Читать книгу The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things - Paula Byrne - Страница 9
ОглавлениеShawls had been hand-woven in Kashmir since the eleventh century. The finest examples were made under Mughal patronage to be worn at court or presented as ostentatious gifts. They could take many months to complete, requiring the skills of spinners, dyers, pattern designers, craftsmen responsible for arranging the warp and weft, weavers and finishers. The best were made from the underbelly fleece of the wild central Asian goat, whereas pashmina, second-grade wool, came from domesticated goats. Many such shawls were brought back to Europe, where they became a popular fashion item in Jane Austen’s lifetime. Western demand duly affected Kashmiri production: by the time the shawl illustrated here was made, the classic boteh design, derived from flowering plants, had become more formal and stylized. This particular ‘moon shawl’ is square, like most Kashmir shawls, and was intended to be worn over the shoulders.
In January 1772, Jane Austen’s Aunt Phila was sent ‘a piece of flowered shawl to make a warm winter morning gown’ from her husband, who was living in Calcutta.1 Seventy years later, Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra mentioned in her last testament ‘a large Indian shawl’. It had once belonged to the woman she had hoped would become her mother-in-law.2 Jane Austen herself once gave a shawl to a Steventon neighbour. She observed her niece Cassy in a fine red shawl and a Bath acquaintance in a yellow one.3 And in her house at Chawton today the visitor can still see a cream silk shawl that was a gift to her from Catherine Knight, her brother Edward’s adoptive mother.
‘Fanny,’ says Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park, ‘William must not forget my shawl, if he goes to the East Indies; and I shall give him a commission for any thing else that is worth having. I wish he may go to the East Indies, that I may have my shawl.’ She hesitates for an instant, then ends with characteristic indulgence: ‘I think I will have two shawls, Fanny.’4
When Jane Austen saw or wore or wrote about an Indian shawl, she entered a whole new realm of cross-cultural exchange, a world far from that of her own Hampshire village. Through her family connections, she became aware of that wider world and it entered subtly into her imagination, shaping her novels to a far greater extent than is often realized. Thanks in particular to a charismatic female cousin, there is a thread connecting Jane Austen to places we do not usually associate with her: not only the East Indies, but also the streets of revolutionary Paris.
The East India Company, with its many trading activities, was developing into a significant economic and political force within the global economy. Cottons and silks, indigo dyes and spices, not to mention diamonds and opium, were imported in vast quantities. As goods came west, so people went east. The Indies became the place to make your fortune when hope was lost at home.
A young woman, an orphan called Cecilia Wynne, leaves her home in England for Bengal. Her journey to the East Indies takes six months, the passage fraught with dangers and privations. She is going with one object in mind: to find a husband. Left penniless by her father, she is travelling at the behest of a rich relation who is eager to marry her off. The girl’s younger sister, also destitute, has been offered a placement as a lady’s companion in England.
When Cecilia arrives in the East Indies, her good looks ensure that she soon finds a rich husband. He is older than her, and very respectable: she is considered to be ‘splendidly but unhappily married’. Back in England Cecilia is regarded by those who know her as a lucky girl. All except one friend, who harbours no such romantic illusions: ‘Do you call it lucky, for a Girl of Genius and Feeling to be sent in quest of a Husband to Bengal, to be married there to a Man of whose Disposition she has no opportunity of judging till her Judgement is of no use to her, who may be a Tyrant, or a Fool or both for what she knows to the Contrary. Do you call that fortunate?’ Another girl replies, cynically, ‘She is not the first Girl who has gone to the East Indies for a Husband, and I declare it should be very good fun if I were as poor.’5
This story is fictional. It is called ‘Catharine, or the Bower’ and it was written by the young Jane Austen in 1792 when she was sixteen. But the facts of the story replicate almost exactly the fate of her own aunts: Philadelphia, elder sister of the Reverend George Austen, did indeed go to the East Indies for a husband, while Leonora, his younger sister, became a lady’s companion at home in England. Even in her teens, the young Jane Austen was preoccupied with the hardships faced by women reduced to a state of absolute dependence on relations who often prove to be unkind and unfeeling. Her interest in the plight of impoverished women and the harsh realities of the Georgian marriage market never left her. She once advised her niece Fanny that ‘Single Women have a dreadful propensity for being poor – which is one very strong argument in favour of Matrimony.’6 The women sent out to the East Indies to find husbands because they had no dowry and little chance of finding an English match were but extreme examples of a widespread phenomenon.
So what was the story of these three children – Philadelphia, known to the family as Phila, George and Leonora – born in rapid succession in May 1730, May 1731 and January 1733? It is a tale of siblings separated, an uncaring stepmother and the prospect of penury or worse.
Perhaps one of the reasons why George Austen grew up to become such a loving, kind and attentive father, and to fill his house with children, was that his own childhood had been one of neglect and misery. His mother, Rebecca, died shortly after giving birth to Leonora. Their father, William Austen, a surgeon, remarried, but he too soon died. Little George was just six.
