Dear friends and readers,
ON Saturday morning, the Admiral (aka Jim) was kind enough to drive me way past Washington D.C., past Ivy Park (now a depressed area) into nearby Maryland, where a highway and several sudden turns took us to historic landmark house, Riversdale, built, decorated, & furnished under the direction of Rosalie Stier Calvert. The team of women running our local JASNA-DC group had set up a delightful treat for us: an instructive and pleasant visit to a local house-museum truly relevant to understanding Jane Austen’s era.
Rosalie and her oldest daughter, Caroline
I found myself walking through a neo-palladian mansion in a large green landscape, and then outside to a fruitful (herbs, garden produce) garden and finally dependency house. The Calverts were a wealthy and powerfully-connected family during the French revolution, and when they came to the US became part of the people in the US who counted. The family were French Catholics who had lived in Belgium and, like many of these French aristocratic types fled either in the 1790s or just after Napoleon took power. Napoleon’s amnesty in 1803 had an important qualifcation: you were urged to return and if you did not, your property would be confiscated. So Rosalie’s father returned, and and gave to her and her husband a goodly sum of money (big) and this house he was building at the time.
We know a great deal about this house and family because they left ample records, and in particular the woman responsible for the building of the house left a large cache of letters which have been edited and published: _Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Calvert, 1795-1807. Rosalie’s years cross with Jane Austen’s — she too died young, at 41: She was a highly intelligent if at times startingly arrogant and admirably determined woman (sufficiently sheltered so that she thought herself more immune than she was). Her house represents a fine house such as it would be in Jane Austen’s era, some of it is due to Calvert’s taste, care, and power of personality. She may have been a lonely woman. Her writing was done on a desk now in the master bedroom — where one sees the bed she gave birth to nine children on and slept with her husband. She was away from the world she wanted to imitate, and while she was often visited, and had many relations, and probably friends, as Mistress of Calvert, she may have felt isolated. She spoke French and retained intense memories of Europe and Europe’s customs. She wanted very badly to dress in fashions used in Europe. When I read her letters I hope to discover something of the way she felt over her husband having a slave mistress and many children by her in a cabin on their estate.
The docent who took our group round a tour of the conversations. I did learn on the tour by asking questions about the master of the house, George Calvert
Calvert is himself a person of note sufficient to merit a wikipedia article. I want to emphasize his relationship with his wives and children. Wives. He had a slave mistress and numerous slave children as well of course as Rosalie Stiers Calvert, his (wealthy) wife who died young partly from exhaustion (9 pregnancies in a very few years of marriage), and typhoid. It’s thought that George, his ancestors and said the black family was treated decently by Calvert: he freed his mistress and moved her to where she was safe from re-captivity and did the same for his black children. The docent said he did not follow the instructions he was supposed to have with his inheritance from his wife but used it as he saw fit. He did not give his white daughter a dowry since she displeased him by her marriage choice: a lawyer (!), a man who has to earn his keep and food (as in Trollope’s HKHWR Hugh Stanbury is not approved of by the Rowleys ), but he gave his other two daughters dowries and provided handsomely for his white sons.
A third person who lived in the house was of interest to us, Francis Adam Plummber. There is an exhibit in the dependency house, about him. Francis Adam Plummer, a male black man who was a slave to the Calverts. He was apparently recognized as intelligent by someone and taught to read and to write. And he was given sufficient materials and time to keep a diary. This is so rare. I’ve been to numerous houses here in the south where the large number of black people who lived side-by-side with their owners simply were erased from history. All that’s left are slave cabins or occasional photos.
What a poignant story. When he grew older, he was permitted to marry a black woman owned by a family not far away and she got pregnant by him. And he was permitted to visit her and their children. Stories of how happy all this was are belied by he and his wife’s plans to escape. They almost managed it. When they were caught they were punished in a variety of ways (including probably savage whipping), some of the children were sold away and nearly the wife. Why she was not sold I cannot say as pleadings did no good. Instead a sister was sold away. He had to live separately from these children, lost contact with them and this wife for many years. At the time of the Emancipation Proclamation they tried again but did not realize (as many people appear today not to) it did not apply to all states — only those states Lincoln wanted to weaken. So they were seized and imprisoned. Imagine this. Finally after the civil war they did gain their liberty, human status, and Plummer became a paid foreman. A whitewashed account. The site tells you more about the publication and diary and great granddaughter responsible for the exhibit about Plummer in the Dependency today — still relegated you see. You can see a transcription of said diary.
