Jane Austen's Possessions and Dispossessions

The Significance of Objects

Sandie Byrne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137406316
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire européenne

Who owns, who buys, who gives, and who notices objects is always significant in Austen's writing, placing characters socially and characterizing them symbolically. Jane Austen's Possessions and Dispossessions looks at the significance of objects in Austen's major novels, fragments, and juvenilia.

1

Austen Possessions and Dispossessions

On the landing of the Jane Austen House and Museum in Chawton is a reproduction of a document which would have been entirely unremarkable when it was printed. It advertises an auction. The chattels to go under the hammer were all kinds of household goods. They were listed in the Reading Mercury and Oxford Gazette:

The neat HOUSEHOLD FURNITURE, well made Chariot (with box to take off) and Harness, 200 volumes of Books, Stump of Hay, Fowling Pieces, three Norman Cows & Calves, one Horse, and other Effects.

The furniture comprises four-post and field bed-steads, with dimity, moreen and other furniture, fine feather beds and bedding, mattresses, pier and dressing glasses, floor and bedside carpets, handsome mahogany sideboard, modern set of circular dining tables on pillar and claws, Pembroke and card ditto, bureaus, chests of drawers and chairs, a piano forte in a handsome case (by Ganer), a large collection of music by the most celebrated composers, an 18-inch terrestrial globe (by Adams), and microscope, mahogany library table with drawers; bookcase with six doors, eight feet by eight feet; a smaller ditto, tea china, a table set of Wedgwood ware, eight-day clock, side of bacon, kitchen, dairy and brewing utensils, 13 ironbound casks, an end of hops, set of theatrical scenes &c. &c.¹

The house was Steventon Rectory, home to the Austen family, who left it when, in 1801, the Reverend George Austen retired to Bath, putting his eldest son, James Austen, into Steventon and another curate into Deane and paying both a wage. The Austens had never owned Steventon Rectory. The Rector was entitled to live in the house and farm the glebe land,² but they remained the property of the Church. Even so, the Austens had been there for more than 30 years; it had been home.³ Jane Austen had been born there and, apart from visits to family and friends, had lived there for the whole of her life. She had learned to play the pianoforte on the

rectory instrument, remedied the deficiencies of her education in schools at Oxford, Southampton and Reading in her father’s library, and watched and taken part in theatricals using the scenery stored in the rectory barn. None of those went with them to Bath.⁴

That Jane Austen cared about the loss of the contents as well as the Rectory itself is evident from letters to her sister. In January 1801 she itemises some that will be lost: ‘As to our Pictures, the Battlepeice [sic], M^r Nibbs, Sir W^m East, & all the old heterogeneous, miscellany, manuscript, Scriptoral peices [sic] dispersed over the House are to be given to James’, and similarly, in the same letter reassures her sister that some of her own possessions, her own drawings and two paintings on tin will remain her own.⁵ It seems that the sisters needed to assert their claim to anything they considered particularly their own; Austen continues: ‘My Mother says that the French agricultural Prints in the best bed-room were given by Edward to his two Sisters. Do you or he know anything about it?’

In a way, James had already been the agent of a dispossession. When he took over the Deane parsonage in 1792, it meant the removal of the Lloyd women to Ibthorpe, removing Austen’s close friend Martha from within walking distance to far beyond. Austen was no stranger to loss of both people and possessions.

One of Austen’s letters notes that her father hoped to have nearly £600 a year during his retirement, but that was dependent on his being about to raise his tithes, and on his son’s willingness to collect them.⁶ The expected yearly improvement of parsonical income would also cease. For the next four years the Reverend George and Mrs Austen and their two daughters lived in a succession of lodgings, moving frequently in a search for less damp and dark, and, often, less expensive rooms. An early visit to the Rectory must have been difficult. They were reduced to the status of guests, and their old home was presided over by James Austen and his second wife, Mary Lloyd, whom Jane Austen may have seen as having become encroaching and domineering since the days when she had dedicated her ‘Vol The Third’ to ‘Miss Mary Lloyd’. A letter to Cassandra Austen of 8–9 January 1801 suggests that Jane Austen may have felt that the James Austens were too keenly anticipating their acquisition of the contents of Steventon. She observes that their father’s old Ministers ‘have already deserted’ him ‘to pay their court to his Son’. Having not had ‘the patience to wait’ for the Austens’ removal, they have settled at Deane. She adds that she supposes that ‘everything else […] will be seized by degrees in the same manner’.⁷

