Uncovering what Steventon rectory looked like before it was demolished seems like such an easy, straightforward question to answer. Yet, like the elusive writer herself, you have to dig deep and appearances can be misleading.

What did Austen’s house really look like?

It’s all too easy to cloud our impressions of her birthplace with the pristine, pedimented whiteness of Bath and Robert Adams’ interiors. And often, almost without meaning to, when many of us think of an Austen building, we picture a country house. The Bank of England has further cemented this association by placing a portrait of the writer in front of the stately Godmersham Park on the £10 note, echoing how often our first impression of her home is accidentally romanticised and gentrified from the screen adaptations we enjoy.

When I come to think about it, Austen herself has somehow come to represent the entire Regency period. And therefore we can much more easily picture her in a neat Regency building than an early Tudor one. It almost seems anachronistic, out of place and out of time, to position her there.

And yet, this is exactly where we find her.

The rectory building

The home Austen grew up in was not a modern Regency building at all, but a creaking three hundred year old house. To bring that into context, imagine that your home had been built in the 1720s, with all the draughty windows and creaking floorboards that would entail.

The earliest reference to Steventon Rectory is in 1535-6 where it’s valued by the church at £11, 4 shillings and 4 pence so we know it dates from at least the early sixteenth century. To put that into context, Henry VIII is on the throne - he’s just broken with Rome and is about to have his wife Anne Boleyn executed and dissolve the monasteries, creating one of the most turbulent periods in British history.

By the time Austen’s father is about to move in, in 1768, he takes out insurance on the 200-odd year old building, describing it as ‘brick, brick panelled and tiled except part of the south side plaister [plaster] and weather tiled’.1 But what does this really mean?

The main description of ‘brick’ tells us that the rectory walls were either made entirely of brick (very expensive) or faced with brick (more likely), and the term ‘brick paneling’ describes a common Tudor feature. This involved placing bricks in decorative paneled sections, separated by wooden beams, as shown on the ground floor of the beautiful Tudor House Museum in Southampton.

The insurance description also tells us that the back of the house was partially rendered with plaster and ‘weather tiled’ (also known as mathematical tiles). As the name implies, the tiles kept off the rain as well as looked smart, by imitating more expensive brick walls.

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Beautified illustrations

This is all well and good as to how the rectory looked in 1768. But… that doesn’t at all match the later images of the building.

There are a couple of illustrations which purport to be of the north front of the rectory, both showing a lime-rendered house nestled within a cosy landscape of trees. Not a brick panel in sight. So clearly at some point, if these illustrations are correct, the front of the property was rendered after 1768, hiding the Tudor brickwork under a layer of smooth plaster.

Both images also depict a symmetrical house with cosy dormer windows peeping out of the attic. So far, so good.

But if we look closer at the images, cracks start to appear.

You’ll notice each image has a different number of windows on the front façade and also in the attic. Look again and you’ll spot that one house sports sash windows whereas the other has casement windows. And while we’re at it, one appears to sit close to the road whereas the other is set back by a sweep. Clearly then, either one or both of these illustrations is inaccurate.

Recollections of a home

Perhaps we can clear this up by referring to the helpful snippets of details that various nieces and nephews handily recalled, such as:

‘The Parsonage consisted of three rooms in front on the ground floor—the best parlour, the common parlour and the kitchen.’

(This in itself implies there were more than two windows on the ground floor, as you’d expect at least one window per room, making the first image with just two windows more suspect.)

‘The Dining or common sitting room looked to the front, & was lighted by two casement windows.’

(The plot thickens. Do we interpret this as saying the dining room has two windows facing the front, or a window on two sides? Also, clearly the image with casement windows got something right.)

‘The road… ran at a sufficient distance from the front to allow a carriage drive, through turf and trees.’

(Does this rule out the first image entirely, or was artistic license or forced perspective used here to bring the house forward?)

Digging up the past

On top of these inconsistencies, when you add in findings from the 2011 dig, it becomes yet more muddled. That dig found that the front door, far from being in the centre as the images show, was off to one side (as you would expect in a Tudor building) and the wall material found was predominantly flint and brick.

The use of easily available local flint to construct the rectory’s foundations and walls makes complete sense. Knapped flint was, and still is, widely used throughout Hampshire. Historic England note that it was ‘highly fashionable’ in the late fifteenth century, and that brick didn’t become dominant as a building material here until the eighteenth century.2

To get a sense of what the building may have looked like, local artist Jo South has beautifully reimagined the rectory based on the archaeological findings, showing us not a classical, symmetrical, neat Regency building that perhaps we might at first have imagined Austen in, but a vernacular, rural, Tudor farmhouse.

Whether or not any later plaster render, as shown in the contemporary illustrations, would show up in the archeological record is not something I, as an historian, can comment on, but it’s fascinating to think of the conversations this building must have held, plastered or otherwise.

Perhaps the illustrators touched up the public image they were presenting of their aunt’s former home, just like they did with her published portrait and some of their public recollections? They certainly modernised the house at least a little, by moving the asymmetrical Tudor front door from its actual location on one side of the façade into the centre, transforming the image into a more idealised Georgian representation of architecture.

Understanding what Austen’s birthplace looked like then is anything but straightforward, and it’s tantalisingly frustrating when the various descriptions and images jostle and compete with each other. Piecing it all together, along with the archeological record, is a fascinating journey.

‘Of the buildings on a farmstead, the most important was the barn’

Whatever it looked like, the rectory, however, didn’t stand alone.

If we think the famous Georgian writer grew up in a rural house, away from the bustle and noise of life, we’d be rather wrong. In fact, she was living on a busy farm. The rectory was surrounded by a cluster of working buildings and spaces, including barns, a dairy, granary, brew-house, wash-house and a pond. The yard adjacent to Austen’s home was therefore filled with busy activity, not to mention being home to cows, a bull, turkeys, ducks, and chickens.

The largest barn consisted of three bays, making it around 45–60 feet long, and was a vital agricultural building. The Weald and Downland Living Museum states:

We know the Austens put on plays at Christmastime in their barn, and it’s fun to imagine them repurposing this practical building to put on shows, presumably surrounded by straw, grain and farm implements.

In the next, and final, part of this series, we will delve into what life was actually like in rural houses like Steventon rectory, using archaeology to tell us what went on.

Back in 2011 the marvellous and dedicated Deborah Charlton led the first ever dig here at Austen’s birthplace, and now in June and July 2026 I was lucky enough to participate in a follow up one. It’s a short drive from my home, following the straight Winchester-Silchester Roman road and it seemed rather fitting that my journey should be via such an historic route.

Austen was born in December 1775 in Steventon rectory - an old sixteenth century house that her parents had moved into seven years earlier after undertaking renovations to make it more habitable. Austen resided here until she was 25, longer than she lived anywhere else in her short life, making it of infinite interest to Austen scholars, literary tourists and eighteenth century historians like myself. Yet by 1822 the house was described as ‘dilapidated’, was knocked down and a new, modern rectory was built higher up the hillside, making knowledge about Austen’s birthplace tantalisingly hard to obtain.

And that is what has drawn us all to the dig this summer.

Life at the dig

On my first day, I volunteered to do finds processing and duly sat myself down under the protection of the marquee to get started with washing finds that had come in the previous day. That day I was very glad of my choice, as periodically slanting rain would wash over the windswept field making the diggers run for cover. (Ironically, the rest of the dig took place in a heatwave.)

My first task was to select one of the bags of objects from out of a large storage box - a thrilling lucky dip of mis-matched historical goodies. Then, I carefully retrieved each indistinguishable item from the bag and laid them out in a tray for sorting and cleaning. Objects small and large were still clad in the dirt that had shrouded them for centuries, and as I gently brushed or washed each of them clean, their original appearance began to return, often surprising me with bursts of colour or detail that hadn’t been apparent before.

Other days on the field, I chose to dig instead - an obsessive, addictive activity which you struggle to stop even when a tea break is called, just in case there’s something wonderful to be found just below where you’re working. Each time, I was allocated a one metre by one metre square of earth to work on - a tiny patch that soon becomes your complete focus as the rest of the world blurs into the background. I would steadily scrape my trowel repeatedly across the earth, always hoping to find something special, hidden just beneath the top layer.

The tinge of jealousy when someone in the trench next to you found something exciting alternated with the thrill of unearthing something that has lain in the ground for centuries. The atmosphere was of light-hearted, friendly industry, and the quiet hum from scattered conversations filled the air, punctuated only by bleats from the sheep we shared the field with. We were a happy band of volunteers - a mix of experienced archaeologists, locals and Janeites - all I think struck with how lucky we were to be there.

One day as we were all starting to gather for a tea break, there came a shout from a trench where someone was still working: “I’ve found a whole bottle!” We all turned round as one and whooped and cheered, punching our arms in the air with joy. The excitement and delight as it was brought out of the trench over to the finds table fizzed through everyone present that afternoon.

Lost things

No doubt a full account of the finds will be shared by Archaeo Briton shortly, and as they need to be first to write about the dig and what it tells us about Austen’s birthplace, I won’t divulge any of the finds from 2026 (other than ones they have publicly shared already).

However, Charlton’s fabulously informative book Archaeology Greets Jane Austen (2017) details hundreds of finds from the 2011 dig, all of which have a story to tell. In it, she lists the objects found, from ubiquitous items such as rusty nails, terracotta-red roof tiles, weighty building flints and cream-coloured clay pipe stems to more special items such as a Willow pattern egg cup, metal shoe buckles and, unbelievably, tiny clothes pins.

They uncovered 153 delicate shards of mint-blue window glass, 149 fragments of broken creamware pottery, and over 2,000 pieces of shattered bottles, among many other objects, totalling a staggering 10,864 artefacts.

Many of these items are so everyday and quotidian as to barely be noticed I assume at the time. But, like all these objects, they are touchstones to the past. Physical, tangible time portals. Museums are often the custodians of such objects, displaying them behind glass and under spotlights, but when you’re part of a dig, you get to experience the real thrill of seeing them come up into the light after centuries of darkness. Forgotten things, re-found.

In fact, it feels slightly mad that these objects are still here at all. Imagine if we were able to time travel back to that day in 1822 and stand on the roadside looking in as the ancient house was pulled down. We would have seen the large, valuable beams and bricks perhaps being sold and then carted off, pulled by horses, for a new life in new buildings. And the rest - the building rubble, and the long-lost, forgotten and unwanted items - were simply left in the house when it was demolished.

Waiting silently for two centuries before coming up to tell their tales.

The second part of this series will be a deep dive into the Austen home, exploring the thorny issue of what it really looked like and what life was like in an eighteenth century rural house.

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Postscript: Afterlives

Nothing of the house remains above ground in the field - visiting as a literary tourist is very much an imaginative experience - yet it’s possible that some of those Tudor bricks may well have not gone very far at all.

It doesn’t take much to imagine waggons of vermillion-hued Tudor bricks being carted across the road and up the hill to find new life at the new rectory. This ‘mansion’ was being built as the old house was demolished, and it continues to victoriously look down across the now empty field.

Yet, if you look closely enough, you can just see a red-brick Coach House peeping out shyly behind the new rectory. Could this building, in fact, be the surviving legacy of Austen’s birthplace? A physical vestige of the original building, reshaped into a new form, but continuing its story nevertheless, in plain sight.

For more information, see:

• https://jasna.org/austen/austen-places/virtual-steventon/

• https://www.hantsfieldclub.org.uk/hampshire-archaeology-report-2012-districts.pdf

• Follow https://archaeobriton.co.uk/ for more information as it comes out.

Extraordinarily, the personal journals and letters of this working woman were bound together and kept safe for centuries by her employers. They cover the years 1790 to 1814, when she was aged around 40 to 64, and offer a unique and detailed glimpse into the reality of working in the ‘governess trade’, as Jane Austen put it in Emma.

Agnes was, like Austen (and her fictional Miss Fairfax), an intelligent, unmarried daughter of a clergyman. She was born in Edinburgh in around 1750 and was well educated - she could speak French, play the harpsichord, knew the classics, read widely, understood natural history, science, geography, the list goes on. When she retired to live in Bruton in Somerset, a friend commented:

As to learning, she will be a hundred miles above any body she will ever see, but she will be an oracle, and there is a gratification in being look’d up to, which perhaps none but those who have been look’d down upon, know.