As to the Dependency building, on Saturday morning it was filled with cooking and food preparation materials, with utensils and dishes of all sorts, plenty of forks and spoons. Big rich houses would have these small square houses nearby: used for hired and indentured servants, as kitchens, for overseers’ families. Chawton cottage is a nice version of these — in the later 19th century it was knocked up into flats for people lower in class than the Austens.
When I exclaimed about Plummer’s sad brief life, the guide who was there and telling us about the cookery things she had about her, the publications of recipes and the like, responded in that way so many people do: well, said she, he had it very good in comparison to so many other slaves. So? why do people respond in this appalling way, why do they endlessly accept harsh horrible injustices when they see them by calling them not so bad as over here. Not that they care about them for real.
Here is a site devoted to him. You learn about the publication of the diary and great granddaughter responsible for the exhibit about Plummer in the Dependency today — still relegated you see. You can see a transcription of said diary.
On ritual occasions: the descendents of Plummer and this slave mistress (whose name I never learned) and the still very wealthy white Calverts come to the house which is in a remarkable state of unspoiled existence and is under renovation and restoration.
Back to our visit: The greatest learning experience was the house: it’s physical self and its accoutrements. It’s strictly neo-palladian. A central block with two symmetrical wings. The windows all square and symmetrical. The rooms have high ceilings and simple lines. Among the more beautiful things I saw was a wallpapered study supposedly used by George, the husband, for reading. Probably he didn’t read in it that much.
The paper is some of it the original papers (one of the panels and placed under glass) and is a long scene of beautiful green landscape in which you watch a hunt. Very like a medical tapestry then. We see the way people dressed then. There was something Hubert Robert about the way the figures were represented in the last panel. The wallpaper may pro-king as it begins with the house Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI stopped fatally at on “the night of the Varennes flights,” and was herself arrogant enough to insists on silver not pewter dishes and thus gave away to an innkeeper who she was. Or it could be more simply nostalgic — for what never was.
On the other hand, the Calverts were good friends with the Custises and George Calvert knew George Washington. Washington was to the British a traitor; had Washington been seized by the British, they would have hung him. The founding fathers were albeit somewhat conservative ones economically as we might see it, and they allowed for slavery in the constitution, nonetheless, radical in their enlightenment thought. They were helped by the French revolutionaries.
We saw a beautiful dining room where every attempt was made to recreate the original ambience and even re-create or bring back literally those things originally there. Faux-marbel lines the bottom half of walls; copies of the paintings of Rosalie and her daughter and George by Gilbert Stuart are on the wall; so too one by Rembrante Peake of Rosalie’s father. A lovely porch-like area was next to that with grand windows facing out to the vast lawn. The next room was the ladies’ withdrawing room; it had some original pieces. The stairwell was a turning one with a square window. AT its bottom a lovely neo-classical statue originally had a candle in her hand. It must have been a dark walk up. Upstairs we saw a room painted yellow: that meant it was for lesser people as yellow was cheaper. A blue room (lapis used) with a beautifully carved ceiling was for special guests. A nursery on the end. And (as I’ve detailed above), a master bedroom where Rosalie slept with George, gave birth, wrote her letters.
Where did the hired and indentured servants and the slaves live? The slaves were (it seems) mostly in cabins outside the house. Inside the house there was a door on one of the corridors on the second floor which led to now invisible quarters. There the servants could sleep ever at hand to be called — or live. I remember seeing the rooms meant for servants on separate back stairways in other houses like this. In some pre-Civil War houses, there was an effort made to re-structure and re-build the house to destroy these rooms, to make them invisible. This was not done here.
It does seem that the Calverts moved out of this house as a permanent place to live later in the century. They had a home in Manhattan to which they brought the furniture they valued. Some of this they have returned to this house. It must have been thought when the house was built, it would become part of a network of powerful houses. That’s not quite what happened. The district of Columbia did not grow large until the 20th century; it became the focus of a major war. (We did see left-over canon, probably from the revolutionary war, on the lawn.) Now, as I’ve said the house is to the side of a poor area leading out of Washington. Miles and miles of railway lots, empty lots, garages and auto-fix places, punctuated by little oases of shops now and again. Just directly around the house is a neighborhood of older lower middle class homes. It’s rather isolated in its present spot. Perhaps that helps keep taxes down, though it’s probably that as a historic landmark site, the people who manage the house get a break. As it is sobering to learn of Francis Adam Plummer’s story, so to see the surrounding area also teaches one a lesson about the US today.
