noted by Jane Austen--will strike many readers, at first sight, as of
quite trivial importance. But it is largely the reason why her novels
have so modern an external air compared with those, let us say, of
Scott, or even of Balzac, who only began to write when her short career
was ending. If Jane Austen had described the conditions of life at
Hartfield or Kellynch with the particularity with which Balzac
describes the Grandets' house at Saumur, and the Guenics' at Guerande,
or had given us such full accounts of the villagers on the estate of
the Bertrams of Mansfield Park as Scott gave us of the smugglers and
gipsies on the lands of the Bertrams of Ellangowan, we should see more
clearly the changes that a hundred years have wrought in the habits of
the English country.
Jane Austen was by no means indifferent to the cut and colour of her
own clothing, however little she allowed her heroines to talk about
theirs. But when we read of "Jane Austen frocks" for bridesmaids in
the accounts of modern weddings, they are copied from the illustrations
of Mr. Thomson or Mr. Brock, or else are so-called merely because {210}
they are of the period of her novels, which is much the same thing.
With the general subject of dress she deals as a novelist, we may
almost say once for all, in a single paragraph of _Northanger Abbey_.
The occasion was the dance at Bath which was to prove so momentous an
event in Catherine's life.
"What gown and what head-dress she should wear on the occasion became
her chief concern. She cannot be justified in it. Dress is at all
times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often
destroys its own aim. Catherine knew all this very well; her
great-aunt had read her a lecture on the subject only the Christmas
before; and yet she lay awake ten minutes on Wednesday night debating
between her spotted and her tamboured muslin; and nothing but the
shortness of the time prevented her buying a new one for the evening.
This would have been an error in judgment, great though not uncommon,
from which one of the other sex rather than her own, a brother rather
than a great-aunt, might have warned her; for man only can be aware of
the insensibility of man towards a new gown. It would be mortifying to
the feelings of many ladies could they be made to understand how little
the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire;
how little it is biassed by the texture {211} of their muslin, and how
unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged,
the mull, or the jackonet. Woman is fine for her own satisfaction
alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the
better, for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a
something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the
latter."
If we regard these as the author's considered opinions, expressed with
a characteristic touch of _malice_, we shall probably agree that she
is, on the whole, right. Were women to make a note, every time a man
describes one of them as "well dressed," of what the subject of the
remark was wearing, they would, I believe, find an overwhelming
preponderance of votes in favour of well-fitting, plain, if not
actually "tailor-made" costumes for the daytime, and simple though not
conventual frocks for the evening, as compared with all the highly
decorated "confections," covered with what one may call "applied art,"
whereon women spend so large a proportion of their allowances.
The letters to Cassandra make up to some extent for the deficiencies of
the novels in a {212} matter so attractive to the author's admirers
among her own sex, though the particulars given are almost always
incomplete; that is to say, they depend on information which Cassandra
possessed, but which is denied to us. Such a case is presented when we
read: "Elizabeth has given me a hat, and it is not only a pretty hat,
but a pretty _style_ of hat too. It is something like Eliza's, only,
instead of being all straw, half of it is narrow purple ribbon. I
flatter myself, however, that you can understand very little of it from
this description. Heaven forbid that I should ever offer such
encouragement to explanations as to give a clear one on any occasion
myself! But I must write no more of this." The tantalizing thing is
that while we know that this pretty hat was something like Eliza's, we
have no idea what Eliza's was like, beyond the untrimmed fact that it
was "all straw."
Then Cassandra is told by Jane, "I believe I _shall_ make my new gown
like my robe, but the back of the latter is all in a piece with the
tail, and will seven yards enable me to copy it in that respect?"
Alas! that we cannot discover how the robe was made, except that "the
back was all in a {213} piece with the tail." Often, of course, the
news about dress is mixed up with other news, as when Jane writes: "At
Nackington ... Miss Fletcher and I were very thick, but I am the
thinnest of the two. She wore her purple muslin, which is pretty
enough, though it does not become her complexion...." Once Jane's
account of her own necessities in the way of dress is nearly followed
by a sentence which not only contains evidence of her close
acquaintance with Fielding's greatest novel, but also reminds us of Mr.
