06 - Jane Austen and her Country-House Comedy by William Henry Helm

In honor of the centenary of Jane Austens death, W. H. Helm offers a beautiful reflection on the enduring charm of her work, emphasizing that despite the passage of time, her books remain as fresh and vibrant as ever. Helm takes readers on a journey through Austens literary influences, her contemporaries, and the prevalent themes in her work. He dives deeply into her fascinating ideas and beautifully crafted characters, providing a succinct compilation of thought-provoking quotes that capture the essence of Jane Austens genius. All insights are succinctly presented in this brief yet enlightening book. Join us as we celebrate the timeless brilliance of Austens work. Summary by Beth Thomas.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter six of Jane Austen and Her Country House Comedy.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Jane Austen and Her Country House
Comedy by William Henry Helm. Chapter six Personal and topographical.

(00:26):
The novelist and her characters, her sense of their reality,
accessories rarely described, her ideas on dress, her own millinery
and gowns, thin clothes and consumption, domestic economy, Jane as housekeeper,
a very clever essay, Mister Collins at Longbourn, the Gypsies

(00:46):
at Highbury. Topography of Jane Austen, Hampshire, Lyme Regis, Godmersham, Bath, London.
On an earlier page, a contrast between Balzac and Jane
Austen has been suggest One characteristic they had in common
was the sense of the reality of their own creations.

(01:06):
Madame de Serville, the sister of Balzac, has recorded how
when the affairs of the family were being discussed, he
would say, ah, yes, but do you know to whom
Felix de Vandoness is engaged one of the Grandville girls.
It is an excellent marriage for him. Further than this,
an author's sense of the actuality of his own imaginings

(01:28):
could hardly go unless, indeed, like one modern author, if
the story is true, as it probably is not, he
were to invite the figments of his brain to lunch.
Jane Austen was not quite so much obsessed by her inventions,
though she spoke with the very novels themselves as personal entities.

(01:48):
Pride and prejudice was my own darling child, and of
sense and sensibility, she writes, when it is passing through
the press. No, indeed, I am never too busy to
think of s and as I can no more forget
it that a mother can forget her sucking child. And
I am much obliged to you for your inquiries. As

(02:09):
for the characters, she loved to talk of them as
living people, and was so fond of Elizabeth Bennett, for instance, that,
as she wrote to Cassandra, she did not know how
she should be able to tolerate those who did not
like her. She used to tell her nieces what happened
to her imaginary people after the novels were ended. How

(02:30):
Mary Bennett married her uncle's clerk or her sister Kitty
a clergyman, and how Missus Robert Ferrar's sister never caught
the doctor. One of the most delightful of her letters,
as evidence of her happiness in her work and of
her half serious consciousness of the reality of her creations,
was written after a round of London picture galleries. The

(02:53):
portraits she looked for were not those of knights or
Austin's or Lee's, but of beautiful women out of her
own novels. They might be labeled Lady this or Missus that,
but she should recognize them if they were portraits of
her darling Elizabeth or her dearest Anne. She was disappointed.
It is true that at the gallery in Spring Gardens

(03:16):
she found a small portrait of Missus Bingley excessively like her.
And moreover, she is dressed in a white gown with
green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed,
that green was a favorite color with her. I dare say,
Missus D will be in yellow, for it was Missus D,

(03:36):
the beloved Elizabeth Darcy Nay Bennett, whose face her creator
and devoted admirer looked forward to seeing on some fashionable
portrait painter's canvas alas at none of the shows was
the desired picture to be found. I can only imagine,
writes the disappointed friend, soothing her regrets with a reflection

(03:59):
natural to her mind, that mister d prizes any picture
of her too much to like it should be exposed
to the public eye. I can imagine he would have
that sort of feeling, that mixture of love, pride and delicacy.
Thus we can see that Jane knew exactly what her
heroines were like, even if in their case, as in

(04:22):
that of nearly all her characters, the reader is left
to fill in details of color and feature very much
as he chooses. She was far more particular in describing
the personal appearance of real people, and in her letters,
the handsome and the ugly are as clearly differentiated as
the lively and the dull. I never saw so plain

(04:43):
a family, she declares, after calling on some people named
Phag five sisters, so very plain. They are as plain
as the Foresters, or the Franfradops, or the sea graves
or the rivers. Excluding Sophie, Miss Sally, Fag has a
pretty figure, and that comprises all the good looks of
the family. Sometimes she attributed the blame for ill looks

(05:07):
to a definite part of the genealogical tree. I wish
she was not so very Palmery, she says of one
of her nieces. But it seems stronger than ever. I
never knew a wife's family features have such undue influence.
The Missus Palmer of sense and sensibility was not of
that family. She was as pretty as she was foolish.

(05:30):
Even if it be true that Jane Austen only painted
the life which she found immediately around her, and that
she would almost have soon have attempted to depict the
interior of a Tibetan lamessary as of an English country house,
of the kind Disraeli loved to paint. Yet do her
characters typify nothing? If Missus Elton and Sir John Middleton

(05:51):
and Mary Musgrove are not types, then I do not
see why Sir Charles Grandison, or Missus Proudie or mister
Tulliver should be guarded as types. Perhaps they should not,
But then what are types? Most of Jane Austen's people
may be common. There may be in the flesh a
hundred Lady Russells for one Lady Camper and five hundred

(06:13):
John Willoughbys for one Willoughby pattern. That is only to
say that humanity is richer in one type than in another.
Jane was a realist, though realism in the sense in
which we apply the term in the criticism of living
writers has little place in her novels. She assumes that
her readers, the men and women of her own age,

