woensdag 29 januari 2014

Speculation: Jane Austen's love of card games

Most social evenings in Jane Austen's time in Bath revolved around card games even though they involved a small amount of gambling. In London at the time of course, thousands of pounds could be lost in a game of whist, but in Bath the stakes were more modest.
Games such as cassino, loo, quadrille, piquet, commerce, brag, whist, vingt-un and speculation could all be played in polite society. Cassino was a game in which open cards on the table were used to make number combinations, piquet required you to make tricks, loo involved gambling tokens wherein players would bet on how many tricks they thought they could take; quadrille also trick-taking related to whist, vingt-un a forerunner of pontoon, commerce depended on certain card combinations and speculation was a gambling game that used tokens, the holder of the highest trump taking the pot.
This latter was Jane's favourite, saying of its superiority over brag: 'When one comes to reason upon it, it cannot stand its ground against Speculation'. She even composed a poem:
'Alas! poor Brag, thou boastful game!
What now avails thine empty name?
[as opposed to]... tender-hearted speculation.'
Speculation is mentioned several times by her in her writings and here in Mansfield Park we read:
'"What shall I do, Sir Thomas? [asks his wife]: Whist and speculation; which will amuse me most?" Sir Thomas, after a moment's thought, recommended speculation. He was a whist player himself, and perhaps might feel that it would not much amuse him to have her for a partner'.
Speculation had disappeared completely by the end of the century.
Commerce, a game whose aim was to finish with the best three-card combination in hand, made Jane rather uneasy because of the expense. She notes sourly in a letter when in Portsmouth:
'We found ourselves tricked into a thorough party at Mrs Maitland's, a quadrille and a commerce table... There were two pools at commerce, but I would not play more than one, for the stake was three shillings (15p), and I cannot afford to lose that twice in an evening.'
Card games occur throughout Jane's novels which reflect the mores of the time and were a quintessential part of a successful society evening.  janeausten
 

zondag 12 januari 2014

I walked in the house, not expecting my sister to seize me and start exclaiming that Mr. Bingley had returned to Netherfield at last

 
Hét bewijs dat er nog altijd Mr Darcy's rondlopen op deze aardbol (en gekke families als de Bennets): http://m.imgur.com/a/dGapG

Lyme Regis

 
On Christmas Day we visited Lyme Regis, a small town in Dorset, by the seaside. I was most excited about this, as I've never been to Lyme before, and anyone who's read Jane Austen's Persuasion will know it as the setting for her novel.

donderdag 9 januari 2014

Pride and Prejudice

Elizabeth Bennet & Mr. Darcy - Netherfield Ball
Played by Jennifer Ehle & Colin Firth — bij Jane Austen's House Museum.
 
 
Elizabeth Bennet & Mr. Darcy

 
 
Elizabeth Bennet - day dress, spencer & bonnet
Played by Jennifer Ehle — bij Jane Austen's House Museum.
 

Elizabeth Bennet - day dress
Played by Jennifer Ehle
 

Jane Bennet - day dress, spencer & cloak
Played by Susannah Harker — bij Jane Austen's House Museum.

bbc/drama/prideandprejudice/

 

woensdag 8 januari 2014

Walking Jane Austen’s London

Walking Jane Austen’s London is a book that should be in every Janeite’s nonfiction section of their library. This book truly is as the front cover describes—a tour guide. With short and interesting anecdotes for each historical place passed (but without the rushed pace of the tour and droning voice of the guide) as well as many pictures of the Regency world then and now, Walking Jane Austen’s London captures the attention and provides a fun activity for any Austen lover.

 
23 Hans Place: Jane Austen stayed a house on this site off Sloane Street with her brother Henry in 1814-15
 
Walk 1—Sloane Street to Kensington Palace Gardens
  • The room of her brother’s home where Jane Austen did most of her letter-writing and proof reading in.
 