We ate a luncheon concocted to be as closely 18th century as Maryland cookery and availability allowed. It was mostly heavily overcooked kinds of paste from cheese, meats on hard bread cookies, a savory pie (from sweet potatoes and a custard) and some greens (represented in their natural state in a garden in the landscape). There was a knowledgeable costume and food historian as well as a lecture by an independent scholar, Clarissa Dillon. Before the tour of the house, we heard a woman who knew a lot about food in the dependency house. Another woman told us quickly a history of the family. A third had prepared the food. All these were short but informative talks.
The longest talk was by Clarissa Dillon. She knew a lot about food and drink in this era, and read aloud to us many details from sheets of recipes she had brought with her. Unfortunately she had a chip on her independent scholar’s shoulder against “academics” who she repeatedly stigmatized as not knowing food in a practical sense, as not approving of the earlier era so not presenting it on its own terms. She cited no one and did not appear to know Maggie Lane’s Jane Austen and Food, which might have given her some pause. She was quite right to say to study Austen’s texts as a way of learning what people in Austen’s era ate or drank would be a frustrating business, but appeared to think the novel that had the most references to food is Sense and Sensibility. It’s Emma that is the novel rich in particular references to food and drink. She herself has made some of the drinks of Austen’s era (wines, beer, spruce beer, port) and brought some hypocras and ratafia for us to try. She had some handsome bottles from the era (practical and strong glass).
I must admit I did not care for the food nor the drink: biscuit dough turned into hard cookies that only break apart after you crunch down — did they not have yeast? Ratafia seemed to me medicinal. They sugared their drinks intensely; it didn’t help their teeth. The desert had real apple and cream. The meal bought home to me that most Americans easily can eat a much more varied diet today. Ms Dillon did remark on how poor many Americans have become and now resort to cheap rice for their diet. Food stamps help. Alas, junk food with a lot of grease as well as sugar is a staple of the American diet today. But if you have the money of course, in my areas there is a weekly farmers’ market for local produce; we have the food gourmet-type supermarkets (Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Wegman’s) and lots of Safeways, all of which provide a vast variety of food and drink not dependent on the seasons. And we didn’t have to spend hours making any of it. Austen herself prepares mead with her relatives; like the Claverts (apparently) she locked up the sugar, wine and anything else valuable or rare or which could be stolen and sold (by servants desperate for some cash).
The whole experience was highly instructive, and I found in the bookstore below a $25 copy of the marvelous book (mentioned above) which describes Riversdale life best: Mistress of Riverdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert, 1795-1821, ed Margaret Law Callcott. I’d go back to see and learn more. In the meantime I’ve an idea I’m in for a real treat in this book. From what I saw quoted on the walls of the Dependency building from Rosalie’s diary and what I saw of her taste in the house, she was an intelligent woman.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
JASNA-DC has produced a slender book from our visit. It’s available from the JASNA-DC people. It includes illustrations and these essays:
Eileen Sutherland’s essay, –Dining at the Great House: Food and Drink in the
Time of Jane Austen|| collects Austen’s mentions of cooking, dining, and food
in the novels. She provides a clear historical background to illuminate these often terse references.
Austen’s lack of specificity contrasts markedly with the obsessive record-keeping of Rev. James Woodforde (1740-1803). Linda Slothouber’s compilation of and commentary on menus from Woodforde’s diary provides
insight into Georgian dining habits.
Close-reading of Austen’s novels and her letters underlies Ellen Moody’s
wide-ranging reflections. Ellen considers food, women’s work, and women’s
bodies to explore how women were treated and regarded in Austen’s lifetime,
and by Austen herself.
Debra Roush looks at the culinary curiosities enjoyed by a certain set of
men – British sailors in the era of the Napoleonic Wars – in her entertaining book review of Lobscouse and Spotted Dog: Which It’s a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by A.C. Grossman and
L.G. Thomas.
E.M.
One of the members of JASNA wrote me later:
“I agree that the presence of Calvert’s alternate family, so close by, is just amazing — I read Mistress of Riversdale before I ever visited the site, and in the book there is (as I recall) simply no acknowledgment in the letters by Mrs Calvert of this second family. They were only encountered in an appendix and then I was stunned to look back at the letters and realize how much Rosalie just closed her eyes to. And, if I remember correctly, didn’t one of the half-black daughters have THE SAME NAME as the white daughter? Mind-blowing.”