(06:36):
are neither blind nor unaccustomed to the ordinary resources of
contemporary civilization. When her characters dine, they may, usually, for
all we hear to the contrary, eat out of a
common dish with the aid of their unassisted fingers, after
the manner of the nomads of the Asiatic steps, they
may drink out of gourds like the bushmen, while after

(06:57):
the custom of the Romans they recline on races couches.
In the attitude of Madame Racamier, we know that they
sat round solid mahogany or oaken tables covered with damas
cloths during the meat and pudding service, that the silver
was polished and the glass bright, even though the supply
of plates was perhaps not always equal to the number

(07:19):
of courses. We have little doubt as to the kind
of chairs where on the diners sat, and we may
wish we had more of them in our own dining rooms.
As to the costumes of the men and women who
sat on the chairs, we are usually left to dress
them as we like, and there is little doubt that

(07:39):
many a modern reader has mentally pictured Darcy wearing a
tweed suit and a bowler hat, Charles Musgrove in a
golfing cap and loose knickerbockers, and mister Collins or mister
Elton in a stiff, roundabout collar of the kind usually
worn by the Anglican clergy of today. For the ladies,
the whirligig of time has brought back the modes of

(08:01):
a century ago. In spite of the cry for the
equality of the sexes, there are as the Lord Chancellor
and other eminent authorities have laid down marked distinctions between
the ways of women and of men. One of such
distinctions may be found in the fact that the fashions
of feminine dress move in a very irregular and therefore

(08:23):
theoretically impossible circle, while those of masculine dress rarely cross
the same point twice. Thus, while during the last few
years we have seen our sisters and ants affecting modes
that were in vogue in the periods of the Renaissance,
the Directory, and the Empire. We have never seen our

(08:43):
brothers and uncles abroad in the streets attired like the courtiers,
either of Francois Premier or of the First Consul. A
woman need not despair of wearing without being followed by
a crowd almost any costume of any period of woman's history.
A man need not look for the day when he
may walk in the park in the garb of Raleigh

(09:04):
or of Burke without attracting more attention than will be
agreeable to the modesty of anyone but an actor manager
or the European agent of some American world industry. The
Missus Bertram of Mansfield Park might go shopping in Regent
Street today without anyone remarking that their dress or their

(09:25):
coiffure was seriously out of date. But we only know
how they dressed because we know the date of their birth,
not because the author of a little bit of their
life history has told us who that has ever read
where of Hermiston can forget the description of the heroine
as she first appeared to Archie and the Kirk. It

(09:45):
was in the very year eighteen fourteen, in which Fanny
Price's story was related, and of Mary Crawford. If not
of Fanny, a tale of town finery as bright as
that of Kirsty might have been told. We know how
a learning Kirsty looked to Archie in her Frock of Strawberry,
colored at jacquonet Muslin, cut low at the bosom and

(10:06):
short at the ankle, and drawn up so as to
mold the contour of both breasts, and in the nook between,
surely in a very enviable position trembled the nosegay of primroses.
Of some such charming pictures. We get at least the
preliminary sketches in Jane Austen's letters, but the finished works

(10:27):
are never shown in the novels. And we may dress
the pretty heroines to our own fancy, so long as
we keep to the style of their period. Or if
our imaginations are feeble and our knowledge of regency costume deficient,
mister Brock will do the work for us in the
more delightful of his colored drawings, or mister Hugh Thompson
in his lively illustrations in pen and ink. This point

(10:53):
that the material factors of manners and habits are little
noted by Jane Austen will strike many readers at first
sight as of quite trivial importance, but it is largely
the reason why her novels have so modern and external
error compared with those, let us say, of Scott, or
even of Balzac, who only began to write when her

(11:14):
short career was ending. If Jane Austen had described the
conditions of life at Hartfield or Kellynch with the particularity
with which Balzac describes the Grande's house at saw Murr
and the Guainiks at Gueranda, or had given us such
full accounts of the villagers on the estate of the
Birthrams of Mansfield Park, as Scott gave us of the

(11:35):
smugglers and gypsies on the lands of the Burtrams of
ellan Gowen, we should see more clearly the changes that
one hundred years have wrought in the habits of the
English country. Jane Austen was by no means indifferent to
the cut and color of her own clothing. However, little
she allowed her heroines to talk about theirs. But when

(11:56):
we read of Jane Austen frocks for bridesmaids in the
accounts of modern weddings. They are copied from the illustrations
of mister Thompson or mister Brock or else are so
called merely because they are of the period of her novels,
which is much the same thing with a general subject
of dress she deals as a novelist. We may almost

(12:16):
say once for all, in a single paragraph of Northanger Abbey.
The occasion was the dance at Bath, which was to
prove so momentous an event in Catherine's life. What gown
and what head dress she should wear on the occasion
became her chief concern. She cannot be justified in it.