Tom Lefroy. "You say nothing of the silk stockings; I flatter myself,
therefore, that Charles has not purchased any, as I cannot very well
afford to pay for them; all my money is spent in buying white gloves
and pink persian.... After I had written the above, we received a
visit from Mr. Tom Lefroy and his cousin George. The latter is really
very well-behaved now; and as for the other, he has but _one_ fault,
which time will, I trust, entirely remove--it is that his morning coat
is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones,
and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine, which _he_
did when he was wounded."
Many of her references to dress are of the {214} partly serious, partly
humorous kind which came naturally from her pen. "Flowers are very
much worn," she writes from Bath in the summer of 1799, "and fruit is
still more the thing. Elizabeth has a bunch of strawberries and I have
seen grapes, cherries, plums, apricots. There are likewise almonds and
raisins, French plums, and tamarinds at the grocers', but I have never
seen any of them in hats." She had, in the Southampton days, a spotted
muslin which she meant to wear out, in spite of its durability. "You
will exclaim at this, but mine really has signs of feebleness, which,
with a little care, may come to something." Then she has some
"bombazins" with trains, which "I cannot reconcile myself to giving up
as morning gowns; they are so very sweet by candlelight. I would
rather sacrifice my blue one ... in short I do not know and I do not
care."
A peep into the economy of Steventon parsonage is now and again
offered. In 1796, "We are very busy making Edward's shirts, and I am
proud to say that I am the neatest worker of the party. They say that
there are a prodigious number of birds hereabouts this year, so that
perhaps _I_ may kill a few."
{215}
Another bit of work that the want of the riches of Kent forced upon the
poorer folks of Hampshire is shown to us when Jane writes: "I bought
some Japan ink and next week shall begin my operations on my hat, on
which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend." In this case
there is no difficulty of interpretation. Now-a-days there are simple
"dips" wherewith young ladies whose allowances are small or who in any
case wish to make the most of their money can change old straw hats
into new, soiled white into black, or green, or heliotrope. It was not
so a century ago, and when Jane wanted to turn her old white straw hat
into a new black one, she must needs Japan it.
"I have read the 'Corsair,' mended my petticoat, and have nothing else
to do," she writes from London in 1814, and on another day about the
same time she informs her sister: "I have determined to trim my lilac
sarsenet with black satin ribbon, just as my China crape is, six-penny
width at the bottom, threepenny or four-penny at top." An even closer
glimpse of Jane in her home is afforded by a letter in which she says--
{216}
"I find great comfort in my stuff gown, but I hope you do not wear
yours too often. I have made myself two or three caps to wear of
evenings since I came home, and they save me a world of torment as to
hair-dressing, which at present gives me no trouble beyond washing and
brushing, for my long hair is always plaited up out of sight, and my
short hair curls well enough to want no papering."
Such references may remind us of Henry Tilney's astonishment that
Catherine did not keep a journal of her doings. "How are your absent
cousins to understand the tenor of your life...? How are your various
dresses to be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion
and curl of your hair to be described, in all their diversities,
without having constant recourse to a journal? My dear madam, I am not
so ignorant of young ladies' ways as you wish to believe me."
Jane Austen was not reduced, as was her own Mrs. Hurst, to playing with
her bracelets and rings when there were no games or dances in progress.
On such occasions, like Elizabeth Bennet, she took up some needlework,
and amused herself by listening to the general conversation, and
entering into it when opportunity offered. Like everything {217} done
by her deft fingers, her fancy sewing is admirable, and her embroidery
would be treasured by her family for its intrinsic beauty even if no
such charming associations attached to it. There is a muslin scarf
adorned by her needle which, to her true lovers, might seem a more
precious relic than even her mahogany desk itself.