To which I at first replied:
When we begin to look at these black and white families, we realize what was going on was an implicit acceptance of polygamy. Men had two wives, two families, and once in a while a great writer will write a story about it that brings this out. You should read Louisa May Alcott’s story sometimes called The Brothers” and someimers “My contraband.” it’s online, complete text.
http://www.online-literature.com/alcott/2722/
But thinking about it, I realized I was mistaken or anachronistic. It was not a matter of two different women being treated as wives — as in many cultures today with them having to endure a favored relationship or spite or hurt . Rather the slave woman had no status whatsoever. He could do with her as he liked: including (as in Fanny Kemble’s diary) carve things on her body, humliate her as he pleased, whatever. We have a hard time today realizing the core of slavery was a total loss of status such that the person was treated as a subject animal. I saw this once in a story about a slave in the Subsahara today.
The system is so cruel, pernicious.
And yet the white wive will know she is being used analogously in bed. Valerie Martin’s Property is about this – a novel centering on a white mistress who uses, abuses, disdains the black slave but who is subject to the same man.
E.M.
My experience of socializing at this JASNA:
I had one of these common experiences of mine: at a previous JASNA I had met a woman about my age who offered to drive me back to the subway from where we were. And we had what I thought was such a pleasant conversation. I was sorry when she did not turn up to any more JASNAs after that when she had said she would. Well she was there on Saturday. I was really pleased to see her and went over to talk. In a nutshell, it seemed to me that within about half an hour I must have said or did something wrong — to enthusiastic — because although she cam to the same sub-tour as I did and had put her seat next to mine at a table, she became cold and kept her distance in talk (especially at the table afterwards). Puzzled because she is one of those at JASNA who (like me) really has read all Austen and books about her and even likes Mansfield Park (a sort of litmus test — the tremendous favorite is P&P and I’ve met people who have not read all the novels – only 6 really — or know Austen from film and yet pay good money to go to these JASNAs and the AGMs too — as fans).
I did feel bad about it and as usual wondered what I had done wrong but will never know. Perhaps she didn’t like what I said during the tour with the docent — for it was I who prompted the docent to tell us (without meaning to because I would not have guessed it) about this plantation owner’s slave family. I would actually liked to know but since she would be the last to tell me I will not learn from this experience.
Well one of the women on one my lists who is intelligent and good-hearted answered my plea for an explanation:
“Is it possible that there are factions within the group, and that your questions/comments may “assign” you to a faction other than the one she wants to be in? If that is the case, associating with you could be counter-productive for her efforts to ingratiate herself with the “boundary enforcers” of the desired faction. That kind of thing is both invisible and disgusting to me, but I’ve been told it’s very common.”
That’s it. I see it now The conversation at the table was about Austen and it quickly emerged that of 7 people sitting there, 3 had read no Austen and were there with another young woman who had read only Pride and Prejudice. The three were there with her. The young woman had asked which was our favorite and of the three left, the woman (slightly) older immediately said how she disliked Mansfield Park. This is the litmus test of the ‘popular’ fan type — they often don’t like MP. I said I loved it, which I do, read it first at age 15, which I did. It was obvious I’d read all Austen’s fiction (not just the famous 6) and it could be this woman who I thought would be a friend wanted to align herself with “pop” fans. I did ask her a little later if she had read all 6 (very quietly) implying that I thought she had, and she said, oh yes, a little resentfully — I suppose at this point and just to me as if she didn’t want it thought she didn’t know Austen.
The young woman by the way was dressed in regency costume and had her compliant boyfriend dressed that way too. This too represents a type of woman who comes to the AGMs. I meant well and kept up a surface of decency towards her throughout. I answered her question, what was a JASNA AGM. I had no subtexts towards her.
Seeing it in this light reminds me then that I didn’t lose anything. It’s silly and the woman who partly snubbed me (not wholly she would not do that quite) showed herself to have and follow preferring worse feeling based on stupidities, for really these conformities mean nothing. Some people will think this way on the slightest provocation. The woman who behaved this way is thus petty and small-minded, and not worth trying to know.
