Lily Dale, spinster, and Grace Crawley, her unmarried friend, wewing together in the evening (George Housman Thomas, from Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset)
Dear friends and readers,
Letter 51 begins a series of very long letters which are then followed by moderate length and long ones. In the immediate vicinity each are more than 3 pages in the typed printed form of this book. They are consecutive and yet again there are gaps where letters have clearly been pulled and/or censored/destroyed, but far less than we’ve had thus far. They are becoming journal letters and project the life of someone who has achieved a modus vivendi she can live with and is living through writing about it partly.
This is an important series of letters. We might look at them as a preface to when Austen girded her loins and determined she would turn her manuscripts into acceptable books and get them into print. This was an arduous task and far from real encouragement, she had only toleration. It went against the mores of the family to publish under her name. We also see at this time that the stability and time given her begins a continuous series of references to books read and books mentioned. These are inadequately annotated (ludicrously under-unnoticed by LeFaye). I have found the only real help here to be Chapman’s list of annotations which forms an appendix to his edition of Northanger Abbey/Persuasion which enables me to trace previous citations of a book or similar books. We find in this letter again her love of women’s memoirs, of travel books and how she regards those she reads as equal friends in the room with her (even if they are now dead — as Baretti [see below] was).
Since many are very long, I won’t try to close-read one a week. I have to go slower as there is much specific detail to be looked up. This one begins with a memory which enables us to look back at the previous history of the Austen family.
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Broadford House, Horsmonden House, Kent (with Georgian additions)
Austen begins:
We have at last heard something of Mr Austen’s Will. It is beleived at Tunbridge that he has left everything after the death of his widow to Mr MY Austen’s’ 3d son John; & as the said John was the only one of the Family who attended the Funeral, it seems likely to be true. — Such ill-gotten Wealth can never prosper!
It’s worth going into this, for it explains how Austen’s father’s character/fate as well as that of his sister, came out of a privileged education with a lack of money and property.
Austen is referring to the Broadford branch of the family in whom the original wealth (and there had been much) of the family had been made and from which three generations back Elizabeth Austen found all her children except the eldest son, a John, deprived of any inheritance. The story has been told a number of times of how this Elizabeth became a housekeeper, lived in narrow staitened circumstances so as to educate these sons of hers.
George Austen, our Jane’s father was the son of Elizabeth’s William, a fourth son of John and Elizabeth Weller Austen; he, along with his other brothers and sisters were left nothing so that everything would go to John, the eldest son. Money was found by Elizabeth to buy an apprencticeship for William, for whom medicine had been chosen; medicine at the time was not at all prestigious necessarily; most of the time anything but. William was thus apprenticed to a surgeon – a man who worked with his hands (gasp). We should recall one of the Watson sons is so apprenticed. William married Rebecca Walter, a widow of a medical man; Philadelphia, Eliza’s mother (married Hancock, lover Hastings) was the first child and her brother George next. Philadelphia was sent out to India to be sold as a wife (in effect — Jane tells this story in Catherine, or The Bower).
Rebecca dies and William remarries, a Susan Kelk who appears to have ignored Rebecca’s children (quite literally). To say that George was not lucky in his stepmother after his mother died is to give the impression that step-children were supposed to be treated with equality; in this period this was not so — you really had to have a generous person (Mary Austen was egregious to James’s oldest daughter, Anne). The Philadelphia whom Eliza writes to is a descendent of this Rebecca (Austen’s grandmother) by her first husband.
Jane’s aunt and father, brother and sister in later life
The gentility we see in Jane Austen’s family comes from William’s older brother, Francis, Elizabeth Weller’s second son. People did recognize that William’s second child and oldest son, George, had gifts and Francis had George Austen educated at his own expense. Francis had grown rich through law: he is remembered by our Jane’s Henry in this way: “he set out in life with 800 pounds and a bundle of pens, as attorney, and contrived to amass a very great fortune, living most hospitably, and yet buying all the valuable land round the town.
Francis Austen, the great-uncle (1698-1791)
Although Austen’s father, George, is said to have had “exceptional intellect, ‘and id very well in Tonbridge school; there another man out of regard for a wealthy merchant who was friends with Francis gave George a fellowship.
