Letters to Alice (6 page)

When Jane Austen was ready to be weaned — at perhaps a year old — she would be removed from her wet-nurse, the woman she must regard as mother, and put back into her family. No doubt they were kind to her. But a contemporary social worker would shake her head in disapproval and regard it as a Major Life Event of the kind that contributes to an early death in the actuarial studies of insurance companies. Jane’s sister, Cassandra, was two-and-a-half years her senior, and tradition has it, had a temper, but no doubt there were servants enough to keep the older child from attempting to smother this sudden new rival. Well, one hopes so.

Your sister Polly is two years your junior, Alice. I seem to remember terrible incidents, when jealousy got the better of your normally sunny nature. You tried to drown baby Polly: she had to have her nose X-rayed, and how your mother worried in case radiation would get her bone marrow! We have no reason to suppose that children then were different from children now, or that they suffered less from the panic of being displaced. We just take better care (if we belong to the new, caring, maternal classes, that is) to save them from it.

When Jane was seven, in 1783, she was sent off with Cassandra to be educated by a Mrs Cawley, the widow of a one-time principal of an Oxford College, and for this reason qualified to teach girls. One wonders why it was necessary: the brothers were educated at home by George Austen, who was a professional tutor, and if it seemed essential that the girls should have a woman’s touch, Mrs Austen was the niece of the President of Trinity, which I would have thought was more than equal to being the widow of the Master of Brasenose — but I joke…It was no laughing matter. Cassandra and Jane, the story has it, were miserable. And Mrs Cawley was horrible. She took the girls to Southampton — (why, why?) — where they both became dangerously ill with a putrid fever. Mrs Cawley did not inform the Austens, but a cousin of the girls, a Jane Cooper, also a pupil, fortunately did. The Rev. and Mrs Austen, and Mrs Cooper, came to retrieve their children. Jane nearly died: poor Mrs Cooper, contracting the infection herself, actually did so.

That episode wouldn’t look good on the social worker’s file either. In fact, to be so traumatized at such an early age might well get you off a criminal charge in later life…But, not abashed, not having the advantage of hindsight, not even, one imagines, believing that their lives and conduct would be put to such unfair scrutiny by succeeding generations — that kind of thing they left to God — the Austen parents sent Jane and Cassandra off to another school in the following year, 1784.

Now, I know the Rectory must have been crowded: although James was nineteen and at Oxford, and Edward, at seventeen, now lived with the rather grand Knight family (who had taken a fancy to him in his early childhood), Henry, aged eleven, and Francis, aged eight, and Charles, only five, were still at home. (Francis and Charles were to be sent off, when they reached twelve, into the navy, a savage, dangerous and fearful place for children.) And I know that Mrs Austen was behaving as mothers of her class and generation did, and I know that bonding is difficult if you don’t breast-feed, and so on, and I know that criticizing the way other mothers bring up their children is always easy and usually despicable (most of us do what we can, as mothers, in the light of our own natures), and that to have Cassandra and Jane about might have been the last straw — especially if Cassandra was peevish and Jane disdainful, and father’s pet — but even so, even so — well
really,
Mrs Austen!

Jane and Cassandra went to a boarding school at Reading where, to all accounts, they were happy enough, and the lady in charge had an artificial leg made of cork. At the end of a year Mrs Austen took her daughters back (perhaps she thought they were enjoying themselves too much). Now I know that is unnecessarily unkind, but most Austen biographers go to such lengths to interpret all family events as benignly intended, by saintly people, that I was tempted and I succumbed. The Austen family, like any family, then or now, but especially then, wished to present a good face to the world, and did, and should be allowed to preserve it, and I will not prod further. Mrs Austen had her daughters back.

Except, Alice, I am distressed for the child Jane, and for the young woman she became, and the old woman she never was to be: and I am conscious of the little back bedroom next to her mother’s large front-facing one, in the ale-house-turned-residence at Chawton where she, in her early middle age, ended her days, and I
wonder.
I think indeed she bowed her will and humbled her soul, and bravely kept her composure, as a good nun in a good convent might, and escaped into the alternative worlds of her novels: and simply because she
was
so good, or did become so, and her self-discipline was so secure, she brought into that inventive world sufficient of the reality of the one we know and think we love, but which I think she hated, to make those novels outrun the generations.