One little "interior" sketched by Jane, after a visit to a young wife
who had just been blessed with a baby, is so illustrative of her own
neat habits, and her ideas of the material needs of happiness, that,
intimate as it is, it merits quotation: "Mary does not manage matters
in such a way as to make me want to lay in myself. She is not tidy
enough in her appearance; she has no dressing-gown to sit up in; her
curtains are all too thin, and things are not in that comfort and style
about her which are necessary to make such a situation an enviable one."
We have seen on an earlier page that Jane Austen provided warm garments
for the village poor. On one occasion we know where she bought her
flannel. In an entry (made at Basingstoke) which might form the text
for a dissertation on prejudice and economy, she notes that: "I gave
{218} 2_s._ 3_d._ a yard for my flannel, and I fancy it is not very
good, but it is so disgraceful and contemptible an article in itself
that its being comparatively good or bad is of little importance." Why
this contempt for what, in spite of all patent substitutes, inflammable
and otherwise, is still commonly esteemed one of the most harmless and
necessary of materials? Marianne Dashwood included the wearing of a
flannel waistcoat by Colonel Brandon among the several defects which
made it impossible that she should ever be his wife, and when, for
reasons not all unconnected with the "happy ending" of the novel, she
agreed at last to marry him, it was in spite of the fact that this
gallant officer had "sought the constitutional safeguard" of the
much-despised garment. To Jane Austen and Marianne Dashwood flannel,
it seems, was as entirely unpleasing a commodity as celluloid collars
and cuffs are to most people of our own day.
The ravages of consumption, as the Baron de Frenilly reflects in his
recently published memoirs, would have been far less terrible in those
times if women had been less hostile to warm dresses and flannel
petticoats. Fresh air and thick boots were {219} also to seek. The
women could not walk ten yards on a wet day without the water coming
through the thin soles of their dainty little shoes. Miss Bates was
quite exceptional in wearing shoes with reasonable soles.
One more sumptuary extract must be quoted; it comes from a letter from
London in 1814: "My poor old muslin has never been dyed yet. It has
been promised to be done several times. What wicked people dyers are.
They begin with dipping their own souls in scarlet sin." The last
sentence brings its writer for the moment very near to modern fiction,
a considerable proportion of which is mainly occupied with the vivid
representation of the process in question as applied to the world in
general.
After clothes, the table. Out of the works of some novelists you might
draw up menus, or at least bills-of-fare, for a month. People who
dwell in a bracing air, and take a great deal of exercise, could live
very comfortably on a small selection from the dishes served up in the
novels of Dickens, and those who like an even more simple cuisine could
rely quite confidently on the meals described by Dumas _père_. There
is plenty of {220} substantial fare, of course, in the Waverley novels,
and as for the works of Harrison Ainsworth, they groan under the
sirloins and haunches that were provided in those imaginary ages when
in Merry England the spits were always turning in every castle and
hall. The people of Jane Austen ate quite as much as was good for
them. They had breakfast, lunch--or noonshine--dinner, supper, and
tea, and everybody--always excepting Mr. Woodhouse and those whose
spirits were temporarily depressed--came with an appetite to every
meal, for all we know of the matter. No dinner is particularly
described, but those who want to know what people ate and drank at the
end of the eighteenth century may partly gratify their appetite from
the references which inevitably occur. Except that there were not
quite so many dishes on the table at once the meals differed little
from that to which Swift introduces us in his dialogue between the
company at Lady Smart's table. The Smarts, by the way, dined at three,
which in Jane Austen's time was still about the hour for the small
country-houses, though in the big houses it was five, marking the
gradual advance from the ten o'clock in the morning of the {221}
twelfth century to the eight o'clock in the evening or later of the
twentieth.
Plain roast and boiled joints of mutton, pork, beef and veal, chickens,
game in season, sweetbreads, meat pies, boiled vegetables, suet
puddings, apple-tarts, jellies and custards were the ordinary food of
the well-to-do. Port and Burgundy were their principal drinks, but
probably the port was not usually such as is chiefly sold now-a-days.