The stepmother was not interested in the three young children. William Austen’s will had established his two brothers as trustees for the orphans. One of these uncles, Stephen, was a bookseller at St Paul’s in London. He and his wife took in their nephew and two nieces. According to family tradition, the children were neglected, even mistreated.7 But one can never be entirely sure how much to trust what one branch of a family says about another. The neglect cannot have been total, since little Leonora stayed in the household. Presumably she would have had the same kind of status as Fanny Price at Mansfield Park. Hardly anything is known of her later life, other than that she became a lady’s companion. George, meanwhile, was sent to live with an aunt at Tonbridge in Kent. He went to the long-established school there and proved himself a clever boy, winning a scholarship to Oxford.
Philadelphia did not have such educational opportunities. When she was fifteen, she was apprenticed to a milliner in Covent Garden. She would have been set to work making shirts and shifts, aprons and neckerchiefs, caps and cloaks, hoods and hats, muffs and ruffles, trim for gowns. Apprentice milliners led tough, unhealthy lives with long hours and poor conditions. Many of them died young, but there was always a stream of young girls available to take their place. Some, especially those as attractive as Phila, were tempted or forced into another profession. The term ‘Milliner of Covent Garden’ was slang for a prostitute. In that part of London, the dividing line between different kinds of working girl was very thin.
Phila needed to get out. Having finished her apprenticeship and come of age, she inherited her small portion from her father’s estate. In November 1751, she made a bold move, petitioning the Directors of the East India Company for leave to go to India aboard their ship, the Bombay Castle.
She set sail on 18 January 1752, together with ten other ‘young beauties’. They all had the same ambition: to find a husband among the lonely white businessmen, soldiers and administrators who worked in the East Indies. In the colloquial language of the English in Bengal, women of this kind would become known as ‘the fishing fleet’.
One of the other girls, Mary Elliott, had named the same two gentlemen as Phila in the role of ‘sureties’ to support her application, so it may be assumed that they were friends before they went aboard. Another, who would also become a good friend to Phila, was Margaret Maskelyne. Only sixteen, the orphaned and impoverished daughter of a minor civil servant, she was escaping a life of boredom with her maiden aunts in Wiltshire. The army had taken her wild brother Edmund to India and he reckoned he had lined up a match for her: a letter had arrived in England with the information that he ‘had laid out a husband for Peggy if she chooses to take so long a voyage for one that I approve of extremely, but then she must make haste, as he is in such a marrying mood that I believe the first comer will carry him’.8
The beauties bound for Bengal finally arrived at Madras Harbour in early August. All eleven had survived the conditions aboard ship, described by Jane Austen as ‘a punishment that needs no other to make it very severe’.9 Many people died in the passage. What must it have been like for these girls? Homesickness at leaving England coupled with the terrors of the voyage, seasickness, weeks upon weeks of cramped conditions, stink from the bilge, coldness on deck and heat below. Always the threat of shipwreck. If the girls were wealthy they could be wined and dined by the captain, but this came at a high price and many East India captains charged exorbitant sums and steep rates of interest if credit was required. The captains also acted as general suppliers of goods such as clothes, delicacies, even furniture, which they sold both to their passengers and to the inhabitants at their destination.
Their first sight of India was the long, low line of the Coromandel Coast. The contrast in journeying from a freezing English mid-winter to August in Madras (now Chennai) can readily be imagined: the heat and humidity, but also the glorious mountains and sea, the white buildings, the endless sky, the smell of Madras, with its mixture of hot dust, burnt dung and spices. From the deck, as the hot breeze hit them, they saw the battlements of Fort St George, with the steeple of St Mary’s Church rising gracefully behind it. The church was a brilliant white, the surface covered with chunam, a cement that was made of burnt sea-shells. It glowed in the setting sun. To the right of the Fort was the native or ‘Black Town’, to the left was the old Portuguese settlement of Thome. Surrounding it all was golden sand and green palm-trees.10
The girls were taken to the Sea Gate of the Fort in a flimsy masula boat. From there, they would be swept into a whirl of concerts, balls and picnics. Their quest for husbands was under way. Margaret Maskelyne was duly introduced to the man her brother had lined up for her. He was the Governor of Bengal, and within six months she had married him. He would go on to achieve fame under the name Lord Clive of India.
In 1745, the year when Phila began her apprenticeship in Covent Garden, a man called Tysoe Hancock, seven years her senior, set sail for the East Indies. Hancock held the post of Surgeon Extraordinary for the East India Company in Madras, but he was also involved in the shipment of diamonds and gold. And he was in search of a wife. He knew all about both the prospects and the perils faced by the ‘fishing fleet beauties’. ‘You know very well’, he wrote in a letter, ‘that no Girl, tho’ but fourteen Years Old, can arrive in India without attracting the Notice of every Coxcomb in the Place, of whom there is very great Plenty at Calcutta, with very good Persons and no other Recommendation … Debauchery under the polite name of Gallantry is the Reigning Vice of the Settlement.’11
Phila’s wealthy uncle Francis, a well-to-do gentleman who made his money practising law and buying land at Sevenoaks in Kent, was Tysoe Hancock’s lawyer and business agent. This connection brought them together. In February 1753, just over six months after her arrival in India, Jane Austen’s aunt became Mrs Tysoe Hancock. At Fort St David, where she settled down to married life, she must have felt a million miles away from her days as a penniless seamstress for fine ladies. She was now the mistress of a large household of servants, including personal maids called Diana, Silima, Dido and Clarinda. She wore fine silks and muslins. The garden, shaded by rows of the evergreen tulip tree, was full of pineapples and pomegranates. The only thing she lacked was a baby. After six years of marriage the couple still remained childless.