(12:36):
Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive
solicitude about it often destroys its own aim. Catherine knew
all this very well. Her great aunt had read her
a lecture on the subject only the Christmas before, and
yet she lay awake ten minutes on Wednesday night debating
between her spotted and her tamboured muslin, and nothing but

(12:58):
the shortness of the time prevented her buying a new
one for the evening. This would have been an error
in judgment great, though not uncommon, from which one of
the other sex rather than her own. A brother rather
than a great aunt might have warned her. For man
only can be aware of the insensibility of man towards
a new gown. It would be mortifying to the feelings

(13:21):
of many ladies could they be made to understand how
little the heart of man is affected by what is
costly or new in their attire, how little it is
biased by the texture of their muslin, and how unsusceptible
of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprig, the mull,
or the jack and eye. Woman is fine for her
own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more

(13:45):
no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness
and fashion are enough for the former, and a something
of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter.
If we regard these as the author considered opinions expressed
with a characteristic touch of malice, we shall probably agree

(14:06):
that she is on the whole right. Were women to
make a note every time a man describes one of
them as well dressed of what the subject of the
remark was wearing, they would, I believe, find an overwhelming
preponderance of votes in favor of well fitting playing, if
not actually tailor made costumes for the daytime, and simple,

(14:27):
though not conventual, frocks for the evening, as compared with
all the highly decorated confections covered with what one may
call applied art, whereon women spend so large a proportion
of their allowances. The letters to Cassandra make up, to
some extent for the deficiencies of the novels in a
matter so attractive to the author's admirers among our own sex,

(14:51):
though the particulars given are almost always incomplete, that is
to say, they depend on information which Cassandra possessed, but
which is to an to us. Such a case is
presented when we read Elizabeth has given me a hat.
And it is not only a pretty hat, but a
pretty style of hat too. It is something like Eliza's,

(15:12):
only instead of being all straw, half of it is narrow,
purple ribbon. I flatter myself, however, that you can understand
very little of it from this description. Heaven forbid that
I should ever offer such encouragement to explanations as to
give a clear one on any occasion myself. But I
must write no more of this. The tantalizing thing is

(15:35):
that while we know that this pretty hat was something
like Eliza's, we have no idea what Eliza's was like
beyond the untrimmed fact that it was all straw. Then
Cassandra is told by Jane, I believe I shall make
my new gown like my robe, but the back of
the latter is all in a piece with the tail,

(15:56):
and will seven yards enable me to copy it in
that respect? Alas that we cannot discover how the robe
was made, except that the back was all in a
piece with the tail. Often, of course, the news about
dress is mixed up with other news, as when Jane
writes at Nackington, missus Fletcher and I were very thick,

(16:16):
but I am the thinnest of the two. She wore
her purple muslin, which is pretty enough, though it does
not become her complexion. Once. Jane's account of our own
necessities in the way of dress is nearly followed by
a sentence which not only contains evidence of her close
acquaintance with Fielding's greatest novel, but also reminds us of

(16:37):
mister Tom Lafroy. You say nothing of the silk stockings,
I flatter myself. Therefore that Charles has not purchased any
as I cannot very well afford to pay for them.
All my money is spent in buying white gloves and
pink persian. After I had written the above, we received
a visit from mister Tom Lafroy and his cousin Joy Orge.

(17:00):
The latter is really very well behaved now, and as
for the other, he has but one fault, which time
will I trust entirely remove. It is that his morning
coat is a great deal too light. He is a
very great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the
same colored clothes I imagine, which he did when he

(17:21):
was wounded. Many of her references to dress are of
the partly serious, partly humorous kind, which came naturally from
her pen Flowers are very much worn, she writes from
Bath in the summer of seventeen ninety nine. And fruit
is still more the thing. Elizabeth has a bunch of strawberries,

(17:42):
and I have seen grapes, cherries, plums, apricots. There are
likewise almonds and raisins, French plums and tamarins at the grocer's,
but I have never seen any of them in hats.
She had in the Southampton days, a spotted muslin which
she meant to wear out in spite of its durability.

(18:02):
You will exclaim at this, but mine really has signs
of feebleness, which, with a little care may come to something.
Then she has some bombazines with trains, which I cannot
reconcile myself to giving up as morning gowns. They are
so very sweet by candle light. I would rather sacrifice
my blue one. In short, I do not know, and

(18:23):
I do not care. A peep into the economy of
Steventon Parsonage is now and again offered in seventeen ninety six.
We are very busy making Edward shirts, and I am
proud to say that I am the neatest worker of
the party. They say that there are a prodigious number
of birds hereabouts this year, so that perhaps I may

(18:46):
kill a few. Another bit of work that the want
of the riches of Kent forced upon the poorer folks
of Hampshire, is shown to us when Jane writes, I
bought some japan ink, and next week shall begin my
operations on my hat, on which you know my principal
hopes of happiness depend in this case, there is no

(19:08):
difficulty of interpretation. Nowadays there are simple dips wherew with
young ladies whose allowances are small, or who in any
case wish to make the most of their money, can
change old straw hats into new soiled white into black
or green or heliotrope. It was not so a century ago,
and when Jane wanted to turn her old white straw

(19:31):
hat into a new black one, she must needs japan It.
I have read the course their mended my petticoat, and
have nothing else to do. She rides from London in
eighteen fourteen, and on another day about the same time,
she informs her sister, I have determined to trim my
lilac sarsenet with a black satin ribbon, just as my

(19:55):
China crape is sixpenny with at the bottom threepenny or
fourpenny at top. An even closer glimpse of Jane in
her home is afforded by a letter in which she says,
I find great comfort in my stuff gown, but I
hope you do not wear yours too often. I have
made myself two or three caps to wear of evenings

(20:16):
since I came home, and they save me a world
of torment as to hair dressing, which at present gives
me no trouble beyond washing and brushing, for my long
hair is always plaited up out of sight, and my
short hair curls well enough to want no papering. Such
references may remind us of Henry Tilney's astonishment that Catherine

(20:38):
did not keep a journal of her doings. How are
your absent cousins to understand the tenor of your life?
How are your various dresses to be remembered, and the
particular state of your complexion and curl of your hair
to be described in all their diversities without having constant
recourse to a journal. My dear madam, I am not

(20:58):
so ignorant a young life, ladies, ways as you wish
to believe me. Jane Austen was not reduced, as was
her own missus Hurst, to playing with her bracelets and
rings when there were no games or dances in progress.
On such occasions, like Elizabeth Bennett, she took up some
needlework and amused herself by listening to the general conversation

