A Visit To Carlton House

Pride & Prejudice’s Mr Darcy could not ‘comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these’. In 1815, Jane Austen was given a personal invitation to visit one of the most splendid libraries in Britain, which belonged to the Prince Regent. The Prince was a noted patron of the arts and literature and loved Austen’s work.  

At this time, Jane was helping nurse her brother Henry through a nasty illness when one of his doctors, who also attended the Prince Regent, realized that Jane was the author of Pride & Prejudice. One day he told Jane that the Prince ‘often’ read her novels’ and ‘kept a set in every one of his residences’.  Accordingly he had informed the Prince she was in London.  His royal highness asked the librarian of Carlton House, James Stanier Clarke, to call on her. 

Clarke duly appeared the next day and invited Jane to Carlton House, so that he could show her ‘the library and other apartments, and pay her every possible attention’. Although Jane disapproved of the Prince Regent’s immoral lifestyle, she felt unable to turn down this high honour.  During her visit, Clarke told her that the Prince had given her permission to dedicate her next novel (Emma) to him, and upon publication, Austen’s publisher John Murray sent the Prince a handsome copy of Emma for his library. Clarke and Jane had a very funny correspondence in which he sent her a series of suggestions for her next work.

Carlton House was the Prince’s primary London residence from about 1783 onwards. Sadly, it was knocked down in the late 1820s as Prinny (now George IV) wanted Buckingham House to be revamped into a splendid new royal residence – now Buckingham Palace. However, you can see some lovely colour images of Carlton House here on Patrick Baty’s website.

Images:

The Prince Regent, 1822. Engraving by William Darton.

Tom and Jerry visit the Throne Room in Carlton House. It had crimson velvet drapes ornamented with gold-lace fringes, and its splendid carpet was made in England, at Spitalfields. Engraving by George and Robert Cruikshank, Life in London, Pierce Egan, (John Camden Hotten, Piccadilly, 1869.)

The front of Carlton House, and the Grand Staircase, Old and New London Vol. IV, (Cassell, Petter & Galpin, c.1878).

All images from the author’s collection.

Going To Church

St Nicholas's Church, Chawton.

Sunday was the quietest day of the week in Jane Austen’s England. Church-going played a far more central role in daily life than today's more secular times. Card-playing was frowned upon, and the theatres were closed in towns. 

Most respectable folk attended church, unless they were unwell or the weather was especially inclement. Important local families had their own pew, like the Tilneys in Northanger Abbey, and their family crest would adorn the door or gate at the end of the pew. 

Regency-era pews, St Oswald's church, Malpas, Cheshire.

As Jane's father George was a clergyman, she was brought up in the Anglican church, and she seems to have been happy and secure in her religion - she even composed her own prayers.   

Another Regency-era pew at Malpas, Cheshire.

The more active clergymen gave twice-daily Sunday services, like the ones held at St Nicholas’s church in Chawton, which Jane Austen attended. (Her mother and sister Cassandra are buried there, and there are several Austen and Knight family monuments inside the church). But many small churches held just a morning or evening service.

Cassandra Austen's monument, Chawton.

Young ladies who found a clergyman’s sermons particularly inspiring wrote them down in a pocket-book or stitched some choice phrases into a sampler. In Emma, Miss Nash, a fan of Mr Elton, ‘put down all the texts he has ever preached from since he came to Highbury’.

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.