IN THE EARLY summer of 1773, a little boy arrived at the rectory in Steventon, a small Hampshire village, around eight miles south-west of Basingstoke. Now five-and-a-half years old, this was Viscount Lymington’s first journey away from home. Surrounded by fields and gently sloping chalk hills, Steventon consisted of a single row of thatched cottages set in a valley. The rectory itself was positioned apart from the rest of the houses, and stood at the junction where the lane from the church met that of the village. The church of St Nicholas lay on a hill above, almost a mile away. The rector was George Austen, and Lymington had come to be tutored by him. For the next six months, the rectory was to be his school and home. Steventon was only about ten miles from Hurstbourne Park, but to Lymington it was worlds apart from the life he had so far experienced.
Everything was on a smaller scale. The rectory was a three-storey house, and when Lymington first arrived he was shown into the ‘best parlour’. On the ground floor there was also a ‘common parlour’ for less privileged guests, a study for George Austen, a kitchen, and back kitchen. The next floor had seven bedrooms, and three attic rooms were on the top. Lymington, like other pupils who came to the Austen household, is likely to have been assigned an attic room. The house was big enough to accommodate pupils, and attractive enough as a country rectory, but was far removed from the grandeur and size of Lymington’s family seat. With its evenly spaced windows, and trellised porch over the front door, the Steventon rectory was thoroughly cottagey in feeling and appearance.
Outside space was too limited to allow for landscaping or extensive formal gardens. There was a sloped grass lawn, a small formal garden with a sundial, and to one side of the house, chestnut, fir, and elm trees. A kitchen garden with vegetable and strawberry beds, yard, dairy, and outhouses were where most of the activity took place. Chickens and ducks ran through the yard, and a newly fitted dairy housed a bull and six cows. Just beyond the garden lay fields where George Austen grew crops of oats, barley, and wheat. In June, everyone in the household, children included, was involved in haymaking, and in August there was the harvest to collect. All of life was tightly packed into a matter of three floors and a few acres.
Lymington was his parent’s first child, but by the time he left Hurstbourne Park for Steventon he had two younger sisters, Urania-Annabella (born 1769) and Camilla-Mary (born 8 November 1770), and now a baby brother, Newton (born 26 June 1772). As the oldest sibling, he may have felt some pride, mixed with an understandable degree of nerves, as the first to leave home. While he was George Austen’s only pupil at Steventon in June 1773, he had the rector’s own children to keep him company. George and Cassandra Austen had three of their sons living at home when Lymington arrived. James was eight years old, Edward was five, and the two-year-old Henry had returned from his nurse the previous autumn. Cassandra, the couple’s youngest child, who had been born that January, had been sent out to a local nurse in April. Jane, her famous sister, did not make her entry into the Steventon household until December 1775.
Lymington had come to be educated, and there was every indication that the Austens would provide him with a fine start in life. George Austen taught his pupils the classics, preparing them for later education at public school and university. George was fond of literature, and when he retired to Bath and auctioned his books, they numbered more than five hundred in total. The books in his library had been bought to be read, not just displayed. Their subjects were diverse, and reflected his wide interests beyond theology and the classics. He had a globe, which he used for teaching, and a microscope through which Lymington could study the wonders of the natural world. Austen was the kind of cultured man of whom Coulson Fellowes, Lymington’s grandfather, would have approved.1
Mrs Austen did not offer Lymington any of the formal schooling for which his parents were paying, yet it is difficult to see how she could not have had an influence upon him. Her appearance was unremarkable; as described by her granddaughter, Anna, she was ‘a little, slight woman, with fine, well-cut features, large grey eyes, and good eyebrows, but without any brightness of complexion’. Cassandra’s family background, however, meant that at first she felt more at ease with her aristocratic pupil than her husband did. She came from a family of wealthy clergymen, the Leighs, and her mother was connected to the Oxfordshire family of Perrot. Proud of her family’s history, she believed that the distinctive shape of her nose bore witness to her aristocratic roots.