  • Kensington Gardens, where Elinor (from Sense and Sensibility) took a stroll–although the beauty would be somewhat marred by her companions, Mrs. Jennings and Lucy Steele!
Lady Brownlow, in her ” Reminiscences of a Septuagenarian,” tells us that after the Peace of Amiens, in 1802, she here met the celebrated Madame Recamier, who created a sensation at the West-end, partly by her beauty, but still more by her dress, which was vastly unlike the unsophisticated style and poke bonnets of the English ladies. “She appeared in Kensington Gardens à l’antique, a muslin gown clinging to her form like the folds of drapery on a statue; her hair in a plait at the back, and falling in small ringlets round her face, and greasy with huile antique; a large veil thrown over her head completed her attire, which not unnaturally caused her to be followed and stared at.” No doubt, dressed in such a costume, and at such a period, Madame Recamier might well have been the “cynosure of neighbouring eyes.” janeausten/kensington-gardens

Walk 2—Marylebone and Bond Street
  • Bond Street (present in many Regency novels), the parading ground of the dandies, beaux, and the Prince Regent.  londons-bond-streets-old-and-new
  • Wimpole Street, where Maria Rushworth (from Mansfield Park) lived before running off with Henry Crawford. wimpole-street
Walk 3—Mayfair
  • The home of Jane’s publisher, John Murray, who was (in her opinion) “…a Rogue of course, but a civil one.”
  • The residence of the fashionable and well-dressed dandy, Beau Brummell.
Walk 4—Leicester Square to Green Park


  • Almack’s Assembly was the exclusive “marriage mart” of the ton. While potential spouses for your sons and daughters could be found elsewhere, the “best” ones could ideally be found at Almack’s, where the average, everyday riffraff need not apply. Who wouldn’t want their daughter to find a wealthy, well-connected—perhaps titled—spouse to enrich the family fortunes? Matchmaking mothers everywhere yearned to have their marriageable offspring included among the exclusive company of Almack’s. regency-rites-almacks-assembly-rooms
 
  • White’s, the most exclusive of the Regency clubs and location of the famous ‘Beau’ Window, place to sit and be admired. This was also where Henry Austen was invited for a ball, along with a prince, a king, and an emperor! White's is a gentleman's club in St James's Street, London. It is the oldest and most exclusive gentleman's club in London.[1][2] It gained a reputation in the 18th century for both its exclusivity and the often raffish behaviour of its members. wiki/White's
Walk 5—Soho to the British Museum


  • The British Museum, which has Regency and Georgian exhibits, as well as a tearoom.
  • Turk’s Head coffee house, the favorite haunt of Doctor Johnson and Joshua Reynolds.
 
Read more on: london-coffee-houses.
The Jamaica Wine House was originally The Turks Head, London’s first coffee house that opened between 1650 and 1652.
 
Walk 6—Westminster to Charing Cross
wiki/Poets'_Corner
  • The Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, where Jane Austen has a plaque in her honor.
  • The site where Jane Austen found a portrait that “was” Jane Bingley (from Pride and Prejudice).
Walk 7—Somerset House to Lincoln’s Inn Fields

Drury Lane 1808
  • Drury Lane Theatre, the lobby where Willoughby learns of Marianne’s illness from Sir John Middleton (from Sense and Sensibility).
  •  Lincoln’s Inn (one of four historic Inns of Court), where Jane Austen’s friend and romantic interest, Tom Lefroy, returned to his legal studies after his time with relatives (and Jane).
  • lincolnsinn
Walk 8—Temple Bar to London Bridge

  • The original Twining’s teashop, where the Austen family bought their tea.

 
  • St. Clement’s Church, where Lydia and Mr. Wickham joined hands in marriage—albeit reluctantly on his part (from Pride and Prejudice).
austenprose

Wikimapia is an online collaborative mapping system that combines google maps with a wiki system, allowing users to add information. Click here to see an interactive image of a portion of London that shows Hyde Park, Mayfair, and Green Park.
map /darton1817/darton

maandag 6 januari 2014

Jane Austen and Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night is January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany, and the official end of Christmas and was often celebrated with games, charades, punch and of course, the Twelfth Night Cake.
During Jane Austen’s life time, the celebration of Twelfth Night was at the height its of popularity. The day and night of the 6th was a time for masks and play acting.
The cake was part of this day rather than the now traditional Christmas evening. Twelfth day cakes were light and covered with coloured sugar, and they contained a bean and a pea. In France this is still a current tradition with a porcelain fève or bean being used instead for the fête des rois. The idea is that the man who found the bean would become king for the night, and the woman who found the pea would become queen. There are variants of this wherein the king and queen could choose a partner for the evening, which could provide an interesting opportunity for romance!
These cakes were quite difficult to make and were often purchased from a local confectioners. In Bath, decorated cakes with Plaster of Paris figures and crowns were displayed in confectioners' shop windows which were illuminated by small oil lamps. In the winter evenings people would go from shop to shop admiring the displays.
Then as now, the end of Twelfth Night dictated that all the decorations should be taken down and the greenery burned or ones house risked bad luck for the rest of the year.
Why not create your own Twelfth day cake and display it on our fantastic blue rose cake stand?
jane-austen-and-twelfth-night
Culture/LiturgicalYear/recipes
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Today is Epiphany, Twelfth Night – the final feast of the Christmas season before all of the Christmas decorations are taken down on January 6th– which is actually called Twelfth day.
In fact, if you have any more room, you can stuff in a bit of Twelfth Cake – which contained a coin or silver trinket or for the less well off, a pea. Whoever found it could be lord of the manor for the night ;-) These often elegantly decorated cakes were an important element in the celebrations for the feast of the Epiphany.

