A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes
of JA’s in Chapter 5 of this Memoir. A manuscript in JA’s hand of a poem
ascribed to James Leigh Perrot, now in the Pierpont Morgan Library,
New York, reads: ‘Thro’ the rough ways of Life, with a patten your
Guard, | May you safely and pleasantly jog; | May the ring never break,
nor the Knot press too hard, | Nor the Foot find the Patten a Clog’ (Jane
Austen: Letters and Manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library (1975),
26). B. C. Southam includes this epigram among JA’s own verses (Minor
Works, 452), but he does not explain his decision. We may wonder why
the piece did survive among papers attributed to JA. The marriage of
Captain Edward James Foote, known to the Austens, and Miss Mary
Patton occurred in 1803.
37 Tunbridge ware: wooden articles, with a characteristic mosaic decoration
made from inlaid wood, manufactured in and about Tunbridge Wells. Cf.
E, ch. 40: ‘Within abundance of silver paper was a pretty little
Tunbridge-ware box, which Harriet opened.’
38 the rough earl . . . ‘ . . . go spin’: attributed to William Herbert, Earl of
Pembroke (c.1501–70). It is quoted by Walter Scott, in his journal for 9
February 1826, included in the biography written by his son-in-law, J. G.
Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart (2nd edn., 1839),
viii. 223, to which JEAL refers below, at p. 43.
the three Fates: in classical and northern myth, the goddesses who determine
the course of human life.
Holy Scripture . . . in the wilderness: Exodus, 35: 25.
‘when Adam delved and Eve span’: fourteenth-century proverb.
spinning jennies: early steam-powered machines for spinning a number of
threads at once, already in use in the 1770s.
39 I know little of Jane Austen’s childhood: this opening section, as far as
‘associating at home with persons of cultivated intellect’, was added in
Ed.2.
putting out her babies . . . in the village: this account of Mrs Austen’s
system of child-rearing was added in Ed.2. Her practice seems to have
been to breast-feed each baby for a few months and then to hand the
child over to a woman in the village for the next year or longer, certainly
until he or she was able to walk. This is what she describes in letters to
her sister-in-law Susannah Walter: ‘My little boy is come home from
nurse, and a fine stout little fellow he is, and can run anywhere, so now I
have all four at home, and some time in January I expect a fifth.’ The date
is November 1772; so the little boy must be Henry, born in June 1771. Of
the fifth child, Cassandra, she writes in June 1773, five months after the
birth, ‘I suckled my little girl thro’ the first quarter; she has been weaned
and settled at a good woman’s at Deane just eight weeks; she is very
healthy and lively, and puts on her short petticoats to-day’ (Austen Papers,
28 and 29). With a steadily increasing family of children, the parsonage
to run, and her husband’s boarding pupils to care for, Mrs Austen may