She also placed a high value on education. Many of her family were Oxford academics, and her uncle, Theophilus Leigh, was Master of Balliol for fifty years. Brains were part of her inheritance, and she was undoubtedly a clever woman. She loved to write letters and read, and her keen sense of humour meant that she enjoyed composing witty verses, some of which she addressed to her husband’s pupils. Cassandra laughed about her ‘own sprack wit’, an old phrase meaning ‘a lively perception of the characters and foibles of others’; nothing passed her by.2 She was sharp and, with a growing family and household to manage, well organized. She took to supervising her domestic tasks with enthusiasm. Bread was baked, beer was brewed at home, and the dairy kept her busy year-round. Outside, she was a hands-on gardener, enjoying time in her vegetable patch, and the challenge of finding recipes and ways of cooking the potatoes she loved to grow.
As his pupil was only five years old, Mr Austen concentrated on teaching and perfecting Lymington’s rudimentary knowledge of reading and writing. As a clergyman, he also hoped to instil into his pupil a religious understanding and appreciation. As well as attending weekly services in Austen’s church, Lymington witnessed at first hand the operation of a household with a strong sense of Christian duty and charity to their less fortunate neighbours.
Even if he was too young to be aware of it, beyond the church and schoolroom was where the Austens offered Lymington his most important lessons for life. Both Mr and Mrs Austen were involved in the running of their farm, dairy, and garden, and Lymington was expected to play his part in helping to tend, feed, manage, and gather agricultural produce and animals. As an adult, Lymington often appeared most at ease when he was outside in the fields and with his workers. It was in his early days with the Austens that this love of the outside was first nurtured.
Lymington also had other children with whom to play. After lessons were over, there was playtime a plenty in the Austen family. The eight-year-old James Austen was the big brother who Lymington would never have, and a role model to follow. The precocious James had yet to start composing the plays that in later years took place in the family’s barn, but his love of words and story-telling made him an entertaining and captivating companion. Away from his two younger sisters and baby brother, Lymington also had Edward Austen, who was just two months older than him, to be a friend. As boys they were encouraged to play outside, where the children rolled down the grassy bank, climbed trees, and explored the country lanes near their home. It was boisterous, physical, and often competitive play. As the autumn approached, and the days became shorter, the Austen children listened to their mother or father read by the fire, played indoor games such as cards and charades, and even practised their dancing steps. It was free time spent together as a family.
Mrs Austen was pleased with the new member of their household. Soon after his arrival in June 1773, she wrote to her sister-in-law that ‘Jemmy and Neddy are very happy in a new Play-fellow, Lord Lymington’.3 George Austen needed to take in pupils to support the modest income he received as rector, and was able to charge the Portsmouths a good amount to tutor their son. Some wives might have resented this economic necessity, and the burden of taking care of another child, especially when the youngest of their own children was barely six months old. But Cassandra was ever the optimist, and immediately saw Lymington as more than a financial asset. He could occupy her two boys, and provide them with fun and pleasure. That, in her view, was what childhood was all about.
In the back of Cassandra’s mind was also a painful memory of the first child she and her husband had taken as a pupil, the seven-year-old George Hastings. The boy had been born in India in 1757, the son of Warren Hastings, future Governor-General of Bengal. He was sent to England following the death of his mother, and in 1764 was recommended to the newly married Austens by George Austen’s sister, Philadelphia. Cassandra and George were then living at Deane rectory while their home in Steventon was renovated. Cassandra was twenty-four years old, and quickly grew attached to little Hastings. But in the autumn tragedy struck, and the boy died of a ‘putrid sore throat’ (diphtheria). His father only learned of his death when he arrived in England the following June. The boy had died in Cassandra’s home, and under her watch. She told others that ‘his death had been as great a grief to her as if he had been a child of her own’.4 A few months later, Cassandra’s first child, James, was born and occupied her thoughts. But the experience of George Hastings had taught her of the fragility of child health, as well as the rewards of child care. Lymington was the first boy to be tutored by George Austen since Hastings. He and Cassandra were determined to do right by this child. And when Lymington needed affection, Cassandra was ready to give it.