The reference to being looked down upon is telling. Although technically Agnes was a gentlewoman, filling her younger days with reading, social calls, and walks, when her father died in 1782, he left the family with little money. At this point, she was in her thirties and, with two younger sisters and a mother to support, it fell on her to provide income for the family.

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Job options for genteel ladies were negligible. After all, working class women filled the bulk of female occupations, undertaking menial, physical jobs such as domestic servant, laundress, seamstress, nurse, and agricultural worker.

But work appropriate for genteel women was much more sparce. It was generally limited to jobs such as governess, school mistress and lady’s companion. A few chose to write or paint for money, such as Agnes’ namesakes, the prolific Porter sisters, but it was often hard for women to make money and keep their feminine, genteel reputation intact. Emma Thompson articulated the work limitations for women slightly higher up the social chain, when she gave the words to Elinor Dashwood, ‘you will inherit your fortune. We cannot even earn ours.’

When pushed, Agnes chose to become a governess. She was lucky and managed to get well paid work which allowed her to financially support her mother and sisters. And she certainly knew that she was lucky, writing in her journal:

Plus it seems that the family she worked for were, in the main, a good family living in good locations. For most of the time, she found herself living in a country house, surrounded by sweet-smelling shrubberies, beautiful parkland and idyllic woods, teaching generally well behaved young girls.

I spent the day as usual with my little friends. It is to me a delightful employment to watch over their health and improvement. (30 Sep 1790)

Yet there is a sadder undercurrent to her story. As grateful as she was for the position, she didn’t really want to be doing it. When her mother was ill, she got permission to rush home to care for her for a few days, reflecting:

She had to return to her live-in job in order to ensure her mother had enough money.

And, although as we’ve seen, she was living in beautiful surroundings, this wasn’t always enough. When one of her friends wrote to her about the topic, she noted in her journal:

A letter from Mrs Williams, in which she envies my enjoyment of the verdant shades and cooling streams of the country. In answer I observed that I indeed possessed these, but where was the rational companion to remark their beauties to? When I had sent my letter, reflected seriously on my own sentiments and feared I was too sensible to the unavoidable want of society in my situation. Resolved to turn my attention more to its various blessings than to its one defect. (4 Aug 1791)

I love this quote. It clearly shows that although her loneliness saddened her, she was using her journal for self-reflection and introspection. A way to manage her feelings and make the best of things, not letting them overcome her. Her fortitude and resilience is inspiring to read.

For certainly, you get a real sense when reading her letters and journals that she doesn’t seem to speak to any other adults most days. She is either with the children or on her own. A typical example is a journal entry in October 1790, where she records that she:

She clearly wanted to get married, as a way to regain her independence and former lifestyle, but meeting other adults was, as we’ve seen, a challenge. As a result, her Plan B was to rely on the company of other single female friends when she reached retirement. However there was one flaw in this plan. And that was that her unmarried friends kept getting married.

In September 1790, she received a letter from her friend Miss Mitchell, telling her of her recent wedding. Agnes confides into her journal that although she’s happy for her, ‘yet it breaks into my future prospect of spending my evening of life with her.’ Within months, another friend, Miss Baillie, wrote to tell her she also was now married. Agnes anxiously noted, ‘my acquaintances are marrying very fast off my hands. They will leave me in the lurch, I believe.’

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A key worry for her was the risk of dying alone. She poignantly recorded how a female friend was poorly treated when dying in 1791, and noted:

This is a touching and remarkably sad and sobering wish. Yet one that was increasingly real for Agnes as the years rolled on. Indeed, it was a fear felt by many single women throughout the long eighteenth century, and the precariousness and vulnerability they experienced is beautifully articulated throughout Agnes’s journals.

In spite of all these worries, Agnes has something she can teach us today. Speaking through the years, her journals model fortitude and strength of mind. She used them to reflect on her days and identify ways she could improve her behaviour and attitude. She recognised that she needed to keep her chin up and coached herself to look for positives, using it almost as we would a gratitude journal today.

She dedicated most of her adult life to supporting her mother and younger sisters, enabling them to live more independent lives than she was able to. Duty and sacrifice were necessary but through it all, she was able to recognise the positives in her life and make the most of them. One of the many examples of her doing just this type of constructive self-reflection is from 1788:

Modern psychologists would certainly agree with Agnes: Insightful, curious, gratitude-focused self-reflection increases wellbeing. And it’s a tip I think I’ll start following.

Naturally, in period dramas sometimes deviations have to be made away from historical accuracy for creative purposes - after all, it isn’t a documentary - and that leaves the door open to historians like me to joyfully dig around and see what we can find.

This is the second of two parts discussing The Other Bennet Sister so also check out Part I if you haven’t yet seen it:

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5. Eating out

In The Other Bennet Sister there’s plenty of opportunity to see the popular evening entertainment of going to someone’s house for dinner. This was a frequent and important social activity in Regency life, and was, like dancing, highly formalised and choreographed.

When dinner was announced, gentlemen would each escort a lady and enter the dining room in order of precedence, with the highest status couple entering first. Your rank determined where you sat - the further you were from the head of the table, the lower down the pecking order you were. Where the guests were of equal rank, then married ladies took precedence over unmarried, and older over younger. If you weren’t sure, the hostess had it all in hand, as she ‘arranges them according to their rank, or according to what she imagines may be their expectations’ and she would gesture to you if you were in doubt.

Then you would wait, standing behind your chair, until the lady of the house sat, and then all guests could sit down. Servants would serve the food, again waiting on the highest status diners first, or gentlemen could help the ladies to nearby dishes.

Incredibly however when Mr Ryder holds a dinner at his house in episode five, he throws off this ritual, jumping forward in time to the Victorian era to borrow their new invention of name cards. He’s a bit of a trend setter, several decades early in his use of them, but at least it enables Miss Bingley to swap everybody’s cards around and relegate Mary to the lower end.

You may also spot from the image of Mr Ryder’s dining table above, that not only have some guests already sat down before everyone is in the room (including even the host himself has entered) but, uncannily, their food has already been served onto the plates. We can also see another Victorian invention that Ryder radically adopted: side plates with individual bread rolls on. It’s refreshing to see his rule-breaking personality employed so thoroughly in dining etiquette.

6. The dangers of the summer sun

Today we are well aware of the dangers of being out unprotected in the sun, and many of us routinely slather on some factor 50 when spending the day outside in the heat. Yet this is nothing new. Back in Austen’s day, everyone, male and female, would have worn hats when outside, and women in particular were strongly encouraged to also shade their faces using parasols or elegant veils.

Or all three for good measure.

In the delightful 1811 guide to all things costume, The Mirror of the Graces, we read why it’s so important for women to do so:

These necessary walking accessories related to the fashion for a fresh, untanned complexion, which was a mark of social standing, taste, health and morality. The Mirror of Graces goes on to explain:

A fine, clear skin, gives an assurance of the inherent residence of three admirable graces to beauty; Wholesomeness, Neatness, and Cheerfulness. Every fair means ought to be sought to maintain these vouchers, for not only health of body, but health of mind.

Yet throughout the series, Mary frequently shuns the advice of such conduct books, happily wandering about hatless, with no guilt whatsoever about not bringing her parasol, in spite of the many extras in the show who usually did, in fact, get the message.

On hiking Scafell Pike, only the guide and Miss Bingley are dressed with decorum regarding headwear, and this offers viewers another beautiful hint that Mary and Mr Hayward are meant for each other: They both pay no heed to cultural norms, forgetting their hats with seemingly no regret.

On the occasions, Mary does recall her bonnet, such as in episode four on a trip out with the Gardinders for the surprise poetry reading, she takes it off as soon as can, handily removing it before a close up scene and private tête-à-tête with Mr Hayward. Clearly, either the heat or the full force of Tom’s poetry overwhelmed her so much, it just had to come off. This, however, is a dangerous game, as The Mirror is keen to warn us:

Chilling stuff.

7. The ‘misery of the victims’ of the governess-trade

In this screen adaptation, we see Mary being invited to act as governess for her own cousins, the Gardiner children. This act of poetic license does seem rather far fetched as family would not have taken on a paid role in this way. Sure, unmarried women were frequently used as free labour, looking after children and supporting the elderly for their extended family, but to be a paid employee for your own kith and kin does not seem particularly plausible.

Furthermore, genteel women generally turned to work as a governess very reluctantly. If you were an educated, well-bred young lady from a ‘good’ family, then to have to admit to needing to work was deeply shameful. A few years after this period, Sarah Ellis perfectly summed this up:

Gentlemen may employee their hours of business in almost any degrading occupation and, if they have that the means of supporting a respectable establishment at home, may be gentlemen still; while, if a lady but touch any article, no matter how delicate, in the way of trade, she loses caste and ceases to be a lady.

Women of Mary’s class then only worked if they absolutely had to - to ensure they had food and clothes and a home - whereas Mary clearly has options. In this series though, they make the point that the heroine has agency and unusually chooses to work. We do know that some women did enjoy it, such as Agnes Porter who in 1791 noted:

At home all day with my pupils… What a pleasure it is to me to see them daily improve in person, manners and elegant accomplishments.

But this seems the exception rather than the rule. You don’t need to look far to find evidence of isolated, lonely, overworked women working as live-in governesses in this period, and beyond into the nineteenth century.

Ellen Weeton wrote in 1812 how ‘I often feel so jaded at night when the children are gone to bed’ and that ‘there is nobody in the house with whom I can be on equal terms.’ This speaks of how governesses were in the unenviable position of being beneath ther employers while also above the other, uneducated, servants.

In her novel Emma, Jane Austen gives voice to a poor, educated woman, Jane Fairfax, by saying, “When I am quite determined as to the time, I am not at all afraid of being long unemployed. There are places in town, offices, where inquiry would soon produce something—Offices for the sale—not quite of human flesh—but of human intellect.” She goes on to note the great “misery of the victims” of the governess trade.

8. The history of hello

Our final topic is a contrary one: ending with a beginning.

In episode six, when Mary is staying at Pemberley, her mother comes to visit her one evening, purportedly to brush her hair, but in fact to cajole her into pursuing Mr Ryder. Mrs Bennet politely knocks on the door and in response Mary says, “Hello?”

I almost didn’t even spot this - it’s such a common word today that it barely registers, but it was definitely not a form of greeting in the long eighteenth century. That wouldn’t take place until the late nineteenth century with the invention of the telephone. At the time of Pride and Prejudice, it would only have been used as a shout to grab attention, like hailing a ferryman or urging hounds in a hunt to run faster - a bit like a “ho, there!” or “whoa!” It certainly wouldn’t have been used by polite young ladies at home, although as we’ve seen Mary does rather like to be a bit of a rebel.

I’ve loved the opportunity to watch and rewatch this fabulous period drama. Art, such as TV adaptations, are a wonderful way to engage with the past and explore new avenues of historical enquiry.

As a historian though, it’s pretty hard to put to bed that part of your mind which is constantly filling up with increasingly random information about the past.

And so I felt it incumbent on me to share some of the little moments from The Other Bennet Sister that, for whatever reason, perhaps weren’t exactly as things would have been two hundred years ago.

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1. What’s in a name?

Introductions were a highly formal and important feature of Regency society. When meeting a new acquaintance for the first time, strangers would always bow or curtsey to each other, and the lower status members were introduced to the higher first. Everyone was known by their title and surname and in the case of multiple unmarried sisters, the eldest was called, for example, Miss Bennet, and the younger sisters were either referred to as Miss Elizabeth Bennet, Miss Mary Bennet etc. or simply Miss Elizabeth, keeping the title to maintain politeness.

This wasn’t just pedantry. It was a handy way of demonstrating respect and status. After all, only servants and children were called by their first names in public. In private of course you could call your close family and friends by their first names, but it was unthinkably rude to refer to an acquaintance so informally, let alone a stranger. You might know someone for decades and only ever call them by their surname.

But back to The Other Bennet Sister and the Meryton ball in episode one. Here we get to watch the Bingley party and the Bennets meet for the first time.