(21:21):
and entering into it when opportunity offered. Like everything done
by her deft fingers. Her fancy sewing is admirable, and
her embroidery would be treasured by her family for its
intrinsic beauty, even no such charming associations attached to it.
There is a muslin scarf adorned by her needle, which

(21:41):
to her true lovers might seem a more precious relic
than even her mahogany desk itself. One little interior sketched
by Jane after a visit to a young wife who
had just been blessed with a baby, is so illustrative
of her own neat habits and her ideas of the
material needs of happiness, that intimate as it is, it

(22:04):
merits quotation. Mary does not manage matters in such a
way as to make me want to lay in myself.
She is not tidy enough in her appearance. She has
no dressing gown to sit up in. Her curtains are
all too thin, and things are not in that comfort
and style about her which are necessary to make such
a situation an enviable one. We have seen on an

(22:28):
earlier page that Jane Austen provided warm garments for the
village poor on one occasion. We know where she bought
her flannel and an entry made at Basingstoke, which might
form the text for a dissertation on prejudice and economy.
She notes that I gave two shillings threepence a yard
for my flannel, and I fancy it is not very good,

(22:49):
but it is so disgraceful and contemptible an article in
itself that it's being comparatively good or bad is of
little importance. Why this contempt for what, in spite of
all patent substitutes, inflammable and otherwise is still commonly esteemed
one of the most harmless and necessary materials. Maryan Dashwood

(23:10):
included the wearing of a flannel wistcoat by Colonel Brandon
among the several defects which made it impossible that she
should ever be his wife. And when, for reasons not
all unconnected with the happy ending of the novel, she
agreed at last to marry him, it was in spite
of the fact that this gallant officer had sought the

(23:30):
constitutional safeguard of the much despised garment to Jane Austen
and Maryann Dashwood, Flannel, it seems, was as entirely unpleasing
a commodity as celluloid colors and cuffs are to most
people of our own day. The ravages of consumption, as
the Baron de Fernie reflects in his recently published memoirs,

(23:55):
would have been far less terrible in those times if
women had been less hostile to warm dresses and flannel petticoats.
Fresh air and thick boots were also to seek. The
women could not walk ten yards on a wet day
without the water coming through the thin soles of their
dainty little shoes. Miss Bates was quite exceptional in wearing
shoes with reasonable soules. One more sumptuary extract must be quoted.

(24:21):
It comes from a letter from London in eighteen fourteen.
My poor old muslin has never been dyed, yet it
has been promised to be done several times. What wicked
people dyers are? They begin with dipping their own souls
in scarlet sin. The last sentence brings its writer for

(24:41):
the moment very near to modern fiction, a considerable proportion
of which is mainly occupied with the vivid representation of
the process in question as applied to the world in general.
After clothes, the table out of the works of some novelists,
you might draw up menus or at least bills of

(25:02):
fare for a month. People who dwell in a bracing
air and take a great deal of exercise could live
very comfortably on a small selection from the dishes served
up in the novels of Dickens, and those who like
an even more simple cuisine could rely quite confidently on
the meals described by Dumont Pear. There is plenty of

(25:24):
substantial fare, of course in the Waverley novels, and as
for the works of Harrison Ainsworth, they groan under the
surloins and haunches that were provided in those imaginary ages.
When in Merry England the spits were always turning in
every castle and hall. The people of Jane Austen ate
quite as much as was good for them. They had breakfast,

(25:47):
lunch or noonshine, dinner, supper and tea, and everybody, always
excepting mister Woodhouse, and those whose spirits were temporarily depressed,
came with an appetite to every meal. For all we
know of the matter, no dinner is particularly described, but
those who want to know what people ate and drank
at the end of the eighteenth century may partly gratify

(26:10):
their appetite from the references which inevitably occur, except that
there were not quite so many dishes on the table
at once. The meals differed little from that to which
Swift introduces us in his dialogue between the company at
Ladies Smart's table. The Smarts, by the way, dined at three,
which in Jane Austen's time was still about the hour

(26:33):
for the small country houses, though in the big houses
it was five, marking the gradual advance from the ten
o'clock in the morning of the twelfth century to the
eight o'clock in the evening or later of the twentieth.
Plain roast and boiled joints of mutton, pork, beef and veal, chickens,
game in season, sweetbreads, meat pies, boiled vegetables, suet puddings,

(26:59):
apple tarts, jellies, and custards were the ordinary food of
the well to do. Port and burgundy were their principal drinks.
But probably the port was not usually such as is
chiefly sold nowadays. It was less fortified, nearer to the
natural wine, which is itself more like a Burgundy than
the port of modern commerce. Wine of any sort is

(27:21):
scarcely mentioned in Jane Austen's works. One of the few
exceptions I can recall is that of unnamed species offered
to Missus and Miss Bates at the wood Houses, which
the host advised them to mix freely with water, a
device they successfully managed to avoid taking, thanks to the

(27:41):
good offices of Emma. Jane Austen herself seems to have
been fond of wine in her thirty eighth years. She writes,
as I must leave off being young. I find many
dussurs in being a sort of chaperone, for I am
put on the sofa near the fire and can drink
as much wine as I like. On a much earlier occasion,

(28:05):
when she was herself under chaperonage, she had written, I
believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstborn.
I know not how else to account for the shaking
of my hands today. You will kindly make allowance, therefore,
for any indistinctness of writing, by attributing it to this
venial error. With our full knowledge of Jane's habit of

