A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes 241
Crabbe . . . Campbell, Moore, and Rogers: for JA’s admiration of the poet
George Crabbe, see notes to p. 71 above. His best-known poetry was
written in rural Suffolk and Leicestershire, where he was a clergyman.
His acquaintance with the fashionable society poets Thomas Campbell
(1777–1844), Thomas Moore (1779–1852), and the banker-poet Samuel
Rogers (1763–1855), famous for his literary breakfasts, can be dated to
1817, when he absorbed himself for a time in the London social life of his
publisher John Murray and the liberal circles of Lady Holland at Holland
House, Kensington. He recorded his experiences in his ‘London
Journal’, subsequently published in the posthumous Life (1834), by his
son, also George Crabbe.
91 Scott’s guest . . . George IV . . . in that city: Crabbe had met Scott in
London, through John Murray, though the two were already correspondents.
Crabbe visited Scott in Edinburgh in August 1822, coinciding
with the ludicrous tartan extravaganza of George IV’s triumphal state
visit at which Scott was master of ceremonies.
a new term, ‘Lakers’: a term coined by Francis Jeffrey (1773–1850), the
critic and chief voice of the influential Edinburgh Review (see issue 24
(1814) ), to denote the coterie of Lake District poets Wordsworth, Coleridge,
and Robert Southey.
Charlotte Brontë’s life: Charlotte Brontë (1816–55), longest lived of the
three Brontë sisters, all of whom were novelists and poets. After the
remarkable success of her novel Jane Eyre (by ‘Currer Bell’) in 1847, she
devoted herself to writing and remained much of the time in the isolated
solitude of Haworth parsonage, West Yorkshire. Her fellow novelist,
Elizabeth Gaskell, wrote her biography immediately after her death,
making public its melancholy details. Brontë’s ‘kind publisher’ was
George Smith, of Smith, Elder, and Co., and the incident in Willis’s
Rooms, where Brontë attended a lecture given by Thackeray, is described
in Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), ch. 23. Gaskell’s biography is
a point of reference to which JEAL returns.
Miss Mitford: see note to p. 13 above. Her plays Julian (1823), Foscari
(1826), and Rienzi (1828) were all performed in London. She had published
her collected plays in 1854, with an autobiographical introduction.
Milman and Talfourd: both significant men of letters to JEAL’s generation.
Henry Hart Milman (1791–1868), minor poet, playwright, biblical
and classical scholar; Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795–1854), essayist,
editor, and biographer of the poet and essayist Charles Lamb.
to know where she was buried: the incident is subsequently related in the
Autobiography of Mrs Elizabeth Fletcher, 1770–1858, ed. Lady Richardson
(1875), 299.
92 one of the Prince Regent’s physicians: identified by Deirdre Le Faye as
possibly Dr Matthew Baillie of Lower Grosvenor Street (Fam. Rec., 202).
Henry Austen’s illness in October 1815 was serious enough for JA to fear
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