Jane Austen and Her Times

by G. E. Mitton

“‘I went only to the post-office,’ said she, ‘and reached home before the rain was much. It is my daily errand, I always fetch the letters when I am here. It saves trouble, and is a something to get me out. A walk before breakfast does me good.’...

“‘The post-office has a great charm at one period of our lives. When you have lived to my age you will begin to think letters are never worth going through rain for.’...

“‘You are speaking of letters of business; mine are letters of friendship.’

“‘I have often thought them the worse of the two,’ he replied coolly.

“‘Ah! You are not serious now.... You have everybody dearest to you always near at hand. I probably never shall again; and therefore until I have outlived all my affections, a post-office, I think, must always have power to draw me out, in worse weather than to-day.’”

When we realise that every one of the letters preserved for us in Lord Brabourne’s book must have cost on an average a shilling, we feel more strongly than before the tie between Jane and Cassandra, which demanded such constant communication, and the retailing of every minute affair.

We have nothing to tell us how letters came to Steventon, but can form some sort of conjecture for ourselves. There was of course no post-office in such a minute place; the letters would arrive at Winchester, and from thence be forwarded by the Basingstoke coach, and dropped at the inn which stands at Popham Lane End, about two miles away. It would be almost certainly impossible for Jane to walk, except in the driest weather, through lanes of which we are told they were impassable for carriages at certain seasons, and could only be traversed on horseback. The man-servant would therefore probably be detailed to go for the post-bag, possibly riding on one of the carriage horses; and Jane would wait in the damp mist of an autumn afternoon by the front door, dressed in a costume most unsuitable for the climate, according to our ideas, with thin heel-less slippers kept up by crossed elastic, and long clinging skirts, with bare arms and only a dainty chemisette not reaching to her neck. She would greet the man eagerly to see if there was a letter for her in the handwriting of her beloved sister,—a welcome break on the monotony of a grey day, when perhaps Mrs. Austen was in bed with one of her chronic complaints.

CHAPTER VII SOCIETY AND LOVE-MAKING

The first of the published letters was written in January 1796, a time of year when such a scene as that sketched at the end of the last chapter must often have taken place. The season was far from being a gloomy one, however, balls and entertainments were going on all round, and the Austens had guests of their own also. These were their cousins the Coopers, in regard to whom Lord Brabourne, who being himself a great-nephew ought to have known, makes a most curious blunder. In his notes previous to the letters he says, “The Coopers, whose arrival is expected in the first, and announced in the second letter, were Dr. Cooper, already mentioned as having married Jane Austen’s aunt, Jane Leigh, with his wife and their two children, Edward and Jane, of whom we shall frequently hear.” This was in 1796, but Dr. Cooper had died in 1792; he had held the livings of Sonning, in Berkshire, and Whaddon, near Bath, contemporaneously until his death. The Mr. Cooper whom the Austens were expecting, was Dr. Cooper’s son Edward, of whom Lord Brabourne speaks as a child, with his wife and their two small children, Edward and Isabella, then both under two years old. The Coopers are mentioned a great deal in the entertaining Diary of Mrs. Philip Lybbe Powys, from which we have already quoted, for Edward Cooper married her daughter Caroline. He, like his father, was in Orders, and was at first a curate at Harpsden under his non-residential grandfather, the Rev. Thomas Leigh, and was afterwards presented to the living of Hamstall Ridware, Staffordshire, by Mrs. Leigh, a relative of his mother’s by whom he was connected with the Austens, Mrs. Austen having been a Miss Leigh. On January 21, 1799, Jane writes: “Yesterday came a letter to my mother from Edward Cooper to announce, not the birth of a child, but of a living; for Mrs. Leigh has begged his acceptance of the rectory of Hamstall Ridware in Staffordshire, vacant by Mr. Johnson’s death. We collect from his letter that he means to reside there. The living is valued at one hundred and forty pounds a year, but it may be improvable.”

The little boy mentioned above as coming with his parents to stay at Steventon, had been christened at Harpsden Church on December 3, 1794, and Henry Austen was one of the sponsors. At the christening of another little Cooper, named Cassandra, in 1797, Mrs. Austen stood sponsor. Jane remarks of the two elder children who came to Steventon, “the little boy is very like Dr. Cooper, and the little girl is to resemble Jane, they say.” This probably gave rise to Lord Brabourne’s mistake, but in reality Jane Austen was commenting on the child’s likeness to its dead grandfather, not to its father, and the Jane the girl was to resemble, was Edward Cooper’s sister Jane, who became Lady Williams, and was killed in a carriage accident in 1798.