These scholarships were by the way regarded as private property, so entrenched was the crony system then.
To cut a long history short, George was utterly dependent for his living on being given places in the church. Jane Austen is therefore talking about the descendents of the Broadford Austens who (probably) was regarded with intense dislike by those cut out, as close tight nasty people. Thus Austen’s remark: the new heir is the only one to go to the funeral so it must be he got the money. His name is John; he is the son of Francis Motley (LeFaye gives us the barest facts), son of that rich lawyer, Francis, William’s elder brother who funded Austen’s father’s education and whom Henry so breezily characterized
“Such ill gotten wealth can never prosper.” Several generations down they are still bitter and remembering. I’ve read how when communism was dissolved in several states, you got these relatives a few generations down trying to wrest from whoever was heir to the lucky recipients of that big steal to give it back to them.
That Austen knows about these big steals is testified to in the opening of Persuasion where she parodies the early history of the Eliots which goes back to the big steal around Henry VIII’s time from the monasteries and nunneries.
Most of the better known books on Austen do not keep up with this branch and only bring in what is necessary to understand the Leigh inheritance and Leigh-Perrot squabble over Stoneleigh Abbey. Much of the above information came from Maggie Lane’s Jane Austen’s Family through Five Generations.
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The Frozen Thames 1677
After her initial brief Jeremiad against those Austens who disinherited this branch (the way primogeniture did work) of Austens, Austen turns to immediate family questions and the house fixing and gardening.
Mary will be obliged to you to take notice how often Elizth nurses her Baby in the course of the 24 hours, how often it is fed & with what;-you need not trouble yourself to write the result of your observations, your return will be early enough for the communication of them.– You are recommended to bring away some flower-seeds from Godmersham, particularly Mignionette seed.
Then on letters received:
My mother has heard this morng from Paragon. My Aunt talks much of the violent colds prevaiing in Bath, from which as my Uncle has sufferd ever Since their return, & she herself has a cough ~much worse than any she evet:..had before, subject as she has always been to bad ones. She writes in good humour & chearful spirits however. The negociation between them & Adlestrop so happily over indeed, what can have power to vex her materially?
I hear the tones of Austen’s Mary Musgrove who always has the worst colds of anyone. Meanwhile she’s not sick at all. That last sentence refers to this new enormous amount of money. The is again also to money. Remember this uncle got a compensation of 20,000 pounds and 2,000 a year annuity.
Elliston, she tells us has just succeeded to a considerable fortune on the death of an Uncle .. I would not have it enough to take him from the Stage; she should quit her business, & live with him in London.-
Austen refers us to a London actor who married a woman in Bath who ran a dancing academy. Robert William Elliston (1774-1831), actor of Bath Theater, became a theatrical manager in London and provinces. He married Elizabeth Rundall, who did not leave her occupation (dance teacher) but was still at it successfully in 1812 in Milsom Street. It’s interesting to see that for once she is for the woman living with the man. Most of the time we find her dreading pregnancies. Perhaps because she saw in the lifestyle and relationship some genuine individual pleasure — the life of the stage would be interesting.
We could not pay our visit on Monday, the weather altered just too soon; & we have since had a touch of almost everything in the weather way; — two of the severest frosts since the winter began, preceded by rain, hail & snow. — Now we are smiling again.
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Grace Crawley reading her letters while at Mrs and Lily Dale’s (George Housman Thomas, Last Chronicle of Barset)
Diane suggests that Austen was not particularly happy at Castle Square, and I agree that there are a number of passages registering dissatisfaction and these are not offset by passages showing delight; nonetheless, I feel she’s more comfortable with her surroundings and is beginning to control her space and enjoy her time in ways she could not before.
The first passage on Saturday shows chagrin:
I have received your letter, but I suppose you do not expect me to be gratified by it’s contents. I confess myself much disappointed by this repeated delay of your return, for tho’ I had pretty well given up all idea of your being with us before our removal, I felt sure that March would not pass quite away without bringing you. Before April comes, of course something else will occur to detain you. But as you are happy, all this is Selfishness, of which here is enough for one page.