Mr Bingley is the first to make not one, but two errors. Significantly, he introduces his party first to the lower status Bennets, instead of waiting to have the Bennets presented to him. Not only that but he introduces the ladies in his party by saying, “These are my sisters, Louisa, and this is Caroline” demonstrating a shocking lack of formality and correctness.

Sir William Lucas manages to claw some politeness back by attempting to introduce all the Bennets correctly, but even he finds it tricky.

“And if I may present Mrs Bennet, Miss Jane Bennet, Miss Elizabeth Bennet, Kitty and Lydia. Oh, and this is Miss Mary Bennet.”

Not only did Jane require no first name, but poor Kitty and Lydia are singled out with very little dignity.

Similar naming issues continue in episode two when the unfortunate Mr Collins announces to the Bennets that there will soon be a ball at Netherfield, asking, “Perhaps Miss Bennett you would take the first dance with me?” Now, because all the sisters are present, this question can only be addressed to Jane, yet he is clearly asking Elizabeth. Happily though, he realises his mistake and seconds later he says, “What about you, Miss Elizabeth, do you sing?”

As innocuous as these issues are, the series does recognise the importance of naming conventions, and beautifully demonstrates the real intimacy of first names - something that is totally foreign to us today - in two heart-warming scenes. At the summit of Scafell Pike in the Lake District, when Mr Hayward is pouring out his real feelings he openly professes the warmth of his love by correcting himself in his use of Mary’s name, calling her first “Miss Bennet”, then, more emotively, “Mary”. It is a declaration of the close relationship he wishes to have with her.

Similarly, in the final episode, he invites Mary to call him Tom, after all they have now kissed. These touching uses of first names between lovers highlight just how personal using them was. And quite how incorrect poor Bingley was at the Meryton ball.

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2. Mary’s lost gloves

In order to not only continue, but heighten, the frisson of excitement felt when hero and heroine touched hands in the 1995 and then the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movies, The Other Bennet Sister frequently ensures Mary is wandering about without gloves just in case she ever has to hold hands with an eligible bachelor.

We first see her up to this at the Meryton ball in episode one, where all the female cast are in gloves but Mary. At balls and dances, it was expected that women should wear evening gloves which came up to, or over, the elbow, but Mary seems to have missed that memo. After all, it is apparently her first ball so perhaps we can let her off.

Unbelievably however, all the men at the ball have also forgotten their gloves, meaning that cheeky Mary can dance skin to skin with Mr Sparrow.

Mary continues to rebel and flout social expectations when out and about in the fresh air, unlike the other female characters and even Austen herself who noted that ‘all my money is spent in buying white gloves and pink persian‘ [petticoat fabric]. This was because wrist-length gloves, usually white, were worn every day and easily lost, needing frequent replacements. (Austen often notes in her letters that she is keeping safe female relations’ gloves that had been accidentally left behind at her house.)

Mary’s perseverance pays off however in episode four when Mr Hayward helps her out of a carriage, as both are recklessly gloveless and so are able to hold hands. For gloves were even supposed to be worn when sitting in a carriage just as they were when walking. Indeed, even that original rebel, Lydia Bennet, wore gloves when riding in a carriage, although she couldn’t resist removing them…

3. Dancing etiquette

The infamous Meryton assembly continues to be under our scrutiny, this time for the dancing itself. After we see the heroine enjoying herself in two back-to-back dances with Mr Sparrow, Charlotte Lucas takes her to one side for some friendly advice. She tells her what she has done is wrong because “two dances in succession suggests a liking”.

In the Regency period, it was common for couples to enjoy (or endure) a pair of country dances, one after the other. This was often because different dances required different set formations (e.g. square or longways) and so keeping dances in pairs meant there was an efficiency in how many times sets were reformed. For example you might have two longways dances back-to-back with the couples staying in position for both.

We see this pairing of dances perfectly illustrated in Pride and Prejudice, where the indefatigable Mrs Bennet is making the most of the fact that Jane was asked to dance the maximum number of times: two pairs, or four dances in total.

“Mr. Bingley … danced with [Jane] twice. Only think of that, my dear: he actually danced with her twice; and she was the only creature in the room that he asked a second time. First of all, he asked Miss Lucas … [but] he seemed quite struck with Jane as she was going down the dance. So he inquired who she was, and got introduced, and asked her for the two next. Then, the two third he danced with Miss King, and the two fourth with Maria Lucas, and the two fifth with Jane again, and the two sixth with Lizzy…”

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Therefore, we can see that dancing two dances in succession was a completely normal and unremarkable thing to do. Charlotte Lucas was a little presumptive in her advice and could have waited to see if Mary stood up for a second pair of dances with Mr Sparrow before saying anything. Indeed, it is that kind of undesirable, antisocial behaviour that Marianne and Willoughby do in Sense and Sensibility and which caused tongues to wag:

Austen describes this as an ‘excessive display’ of affection - something poor Mary Bennet is not guilty of at the assembly.

4. You say tomato, I say tomato

Our last point for this post relates to episode three when Mr Hayward asks Mary if she likes poetry. She replies, “I’ve tried, well, Cowper, Byron, even some Dryden”.

In spite of the fact that pretty much all genteel folk of Mary’s class, bookish or otherwise, would have been well versed in poetry (see my post on The Necessity of Poetry for more info), Mary mispronounces a poet’s name: William Cowper.

He was one of the most famous poets of his era, beloved by many, including Jane Austen, and was named ‘the best modern poet’ by Coleridge, so one that Mary would undoubtedly have heard being discussed in polite conversation.

Confusingly though for modern readers, his name is pronounced “Cooper”, and not “Cowper” as Mary refers to him. I think we can go easy on her though, after all she much prefers reading history - a woman after my own heart.

Part II coming soon…

Subscribe to be the first to catch the second, and final, post on the Regency world portrayed in this fabulous series.

But back in the 18th century, poetry didn’t need a special international day for people to remember it - poetry was ubiquitous. It was commonly read, commonly written, and commonly shared.

Poetry, poetry everywhere

Poetry was often a staple in education, with Hester Chapone advising in her 1786 book Letters on the Improvement of the Mind: Addressed to a Young Lady that:

The faculty, in which women usually most excel, is that of imagination; and, when properly cultivated, it becomes the source of all that is most charming in society. Nothing you can read will so much contribute to the improvement of this faculty as poetry; which, if applied to its true ends, adds a thousand charms to those sentiments of religion, virtue, generosity, and delicate tenderness, by which the human soul is exalted and refined.

Fine words.

Men and women frequently wrote into magazines to share their own poems with the nation. The Lady’s Magazine ran from 1770 and made a regular feature of contributed poems alongside a ‘glorious miscellany’ of news stories, fashion, births, marriages and deaths, and gardening tips.1

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Back then there was nothing niche or unusual about reading and writing poetry regularly. It was not only mainstream but viewed as a highly respectable and prestigious form of literature - a sign of education, taste and even status and it ranked well above mere novels. (For more information on the lowly status of novels, take a look at my article on the dangers of reading.)

Writing poetry then was a form of social capital that demonstrated a writer’s intellectual credibility. And because of that many novelists started their careers as poets. It was a respectable route into publication, especially for female authors, and was one taken by Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Jane West and Mary Robinson among many others. Even the celebrated Walter Scott started as a poet, and when he transitioned into writing novels with the publication of Waverley in 1814, Jane Austen quipped:

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. – It is not fair. – He has Fame & Profit enough as a Poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths.

Other authors who moved from publishing poetry to fiction, still continued to write poems and include them within their novels, perhaps to add professional legitimacy to this less well-regarded form of writing. Charlotte Smith was one such writer, peppering her plots with poems allegedly composed extempore by her characters.

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The Austens and poetry

The Austens were a poetry-loving family. Mrs Austen was described as ‘already the poet of the family’ by her uncle at just six years old and most of Jane Austen’s siblings wrote poems, verses and charades, including Austen herself. Several of her poems exist today and they vary from elegies to riddles, from political to playful, and everything in between. She often used her poems as gifts, sending them to family and friends to accompany presents or slipping them into letters. One such offering was gifted in a letter of January 1809 to her teenaged nephew Edward Knight, tucked in between the local news and gossip:

For a day or two last week my mother was very poorly with a return of one of her old complaints, but it did not last long, and seems to have left nothing bad behind it…

Miss M. conveys to us a third volume of sermons, from Hamstall, just published, and which we are to like better than the two others; they are professedly practical, and for the use of country congregations. I have just received some verses in an unknown hand, and am desired to forward them to my nephew Edward at Godmersham.

Alas! poor Brag, thou boastful game!
What now avails thine empty name?
Where now thy more distinguished fame?
My day is o’er, and thine the same,
For thou, like me, art thrown aside
At Godmersham, this Christmastide;
And now across the table wide
Each game save brag or spec. is tried.
Such is the mild ejaculation
Of tender-hearted speculation.

The joke of course is that the ‘unknown hand’ is her own and the verses refer to her favourite card games of Brag and Speculation which have apparently not been played at Godmersham that Christmas. In her following letter she refers to the poem again, teasingly saying:

I am sorry my verses did not bring any return from Edward. I was in hopes they might, but I suppose he does not rate them high enough. It might be partiality, but they seemed to me purely classical,—just like Homer and Virgil, Ovid and Propria que Maribus. [The Latin phrase means ‘things that are suitable for men’]

Although light-hearted, Austen’s caring nature shines through. Her nephew had just lost his mother, and while mourning she had entertained him by teaching him Speculation. Now, a few months later, her offering of an amusing poem about the game she had taught him was her way of checking in on him and showing she was thinking of him in his grief.

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The Austens also enjoyed reading poetry and Jane’s favourite poets included Walter Scott, William Cowper (pronounced Cooper) and George Crabbe. She went so far as to judge others on their taste in poetry, such as when visiting Chilham Castle in Kent in 1813. There she met a Miss Lee who was staying in the castle and Jane reports:

She amusingly imagined herself as Crabbe’s wife, as a niece noted, ‘she thoroughly enjoyed Crabbe; perhaps on account of a certain resemblance to herself in minute and highly finished detail; and would sometimes say, in jest, that, if she ever married at all, she could fancy being Mrs Crabbe.’ Indeed, on hearing of the death of his wife in 1813 Austen flippantly joked: “I will comfort him as well as I can, but I do not undertake to be good to her children. She had better not leave any.”

Poetry in our lives

Reading, writing, gifting, discussing and sharing poetry were staple activities of educated Georgian and Regency men and women. Poems were used as social glue, as status symbols, as signs of affection and as ways to better understand the world. This is a language practice now unfamiliar to us, yet if we agree with Wordsworth that:

Then surely, we read, write and share our spontaneous feelings through different mediums, having shifted from poetry to Instagram, from odes to journaling, and from verses to book groups. The need is still there, the love and appreciation for beautiful words still there. But in a very different era, they are naturally being expressed in a different way.

Yet, in spite of all that, I for one take delight in reading Georgian poetry. After all, as Percy Bysshe Shelley said:

All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed.

A great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.

A very pretty art

Well, it appears that we’ve been sliding and skating on frozen rivers, lakes and flooded meadows for a very, very long time.

As far back as the twelfth century William Fitzstephen noted in his Description of the City of London that:

‘When that vast lake [Moorfields], which waters the walls of the city towards the north, is hard frozen, the youth in great numbers go to divert themselves on the ice. Some, taking a small run, for an increment of velocity, place their feet at the proper distance, and are carried sliding sideways a great way.’

He also noted how people tied the leg bones of animals to their feet and pulled themselves over the ice using poles.

Fast forward to the seventeenth century and the newly built canal in St James’ Park was a particularly popular London location for sliding about on the ice, a pastime that now featured metal skates.

The diarist Samuel Pepys noted in December 1662, that:

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Eighteenth century skating

The craze continued into the eighteenth century, with figure skating being officially defined and taught in A Treatise on Skating by Robert Jones in 1772. In it Jones noted, ‘in England…skating is used here as an exercise and diversion only; hence an easy movement and graceful attitude are the sole objects of our attention’ and he went on to describe how to make various attractive positions when ice skating.

Ice skating certainly seems to have been extremely popular, and Wordsworth perfectly captured the exhilaration of skating, when in December 1799 he wrote:

But what about ice dancing?

