to all of you

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Jane Austen's Christmas:

The Festive Season in Georgian England
by Maria Hubert

With a bright holiday cover featuring Polly Maberly (Kitty Bennet) of Pride and Prejudice fame, Jane Austen's Christmas promises to be a delightful read. However, like Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, this book is not so much Austen as a vignette of one aspect of the Regency. It contains suppositions and outright falacies (for example, one of the first illustrations - that of a young girl, pen in hand - is labeled "Jane Austen". There are only two officially recognized portraits of the author- this is neither.)

That said, this is a delightful account of the Christmas season in Georgian England. Be aware that this book primarily refers to the middle class and their celebrations that cannot neccesarily be attributed to upper or lower class life. If you are doing research or simply looking for an enjoyable holiday read, this is a great place to start. It does include many period resources and writings, just be sure to check your facts.

The author, Countess Maria Hubert von Staufer, is Director of Christmas Archives International in the United Kingdom. She has written extensively on the subject of Christmas celebrations in Britain through the centuries:

"For many people, Christmas was reinvented by the Victorian/nineteenth century society. It is a popular misconception that Christmas in England was eradicated by the Cromwellians in the seventeenth century and was only reinvented by the Victorians. Although the customs went underground they remained solid traditions celebrated by all who wished to do so."

The best content description comes from the back cover blurb posted at Amazon.uk.co. Also posted at Amazon are several pages of text, both covers and the front index.

From the almost dismissive references in Jane Austen's novels, one could be forgiven for thinking that Christmas in Georgian England was a somewhat dismal affair. To the contrary, Miss Austen would have known elaborate house parties and fancy dress balls. The Mummers would surely have attended her home in Hampshire, as would the Waits, encouraging "good Christians" to "awake" on Christmas morning. She is also known to have enjoyed Christmas pudding, still then a fairly new dish, loved by the Georgian monarchy and copied by many families at the time.

Readers will discover the little-known story of how "Emma" came to be dedicated to the Prince Regent, and how the Austen family entertainment was almost ruined one year because of the prudishness of a country cousin. The elaborate Christmas seasons enjoyed by Jane's sisters at brother Edward's home in Kent contrast with those of the Georgian parson, Rev William Holland, among whose parishioners Christmas was but a poor affair. In this text, readers can experience Christmas in the later Georgian period, as described by many of Austen's contemporaries, including Robert Southey, John Clare and Sir Walter Scott; and play the very games and charades that the Austens themselves enjoyed and wrote. Or try some of the authentic recipes from her own kitchen - perhaps the festive rice pudding, a gloriously rich dessert. And read poems and songs of the festive season, and learn of parlour theatricals in the Christmas holidays.
The observations of an Englishman's Christmas as seen through the eyes of a contemporary American writer, Washington Irving, provide an eye-witness account of how an outsider viewed a Georgian Christmas. Contemporary engravings and sketches illustrate the customs and traditions of the day, alongside portraits of the Austen family.

Jane Austen's Christmas : The Festive Season in Georgian England
Paperback - 128 pages
October 1997
Sutton Publishing
ISBN: 075091307X
The author, Countess Maria Hubert von Staufer, is Director of Christmas Archives International in the United Kingdom. She has also written: Christmas in Shakespeare's England, The Brontes' Christmas, and Christmas Around the World. Visit her website: http://www.christmasarchives.com/ for excerpts.

What Pride and Prejudice Can Teach Us About Inequality - Branko Milanovic - Business - The Atlantic

Elizabeth and her family live the charmed life of English country gentry, a sort of pleasant idleness punctuated by balls and parties--and the social gossip to which the balls and parties give rise. Elizabeth is beautiful, intelligent, and, of course, unmarried. Her family's annual income is around £3,000, which, divided by seven family members (five sisters and their parents), gives a per capita income of £430 (excluding, as in the rest of the examples here, the imputed value of housing, which must have been considerable). This level of income places the Bennets in the top 1 percent of the English income distribution at the time, as calculated from Robert Colquhoun's English social table done for the early years of the nineteenth century.