She is hurt that Cassandra can be happy at Godmersham away from her, and indeed she might have been happier there (this would be heterodox for those who insists on their closeness of spirit). Then Austen turns to the particular child who demanded Cassandra’s presence before they came to live in Southampton (Letter 45; also Letter 46): “Pray tell Lizzy that if I had imagined her Teeth to be really out I should have said before what I say now, that it was a very unlucky fall indeed, that I am afraid it must have given her a great deal of pain, & that I dare say her Mouth looks very comical.”
Austen had apparently written a letter teasing the sensitive Lizzy about having her teeth pulled out after an accident. This must have been in a destroyed letter. When Fanny does indeed have a tooth extracted, Austen feels bad (each part of our body that goes is a kind of little death). but the child may not know this and not appreciate her other aunt’s sense of humor. It was painful, and gently Austen says she must have looked comical. Mrs Coleman was another of these fringe woman with a host of children in tow.
A lovely transition from the weather to Frank:
“You must have had more snow at Godmersham than we had ere; — on Wednesday morning there was a thin covering of it over the fields & roofs of the Houses, but I do not think there was any left the next day. Everybody used to Southampton says that Snow never lies more than 24 hours near it, & from what we have observed ourselves, it is very true …”
Frank’s going into Kent depends of course upon his being-Unemployed, but as the after promising Ld Moira that Capt. A. should have the first good Frigate that was vacant, has since given away two or three fine ones, he has no particular reason to expect an appointment now. – He however has scarcely spoken about the Kentish Journey; I have my information cheifly from her, & she considers her own going thither as more certain if he should be at sea, than if not.-Frank has got a very bad Cough, for an Austen;-but it does not disable him from making very nice fringe for the Drawingroom-Curtains.
The busy active Captain Harville. This is not the first time Austen has noted Frank’s disinterest in landscape.
– Mrs Day has now got the Carpet in hand, & Monday I hope will be the last day of her employment here .. A fortnight afterwards she is to be called again from the shades of her red-check’d bed in an alley near the end of the High Street to clean the new House & air the Bedding
Notice the servant is someone there just during the hours it takes her to clean. The Austens have certainly come down in the world. They pay less and will not find the servant food or drink.
We hear that we are envied our House by many people, & that the Garden is the best in the Town.There will be green baize enough for Martha’s room & ours;-not to cover them but to lie over the part where it is most wanted, under the Dressing Table. Mary is to have a peice of Carpetting for the same purpose; my Mother says she does not want any; & it may certainly be better done without in her room than in Martha’s & ours, from the difference of their aspect.
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–I recommend Mrs Grant’s Letters, as a present to the latter;-what they are about, nor how many volumes they form I do not know, having never heard of them but from Miss Irvine, who speaks of them as a new & much admired work, & as one which has pleased her highly. – I have enquired for the book here, but find it quite unknown.
For Anne Grant, see my foremother poet blog: poet, traveler, life-writer.
It’s clear the recommendation suggest that Austen assumes Cassandra and Martha will like them; Miss Irvine (actually a congenial friend if not really prestigious or high class or close enough for Austen to make the effort). Austen enquires for the book but finds it quite unknown. This shows Miss Irvine was a reader and also the similarity of romantic tastes (landscape, anthropological points of view). I have bought myself a copy of Grant’s Letters from the Mountain and will read and report on them; Grant would be part of the sensibility side of the century while Sarah Burney and Charlotte Lennox (read and commented on in Letter 50) represents an older more satirical point of view. Austen participates in both movements.
I beleive I put five breadths of Linen also into my flounce; I know I found it wanted more than I had expected, & that I should have been distressed if I had not bought more than I beleived myself to need, for the sake of the even Measure, on which we think so differently. – A light morning gown will be a very necessary purchase for you.
Mary gets a piece of carpeting. Money again on her mind: Austen would have put 5 breadths of linen into her dress to make a flounce, and regrets she did not buy more for the areas aound them in Southampton would not have the right linen. Cassandra would have made do with less (“for the sake of even Measure, on which we think so differently”). Austen insists Cassandra needs a “light morning gown”, and hopes she gets a pretty one, promising “I shall buy such things whenever I am tempted, but as yet there is nothing of the sort to be seen.”