But we are meant to be being factual: not too fanciful. Not whimsical, as the young Jane Austen was accused of being. Francis went off into the navy and the girls came home. Mrs Austen taught them the domestic arts. Don’t despise these, Alice. A time in your life will surely come when circumstances confine you to your home, and that time can be usefully, and pleasantly, and creatively spent looking after it, and making up for the years in which you have left furniture unwaxed, and copper unpolished, and put hot, wet cups of coffee down on delicate surfaces. (If we should ever meet, and you should ever do such a thing, expect to be asked to leave. You must learn to respect anything, even if only furniture, in which human care, effort and affection has been invested.) The domestic arts did not mean merely flower arrangements and watercolour painting: they were useful as well as decorative. (Our forbears, of course, did not make the distinction between the two that we do.) The servants might do the work, but the women of the family would know in detail how it should be done: how a room should be turned out, how a floor scrubbed, how silver cleaned, bed-clothes aired and dried, clothes cared for, and the winter curtains stored when summer arrived. There was a romance, a reverence and a dignity about housework then: I look forward to the day it is revived. It is too easy to believe that because something is traditionally women’s work, that it is worth nothing. On the contrary.

The daughters of the house would be taught to regard waste with alarm — to make a patchwork quilt out of scraps of fabric, a summer pudding out of stale bread and blackberries from the hedgerows. When there were so many shivering, starving wretches around, waste must have seemed not just immoral, but unlucky: an insult to the Gods.

The girls would learn how to sew: they would start with samplers, perfecting different embroidery stitches, on coarse linen. (Your mother and I had one in our bedroom at home when we were children, framed and hanging on the wall: ‘The days of man are but as dust — Sara Price, her work. 1799: In God we Trust.’ It used to worry me. What use was it, her trusting God? Poor little Sara Price, dead and gone, for all her prayers, all her pious thoughts and all her endeavours. I used to annoy your unfortunate mother by weeping for Sara Price, and being discovered doing so, thus laying unfair claim to a greater sensibility than she.)

The domestic arts included cookery. The girls would not have cooked themselves, but could have instructed and supervised the cook. They would know how a goose should be plucked and dripping clarified, and when the carrots were ready for the gardener to pull. They would know how to clear coffee, by pouring off a little from the jug into a saucer, letting it cool, and then pouring it back into the jug, so the cooler liquid sinks to the bottom, taking the grounds with it. They would know how to make hens lay in the winter time, by removing the rooster from the flock and giving the birds a little chopped meat daily. Their knowledge of the way things grow, and prosper, and work, and are best looked after would be, I imagine, very much superior to yours, Alice. The ‘domestic crafts’ nowadays taught in schools (and taught to the dullest girls, at that, so I don’t suppose
you
ever learned any) are just a sorry hand-me-down from the days when these skills were sharp, necessary and highly regarded.

They do say that the reason for the decline in English cooking, so that for a period of about a hundred years, from the middle of the last century to the middle of this, English cooking was the worst, the wateriest, and the dullest in the world, was due to the social aspirations of the new socially mobile working class; no household could be without its maid-of-all-work, if only living in the cupboard beneath the stairs. The new-style mistress not only felt cooking to be beneath her, but did not have the knowledge or the will to instruct the wretched slattern she employed to do it. The traditions of good cooking, the understanding of food, died out. In the rest of Europe, which remained predominantly rural, and where the population growth was not so sudden and severe as it was in Britain, the traditions were retained.

Well, we learned. We read books. In the last twenty years cookery books have headed the bestseller lists. We got our skills back. They say that in the English private household today the food is better, not just than it used to be, but than almost anywhere else in the world. (Mind you, they’ll say anything.) And not so long since my mother, and your mother’s mother, took a job in a restaurant and her first task when she got there at eight in the morning was to put the cabbage on for lunch.