Elizabeth meets a rich suitor, Mr. Darcy, whose annual income is put (by all concerned in the book) at £10,000. Both he and his somewhat less rich friend Mr. Bingley are understandably deemed very desirable bachelors by the socially conscious (and no-nonsense) mother of Elizabeth Bennet. Mr. Darcy's huge income places him, at the least, in the top one-tenth of 1 percent of income distribution. Note the huge gap existing between the top 1 percent and the top one-tenth of 1 percent, or, to use George W. Bush's modern phraseology, between "the haves and the have-mores." Although these early-nineteenth century English haves and have-mores freely intermingle socially (and apparently intermarry), Mr. Darcy's income is more than three times greater than Elizabeth's father's; translated in per capita terms (since Mr. Darcy does not take care of anyone but himself ), the ratio is in excess of twenty to one.

It will not be giving away the plot to point out that Elizabeth does have some doubts about the suitability of Mr. Darcy, who, in no uncertain terms, expresses his "adoration"--a period euphemism that would be stated quite differently in a modern book. But rebuffing him forever has an additional unpleasant implication. Due to English inheritance laws, if Mr. Bennet dies without a direct male heir, the house and well-functioning estate revert to his obnoxious cousin, the Reverend William Collins. In that case, Elizabeth has to live on her own income, which is basically her share of the £5,000 that her mother brought ("settled") into the marriage. Elizabeth's independent wealth is thus somewhat indelicately estimated by Reverend Collins, who also doubles as her ill-starred suitor, at £1,000. Mr. Collins assumes that she would make a return of 4 percent on it, and hence earn £40 per year. This is a rather measly amount, approximately equal to twice the mean income in England at the time. It is an income that a family of a surveyor or merchant marine seaman could expect.

This is where the love-wealth trade-off makes its appearance. Consider the situation from the point of view of Elizabeth's mother, worried about the happiness of her daughter. On the one hand, Elizabeth can marry Mr. Darcy and enjoy an annual income of £5,000 (we assume that she contributes nothing in monetary terms to Mr. Darcy and that Mr. Darcy shares his income evenly with Elizabeth). On the other, she can fall into what certainly seems to Mrs. Bennet a world of unremitting poverty, living on less than £50 annually. The income ratio between these two outcomes is simply staggering: more than one hundred to one. At that cost, the alternative of not marrying, or perhaps waiting until an ideal lover appears on the horizon, is out of the question. One would really have to hate Mr. Darcy to reject the deal he is tacitly offering!
But, we may ask, is it any different today? To reset Pride and Prejudice in today's United Kingdom, we need simply to look at today's income distribution. After taxes, people in the top 0.1 percent in 2004 made about £400,000 annually per capita, and those in the top 1 percent earned on average £81,000, while the average British per capita income was £11,600. The cost of turning down a Mr. Darcy-equivalent today would still be significant but much less overwhelming: The ratio between the incomes of those in the top 0.1 percent of the distribution and those at twice the mean is about seventeen to one rather than one hundred to one.
Jane Austen has thus not only illustrated the all too common trade-off between romance and riches but also allowed us to see that although the trade-off itself may be timeless, the stakes do vary with time and with the income distribution of the society in which one lives. In more equal societies, we expect that when decisions about marriage are made, love tends to trump wealth more often. And the reverse will then be true in very unequal societies. Will love in very unequal societies, then, exist only outside marriage?

Excerpted from The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Inequality Around the Globe.

Books and Christmas

I was spending

some time

 to give my new books

a Christmas feeling

 

Snow in Chawton

I bought myself

some very nice books

for Christmas

The biography of

Claire Tomalin

I was reading allready

from the library

But now

I am the proud owner

of the biography

and ""the letters"'

are new for me.

Merry Christmas

to all of you

The Christmas season in the early 1800s

The Christmas season in the early 1800s was a time of festive balls, dinner parties, and parlor games. This season, the Read House in New Castle presents A Jane Austen Christmas. Jane Austen, author of Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, and Emma, provides us with first-hand accounts of how Christmas was celebrated in Georgian England. At the same time, in America, George Read had just completed building his mansion along the Delaware River. The Reads being a wealthy family were able to celebrate Christmas in the lavish manner described in Jane Austen's novels.

