Jane and Dorothy Read online

  It would seem that at a very young age Dorothy began to take lessons from a Cockermouth dancing master, Mr Hadwin; for in the summer of 1777 he gave a children’s ball to demonstrate his pupils’ proficiency, and the ‘ball was opened by Master Lucock and Miss Wordsworth (both under 5 years old) who notably performed the Minuet, Cotillion, and Country Dance.’

  Master Lucock was the grandson of the High Sheriff of Cumberland and, as John Worthen has pointed out, ‘The pairing of the Wordsworth daughter with the grandson of a great local landowner and magnate suggests the circles in which the Wordsworth family moved.’27

  Children’s balls were sufficiently common in the last decades of the eighteenth century to draw several pages of condemnation from the moralist and educational reformer, Hannah More. ‘Baby-balls’ as she contemptuously termed them, were a ‘conspiracy against the innocence, the health and the happiness of children.’ She complained that ‘instead of bounding with the unrestrained freedom of little wood-nymphs, over hill and dale . . . these gay little creatures are shut up all the morning acquiring a new step for the evening.’ The result, she believed, was the creation of ‘Lilliputian coquettes’.28

  Little Dorothy with her sensitivity and impulsive feelings certainly seems more like a bounding wood-nymph than a Lilliputian coquette. It is intriguing to think of her leading a dance and, in particular, performing the stately minuet. This dance – to which Austen-Leigh draws attention in his description of Jane Austen’s dancing days – ‘was a slow and solemn movement, expressive of grace and dignity, rather than merriment’ and its many ‘complicated gyrations’ were ‘executed by one lady and gentleman, amidst the admiration, or criticism, of surrounding spectators.’29 Quite a challenge for a sensitive five-year-old!30

  This fragment of Dorothy’s very early education suggests the kind of life her parents expected her to lead, and offers a tantalising glimpse of what the social world of Miss Wordsworth of Cockermouth might have been. If she had not been orphaned so young, she might have grown up as a young lady of some consequence in the little market town. Perhaps the honour of opening balls would have frequently fallen to her. And if it had, would she have sought it jealously as Emma’s heroine does, or dreaded and tried to avoid it as Fanny Price does in Mansfield Park?

  It is impossible to know, because, little more than a year after this social triumph, Dorothy’s young life was shattered by the death of her mother. At six years old she left Cockermouth, and was never again to step inside the ‘swagger house’ by the River Derwent.

  When Mrs Wordsworth was dying of pneumonia – at the age of only thirty – she begged her cousin, Elizabeth Threlkeld, to give a home to her daughter. Perhaps she felt that, unlike the boys, six-year-old Dorothy would need a mother figure in her life, and her choice of foster-mother was certainly an excellent one. For the next nine years ‘Aunt Threlkeld’ would provide a secure, happy home for her cousin’s child, and Dorothy came to love her dearly. This new home was in Halifax, however, over a hundred miles from Cockermouth and, for reasons which are not clear, her father did not allow her to return, even for a visit, to the house in which she was born.

  Not much is known of Dorothy’s father. He seems to have been diligent and honest in business, though he earned himself some unpopularity by being associated with a man so disliked as James Lowther, and it is impossible not to conclude that he felt little affection for his only daughter. There can be no other reasonable explanation for poor little Dorothy’s unrelieved exile.

  It was a separation which, she would say, ‘I cannot think of without regret from many causes, and particularly, that I have been thereby put out of the way of many recollections in common with my Brothers . . . ’31

  Sending his daughter to a foster-family might have been expedient, and travel was not easy in the eighteenth century, but Dorothy’s lack of contact with her family between the ages of six and sixteen is remarkable. If John Wordsworth had cared for his daughter’s company, travel arrangements could have been made. Maybe this thought occurred to Dorothy as she grew older, for, though she never wrote disrespectfully of her father, it was not the opportunity of being with him which she regretted losing, only that of being with her brothers.

