A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes
Both can be dated to the turbulent period 1801–4, soon after the family
move from Steventon to Bath, when JA was 25–29 years old. The first
episode can be fixed precisely, in December 1802, and refers to the proposal
by Harris Bigg-Wither, the younger brother of JA and Cassandra’s
old friends Catherine and Alethea Bigg, of Manydown Park. JA apparently
accepted the offer but immediately had a change of heart and
rejected him. Writing to JEAL with details of this and the second, far
shadowier, seaside romance, Caroline observed: ‘My own wish would be,
that not any allusion should be made to the Manydown story–– or at least
that the reference should be so vague, as to give no clue to the place or the
person.’ Bigg-Wither is not named until Constance Hill does so in her
Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends (1902; 1904 edn., 240). The
second episode, the seaside romance, is possibly earlier, and refers to a
chance meeting when JA was on holiday in Sidmouth, Devon, in the
summer of 1801; again it is from Caroline Austen’s account. She got it
from the elderly Cassandra, and in the various family versions it becomes
steadily more inconsistent. Caroline writes of it to JEAL: ‘My Aunt told
me this in the last years of her own life–– & it was quite new to me then––
but all this, being nameless and dateless, cannot I know serve any purpose
of your’s–– and it brings no contradiction to your theory that she ˆAunt
Janeˆ never had any attachment that overclouded her happiness, for long.’
(See Caroline Austen’s letter to JEAL, included in the Appendix to this
collection from transcribed extracts, NPG, RWC/HH, fos. 8–10; Life &
Letters, 84–94; and Fam. Rec. 121–2, 250–1.)
29 soon after I was born: JEAL was born at Deane on 17 November 1798. His
father James Austen moved his family into Steventon rectory in May
1801, at which time the Austens went to Bath.
30 Pope . . . ‘to mark their way’: slightly misquoting Pope, Epistle 1, To
Cobham, ll. 31–2.
‘to chronicle small beer’: to make something trifling appear important. Cf.
Shakespeare, Othello, II. i. 160 (‘To suckle fools, and chronicle small
beer’).
the dinner-table . . . general use: for the splendid appearance, notionally
desirable for the mid-Victorian dinner-table, see the table plans in Mrs
Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861). It was usual in the eighteenth
century to have dinner, the main meal of the day, in the midafternoon.
But from the end of the century mealtimes slowly changed,
with the emergence of luncheon and an increasingly late dinner hour
among the fashion-conscious. In the grand surroundings of Godmersham
Park, her brother Edward Knight’s Kent estate, JA dines at a comfortable
family time of half past four; and on special occasions as late as
half past six. But at Steventon in 1798 dinner is at ‘half after Three’, with
the knowledge that they are finished before Cassandra, then staying at
Godmersham, has even begun (Letters, 251, 244, and 27). In P&P the
smart Bingleys dine at half past six (ch. 8), while Tom Musgrave, in The
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