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Giuseppe Baretti (1719-89)
Another book being read: Baretti’s “other book.” The chief book is another of these travel books, An Account of The Manners and Customs of Italy; Giuseppi Baretti (1719-89) wrote a second one in response to a Mr Samuel Sharpe. Sharpe had himself written a travel book; and Baretti attacked it, so when Sharpe defended himself Baretti added material to the 2nd edition of the Voyage of the Beagle. Baretti was a writer, a critic, a popularizer, a member of the Johnson-Thrale circle; he wrote a dictionary. So here is one site for connecting Austen to Italy through an Italian speaker. Apparently 9 years ago, 1998, Jane defended Baretti’s mode of satire against Cassandra’s dislike and she remembers it.
The topic of Austen and Italian is worth exploring however briefly.
How much of the Italian did she know? If very little, where did she get some knowledge of Italian songs (she seems to have some in Persuasion). There’s a line in Chapter 8 of Persuasion which sounds like Dante but it could come from Byron quoting or alluding to Dante. Her nephew wrote: she “”read French with facility, and knew something of Italian.” Upper class and educated women of the 18th and 19th century tried to know something of Italian; they studied the language, read the famous Renaissance romances and earlier poetry. What books would she have gotten her hands on. So here we have some inkling: Joseph Barretti’s travel book which they’ve read and now they have its revision with Baretti’s critiques of Sharpe who wrote such a book before him.
From Austen’s offhand reference to Sharpe we can see that she has gauged Baretti’s temperament (strong mocking tendency) and knows the relationships of his books to one another. He brought out a dictionary of Italian. My guess is a central source for her beginning Italian could have been Baretti: he was a popularizer and a central distributor for Italian in the era.
Baretti was close to Johnson in temperament, and owed him a lot. Austen felt an affinity with Johnson, and also Burney. Baretti’s book would be one that she could live near them with.
For those who would like to know something about Baretti, here the ODNB life. We underestimate Austen’s links with the other outside the Anglo one too, especially the French one.
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Again George Housman Thomas’s depiction of women living alone on a limited income at breakfast at the Small House of Allington (from The Last Chronicle of Barset)
The first page on Sunday is a long paragraph about Martha, and teases about what seems to have been Martha’s penchant for vocalizing a desire to be married. This is not the first time Austen has made fun of this. Austen’s humor is again a deflected attack as well as self-defense (Murdock was right about this). I imagine it made her uncomfortable. Mary’s materialism is brought out.
This post has brought me Martha’s own assurance of her coming on tuesday evening which nothing is now to prevent except William should send her word that there is no remedy on that day. Her letter was put into the post at Basingstoke on their return from Eversley, where she says they have spent their time very pleasantly; she does not own herself in any danger of being tempted back again however, & as she signs by her maiden name we are at least to suppose her not married yet. – They must have had a cold visit, but as she found it agreable I suppose there was no want of Blankets, & we may trust to her Sister’s’ taking care that her love of many should be known.-She sends me no particulars, having time only to write the needful.-
Another reading: Martha has been with Mary Austen and is coming home — Jane is eager for her company. She dearly loves Martha who will bring some decent It’s not entirely clear what the second sentence could mean. I assume Martha too must wait for someone to bring her in a respectable solitary private carriage. The third sentence is yet another tease about Martha’s longing to get married and a pretense she has swarms of men around her. From her picture we can see Martha is very plain so these are not particularly kind jokes. The cold visit can mean it was cold at Steventon or Mary Austen was cold to Martha — or both. The next sentence confirms both meanings are intended; there were plenty of blankets this time (the sense is another time there was not), and Mary would be sure to give out to tall that she was ever so loving. No particulars; they’ll hear when she returns home.
She turns the page and there is a mood shift. She is now irritable and mentioning all the bad sides of everyone. Perhaps thinking about Mary Austen and Martha’s behavior brought this on. The Hattons have these irritatingly long necks. Apparently it was the fashion in the Finch household to wear low-cut dresses. Austen affects to despise Lady Eleanor Foote as someone would would fix on any man for sex, shameless. Austen at any rate say there is something wrong with these people to act so freely; but then knowing how badly she sounds, she backtracks and maybe means to withdraw her satire. Again Marth is coming and will supply matter. She may be asked how she likes Southampton and what she thinks of Mary, Frank’s wife.