Unbelievably, I did manage to find a reference to group ice dancing. There is a beautiful example given in Joseph Strutt’s 1801 history of sports and pastimes, when he recalled:

‘I have, however, seen, some years back, when the Serpentine river in Hyde Park was frozen over, four gentlemen there dance, if I may be allowed the expression, a double minuet in skates, with as much ease, and I think more elegance, than in a ball room.’

What a beautiful sight that must have been.

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Skating is only for male part of our species

As you can tell from the examples above, most references and images of ice skating in the long eighteenth century portray men on the ice, with women either watching or walking. However there was a creative solution for those ladies who felt it was improper to skate, but who still wanted to join in the fun.

In a letter from 1799, Samuel Coleridge described Ratzeburg Lake in Germany as ‘all alive with Skaters, and with Ladies driven onward by them in their ice cars.’ Being pushed around in an ‘ice car’ sounds rather stately and dignified, and when Dorothy Wordsworth had a go, she described it as ‘one of the most delightful days that ever was felt.’

You did have to be careful however, as Rowlandson captured the moment of a disastrous crash in his satirical painting of the Serpentine in 1786.

Eventually, by the turn of the nineteenth century it was gradually becoming more acceptable for women to skate. Robert Jones in his 1772 book said he’d been told that ‘skating is calculated only for the male part of our species’, but that he himself saw ‘no reason why the ladies are to be excluded; to object to it as not being hitherto practised, is the effect of prejudice and confined ideas.’1 Hear, hear.

Did Jane Austen ice skate?

Although Austen did mention the sport in one of her letters, she clearly was a spectator rather than a participant, like most women were.

While living in Southampton in December 1808 she wrote of her brother Frank.

We did not take our walk on Friday…; we may perhaps do something like it to-day…after seeing Frank skate, which he hopes to do in the meadows by the beech...
It is one of the pleasantest frosts I ever knew, so very quiet. I hope it will last some time longer for Frank’s sake, who is quite anxious to get some skating; he tried yesterday, but it would not do.

The ‘meadows by the beech’ was in fact Porter’s Meadow (or Porter’s Mead) which at the time was situated by the beach (now reclaimed land), and which frequently flooded and froze during winters, creating perfect conditions for urban ice skating. It’s now a municipal park and it’s wonderful to think people ice skated here in the past, although rather hard to imagine with busy traffic rushing past.

Winter Olympics sports in the long eighteenth century

It’s been fascinating to trace how ice skating has been a ‘healthy winter exercise’ (as described by visitor Mirza Abul Hassan in January 1810) in Britain for so many years. And not only that, but other Olympic sports have a long history here.

Curling has been played in Scotland since at least the sixteenth century, using branches for brooms, beautifully showing how many of our modern Winter Olympic sports are rooted in the activities of those who took to the ice hundreds of years ago.

So get comfy, and let’s dive in and see what we can glean from one of Britain’s most beloved authors.

(If you haven’t already, check out What would Jane do? Part I where we uncovered four tips from her youthful days writing juvenilia and What Would Jane Do? Part II where we saw some of her adult writing practices.)

Tip Nine: Ruthlessly edit and cut

I’ve read hundreds of books from the late 18th century and early 19th century and one thing I hear myself often saying on finishing a book is “well, that could’ve done with some editing.”

Novels in this period could be excessively long by modern standards - they were usually published in multiple volumes (it made them easier to borrow from circulating libraries for one thing) and the more the merrier seems to have been many authors’ maxim.

Compare for example Frances Burney’s eight volume novel Cecilia published in 1782 with Austen’s three volume Pride and Prejudice. Austen herself said of this novel:

‘I have lop't and crop't so successfully.’

She clearly then went through her manuscripts cutting extraneous text ruthlessly, a practice that made her fiction distinctly more pithy and succinct than her contemporaries’.

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And she wasn’t hesitant at completely cutting and rewriting whole chapters that weren’t working. According to a nephew, after completing her first draft of Persuasion in July 1816, she reflected on the éclaircissement between the two lovers and ‘she thought it tame and flat, and was desirous of producing something better. This weighed upon her mind.’

In the original scene shown above, the lovers are sat together in a drawing room having ‘a silent, but a very powerful Dialogue’, before punctually, briskly and economically ‘they were re-united.’ A whole book of longing and the couple get together in a few short sentences - it very much leaves the reader wanting more.

Austen spent a month pondering exactly how to fix the issue, then:

Courage to radically edit and cut helped her to write beautifully precise novels where no word was wasted and where every scene was the best she could imagine it to be.

Tip Ten: Be persistently ambitious

Austen worked hard to get her novels in print. She was an ambitious writer who demonstrated grit and perseverance even in the face of failure.

‘I have now therefore written myself into £250 — which only makes me long for more.’ (July 1813)

In the past she’s been tainted with the image of a demure, domestic spinster, scribbling away at home and shying away from the limelight. But as has beautifully demonstrated in her book Wild for Austen, she was anything but.

We can see her drive, courage and ambition firing out from a letter she wrote to her publisher in 1809. Six years previously they had bought her manuscript of Susan (an early version of Northanger Abbey) but then spectacularly failed to actually print it. She wrote them a wonderfully terse letter, sharing her frustration and demanding they print it, using the pseudonym Mrs Ashton Dennis (or MAD for short):

‘Should no notice be taken of this Address, I shall feel myself at liberty to secure the publication of my work, by applying elsewhere. I am Gentlemen &c &c MAD.’

Sadly the letter didn’t work, but she didn’t give up.

She painstakingly saved up money and fourteen years after first selling it, and eighteen years after writing it, she bought the manuscript back from them and completely revised and updated the novel, getting it ready for publication once again. It’s a remarkable example of grit and perseverance in the face of publication setbacks and failure, showing a steely determination to get her writing in print.

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Learning from Jane

In all three articles, we’ve explored how Austen role modelled great writing practices, from experimenting in different genres, to seeking honest feedback, and showing determined persistence in getting published.

It’s easy for someone like Austen to be put up on a pedestal and endowed with the label of ‘genius’, as if her writing had come without effort or setbacks. But from examining her writing practices, we can attempt to do what Virginia Woolf rightly said was exceptionally difficult:

I’d love to finish with one last tip she has given us through the years. In 1816 a rather pompous and self-important royal librarian gave her unsolicited advice on what and how she should write, rather patronisingly directing her to make her next novel a ‘Historical Romance illustrative of the History of the august house of Cobourg’. Austen advised both him, and us, in her polite but firm reply:

During this year then, let’s take what’s helpful from Austen’s example in our own writing and working practices and have the courage to go on in our own ways.

Following on from What would Jane do? Part I where we uncovered four tips from her youthful days writing juvenilia, this article continues with her journey to publication, focusing on her as an ambitious adult writing full-length novels. So let’s dig in!

Tip Five: Take inspiration from your observations

Austen comes across as one of life’s keen observers. In company, she quietly took in what was being said and done around her, making mental notes she could mine from when she returned back to her writing desk. A nephew recalled how she used observations of others’ peccadillos to add flavour and authenticity to her characters.

Cherry-picking little details to form something entirely new was an important part of her creative process and marks her characters out as particularly well-formed and recognisable. One example I love is the uncannily familiar mannerisms of one of her neighbours. This was a Mrs Powlett who not only was ‘at once expensively & nakedly dress’d,’ wearing pricey lace and muslin, but who also referred to her husband as her ‘caro sposo.’ Ring any bells?

Mrs Elton has to be one of my favourite characters and it’s delightful to imagine that Austen could have leveraged the characteristics of acquaintances to create this ghastly fictional personality.

These observational skills however weren’t necessarily appreciated by those around her. Mary Russell Mitford wrote to a friend in 1815, telling him that since Austen’s authorship had become known, everyone was now afraid of her:

It must be confessed that this silent observation from such an observer is rather formidable. Most writers are good-humoured chatterers, … unaffected and pleasant, and quite removing by their conversation any awe that may have been excited by their works. But a wit, a delineator of character, who does not talk, is terrific indeed!’

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Tip Six: Prioritise writing over chores

This obviously has to be the best lesson Austen role models to modern writers, and one I really want to try and put into practice in the upcoming months.

In an era where the domestic duties most women faced were considerable, Austen’s sister Cassandra generously enabled her writing by taking on the lion’s share of the work. A niece tells us about the division of labour in the Chawton household and of the expectations on Austen:

So basically, Austen prepared breakfast and then was pretty much free of domestic responsibility for the rest of the day, enabling her to get on with writing. And on the occasions that her sister was away and she had to take over, Austen found it very frustrating – the lack of time and headspace made it difficult for her to write. In September 1816 she had been busy hosting and entertaining guests in Cassandra’s absence and she wrote about how she was finding it.

‘It had been a busy week, & I wanted a few days quiet, & exemption from the Thought & contrivances which any sort of company gives. — I often wonder how you can find time for what you do, in addition to the care of the House; … Composition seems to me Impossible, with a head full of Joints of Mutton & doses of rhubarb.’

Although my head isn’t full of mutton and rhubarb, the thought of prioritising writing over school emails, food shopping, house insurance renewals, and life admin in general definitely has its appeal.

Tip Seven: Give yourself brain breaks

Have you ever been lying in bed, taking a shower, or walking the dog when all of a sudden a brilliant solution to a challenge you’ve had pops unasked into your mind?

Many thinkers from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to Winifred Gallagher talk about how performing mundane, unrelated tasks mindfully enables our subconscious to incubate any tricky problems we are working on. It’s able to wander and spark new connections in a brilliant, unexpected burst of creative problem-solving.

We see a wonderful example of Austen doing exactly this. Her niece Marianne recalled how she ‘would sit quietly working beside the fire in the library, saying nothing for a good while, and then would suddenly burst out laughing, jump up and run across the room to a table where pens and paper were lying, write something down, and then come back to the fire and go on quietly working as before.'

It’s here in this quotidian and unrelated task of needlework that we see Austen’s mind being particularly productive, whirring away in the background and producing innovations and creative ideas for her writing while otherwise engaged in a mindful and repetitive activity.

Tip Eight: Seek honest feedback

As Austen completed her drafts, she started to share them with close family and friends, seeking feedback and responses from her loved ones. When visiting her brother’s family in Kent, niece Marianne, recalled:

‘When Aunt Jane came to us at Godmersham she used to bring the MS. of whatever novel she was writing with her, and would shut herself up with my elder sisters in one of the bedrooms to read them aloud. I and the younger ones used to hear peals of laughter through the door, and thought it very hard that we should be shut out from what was so delightful.’

Like Marianne, we too are shut out from this shared experience but it vividly illustrates how reading aloud to others was an important part of Austen’s process.

Austen also deliberately sought and collated wider feedback, writing down ‘Opinions’ about her work and these survive for both Mansfield Park and Emma.

These show a fascinating insight into the contemporary reception of her writing and include some surprising responses, such as these for Mansfield Park:

• Her brother Frank Austen: ‘We certainly do not think it as a whole equal to P&P but it has many & great beauties. Fanny is a delightful character!’

• A Kentish relation, Fanny Cage: ‘Did not much like it – not to be compared to P&P – nothing interesting in the characters – language poor – characters natural and well supported – improved as it went on.’

• Her mother: ‘Not liked it so well as P&P – Thought Fanny insipid. Enjoyed Mrs Norris.’

Austen then was deeply interested in what others thought of her characters and stories. She used this information to hone her writing and better understand how her novels were landing in the marketplace, demonstrating a keen awareness of the commercial element to publishing.

Join me soon for the final episode in this short series, where we will uncover some of Austen’s editing and publishing tips and techniques. I look forward to seeing you then and in the meantime, do comment below on whether you have tried out any of these tips in your own writing practice.

Much has been written about her genius and life, from her hobbies and wardrobe to her family and her characters. But as a writer, if she were here today, the question I would really want to ask her is: What’s your process?

This article is part one of a short series of Top Tips gleaned from studying how Austen wrote and published her beloved novels. As a historian, I firmly believe there are hard-won lessons the past can teach us, and even the sheer weight of time does nothing to negate the profound usefulness of understanding human experience, whenever that experience took place.

