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Jane Austen in Perspective: An introduction to Jane Austen

Study Guide
for students

The people in Jane Austen's life -
The neighbours: the Digweeds et al.

The range of the Austens’ social activities, and the Austens’ interaction with the neighbours, were limited by the distance that could be covered by carriage and horse. Around Steventon there were the Chutes of The Vyne, the Boltons of Hackwood Park, the Terrys of Dummer, the Bramstons of Oakley Hall, the Portals of Laverstoke, Mr Holder who rented Ashe Park House from the Portals, the Lefroys of Ashe Rectory, the Biggs of Manydown, the Digweeds of Steventon, and the Harwoods of Deane.

The first available letter from Jane Austen tells us about one of the most interesting occasions for meeting:

[W]e had an exceeding good ball last night ... we had the Grants, St Johns, Lady Rivers, her three daughters and a son, Mr and Miss Heathcote, Mrs Lefevre, two Mr Watkins, Mr J Portal, Miss Deanes, two Miss Ledgers, and a tall clergyman who came with them. ... I danced twice with Warren ... and once with Mr Charles Watkins, and, to my inexpressible astonishment, I entirely escaped John Lyford. I was forced to fight hard for it, however. ... We had a visit yesterday morning from Mr Benjamin Portal, whose eyes are as handsome as ever’. (Letter # 1)¹

Jane Austen also had contact with various neighbours for professional reasons. The John Lyford at the ball was the son of old Mr Lyford, the chief medical man in Basingstoke. James Edward Austen-Leigh (Jane Austen’s nephew who inherited the Leigh-Perrot fortune) writes of the latter:

I remember him a fine old man, with such a flaxen wig as is not to be seen or conceived, by this generation. This wig he used to ‘dispart [sic] with biennially’ (as Sir Walter Scott expresses it) and to bestow the reversion of it every second year on an old man in our parish (of Steventon) as tall and fine-looking as himself, producing thereby a ludicrous resemblance between the peasant and the doctor.²

We hear of old Mr Lyford visiting the Austens:

He came while we were at dinner, and partook of our elegant entertainment. I was not ashamed at asking him to sit down to table, for we had some pease-soup, a sparerib, and a pudding. He wants my mother to look yellow and to throw out a rash, but she will do neither. (Letter # 13)

The Digweeds rented Steventon’s grey Tudor manor house, and Jane Austen was acquainted with the four sons. From 1798 until his marriage in 1808, Harry Digweed was joint tenant of Steventon with his brother William-Francis. He married Miss Jane Terry and they moved to Alton.

Jane’s views of Mr and Mrs Harry Digweed are expressed in her letters.

Mrs H Digweed looks forward with great satisfaction to our being her neighbours [in Chawton]– I wd have her enjoy the idea to the utmost, as I suspect there will not [be] much in the reality’. (Letter # 63)

In contrast, Jane looks forward to associating with Harry Digweed’s bailiff and his wife, who are said to be a very ‘good sort of people’. Jane appears to have thought Mrs Digweed to be fatuous, dull and selfish. ‘Dear Mrs Digweed! I cannot bear that she should not be foolishly happy after a ball.’3 Mrs Digweed’s favourite expression was ‘Beyond anything & everything’. (Letter # 79, Note 10) She had been sent a parcel which she opened in front of Jane and others, and Jane Austen reports; ‘... she desired me to make her best Thanks &c. to Miss Lloyd for it. – Martha may guess how full of wonder & gratitude she was.’ (Letter # 79) She had found Emma very dull indeed and was barely able to read it through, though her sister, Miss Terry, admired Emma very much. (Letters, pp. 517 & 577) Mrs Digweed was indeed thoughtless with this sister. ‘Miss Terry was to have spent this week with her Sister, but as usual it is put off.’ Moreover, she could be capricious with the servants. ‘Mrs Digweed parts with both Hannah & old Cook, the former will not give up her Lover, who is a Man of bad Character, the Latter is guilty only of being unequal to anything.’ (Letter # 145)

Jane appears to think more kindly of Harry Digweed, though not according either him or his wife the ability to add wit to a dinner party. (Letter # 144) Despite Harry Digweed’s apparent prosperity at this time, he and his wife and most of their children ended their days in exile in Paris, victims of economic decline.

