This is not entirely a joke: Jane Austen’s mother’s family, the Leighs of Stoneleigh, had a spectacular history of madness, and her attitude towards madness and mental illness shows a lack of embarrassment and sentiment perhaps because of her proximity to those affected by it. In addition to those in the immediate Austen family circle, her uncle Tom and her brother, Jane’s cousin Eliza de Feuillide had a son called Hastings who had ‘fits’ and did not develop like other children.
The story of George Austen remains shadowy. As a little girl, Jane was especially close to two other brothers Frank and Charles. Frank, nicknamed ‘Fly’, was a small, burly boy, ‘fearless of danger, braving pain’. He often got into trouble. Jane gives a lovely retrospective glimpse of his childhood self in a poem she wrote to celebrate the birth of his son:
My dearest Frank, I wish you joy
Of Mary’s safety with a Boy …
In him, in all his ways, may we
Another Francis William see! –
Thy infant days may he inherit,
Thy warmth, nay insolence of spirit.13
Warmth, insolence, spirit: these were qualities that Jane Austen had herself and that she valued in Frank. At the same time, she had a soft spot for Charles, the baby of the family, who was sweet-tempered and affectionate, without the fiery nature of Fly. It is easy to see him being dragged along by Jane to meet Cassandra’s coach. The affection in which she held her siblings is clear from the way that her novels are full of private jokes – a phenomenon that is common among large families, who so often have their own secret language.
It was not only because of the brothers that Steventon parsonage, the family home, was a household of boys. Jane Austen’s father George took in scholars to supplement his rector’s stipend, effectively running his own little boarding school. Over the years there were probably more than fifteen boys, who provided a network of contacts among prosperous local families. Many of them remained devoted to the Austens and among them were some potential suitors for the two girls. Jane’s mother Cassandra seems to have been very popular with the schoolboys. She composed comic verses for them. She wrote a funny poem urging one reluctant schoolboy to return to school and his studies, rather than wasting his time dancing. Another boy complained to Mrs Austen that he felt left out because she hadn’t written a special poem to him.
The first schoolboy to be taken on at Steventon, in 1773, was a five-yearold aristocrat, John Charles Wallop, Lord Lymington. He was the ‘backward’ and eccentric eldest son of Lord Portsmouth, who lived just ten miles away at Hurstbourne Park. A boy called William Vanderstegen was taken on later that same year. By 1779, the year that Jane Austen’s mother Cassandra gave birth to her last child, there were four boys living at Steventon – Fulwar Craven Fowle, Frank Stuart, Gilbert East and a boy named Deane (either George or Henry). By 1781, the pupils included George Nibbs and Fulwar’s brother Tom and possibly his brothers William and Charles. In later years, John Warren, Charles Fowle, Richard Buller, William Goodenough, Deacon Morrell and Francis Newnham attended the school. At least ten of the boys stayed four years or more. The Reverend George Austen only stopped teaching in 1795 when Jane was in her twentieth year.14
Lord Lymington stayed just a few months at Steventon. Mrs Austen found him ‘good-tempered and orderly’,15 but his mother took him away on account of his very bad stammer, which grew worse as his behaviour became more erratic with the passage of years. Tales abounded of his eccentricities, including his habit of pinching servants, throwing them into hedges and playing other practical jokes. He once tried to hang a young boy from the bell tower of the village church. The young Lord Byron objected strongly to being pinched by Lord Portsmouth, threw a large shell at his head in retaliation (breaking a mirror) and, many years later in 1814, exacted cruel revenge by taking part in a devious plot to marry him off to a vicious woman who tortured him and beat him with a horsewhip. Jane Austen commented on this marriage to her sister Cassandra: ‘And here is Lord Portsmouth married too to Miss Hanson!’16 Whether or not she knew that Lord Byron gave away the bride is not known. Byron recorded in his journal that he ‘tried not to laugh in the face of the supplicants’ and ‘rammed their left hands, by mistake, into one another’.17
Later, John Wallop became known as the Vampyre Earl for his supposed addiction to drinking the blood of his servants. He was eventually certified a lunatic. Despite all his tribulations, he never forgot the Austens and invited them to his annual ball at Hurstbourne Park. In 1800, just after his first marriage, Jane attended his ball and wrote a long vivid account to her sister. Cassandra had clearly made a favourable impression on the Earl over the years. Jane seems surprised by his interest: ‘Lord Portsmouth surpassed the rest in his attentive recollection of you, enquired more into the length of your absence, and concluded by desiring to be “remembered to you when I wrote next”.’18 Our customary image of Jane Austen’s family home does not usually make room for her fond memories of the lunatic Earl.
The other boys opened up a range of worldly contacts for the Austen family. William Vanderstegen was an only child, born almost twenty years after his parents married. His father was one of the first Commissioners of the Thames, deeply involved in a campaign to make the river more navigable. George Nibbs’s father owned a plantation in the West Indies: we will meet him in a later chapter. Richard Buller, who stayed for five years, became a clergyman in Devon before dying at a sadly young age. His closeness to the Austens is apparent from a letter written by Jane to Cassandra in 1800, in which she gives the news that he has recently married: ‘I have had a most affectionate letter from Buller; I was afraid he would oppress me by his felicity and his love for his Wife, but this is not the case; he calls her simply Anna without any angelic embellishments, for which I respect and wish him happy – and throughout the whole of his letter indeed he seems more engrossed by his feelings towards our family, than towards her.’19 The following year, they visited him in his Tudor vicarage in the little stone-built town of Colyton on the Devon coast.
Rear view of Steventon rectory: Jane Austen’s childhood home
Cassandra made an especially strong impression on another of her father’s boarders, Tom Fowle. They became engaged and were due to be married before he died of yellow fever in the West Indies. This loss was a decisive factor in the development of Jane Austen’s own life. George Austen clearly had no compunction about bringing up his daughters alongside a variety of unfamiliar young men, though no record survives of any romantic interest on Jane’s part. The uproariously funny tales that she wrote as a young girl, full of violence, drunkenness, madness and suicide, suggest that she played more of a tomboyish role at Steventon than that of a young ingénue looking for love. She was more of a Catherine Morland – playing baseball,20 rolling down the green slope at the back of the house, preferring cricket to dolls – than a boy-mad Isabella Thorpe chasing unsuspecting young men along the streets of Bath. There was indeed a green slope at the back of Steventon rectory, perfect for rolling.
Perhaps in part due to the need to house an ever-increasing number of boarders, George and Cassandra Austen decided to send their daughters away to school. At the age of seven, Jane Austen, together with her ten-yearold sister, was taken to Oxford by their cousin Jane Cooper. They were to be taught by a Mrs Cawley, a Cooper relation. Seven seems to us an early age for a young girl to be living away from her family, especially from such a warm, loving home, full of life and animation. It must have been a wrench to leave the safety and security of the family home for school in Oxford, though elder brother James Austen was studying there and showed the girls the sights of the city. The arrangement was similar to that in Steventon: it was a case of a family taking in pupils, not a formal school environment. Presumably George Austen had made the financial calculation that the income gained from sending his girls away and creating more space for boy boarders in the rectory would exceed the outlay required to keep them in Oxford.