I wish You a pleasant party tomorrow & not more than you like of Miss Hatton’s neck.-Lady B. must have been a shameless woman if she named H. Hales as within her Husband’s reach. It is a peice of impertinence indeed in a Woman to pretend to fix on anyone, as if she supposed it cd be only ask & have. – A Widower with 3 children has no right to look higher than his daughter’s Governess. – I am forced to be abusive for want of subject, having really nothing to say. – When Martha comes she will supply me with matter; I shall have to tell you how she likes the House & what she thinks of Mary.-
And then remembering Cassandra and imagining her reading the letter: “You must be very cold today at Godmersham” [“where everybody is however very rich” to paraphrase Jane in a later later]:
1995 Sense and Sensibility: the family sitting around Edward (Hugh Grant) as he reads aloud from Cowper
She ends with a wry comment on her expectations: how she ever expects the worst. When Mrs Dashwood accused Elinor Dashwood of continual scepticism, of ever expecting the worst and refusing to assume good will come, Austen is probably remembering what was said to her about herself:
We are cold here. I expect a severe March, a wet April, & a sharp May. – And with this prophecy I must conclude.- My Love to everybody- yrs affec1e1y J. Austen
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These letters from Southampton are not paid sufficient attention to. They are a preface to the time of Chawton. Here we’ve gone over the previous family history (back to the great-great grandmother’s loss and heroism), Anne Grant, Baretti and Austen’s Italian and French reading. There is much to think about as she also sets about gardening and her appreciation of landscape. I have not annotated what one could do for Frank’s doings (they are not part of the immediate life Austen lives, though his income is what has allowed this lifestyle) Another day I’ll add some annotations on Frank in a comment (from Sailor Brothers and Southam).
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Baretti, Giuseppe Marc’Antonio (1719–1789), writer, was born in Turin, Italy, on 24 April 1719, the eldest son of Luca Baretti (1688–1744) and Anna Caterina Tesio (c.1695–1735); he was baptized on the same day. His grandfather, Marc’ Antonio (1656–1704), a physician from Rivalta Bormida, a small village now in the Piedmontese province of Alessandria, married Diana Maria Arcasio from the nearby town of Bistagno. They moved to Mombercelli in the province of Asti, where Luca Baretti was born on 17 October 1688. By 1692 Marc’Antonio had returned to his home town of Rivalta, where he became mayor. His son Luca studied architecture in Turin and was employed as bursar by the Turin Royal University. In 1716 Luca married Anna Caterina Tesio, a person of humble origins, and of this union four sons were born: Giuseppe, Filippo, Giovanni Battista.
Early life
As was common at the time, Giuseppe Baretti at a very young age was destined by his father for the priesthood, which would guarantee a livelihood and an education. When the boy resisted this plan it was thought that he might study to become an architect like his father, but the idea was abandoned owing to Giuseppe’s extreme short-sightedness. A month after Baretti’s mother died in May 1735, his father, Luca, married Genoveffa Astrua, who brought into the Baretti household Miglyna di Capriglio, her cicisbeo (or male companion of the kind then customarily kept by well-to-do women), as her attendant. Disgusted by what apparently turned out to be a ménage à trois, the young Baretti left the parental home following a quarrel and went to live with his uncle, Giambattista, at Guastalla, near Mantua, where he worked as a clerk for a local merchant. Employed in the same office was the poet Carlo Cantoni, who instilled in Baretti a love for Italian literature, especially burlesque poetry. Two years later, in 1737, Baretti returned to Turin, where for a year he attended some of the university lectures given by the professor of literature Girolamo Tagliazucchi, whom he regarded highly.
