In Janeites & Austen L, Diane Reynolds wrote: “Henry [Austen]'s letter [at the end of Chapter 1 of
Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh’s Austen Papers] fascinated me because it
has all the dry wit we associate with Jane, revealing this mode of discourse
was not unique to her but a family trait…”
Diane, I agree that there
are flashes of Jane-like dry wit in Henry’s summary of the life of Old Francis
Austen. I just reread one of the 18-year old Henry’s contributions to the Loiterer
in 1789, … http://www.theloiterer.org/loiterer/no32.html)
…and confirmed my recall that Henry
already was fairly adept in his irony back then; although less subtle and sly than
what we see in this mature letter to JEAL, which Henry clearly took a great
deal of care and time in composing.
One of Henry’s slyest
zingers in his letter to JEAL is this:
“It is better to be lucky
than wise; it is no scandal to say that my aforesaid relations of West Kent never
raised any alarming fears of their setting even the Medway on fire; and
certainly the Rev. John Austen will bring no such disgrace on his family.”
Henry is clearly winking
at Admiral Croft’s sarcastic backhanded compliment to Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion: “The Baronet will never set the Thames on
fire, but there seems to be no harm in him."
Indeed, in Sir Walter’s
case, it is better to be lucky (i.e., to be born into wealth, like John Austen
VI) than wise! And note also that Sir Walter, like Elizabeth Weller’s husband,
John Austen V, caused a heap of family trouble by getting deeply into debt—so maybe
Henry was hinting that Sir Walter Elliot was himself in part JA’s
representation of her own great-grandfather John Austen V, and Anne Elliot’s
nostalgia for the lost glory of Kellynch reflected an Austen family nostalgia
for its real life squandered Kentish estate?
Diane also wrote: “We open
with the image of Francis, Jane's great uncle, setting off in life "with
800 pounds and a bundle of pens," a vivid and comic juxtaposition, to
become an attorney. (Where did he get the 800 pounds?)…a picture of his great
uncle Francis amassing his fortune, by living "hospitably"
(networking), "buying up all the valuable and around the Town" and
"marrying two wealthy wives" (Plus ca change ...) --and, Henry drops
dryly, by persuading his eldest son's godmother "to leave said Godson a
small [!] legacy of 100,000 pounds." (So there really were fairy
godmothers.) Henry goes on to note his uncle's not inconsequential
kindness in leaving his nephew, Henry and Jane's father, 500 pounds, despite
having three sons of his own and 12 grandchildren and buying him the living at
Deane….”
Diane, I’m so glad you’ve
focused on these details of the rags-to-riches story of Old Uncle Francis
Austen that Henry Austen shared with his nephew JEAL in a letter which I guess
would have been written sometime between the death of CEA in 1845 (when various
of JA’s manuscripts and letters passed into the hands of the next Austen
generation) and (obviously) Henry’s own death in 1850. As my Subject Line
indicates, this letter turns out to be a key clue to yet another damning
example of how:
JEAL, in his 1870 Memoir,
intentionally and deceptively suppressed evidence of JA’s satire of dark
chapters in Austen family history; then
RAAL, in both his 1911 JA’s Life & Letters and his later Austen Papers, sought to atone for his
grandfather JEAL’s editorial sins by revealing what JEAL had concealed or
obfuscated; then
Deirdre Le Faye, in her
1989 expansion of RAAL’s Life &
Letters, sought (and has largely succeeded, to this day) to put the genie
back in the bottle which RAAL had released eight decades earlier.
Let me walk you through
this Gothic tale of repeated editorial fraud.
To begin, I strongly
recommend that you all read, and then reread, the following introductory
portion of Henry’s letter to JEAL, to get a real sense of what a great bit of
writing it really is, and of the high interest level it holds for Janeites
eager to better understand the shadows of the Austen family saga which gave
rise to JA’s fiction, in particular her (as Auden put it) utterly clear vision
of the economic basis of family life:
“There (at Sevenoaks) my
Father’s Uncle, old Francis Austen set out in life with £800 and a bundle of
pens, as Attorney, & contrived to amass a very large fortune, living most
hospitably, and yet buying up all the valuable land round the Town --marrying
two wealthy wives & persuading the Godmother of his eldest son, Motley
Austen, to leave to her said Godson a small legacy of £100,000 — He was a kind
uncle too, for he bought the presentations of Ashe & Deane, that your
Grandfather might have which ever fell vacant first — it chanced to be Deane.
He left your Grandfather a legacy of £500, though at that time he had 3 sons
married & at least a dozen grandchildren. All that I remember of him is,
that he wore a wig like a Bishop, & a suit of light gray, ditto, coat, vest
& hose. In this picture over the chimney the coat & vest had a narrow
gold lace edging, about half an inch broad, but in my day he had laid aside the
gold edging, though he retained a perfect identity of colour, texture make to
his life’s end — I think he was born in Anne’s reign, and was of course a smart
man of George the First’s. It is a sort of privilege to have seen and conversed
with such a model of a hundred years. Of his 8 sons one died childless, another
has left a son who distinguished himself at St. John’s Cambridge, and is
settled in the valuable living of Aldworth near Pangbourne & has children.
My great Uncle’s eldest
son, Motley, completed his Father’s various purchases of land about Sevenoaks
by buying Kippington House & demesnes a short mile from the Town — and so
forming an extensive Park….”