In 1759 they moved to Fort William in Calcutta, at the request of Lord Clive. Here they became part of the elite British Bengal community, meeting and befriending Warren Hastings. Hastings had joined the East India Company in 1750 as a clerk, and by 1773 he would rise to become the first Governor-General of India. Hastings and Hancock entered into a business relationship, trading in salt, timber, carpets, rice and Bihar opium. Phila was reunited with her friend from the voyage out, Mary Elliott. She too had succeeded in making a quick match soon after arriving, but it had ended abruptly when her husband had the misfortune of being among the British soldiers who died when incarcerated in the Black Hole of Calcutta. With rather indecent haste, Mary married Warren Hastings just a few months later. In December 1757, she gave birth to a son called George. Then in 1758 she had a daughter called Elizabeth, who did not survive. The friends who had once been part of the fishing fleet did not have long together, for Mary Hastings died in July 1759, just weeks after Phila had moved to Calcutta.
Calcutta was grander and more luxurious than the Coast. Great mansions resembling Italian palazzi lined the river front. It was more like a European city than Madras, as its houses and public buildings were not all crammed into the confines of the Fort but were mingled on the streets of the town itself. Armenians mixed with Portuguese, providing the English with cooks and servants. Many of the English lived in large one-storey villas reached by outdoor stairs, boasting handsome verandas on which to sit in the cool of the evening. Walls were not papered but whitewashed and, the climate being too hot for carpets, the floors were covered in matting. The rooms were large, cool and airy, furnished with European imports. Many of the English had a ‘garden-house’ out of town, where they retired at the weekends, escaping the intense heat of the city. Siestas were necessary, the heat being so great that the ladies would retire wearing ‘the slightest covering’. Only in the cool of the evening would everyone dress in their finery and go out into society. One of the most popular meeting places was Holwell’s Gardens, where the British gathered together for supper parties and for their children to play. In early 1761 Philadelphia discovered that she was at last pregnant.
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Phila’s new life could hardly have been more different from that of her brother George, Jane Austen’s future father. After Oxford, he was ordained deacon and became a master at his old school in Tonbridge. After his second ordination, as a full clergyman, in 1755 he resigned his schoolteaching post and returned to Oxford where he became assistant Chaplain at St John’s College.
In 1762, George Austen met Cassandra Leigh. They married two years later and were accompanied on their honeymoon by a sickly seven-year-old boy called George Hastings. The worlds of India and England were colliding again: the first child to come into the household of Jane Austen’s father was the son of Warren Hastings.
Jane Austen’s aunt Phila
George Hastings had been sent to England in 1761, at the time when Phila Hancock was pregnant. He was initially entrusted to the Leigh family of Adlestrop, who were old friends of Warren Hastings. In this sense, he came as part of the marriage package when George Austen proposed to Cassandra Leigh. George was rewarded with a salary from Hastings, and expenses incurred on behalf of the boy were reimbursed. After the honeymoon, the boy moved in with the newly married couple at the parsonage in Deane, Hampshire, where the Reverend George Austen had been granted a living. But the boy was in very poor health. He died of diphtheria in the autumn. According to family tradition, Cassandra Austen reacted as badly as if George had been her own child.
Meanwhile in Calcutta, sister Phila’s seven barren years came to an end. On 22 December 1761, she finally gave birth to a daughter. This was Eliza Hancock, the little girl who would bring colour, danger and excitement into Jane Austen’s world.
The Austen family still possesses an Indian rosewood writing desk that, it is said, was given as a present by Warren Hastings to Phila Hancock, in order to thank her for nursing his dying wife. The gossip among the British in Calcutta was that Phila had very quickly become much more than a nurse and a friend. It appears to have been an open secret in the community of the East India Company that Eliza was the illegitimate daughter of the great Warren Hastings. He was her acknowledged godfather, and Eliza was named after Hastings’s daughter Elizabeth who had died in infancy. She in turn would name her only child, a son, after him: Hastings.
The gossip raged, fuelled by a jealous secretary of Clive’s called Jenny Strachey. Lord Clive himself wrote to his wife, demanding that she dissociate herself from her fellow-traveller on the fishing fleet: ‘In no circumstance whatever keep company with Mrs Hancock for it is beyond a doubt that she abandoned herself to Mr Hastings.’12
Warren Hastings remained profoundly loyal to Phila and her little girl, who quickly became known as Betsy. He settled a fortune of five thousand pounds on the child, later doubling the amount, giving her more than enough for a dowry to enable her to make a good marriage. The source of the money was a bond for forty thousand rupees made over to Hastings to be paid in China, which he then passed over to Eliza in English money. Sums of that kind coming from the India–China connection at this period always carry the smell of opium.