For Lymington, the contrast between Mrs Austen and his own mother could not be greater. Mrs Austen had an ordered home and well-behaved children. As she told her sister-in-law, she liked the fact that Lymington was ‘good temper’d and orderly’.5 He was no threat to her way of doing things. Yet she achieved this in a less controlling and rigid way than Lady Portsmouth. She was at ease with herself and her role as wife and mother, and prepared to let her children be themselves and develop at their own pace. Muddy shoes, rough and tumble, and the odd accident in the yard did not ruffle her.
Lady Portsmouth was of an entirely different school of parenting. Twenty years later, when her young nephews had an unexpected school break from Winchester and stayed with her at Hurstbourne Park, she wrote to her brother to reassure him that they were no trouble. ‘We feel no sort of inconvenience,’ she explained to their father:
They are so mild, that they are to be seen, but not heard, save only when an answer is required, and that always given with great natural civility and propriety … I do think them very pleasant boys, not disposed to be running about anywhere.6
For Lymington’s mother, manners were everything. Children were a potential disturbance, liable to disrupt the propriety of the adult world. They should be taught ‘to be seen, but not heard’. Their conversation, even their presence, had nothing to offer. Children and parents should have separate lives, according to Lady Portsmouth. It was her nephews’ silence, and their ordered conduct that made them ‘valuable youths’.
When she was in her mid-seventies, one of Lymington’s sisters, Henrietta Dorothea, wrote a letter to Eveline, the 5th countess of Portsmouth, in which she described the childhood she shared with her brothers (including Lymington) and sisters at Hurstbourne Park. Hurstbourne had no flower gardens, she explained, but the kitchen garden and range of glasshouses ‘were magnificent’. However, as children they were not allowed to walk in this garden, or enter the glasshouses without their parents. It was only when they were attended by a governess or ‘my mother’s maid’ that the children could walk in the ‘pleasure ground’. Times had changed since then, Henrietta Dorothea acknowledged, and ‘this will make you smile the regime being somewhat close but I know now it was wise and kind – altho’ my volatile spirits bobbed a bit for less restraint’.
Henrietta Dorothea had to wait for adulthood to escape this ‘close regime’, where children could not walk (let alone run) outside without strict supervision. But his time with the Austen family gave Lymington his first taste of freedom. The Austens’ home and grounds may have been much smaller than Hurstbourne Park, but the atmosphere was altogether less claustrophobic. Having arrived at the start of summer, he could run, play, and explore with two other boys, uninhibited by the presence of any adult. Joining the closely knit Austen family, he could feel supported, rather than stifled. While the children at Steventon were expected to show respect for their elders, there was none of that stiff formality between parents and children that existed in the Portsmouth family. Mr and Mrs Austen took pleasure in their children, and, when their work and duties allowed, joined in the fun. Henrietta Dorothea felt obliged to defend her ‘Mother’s management of things,’ saying that it was ‘graceful in her rank and most strickly [sic] supported by Christian influences’. Lady Portsmouth’s style of motherhood was appropriate to her social position, and governed by her moral principles. But whether it left her children happy, Henrietta Dorothea did not say.7
Lymington’s mother can hardly have approved of all that outdoor playtime, and her personality was so different from Mrs Austen that they were unlikely to have ever agreed about how children should be raised. So the choice of the Austen family to tutor the Portsmouth’s eldest son and heir might seem surprising. There were plenty of other clergy families within a short distance of Hurstbourne Park who could have offered lessons and lodging. Why the Austens?
The Portsmouths would have been ready with an answer: Reverend Barton Wallop, Lymington’s godfather and his father’s brother, was friendly with George Austen. Barton was rector of Upper Wallop, a nearby Hampshire village. The friendship between the Austens and this branch of the Wallop family was long lasting, and, when Barton’s daughter married the elderly Reverend Henry Wake in 1813, Jane Austen wrote a humorous poem about the couple.8
Family connections may have been important, but the experiment of sending a boy from the Portsmouth family to the Austens was not repeated with any of Lymington’s other brothers. Lymington was a special case, and he was already receiving different treatment from his siblings. For the Portsmouths had a growing suspicion that all was not right with their oldest child. The real reason why the Austens were selected was that they shared a family problem.
