Jane Austen and Bath V: Walcot

St Swithin's Church tower.

Anne Elliot walks off with Mr Elliot.

Jane Austen fans will know that the novelist, like Persuasion's Anne Elliot, had a very strong 'disinclination for Bath', but the town held very fond memories for her parents.
That's probably why George Austen decided to retire there sometime towards the end of 1800. Over thirty years earlier, George and his wife Cassandra Leigh were married in the medieval church of St Swithin's Church, Walcot on 26 April 1764. 

Jane's aunt and uncle, the Leigh-Perrots, lived in Bath, too. And the town's genteel pleasures were just the ticket for a clergyman's retirement, with its libraries, shops, concerts - and therapeutic spa baths in case of illness.

 

St Swithin's Church.

George Austen's grave.

But despite the fame of the Bath waters, George was poorly during the last three years of his life. He died on 21 January 1805, and was buried in the crypt of St Swithin's; you can visit his gravestone in the churchyard.










All photos (c) Sue Wilkes.

Popping The Question

Mr Collins proposes to Charlotte Lucas.

For a Regency lady, marriage is ‘the only honourable provision for well-educated women of small fortune, and, however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want’ (Pride and Prejudice).  So a marriage proposal from an eligible suitor is one of the most important moments of a young lady’s life.

Lizzy accepts Mr Darcy.

Common prudence dictates that you choose a partner with whom you can respect and esteem.  In Pride & Prejudice, Mr Bennet is extremely worried when Elizabeth tells him that Mr Darcy has proposed: ‘I know that you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband; unless you looked up to him as a superior.  Your lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage.  You could scarcely escape discredit and misery’.

If all goes well, you’ll receive a proposal from an eligible young man in your first season.  If no-one suitable makes an offer after your first few seasons, you’ll be nearing the ‘years of danger’ like Elizabeth Elliott in Persuasion.

Capt.Wentworth gives Anne a letter.

Mr Knightley and Emma.

Every gentleman has his own way of declaring his love.  Mr Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth Bennet is passionate but unflattering: ‘In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you’.  Darcy does not recommend his suit when he declares that their marriage will be a ‘degradation’ and speaks of ‘the inferiority of your connections’.

So Elizabeth was puzzled how to accept Mr Darcy’s second proposal of marriage. She ‘immediately, but not very fluently, gave him to understand, that her sentiments had undergone so material a change...as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances’.

How should you say ‘Yes’?  when asked? When Mr Knightley proposed to Emma Woodhouse, she said ‘Just what she ought, of course.  A lady always does’.  

Illustrations courtesy of the elegant and erudite Molland’s website.

Latest Reviews of A Visitor's Guide to Jane Austen's England

I have been very busy working on a new project for the last few weeks, so I've been rather out of the loop. So I was thrilled to bits when I discovered this review on the Shields Gazette website:
'Discover the grim reality of Jane Austen’s England
In fact, the smells and tastes would probably make us sick; go far enough back, and we wouldn’t even be able to understand our own language.
So while period dramas are seductive on the telly, in reality, returning to, say, the turn of the 19th century may mean that your false teeth could have been taken from a dead soldier, face powder turns your skin brown, or even black, and surgery is carried out without anaesthetic.
Given that I’ve just had a tooth out, a Regency-era remedy for toothache – using a hot wire driven into an aching tooth to kill the nerve – makes me wince.
You would, then, need something like A Visitor’s Guide to Jane Austen’s England, which chaperones you across the social, health etc minefields of what could feel, in effect, like a foreign country.
Not that it’s even the terrain of the working man. The world Austen moved in bordered the middle/upper class, so there is the treatment of servants to consider, and how to keep up with fashion – “What wicked people dyers are” – dyeing a dress being one way of recycling your clothes.
A dance at a ball or an assembly hall is the best, approved way to meet the opposite sex. Once married, though, having separate rooms may be your only form of contraception. Jane Austen’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth, had 10 children before the age of 35, when she died in childbirth.
It all makes for an entertaining read and is charmingly illustrated with contemporary images, including the work of hilarious caricaturist Gillray'.
There's also another lovely review here on the Heritage Traveller website.

Morning Visits

Darcy and Georgiana visit Lizzy.