(28:27):
playful exaggeration, we may be certain that her too much
was nothing to shake our heads over, and that the
error was indeed venial. Jane gives us sufficient evidence of
the simplicity with which the Austin's Own table was furnished
from Steventon Parsonage in seventeen ninety eight. She thus refers

(28:48):
to one of the doctor's professional visits to her mother.
Mister Lyford was here yesterday. He came while we were
at dinner and partook of our elegant entertainment. I was
not ashamed at asking him to sit down to table,
for we had some peas, soup, a spare rib and
a pudding. He wants my mother to look yellow and

(29:08):
to throw out a rash, but she will do neither.
Years later, from Chawton, she writes that Captain Foote dined
with us on Friday, and I fear will not soon
venture again, for the strength of our dinner was a
boiled leg of mutton, underdone even for James. Jane herself

(29:29):
did the housekeeping when her mother was indisposed and Cassandra away,
and she prided herself on her success, though she detested
the necessity of great economy. Her ideas on the eternal
servant question are not, we may be sure, quite faithfully
expressed when she writes, my mother looks forward with as
much certainty as you can do to our keeping two maids.

(29:52):
My father is the only one not in the secret
we plan having a steady cook and a young giddy housemaid,
with a sedate middle aged man who is to undertake
the double office of husband to the former and sweetheart
to the latter. No children, of course, to be allowed
on either side. The simple life of the parsonage is

(30:14):
more accurately reflected in a comparison between the house of
the Austins and that of the Knights at Godmersham. We
dine now at half past three, and have done dinner.
I suppose before you begin we drink tea at half
past six. I am afraid you will despise us. My
father reads Cooper to us in the morning, to which

(30:37):
I listen when I can. How do you spend your evenings?
I guess that Elizabeth works, that you read to her,
and that Edward goes to sleep. Jane declares that she
always takes care to provide such things as please her
own appetite, which she considers the chief merit in housekeeping.
Ragout of Veal and harricom Mutton see to have been

(31:00):
especially attractive to her. Pic nicks. We hear of one
in particular of course at box Hill, and the Middletons
were always getting them up cold pies and cold chickens,
and no doubt cold punch were provided in plenty on
those happy occasions. French cookery was not so much appreciated

(31:22):
in England in those days as that had been twenty
or thirty years earlier before the Revolution. The bread of
our then hostile neighbors across the Channel was, however, not
infrequently copied in the bakehouse, as was the Boulange dance
in the ball room. Missus Morland reproached Catherine for talking
so much at breakfast about the French bread at Northanger.

(31:45):
But the poor little girl, who had been so shamefully
treated by General Tilney and sadly missed the attentions of
his younger son, replied that she did not care about
the bread, and it was all the same to her
what she ate. Missus Morland could only attribute the girl's
obvious unhappiness to the contrast afforded by their humble parsonage

(32:07):
to the glories of the Tilley mansion. There is a
very clever essay in one of the books Upstairs, upon
much such a subject, says this anxious mother about young
girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance
the mirror. I think I will look it out for
you some day or other, because I am sure it
will do you good. Catherine tried to be cheerful, but

(32:31):
presently relapsed into languor and weariness, and missus Morland went
off to seek for the Very Clever Essay as Henry
Tilney arrived before she returned with it. Its efficacy as
a prophylactic for listlessness and discontent was never put to
the test. I will take the risk of inducing the
listlessness and discontent of the present reader by devoting a

(32:55):
page to this moral souvenir of Jane Austen's infancy and
of her own literary diversions. The Very Clever Essay is
dated March sixth, seventeen seventy nine, and is in the
form of a letter from John Homespun, a plain country
gentleman with a small fortune and a large family, two

(33:16):
of whose daughters had been allowed his opposition. Having been
overcome to spend the Christmas holidays with a great lady,
whom they had met at the house of a relation,
they went with sparkling eyes and rosy cheeks. They came
back with cheeks as white as they curd and eyes
as dead as the beads in the face of a baby.

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Their father sees no reason to wonder at the change
when he hears the girls, with newfound affectations of speech
and manner, describe the habits of their new friends. Instead
of rising at seven, breakfasting at nine, dining at three,
supping at eight, and getting to bed by ten, as

(33:59):
was their custom at home home, my girls lay till twelve,
breakfasted at one, dined at six, supped at eleven, and
were never in bed till three in the morning. Their
shapes had undergone as much alteration as their faces. From
their bosoms. Next they called them which were squeezed up
to their throats, their waists tapered down to a very

(34:22):
extraordinary smallness. They resembled the upper half of an hour glass.
At this also I marveled, But it was the only
shape worn at blank, blank blank. Nor is their behavior
less changed than their garb. Instead of joining in the
good humored cheerfulness we used to have among us before,
my two fine young ladies check every approach to mirth

(34:45):
by calling it vulgar. One of them chid their brother
the other day for laughing, and told him it was
monstrously ill bred. Would you believe it? Sir? My daughter Elizabeth,
since her visit, she is offended a we call her Betty,
said it was fanatical to find fault with card playing
on Sunday, and her sister Sophia gravely asked my son

(35:08):
in law, the clergyman, if he had not some doubts
of the soul's immortality. Mister Homespun declares that the moral
plague among the worldly rich should be dealt with by
government as much as the distemper among the horned cattle. Happily,
Catherine Morland had not caught this particular disease of all.