It was less fortified, nearer to the natural wine, which is itself more
like a Burgundy than the port of modern commerce. Wine of any sort is
scarcely mentioned in Jane Austen's works. One of the few exceptions I
can recall is that--of unnamed species--offered to Mrs. and Miss Bates
at the Woodhouses', which the host advised them to mix freely with
water, advice they successfully managed to avoid taking, thanks to the
good offices of Emma. Jane Austen herself seems to have been fond of
wine. In her thirty-eighth year she writes: "As I must leave off being
young, I find many _douceurs_ in being a sort of _chaperon_, for I am
put on the sofa near the fire, and can drink as much wine as I like."
On a much earlier occasion, when she was herself under {222}
chaperonage, she had written: "I believe I drank too much wine last
night at Hurstbourne. I know not how else to account for the shaking
of my hands to-day. You will kindly make allowance therefore for any
indistinctness of writing, by attributing it to this venial error."
With our full knowledge of Jane's habit of playful exaggeration we may
be certain that her "too much" was nothing to shake our heads over, and
that the "error" was indeed "venial."
Jane gives us sufficient evidence of the simplicity with which the
Austens' own table was furnished. From Steventon parsonage, in 1798,
she thus refers to one of the doctor's professional visits to her
mother. "Mr. Lyford was here yesterday; he came while we were at
dinner, and partook of our elegant entertainment. I was not ashamed at
asking him to sit down to table, for we had some pease-soup, a
sparerib, and a pudding. He wants my mother to look yellow and to
throw out a rash, but she will do neither."
Years later, from Chawton, she writes that: "Captain Foote dined with
us on Friday, and I fear will not soon venture again, for the strength
of our dinner was a boiled leg of mutton, underdone even for James."
{223}
Jane herself did the housekeeping when her mother was indisposed and
Cassandra away, and she prided herself on her success, though she
detested the necessity of great economy. Her ideas on the eternal
servant question are not, we may be sure, quite faithfully expressed
when she writes: "My mother looks forward with as much certainty as you
can do to our keeping two maids; my father is the only one not in the
secret. We plan having a steady cook and a young, giddy housemaid,
with a sedate, middle-aged man, who is to undertake the double office
of husband to the former, and sweetheart to the latter. No children,
of course, to be allowed on either side." The simple life of the
parsonage is more accurately reflected in a comparison between the
house of the Austens and that of the Knights at Godmersham. "We dine
now at half-past three, and have done dinner, I suppose, before you
begin. We drink tea at half-past six. I am afraid you will despise
us. My father reads Cowper to us in the morning, to which I listen
when I can. How do you spend your evenings? I guess that Elizabeth
works, that you read to her, and that Edward goes to sleep." Jane
declares that she "always takes care to provide such things as please
(her) own {224} appetite," which she considers "the chief merit in
housekeeping." Ragout of veal and haricot mutton seem to have been
specially attractive to her.
Picnics we hear of--one in particular, of course, at Box Hill--and the
Middletons were always getting them up. Cold pies and cold chickens,
and no doubt cold punch, were provided in plenty on those happy
occasions.
French cookery was not so much appreciated in England in those days as
it had been twenty or thirty years earlier, before the Revolution. The
bread of our then hostile neighbours across the Channel was, however,
not infrequently copied in the bakehouse, as was the Boulanger dance in
the ball-room. Mrs. Morland reproached Catherine for talking so much
at breakfast about the French bread at Northanger, but the poor little
girl who had been so shamefully treated by General Tilney, and sadly
missed the attentions of his younger son, replied that she did not care
about the bread, and it was all the same to her what she ate. Mrs.
Morland could only attribute the girl's obvious unhappiness to the
contrast afforded by their humble parsonage to the glories of {225} the
Tilney mansion, "There is a very clever essay in one of the books
up-stairs, upon much such a subject," says this anxious mother, "about
young girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance--_The
Mirror_, I think. I will look it out for you some day or other,
because I am sure it will do you good." Catherine tried to be
cheerful, but presently relapsed into languor and weariness; and Mrs.
