Jane Austen and Her Country-house Comedy

by W. H. Helm

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 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 2s. 3d. 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 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 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 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 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."