her sensitive spirit: ‘Nobody meant to be unkind, but nobody put themselves out of their way to secure her comfort.’28
One of the main themes of the novel is the importance of home. The word is repeated over 140 times in the course of the narrative. What does ‘home’ mean? Is it a place or is it a family? What happens when a home is left unprotected or badly governed? When Fanny returns home to Portsmouth she has an epiphany that shakes her to the core:
Her eagerness, her impatience, her longing to be with them, were such as to bring a line or two of Cowper’s Tirocinium for ever before her. ‘With what intense desire she wants her home,’ was continually on her tongue, as the truest description of a yearning which she could not suppose any school-boy’s bosom to feel more keenly.
When she had been coming to Portsmouth, she had loved to call it her home, had been fond of saying that she was going home; the word had been very dear to her; and so it still was, but it must be applied to Mansfield. That was now the home. Portsmouth was Portsmouth; Mansfield was home.29
The literary reference is crucial. William Cowper was Jane Austen’s favourite poet. The poem to which she refers here, Tirocinium, was extremely well known. It bids a father not to send his son away to school, but to educate him at home so that the natural ties of affection are not damaged and so that the father’s spiritual and moral guidance will be uppermost.
Why hire a lodging in a house unknown
For one whose tenderest thoughts all hover round your own?
This second weaning, needless as it is,
How does it lacerate both your heart and his!
The indented stick, that loses day by day,
Notch after notch, till all are smoothed away,
Bears witness, long ere his dismission come,
With what intense desire he wants his home.30
Indeed, Mansfield Park shares many of the concerns of Tirocinium. It is a profound exploration of the duty of parents to shape their children’s moral and spiritual development. It includes a father who is emotionally distant, his children ‘chill’d into respect’. It reflects on the importance of home, the nature of good education, the alienation of sons from their father, the importance of conscience: ‘In early days the conscience has in most/A quickness, which in later life is lost.’ At the centre of the book is a timid, shy displaced child with an unshakeable sense of conscience.
Fanny is a heroine who is deeply sensitive, and loves nature, poetry and biography, especially Shakespeare, Crabbe and Cowper. She is religious and her spirits are easily depressed. As well as quoting from Tirocinium she also loves Cowper’s The Task, a poem inspired by his muse, Lady Austen (a distant relative of Jane’s), an elegant and attractive widow who set him ‘a task’ to write a poem about a ‘sofa’. This extraordinary poem in six books is the eighteenth century’s great celebration of the retired and religious life. ‘God made the country, and man made the Town’ is among its most famous lines. Cowper undertakes a fierce assault on contemporary society, condemning the slave trade, French despotism, fashionable manners and lukewarm clergymen. ‘England, with all thy faults, I love thee still –/My country!’ writes Cowper, and the sentiments could have been Austen’s own.
It was Henry Austen, Jane’s brother, who revealed that Cowper was her favourite poet. But one could have guessed as much from her portrayal of Fanny Price and of Anne Elliot in Persuasion. As much admired by the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth as by Jane Austen, Cowper was a brilliant but deeply troubled man, a depressive who tried to kill himself at least three times and was for a time confined to a lunatic asylum before finding refuge from his despair in a profound Christian faith. He was a friend of slave trader turned Evangelical preacher John Newton, the author of ‘Amazing Grace’. Cowper’s poetry was pioneering because he wrote about everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. For Jane Austen, his work embodied love of the country as Dr Johnson’s embodied the energetic life of the town.31 He transformed English poetry rather in the way that Jane Austen herself would transform English fiction.
Though Jane Austen was to return to the theme of the adopted child in Emma, there she does not enter the mind of the child as she does in Mansfield Park. In that novel, Fanny’s transference into the great house is a blessing and a final redemption, especially to Sir Thomas: ‘Fanny was indeed the daughter that he wanted. His charitable kindness had been rearing a prime comfort for himself. His liberality had a rich repayment.’32 The child of the impoverished branch of the family redeems the materially more prosperous but morally bankrupt household. By accepting Fanny, the Bertrams become more human.
Mansfield Park is not a retelling of the story of Jane Austen’s wealthy relatives, the Knights of Godmersham Park. Her brother Edward Austen, who became Edward Knight, is not the ‘original’ of Fanny Price. But the theme of the bond between branches of a family with very different prospects came close to Austen’s own experience. The liberality of the Knights eventually made it possible for her to become a novelist. Mrs Knight, her only patron, was described by her as ‘gentle and kind and friendly’.33 And, crucially, it was through the Knights that Edward was to give his mother and sisters a home. Had he not been adopted, he would not have grown up to inherit the great house at Chawton, from where he was able to give his poor relations the modest property near by in which Jane lived the last eight years of her life and wrote her novels.
Shawls had been hand-woven in Kashmir since the eleventh century. The finest examples were made under Mughal patronage to be worn at court or presented as ostentatious gifts. They could take many months to complete, requiring the skills of spinners, dyers, pattern designers, craftsmen responsible for arranging the warp and weft, weavers and finishers. The best were made from the underbelly fleece of the wild central Asian goat, whereas pashmina, second-grade wool, came from domesticated goats. Many such shawls were brought back to Europe, where they became a popular fashion item in Jane Austen’s lifetime. Western demand duly affected Kashmiri production: by the time the shawl illustrated here was made, the classic boteh design, derived from flowering plants, had become more formal and stylized. This particular ‘moon shawl’ is square, like most Kashmir shawls, and was intended to be worn over the shoulders.
In January 1772, Jane Austen’s Aunt Phila was sent ‘a piece of flowered shawl to make a warm winter morning gown’ from her husband, who was living in Calcutta.1 Seventy years later, Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra mentioned in her last testament ‘a large Indian shawl’. It had once belonged to the woman she had hoped would become her mother-in-law.2 Jane Austen herself once gave a shawl to a Steventon neighbour. She observed her niece Cassy in a fine red shawl and a Bath acquaintance in a yellow one.3 And in her house at Chawton today the visitor can still see a cream silk shawl that was a gift to her from Catherine Knight, her brother Edward’s adoptive mother.
‘Fanny,’