Morland went off to seek for the "very clever essay." As Henry Tilney
arrived before she returned with it, its efficacy as a prophylactic for
listlessness and discontent was never put to the test. I will take the
risk of inducing the "listlessness and discontent" of the present
reader by devoting a page to this moral souvenir of Jane Austen's
infancy and of her own literary diversions.
The "very clever essay" is dated March 6, 1779, and is in the form of a
letter from John Homespun, a "plain country gentleman, with a small
fortune and a large family," two of whose daughters had been
allowed--his opposition having been overcome--to spend the Christmas
holidays with a "great lady" whom they had met at the house of a
relation. They went with sparkling {226} eyes and rosy cheeks, they
came back with "cheeks as white as a curd, and eyes as dead as the
beads in the face of a baby." Their father sees no reason to wonder at
the change when he hears the girls, with new-found affectations of
speech and manner, describe the habits of their new friends.
"Instead of rising at seven, breakfasting at nine, dining at three,
supping at eight, and getting to bed by ten, as was their custom at
home, my girls lay till twelve, breakfasted at one, dined at six,
supped at eleven, and were never in bed till three in the morning.
Their shapes had undergone as much alteration as their faces. From
their bosoms (_necks_ they called them), which were squeezed up to
their throats, their waists tapered down to a very extraordinary
smallness; they resembled the upper half of an hour-glass. At this,
also, I marvelled; but it was the only shape worn at ----. Nor is
their behaviour less changed than their garb. Instead of joining in
the good-humoured cheerfulness we used to have among us before, my two
_fine_ young ladies check every approach to mirth, by calling it
_vulgar_. One of them chid their brother the other day for laughing,
and told him it was monstrously ill-bred.... Would you believe it,
sir, my daughter _Elizabeth_ (since her visit she is offended if we
call her {227} _Betty_) said it was _fanatical_ to find fault with
card-playing on Sunday; and her sister _Sophia_ gravely asked my
son-in-law, the clergyman, if he had not some doubts of the soul's
immortality?"
Mr. Homespun declares that the moral plague among the worldly rich
should be dealt with by Government "as much as the distemper among the
_horned cattle_."
Happily Catherine Morland had not caught this particular disease of
all--it was only the plague of love that troubled her innocent soul,
and the medicine was provided without the interference of a Government
inspector.
From such a deliberate departure from the straight path I come back to
the subject of the economy of accessories in Jane Austen's novels.
When the French bread at Northanger led me astray, I was writing about
domestic economy, costumes and cookery. Why _should_ the dresses be
described or the dishes be named? We are concerned with the sayings
and doings of squires and parsons and their wives and daughters, not
with the achievements of cooks and milliners. This would be quite a
fair criticism, but it is none {228} the less certain that an author
who tells you what people eat and drink and wear does enable you to
realize more fully the contrast between the present and the period with
which the novel is concerned. That is our business, however, not his.
He is an artist, not an historian. There is a common practice on the
stage of "furbishing up" old plays by cutting out obsolete references
and introducing topical touches. The comedies of Robertson may be
"freshened" considerably to meet the taste of thoughtless play-goers,
by giving Captain Hawtrey a motor-car and Jack Poyntz a magazine-rifle.
The "moral" of these present pages is merely this, that with a few such
slight changes as making post-chaise read motor and coach read train,
and retarding the dinner from three or five to eight or half-past,
cutting out the occasional "elegants," and otherwise changing a word
here and there in the dialogue, long scenes from any one of Jane
Austen's novels could be acted without material alteration, in the
costume of to-day, with no serious offence to the unities. The absence
of physical detail in her narrative is no artistic defect. Mr.
Collins's first evening at Longbourn, for instance, is so vividly
represented that {229} we gain the impression of having been in the
room, though of its size and shape, and furniture, or of the appearance
and costume of its occupants, we are told little or nothing--
"Mr. Bennet's expectations were fully answered. His cousin was as
absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the keenest
enjoyment, maintaining at the same time the most resolute composure of
countenance, and except in an occasional glance at Elizabeth, requiring
no partner in his pleasure.