A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes
Drury Lane in January 1814 and was an immediate huge success. JA is to
see The Merchant of Venice.
little Cass . . . bed comfortable last night: JA’s sentence goes on: ‘& has not
filled it with fleas’ (Letters, 256). ‘Little Cass’ (JA wrote ‘little Cassandra’)
is Charles’s daughter Cassy Esten (b. 1808), and in 1870 the letter’s
owner.
Dr. Syntax . . . Gogmagolicus: References included to amuse little Cassy
Esten–– William Combe, The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque
(1812), a comic poem, hugely popular owing to its engravings by
Thomas Rowlandson of the be-chinned cleric, Dr Syntax, in preposterous
situations; and Gogmagolicus (JA wrote ‘Gogmagoglicus’), a legendary
giant who according to one tradition was captured and made to serve
as a porter at the Guildhall in London, where his statue was still to be
seen.
90 Fanny Burney, afterwards Madame D’Arblay: referred to already in this
Memoir, as a novelist much admired by JA and as an important critical
comparison for her growing reputation (see note to p. 20 above).
Through her father Charles Burney, author and musician, as well as by
her own early literary success (her first novel, Evelina, appeared in 1778
when she was 26), Burney was able to mix in London’s intellectual circles.
Hester Thrale (see note to p. 12 above) attracted many eminent
figures to her social gatherings in Streatham, among them the actor and
playwright David Garrick (1717–79) and the society painter and writer
on aesthetics Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92). Himself a literary patron,
Reynolds was a long-standing friend of Charles Burney. Samuel Johnson
was Mrs Thrale’s lodger at Streatham. An assiduous diarist throughout
her life, Burney recorded her early meeting with Johnson and the
Thrales in an entry for 27 July 1778. From the same time she has left a
vivid account of her first visit to Reynolds’s splendid house in Leicester
Fields (now Leicester Square). (See The Early Journals and Letters of
Fanny Burney, vol. 3, ed. Lars E. Troide and Stewart J. Cooke (1994),
66ff.)
Anna Seward: sentimental poet and letter-writer (1747–1809), known as
‘the Swan of Lichfield’, where she lived for most of her life. Despite
rarely travelling, she managed, by tactical flattery and determined correspondence,
to situate herself at the centre of an extensive literary circle,
which included Johnson (born at Lichfield), the Edgeworths, Hester
Thrale, and Walter Scott, to whom she bequeathed her literary works.
Joanna Baillie and Maria Edgeworth: Joanna Baillie (1762–1851), Scottish
poet and dramatist, who enjoyed some commercial success and much
educated admiration; she moved to London in 1784 and numbered Walter
Scott and the intellectual Anna Barbauld among her friends. For JA’s
admiration of Maria Edgeworth, see note to p. 72 above. For most of her
life Edgeworth lived in the family home at Edgeworthstown, County
Longford, Ireland.