Hastings was famously generous and well known for his love of children, but his private letters to Phila are unusually affectionate and revealing: ‘Kiss my dear Bessy for me, and assure her of my tenderest Affection. May the God of Goodness bless you both.’13 Whether or not Hastings was Eliza’s natural father, she always treated him like one. When she married her cousin Henry in 1797, she wrote at once to Hastings, seeking his approbation of the union. After Eliza’s death, Henry visited Hastings. Reporting on the visit, Jane Austen wrote, somewhat mysteriously, that he had ‘never hinted at Eliza in the smallest degree’.14 She was clearly astonished that Hastings had said nothing about the last days of the child he had so adored. It may well be inferred that the relationship was so close, his pain so great, that he could not bear to speak of her.
In the summer of 1765, the Hancock family arrived back in England, accompanied by Warren Hastings and their maid Clarinda. It was reported that the first news he heard on his arrival was word from the Austens of the death of his son. He was deeply affected, his love for his god-daughter Eliza only intensified. In London, Hastings and the Hancocks rented houses close to one another. Eliza and her mother stayed on in England when Hancock returned to Bengal. He sent them wonderful supplies: spices for cooking, curry leaves, pickled mangoes and limes, chillies, balychong spice and cassoondy sauce. Perfumes, such as attar of roses from Patna, arrived too. Diamonds were sent worth thousands of pounds, and gold mohurs (coins). He also shipped over fine linen and silks for bed linen and for dresses for both mother and daughter. They received seersucker, sannow, doreas, muslin, dimity, Malda silks, chintz and flowered shawls. In return, Phila sent books, gin and newspapers. Hancock requested that his wife share her treasures with members of her family, including of course George Austen and his family, which by this time was growing rapidly. Little wonder that Jane Austen’s juvenile writing contains references to consumer goods such as Indian muslins, not to mention curry sauces.15
Hancock wrote vivid letters to his wife, telling terrifying tales of servants killed by tigers in the Sunderbunds and reporting that her two maids, Diana and Silima, had become prostitutes. Phila shared this Indian news with Jane Austen’s parents. She often visited Hampshire to help Mrs Austen in her confinements. She was definitely present at Cassandra’s birth and probably at Jane’s in 1775.
Warren Hastings met George Austen in London in July 1765. Austen was extremely impressed with Hastings, who had been a brilliant classicist at Westminster School and had always been disappointed that instead of proceeding to university he had been sent out to the East India Company as a young man. Hastings loved Latin poetry and had a taste for writing verse based on the Horatian model. George Austen urged his own children to emulate the great man’s learning.
Eliza’s parents wanted her to be educated in England or France. She was given the best London masters for drawing and dancing lessons, and for music. She played the guitar and the harpsichord. She was taught to ride, to play-act and to speak French. This was a typical education in female accomplishments with the express purpose of attracting a man of means. But Hancock also insisted that she had arithmetic and writing lessons: ‘her other Accomplishments will be Ornaments to her, but these are absolutely necessary’.16 He took advice on her education from Hastings, who urged ‘an early practice in Economy’, but also hinted that he would provide for Eliza: ‘but if I live and meet with the success which I have the Right to hope for, she shall not be under the Necessity of marrying a Tradesman, or any Man for her Support’.17 Hancock fretted about his daughter. He worried about her moral health, fearing that she might ‘pick up the Levity or Follies of the French’, and also about her physical health – when she got threadworms he noted that ‘they cannot be watched with too much Caution, as they may be greatly detrimental to her Constitution’.18
After Hancock’s death, alone in India in 1775, still trying and failing to make money, Eliza and her mother stayed in London another year. Then they began their travels in Europe, first going to Germany and Belgium, before reaching Paris in 1779. By 1780 Eliza had seen the French royal family at close quarters in Versailles, taken up the harp and sat for her ivory miniature. It was a present for her beloved uncle George Austen, dispatched to his rectory. She is wearing a pretty low-cut dress, adorned with blue ribbons, and her hair is heavily powdered, as was the fashion in Paris (‘Heads in general look as if they had been dipped in a meal tub,’ she wrote in a letter).19
Jane Austen was five when the miniature reached Steventon. A year later Eliza became engaged to a captain in Marie-Antoinette’s regiment of dragoons, Jean-François Capot de Feuillide. Ten years older than Eliza, he was the son of a provincial lawyer – though he called himself the Comte de Feuillide, on somewhat dubious grounds. George Austen thoroughly disapproved of the match, fearing that the self-styled Count was a fortune-hunter and complaining that Eliza and her mother were giving up their friends, their country and even their religion.20
In December 1773, Hancock had drawn up letters of attorney enabling George Austen to act on his sister’s behalf in the confidential handling of receipts from India. Invoices for assignments of diamonds were made out in George Austen’s name. Hastings and Hancock were also involved in trading opium, among other commodities. It is startling to suppose that Jane Austen’s education and the books in her father’s library, which did so much to inspire her to become a writer, may well have been funded, at least indirectly, by the opium trade. So much for the notion of her family being wholly sequestered from the world in a cosy Hampshire village.
Hancock’s death, back in Calcutta in 1775, was the occasion for Warren Hastings’s doubling of his gift to his god-daughter Eliza. George Austen was one of the trustees named in the legal documents. It was just two months after Hancock’s death that Jane Austen was born.