Let’s kick off then in the place it all started. I’d like to take you back to 1787 and to a busy seven-bedroom parsonage, crammed full of young people - Austen children mingled with teenaged boys being taught by Rev. Austen - and surrounded by the rural noises emanating from the family dairy, hen house, and stables. In one of the rooms stands an 11-year old girl reading aloud from her notebook of stories and making the other children laugh. Welcome to Jane’s early world.

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Tip One: Write, write, write

From the ages of 11 to 18 Austen poured her creativity into three beautiful volumes of irreverent, burlesque juvenilia.

The contents are wonderfully joyous and experimental, and they contain all the trappings of published books, from contents pages and page numbers to dedications. These objects so clearly showcase her deliberate practice, her 10,000 hours, and her dedication to honing her writing.

As with any skill, writing requires regular practice - frequently dipping in and out, sometimes to write longer pieces, other times to pen down a few sentences. Consistently showing up and keeping writing. (It brings to my mind Malcolm Gladwell’s fascinating book Outliers, where he shows how dedicated deliberate practice reaps powerful advantages, exemplified by Bill Gates’ success following hours and hours practicing computer programming at school.)

Yet ironically, although we know how vital practice is, Austen in later years didn’t particularly value it, advising her niece Caroline otherwise:

‘She said – how well I recollect it! ... that if I would take her advice, I should cease writing till I was 16, and that she had herself often wished she had read more, and written less, in the corresponding years of her own life.’

Luckily for us, she didn’t though. Instead she spent years writing, writing, writing - practicing her craft and sharpening her skills.

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Tip Two: Experiment with other writers’ styles

One of the delights of reading this collection is to witness Austen playing with other writers’ styles, parodying their tone, language and syntax.

A great example is her spoof History of England, from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st.

In 1771 Oliver Goldsmith published his seminal History of England, from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II, a text presumably available in the library of Rev. George Austen. In the preface Goldsmith confidently assures us how balanced his text is, being neither too obsequious to the monarchy, nor too vulgar and low through scandalous gossip. Because of this he believes ‘the reader will admit my impartiality.’

Yet Austen knew as well as any historian that being completely impartial is surely impossible, with biases creeping into any form of writing, so she took the form and hubris of the source text and playfully wrote her own version. Her title page tells us all we really need to know about it:

‘The History of England
from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st.
By a partial, prejudiced, & ignorant Historian …
N.B. There will be very few Dates in this History.’

And Goldsmith wasn’t the only author she mimicked. In the late 18th century, sentimental and gothic novels were particularly fashionable, with authors such as Ann Radcliffe popularising the fainting heroine.

To give you a flavour of the style, a few gems include:

• ‘… the Marquis de Montalt appeared. He approached the sofa where Adeline sat, and addressed her, but she heard not his voice—she had fainted.’ (Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest)

• ‘Adeline, no longer able to struggle with the tumult of emotions that now rushed upon her heart, uttered a deep sigh and fainted away.’ (Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest)

• ‘She alternately threw herself upon the sopha, and reclined upon the bosom of her confidential maid Patty. She now feared she should never support herself in the expected conversation.’ (West, A Gossip’s Story)

Anyone who has read Austen’s Juvenilia will have bells ringing right now, as she took the tropes and language of these authors to experiment with style, showcased by my personal favourite line ever to flow from Austen’s pen:

‘Never did I see such an affecting Scene as was the meeting of Edward & Augustus. “My Life! My Soul!” (exclaimed the former) ”My Adorable Angel!” (replied the latter) as they flew into each other’s arms. – It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself — We fainted Alternately on a Sofa.’ (Austen, Love and Freindship)

In these notebooks then we see her doing something really playful, freeing and creative, as she experiments with and mimics well-established genres and authors, exaggerating and imitating others’ styles in order to better find her own.

Tip the Third: Be genre-fluid

In addition to experimenting with authorial style, Austen also experimented with different genres, turning her hand to not only short stories, but also humorous standalone letters, poetry, epistolary tales, plays, song lyrics and, as we’ve already seen, non-fiction.

One of my favourites is an asinine script for an unfinished play called The Mystery. After formally introducing all of the ‘dramatis personae’, the play begins.

Act the First
Scene the 1^st
A Garden
Enter Corydon

Cory: But hush! I am interrupted.

(Exit Corydon)

(It’s no Shakespeare, but you can’t say it’s not funny.)

In yet another play, simply titled The First Act of a Comedy, Austen wrote song lyrics to be performed by a character called Chloe and a chorus of ploughboys:

I go to Town
And when I come down,
I shall be married to Stree-phon
And that to me will be fun.
Be fun, be fun, be fun,
And that to me will be fun.

I am going to have my dinner,
After which I shan’t be thinner,
I wish I had here Strephon
For he would carve the partridge if it should be a tough one.
Tough one, tough one, tough one,
For he would carve the partridge if it
Should be a tough one.

I can only imagine that the excessive number of syllables in the final line of verse two was part of the joke (try singing it to a steady rhythm and you’ll see what I mean…), as well as the forced rhyming of ‘be fun’ with the imaginatively pronounced ‘Stree-phon’.

In addition to writing in all these various genres, she even had a go at transposing between genres, as shown in her attempt to turn Samuel Richardson’s epic 7-volume novel Sir Charles Grandison into a play, condensing someone else’s content into a completely different genre.

All of these experiments were a vital part of Austen’s early writing experiences and literary development, and practicing writing in a wide variety of genres and forms will have certainly helped develop her skills.

Tip Four: Identify as a Writer

Our final tip from her early days is a mindset one, and one that Austen fully embodied.

For many of her early stories, she included dedications to family members and friends. This one below is addressed to her eight year old brother Charles, and rather than simply signing her name, she chose instead to sign herself, ‘The Author’ (note the capital A).

Although a small point, it’s a crucial one. This simple act demonstrates how she fully embodied the identity of a writer, demonstrating the belief that we are writers because we write. Self-authoring this identity helped her to manifest her writing career through the very act of writing, showing her confident belief that it was her regular writing practice that made her a writer, regardless of external validation.

Using Austen as a role model and inspiration for our writing practice is just one of the many ways we can utilise the past to inform our present. Stay tuned for the next article in the series, where we meet a mature Austen now taking on full-length novels…

While of course exaggerating to make a point, there could be some truth in what they say about a preference for emotions over reason. I mean, the obvious British example comes from the Brexit campaign when Michael Gove damningly stated, “people in this country have had enough of experts.” Or when Trump told The Washington Post back in 2018: “I have a gut and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” These views reflect a sense that expertise might be biased and flawed, that if you can’t rely on experts, you need to rely on your own internal judgements. And it is this opinion that rings a familiar bell for me as a historian.

Let me take you all the way back to the 1760s to meet that hugely popular Georgian influencer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

He famously, and radically, believed that an individual’s natural moral sentiments were a far better guide for living than the artificial and unfair ways of the modern civilised society. In his libertarian work, The Social Contract, he included a prayer for humanity that summed up his beliefs:

‘Almighty God! … Deliver us from the fatal arts and sciences of our forefathers; give us back ignorance, innocence, and poverty which alone can make us happy.’
Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)

In the same year he published an educational treatise titled Emile, in which he advised young people to ‘consult your own heart’, describing his own wisdom as stemming from ‘a certain amount of common-sense and a constant devotion to truth’ which had been enabled by learning from personal experience. He believed our innate humanity and compassion were much better guides to life than arbitrary manmade rules, advising us to:

He believed that we should let our feelings guide us through life, like an emotionally-geared Jiminy Cricket, helping us do what is morally right and acting as a source of true wisdom.

According to Rousseau, we should act on our feelings and initial impulses as they are inherently good. After all, ‘it is through these feelings alone that we have knowledge of fitness or unfitness of the relationship between ourselves and the things that we must seek out or avoid.’

In his lifetime Rousseau was a superstar, his radical views making him an instant hit. And his ground-breaking ideas had a phenomenal afterlife, inspiring the modern autobiography, child-centred education, Romanticism, and the French Revolution to name a few. Not bad for a guy with a damaged upbringing, a charismatic yet difficult personality, high sensitivity and paranoia, who left a trail of quarrels, feuds and abandoned children in his wake.

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But for now, let’s fast forward only a few years to 1771 when another trailblazing publication reaches the public - this time a novel.

A Man of Feeling was Scottish lawyer and author Henry Mackenzie’s debut novel and it offered exactly what its title promised. In it the reader is introduced to Harley, a man who feels intense emotions (surely the original empath?). His exquisite sensitivity to the sufferings of others show him to be truly virtuous and refined. This is a man fully in tune with all those moral, natural sentiments that Rousseau spoke of, and he’s not afraid to show them publicly.

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In one chapter we find him visiting Bedlam, the famous lunatic asylum in London that in the 18th century doubled as a sightseeing venue. Here, Harley observed a dejected yet dignified woman whose keeper tells him the story of how she lost her true love. The reader learns how ‘he had given it [her story] the tribute of some tears’, after which the lady begins singing with ‘a plaintive wildness’ which naturally leads Harley to weep once more. Next, he has a conversation with her, during which ‘she stretched out her hand to Harley; he pressed it between both of his, and bathed it with his tears.’ Eventually however he had to leave, and I suspect by now you can guess how it’s going to end…

‘He put a couple of guineas into the man’s hand: “Be kind to that unfortunate.”—He burst into tears, and left them.’

Although widely mocked by the 19th century (with one edition going so far as to provide an index to every occasion where Harley cried) this book was hugely influential. It celebrated the pure expression of feeling, placing emotion at the heart of our morality and creating a kind of natural state for people uncorrupted by the vices of the modern world. It went on to inspire sentimental novelists like Charlotte Smith, Gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe, and the culture of a generation, where being led by your personal feelings was celebrated.

So then it seems that individual emotional authenticity as a driver in decision-making and as a moral compass is nothing new. In the 18th century it developed in part as a reaction to the cold and objective ‘Age of Reason’ that preceded it. Perhaps we too are experiencing a counter-reaction to data-driven institutions and cold, evidence-based decision-making, although I suspect there are a multitude of complex reasons why many people choose to trust their gut over empirical data.

But if indeed there is a cultural trend towards ‘the privileging of emotion over reason’, let’s take a cue from our Georgian ancestors and reunite emotional decision-making with the compassion, sympathy and empathy for others that it was originally coupled with.

On that note, let’s leave Rousseau with the final words.

As soon as I could get away in September, I disappeared off to Lyme Regis on a research trip. Naturally, I wandered over the sands and made my way to the Cobb, the harbour made famous in Jane Austen’s novel, Persuasion.

While pottering about beneath its uneven walls, I couldn’t help smiling when I saw a smart, middle-aged man climbing halfway up the crooked steps to pose as if falling while his wife took a photo. And I wondered to myself how many people have done exactly this? How many tourists have attempted to recreate and embody Austen’s most dramatic scene?

We are told that even the poet Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) succumbed to the drama of this scene. When he arrived in Lyme, his friends were keen to show him the spot where the Duke of Monmouth had landed, but instead:

‘He exclaimed with an indignation equally creditable to his own genius and to hers, “Don’t talk to me of the Duke of Monmouth. Show me that precise spot where Louise Musgrave fell.”’1

The attraction of visiting places associated with Austen was similarly felt by the writer and Janeite, Constance Hill (c1844-1929), who published one of the first Austen travelogues entitled Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends in 1902. Throughout the book she describes her travels around England searching out places associated with the famous writer, places she called ‘Austen-land’.

Clearly then, Austen fans have been flocking to these locations for well over 100 years, which makes me wonder, why is it that so many of us enjoy visiting the haunts of beloved authors? What does walking in their footsteps give us?

Lost in Austen?

I’m someone who also enjoys a visit to Bath, Chawton, and, as we’ve seen, Lyme Regis, and so when I started looking into Austen tourism, I was surprised to read comments like ‘the prime mover in Austenian tourism is often a nostalgic, Anglophilic notion of “heritage” … a kind of time-travel to the past, … [seeking] an all but vanished Englishness or set of “traditional” values.’2

This just didn’t ring true with my experience at all. I’m certainly not nostalgic for the past (I value antibiotics, modern dentistry, and gender equality for starters). So I decided to ask around 100 other Austen fans across the globe what they thought.