  Shared memories and jokes are such an important ingredient in the cement that binds families that it is easy to understand Dorothy’s regret and sense of exclusion. It is just these kinds of recollection – these memories that brothers and sisters hold in common – that Jane Austen was to celebrate in Mansfield Park. ‘Children of the same family . . . with the same first associations and habits,’ she would write, ‘have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement . . . if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived.’32

  Despite the long years in which she was denied her brothers’ company, Dorothy’s earliest attachments never were outlived. ‘I have at all times’, she wrote, ‘a deep sympathy with those who know what fraternal affection is’.33

  When tragedy or poverty struck, the Georgian family had to regroup and survive as best it could. Children’s feelings could be overlooked and Dorothy’s experience rather resembled that of poor little Fanny Price (Mansfield Park’s heroine). Like Fanny, Dorothy was parted from her siblings by adults who may have believed they were acting for the best but who seem not to have understood the importance of her daily companions in the life of a child, nor the grief and trauma that might result from being suddenly removed from them.

  As a mature writer in her thirties, Jane Austen would recognise the hurt caused by such a separation, but it was something Dorothy experienced while she was still young. The sense of loss would colour her whole life.

  Three

  Original Sin

  Dorothy’s removal, at the age of six, to her foster home at Halifax not only separated her from her brothers, it took her from an old-fashioned market town to a rapidly growing industrial community.

  Dorothy, who would later write so beautifully about the natural world, was not a child of the countryside; she spent her early years in urban environments. The towns in which she lived – Cockermouth, Halifax and Penrith – were smaller than they are now and it was possible, even in Halifax, for a determined walker to escape into fields, but she did not grow up, as Jane did, attuned to the rhythms and habits of rural life. Dorothy was not surrounded by the earnest concerns over cows and barley and hay which fill Mrs Austen’s letters; she did not, for example, learn the names of birds and wildflowers in the natural, almost unconscious way that country children do. Years later she would long for a book on botany in order to identify the flowers she saw around her at Grasmere.

  The move to Halifax also placed Dorothy under the influence of a strong, determined woman. Elizabeth Threlkeld, the cousin she would always call ‘aunt’, the woman of whom she was to say, ‘she has been my mother’,1 was a positive and rather unusual female role model for this displaced child.

  Family letters reveal Elizabeth Threlkeld to have been a dynamo of a woman who, ‘will not allow herself time to grow fat’.2 When Dorothy arrived in Halifax Miss Threlkeld was already taking care of two nephews and three nieces (all older than Dorothy) as well as running the business left by their dead father. Her obituary hints at a strength of mind and a determination to do what she believed was right. ‘[W]hilst a young, and admired Woman,’ it says, she ‘ . . . took upon herself the charge, and Maintenance of five Orphan Children . . .  relinquishing the Society of her Relatives – amongst the Gentry of Cumberland, to place herself in a small Haberdashers Shop . . . ’.3

  In her young adult life Dorothy would demonstrate a capacity for hard work and a lack of concern for genteel expectations very similar to Miss Threlkeld’s. She admired her foster-mother and thrived in the busy household attached to the haberdasher’s shop. She was fond of her older cousins and it was here too that she met her life-long friend and confidante, Jane Po
llard, a little girl of just her age who lived on the opposite side of the street.

  The move also brought another very significant influence into Dorothy’s life, and it was one which may have deepened the difference in character between her and Jane, for they were now on opposite sides of an important religious divide. The home in which Dorothy found herself was a dissenting household, while Jane Austen lived all her life among traditional Anglicans.

  This was a time when to be born English was considered, almost by definition, to be born Christian, but conventional Christianity had got very worldly. It was a time when Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Collins might congratulate himself on being advantageously settled in his ‘humble parsonage’4 by a great patron such as Lady Catherine De Bourgh, or a well-meaning, shy young man such as Edward Ferrars of Sense and Sensibility might be made ‘comfortable as a bachelor’ in a rectory of £200 a year, by a kindly landowner interested in his welfare.5

  A clergyman with the right friends frequently held more than one living. He was not obliged to live in the parish from which he drew his income, and might not even be seen by his parishioners – the weekly services often being read by a badly-paid curate. Jane’s father held two church livings and when he was first appointed to the living of Steventon in 1761, he neither moved to the village nor took services there, though the tithes would have begun to be paid to him. It was not until he was preparing for his marriage in 1764 that he took up residence and began to do the duty of a clergyman.