Cecilia Wynne in the early novella ‘Catharine’ is the only young woman in Austen’s fiction to join the fishing fleet to seek marriage in India. But her family connections with Bengal periodically pop up in the mature novels. Lady Bertram’s request for an East Indian shawl is one example. And in Sense and Sensibility, Marianne and Willoughby make fun of Brandon’s experience there: ‘“he has told you that in the East Indies the climate is hot, and the mosquitoes are troublesome” … “Perhaps,” said Willoughby, “his observations may have extended to the existence of nabobs, gold mohrs and palanquins.”’21 Jane Austen never based her stories directly on her own family’s experiences, but in a life dominated by conversation, the exchange of family news, storytelling and letter-writing, it seems more than a little coincidental that the reason Brandon asks his regiment for a transfer to Bengal is his desire to escape from the heartbreak of losing his great love, who is called Eliza. She is forced to marry his brother, against her will, and later becomes a prostitute; her daughter, also called Eliza, is seduced by Willoughby when only sixteen, has his child and is abandoned. For Jane Austen, it would seem, the name of Eliza was inextricably connected with both the East Indies and sexual scandal.
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Eliza
Eliza Hancock, now the Comtesse de Feuillide and bringing with her a baby boy, burst into the life of the Steventon parsonage just in time for the Christmas festivities of 1786. Slight of build and extremely elegant, she had high cheekbones, elfin features, large expressive eyes and masses of curly hair. Marriage had not tamed the vivacious Eliza. She had plenty of admirers at Steventon, male and female. Jane Austen, at the impressionable age of eleven, was simply enchanted by the cousin who brought tales of India and Europe to rural Hampshire.
For the young Jane Austen, Eliza Hancock was the living incarnation of her favourite character in one of her favourite novels: Charlotte Grandison in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. Reading Eliza’s real letters is like reading Charlotte’s fictional ones. Temperamentally, Eliza was unsuited to marriage, which she saw as giving up ‘dear Liberty and yet dearer flirtation’. ‘Flirtation’s a charming thing,’ she wrote: ‘it makes the blood circulate!’ Of her first husband, the Count, she remarked, ‘it is too little to say he loves, since he literally adores me’. Of weddings she quipped, ‘I was never but at one wedding in my life and that appeared a very stupid idea to me.’ Of herself she wrote, ‘independence and the homage of half a dozen are preferable to subjection and the attachment of a single individual … I am more and more convinced that She is not at all calculated for sober Matrimony.’22
Her liveliness mesmerized the Austens. She played piano for them every day, and arranged impromptu dances in the parlour. She told stories of Paris and of Marie Antoinette. She complained of French theatre that ‘it is still the fashion to translate or rather murder, Shakespear’.23 She gave Jane for her birthday a twelve-volume set of Arnaud de Berquin’s stories L’Ami des enfants.
Jane and Cassandra, who had been at boarding school for the previous eighteen months, were now home for good. In Steventon rectory Eliza also encountered Henry Austen, no longer a child but a tall handsome man about to go up to Oxford. He soon made a point of visiting her when she went back to London, and arranging for her to visit him at college. At St John’s in Oxford, Eliza ‘longed to be a Fellow that I might walk [in the garden] every day’. ‘Besides,’ she added, ‘I was delighted with the Black Gown and thought the Square Cap mighty becoming.’24
Eliza had confessed to Philadelphia (‘Phylly’) Walter, cousin to the Austens, that she was no longer in love with her husband. While he was in France she led, according to this cousin, a ‘very dissipated life’ in London.25 To judge from Eliza’s surviving letters, her life was full of socializing and adventure. She narrowly misses being robbed and attacked by highwaymen on Hounslow Heath. She takes her little boy Hastings to Hastings and other seaside resorts for the benefit of sea-bathing. She attends balls and the opera and moves back and forth between England and France.
Following the success of her visit to Steventon in 1786 she was keen to go down to Hampshire again, though her uncle had told her that he was able to entertain only at midsummer and Christmas. She made plans to return to Steventon for the following Christmas and she encouraged her cousins in their plans to put on private theatricals. As will be seen, Eliza led the way in choosing the plays and it is no surprise that those she chose featured spirited heroines who refuse to be cowed by men.
Both James and Henry Austen were ‘fascinated’ by the flirtatious Eliza, according to James’s son, who wrote the first memoir of Jane. One of Jane Austen’s comic stories written before the end of the 1780s was called ‘Henry and Eliza’. Eliza is a beautiful little foundling girl discovered in a ‘Haycock’, rather as Austen’s cousin was a beautiful little girl of uncertain origin called Eliza Hancock. The action turns on an elopement by the titular characters, who run off to France leaving only a curt note: ‘Madam, we are married and gone.’ With the real Eliza anything could happen and the young Jane Austen seems to have found it both exciting and amusing to imagine her eloping with Henry. Little did she know how the story of the real Eliza and Henry would end.
Eliza returned to Steventon in the summer of 1792, in much darker circumstances. She brought with her a fund of true tales as shocking as anything in the Gothic novels that young women were devouring at the time. Eliza, her mother and little Hastings had fled from France as trouble brewed in the months leading up to the storming of the Bastille in 1789. They were in London when news of the revolution broke. From then on, they were forced to stay in England.
