Jane Austen’s links to Bath are well known, with the area awash with her 250th anniversary celebrations this year, but can Andrew Swift persuade you that one of history’s most famous authors might have actually preferred Bristol to its sandy-coloured city neighbour? He’s been poring over Austen’s pages to share some convincing evidence…
Bath figures prominently in two of Jane Austen’s novels and the city makes much of the association, with a Jane Austen Centre, a Jane Austen Festival and a good deal else besides. As the 250th anniversary of her birth approaches, her links with the city will be celebrated as never before.
Bristol, on the other hand, doesn’t seem likely to get much of a look in, which is a pity.
Although she makes only a few tantalising references to Bristol, these are enough to suggest not only that she knew Bristol – and especially Clifton – well, but also that she may even have preferred it to Bath.
Bristol first crops up in Lesley Castle, which she wrote around 1792 when she was 16. The sister of one of the characters takes her to Bristol, for the sake of her health, after the death of her fiancé. Unfortunately, ‘the air of the Bristol downs, healthy as it is’, is not ‘able to drive poor Henry from her remembrance’. To make matters worse, they arrive in February – ‘so unfashionable a season of the year, that we have actually seen but one genteel family since we came’.
Whether Jane Austen had visited Bristol when she wrote Lesley Castle is impossible to say. We do know, from surviving letters, however, that she visited Bath in 1797 and 1799, staying for over a month on each occasion. She almost certainly visited Bristol during these visits, for Northanger Abbey, which she completed in 1799, displays not only an intimate knowledge of Bath but also more than a passing acquaintance with Bristol.
A ‘heavenly drive’ to Bristol
Northanger Abbey’s central character is an impressionable young woman called Catherine Morland, who, while staying in Bath with her family, makes the acquaintance of the Thorpes. John Thorpe invites her to join them for a ‘heavenly drive’ to Bristol. They will, he tells her, ‘drive directly to Clifton and dine there; and, as soon as dinner is over, if there is time for it, go on to Kingsweston’.
When Catherine’s brother doubts their being ‘able to do so much’, John Thorpe scoffs that, ‘we shall be able to do ten times more. Kingsweston! Aye, and Blaize Castle too, and anything else we can hear of’. When Catherine asks him about Blaise Castle, he declares it ‘the finest place in England’, the oldest castle ‘in the kingdom’, with ‘towers and long galleries … by dozens’.
Catherine is destined never to see it, however, for they get no farther than Keynsham before realising they have set off too late and heading back to Bath.
The Thorpes set off for Bristol again a few days later, but Catherine is unable to join them. This time, they leave early, and, after driving directly to the York Hotel in Clifton, walk down to the Pump Room, where they taste the water and buy some ‘purses and spars’. Purses or reticules were indispensable fashion accessories and spars were quartz crystals cut from St Vincent’s Rocks. They then adjourn ‘to eat ice at a pastry-cook’s’ before hurrying back to the hotel for an early dinner, followed by ‘a delightful drive back’ to Bath.
Blaise Castle is never mentioned again, and Catherine is never disabused of the notion that, far from being the oldest castle in the kingdom, it is a folly built some 30 years earlier. Nor, for that matter, is the unwary reader; it remains an in-joke shared by Jane and those readers familiar with Bristol.
Escaping to Clifton
In 1801, Jane’s father, the Rector of Steventon in Hampshire, decided to appoint his son as curate and move to Bath with his wife and daughters. They lived in Bath for almost five years, but, as almost all Jane’s letters from this period have been lost, we know virtually nothing about what she did during this time.
In July 1806, she left, with her mother and sister Cassandra, for Clifton, where they stayed for several weeks before going on to visit relatives in Gloucestershire. Looking back on her departure from Bath, she wrote to Cassandra, ‘It will be two years tomorrow since we left Bath for Clifton, with what happy of feelings of Escape!’
This comment has been taken to indicate that she disliked Bath and much preferred Clifton. Perhaps she did – but this remark needs to be set in context. For most of the time the Austens were in Bath, they lived at one of the best addresses in town – Sydney Place.
After moving to the equally imposing Green Park Buildings, however, Jane’s father died.
Without his stipend, the family found themselves in straitened circumstances and were forced to look for cheaper lodgings. They ended up in Trim Street – an out-of-the-way place which Jane’s mother had done ‘everything in her power to avoid’. In letters to Cassandra, Jane lamented their new-found poverty and the prospect of spending the rest of their lives staying with amenable relations.
Given the circumstances, it is hardly surprising she was glad to leave Bath, but why they went to Clifton, where they lodged or what they did there are unknown.
Jane’s fears for the future proved groundless. In 1809, one of her brothers settled them in a cottage at Chawton in Hampshire, where she wrote the rest of her novels. Whether she ever returned to Clifton is again unknown, although two letters she wrote in 1814 indicate that she had fond memories of it.
On 23 June, she wrote to Cassandra that a friend of theirs had ‘taken a House at Clifton, – Richmond Terrace – & she is as glad of the change as even You & I should be – or almost’. Just over two months later, in a letter to a friend who was visiting Bath, she wrote, ‘I hope you will see Clifton’.
Persuaded, yet?
The only other novel in which Jane Austen mentions Clifton is Persuasion, and then only in passing. Bristol, however, appears in Emma, courtesy of Augusta Hawkins, who marries the Rev Philip Elton. Augusta’s father had been a merchant ‘in the very heart of Bristol’, while her brother-in-law has a grand house called Maple Grove in a salubrious suburb which, although unnamed, sounds very like Clifton. Not only does Augusta epitomise the vulgar affluence Jane clearly despised, but there are strong hints that her wealth derives from slavery.
Jane Austen started writing Emma in January 1814. The previous July, in a letter to her brother Frank, she had noted that Samuel Blackall, the Rector of North Cadbury in Somerset, ‘was married at Clifton to a Miss Lewis, whose father had been late of Antigua’, and added that she ‘should very much like to know what sort of woman she is.’ Jane was wrong on one point: Miss Lewis’s father was not from Antigua but from Jamaica, where he owned a large plantation worked by enslaved labour. He also owned a large house in Clifton, and Susannah’s dowry was so generous that her husband immediately laid out £2,800 on a magnificent new rectory.
Jane Austen had first met Samuel Blackall in 1798, and it seems that, despite her avowal of a mutual indifference between them, he was seen as a potential suitor. There have even been suggestions that he may have been Jane’s one true love, but that – possibly because his prospects at the time were not that promising – the relationship was broken off. The truth of the matter is unlikely ever to be known, nor is there any evidence that Jane ever met Susannah, but the parallels between the Rev Blackall’s marriage and that of the Rev Elton suggest that the betrothal of her former suitor was very much in her mind when she sat down to plan Emma.
Bristol may not figure on the list of places devotees of Jane Austen’s novels will be aiming to visit in this anniversary year, but, given her ample, if somewhat hazy, associations with Clifton, there seems every reason to include it. An excursion to Clifton was de rigueur for many visitors to Georgian Bath; their modern counterparts, seeking to recapture something of the spirit of Regency England, could do no better than follow their example.
Discover more of Andrew Swift’s work at akemanpress.com. Images provided courtesy of Andrew Swift (except inset above).