And it looked like my gut feeling was right. Only 7% of respondents said that escapism was an important outcome of visiting an Austen site, and just 3% listed a sense of Englishness. Instead the vast majority of fans enjoyed a sense of connection with Austen and her world, such as this British tourist:

‘Being at Austen sites and events feels like stepping into the living texture of her world. It brings a sense of closeness to her life and imagination that no amount of reading can fully replicate. Walking through the spaces she inhabited or set her stories in deepens my emotional and intellectual connection to her work — it’s grounding, moving, and often quietly exhilarating.’

For many tourists, visiting Austen sites is a way to feel closer to the elusive author herself, using these shared spaces to better understand the experiences and thinking of a person they admire. Several respondents spoke of a deeply personal parasocial relationship with Austen, similar to the common practice many of us feel when we admire an icon such as a musician, film star or other famous personality. And this relationship was generative and constructive, with many respondents speaking of her as a positive role model, such as this Canadian fan:

‘In some ways she feels like an older sister…who is so clever…I learn from that. She feels like a sisterly guide.’

As we walk in her footsteps, we also gain knowledge about the world she inhabited, as another respondent articulated:

‘As an Austen fan and researcher, I find that being physically present in these environments deepens my understanding of the social, cultural, and geographical textures that shaped her writing.’

I couldn’t agree more. There’s something profound that you experience and learn through doing, through being, when you visit an Austen site. Something more deeply moving than learning through reading or listening. Something unspoken thrills through us, a thread from hundreds of years ago reaching out to connect with us today, here. We feel it in our bodies and in our minds, and it reminds me of the experience of writing somehow, in that literary tourism is fundamentally an introspective and transformative experience.

It tells us something about ourselves, it deepens our understanding of who we are and it shapes and reaffirms what we believe in. And I think it’s best if I leave the final words to one Austen fan:

I’ve even got some beautiful sepia photographs of my Nan in the 1920s doing exactly the same thing, travelling to the coast and paddling in the sea. And this makes me wonder, how long has this type of holiday been popular? Clearly for a good while, but were we flocking to British beaches 200 years ago? 300? (And while we’re at it, how old is Punch and Judy? I think of it as Victorian but did it really start there?)

I knew that Regency folk loved a trip to the seaside - if nothing else Jane Austen tells us in Persuasion that ‘the young people were all wild to see Lyme’, that Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice strongly believes ‘a little sea-bathing would set me up for ever,’ and lastly, through the enthusiastic Mr Parker in Sanditon that:

There we have it. Seaside holidays were very much a thing 200 years ago.

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The Regency seaside

Regency seaside holidays were indeed very much de rigour for genteel Brits. Like spa towns, the fashion for seaside visits had been initially driven by attempts to improve health, with both drinking and bathing in sea water being recommended by contemporary physicians. After all, as a Dr Crane of Weymouth said in 1795:

‘The salutary Effects of Sea-Bathing, as well as the great Efficacy of Sea-Water, as an internal Remedy in many Cases, are such, that the Use of them, under due Restrictions, cannot be too strongly recommended.’

Sea water was said to cure everything from asthma, constipation, scrofula, gout, leprosy, headaches, hysteria and even hypochondria. The list goes on. (Was there anything sea-water couldn’t fix?) Dr Crane even tells us the very ‘Sea-Air itself conduces greatly to Health and Longevity’ because (and here comes the science part) ‘Sea-Air is warmer, purer, and more elastic than common Air.’ Well, I believe him.

And certainly many people did, because even the very highest levels of society made seaside excursions in this period. On 7th July 1789 none other than King George III stripped off and plunged into the sea at Weymouth in order to improve his health. Eyewitness Frances Burney wrote of the enthusiasm of the locals who were all rather excited by this royal patronage:

Like his father, the Prince of Wales also took a shine to a coastal town. He loved the quaint old fishing town of Brighthelmstone but we know it of course as Brighton. The Prince initially went because his physician had advised a little sea-dipping for his health, but he clearly loved it so much that he went on to help develop the town, building his delightful and extravagant home-from-home, the Royal Pavilion.

Naturally, where royalty goes, everyone follows and sea-bathing caught on, aiding the transformation of Britain’s coastline from small fishing villages to smart tourist hotspots. But if this was your first visit, how did you go about it? How could you keep your modesty? And what was the most effective way to bathe to benefit your health?

Directions for Sea-Bathing

Naturally there was a ‘proper’ way of sea-bathing for those genteel holidaymakers - a method that was both decorous and safe to one’s health. And luckily for us, Dr Crane has literally written the guidebook for us.

But if you don’t have time to read a whole guidebook on the topic, let me summarise what you need to know to bathe like a Regency holidaymaker.

The main thing to remember is that you needed to respect your modesty, and you could do this by hiring a bathing machine and Dipper.

You then stepped into your machine, in which women would get changed into a linen or flannel bathing gown whereas men would simply strip off. Then a man on a horse would pull the machine into the water, leaving you to open a little door and step down where a strong woman, known as a Dipper, would essentially make sure you didn’t drown, holding onto your arms to keep you afloat.

When your session was over, you returned to the machine where there were towels for you to use and you could get dressed. Meanwhile the horseman would attach the horse to the beachside end of the machine and pull you back onto the land. Men and women were to bathe either at different times or at a distance from each other.

It all sounds rather civilised (and rather like a very convenient beach hut on wheels), and as you can imagine it was an experience that working folk were unlikely to participate in. This was for families who could afford to holiday only. But when did they do their bathing?

When we go on a beach holiday we usually go for a swim in the middle of the day to cool off from the summer sun. But in this period it was seen as very dangerous to cool down too quickly so they recommended that people bathe first thing in the morning and during the colder months of autumn and winter. Our friend Frances Burney noted that when visiting Brighton in November 1782:

It’s interesting to think how similar this all sounds to the current trend for cold water swimming and wild swimming, and how cyclical our habits can be over time.

So now all I wanted to know was: Did the British seaside holiday go back any further?

The Georgian seaside

Once you rewind to the mid-18th century it seems to be a very different picture.

Because there were few tourists, there was no real tourism infrastructure in seaside resorts. At this time they were still generally working fishing towns, with little in the way of amusement for holidaymakers. Unlike Georgian spa towns which were booming mid-century, coastal resorts had no Assembly Rooms, no libraries, no theatres, no coffee houses, no card rooms, and definitely no Punch and Judy. Inns were likely to be offering few rooms and those could be of varying quality, and roads down to the seaside could be very poor. To get to Lyme Regis for example you had to go by horse or on foot, as its steep, rough lanes couldn’t take wheeled vehicles until a road was improved in 1759.

The coast was seen as a dangerous place, where smuggling, piracy and invasion could occur, and the sea was not a place for pleasure activities, but somewhere utilised by industry and the navy. These were towns and villages geared towards fishing, shipbuilding and coastal trade. They were very much the poor man’s spa.

So then it seems the British seaside holiday is a relative newcomer to our lives, with its beginnings taking place during the lifetime of Jane Austen, an author who loved the sea and wrote fondly about the seaside in her novels, which all seems rather apt.

That just leaves me with one unanswered question relating to our holiday at a Dorset beach this summer: What about Punch and Judy shows?

That’s the way to do it

Well it turns out the puppet Punch first came to our shores from Italy in the 17th century. The very first recorded mention comes from the diarist Samuel Pepys who on the evening of Friday 9th May 1662 went to Covent Garden for some entertainment, writing:

‘Thence to see a Italian puppet play that is within the rayles there, which is very pretty, the best that ever I saw, and great resort of gallants.’

These puppet plays were phenomenally popular (we have to remember this was before TV) and the popular leading character was of course Punch (at the time known as Pollicinella or Polichinello). From the beginning he had the familiar squeaky voice, beak-like nose, and irreverent boisterous personality.

By the late 18th century the puppets had moved from theatres into small portable booths run by itinerant performers. They travelled around performing at fairgrounds and street corners, and by the mid-19th century became a staple at British seaside resorts. So then although Punch has been entertaining British audiences for over 300 years, he’s been an integral part of our seaside holidays for just over 100 years.

As staycations, beach day trips and UK holidays remain popular, it seems those early adopters in the late 18th century had been on to something, developing fishing towns and ports and paving the way for centuries of seaside visiting.

Perhaps next time you visit the British seaside for a ‘dip’, you’ll think back to all those people who holidayed there before. And feel thankful that you had swimming lessons as a kid so that you don’t need to be ceremoniously dunked into the water by professional Dippers.

The book describes itself as ‘The uplifting true tale of the couple who lost everything and embarked on a journey of salvation across the windswept South West coastline.’ And it’s this veracity that has made the memoir so popular - a reader buys the book to hear about a real person’s real story. If they wanted a fictional tale, they would have bought a novel. Of course readers know that memoirists tell their own truth - there is, after all, no such thing as objective truth when people recall their pasts.

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But it’s the description of the volume as a ‘true tale’ that catches my interest. Because this is a sales pitch that’s as old as the hills, and it’s a phrase I’ve read again and again in stories from the long 18th century - in stories that appear to be accurate accounts, and in stories that are anything but.

The craze for ‘true’ novels

When novels were truly novel and new, early readers were skeptical about them. What was the point of reading made-up stories? And so to counter this, writers frequently wrote forewords that argued their fictional tales were in fact based on true stories, and many readers fell for it.

One the earliest novels was Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719. Now we all know this is a classic work of fiction, and yet the author chose to publish it as being written by Crusoe himself and the editor wrote in the preface:

‘The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is their [sic] any Appearance of Fiction in it.’

Similarly, the extraordinarily popular novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded written by Samuel Richardson in 1740 also purported to be true to the extent that readers would write in to the editor asking for the identity of the heroine. This happened to such an extent that in the preface to the sixth edition they shared that:

‘The Editor has been much press’d with Importunities and Conjectures in relation to the Person and Family of the incomparable Lady, who is the Subject of these Volumes: All that he thinks himself at Liberty to say … is only to repeat what has been already hinted, That the Story has its Foundation in Truth.’

And this trend for advertising novels as biography continued throughout the century, blurring fiction into memoir.

Founded on the most solid truths…

Which posed a problem for memoirists and autobiographers. How could they prove to potential readers their tales were true?

Let’s go back to the 17th century to 1656 to meet a 33-year-old Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. She was living in exile in Antwerp and had just published A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life. This was an autobiographical piece aimed at boosting and controlling her self-image, providing a space where she could share her impressive lineage and highlight her feminine respectability. Early on she says how she was ‘bred virtuously, modestly, civilly, honourably, and on honest principles’, reassuring her readers that the text they are enjoying is accurate.

But most importantly of all, she concludes her piece by saying:

‘I verily believe some censuring readers will scornfully say, "Why hath this lady writ her own life? …" I answer that it is true, that 'tis to no purpose to the readers, but it is to the authoress, because I writ it for my own sake, not theirs; neither did I intend this piece for to delight, but to divulge; not to please the fancy, but to tell the truth.’

This brazen honesty to tell the truth for herself and not her readers is, she tells us, ‘lest after-ages should mistake, in not knowing I was … second wife to the Lord Marquis of Newcastle; for my lord having had two wives, I might easily have been mistaken, especially if I should die, and my lord marry again.’ This was a woman who wanted to be remembered by us. She wanted to share her story, her version of the truth, and her name with posterity, unashamedly and unapologetically.

Fast-forward to 1786 and we find a very different kind of memoirist. Jane Elizabeth Moore was a working woman who’d fallen on difficult times and to make ends meet had published a three volume book with the title Genuine Memoirs of Jane Elizabeth Moore.

It’s interesting she felt the need to make authenticity explicit in the very title of her publication, something she went on to stress in her preface: ‘I wish to aver that no particulars whatever contained in those volumes, have been gathered from any other information than such as met my own observation on which account I thought it quite necessary to make this remark and solemn declaration on the matter.’ She goes on to say that:

Truth and accuracy then were vitally important to Moore as she sought strong sales to boost her flagging income, in the same way they were to Cavendish to manage her personal brand.

And there were plenty of other women who sought to manage their public reputations through memoir. I’ve already written about the how the famous actress Frances Kemble wrote her own memoir, but other actresses weren’t so lucky. Poor Mrs Billington had a “memoir” written about her acting career and life without her knowledge in 1792 which turned out to be a lurid and libelous pack of lies.