Like most of our Christmas traditions, it’s all a bit of a mish-mash. It seems likely that the present day Christmas cake has its origins in the Twelfth Cake and now the coins and trinkets are more likely to be hidden in the Christmas Pud.
So just one more slice of cake and then it really is all over…
And for those who like recreating the traditional, here’s the earliest printed recipe (1803) for Twelfth Cake by John Mollard, the Jamie Oliver of his day, from his best-seller “The Art of Cookery”.
epiphany-party

twelfth cake recipe - The art of cookery

zondag 5 januari 2014

Pride, prejudice and an Irish connection that Austen could never have imagined

Maggie Armstrong – 04 January 2014

It would be such fun to go to Pride and Prejudice in the Gate with Jane Austen. The book is 200 years old this year and you would get to ask her about posthumous celebrity. You would get to ask her what she meant by having Mr Darcy describe the Irish as "savages". And you'd get to ask her what she thought of three of her favourite nieces ending up in Ireland.

Mr Darcy's slight gives us insight into Jane Austen's own prejudices. When Elizabeth first shirks Mr Darcy at a local dance, in an intrepid demonstration of "treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen", Darcy is encouraged to jig along to some Irish and Scottish airs. "Every savage can dance," he snaps. The comment from literature's worst-tempered hero shows Ireland was a colony Jane Austen knew little about and most definitely feared. Her brother Henry was sent here under General Cornwallis to deal with the 1798 Rebellion.


As a maiden aunt, Jane Austen dispensed advice to younger family members. When her niece Anna was working on a novel, she told her in a chary letter not to even write about Ireland, "as you know nothing of the Manners there". Had she not died at 41, Austen would surely have worried about her niece Cassandra marrying an Irishman, and what that meant for the family.

 
Edward Austen Knight.

Marianne, Louisa and Cassandra Knight were the youngest daughters of Austen's brother Edward Knight. Their stories of privilege and displacement to Ireland add to what little we know of Jane Austen's short life, and deepen our knowledge of the Famine and the Land Wars they lived through.

Dr Sophia Hillan, who discovered their tombstones on a hilltop in Donegal, describes their life here as their "long years of exile". Her book May, Lou & Cass: Jane Austen's Nieces in Ireland is interesting for Austen fans and a sturdy read for anyone curious about the 19th Century.

The girls grew up in a Palladian mansion very different to Jane Austen's rectory in Hampshire. They called her "poor Aunt Jane". While Maiden Aunt Jane's role in the family was to read to them and supervise their needlework, we know from her letters that she also would have been a great fun house guest. On one visit, she planned to "eat ice & drink French wine". Marianne remembers how she wrote.

"Aunt Jane would sit quietly working beside the fire in the Library, saying nothing for a good while and then would suddenly burst out laughing, jump up and run across to a table to write something down and then come back to the fire, and go on quietly working as before." By working, she means darning. Aspiring writers (men too) might try that out.


In 1837, Cassandra Knight, the Jane Bennet of the sisters, married the dashing Lord George Hill, a young Irish nobleman stationed in Dublin Castle as Comptroller of the Household of the Lord Lieutenant. The match took her to Dublin and then the depths of Donegal when he bought a property near the sea.

Lord George was a Gaelic scholar and reformist, and chairman of the Relief Commission in Donegal during the Famine. He built the Gweedore Hotel, which still stands.
After Cassandra's death in childbirth (the daughter, little Cassandra, would become a Gaelic speaker and social reformer), Louisa married Lord George. Described as "nun-like" by one novelist, she moved to Gweedore in 1847 at the height of the Famine and became involved with relief works.