As a dependent unmarried daughter, Jane Austen had little autonomy over her own bodily presence. She could be picked up, carried away and put down like a parcel. The only clear exception to this, when insistence obtained transport as and when she and her sister required it, was when James Austen took them both back to Bath on the same day as their unexpected arrival at Steventon from the abortive visit to Manydown, when Jane had accepted and then refused Harris Bigg-Wither’s proposal of marriage.⁸

Jane Austen liked balls, dancing and flirting; she visited friends and family, and could enjoy company – the right kind – in moderation. Perhaps she enjoyed the diversions and busyness of Bath, but whereas at Steventon she had written not only the lively, satirical, humorous juvenilia but also the earlier versions of Pride and Prejudice (‘First Impressions’), Sense and Sensibility (‘Elinor and Marianne’) and Northanger Abbey (initially ‘Susan’, later ‘Catherine’), as far as we know, between leaving Steventon Rectory and moving into Chawton Cottage she wrote very little new fiction, and abandoned her draft of The Watsons,⁹ though she did work on revisions of ‘Susan’, including inserting a reference to Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, which was published in 1801.¹⁰

In Bath, initially staying with the Leigh-Perrots, Austen was separated from her sister, and obliged to attend to what Deirdre Le Faye calls the ‘small and very dull evening parties’ of her aunt.¹¹ As they searched for suitable lodgings, a picture emerges of a succession of small dark, damp rooms which must have made depressing viewing. The advertisement for 4 Sydney Place must have seemed like a godsend. Opposite the extensive Sydney Gardens, which themselves had a prospect of open country, and available for three and a quarter years for £150 p.a., this was very desirable, and whilst the landlord fulfilled his obligation of painting the two first-floor rooms, the Austens would have been able to travel to the seaside with relieved minds.

A further holiday tour in 1804 meant giving up the last quarter of the Sydney Place lease. After Sydney Place, on their return to Bath the family moved into 3 Green Park Buildings, in spite of the street’s having been rejected earlier because of its damp offices. The death of the Reverend George Austen in January 1805 deprived the women of the family of that part of the income that had derived from Steventon (after the payment of James’s salary) and an annuity. But for the Austen brothers, the women would have been reduced to living on the income from Mrs Austen’s capital and that of the £1000 left to Cassandra Austen by her late fiancé, Tom Fowle. Jane Austen had no income of her own at all. In a letter just very slightly reminiscent of Fanny Dashwood’s prediction of the future comfort and prosperity of the Dashwood women on their much-reduced income, Henry Austen writes to his brother Frank of the income that he calculates will accrue from the donations of Frank and James (Charles was away in the West Indies), and from what Henry believes is the least that Edward, as the wealthiest of the brothers, ought to do. The sum calculated is £450 p.a., on which Mrs Austen is to be ‘very comfortable’. Henry decides that a smaller establishment will be agreeable to the women, and calculates that they ‘will be to the full as rich as ever. They will suffer no personal deprivation, but will be able to pay occasional visits of health and pleasure to their friends.’¹²

After this, the Austen women’s lives were measured by lodgings as much as by months and years, as they moved about in quest of inexpensive yet not too unhealthy homes. Two months after the death of the Reverend George Austen, they moved to 25 Gay Street. After a round of holidays and visiting, they moved again, to Trim Street, in January 1806, but by April Mrs Austen was again writing of looking for a new place.¹³ In July they finally left Bath for the last time, for visits in Clifton, Adlestrop, Stoneleigh and elsewhere. In October they moved to Southampton where the plan was that they should live with the new (since July of that year) Mrs Frank Austen, and keep her company while Frank was at sea. Family visits by and to the Austens continued through the year and in 1807 included a stay in Edward Austen Knight’s manor house at Chawton, recently vacated by a tenant, during which the women would have passed by the cottage, then two dwellings, into which they were to settle in 1808.