The book’s full title was Memoirs of Mrs. Billington: From Her Birth: Containing a Variety of Matters, Ludicrous, Theatrical, Musical, and With Copies of Several Original Letters and claimed to be a truthful account of her life written by herself.

The ‘advertisement’ introduction talked of the efforts the editor made to ensure the publication was correct, stating how ‘having avowed their authenticity, he finds it incumbent upon him to give the Memoirs’ to the public. And yet the few original letters the editor has gleaned are printed out of chronological order and out of context, alongside rancid double entendres, making the whole piece defamatory and untruthful.

So it seems that two hundred years ago readers would have been hard pressed to know whether a ‘true story’ was in fact true at all. An 18th century memoir could have been a fictional novel, a defamatory dig at a famous celebrity, or just possibly, actually a memoir. Indeed even the word ‘memoir’ in Dr Johnson’s dictionary is listed as follows:

Honesty and accuracy seem to be entirely absent from this definition - memoir was simply a recalling of events and experiences, and as to whose events or whether they should be real events, well, that was out for debate.

It seems then that this genre has always been plagued by a kind of grey area around authenticity and truthfulness. And certainly readers’ frustrations around the veracity of a memoir such as The Salt Path would have been very familiar to those reading memoirs several hundred years ago. I guess though the difference is that this example is unusual, newsworthy, surprising. Luckily readers today however can feel slightly more confident than their ancestors in what to expect from a memoir that they pick up from their local bookshop. Mostly.

Women started competing at Wimbledon in 1884 (seven years after the competition began) and I wondered how long women have been playing tennis anyway? And looking at the outfits they wore, did the Georgian and Regency women have it any easier?

Certainly Brits have been playing tennis for a very long time - there’s references to the game in Shakespeare, such as this use of the sport as a metaphor in Henry V:

French Ambassador: He therefore sends you, meeter for your spirit, this Tun of Treasure…

King Henry: What treasure, Uncle?

Exeter: Tennis balles, my liege.

Real or long?

By the 18th century it appears that there was a fair bit of hierarchy and elitism taking place with tennis. On the one hand you had real tennis (this is the sport Shakespeare was referring to above). This game was played indoors in specially-built tennis courts, and was the preserve of the wealthiest part of society who could afford such a luxury. It is even referred to as ‘the sport of kings’ for this very reason.

In the delightful Sporting Magazine for 1793, the author demonstrates this exclusivity when they describe the Duke of Richmond’s estate in Goodwood, Sussex:

‘Early in life, the Duke built what is not common - a tennis-court; and what is more uncommon still, a dog kennel, which has cost him above 10,000l.’

(Expensive dog kennel! But both activities, tennis and hunting, would have set him out clearly as a high status individual.) The Duke was certainly in fairly select company as real tennis seems to have experienced a bit of a lull during the 18th century. Indeed, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England by Joseph Strutt, published in 1801, tells us that: ‘The Hanoverian dynasty were not specially addicted to tennis.’

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However on the other hand you had field or long tennis. This was played outdoors and hence had a broader spectrum of society playing it. Our journalist at the Sporting Magazine in 1793 again illustrates this when he makes a throwaway remark in the section on cricket:

‘Field-tennis threatens, e'er long, to bowl out cricket; the former game is now patronized by Sir Peter Burrell.’

A rich description of Georgian field tennis has been left to us by the shockingly profligate lawyer and memoirist William Hickey (1749-1830). He writes of the summer of 1767 when he was a hedonistic 18-year-old and leading a life he described as one of ‘idleness and dissipation’ so vividly that it’s worth quoting more fully:

So here we see a boy’s club of sport, drinking, eating and womanising, but what of the ladies?

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Ladies with racquets

I’ve found it very hard to find many references to women playing tennis. Certainly there was a professional French female player called Madame Bunell who came over to England to play one of our best players, Mr Tomkyns, in 1768 - an event that naturally sparked bets on which side would win. The St James’s Chronicle noted the event:

On Tuesday last another grand Match at Tennis was played at his Majesty's Tennis Court, Whitehall, between Madam Bunell and Mr. Tomkyns, for a considerable Sum; there were six Games played, four of which were won by Madam Bunell.

Similarly another famous French tennis player, Madame Masson, visited Britain in the 1790s, and the Caledonian Mercury apparently reported that:

Madame Masson, the celebrated tennis-player, lately arrived from Paris, has had an audience with his Royal Highness the Duke of York. This Gallic heroine of the racquet, it seems challenges to play with any person in Europe for one thousand guineas. The Royal Duke is to have the honour of first entering the lists with her.

She plays in her female attire, a la Grecque, with a short petticoat and drawers.

Being a woman, the paper felt compelled to describe her outfit to let their readers know how it was possible for a lady to play such a sport.

Now at the end of my search, I’m after images of female tennis players in this period. Yet that has proved fruitless for me today, with one exception. A young French girl peering across time at us, holding a tennis racquet.

I’m sad I couldn’t see any Georgian women playing tennis, but I guess there’s a reason I can’t. They remain hidden from me today, as it seems that few women played tennis in this period. They’d have to wait a while before it was acceptable.

Yet I’m certainly glad I found this little girl. Peeping out from behind her mother and offering a promise of what was to come. And I’ll keep her in mind as I watch the Ladies’ tennis at Wimbledon this year. What a long way we’ve come.

Of course we’ve all heard the story: In 1762 the 4th Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, was playing cards with his friends late at night, felt a bit peckish, and voila! - he invented the sandwich. But where did this story come from and is it even true?

If we go back in time, the British have been eating bread with butter, cheese, and meat for centuries, either eating them side by side like tapas or as an open sandwich. But when did we start to put two and two together and enclose our fillings between the bread?

Looking back through Georgian sources, I can see that sandwiches were very much commonplace by the end of the century. In November of 1798, Bath’s Lower Assembly Rooms advertised that ‘as last year, the opening of room for sandwiches after the Ball will continue.’ Clearly this handy snack was being served after a night’s dancing as a form of polite supper.

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In the same decade, a political dictionary was printed by Joseph Pearson, a man who was ‘many years principal door-keeper’ in the House of Commons. In it, rather surprisingly, there is a definition for ‘sandwiches’, tucked away between entries for RUBBING-OUT and SECRET-SERVICE MONEY. Pearson clearly didn’t think much of the sandwiches available for purchase in the house as he described them as:

‘Two small slices of bread and butter, almost transparent, with a thin piece of stale ham, or beef, between them, and used to keep the people in the gallery from famishing, from Eleven o’clock, till six the next morning.’

Although satirical, it is clear that sandwiches were common snacks for spectators and journalists at the end of the century, just as we enjoy them now.

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But before the 1790s there seems to be a dearth of records which mention this delightful food. It certainly isn’t mentioned in the editions of Dr Johnson’s dictionary that were published in 1768 and 1777, nor John Ash’s dictionary of 1775.

In fact, the only earlier reference I can find is the core text for the story we know and love about the Earl of Sandwich. It is a fabulous travel narrative written by the French man of letters, Pierre-Jean Grosley.

Grosley visited London in 1765 and captured wry observations about the social experiences and scenes he witnessed there. An English translation of his travel writing was published in 1772 titled A Tour to London, and includes this significant moment in British history:

So there we have it. The only evidence of the invention of a classic British food, born out of what can only be called aristocratic gambling addition.

And so it seems only fitting to end this journey back where we began, with the Earl of Sandwich himself. It’s rather ironic that, in spite of a successful career as First Lord of the Admiralty, Secretary of State for the Northern Department, Postmaster General, and active supporter of James Cook’s voyages, he is most remembered for inventing the sandwich while on an all-night gaming binge. His name has even become a verb. I do rather wonder what he’d think about his legacy 300 years on…

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And that’s when a throw-away comment from a friend opened my eyes. She mentioned that the baseline most of us use - our own lifetimes - is simply too short to really see the whole picture. We need to step back and widen the focus to show the whole timeline from the Industrial Revolution to now to avoid being, as ecologist Isabella Tree says, ‘blinded by the immediacy of the present.’

Jane Austen was born in 1775, right back at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution - that mammoth tidal wave of technological change that spread from the UK across the world. Surely then comparing the environment and natural world from her life to mine might give me a clearer picture and help me to avoid the Shifting Baseline Syndrome that I’ve been prone to for so long?

And so I dived in.

And it turned out that when Austen stepped outdoors she would have seen and heard a much more colourful, noisy world.

One difference she’d have seen was in how the land was being used. For example she’d have regularly walked past beautifully rich hay meadows brimming with wildflowers and insects (over 97% of wildflower meadows have been lost since the 1930s1). Hay meadows were a vital part of the farming landscape. These grasslands were left wild until summer when the community cut and stored the hay to use as animal feed during the winter months.

The sheer number of native wildflowers and plants Austen would have seen, in these hay meadows and also throughout the landscape, would have been significantly larger than the numbers we see today (half of our native plants have declined over the last 20 years2). Unbelievably, there are now more non-native species than native growing in Britain.3

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Another obvious change, that many of us will be aware of of, is the enormous decline in elm trees. This lofty tree used to dominate the landscape but sadly since the 1960s it has been decimated by Dutch elm disease and is now a rare sight, although there are currently breeding programmes of new disease-resistant hybrid varieties.

Furthermore, the number of birds was dramatically higher when Austen walked through fields and down lanes. Unlike me, she’d have frequently heard the soft call of cuckoos, the evening song of nightingales, and the lively trill of wood warblers (cuckoo numbers have dropped by 65% since the early 1980s; nightingale numbers plummeted 90% between 1967 and 2022; wood warbler numbers have fallen 81% in the last 30 years; and almost half of all UK bird species are in decline4). In the skies above her, she’d have seen multitudes of swifts (swifts have decreased by two-thirds since 19955), scores of lapwings, and flights of graceful swallows.

Austen contemporary and ‘parson-naturalist’ Gilbert White of Selborne in Hampshire (close to Chawton where Austen lived) wrote in his diary in July 1786:

I love this description - he saw so many swifts flying together that the best collective noun he could ideate was ‘cloud’. (Incidentally in the same entry White goes on to say that ‘on this day Thomas got up all my hay in good order, & finished my rick’ so even curates could have their own hay meadows.)

Flying insects would have likewise been significantly more abundant in Austen’s time, with many more bright butterflies and dusky moths than we see today (half of British butterflies are on the extinction Red List,6 and flying insects have decreased by 60% over the last 20 years7).

British mammals that Austen would have seen many more of include bats, red squirrels, water voles, and hedgehogs (many species of British bats, as well as water voles and hedgehogs are now on the ‘near threatened’ or ‘near extinction’ Red Lists8 and native red squirrels have long since been pushed out of most of England by North American grey squirrels that were introduced in the 1800s).

In fact it turns out that the UK has lost around half of its biodiversity since the Industrial Revolution, and damningly we’re in the bottom 10% of all countries globally, which I suppose sadly makes sense considering it all started here.9

And lastly, a warming climate means that spring in England starts around a month earlier than Austen would have been used to,10 and in autumn she would have seen the trees lose their leaves earlier than they do today.

So all things considered, the English countryside around me seems sadly different since Austen’s birth.

But there is good news. There are lots of successful projects bringing back threatened species and increasing local biodiversity.

In Selborne, Gilbert White had recorded in 1787 how the swifts used to nest in the eaves of the ancient church, but by the early 2000s they were long gone. However the charity Hampshire Swifts has worked in partnership with the church to install nesting boxes and has successfully encouraged the swifts back.

And this is just one of many similar projects. And as individuals we can all help too - from planting native flowers in our gardens to doing No Mow May, or from leaving weeds, long grass, and twig and leaf piles, to putting out a dish of water for thirsty hedgehogs on hot days. There are also loads of great books full of rewilding ideas available to give us inspiration and ideas.

Yes, Austen’s countryside was much more biodiverse, but learning what she’d have seen and heard that I don’t, has galvanised me to take positive action, and make changes in my garden and in my community to increase those missing and threatened species and encourage nature to come back.