Morning visits were a very important part of a Regency lady or Austen heroine's day. After breakfast ladies went shopping or made ‘morning’ visits until dinner, which could be late in the afternoon.If the family you were visiting were out (or ‘denied’ by the servant), you left a visiting card. In Sense & Sensibility, when Elinor and Marianne stayed in town with Mrs Jennings, they knew that Edward Ferrars had arrived in London because: ‘Twice was his card found on the table, when they returned from their morning engagements’. Morning visitors were received in the drawing room and offered refreshments. In Pride & Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennet and her aunt paid a morning call to Miss Darcy at Pemberley, they were treated to ‘cold meat, cake, and a variety of all the finest fruits in season’.

Ladies wore ‘half-dress’ or ‘morning’ dress for paying morning visits and going shopping. Morning or ‘walking’ dresses (circa 1800) usually had long sleeves. Men like Beau Brummell usually wore a beautifully-cut blue morning coat with brass buttons, a light-coloured waistcoat, buckskins, a crisply starched cravat, and top-boots. Ackermann’s Repository for April 1809 reported that ‘dark blue, olive, and bottle green’ coats with ‘silver and gilt basket buttons’ were fashionable for dress and morning coats. On the morning of her marriage to George Wickham, flighty Lydia Bennet (Pride & Prejudice) ‘longed to know whether he would be married in his blue coat’.

Illustrations:

Mr Darcy and his sister Georgiana pay a morning visit to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. C.E.Brock illustration courtesy of the wonderful Molland’s website.

Morning dress, Lady’s Monthly Museum fashion plate, December 1798. Author’s collection.

Full dress and walking dress, Lady’s Monthly Museum fashion plate, January 1805. Author’s collection.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers!

 Images from the author's collection: 'The Robin', and  'Saturday Night' - a humble family studies their Bible. The  Affectionate Parent's Gift, and Good Child's Reward, T.Kelly, 1827.

Happy Birthday Jane Austen!

Jane Austen was born on a snowy winter’s night at Steventon Rectory at Hampshire, on 16 December 1775. She was the daughter of clergyman George Austen and Cassandra Leigh, who had eight children: James, George, Edward, Henry, Francis (Frank), Cassandra, Jane and Charles.

The rectory at Steventon had a front door which opened into a small parlour, where Mrs Austen sat busily making and mending clothes. A dining or common sitting-room was at the front of the house, and George Austen had a study overlooking the garden. 

Steventon Parsonage.

Jane was very happy living at Steventon. She had the run of her father’s extensive library (over 500 volumes), and her family encouraged her to write - Austen’s juvenilia and early satirical works are full of fun. Early versions of her novels Sense & Sensibility (Elinor and Marianne), Pride and Prejudice (First Impressions), and Northanger Abbey (Susan) were all written at Steventon. 

Jane shared a bedroom with her sister Cassandra upstairs, where there was another small sitting-room or ‘dressing-room’ which, Jane’s niece Anna Lefroy recalled, ‘opened into a smaller chamber in which my two aunts slept. I remember the common-looking carpet with its chocolate ground, and painted press with shelves above for books, and Jane’s piano, and an oval looking-glass that hung between the windows; but the charm of the room with its scanty furniture and cheaply painted walls must have been... the flow of native wit, with all the fun and nonsense of a large and clever family’ (W. & R.A. Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, Smith, Elder & Co., 1913). 

Hyde Park

In Jane Austen’s day, at about five o’clock in the afternoon, in London people of fashion loved to promenade in the public parks such as Hyde Park. In June 1806 ladies paraded with ‘hats and tiaras of white satin and various coloured silks’, and ‘turbans, bonnets and straw hats...‘tastefully ornamented’ with roses, lilac and hyacinths, according to La Belle Assemblée. Kensington Gardens were popular, too, but St James’s Park was no longer fashionable.

The very ‘best’ society like the Prince Regent and his friends drove their carriages there. Captain Gronow (1794–1865 recalled that after the Peninsular War, many ladies were seen driving in Hyde Park ‘in a carriage called a vis-à-vis, which held two persons. The hammer-cloth, rich inheraldic designs, the powdered footmen in smart liveries, and a coachman who assumed all the gaiety and appearance of a wigged archbishop, were indispensable’. 
The crowds headed home again about three o’clock.