Visitors will enter the front parlor which is ready for a Christmas Ball complete with holly and ivy as well as the traditional spring of mistletoe. During the Christmas holiday, large gatherings of family and friends would entertain themselves with parlor games as visitors will learn when they step into the back parlor of the Read House. Some games like Charades or bobbing for apples are still with us, but others like Snapdragon (shown on right) have long disappeared. To play Snapdragon, each person had to pick currants out of a shallow bowl of flaming brandy using their mouth to extinguish the flame. For obvious reasons this parlor game eventually lost favor.
All the rooms of the house will be decorated to show visitors both the entertaining centers and behind-the-scenes activities of the owners, their children, and the servants. Jane Austen would immediately recognize the preparation of gifts, the choosing of Christmas finery behind closed bedroom doors, and even the winter bathing habits of the well-to-do like Mary Read or Elizabeth Bennett.
In the Read House kitchen, visitors will learn how the fine family parties affected their servants. With so many guest visiting the house, the kitchen was always abuzz with activity, leaving servants little time to enjoy the holidays. From preparing large feasts and special desserts like Twelfth Night cake to increased laundry and housework, a servant's day began before dawn and lasted long into the night.

Jane Austen Christmas

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JANE AUSTEN

235 year ago Jane was born

The 235th birthday of Jane Austen has been celebrated with a new Google doodle.

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"[Miss Austen] had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me."

Walter Scott, Journal entry, 14 March 1826

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 "Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it."

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

I guess not everyone loves her the way I do.

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Facebook and Jane Austen

Ms. Olay, 66, is trying to tap into that passion to ensure that the Austen Society, formed in 1979, endures. In 2008, at the suggestion of member Cattleya Concepcion, 27, Ms. Olay set up a Facebook page. She quickly found that the Web was already a hotbed of Austen activity.
"Using the Web and Facebook, we were able to reach younger members," says Ms. Olay. "They are forming friendships and learning how to plan events."
DeeDee Baldwin, 31, of Starkville, Miss., created in 2008 "AustenBook," a Web spoof of Facebook that digitally chronicles the happenings of Elizabeth Bennet and the other characters in "Pride and Prejudice." "When you read her books, you feel like the characters could be with you right now," says Ms. Baldwin.
The Austen Society is reaching young people in other ways, too. For the past three years the group has bought space at the Brooklyn Book Festival, making Ms. Austen the only deceased author with her own booth at the ultra-hip event.
Jaclyn Green-Stock, 23, co-heads the New York "Juvenilia" chapter of the Austen Society, a 50-member group of Janeites in their 20s and 30s. Ms. Green-Stock is also writing a screenplay about gentrification in New York, using "Persuasion" as her chief inspiration.
The Juvenilia members take walking tours in lower Manhattan and gather at each other's apartments to watch DVDs of Austen-themed movies such as a Bollywood version of "Sense and Sensibility" called "I Have Found It."
Media companies are tapping into the Austen craze as well. Quirk Books in Philadelphia in 2008 commissioned author Seth Grahame-Smith to write "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," a work that adds the undead to Ms. Austen's classic novel. The book is slated to become a film next year.
The seeds of the Austen resurgence were sown during the 1990s. In 1995 came two big film and TV adaptations: the BBC miniseries of "Pride and Prejudice," featuring actor Colin Firth as Fitzwilliam Darcy; and director Ang Lee's "Sense and Sensibility," starring Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant and Kate Winslet. A year later Gwyneth Paltrow starred in "Emma."
"Clueless," a 1995 movie starring Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd, was a thinly disguised adaptation of "Emma," set in modern-day California.
But while those movies stirred young people's passions for Ms. Austen's works, the Web is allowing fans to connect in new ways.
Among the Jane Austen Twitter feeds, blogs and chat rooms that have cropped up is "Jane Austen's Fight Club," a faux movie trailer that juxtaposes women in Austen-era frocks with the bruises and blood of the cult classic "Fight Club." There's also dwiggie.com, a hub of fan fiction overseen by Crystal Shih, 29. Ms. Shih and her college roommate discovered Ms. Austen a decade ago and began writing Austenesque prose in their Massachusetts Institute of Technology dorm room. Now her site boasts about 1,000 registered users. Everything from "Clueless" to Colin Firth is fair game for debate.
"The movie adaptations created a lot of fanatics," says Ms. Shih, now doing postdoctoral work in biochemistry at MIT. "In some of the forums, there are throw-downs about who is their favorite Darcy…At one conference an 80-year-old said Laurence Olivier was the only one for her, but Colin Firth definitely propagates that Darcy image today."
Laurie Viera Rigler has written two Austen-theme novels, "Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict" and "Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict." In May she launched "Sex and the Austen Girl," a Web series at babelgum.com that plays on the differences between life today and in the Austen era.
The two-and-a-half minute webisodes include such titles as "The 200-Year-Old Virgin."
Young people, says Ms. Viera Rigler, are deep into Austen's universe and obsessive fandom "is normal to them."
"It's true," she says. "We are a little crazy."
Write to Arden Dale at arden.dale@dowjones.com and Mary Pilon at mary.pilon@wsj.com