The conversation later the young woman again asked me if I had was gong to see the movie, Jane Austen and the Zombies as if this would offend me and she wanted to hear me say I wouldn’t do it if you paid me. The assumption then was I’m this prig of a scholar I suppose; she was trying to get a rise out of me and I saw on her face a look which showed me she was looking for something she could laugh at. I said no I didn’t mean to go (again very flatly with no subtext), but that I had skimmed the book. Which I had, and told her that the book makes fun of Austen by what’s called queering Austen. Which it does. The author has interlarded into the original book parodies which make fun of Austen’s reticent heterosexual romance.
See my blog on this:
She was startled. One of the two young men (each with one of the young women) was amused. He had told me he read 100 pages of P&P and that was it. No more. Then he and I got to talking about these Zombie type books where the original text is out of copyright so people can do with them whatever they like. I had said to him somewhat sympathetically that the films of Jane Austen books cannot follow the books for real. They’d get no mass audience. He liked that. It was the best conversation with another person I had the whole time. I can talk to the non-intellectual men who are not inclined to be phony or belligerent. The young woman in the costume by contrast was sly, insinuating. She too of a narrow mind.
E.M.
A friend: “I had to laugh at your characterization of the way people read the novels –or don’t, merely watch the movies. I also know people who can’t seem to comprehend the first thing about the novels until they hear them on tape. Then they write to me with “revelations” from listening!”
I am finding I can read this one at night. Rosalie Calvert is an incisive vivid writer. She is also — wow — deeply conservative. What she is really is a displaced member of the French ancien regime as it was embodied in people among the elite in Belgium. What is happening is a number of her family members, especially the brother and father are returning to France to protect their property once Napoleon emerged as a anything in reality but a socialist revolutionary and decreed people who didn’t return would lose their property. By this time she has already married and her husband has deep ties, economic, social, political, in Maryland: they are related to the first lords of Baltimore who settled there.
So reading this book is a cross. One learns about later 18th century life in America — and it’s a full effective portrait of how she gets through her days, not quite a mistress, but a member of the clan, ordering servants and slaves about. And one gets a strong dose of the aristocratic group who really wanted the Bourbons back, these Gemaine de Stael characterized so aptly in her novels as intransigeant, so arrogant and when male violent the only thing you could do to make them accept the new situation was behead them. In other words, they would never accept and endlessly fight to turn back to the ancien regime.
There is this oddity about it. All the letters, all the journals of Rosalie and much of her relatives are in French so everything is really the words of Margaret Law Callcott who is editor and translator. She does say this once and say she’s been faithful to the words (metaphase using a blend of modern and later 18th century style), but nowhere else beyond that brief admission does the book speak of this. It doesn’t call her a translator on the front page either. So you could come away forgetting this is a French book really which is an important aspect of it. One could see herr as “displaced Blood Sister” as described by Marilyi Yalom in her Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women’s Memory and lump Rosalie with the other super-rich and aristocratic women who wrote memoirs of the terror. See my blog:
http://www.jimandellen.org/feministblog/605.html
I have no time for details on this one, will just post generally but I do recommend it for what I’ve just said.
Ellen
The volume contains letters from Rosalie’s father, mother, brother and sister-in-law abroad so we get a picture of Belgium too at the time.
And ones by George, not about his other family; this is in documents at the back of the book:
Calvert early on freed this other family of his, left them property and tried again and again to provide for them after his death. He was continually having to manumit them: once you freed a slave, he or she could be snatched back and harassed and hounded at any time. Eleanor died too early to lose her “place” and security from him; but his eldest daughter by her, of the same name as his eldest daughter by Rosalie in the end was badly cheated of property he did all he could to leave to her. This came about through the same kind of mechanism used against Edward Austen: that there was no biological or recognized legal claim.
Ellen
Journalizing myself, 10/23/11:
Very striking is her complete indifference to her slaves; how she sells, buys, uses them. She is ever complaining about how she can’t get decent service. Very callous behavior to white servants too. Does she not see these people as human beings at all? One sees the invisible path to the guillotine.
At the same time she is so human about other people. We get glimpses of powerful local people, their wives, and customs very like English provinces.
She really does recreate a world and we watch her alone build herself a magnificent American style chateau. One has to keep in mind the French ideal, that she longs to be in Belgium and listen hard for the notes which show in tiny ways how aware she is her husband is gone from her for long periods of time. Meanwhile he gets her endlessly pregnant so he’s there enough.
And that is partly why she cannot return home, even if she didn’t have small children, one of which a Louisa is not developing right. She cannot walk at all and is over 1; makes no coherent sounds as yet. Disabled child.
Ellen