A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes
that he was. He signs himself “Geo: Austen, Rector”, at the bottom of
every page from 1764 to 1800’ (HRO, MS 23M93/84/1, letter to Anna
Lefroy, 8 July 1869). Himself a clergyman, JEAL is understandably anxious
to acquit his grandfather of the contentious charge of pluralism (that
is, of holding several livings at once). Though the practice might be
justified, as implied here, by the poor financial returns of a single living
and the closeness and smallness of the two parishes, pluralism often led
to the neglect of responsibilities when a clergyman did not live in his
parish. George Austen seems to have taken the matter sufficiently seriously
to seek approval from the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1773 (Fam.
Rec., 6, 11, 23; Tucker, 29–31).
Cassandra: Cassandra Leigh (1739–1827), JA’s mother. For the Leigh
family, their Oxford connections, and their colourful but distant aristocratic
pretensions, see Tucker, 53–65.
12 ‘monuments . . . memorials need’: George Crabbe, The Borough (1810),
Letter 2, ‘The Church’, l. 110.
Mrs. Thrale . . . ‘divided the Board’: Theophilus Leigh (1693–1785), JA’s
great-uncle, was Master of Balliol College, Oxford, from 1726 to 1785.
He is described by Hester Lynch Salusbury, Mrs Thrale, later Mrs
Piozzi (1741–1821), diarist, memoirist, and travel writer, in her Letters to
and from the Late Samuel Johnson LL.D (2 vols., 1788), ii. 245; here
slightly misquoted by JEAL.
Pope . . . ‘study of mankind is Man’: Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
(1733), Epistle 2, l. 2.
‘the ruling passion . . . death’: Pope, Epistle 1, To Cobham (1734), l. 263
(‘Shall feel your ruling passion strong in death’).
13 in 1771 to Steventon: in 1768, see note to p. 11 above.
the celebrated Warren Hastings: plenty of speculation hangs around the
relationship between Warren Hastings (1732–1818), the future
Governor-General of Bengal (1773–85), and the Austen family. Taking
his cue from the other main source of family authorized biography, Life
& Letters, R. W. Chapman finds it ‘very doubtful’ that Hastings would
have committed his son, only 3 years old when sent to England in 1761,
to the charge of George Austen, a young bachelor. He therefore concurs
with the later generation of Austen-Leighs in assuming a confusion with
Hastings de Feuillide, another sickly and short-lived child, the son of
George Austen’s niece Eliza, ‘who undoubtedly did stay at Steventon and
did die young’ (Memoir (1926), 215). But earlier family memory has it
that Hastings’s small son (also named George) died in the Austens’ care
in autumn 1764 and that Mrs Austen was deeply upset by his death.
JEAL was clearly hoping to find confirmation on his 1869 visit to Steventon,
but was disappointed, writing to Anna Lefroy: ‘There is certainly no
entry of the burial of young Hastings either at Deane or Steventon; & the
beautiful accuracy with which our Grandfather kept his register prevents
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