Friends talk, and it is just possible that Barton knew more about Cassandra’s family than even she was prepared to admit publicly. When he came to Steventon in the summer of 1773, Lymington met only three of Cassandra and George Austen’s four sons. Their second eldest son, also called George, turned seven years old in August 1773, but had not lived regularly at home since he was four years old. He suffered from epileptic fits, and may have had problems communicating (this could be why his sister Jane learned sign language). Reverend and Mrs Austen both mentioned their son in letters. ‘I am much obliged to you for your kind wish of George’s improvement. God knows only how far it will come to pass,’ wrote Reverend Austen in July 1770. ‘Be it as it may,’ he concluded with Christian resignation, ‘he cannot be a bad or wicked child.’
Cassandra had her hopes raised when George did not have fits for nearly twelve months, but then cruelly dashed when they reoccurred. ‘My poor little George is come to see me today,’ she reported in December 1770.9 For Cassandra, the problems of her son were a cruel reminder of the sufferings that had been inflicted on her younger brother, Thomas Leigh. His mind had never developed beyond a childish state and he remained what we would regard as mentally disabled all his life.
The Austens, then, were a couple who knew the pain and the difficulty of having a child who was not normal. How much the Portsmouths told the Austens about their son and their concerns before he arrived at Steventon we do not know. Possibly they said nothing, not wishing to prejudice their opinion before they met Lymington, and in order to test the Austens’ reaction. But Reverend and Mrs Austen recognized the warning signs when they saw them. While many boys would have struggled to compete with the remaining Austen children in the intelligence stakes, especially with the quick-witted James, it was evident to Cassandra that, aged five, Lymington was already way behind. As she told her sister-in-law, Lord Lymington is ‘very backward of his Age’. He was not developing as he should. Bitter experience meant that Cassandra was likely to be kind and sympathetic towards Lymington, while Reverend Austen’s view of his own troubled son made him an understanding tutor. If Lymington got things wrong, it was not his fault; he could not be ‘bad or wicked’.10
Though Mrs Austen’s approach to mothering was in so many ways different from Lady Portsmouth’s, for at least a short time both women followed the same course of action towards their troubling children. They sent them away. They let others do the caring. ‘Poor little George’ was eventually housed with his disabled uncle in the village of Monk Sherborne, on the other side of Basingstoke. He was probably looked after by the Culham (or Cullum) family, for it was a member of this family who signed his death certificate in January 1838. He lived until he was seventy-two years old.11
If the Portsmouth family knew about these circumstances, then they would also have been reassured that the Austens would be discreet when caring for Lymington. After all, they placed considerable trust in the Austens. Talk of Lymington’s emerging problems would have done untold damage to the Portsmouth’s family reputation, but would have also discredited the Austens. Whether Lymington was visited by his parents when he stayed at Steventon we do not know. Given the sensitive nature of his case, it is unlikely that any letters were written between the two families. News of Lymington’s progress (or lack thereof) was probably by word of mouth.
The Austen family perfected the art of secrecy when it came to family problems. After their two brief mentions of him in 1770, George Austen never featured again in his parents’ letters. Realizing that their family was destined to be famous, their daughter Cassandra destroyed many of their letters following her sister Jane’s death. If Jane, or any other member of her family, had ever mentioned the disabled George in their letters, they did not survive. Monk Sherborne was near to Sherborne St John where James, George’s elder brother, was rector until his death in 1819. So perhaps James visited George and his uncle. Certainly, the Austen family made financial provisions for the two men. But otherwise they were excluded from the family circle. The silencing of this aspect of the Austens’ family history was continued by later biographers, who simply erased George from the family tree.12
Unlike ‘poor little George’, Lymington was destined to inherit a title and vast wealth. The future of the Portsmouth family rested with him. If the Austens confirmed her worst fears about her son, then Lady Portsmouth knew she needed to act fast if there was any hope of remedy. Lymington never forgot his time at Steventon and the kindness of the Austens. In later life, their paths crossed again. But staying with the Austens long term was not an option.