Father’s house, in wet or dry

  My sister Emmeline and I

  Together visited.’

  Emmeline (or Emma) is a name which he often gave to his sister in his poems. (Perhaps it falls more readily into metre than Dorothy.) The poem continues with her reaction to the nest:

  ‘She looked at it and seemed to fear it;

  Dreading, tho’ wishing, to be near it:

  Such heart was in her, being then

  A little Prattler among men.’

  The same cautious sensitivity is displayed in a memory Dorothy herself recorded in her Grasmere Journal. She wrote of how, as a child, she used to chase butterflies ‘a little but . . . I was afraid of brushing the dust off their wings, and did not catch them.’18 William also remembered how Dorothy, when very small, displayed ‘the sensibility for which she was so remarkable’ by bursting into tears at her first sight of the sea.19

  These scraps suggest that Dorothy, the child, already had the extremely sensitive feelings of the writer of the Grasmere Journal who, after parting with her brothers in May 1800, ‘sate a long time upon a stone at the margin of the lake, and after a flood of tears my heart was easier’, the woman who was so upset by the breaking of a swallows’ nest by her window that – ‘Poor little creatures they could not themselves be more distressed than I was.’20

  As an adult, Jane Austen does not seem to have valued this kind of behaviour in children. She sternly adopted the voice of reason when she described the childhood of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, insisting that the young Catherine displayed no excess of tenderness towards people, animals or nature. She had no taste for ‘the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary bird, or watering a rose-bush.’21 Catherine’s childhood, her creator insists, was not a typical preparation for the role of a novel heroine; though Dorothy’s – as it is described by herself and her brother – might well be. Catherine Morland is definitely not the sort of child who would approach a birds’ nest with caution or worry about the careless handling of a butterfly. She is ‘noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.’22

  It is tempting to read this down-to-earth portrayal of childhood as a description of Jane’s own early years, and biographers have even identified a ‘green slope’ behind Steventon rectory down which she might have rolled23. But Catherine’s infancy may be entirely fictitious.

  There is, in fact, only one quality which Jane attributed to her own childhood self: shyness. When she was thirty-one she enjoyed the visit of a friend’s young daughter and wondered at the little girl’s confidence. ‘What is become of all the shyness in the World?’ she mused. But she admitted that the change might be for the better. ‘[S]he is a nice, natural, openhearted, affectionate girl, with all the ready civility which one sees in the best Children of the present day; – so unlike anything that I was myself at her age, that I am often all astonishment & shame.’24

  Shy, rather cautious and not given to displays of feeling in company: this is our best glimpse of little Jane’s character, while sensitive and easily moved to tears must be our clearest idea of Dorothy’s.

  If Jane Austen had written about the childhoods of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, her description may not have been very unlike this.

  We know little of how either of the children looked, but Dorothy was probably a small child, for she was small as an adult. It was, perhaps, this which prompted William’s slightly odd description – ‘a little prattler among men’ – which presents the Wordsworth brothers, though still children themselves (the eldest, Richard, not four years older than Dorothy), as ‘men’ in comparison to their sister, and emphasises solemn male wisdom in the face of the little girl’s talkativeness. Dorothy was certainly a chatty little girl. ‘[Y]ou are well acquainted that I was never remarkable for taciturnity’,25 she wrote, at fifteen, to Miss Pollard, who had known her for nearly ten years.

  The description, ‘a little prattler among men’ might also have been applied to the young Jane. Her eldest brother, James, was ten years her senior and, by the time she was three, the spacious old rectory was crammed full with lads who may well have appeared ‘men’ in her eyes. Mr Austen, finding his income insufficient for the support of his growing family, had begun to take paying pupils, boarding them in his own house. In 1779 there were four boys – probably all teenagers – besides Jane’s brothers, sharing her home, and other pupils came and went over the years. The little girl was surrounded by ‘men’, the house devoted to the serious masculine business of studying the classics in Latin and Greek, the whitewashed beams echoing with the earnest reading of lessons and translations.

  Though Homer and Ovid may have been passing over her head, little Jane had begun to learn a lesson which would be very important in her life and in her work: she was learning about the true nature of the opposite sex, and she had the opportunity to develop easy familiar relationships with boys.

  At a time when boys and girls were usually educated separately; when young men hunted and shot while ladies sewed and pursued mainly se
dentary hobbies, the contact between the sexes in adult life could be confined to the dance floor and the dinner table. To girls who had not lived closely with brothers, the male sex might appear almost an alien species. Jane was particularly fortunate in this respect. Her brothers remained at home for their schooling, and, from her very earliest days, she was used to living on intimate terms, not only with them, but also with young men unrelated to her.

  By the time she began to write her mature novels in her late teens, she was aware of how inadequate the conventional interaction of men and women could be when it came to the important business of choosing a marriage partner. In Pride and Prejudice, the pragmatic Charlotte Lucas argues that Jane Bennet should do her best to ‘fix’ the highly eligible Mr Bingley. Elizabeth Bennet is, however, much more cautious: the couple, she believes, do not really know one another. Four dances, four dinners and one morning visit, she maintains, are ‘not quite enough to make her understand his character.’26

  The exploration of friendships between men and women was to be a major concern of Jane’s work. Her characters struggle to achieve satisfying relationships even as they socialise in the restricted world of dinners and visits and balls – the world with which Jane Austen’s name is most often associated.

  Later in her life, Dorothy, through her closeness to her brother William, would have opportunities to forge meaningful friendships with men in much less restricted situations. However, there is one glimpse to be had of little Dorothy Wordsworth in the very formal setting of a ballroom.