(35:31):
It was only the plague of love that troubled her
innocent soul, and the medicine was provided without the interference
of a government inspector. From such a deliberate departure from
the straight path, I come back to the subject of
the economy of accessories in Jane Austen's novels. When the
French bread at Northanger led me astray, I was writing

(35:54):
about domestic economy, costumes and cookery. Why should the dresses
be described, or the dishes be named. We are concerned
with the sayings and doings of squires and parsons and
their wives and daughters, not with the achievements of cooks
and Meliner's. This would be quite a fair criticism. But

(36:14):
it is nonetheless certain that an author who tells you
what people eat and drink and wear does enable you
to realize more fully the contrast between the present and
the period with which the novel is concerned. That is
our business, however, not his. He is an artist, not
an historian. There is a common practice on the stage

(36:36):
of furbishing up old plays by cutting out obsolete references
and introducing topical touches. The comedies of Robertson may be
freshened considerably to meet the taste of thoughtless playgoers by
giving Captain Haughtrey a motor car and Jack Points a
magazine rifle. The moral of these present pages is merely

(36:58):
this that, with a few such slight changes as making
post chaise read motor and coach read train, and retarding
the dinner from three or five to eight or half past,
cutting out the occasional elegance, and otherwise changing a word
here and there in the dialogue. Long scenes from any

(37:19):
one of Jane Austen's novels could be acted without material
alteration in the costume of today, with no serious offense
to the unities. The absence of physical detail in her
narrative is no artistic defect. Mister Collins's first evening at Longbourn,
for instance, is so vividly represented that we gained the

(37:40):
impression of having been in the room, Though of its
size and shape and furniture, or of the appearance and
costume of its occupants, we are told little or nothing.
Mister Bennett's expectations were fully answered. His cousin was as
absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him
with the keenest enjoyment, maintaining at the same time the

(38:04):
most resolute composure of countenance, and except in an occasional
glance at Elizabeth, requiring no partner in his pleasure. By
tea time, however, the dose had been enough, and mister
Bennett was glad to take his guest into the drawing
room again, and when tea was over, glad to invite

(38:24):
him to read aloud to the ladies. Mister Collins readily assented,
and a book was produced, but on beholding it for everything,
announced it to be from a circulating library. He started
back and, begging pardon, protested that he never read novels.
Kitty stared at him, and Lydia exclaimed. Other books were produced,

(38:47):
and after some deliberation he chose Fordyce's servants. Lydia gaped
as he opened the volume, and before he had, with
very monotonous solemnity, read three pages, she interrupted him with
do you know, Mamma, that my uncle Philip's talks of
turning away Richard, and if he does, Colonel Forster will
hire him. My aunt told me so herself on Saturday.

(39:11):
I shall walk to Meryton tomorrow to hear more about it,
and to ask when mister Denny comes back from town.
Lydia was bid by her two eldest sisters to hold
her tongue, but mister Collins, much offended, laid aside his
book and said, I have often observed how little young
ladies are interested by books of a serious stamp, though

(39:33):
written solely for their benefit. It amazes me, I confess,
for certainly there can be nothing so advantageous to them
as instruction. But I will no longer importune my young cousin. Then,
turning to mister Bennett, he offered himself as his antagonist
at backgammon. Mister Bennett accepted the challenge, observing that he

(39:56):
acted very wisely in leaving the girls to their own
trifling amusement, the mephistophilian delight of the father in the
unconscious absurdity of his sententious guest, the rudeness of the
younger daughters, and the attempts of the elder girls to
enforce the observance of ordinary good manners could not well

(40:16):
be realized with finer effect, and no description of accessories
would heighten it. It is not only material accessories and
necessaries furniture, dress, and so on that are slided by
Jane Austen. Incidents that are of positive value to her
plan are not allowed to linger a moment after they
have served the turn. The adventure of Harriet Smith and

(40:40):
Emma with the Gypsies, ending in her rescue by Frank
Churchill fills just half a page. It would have filled
a chapter in a novel by Scott or Dickens. One
possible reason for this brevity is clear enough. The author
knew little about Gypsies. They were to her merely low
ruffians and drabs, furse stealers and pilferers, And of their

(41:02):
fascination for the student of character, she had no idea
at all. There were hundreds and hundreds of genuine romany
about the country in those days. Borrow was not yet
at work, and few people had taken the trouble to
discover what manner of mind the Egyptians possessed, and how
they spent their time when they were not robbing henroosts

(41:23):
or swindling housemaids. Scott felt something of the mysterious charm
of this ancient and nomadic race. But he was romantic,
and romance in Jane Austen's way of thinking was very
nearly a synonym for absurdity. So it is therefore that
the Gypsies in the Highbury Lane appear for half a page,

(41:43):
speak no word that is reported, and then vanished from Arakan.
The author implies that they hurried away to avoid prosecution.
Perhaps she was almost as glad to see the last
of them as were the inhabitants of Highbury. Thus is
a fine opportunity for a picturesque scene thrown away undeveloped.

(42:03):
As it is, the adventure stands absolutely alone in the
novels as the sole occasion whereon any of the characters
has reason to fear violence at the hands of ill
disposed persons. It was only an imagination that Catherine Morland
was carried off by masked men, though a spirited illustration
of mister Hugh Thompson's did once mislead a too hurried

(42:27):
critic into regarding the affair as an event in the
heroine's life. There are, in fact very few digressions in
these books, fielding digressed by whole chapters at a time.
Sterne's digressions filled more space than his tail In his
one novel, Jane Austen keeps to the road and leaves

(42:48):
the bye lanes unexplored. It is a pleasant road, old
and bordered here and there with attractive looking houses into
which we may enter by her kindly introduction. And if
we wish to go off to that hamlet on the
right or that coppice on the left, we must go alone.
She will sit on a style till we return to