By January 1791 Eliza’s husband Jean-François, now no doubt regretting his title of ‘Comte’, had fled to Turin with the King’s brother and other royalist émigrés. Eliza wrote from London to the Austen family at Steventon telling them the news and also giving bulletins of her mother’s declining health. She comforted herself with gossip about her Steventon cousins, especially Jane and Cassandra: ‘I hear they are perfect beauties and of course gain hearts by dozens.’26
After a long battle with breast cancer, Phila Hancock died in 1792. Eliza’s husband managed, via a circuitous route, to join her in England to provide some comfort in her bereavement. They went to Bath for a period of recuperation and she became pregnant. The Count decided, however, to return to France for fear of having his land confiscated. As Eliza reported,
M. de F proposed remaining here some time, but he soon received Accounts from France which informed him that having already exceeded his Leave of Absence, if he still continued in England he would be considered as one of the Emigrants, and consequently his whole property forfeited to the Nation. Such Advices were not to be neglected and M. de F was obliged to depart for Paris.27
Within days of his departure, Eliza’s nerves, already frayed, were shattered when she was caught up in serious riots in London. On 4 June 1792, the King’s birthday, a group of forty servants had been invited to a dance and dinner at a pub, the Pitts Head. There was no disturbance until the High Constable of Westminster along with his watchmen entered the pub, made trouble and arrested all the servants, taking them to the Watchhouse in Mount Street. The next morning a mob arrived at the Watchhouse and soldiers were called to read the Riot Act. Eliza’s coach was attacked and her driver was injured, terrifying her out of her wits and causing her to miscarry the baby she had conceived on her husband’s visit to England. She wrote a graphic account of the events:
The noise of the populace, the drawn swords and pointed bayonets of the guards, the fragments of bricks and mortar thrown on every side, one of which had nearly killed my Coachman, the firing at one end of the street which was already begun, altogether in short alarmed me so much, that I really have never been well since. The Confusion continued all that day and Night and the following Day, and for these eight and forty Hours, I have seen nothing but large parties of Soldiers parading up and down in this Street, to which Mount Street is very near, there being only Grosvenor Square between. My apprehensions have been that they would have set fire to the houses they were so bent on demolishing, and think if that was to be the case how soon in such a City as this a Fire very trifling in the beginning might be productive of the most serious Consequences.28
Parallels were instantly drawn with recent history in France. A caricature of the Mount Street riots, published two days later, showed a French manservant arguing with a violent watchman and saying ‘Ah, Sacre Dieu! I did tink it vas all Dance in de land of Liberté!’ On the back wall is a print of the Storming of the Bastille, with cannons and decapitated heads on pikes. The implication is clear: like Paris, London was in danger of being swept into revolution.29
Eliza immediately made plans to escape to Steventon. But as a result of her miscarriage and then a severe case of chickenpox, she didn’t get there until August. So it was that she arrived at the Austen rectory with her head full of English riots and anxieties about her husband back in Paris. Weakened by miscarriage and illness, she cried when she saw the uncle whose features so resembled those of the beloved mother whom she had recently lost.
She noted how tall her cousin Jane had grown and assured Phylly Walter, who disliked Jane, that she ‘was greatly improved in manners as in person’. Eliza also expressed her own sense of loyalty to the younger sister: ‘My Heart gives the preference to Jane, whose kind partiality to me, indeed requires a return of the same nature.’30
She may have felt safe in rural Hampshire, sharing stories and books with her cousins, but news from France reached her in private letters from Jean-François and also via the English press: ‘My private Letters confirm the Intelligence afforded by the public Prints,’ she wrote to Phylly Walter, ‘and assure me that nothing we read there is exaggerated.’31 She was referring to the September Massacres, that wave of mob violence which began with the storming of the Tuileries Palace and culminated in the massacre of fourteen thousand people, including priests, political prisoners, women and children as young as eight. William Wordsworth would witness the aftermath as he passed through Paris soon afterwards. The unthinkable had happened: France abolished its monarchy and formally established the Republic.
The atrocities were reported in gruesome detail in the English press. The royal family were imprisoned and the London papers focused on the fate of the Queen’s friend, the Princess de Lamballe. On 3 September she was killed by the mob, decapitated, her innards and her head carried away on pikes. The head was taken to a barber who dressed the hair with its striking blonde curls so as to render it instantly recognizable to Marie Antoinette when it bobbed up and down outside the window where she was incarcerated. Caricatures of decapitated heads being carried along the streets of Paris on pikes filled the windows of the London print shops.