During the peripatetic years it would have been advantageous for the women to travel light. The place of the Reverend George Austen’s library would have been to an extent filled by circulating libraries, and there were plenty of places from which music, paper, ink and other essentials to Jane Austen’s well-being could be obtained. Funds to procure them, however, were limited. These anchorless years finally ended when the women were given – lent – a home by Edward Austen Knight, the brother who had been adopted by the Knights, wealthy but childless connections of the Austens, and who had inherited estates in Kent, where he lived, and in Hampshire. Edward offered his mother and sisters the choice of a house either at Wye, near his Godmersham Park home, or in the village of Chawton, a short walk from the Great House. They chose the latter, and in a verse letter to Frank Austen on the birth of his son, Austen professed herself delighted with the cottage.¹⁴

Their new home was not as commodious as the Rectory, it was a cottage, with relatively small, low-ceilinged rooms; it did not have glebe land for a home farm;¹⁵ it did not have long attics or large barns; but it was a settled home – for as long as Edward could defend his inheritance against the Knight relatives who contested it.¹⁶

The cottage at Chawton is now the Jane Austen House and Museum, a wonderfully restored and maintained resource which houses a number of the possessions of Jane Austen and her family. Many of those that belonged to the sisters are handmade; testament to their own and their friends’ skills as craftswomen, and to the custom of exchanging such gifts in preference to the shop-bought kind. There is beautiful white-work and embroidery; beading; plain sewing; quilting. There are also objects which represent customs no longer common, such as the preservation of locks of hair of lost relatives, and the giving and wearing of mourning rings and brooches.

The Austen industry has made objects owned by Jane Austen, her family and friends valuable not only as records of the material culture of the Georgian and Regency period but also as relics touched with an almost religious significance. At the Jane Austen House and Museum one can look down into a glass case and see gloves, scarves and kerchiefs, or stand before a large display of clothes and a representation of a bed covered with the Austen ladies’ quilt. Or one can pull out a drawer and gaze on the famous topaz crosses given to the Austen sisters by their youngest brother, Charles, from his £40 share (£30 received and £10 expected in May 1801) of the prize-money from the capture of the La Furie.¹⁷ At the British Library, one can see, also through a glass case, Jane Austen’s writing-desk, alluded to by James Edward Austen-Leigh in his Memoir,¹⁸ separated from the small table on which it would have rested. Posted on the BBC ‘A History of the World’ website is a picture of a silk suit once belonging to Edward Austen Knight and now at Chawton House.¹⁹ Staff of museums to which Austen memorabilia are donated respond with evident delight, as did the Lyme Regis Museum on being given (after having been lent) a collection of Austen family possessions by a descendant (on both sides) of Edward Austen Knight. These are described on the Museum website as:

– a set of bone counters with letters inscribed on them from which Jane may have learned her alphabet

– a set of fragile bone spillikins which was a game of skill similar to some [g]ames still available today

– bone counters and box for the game of Merelles

– glasses and their case which belonged to Jane’s mother

– Leather gloves and cotton mittens

– Kerchief with lace edging which would have been worn around the neck like a scarf

– a fine woman’s cap decorated with lace for indoor wear²⁰

Unlike the writing-desk, these have no immediate relation to Austen’s work, and although we might hope that the bone counters were those that helped her to learn her letters, we cannot know it. Nonetheless, in addition to being testament to the generosity of Ms Diane Shervington, they are also popular and valued exhibits.

In 2010, Bonhams auctioned a ‘Turkish shawl reputedly owned by Jane Austen’ which was bought for £720, including buyer’s premium.²¹ In the summer of 2012 a ring belonging to Jane Austen was sold at auction by Sotheby’s for £152,450 (including buyer’s premium).²² The ring, a slender gold band with a cabochon turquoise in a simple bezel setting, has nothing like that value intrinsically, but the auction attracted a large attendance and the provenance of the ring, provided by a letter from Eleanor Jackson, second wife of Henry Austen, to Austen’s niece Caroline, bequeathing the ring and explaining that it was given to her by Cassandra Austen, as well as other notes, ensured that the bid which acquired it would be high. The successful bidder, however, will not be able to possess this new acquisition and take it home to the USA. An export bar was placed on the ring until September 2012 to allow time for funds to be raised in order that it could be retained in Britain. A generous anonymous donation of £100,000 was made, and the Jane Austen House and Museum successfully raised the remaining sum.

The committee which reviews applications for the export of arte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on the Texts
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Austen Possessions and Dispossessions
• 2 Sense and Sensibility: Giving and Taking
• 3 Pride and Prejudice: General Impressions
• 4 Mansfield Park: Everything has its Price
• 5 Emma: The Obliged and the Obligated
• 6 Persuasion: Loss and Retrieval
• 7 Northanger Abbey: Signs Taken for Wonders
• 8 The Early Writing and Fragments
• 9 The Land and the Big House
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index