The Biggs and Lefroys became special friends for Jane Austen, as other members describe in these pages. The friendship with the Bigg sisters lasted the whole of her life. Alethea is mentioned in the first letter we have, in January, 1796, as dancing with Jane’s brother James at the ball. (Letter # 1) Jane is enough of a friend to be in Alethea’s confidence ahead of the time of the proposed wedding of her sister Elizabeth to Mr Heathcote, and to be gossiping about another proposed wedding match. (Letters # 54 & 61) And in January, 1817, one of the last letters we have is written to Alethea in gay spirits: ‘one circumstance my dear Alethea, which I must confess has given me considerable astonishment & some alarm – Your having left your best Gown at Steventon. ... I would lay any wager that you have been sorry you left it’. (Letter # 150c)

Claire Tomalin gives us the background to the Terrys:

[They] were an old-established family, with a very handsome small manor house in Dummer, within easy walking distance across the fields from Steventon. Thirteen Terrys were born there to the squire and his wife between the mid-1770s and the 1790s, and a good many of them figure in Jane’s letters. As a group, she called them ‘noisy’; but she was on friendly terms with the girls and danced with the boys. [One of them,] Michael ... became a clergyman and was later engaged to Jane’s niece Anna. The second Terry girl in due course read Emma and particularly admired Mrs Elton; and two of her sisters married neighbouring squires’ sons, one a Digweed at Steventon, and the other a Harwood at Deane.⁴

Some of Jane Austen’s plots in her novels are informed by the events of her life and her neighbours. Reverend John Harwood expected to gain an inheritance of about Ł1,200 a year from the property at Deane on the death of his father. He and the family were shocked to discover that his father had incurred many debts which must be repaid and, as the eldest son, he was responsible. John Harwood had been expected to marry Elizabeth Heathcote (formerly Elizabeth Bigg, sister of Alethea) after her husband had died in 1802, but their hopes were now ruined. His mother and unmarried sister were impoverished and he spent the rest of his life attempting to pay off the debts. (Letter # 80, Note 4) In addition, it was expected that Alethea and her widowed sister, Mrs Heathcote, would move from their home at Manydown on Harris Bigg-Wither’s moving in with his wife and children. Alethea and her mother moved to Winchester and Jane and Cassandra visited them there. (Letter # 81, Note 1) These events remind us of the circumstances of the Dashwoods in the opening scenes in Sense and Sensibility and of Mrs Bennet’s fears in Pride and Prejudice.

Miss Benn is often mentioned in the letters from Chawton. Mary Benn was the unmarried sister of Reverend John Benn and lived in very poor circumstances. We hear of her being admired by the gentlemen and of visiting or dining with the Austens at Chawton Cottage. (Letters # 75, 78, 79, 80 & 85) Her fur tippet was almost worn out and a present of a shawl was spoken of – but not too fine or she would not wear it. Yet, the shawl turned out to be a great success: ‘Miss Benn wore her new shawl last night, sat in it the whole eveng & seemed to enjoy it very much’. (Letters # 77 & 78) Jane assures Cassandra that Miss Benn is not being neglected by her neighbours – on different days Miss Benn was due to dine at Mr Papillon’s, with Captain and Mrs Clement, with the Austens again and with Mrs Digweed. Eventually she had to move to lodgings and Jane worries about how she would be entertained when Cassandra has left Chawton. (Letters # 91 & 92) Jane’s last direct reference to her in the letters is: ‘Remember me most kindly to everybody, and Miss Benn besides’. (Letter # 127) Miss Benn was buried in Chawton aged 46 in January, 1816. (Letters p. 496)

The various fates of Jane Austen’s neighbours are a reflection of the social mobility of the time. Many of the families in Hampshire were new arrivals, not unlike the Austens themselves. At Hackwood Park, Lord Bolton had obtained his brand new title by marrying one of the illegitimate daughters of the fifth Duke of Bolton. William Chute had succeeded his father as owner of The Vyne in 1790, entered Parliament and shortly afterwards married Elizabeth, a daughter of the Member for Devizes in Wiltshire. Mr Holder had made his fortune in the West Indies. On the other hand, the younger Harwood sank with his wife from land-owner to humble yeoman farmer.5 These were the families Jane Austen knew well. She observed their situations closely. Yet her novels are couched in such genteel terms that on first reading it is easy to miss the informed, insightful comments on the transience of financial security and social position.

Penny Nash

Letter numbers from Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, OUP, 1995.
The Vyne Hunt, J E Austen-Leigh, printed for private circulation, as quoted in Constance Hill, Jane Austen: Her Homes & Her Friends, ‘Ch. VII: Friends and Neighbours, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/hill/austen/homes07.html.
A Portrait of Jane Austen, David Cecil, Penguin, London, 1980, p. 165
Jane Austen: A Life, Claire Tomalin, Viking, London, 1997, p. 90
Tomalin, p. 90

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10 April 2007

The people in Jane Austen's life - The neighbours: the Digweeds et al.

The people in Jane Austen's life -
The neighbours: the Digweeds et al.