Literary activities in Italy
The years 1738 and 1739 were spent in Venice, where Baretti made the acquaintance of the young Gasparo Gozzi, who was destined to become one of the chief literary figures of the period. In 1740 Baretti moved to Milan. Here he mixed with writers such as Passeroni, Tanzi, Bicetti, and Balestrieri, who soon after established the respected literary circle the Accademia dei Trasformati. While in Milan he studied Latin and made Italian translations of Ovid’s Remedia amoris and Amores, which he published more than ten years later, in 1752 and 1754. The war of the Austrian Succession began in 1740, and after returning briefly to Turin in 1742 Baretti obtained employment in Cuneo, as keeper of the stores for the city’s new fortification works. However, a few days before the French and Spanish armies laid siege to the town in September 1744, he returned to Milan, from where he travelled again to Venice. Here he joined another literary circle, the Accademia dei Granelleschi, and translated into blank verse the tragedies of Pierre Corneille; these translations were published in four volumes in 1747–8. It was in Venice that his polemical nature first gained notice when, following criticism made by a quarrelsome priest, Dr Biagio Schiavo, of a sonnet that Baretti had written previously, he published in response a Lettera ad un suo amico, in which he ridiculed Schiavo’s character, literary ability, and physical appearance. On his return to Turin, Baretti found another pretext to be controversial, this time reaching a much wider audience. His dislike of both the relatively new science of archaeology and of Giuseppe Bartoli, the professor of literature who had succeeded Tagliazucchi at the University of Turin, led him to denounce Bartoli’s study of an antique diptych owned by Cardinal Quirini. In 1750 Baretti published what he entitled his ‘First prattle’, Primo cicalamento sopra le cinque lettere del signor Giuseppe Bartoli intorno al libro che avrà per titolo ‘La vera spiegazione del dittico quiriniano’, in which he mocked Bartoli and attacked archaeologists and antiquaries in general. Enraged archaeologists publicly denounced Baretti for criticizing a university professor who had been appointed by the king. Baretti was summoned before the president of the senate and the chancellor of the University of Turin, reprimanded, and ordered not to write any more cicalamenti. In the same year he published a collection of his poems, Le piacevoli poesie, which were burlesque and satirical in style in the manner of the sixteenth-century poet Francesco Berni. These poems, compiled over several years up to 1750, also included attacks on Bartoli, whose lack of literary ability he criticized, but Baretti avoided the wrath of the censors by tempering his language and not referring to Bartoli directly.
First period in England
As early as 1747 in Turin, when he met Lord Charlemont during the latter’s tour on the continent, Baretti had thought of travelling to England. No doubt the difficulty of living and of writing in his homeland, which he had deeply felt during the events of 1750, induced him to leave for England in January 1751. After arriving in London, he began studying English in a far more earnest fashion than he had done previously in Italy. He met another Italian from Turin, the violinist Felice Giardini, who obtained employment for him at the Italian opera for the next two years. Baretti was struck by the size of London and its contrasts, where the bustling, dirty streets were filled on the one hand with charming and attractive women, and on the other with countless beggars and petty criminals.
Two years after his arrival in London, Baretti was introduced to the writer Mrs Charlotte Lennox, who was anxious to learn Italian in order to read Italian works, and was willing to offer lessons in English in return. Baretti promptly agreed to become her tutor, and was introduced to Mrs Lennox’s circle of artists and literary friends, who included Henry Fielding, Sir Joshua Reynolds (who later painted Baretti’s portrait), David Garrick, and—most significantly for Baretti—Samuel Johnson. Baretti’s presence in the group was appealing because of his familiarity with literary academies in Italy, and for his knowledge of French and Italian literature. Baretti, for his part, saw the circle as providing access to some of the most cultured people in London and a direct link to possible publishers of his own writings. Indeed, that year, 1753, was a prolific year for Baretti. He published two booklets, both written in French, dealing with current disputes at the opera. He produced an essay, Remarks on the Italian Language and Writers, which, given that he had not yet fully mastered English, was probably first drafted in French and then turned into English with the help of one of his new friends. In addition, no doubt encouraged to write on the subject of Italian poetry by his English friends, and as a means of making some money, he published a Dissertation upon the Italian Poetry, which included a censure of Voltaire. The vocabulary, syntax, and writing style used in the Dissertation clearly point to the involvement of Johnson, whom Baretti very much admired. In the years that followed, Baretti, not just because of his cultural ideals and the interest of his learned friends but also for mere pecuniary reasons, realized that one of his major roles in England was to be that of promoter of Italian language and literature, and a writer who could make contemporary Italian culture accessible to the English. In the same decade he published a bilingual collection of Italian prose and verse, entitled An Introduction to the Italian Language (1755), and The Italian Library (1757), which provided short commentaries on the lives and works of well-known Italian writers, as well as a brief history of the development of the Tuscan language.