  This was not an unusual practice but dissenting churches such as the one to which Dorothy’s new foster-mother, Aunt Threlkeld, belonged, challenged this laxity.

  At the time when Dorothy began to attend its services, the Northgate End Chapel in Halifax was strongly influenced by the Unitarian beliefs of its Minister, John Ralph. Unitarians rejected as unbiblical the established church’s doctrine of Original Sin: the doctrine which taught that all men and women were intrinsically evil, tainted by the first sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. So Mr Ralph’s sermons may well have encouraged Dorothy’s belief that her own feelings were right and that they could be trusted as a guide to behaviour.

  The opposition of character which Jane Austen sets up at the beginning of Sense and Sensibility was part of a wider debate in Georgian society. Elinor’s prudence and Marianne’s eagerness relate to two very different approaches to life: the rationality championed by the Enlightenment and the cult of feeling which had grown up as a reaction against it.

  Philosophers asked the question: which is the more virtuous, the ‘natural’ man who acts honestly on his emotions, or the schooled, controlled individual who allows himself to be governed by external rules of behaviour? Religion played an important part in this discussion.

  Anglicans such as the Austens, with their orthodox belief in Original Sin, believed that, since all human beings were naturally sinful, feelings should be controlled by external laws. On the other hand, the Unitarian idea that man was naturally good – untainted by Original Sin – encouraged a belief that subjective feelings were of value and should be trusted and acted upon.

  However, it is not the case that Dissenters always championed sensibility over sense. Reason was more important than ritual to them and they promoted a personal quest for truth, rather than unquestioning adherence to the teachings of the established church. The chapel’s policy when choosing books for the library it provided for the poor was this: ‘As it behoveth us to try all things, it is not intended to exclude the writers upon any doctrinal system, provided their books breathe the spirit of that religion they are designed to teach.’6

  This ethos of open-minded discussion, which she encountered in Halifax, would remain, for many years, an ideal of Dorothy’s. Describing her dream home in 1793, she conjured up a picture of friends gathered about a fireside, reading together, and ‘at Intervals we lay aside the Book and each hazard our observations upon what has been read without the fear of Ridicule and Censure.’7

  Dissenters were, in many ways, outsiders; by the Corporation Act of 1661 they were excluded from holding any civic or municipal office because they had not taken communion in the Church of England. This was, inevitably, a source of grievance, and many Dissenters were critical of the Establishment. It is likely that Dorothy encountered political as well as religious debate in Halifax.

  Jane’s early experience was at the opposite end of the Georgian religious and political spectrum. Orthodoxy would have been in the very air of Steventon parsonage.

  ‘Moderate Toryism,’8 was the political creed which prevailed in her family, though this was ‘rather taken for granted . . . than discussed,’9 and religion too was probably more taken for granted than discussed. The daughter of an Anglican clergyman would certainly not have been expected to ‘try all things’ in the spirit of Reverend Ralph.

  Jane’s opinions ‘accorded strictly with those of our Established Church’10 – or so said her brother Henry when he wrote the very earliest account of her life, shortly after her death in 1817. Henry’s idea of how a woman should be remembered – the way in which her family wished Aunt Jane to be remembered – is as a very conventional Anglican lady. But Henry’s almost hagiographic summary of his sister’s life is not to be trusted entirely, and Kathryn Sutherland has observed that Jane’s novels ‘offer little evidence’ that her opinions were in accord with Anglican doctrine.11 And yet, there is a sense in which the early novels do accurately reflect the moribund Georgian church from which Jane’s father drew his livelihood – and that is the very scarcity of religious references.

