A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes 217
have found this the most efficient plan, and perhaps one that assured the
babies a degree of attention she could not provide. It sounds from the
account she gives of Cassandra that she used, at least in this instance, a
dry nurse, in which case Mrs Austen’s babies were weaned very young. In
the course of the eighteenth century there was mounting pressure on
middle-class women to set a good example to their sex and rank by
breast-feeding rather than farming their children out. The argument was
posed as a matter of hygiene and sound medical advice, but also contained
a strong moral imperative. There was the added warning in some
advice manuals that to hand over one’s baby to the care of another might
endanger the natural bond of affection between mother and child (‘That
those Mothers who do, as it were, discharge their Children from them,
and thus dispose of them, do at least weaken, if not dissolve the Bond of
Love and Tenderness which Nature ties between them’, The Ladies Dispensatory:
or, Every Woman her own Physician (1740) ). Some modern
biographers have attempted to explain what they sense as JA’s emotional
defensiveness in terms of this early severance (e.g. ‘the emotional distance
between child and mother is obvious throughout her life’, Tomalin,
Jane Austen, 6). Such theories tend to have a late twentieth-century feel
to them. It is worth noting, on the other side of the argument, that the
practice of farming out was not uncommon at the time, that the Austen
babies seemed to thrive on it, and that they were not banished totally out
of sight but were apparently visited daily by their parents. Deirdre Le
Faye has suggested that a couple called John and Elizabeth Littleworth
may have been regular foster-parents to the Austen children. The
extended Littleworth family remained in service to the Austens for several
generations, but there is no hard evidence for their fostering (see
‘The Austens and the Littleworths’, Jane Austen Society Report (1987),
64–70).
40 copy books extant . . . by the time she was sixteen: in Ed.1 this sentence
reads: ‘There is extant an old copy-book containing several tales, some of
which seem to have been composed while she was quite a girl.’ The
description of JA’s early writings is much briefer in Ed.1, and no specimen
example is given. The ‘copy books’ to which JEAL refers can be
assumed to be the three transcript volumes of juvenilia, ‘Volume the
First’, ‘Volume the Second’, and ‘Volume the Third’, begun as early as
1787 and continued to 1793. JA herself gave them their imposing titles.
By the terms of Cassandra’s will (she died in 1845 and had inherited all
JAs manuscripts), ‘Volume the First’ went to Charles Austen, ‘Volume
the Second’ to Frank, and ‘Volume the Third’ to James Edward (JEAL).
In the interval between Ed.1 and Ed.2 of the Memoir, JEAL may have
gained more first-hand knowledge of these copy-books and their contents.
B. C. Southam has assumed that JEAL did not see ‘Volume the
First’ but worked instead from copied extracts from which he chose
to include in Ed.2 ‘The Mystery’ (‘The Manuscript of Jane Austen’s
Volume the First’, The Library, 5th series, 17 (1962), 231–7 (at p. 231). But