A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes 255
‘Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo’: 1816, by Robert Southey, nephew of
Catherine (Bigg) Hill’s husband, the Revd Herbert Hill. Southey’s
beloved son Herbert died aged 9 in April 1816, soon after the poem with
its proem celebrating domestic contentment was completed.
to her niece: Caroline Austen. The extract is from the closing section of a
longer letter (no. 149), where it reads: ‘I feel myself getting stronger than
I was half a year ago, & can so perfectly well walk to Alton, or back again,
without the slightest fatigue that I hope to be able to do both when
Summer comes’ (Letters, 326).
of the niece: again Caroline Austen, slightly altered in wording from her
recollections printed here as MAJA, (178–9).
128 Mrs Leigh Perrot . . . late husband’s affairs: see notes to p. 120. Caroline’s
father, James Austen, was to be the chief beneficiary of his uncle James
Leigh Perrot’s will, but subject to the widow’s life interest; as it turned
out, she survived him by sixteen years.
Mr. Lyford: Giles King Lyford (1764–1837), surgeon-in-ordinary at the
County Hospital, Winchester. His father and uncle were also surgeons in
Basingstoke and Winchester. Mr Lyford had already been called in and
his treatment yielded some temporary relief while JA was still at Chawton
(Letters, 340).
in College Street: at no. 8 College Street (still to be seen), where a Mrs
David offered lodgings.
129 There is no better way, my dearest E.: no. 160 in Letters, to JEAL, then at
Exeter College, Oxford. JA wrote: ‘I know no better way my dearest
Edward.’
Charles: Edward Austen Knight’s eighth child, then a pupil at Winchester
College.
William: William Heathcote, Elizabeth (Bigg) Heathcote’s son and
JEAL’s boyhood friend.
130 a letter . . . before printed: no. 161, for which see note to p. 120 above. This
extract, like the former, is known only from its earlier publication in
Henry Austen’s ‘Biographical Notice’ of 1818, where the wording is
slightly different (see p. 142 in this edition).
her sister-in-law, my mother: Mary Lloyd Austen, whose memories of the
deathbed are woven into Caroline’s account in MAJA, 179–82.
two of her brothers . . . clergymen: James and Henry.
131 she amused them even in their sadness: a reference to ‘When Winchester
races first took their beginning’, a set of comic verses written by JA three
days before her death, and so her last literary work. Cf. Henry Austen:
‘The day preceding her death she composed some stanzas replete with
fancy and vigour’ (‘Biographical Notice’, p. 138). The younger generation
were uncomfortable with the idea of publishing such frivolous
verses as JA’s deathbed production, and Henry’s embarrassing reference