  It is only in times of crisis that God impinges on the bright young lives of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Thus, Marianne’s life-threatening illness produces ‘serious recollection’ and a wish for ‘atonement to my God’.12 When Lydia’s elopement threatens herself and her family with disgrace, Elizabeth obliquely refers to religious morality as she regrets that her sister ‘has never been taught to think on serious subjects.’13 But, once the crises are over, the Almighty soon passes out of the narratives, and He has no place in the happy denouements.

  Anglican religion of the kind Jane knew as a little girl was like a trusted bottle of medicine: always on the shelf, to be reached for when needed: accepted, ever-present, and not much talked about. The Austen family appears to have been particularly adept at avoiding controversy. According to Jane’s niece, Caroline, the ‘family talk’ among the adult brothers and sisters was ‘never troubled by disagreements as it was not their habit to argue with one another.’ 14

  Caroline was writing about the last decade of her aunt’s life, but the habit seems to have been firmly established by then. In 1816 Henry Austen’s financial problems lost his brothers many thousands of pounds, but this ‘produced no quarrels and created no permanent estrangement’15 among them. By then their reticence was an established part of family life, and it had probably begun under the parental roof at Steventon. It was certainly a peaceable little community that Mary Leigh (wife of Mrs Austen’s cousin) found there when Jane was about five years old. She remarked upon ‘the simplicity, hospitality, and taste’ of the Steventon household.16

  It sounds like a pleasant, happy home but not one filled with the discussion of dangerous or uncomfortable ideas. It was a home in which the young Jane might have had little opportunity for open-minded enquiry – that rigorous search after personal truth which cannot help but lead to disagreement – that Dorothy enjoyed among the dissenters of Halifax.

  Four

  Fashionably Educated and Left Without a Fortune

  It is not possible to read the works of Jane Austen without gaining the impression that their author disliked schools. In Persuasion Anne Elliot has been unhappy at her school in Bath and her friend, Lady Russell, believes that the simple fact of her having been ‘three years at school there,’ is sufficient reason for her prejudice against the city. 1

  ‘I would rather be a teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than ma
rry a man I did not like’, declares Emma Watson in Jane’s unfinished novel The Watsons. But her more realistic elder sister replies: ‘I would rather do anything than be a teacher at a school . . . ’2 Real women echoed this view. ‘A teacher at a school,’ wrote Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘is only a kind of upper servant, who has more work than the menial ones.’3

  It is only Mrs Goddard’s homely little school in Emma that gets any praise in Jane Austen’s fiction, and this is approved because it is unlike other schools of its time. It is not ‘a seminary, or an establishment . . . where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity.’4

  Jane herself attended two schools, but we know too little about either to be sure whether they resembled the despised seminaries and establishments or were more like Mrs Goddard’s comfortable little school. However, one line in her novels may have been influenced by experience, and that is the remark about young ladies being ‘screwed out of health’. The first school to which Jane and her sister, Cassandra, were sent in the spring of 1783, when Jane was just seven years old, was run by a Mrs Cawley. When the Austen girls first joined Mrs Cawley she was based in Oxford but, later in the same year, she and her pupils removed to Southampton. Here an epidemic of typhus fever struck. Jane became dangerously ill and was saved only by the intervention of her cousin Jane Cooper, another of Mrs Cawley’s pupils, who wrote to warn her mother of the situation. The girls were taken home and Jane recovered but the misery and terror of a seven-year-old experiencing severe illness away from home, together with the later realisation of the danger she had been in, would be enough to account for a lifelong bias against boarding schools.5

  Since Jane had been entrusted to Mrs Cawley’s care at the age of seven, it is rather surprising that, two years later, when the subject of school was next mooted, Mrs Austen considered that ‘Jane was too young to make her going to school at all necessary’.6 The plan this time was to send twelve-year-old Cassandra on her own but Mrs Austen had reckoned without the determination of her younger daughter: Jane insisted on accompanying her sister. ‘[I]f Cassandra’s head had been going to be cut off,’ said Mrs Austen. ‘Jane would have her’s (sic) cut off too’7.