(43:09):
pursue the direct route. It is to her effort to
avoid all but the essential factors in achieving her object
that the general absence of landscape and topographical detail of
all kinds in her work is to be attributed in
the case of a Dickens, a Baalzac, a Hardy, or
a Meredith. You can constantly identify the places where the

(43:30):
scenes are laid. In Lincoln's inn Fields. You can watch
mister Tulkinghorn's windows. At Rochester. You can see the very
room where mister Pickwick slept. At Nemour, you can gaze
at the house where the minaree Levreaux in Ursula Mirroway lived.
At Woolbridge, you can find the manor house where the
unhappy Tests passed her bridal night. Down in Surrey, you

(43:52):
can take a photograph of the Crossways House, which was
almost the whole fortune of Diana. At Seaford you can
see the Elba hall of the house on the beach,
sheltering beneath the downs. And as in these instances, so
in scores of others, but in connection with the Austin novels.
Save for the London streets and squares, there are only

(44:15):
bath and limereages and Portsmouth where one can truly feel
sure that such and such an incident in one or
other novel occurred on this very spot. If, however, there
is no special Jane Austen country to be traced out
by the diligence seeker for visible associations, there are scattered
spots where her presence is still to be felt. At Steventon,

(44:39):
where the earlier works were produced, the house of the
Austins no longer stands, having given place long since to
a rectory on the other side of the valley, more
convenient and comfortable than that wherein the father wrote his
sermons and the daughter her novels, sermons and novels, which
at the time seemed equally likely to achieve enduring fame.

(45:00):
Only the well and the pump remain to mark the site.
The surroundings are not all new, how should they be.
In a thinly populated parish. There are still farms and
cottages that were old before Jane was born. The church
is in better trim, but externally, at least it is
much the same, probably with scenery as with men and women.

(45:23):
Jane Austen did not usually draw from models, and when
she did, she gave the models their own names. The
one real bit of description of a place named in
her work is the account of the environs of Lyme Regis,
which is so obviously written from personal interest that some
of her biographers have supposed that her own experiences during

(45:43):
her visits there had included a Captain Wentworth, or at
least a Captain Benwick. A very strange stranger, it must be,
she writes, who does not see charms in the immediate
environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better.
The scenes in its neighborhood, Charmeth, with its high grounds
and extensive sweeps of country, and still more, its sweet

(46:07):
retired bay backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low
rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for
watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation,
The woody varieties of the cheerful village of up Lime,
and above all Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks,
where these scattered forest trees and orchards of luxuriant growth

(46:30):
declare that many a generation must have passed away since
the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground
for such a state where a scene so wonderful and
so lovely is exhibited as may more than equal any
of the resembling scenes of the far famed Isle of Wight.
These places must be visited and visited again to make

(46:52):
the worth of lime understood. This was quite an exceptional
digression from the thought and conversation of Jane Austen's characters.
One of those letters which Leslie, Stephen and others have
thought so trivial, but which are so characteristic in their spirit,
was written from Lyme by Jane to Cassandra on September fourteenth,

(47:15):
eighteen four. I continue quite well, in proof of which
I have bathed again this morning. I endeavor as far
as I can to supply your place, and be useful
and keep things in order. I detect dirt in the
water decants as fast as I can, and keep everything
as it was under your administration. The ball last night

(47:39):
was pleasant. Nobody asked me for the two first dances.
The two next I danced with mister Crawford, and had
I chosen to stay longer, might have danced with mister Granville,
or with a new odd looking man who had been
eyeing me for some time, And at last, without any introduction,
asked me if I meant to dance again? It is

(48:01):
impossible to leave Lime Regis without recalling how Tennyson, when
he was shown the place where the Duke of Monmouth
was supposed to have landed, cried, don't talk to me
of the Duke of Monmouth. Show me the exact spot
where Louisa Musgrove fell. Jane's intimacy with places was chiefly
confined to Steventon, Godmersham, Chawton, Southampton, Bath and their neighborhood.

(48:27):
It is not a day's walk or an hour's motoring
from Steventon to Chawton, where, after the long interval of
comparative inactivity, the later novels were born at Chawton. According
to one of her later biographers, the cottage where she
lived and worked has disappeared. This is happily not true.

(48:47):
It is true that it is now turned to other
uses than that of sheltering a parson's widow and her daughter's.
It has been divided internally and now forms a couple
of labourers cottages and a village club where tired toilers
who have never read a line of the books that
were written under that roof discussed the merits and defects
of the tobacco tacks and the Old Age Pensions Act.

(49:11):
Chawton House itself shows little structural change, and the park
is scarcely altered since Jane walked across from the cottage
to take tea with her relations at the Great House.
At either of these villages, Stephenton, the birthplace of Jane
herself and of Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park and Chawton,

(49:32):
where Persuasion and Emma came into being, you may find
scenes which you will associate with this or that story
or incident. But nowhere are you likely to feel the
influence of locality more strongly in connection with either author
or novels than at Godmersham, the home of her brother Edward,
where until long after her death her relations dwelt amid

(49:56):
their own broad acres. The place with other property, came
to Edward Austin from mister and Missus Nyde, who had
adopted him and whose name he ultimately took. There is
no more typically English seat in the typically English county
of Kent. The small Sylvan village the old Church above

(50:16):
the Stour River offered no special attractions for tourists, and
Godmersham House itself is one of the plainest even among
the country seats of the Early Georgian Age. Its one
external charm is its unpretentiousness. It has not even the
huge classic portico on which so many of the country
houses of its period depend for impressiveness, plain, commodious, well placed,

(50:41):
the house is lovely for us only in that it
sheltered for many a week from year to year. The
author of Pride and Prejudice this just such a house
as Sir John Middleton filled with visitors at all seasons,
or mister Darcy showed to his future bride and her
uncle and aunt gardener. If the house itself is without