Eliza must have been terrified for Jean-François as the English press reported that even those said to sound like an aristocrat or resemble one in the slightest way would be ‘run through the body with a pike’. The Times reported that ‘A ring, a watch chain, a handsome pair of buckles, a new coat, or a good pair of boots in a word, every thing which marked the appearance of a gentleman, and which the mob fancied, was sure to cost the owner his life. EQUALITY was the pistol, and PLUNDER the object.’32
Eliza was comforted by the calm and practical Austens. They fussed over her, soothed her worries and, most importantly, paid attention to her little son, Hastings – ‘very fair’, ‘very fat’ and ‘very pretty’, according to Mrs Austen.33 Earlier, Eliza had worried that he had no teeth. And when he did begin teething, he started having convulsions. As he became a toddler and failed to start walking or talking properly it grew clear that something was wrong. Comparisons with little George Austen were inevitable. Cousin Phylly Walter wrote to her brother to tell him that Hastings had fits, was unable to walk or talk but made continuous ‘great noise’: ‘many people says he has the appearance of a weak head; that his eyes are particular is very certain; our fears are of his being like poor George Austen’.34 Later, she wrote, ‘I’m afraid he is already quite an idiot.’35
For a long time, Eliza refused to believe that anything was wrong with her beloved ‘son and Heir’. Her letters are full of references to him, as she took pleasure in his every tiny accomplishment: ‘he doubles his prodigious fists and boxes quite in the English style’. There is something very touching in her attempt to convince herself that her boy was completely normal, despite his bad epilepsy, his strange noises and his struggle with speech and movement. She insisted on keeping him at home with her. There was no question of sending him away to join his similarly disabled Austen cousin at Monk Sherborne. Eliza devoted herself to teaching him his letters and to gabble in French and English. From all accounts, ‘little Hastings’ was a sweet-tempered child, who would offer people his ‘half muncht apple or cakes’. When a doctor recommended sea-bathing, Eliza was happy to oblige and spent months at seaside resorts, insisting on their efficacious effect on his health. She ‘breeched’ him early (taking him out of ‘petticoats’ and into jacket and trousers) in order to ease his difficulties in walking. She fondly called him ‘as great a pickle as any who ever deserved that appellation’. She would have never described him as an idiot, as cousin Phylly Walter was wont to do. His Austen cousins adored him and he often spent time in Steventon. He was, in Eliza’s words, ‘the Play Thing of the whole Family’.36
Eliza’s adventurous and difficult life had a great impact on the vivid imagination of the teenage Jane Austen. This close familial connection to the reign of terror brought her much closer to the French Revolution than most of her English contemporaries. According to family tradition, Jane’s dislike of the French never left her from this moment.
Eliza stayed at Steventon probably until the spring of 1793. On 1 February, the new French Republic declared war on Britain and Holland. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars would continue for another twenty years. There is an uncorroborated, probably apocryphal, family tradition that Eliza went back to France and then escaped, heavily pregnant once again, in company with a maidservant (perhaps the Madame Bigeon who would become her housekeeper in later years). She was certainly back in London by March 1794. At one o’clock on a very wet Saturday, Warren Hastings called on her, by request, and she read out to him a paragraph in the émigré newspaper giving the very worst possible news: ‘that on the 22nd February – Jean Capote Feuillide was condemned to death’.37
Jean was guillotined the day after he had been found guilty. Listed in the official record as ‘Prisoner No. 396’, he was bundled into a tumbrel and taken to the scaffold on the fifth day of the newly created month of ventôse in Year 2, according to the revolutionary calendar.38 The revolutionary tribunal had found him guilty of two charges. First, for complicity with Nicolas Mangin, who was executed the same day, in conspiring against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic and the sovereignty of the French people. And secondly, for being ‘the accomplice of the Marboeuf woman in trying to seduce, by means of a bribe, one of the secretaries of the Committee for Public Safety in an attempt to persuade this public official to steal or burn documents related to the said Marboeuf’.39 The family had no doubt that these were trumped-up charges. From Eliza’s point of view, her husband had nobly helped an elderly friend, the Marquise de Marbeouf, by trying to buy off her false accusers (she was executed a few weeks earlier for the crime of ‘desiring the arrival of the Prussians and the Austrians’,40 enemies of the Republic). He had been betrayed and guillotined. There was a family tradition that he tried to save himself by claiming to be a valet impersonating his master, though no evidence of this fruitless plot came out in his trial.
There are no surviving letters of Jane Austen until 1796, so there is no way of knowing how the execution of prisoner 396 affected her, but her closeness to her cousin and little Hastings must have brought home the full horror of the guillotine. Eliza noted in her letters that the Austen children were rather special, each of them endowed with ‘Uncommon abilities’. Jane, her clear favourite, returned Eliza’s interest by dedicating stories to her, and by using her as a model for her clever coquettes. The notion that Jane Austen was somehow oblivious to the violent events of her time is belied by the fact that Eliza was with her and her family at the Steventon rectory in September 1792, one of the bloodiest and most dramatic months of that bloody and dramatic age, and that they remained in close contact at the time of the guillotining of Eliza’s husband.
***
For Eliza: Austen’s affection for her cousin is apparent from her decision to dedicate the early novella ‘Love and Freindship’ to her
It was in the late summer of 1792, exactly at the time when Eliza arrived in Steventon with news from revolutionary France, that Jane Austen began the short novel, ‘Catharine, or the Bower’, which includes the story of Cecilia Wynne heading out on the fishing fleet to India. One of the other characters, Mr Stanley, ‘never cares about anything but Politics’,41 while another, Mrs Percival, has fashionable disdain for the horrors of the modern world:
After Supper, the Conversation turning on the State of Affairs in the political World, Mrs P, who was firmly of opinion that the whole race of Mankind were degenerating, said that for her part, Everything she beleived was going to rack and ruin, all order was destroyed over the face of the World … Depravity never was so general before.42
Catherine,43 the heroine, is a clever girl who is interested in politics and is shocked when her feather-brained friend, Camilla, professes, ‘I know nothing of Politics, and cannot bear to hear them mentioned.’
