The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. Paula Byrne

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      This is a novel in five duodecimo volumes, dated 1796. The title page reads Camilla: or, A Picture of Youth. By the Author of Evelina and Cecilia. It was printed for two publishers, T. Payne at the Mews Gate, and Cadell and Davies in the Strand. A dedication to Queen Charlotte carries the name of F. d’Arblay, who some years earlier had been employed by Her Majesty as Second Keeper of the Robes. Madame d’Arblay was known to her friends as Fanny Burney, daughter of Dr Johnson’s friend, the famous musical historian Charles Burney.

      There was a huge sense of anticipation in the fashionable literary world for the third offering of one of the nation’s favourite female authors. What increased the sense of excitement was Burney’s shrewd decision to publish Camilla by subscription, with purchasers paying upfront in order to underwrite the production costs, guaranteeing that ‘its sale becomes almost instantly as quick as general’.1 The Morning Chronicle had made the first public announcement on 7 July 1795: ‘PROPOSALS for printing by Subscription a NEW WORK, in Four Volumes, 12 mo. By the AUTHOR of EVELINA and CECILIA: To be delivered on or before the 1st day of July, 1796. The Subscriptions will be one Guinea; to be paid at the time of subscribing.’

      Burney herself alphabetized her list of subscribers for the printed edition. She freely admitted that she also kept a sharp eye on protocol and title: the most elite subscribers were given due prominence. The list of names, which followed the Dedication and Advertisement, ran to thirty-eight pages. Royalty, aristocracy, politicians and writers were there – a thousand subscribers in all. Edmund Burke signed up for five sets and the widow of the renowned actor David Garrick for two. Warren Hastings promised to ‘attack the East Indies’ on the novelist’s behalf. Mrs Hannah More, Miss Edgeworth and Mrs Radcliffe of Babington, leading novelists of the day, all put down their names, as did the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, the celebrated Duchess of Devonshire, the actress Sarah Siddons, the landscape gardener Humphry Repton, various members of the Leigh family of Adlestrop and, sandwiched between ‘George Aust, Esq.’ and ‘Mrs Ayton’, a certain ‘Miss J. Austen, Steventon’. She was in her twentieth year; the guinea was paid by her father, a sign of his commitment to her literary interests. This was Jane Austen’s first appearance in print. Indeed, since her novels would be published anonymously, it was one of only two occasions on which her name appeared publicly in her lifetime. The other was in a subscription list to a volume of sermons.

      Jane Austen’s copy of Camilla was bought in boards, uncut, and was later half-bound, probably by Cassandra, who inherited the volumes after her sister’s death. Though Jane cherished her novels, she was not averse to defacing them for the sake of a good joke. As a fledgling writer, she just couldn’t resist scribbling, even in places where it was rather inappropriate. On the back of the novel there is an inscription, its final word obscured by the half-binding: ‘Since this work went to the Press a Circumstance of some importance to the happiness of Camilla has taken place, namely that Dr Marchmont has at last [?died].’2

      Jane Austen’s joke here refers to the meddling Dr Marchmont, who is the chief obstacle to the union of the lovers. For five long volumes, he manages to keep Camilla and Edgar from marrying, despite the fact that they adore, and are suitable for, one another. Austen knows perfectly well that the story is fictional, but the characters have been made to seem so real that she cannot resist imagining their continuing life after the end of the book. In its tiny way, her intervention on the endpapers of Camilla is a licence to those many lovers of Jane Austen’s novels who have taken it upon themselves to imagine how the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy might unfold.

      Austen was forced to sell many of her belongings when she moved to lodgings in Bath, but this was one novel that she was never going to sell. It stayed in the family and was eventually given to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Austen’s father, who held an account at John Burdon’s bookshop in College Street, Winchester, owned a library of several hundred books, but that resource dried up when the family left their home and much of the library was sold. When Jane visited Kent there was always her wealthy brother Edward’s well-stocked library, which included many novels. And when she eventually joined the publishing house of John Murray, Murray himself loaned her books.

      Most of the dozens of novels that Austen read were borrowed from libraries. Commercial subscription libraries began when booksellers rented out copies of new titles in the mid-eighteenth century. By 1790, about six hundred rental and lending libraries were in business, with a clientele of some fifty thousand.3 To the consternation of moral commentators, there was a veritable epidemic of female novel reading.

      When she lived in Bath and Southampton Jane Austen depended on public circulating or subscription libraries. Most of the novels in libraries were unbound and tattered from heavy use. There may be a hint of this neglect in Mr Collins’s horrified backward start when he is offered a book to read aloud in Pride and Prejudice: ‘every thing announced it to be from a circulating library’.4 In Sanditon, Austen’s final unfinished novel, Sir Edward Denham is at pains to emphasize that the new seaside resort boasts a smart and upmarket ‘subscription’ library. Mr Parker pays a visit, not to take out a book but to inspect the all-important subscription list. He wants to see if there are enough fashionable people in town: ‘The List of Subscribers was but commonplace. The Lady Denham, Miss Brereton, Mr. and Mrs. P. – Sir Edward Denham and Miss Denham … were followed by nothing better than – Mrs. Mathews – Miss Mathews, Miss E. Mathews, Miss H. Mathews.’5

      Some libraries charged an entrance fee, others charged a rate for borrowing books. Reading was becoming a social activity. Libraries were places where you met friends and exchanged gossip. Some were attached to a milliner’s shop or a draper’s, as is the one in Sanditon, where the heroine picks up a copy of Camilla and also buys trinkets: Charlotte pays for her goods ‘as she had not Camilla’s youth, and had no intention of having her distress’.6 This refers to a famous scene in Burney’s novel, concerning the winning of a gold locket, which is set in a library. Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice meets officers at the library and sees ‘such beautiful ornaments as made her quite wild’.7

      The family memoir insists that Jane Austen’s clerical brother James formed and directed her taste in reading.СКАЧАТЬ