As RAAL describes in Ch. 1
of The Austen Papers, Francis was the
second eldest of the sons of Elizabeth Weller, the very same matriarch whose
extraordinary maternal valor and determination RAAL foregrounded so effectively
at the start of his book. Francis Austen, like his mother and his younger
siblings, got screwed out of any share in his grandfather’s large estate,
because his eldest brother, John Austen VI, inherited EVERYTHING from granddaddy
John Austen IV, thereby providing one of the allusive sources for the horrible
inheritance injustice we read about in Chapter 1 of S&S. I explained all of
that in 2011…
…only to learn a few
months ago that this veiled allusion in S&S to that dark Austen family
history had actually first been detected and flagged by RAAL (and his uncle WAL)
a century ago, as I explained here:
So, here in Chapter 1 of The Austen Papers, we see RAAL once
again as a diligent Austen family biographer, who, as you so aptly pointed out,
Diane, doggedly dug up this letter from Henry to JEAL (RAAL’s grandfather). What’s
crucial to realize is that this is a letter which, revealingly, JEAL himself
chose NOT to include in the 1870 Memoir, but instead chose to summarize in a
very unsatisfactory and obfuscatory way!
It’s easy to prove this claim.
Here’s the grossly abbreviated summary of Henry’s letter that JEAL instead chose
to write as his sole description of Old Uncle Francis Austen. It’s clear to me
that JEAL found Henry’s letter too revealing of actual Austen family history,
and also too suggestive of even darker unspecified misdeeds, via its broadly
winking, ironic tone that you so alertly picked up on, Diane:
[JEAL’s Memoir] “Mr.
George Austen had lost both his parents before he was nine years old. He
inherited no property from them; but was happy in having a kind uncle, Mr.
Francis Austen, a successful lawyer at Tunbridge, the ancestor of the Austens
of Kippington, who, though he had children of his own, yet made liberal provision
for his orphan nephew. The boy received a good education at Tunbridge
School, whence he obtained a scholarship, and subsequently a fellowship, at St.
John’s College, Oxford. In 1764 he came into possession of the two
adjoining Rectories of Deane and Steventon in Hampshire; the former purchased
for him by his generous uncle Francis, the latter given by his cousin Mr.
Knight. This was no very gross case of plurality, according to the ideas
of that time, for the two villages were little more than a mile apart, and
their united populations scarcely amounted to three hundred.”
Now reread Henry’s letter
at the end of this post, and you see that JEAL has done a ham-handed hatchet
job on Henry’s letter, exactly like the hatchet jobs JEAL did on a number of JA’s
own letters! JEAL has in effect lobotomized Henry’s letter! Nothing about
Elizabeth Weller, nothing about the disinheritance of her and her younger
children, including Francis Austen. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing.
And lest someone suggest
that JEAL had to edit down and summarize letters in the interest of keeping his
narrative moving along, recall that JEAL at several points in his Memoir devoted
several pages of the Memoir to totally
extraneous crap--such as his long excursus about hunting during JA’s lifetime.
And yet, when JEAL indisputably had in his hands a letter like Henry’s--- written
to JEAL himself!--overflowing with razor-sharp wit and juicy information about
one of the key figures in Austen family history, the colorfully grey Old Uncle
Francis Austen, yet JEAL chose instead to write a paragraph of boring, mostly
extraneous misinformation and trivia.
And worst of all, and
surely a key motivating factor for him in his deletions, he omitted the most
important part of Old Uncle Francis’s rags-to-riches story, which was that Francis
was in “rags” in the first place, because he, his mother, and all his younger siblings
were all completely shut out of their fair share of their grandfather’s great
wealth. JEAL had read S&S, he already knew that John and Fanny Dashwood
were representations of his own parents, and so he surely could not allow into
his Memoir a foundational part of Austen
family history, which would strike any alert Janeite, as it did RAAL, as being yet
another embarrassing source for the tale of disinheritance woe of the Dashwood
women in S&S.
But that still leaves the
role of Deirdre Le Faye in all of this. As I outlined in that 2011 post of mine
that I linked to, above, Le Faye’s expanded 1989 version of RAAL’s 1911 Life & Letters omitted the most
interesting part of RAAL’s comments about the disinheritance of Elizabeth
Weller and all her younger children by their grandfather:
“This almost exclusive
care of the old man for his eldest grandson may possibly have been the model
for the action of old Mr. Dashwood at the beginning of Sense and Sensibility.”
Le Faye, just like her
role model, JEAL, added various additional trivia about that crucial episode in
Austen family, but deliberately omitted that single sentence---the very one that
might actually have caused Janeites to think very differently about Jane Austen’s
agenda as a writer of fiction—i.e., to realize that JA used her novels, in
part, as a way of writing veiled Austen family history that could not be
written explicitly by JA, for fear of reprisal and censorship from the rest of
JA’s family!
So in this one example, we
see, in stark vividness, the unholy alliance over time of the two most
influentially deceitful Austen family biographers of all time, Deirdre Le Faye
and James Edward Austen-Leigh—and, in a chronological sandwich, squeezed in
between them, we see poor Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, who sought to rectify
his grandfather’s deceptions, but whose noble efforts have mostly been ignored even
till today in2014.
Which is why this group read of The Austen Papers is so worthy an effort, to reclaim as much
deep-sixed Austen family history as we can, by (as Lydia Bennet put it) reading
“the lines under the words” .
In my next post, I will
discuss what Henry Austen neglected to mention about old Uncle Francis, and
that RAAL, dogged researcher that he was, nonetheless did not know about—it has
to do with how Francis gathered his great wealth, and also how old Francis’s son
and junior legal partner Francis-Motley came to have 100,000 pounds of fairy
dust sprinkled on him by his fairy god-mother!
;)
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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