Catherine finds succour in a garden bower that she has built. When Edward Stanley, recently returned from France, kisses Catherine’s hand in the arbour, her aunt, Mrs Percival, is horrified: ‘Profligate as I knew you to be, I was not prepared for such a sight … I plainly see that every thing is going to sixes and sevens and all order will soon be at an end throughout the Kingdom.’ Catherine is dismayed by her aunt’s rebuke: ‘Not however Ma’am the sooner, I hope, from any conduct of mine … for upon my honour I have done nothing this evening that can contribute to overthrow the establishment of the kingdom.’ ‘You are mistaken Child,’ replies the older woman, ‘the welfare of every Nation depends upon the virtue of it’s individuals, and any one who offends in so gross a manner against decorum and propriety, is certainly hastening it’s ruin.’44
This is one of Austen’s most explicit references to the French Revolution. There is no mistaking what Mrs Percival means by the overthrow of the establishment of the kingdom. She sees no distinction between radical politics and dangerous sexual impropriety: in her view Edward Stanley has picked up both vices on his French travels. The stability of the state, she suggests, depends on proper behaviour between the sexes. She is horrified that Catherine has been neglecting the improving sermons and catechisms she has foisted upon her.45 French influence, inappropriate reading and sexual licence mean only one thing: revolution. The fact that Jane Austen is clearly mocking Aunt Percival’s political paranoia shows that she has no sympathy for mindless conservatism. But, at the same time, the presence of Eliza and her French news in the household at Steventon alerted the young Austen to the high stakes in the current ‘State of Affairs in the political World’.
Later in the turbulent 1790s Jane Austen wrote the first draft of the novel that was eventually published after her death under the title Northanger Abbey. It includes a scene not dissimilar to Catherine’s debate with Mrs Percival. The exchange takes place on Beechen Cliff, the hill above the city of Bath. Henry Tilney has been lecturing another Catherine, Miss Morland, on the picturesque, and then moves on to politics and the ‘state of the nation’:
Delighted with her progress, and fearful of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to decline, and by an easy transition from a piece of rocky fragment and the withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to forests, the inclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was an easy step to silence.46
Strikingly, it is Catherine who puts an end to the silence: ‘I have heard that something very shocking indeed, will soon come out in London.’ Catherine is in fact talking about a new Gothic novel that is about to be published, but she is misunderstood by Henry’s sister, Eleanor, to mean mob riots in London: ‘Good Heaven! – Where could you hear of such a thing?’
‘A particular friend of mine had an account of it in a letter from London yesterday’ [replies Catherine]. ‘It is to be uncommonly dreadful. I shall expect murder and every thing of the kind.’
‘You speak with astonishing composure! But I hope your friend’s accounts have been exaggerated; – and if such a design is known beforehand, proper measures will undoubtedly be taken by the government to prevent its coming to effect.’
‘Government,’ said Henry, endeavouring not to smile, ‘neither desires nor dares to interfere in such matters. There must be murder; and government cares not how much.’ …
‘Miss Morland, do not mind what he says; – but have the goodness to satisfy me as to this dreadful riot.’
‘Riot! – what riot?’
The reference to reading about the London horrors in a letter from a friend echoes the real-life detail of Eliza writing to her family about the Mount Street riots. Henry’s reproving speech to his sister blames female imagination for the misunderstanding:
‘My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain … You [Catherine] talked of expected horrors in London – and instead of instantly conceiving, as any rational creature would have done, that such words could relate only to a circulating library, she immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St George’s Fields; the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood, a detachment of the 12th Light Dragoons, (the hopes of the nation,) called up from Northampton to quell the insurgents.’
Henry’s graphic description recalls a series of violent insurgencies on the streets of London: the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots back in 1780, the Mount Street riots witnessed by Eliza, and also the Bread riots of 1795, when hungry mobs seized flour and bread, damaging mills and bakeries. The threat to the Tower and the image of the streets of London flowing with blood inevitably conjure up the Bastille and the September Massacres.
‘Catharine, or the Bower’ ends abruptly with Edward Stanley’s return to France. The events that winter, culminating in the execution of Louis XVI and later Marie Antoinette, perhaps contributed to Jane’s decision to leave it unfinished, though she continued making adjustments to the fragment until at least 1809. Many critics have complained that she ignored the historical events of her times. In 1913, the historian Frederick Harrison described her to his friend Thomas Hardy as ‘a heartless little cynic … penning satirettes about her neighbours whilst the Dynasts were tearing the world to pieces, and consigning millions to their graves’.47 This kind of accusation ignores the evidence of ‘Catharine’ and Northanger Abbey, where anxiety about revolution is clearly part of the narrative. And it neglects the fact that, because of her cousin Eliza, Jane Austen was brought exceptionally close to the events of revolutionary France. Why do Austen’s novels not engage more frequently and directly with ‘the Dynasts tearing the world to pieces and consigning millions to their graves’? Could it have been not so much because she knew and cared little about it all, but because she knew too much and cared all too deeply? Loving Eliza as she did, it would have been too painful to let her pen dwell on the guilt and misery of revolutionary Paris.