In the 18th century novels were exactly that, novel. They were a new invention and women turned out to be a core audience, being major consumers of this new craze. They purchased books, shared books, and borrowed books avidly from the new circulating libraries. They wrote about them in their letters and talked about them with friends, reading passages aloud to each other. And they read, and read prolifically for hours. And parents, particularly mothers, quickly found that supporting their daughters to read the “right” books was an important part of their parental responsibilities.

The delightfully instructive Adelaide and Theodore, or, Letters on Education by Madame de Genlis (pub. 1783, London) is very clear on the matter, warning of the dangers of allowing girls to read solely for pleasure. I can’t help visualising Disney movies and princess picture books as I read this text:

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“I neither give my children Fairy Tales to read, the Arabian Nights, nor even Madame d’Aunoy’s Fables…there is scarcely one of them which has a moral tendency: love is the subject of them all. You find a Princess persecuted on account of her beauty; a Prince, handsome as the day, dying of love for her, and a wicked ugly rival, consumed with envy and jealousy!.. children cannot improve by them; and, struck only with the wonderful, they will remember nothing but the enchanted gardens and diamond palaces: all these ridiculous ideas give them only false notions, stop the course of their reasoning, and inspire them with a dislike for instructive reading.”

Moral, instructive, and real stories are what Genlis advised girls to read, and often mothers read such texts aloud regularly to their daughters, also including classics such as Shakespeare, Spenser and Hume, asking the girls questions about what they had heard to ensure the lessons were being taken on board. Even at boarding schools, the same practice was adopted, and the wonderful Frances Kemble records in her memoirs: “The monastic rule of loud-reading during meals was observed, and l'Abbé Millot's Universal History, of blessed boring memory, was the dry daily sauce to our diet.”

(Funnily enough, she too was subjected to Genlis’ Adelaide and Theodore, of which she damningly said its “false morality and attitudinizing sentiment” was “rubbish, if not poison” - clearly girls were not always keen with the choice of literature their elders prescribed for them.)

However often teenaged girls would try anything to get their hands on more exciting, racy reading. Frances recollected how at boarding school she secretly hid away a copy of Byron’s poetry (which she called a “dangerous prize”), and young women across the country flocked to circulating libraries to get the latest novels as soon as they were old enough to choose their own books.

This colourful satirical print shows clearly the types of problematic literature that folks felt women were reading, as the shelves for novels, romances and tales are almost empty, while the sermons and history shelves are full. And it was this enormous popularity of the frivolous, low-brow, humble novel that sparked grave concern in society at large. And of particular concern was the craze for sentimental and Gothic fiction.

These romantic, overdramatic and unrealistic stories were seen as polluting women’s common sense and reason, draining their time and taking them away from healthy, productive pursuits, and even encouraging them to behave immorally. The novels’ fantastic tales took women away from the present, enabling them to escape to a place where there was a different moral code and where they were the mistresses of their own imaginative worlds.

Gothic novels, like Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho quoted above (pub. 1794) was just one of a flood of such stories which were voraciously read and shared. One teenager, Harriet Wynne, noted in her diary that she got hold of a copy from a friend - “I read in the evening the ‘Mysteries of Udolpho’ which Lucy sent me” - showing how novel reading was supported by, and strengthened, female networks.

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And it was this speed and generality of consumption, this perceived ‘reading mania’, that caused widespread cultural anxiety about the short- and long-term impact of the new trend. Because, as one periodical writer put it: “Women of every age, of every condition, contract and retain a taste for novels... [and] the depravity is universal”.1 He goes on to explain just why it is so dangerous for society at large if women continue to waste their time reading novels.

It is very clear: a woman reading is a woman not doing her domestic responsibilities. A woman reading is not a good mother. A woman reading is not a good wife.

As pushback, female authors started including this hyped-up anxiety into their own stories, weaving in a kind of meta parody which helped to both mock those fears while also demonstrating that their books were very much not that sort of novel. The heroine in Charlotte Lennox’s witty novel The Female Quixote (pub. 1752) gets into all sorts of scrapes because of her early reading habits:

“From her earliest youth she had discovered a fondness for reading… [her father] permitted her therefore the use of his library, in which, unfortunately for her, were great store of romances… and, supposing romances were real pictures of life, from them she drew all her notions and expectations.”

Just like Jane Austen’s tongue-in-cheek critique of her heroine’s sense of reality being damaged through her excessive reading of Gothic novels in Northanger Abbey, here Lennox jokingly portrays a young woman out of touch because of her love of romances - a character and plot so ridiculous she is poking fun of anyone who thought this kind of thing might actually happen in real life.

Happily this fear gradually abated as it turned out (spoiler!) that women could still be sensible and rational, and could still be good wives and mothers, while also being novel readers. Who knew?

It’s fascinating to think that a new popular craze created such concern about moral decline, a concern which has not only gone, but is now reversed, with reading being actively promoted. It puts me in mind of the former fears about gaming addiction which the WHO described as “moral panic” back in 2018.2 And it makes me wonder what our descendants will think about gaming and screen use in 200 years time.

“Though I came only yesterday, I have equipped myself properly for Bath already, you see,” (pointing to a new umbrella); “I wish you would make use of it, if you are determined to walk”.

This simple act of offering his umbrella to her marks out his genuine affection and hints to the reader that all will end well for this couple. And it got me to thinking: when did people started using umbrellas? I’ve certainly not really heard about them at the beginning of the eighteenth century, so when were they first adopted, and by whom?

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I trawled through old books and magazines, finding gems like the 1855 tome Umbrellas and their History by William Sangster and the intriguingly-named 1809 guide Hints to the Bearers of Walking-Sticks and Umbrellas by J. S. Duncan. But the earliest reference I stumbled across was from 1709 in the magazine The Female Tatler, in which the author discusses a man who borrowed the umbrella of a Coffee House:

The author is clearly suggesting that the Custom-house man was behaving in a very unmanly way by using an umbrella, so much so that they suggest he wear women’s pattens next time it rains to keep his feet dry too. Pattens were iron and wooden clogs (shown in the illustration below) that were worn only by women to protect their shoes and stockings from getting wet, so clearly the author strongly believes that, in 1709 at least, Real Men don’t use umbrellas!

And this certainly seems to be the case. From looking in a dictionary of 1720 by Edward Phillips the definition for umbrella is described as:

A kind of broad Fan or Skreen, which in hot Countries People hold over their Heads to keep off the Heat of the Sun; or such as are here commonly us'd by Women to shelter them from Rain.

So what were men doing them to keep themselves dry if it was socially unacceptable for them to use brollys? It seems that for most of the 18th century men made do with great overcoats, sometimes known as surtouts, which featured broad collars, to help keep them dry.

John Gay in his 1716 poem Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London highlighted this gendered difference when it came to the rain.

For women he wrote:

Good Huswives all the Winter’s Rage despise,
Defended by the Riding-hood’s Disguise;
Or underneath th’ Umbrella’s oily Shed,
Safe thro’ the Wet on clinking Pattens tread…

As for men, he stated:

And when the bursting Clouds a Deluge pour,
Let thy Surtout defend the drenching Show’r…
Be thine of Kersey firm, though small the Cost,
Then brave unwet the Rain, unchill’d the Frost.

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However by the 1750s, the tide was about to change, because elsewhere in the world umbrellas were much more acceptable and the fashion was coming our way. The famous army officer James Wolfe (1727-1759) was out in Paris in December 1752 when he wrote home to his father about some of the French customs he was seeing.

And according to tradition, this was written just four years before Jonas Hanway (1712-1786) stepped out onto the London streets boldly and unashamedly carrying…an umbrella. Jonas’s life was one of adventure and travel and, like Wolfe, he had seen umbrellas much used in other countries and defiantly wanted to use one in back in England. According to his friend and biographer John Pugh, “he was the first man who ventured to walk the streets of London with an umbrella over his head: After carrying one near thirty years, he saw them come into general use.”

That slow 30-year journey to social acceptance covered the decades from the 1750s to the 1780s, so that by the time Jane Austen was writing, her heroes could comfortably carry umbrellas without risking their masculinity in any way. However that three-decade-long interregnum as umbrellas slowly caught on didn’t always go smoothly for the early adopters. The Bath Chronicle in 1773 damningly noted that “in these days to see Englishmen import every Foreign effeminate custom is a proof we are dwindling into soup meagre itself”. And a John MacDonald who had brought back an umbrella with him from Spain to London described how in the late 1770s:

Those brave men of the 1770s! For men carrying an umbrella back then, they risked appearing effeminate, unmanly, unpatriotic, and, apparently worst of all, French.

However, luckily for us, they continued until eventually by the end of the 18th century, the use of umbrellas by both men and women was socially acceptable. By the mid-19th century, new technologies made umbrellas lighter, easier to use, and cheaper, making them ubiquitous.

Because after all that, and just like Jane Austen told us, real men do carry umbrellas.

England’s worst urban riots?

Throughout the long eighteenth century there were hundreds of violent and destructive riots, with the Gordon Riots in June 1780 being “the most destructive urban riots in English history”.1 The trigger was Lord Gordon inciting a large crowd of around 50,000 Protestants on 2 June to petition the government to repeal the Catholic Relief Act. The act sought to reduce discrimination to Catholics and support religious tolerance, however it was highly controversial and not generally popular at the time. As it turned out, on the day the crowd became unruly and the riots escalated and spilled over into the ensuing week. People took to the streets across London as well as in Bath, Norwich and Bristol, burning down Catholic churches, and attacking the houses and even the carriages of Catholics and perceived Catholic sympathisers, causing panic and destruction. The author Frances Burney was staying in Bath at the time, describing how she felt in her letters: “O what dreadful Times!”. The riots and the brutal retaliation from the military resulted in up to 700 deaths.

And yet the Gordon Riots were by no means a rare occurrence during the long eighteenth century. Of the hundreds of Georgian and Regency riots we also find the Gin Riots in 1736, the Wilkes Riots and the Spitalfield Riots of the 1760s, the Luddite Riots of the 1810s and the Swing Riots of 1830-31, among many others.

Why did these riots happen?

Although they were all distinct, with unique triggers and causes, there does seem to be a commonality among them. We see time and again that an underlying contributing factor was economic distress. Then, as now, in times of high food prices, low wages, and increased living costs people are more likely to take to the streets and protest. Throughout the eighteenth century wars, poor harvests, economic recession and instability, high taxation and tithes, and disruptions to trade imports due to naval warfare and blockades, all contributed to creating economic hardship for many people. Inequitable wealth distribution meant the rich got richer while the poor got poorer, with new factories visually highlighting this discrepancy.

Similarly the threat from new technology taking traditional jobs is front and centre in this period. During the early nineteenth century both the Luddites in the north and the Swing Rioters in the south destroyed new machinery that threatened their jobs, from wide weaving frames and steam-powered looms, to threshing machines.

The rapid technological, social and economic changes of the era also played a part, with both the ongoing Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions exacerbating disruption and threatening traditional practices. Social changes also brought fresh new workforces into the economy, particularly Irish weavers and farm labourers, and throughout we can see the ‘other’ being scapegoated for contributing to the issues of the day, from Catholics to Irish migrants.

Similarly, at the time many people felt a sense of political disenfranchisement fuelled by resentment and distrust of the government. Acts like the unpopular Corn Law of 1815 protected rich landowners’ profits and kept the price of bread unnecessarily high. Meanwhile there were still ‘rotten boroughs’ where MPs could be voted in by just a handful of individuals, and protestors were often violently dealt with such as at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. There was growing politicization fuelled by the rampant radical press of the late eighteenth century. These radical pamphlets, newspapers and satirical prints made their way into coffee shops and popular culture, despite sometimes being unregulated and questionably legal.

The long view

Taking the long view on the root causes of rioting helps me in some way understand our current situation a little more. I can see how our current cost of living crisis, increasing inequitable distribution of wealth, the perceived threat of AI to our jobs, the blame of immigrants for economic hardship, political disenfranchisement and distrust, and rampant politicized social media - all have surely contributed to the events we’ve seen on our screens, just as similar issues led to the riots of the long eighteenth century. Although different, the themes are the same.

Learning from the past, then, can surely help us to see these themes clearly for what they are and the impact they have, and motivate us all to take steps: to encourage social cohesion in our communities, to fact-check media sources, and to encourage our governments to create positive change.