Baretti’s Italian and English dictionary
Inspired by the success of Johnson’s recently published English dictionary, in the latter part of the 1750s Baretti set about compiling an Italian and English bilingual dictionary for the use of both Italian- and English-speakers. He considered Johnson’s dictionary an extraordinary achievement that could dispute the pre-eminence of lexicography with that of the Florentine Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1612), a volume that had been compiled not by one person but by numerous academicians. He stipulated in an agreement with London booksellers that he would revise Ferdinando Altieri’s previous Italian and English dictionary (1726–7) for £200, a considerable sum. Baretti published A Dictionary of the English and Italian Languages in 1760, in two volumes, with the addition of an Italian and English grammar and a dedicatory letter written by Samuel Johnson. In the preface Baretti made a virulent attack on Altieri, claiming that his predecessor’s dictionary definitions awakened his ‘risibility’ and were evidence of his ‘ignorance’, and that Altieri himself ‘had not the least spark of poetical fire in his soul’. One would have therefore expected Baretti to have carried out a radical revision of Altieri’s previous work. The fact was, however, that the alterations and additions wrought by Baretti were, all in all, very minor. In the Italian word-list he inserted a modest selection of the additional vocabulary contained in the latest edition of the Vocabolario della Crusca, and on the English side he added some of the entries from Johnson’s dictionary.
Despite representing only a minor revision, Baretti’s dictionary marked the death knell for Altieri’s twin volumes of three decades before. Baretti’s work proved extremely successful, for its author financially as well, and may be considered the most important work he published during his first stay in England. The dictionary, as the standard reference work of its kind, went through numerous reprints and revisions, some long after his death, and the last as recently as 1928.
Return to Italy
Flushed with the success of his dictionary, Baretti the same year took the opportunity to accompany to Italy a young aristocrat, Edward Southwell, whose intention it was to embark on the usual continental tour, travelling first through Portugal and Spain. Baretti planned to return to Italy definitively, in the expectation that there he would now achieve greater fame as an Italian writer than previously. Before his departure Johnson suggested he write a daily journal of his travels as the basis for a future publication, a request Johnson reiterated in his correspondence with Baretti while the latter was abroad. After visiting his brothers in Turin, Baretti travelled to Milan and then to Venice, where he parted from his companion Southwell, having completed his contract as his tour guide. On returning to Milan, he was introduced to the new governor, Count Firmian, who was a patron of the arts and letters, in the hope that the governor might provide him with patronage. He renewed his contacts with those who frequented the Accademia dei Trasformati, and made the acquaintance of the poet Giuseppe Parini.
In 1762 Baretti published the first of what were to be four volumes that recounted his recent journey to the continent, giving it the title Lettere familiari ai suoi tre fratelli. But following a complaint lodged with Count Firmian by the Portuguese minister in Milan, who believed that Baretti had unjustly criticized the hospitality of the Portuguese, Firmian ordered him to halt further publication. Baretti, having lost the opportunity both to obtain patronage and to publish his travel journal, moved to Venice, thinking that he might be able to complete the publication there. But the Venetian government was just as unsympathetic, and allowed him to publish the second volume in 1763 only after he had deleted any suggestion of criticism of Portugal. Although the two Italian volumes remained incomplete, they reflected Baretti’s new-found maturity as a writer who demonstrated, somewhat like a modern journalist, that he was an acute observer of everyday life, able to provide vivid descriptions of the places that he had visited and the people whom he had met.
