Because of laws restricting festivites at Christmastime, Christmas carols weren’t as common in the Regency Era as they are now. However, country people continued to sing carols in their homes and sometimes in churches. In 1822, shortly after Jane Austen’s death, Davies Gilbert, a native of Cornwall, published a collection of carols from his childhood in the West of England, which wasn’t too far from where the Austens lived. (You can find the entire volume here.)
I suspect that Jane may have been familiar with a few of these carols. Here is the first in the volume,entitled “The Lord at First Did Adam Make.”
In all, the carols he shared were as follows (click on each title to link to the words to each carol):
Jane Austen was born 16 December 1775 in Hampshire, England. Birthdays were important events in Jane Austen’s life – those of others perhaps more so than her own. The first of her letters which has come down to us was a birthday letter, addressed to her sister Cassandra, who had turned 23 that day. “I hope you will live twenty-three years longer,” Jane Austen wrote on 9 January 1796, immediately adding that “Mr Tom Lefroy’s birthday was yesterday”, and that in celebration of this, they had “had an exceeding good ball last night” (Letter 1). Tom Lefroy was a young man Jane Austen was very much in love with at that time, though he would have been too young for anything serious to have come of it. Another birthday letter to Cassandra survives, written three years later: “I wish you Joy of your Birthday twenty times over” (Letter 17, 8−9 January 1799).
Read more: blog.oup/12/birthday-letters-jane-austen
About 600 pieces of music that belonged to Jane Austen have been made available online for the first time. The Pride and Prejudice author, who also played piano and sang, copied music by hand into personal albums and collected sheet music. They were digitised by the University of Southampton's Hartley Library. Project leader and professor of music Jeanice Brooks said they would help to explain the "musical environment that fed the novelist's imagination". She added that the novels were "full of musical scenes", and the collection would provide music historians with a "unique glimpse of the musical life of an extended gentry family in the years around 1800".
In all, 18 albums of music that belonged to the 19th Century writer and her relations have been digitised. A university spokesman said they reflected the personal tastes of their owners "just as a digital music collection on a mobile phone or MP3 device would today". They include the music for the traditional Welsh song Nos Galan, better known today as Christmas song Deck the Halls.
Austen's sisters-in-law and nieces also contributed material. It is thought the collection was inherited by the writer's older brother Edward Austen Knight, and brought to the family library at Chawton House in Hampshire by his daughter Fanny Knight, Lady Knatchbull. Diane Bilbey, from Jane Austen's House Museum, said: "We are delighted that this collection can be shared with so many through digital means, and that its availability will benefit researchers and musicians alike." bbc/uk-england-hampshire
The seventh child and second daughter of Cassandra and George Austen, Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, England. Jane's parents were well-respected community members. Her father served as the Oxford-educated rector for a nearby Anglican parish. The family was close and the children grew up in an environment that stressed learning and creative thinking. When Jane was young, she and her siblings were encouraged to read from their father's extensive library. The children also authored and put on plays and charades. biography./jane-austen
From: austenprose/a-jane-austen-christmas-celebrating-the-season-of-romance-, Never really realized that Jane Austen first met Tom LeFroy when he was visiting the area around Christmastime. I also never realized that Harris Bigg-Wither proposed to her while the Austen sisters were staying with his family over the holidays. Understanding some of these moments in the context of the season helped to give them an intimacy that hadn’t been there before—at least not for me.