I have no doubt that in the Austen household the gardener would bring in a good cabbage during the morning: the vegetable would be soaked briefly in salt water to bring out the slugs, it would be finely chopped immediately before cooking, put into boiling milk (which removes the sulphur and makes it more digestible) until tender, then well drained and served at once. Delicious! as I would have said, in my advertising days.

So much for the domestic arts. Meanwhile, Cassandra and Jane’s minds were being elegantly and gracefully developed. Their father taught them the classics, as he, being a clergyman, was well qualified to do. Not so long, after all, since Latin was the written language of all Europe, and its native tongues merely the vernacular. Now there was true internationalism! You will have been taught to reject Latin as irrelevant, elitist, and old-fashioned, but it makes the student alert to the structure of language itself, and more sensitive to the patterns of his own thought. Subject, object, genitive, passive, active — I expect it sounds boring to you, but to me, and to many people of my generation who later became writers, the study of Latin is remembered with pleasure, almost affection. There is no reason to think it was otherwise with Cassandra and Jane Austen — two bright girls.

I am sure that they behaved well. Village girls romped with boys, tumbled in haystacks, laughed aloud, wept freely, argued hugely — but not the clergyman’s daughters. Mr Austen wrote to Francis, away at the Royal Naval Academy, when he had finished his training as an officer and was about to go to sea, at the age of fourteen, in these terms:

I think it necessary, therefore, before your departure, to give my sentiments on such general subjects as I conceive of the greatest importance to you…You may either by a contemptuous, unkind and selfish manner create disgust and dislike: or by affability, good humour and compliance, become the object of esteem and affection: which of these very opposite paths ‘tis your interest to pursue I need not say.

A modern father, I daresay, knowing his son was setting off to sea at a time when England was at war with France, when the ships were hell-holes, sailors had to be forcibly enlisted into the navy, and disease and harsh treatment carried off more good men than the French ever did, would have written differently. Never mind. The Rev. Austen preached survival by good manners, and it was not such a bad path to be required to follow. Francis became an Admiral.

The Austen family were very
English.
They did not make a fuss: nor did Jane, in particular, in her novels. The Reverend Austen knew well enough the dangers his son was facing: Jane knew well enough the disease, hunger, and distress that afflicted the village. But the human spirit was supposed to rise above these things, above the dreadfulness of the life of the flesh, outside Heaven but not quite in Hell, and did. It is a mistake, I do believe, to regard their attitude as callous indifference. It was policy. It was the best that could be done, given the general dreadfulness of the world. English middle-class women, still, make less noise in childbirth than anyone else, anywhere in the world. They apologize, saying, ‘I’m sorry to make such a fuss, doctor. I’m sure there are others far worse off than me.’ What a tradition — wonderful, absurd and dangerous!

And Francis, as midshipman (did you ever see the original
Mutiny on the Bounty
with Charles Laughton? You’ll have got a good picture of a midshipman’s life from that), would have eaten well, or at any rate better than the men. Hard-tack and brackish water were flung at those unfortunates; up in the officers’ mess the same food might, in the end, after a couple of weeks becalmed, be served to their masters, but on porcelain plates, with white napery and polished silver, and perhaps it was the more nourishing for it. There is the spirit, you know, Alice, as well as the flesh. Next time you’re in McDonald’s, remember it.

So here is the Austen household in the last years of the eighteenth century, busy, cheerful, and self-disciplined, practising compliance and the filial arts. If Jane Austen, in her letters, is occasionally quite remarkably disagreeable, it is hardly surprising. More of this later. She was very bright, very perceptive, lived for ever under her mother’s thumb, loving and admiring a father who in the event did her no favours — like Mr Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice
he left his wife and children unprovided for — and lived chastely, though having a sensuous, responsive and romantic nature.

In your language, I imagine, one would describe her as ‘repressed’ but that would be an over-simplification; and perhaps imply too strongly that her writing was a reaction to her life, her talent a form of neurosis, and so forth. The initial ability to ‘write’ is a gift, a talent, a golden present from a fairy godmother: the development of the craft of writing to such a high pitch that the world sits up and takes notice, if sufficiently obsessive, may I suppose be called neurotic, but I say so grudgingly.