The niece to have most absorbed Jane Austen's spirit, or its avatar the boisterous Lizzie Bennet, was Marianne, her god-daughter and a witty, free-spirited gal.
Austen took her to the theatre aged 12, and left her a gold chain in her will.
She moved here after Lord George's death aged 83, undertaking a storm-tossed journey from Kent to Donegal to care for Louisa. The two grew old together, and Marianne lived with niece Cassandra until aged 95.
Sophia Hillan found the graves of these characters clambering with nettles and wild flowers. Theirs is a story of how the landowning class came to regard their exile as their home. And they give us just a little bit of ownership over their minder Jane Austen's genius.

Irish Independent independent.ie
---------------------------------
 
Hillan tells the sometimes complicated but fascinating tale of Edward Knight and his wife, Elizabeth’s children, who featured  so frequently in Jane Austen’s letters. She concentrates on the lives of Louisa (Lou-below) who was Jane’s goddaughter, Marianne (May) and Cassandra (Cass), but of course, during the course of the tale, we hear much about the lives of the other seven children and their aunts and uncles.
Louisa and Cassandra married the same man, Lord George Hill of Gweedore in Donegal. He married first Cassandra who died in 1842, of puerperal fever after the birth of her last child . In 1847, after she had cared for her sister’s children for five years, Lord George Hill married Louisa. This was marriage that caused much discussion and distress as such marriages were then unlawful in Victorian England. Indeed, the couple travelled to Denmark so that they could be married, as it would have been impossible for them to have been married in England, as marriages between brother and sisters-in-law were then considered illegal on the grounds of consanguinity.
The story of their time in Ireland where Lord George was seem as an improving but strict landowner is truly fascinating and absorbing. Sophia Hillan writes with great insight and sensitivity on the terrible time of the Irish Famines and the actions of landlords whose acts, which now seem cruel and incomprehensible. These acts  were often prompted by the desire for efficiency but  ultimately failed, tragically, to understand the customs, habits and nature of the Irish over whom the Anglo-Irish landlords possessed such power. The later part of the book deals with this subject magnificently and I found myself rapidly turning the pages,desperate to know the outcome of Lord George’s actions.

The sister I enjoyed reading about most was Marianne (May-shown above). Her story could have been heartbreaking, but her strength of character and bravery made it one of triumph over adversity. She never married but devoted herself to looking after her father and then,after his death,  her brothers. She did indeed begin life as an Emma Woodhouse figure, the daughter of a great house, Godmersham in Kent, administering the household and overseeing the care of the poor in the parish under her care after the marriage of her sister Fanny. She eventually moved from Godmersham to Chawton where she lived with her brother Charles Bridges Knight, who was rector of Chawton, and like her Aunt Jane, she seems to have enjoyed her quiet, settled life in that village. But she ended her life as a Miss Bates, impoverished and without a real home to call her own, settling in Ballyarr in Donegal, with her widowed sister, Lou, where she eventually died. I loved her character, with its refusal to be cowed by circumstances, her positive outlook and above all, her humour. She did indeed seem to inherit some of her Aunt Jane’s strongest character traits. I would love someone to reproduce in facsimile her Garden Book which she kept while she lived in Chawton.
I would urge all of you to buy this book, because the story of these sisters and their lives in England and most of all 19th century Ireland is so vibrantly presented to us by Sophia Hillan. I’ve read it twice now- the second time to savour all teh twists and turns of  the fascinating tale. It is available as a Kindle edition if you are running out of books space, or prefer e-books. I am certain you will not be disappointed by this wonderfully written book.
 

woensdag 1 januari 2014

Life Downstairs/ servents

Those familiar with “Pride and Prejudice” know that, midway through the Jane Austen novel, Elizabeth Bennet embarks on an expedition to Derbyshire with her aunt and uncle, where she and the Gardiners visit the magisterial grounds of Pemberley, Mr. Darcy’s estate. But few readers wonder who looks after the four Gardiner children while their parents are away. We read that the little ones stayed behind in Longbourn, with the Bennets, but, swept up in the impending romance between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, we don’t give these practical arrangements much thought. But in Baker’s retelling, which is centered on the Bennets’ young housemaid Sarah, the Midlands trip is the cause of “a deal of extra trouble, and noise, and meals, and washing…. shitty nappies, the wetted beds: the work.” Read more on: newyorker/life-downstairs-the-popularity-of-the-literature-of-servants

janeaustensworld/servants/
theresestenzel
Downstairs-Downton-Abbey-How-real-servants-worked-14-hour-days-maids-confined-virgin-quarters.

JANE AUSTEN/ WEBSITES

Jane Austen

Jane Austen

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