A new curator is appointed for Jane Austen House museum - Entertainments - Petersfield Post

A new curator is appointed for Jane Austen House museum - Entertainments - Petersfield Post
Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton has announced the appointment of Louise West as its new curator.
Louise, who has been employed at Jane Austen’s House Museum for the past eight and a half years, previously held the position of education and collections manager.
In this role Louise has developed the award winning education programme and has been closely involved with the recent lottery funded redevelopment.
The appointment of a new curator is in anticipation of the retirement of Tom Carpenter who has held the post since the mid 90s. Mr Carpenter’s grandfather, Mr T J Carpenter, bought Jane Austen’s House in 1949 and established the Jane Austen Memorial Trust which runs the museum.
Louise said, “I am looking forward to taking the museum forward in what is a very exciting period for Austen lovers.
“The next few years see the bicentenaries of all of her novels, either written or revised at this house.
“I feel proud and honoured to be leading the staff at the home of Jane Austen at this important time.”

The Georgian Christmas

The Georgian Christmas season stretched from December 6th (St. Nicholas Day) to January 6th (Twelfth Night, Epiphany). The holiday was spent by the gentry in their country houses and estates, as they did not return to London until February*. It was a time of high celebration with visiting, gift and charity giving, balls, parties, masquerades, play acting, games and lots of food. Since families and friends were already gathered together, it was also a time for courtships and weddings.

The Austens were no exception to this and we know that they participated in these celebrations with alacrity. A Christmas Eve letter to Cassandra mentions Jane’s enjoyment in a ball held that week and a list of her charitable giving. Many of Jane’s plays written for the family survive, and in 1787, they staged a full length production which included cousins and friends. Her niece, Fanny’s, letters are full of descriptions of every kind of amusement held during the season.
The novels are not devoid of Christmas mention, either. Sir Thomas gives a ball for Fanny and William, the Woodhouses, Musgroves and Bennets host relatives. Lady Susan descends upon her brother-in-law’s house, Charlotte Lucas is married, John Morland visits the Thorpes, Willoughby ‘danced from eight o'clock till four without once sitting down’, the Westons give a party and Emma is not able to attend Church. All of these events give insights into the doings of the season.

While the visiting was enjoyable, it’s easy to see how these preparations could take their toll on the hostess. No wonder Jane wrote to Cassandra “[January 7, 1807] When you receive this our guests will all be gone or going; and I shall be left to the comfortable disposal of my time, to ease of mind from the torments of rice puddings and apple dumplings, and probably to regret that I did not take more pains to please them all.” You can see through the humor to the very real stress involved in playing hostess for so long.

Originally the feast of the Epiphany, celebrating the Wise Men’s arrival in Bethlehem and their presentation of gifts to the Christ child, Twelfth Night (of the Twelve Days of Christmas fame) signaled the end of the Christmas season and was celebrated in grand style with masquerade parties and gifts. These gifts were often accompanied by poems and riddles. Guests would dress in costume or draw names of characters to play throughout the party. Sir William Heathcote remembered attending a Twelfth Night Party once, as a boy, where Jane Austen drew the name of “Mrs Candour”. Can you just imagine the fun she would have had pulling guests aside all evening telling them what “she” thought of them or gossiping about them in loud whispers?! It was all in fun, of course, and each person played his part through the games and rounds of cards. Once the party was over, it was time to go home and start getting back to the business of day to day life. No wonder they tried to stretch the season out as much as possible!

Jane Austen Today: A Happy Jane Austen Birthday Event With Free Gifts...

Jane Austen Today: A Happy Jane Austen Birthday Event With Free Gifts...: "It wouldn't be fair to neglect someone as important and dear to us as Jane Austen on her birthday. She was born on 16th December 1775,..."