(51:03):
external beauty, the park surrounding it is delightful. The sparkling
river flows through the midst of great elms and oaks,
beneath which mingled herds of deer, sheep and oxen brows
in the peaceful security of the Golden Age. As you
sit on the low wall of the lichen covered bridge,
you see nothing that can have changed in character since

(51:24):
Jane Austen sat there and thought over the doings of
her dear heroines. One can almost hear the rumble of
the baruchh that brought her mother and herself from the
coach at Ashford to the hall at Godmersham. And if
that high hung carriage were suddenly to turn the corner
beside the big elm near the gate, one would scarcely
be astonished. This park and this house, this river, the

(51:49):
old trees, the thatched cottages, the lanes and brooks all
speak of the days when Bingley came for Jane Bennett,
and Henry Tilney for Catherine Morland. If there is anything
in the influence of place, Godmersham was part author of
the nobles. The spirit of Jane Austen abides in the
delicious air of this quiet and unspoilt valley, where, when

(52:11):
the wind blows strongly from the southeast, the salt of
the sea breeze mingles with the perfumes of the grass
and the woodsmoke as pleasantly as the attic wit of
Jane Austen mingles with the sweetness of her heroines, and
the thousand delights of her dialogue. These are the chief
country scenes of Jane's life. As to the towns, we

(52:32):
know more or less of her associations with Bath, Southampton,
and Winchester, as well as London. At Bath she used
to stay in early youth with her uncle and aunt,
and she lived there for four years with her parents.
The fruits of her experience there may be enjoyed in
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, though her lack of the topographical

(52:54):
instinct is suggested by the absence of evident interest in
the buildings of Bath. We learn as much about the
place from the Pickwick papers, which merely touched there on
their way, or from the allusions of the characters in
the rivals, where the events are of a few days,
as we do from chapters that cover long periods of
residence in one of the most beautiful and still in

(53:16):
spite of the disproportionate and architecturally discordant hotel, the least
injured cities of England. Souvenirs of the personal association of
Jane Austen with Bath are almost as plentiful as those
of Johnson with Fleet Street. The house in Sydney Place,
where the Austins lived during most of the time between

(53:36):
mister Austin's resignation and his death, is the only one
that bears a tablet to Jane's memory, but in Queen's Square.
Whence several of her letters are dated in Gay Street,
in the Green Park in the Paragon, the rooms she
occupied with her relations at one time or another remain
very much as they were in her day, and externally

(53:57):
the buildings are unaltered, one and all being built of
the local stone, which gives so notable a character to
the Georgian architecture of the city. In Camden Place, where
the Elliots rented the best house, in Pulteney Street, where
Catherine stayed with the Allens, in Westgate Buildings, where Anne
cheered missus Smith's lonely days, there has been little change

(54:19):
since Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were written. There is probably
no town in the world associated with the work of
a famous person of even so near a period, which
has altered less in appearance than Bath since eighteen five.
At Southampton, the mother and daughters lived after the father's
death in a house in that secluded part of the

(54:41):
town which stands between the high Street and the old
walls above the water. There is a bit of those
walls which abuts on the spot where the Austin's house stood,
and it is one of those places where we may
feel confident that we are walking where Jane often walked,
and gazing out over a scene which was familiar to
her in almost all save the funnels of the steam

(55:03):
yachts and the distant view of the train on its
way to Bournemouth or to London. In London itself, there
are many spots that will always recall Jane Austen to
her devoted friends and her lovers. In Henrietta Street, Covent Garden,
in Hans Place in Cork Street, we know that she
herself stayed. Many of the characters in Sense and Sensibility,

(55:27):
the only novel in which we hear much of London,
are associated with familiar streets. Edward Ferrars State in pell Mell,
the Steel Girls in Bartlett's Buildings, Missus Jennings in Barkley Street,
the john Dashwoods in Harley Street. The Gardener's Pride and
Prejudice lived in Graystrouch Street. The day has not yet

(55:49):
come when public bodies could be sufficiently affected by imaginative
literature to place memorials on the houses where fictitious personages
have been supposed to dwell. In Paris, the memorial to
Charley is an admirable group of a grenadier and a gammon,
typical characters from his work, and a musketeer guards the

(56:11):
Monument of Dumas. The gods forbid that any sculptor should
be commissioned to give us life sized figures of Emma, Elizabeth,
Ann and Fanny to sit around a statue of Jane Austen.
But when next the London County Council contemplates the placing
of plaques on the former residences of departed worthies, they

(56:31):
might consider whether, of course, with the consent of the
freeholder and the leaseholder, her name might not be placed
on the house in Henrietta Street, once her brother Henry's home,
where so many of her letters were written. She tells
of the convenient arrangement of its rooms for the comfort
of herself and her nieces, and from its door she
went to the neighboring church or the theaters, which were

(56:53):
within a few minutes walk. It is not likely that
any political prejudice would cause even the most advanced progressive
on the Council to object to the name of so
very mild a Tory being thus honored. As to the
more probable objection that she did not reside there, but
was only a visitor, one may plead that, as there

(57:14):
is a plaque on a newly erected tube station recalling
the residence of Missus Siddons, and that a tablet proclaims
that Turner lived in a house built thirty years after
his death. There would be no great straining of logic
in admitting the claim of a house in which Jane
Austen did undoubtedly write and sleep and talk. The front

(57:36):
was cemented in the middle of the last century, and
the ground floor is now used for business purposes, but
otherwise the house is little changed since the Austins were there.
End of Chapter six