Baretti’s despondency at the difficulties that he had encountered in Italy (which was evidently heightened by an ill-fated love affair about which Johnson wrote a letter of consolation in December 1762) was alleviated by his contacts with the renowned writers Carlo and Gasparo Gozzi, whose company he assiduously frequented while in Venice. That year, in Padua, Baretti submitted to the censors a request to publish a fortnightly journal La Frusta Letteraria (‘The Literary Scourge’) which aimed, like Addison’s Spectator and Johnson’s Rambler, to evaluate contemporary customs and literature, to review books, and to condemn, as necessary, examples of bad taste. The first issue appeared in October 1763. In subsequent issues Baretti attacked archaeologists, the Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni, the Arcadians, Voltaire, Pietro Verri and the Milanese journal Il Caffè, and blank verse. The journal, as an independent and iconoclastic publication, did not bow to any public authority, and did not hesitate to be critical of the art and culture of its time or to censure otherwise untouchable writers who had achieved fame and respect. For this reason La Frusta Letteraria became the work for which Italians today most remember Baretti. His continued attack on writers, including the revered sixteenth-century Venetian Pietro Bembo, resulted in the journal’s being suppressed by the Venetian authorities in 1765. Baretti fled Venice, and, after several months spent near Ancona, where he published his last issues of the journal (April–July 1765), he decided that he could no longer continue to write and publish in Italy.
Second period in England
Baretti left Italy for England in August 1766 having made the decision to reside there permanently. In the literary environment of London, which he found much more congenial than the one he had just left, he renewed his acquaintance with his old friends, especially Samuel Johnson, who had kept up a correspondence with him during his absence in Italy. The circle had by now become the renowned Literary Club, where Baretti was introduced to Oliver Goldsmith, James Boswell, and Edmund Burke. Baretti’s first publication in London was An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy (1768), written as a reply to the inaccurate and superficial description of Italian customs and manners given in Letters from Italy by Samuel Sharp, published two years earlier. Unlike the negative view of Italy that he had portrayed in La Frusta, Baretti’s Account provided a more favourable picture of Italian life and culture that appealed to his Italophile British friends. The book was so popular that a second edition followed in 1769, containing an answer to Sharp’s criticism of the first edition. Baretti had now established his reputation as an English writer, so much so that in 1769 the king appointed him secretary for foreign correspondence to the Royal Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. In 1768 Baretti visited France and Spain to collect more material for what would be the English edition of his Lettere familiari, which he had not been able to complete in Italy.
In October 1769, while walking at the Haymarket, Baretti was struck a blow by a prostitute. Owing to the darkness and his bad eyesight he retaliated by striking her female companion. Three pimps appeared on the scene, and Baretti drew a fruit-knife that he carried and fatally wounded one of them. He was arrested and subsequently brought to trial for murder at the Old Bailey. His friends Topham Beauclerk, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr Johnson, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and others—‘a constellation of genius’, in Boswell’s account—rallied to support him and testified at the trial to his good character (Boswell, 419). The jury acquitted him on the grounds of self-defence. Baretti felt more than ever now that justice and his real friends resided in England. He told his old friend Lord Charlemont that ‘those I had about me did their part so well that they have made me an Englishman forever’ (Collinson-Morley, 222).
In the following year Baretti published the definitive edition of his Lettere familiari, entitled Journey from London to Genoa (1770). The work, enlarged and now in English, achieved instant success: Johnson called it one of the best travel books ever written. Baretti was now at the height of his success. He decided to pay a visit to Italy to see his brothers and to enjoy the pleasure of appearing as a famous writer, but within a year, after visiting Turin, Genoa, and Florence, he returned to England to what he now called his ‘nest’, unhappy with the country of his birth, which he referred to as dull, and whose people he felt were ignorant. This was his last trip to Italy. In London he returned to writing, publishing in 1772 An Introduction to the most Useful European Languages and in 1773, in three volumes, Tutte le opere di Niccolò Machiavelli. His popular dictionary was reprinted in 1771.
Between 1773 and 1776 Baretti became the language tutor to Hetty (Queeney), the daughter of Henry Thrale, brewery proprietor, and his wife, Hester Thrale, to whom he was introduced by Johnson. During these three years Baretti chose to live on and off at their villa at Streatham, where the Thrales were accustomed to entertaining artists, writers, and distinguished professional people. In 1775 they arranged for Baretti and Johnson to travel with them for two months to France. Mr Thrale was so pleased with the French tour that they planned another trip, this time to Italy the following year, but were prevented from leaving owing to the death of their only son, Harry. In 1775 Baretti wrote and published a collection of dialogues, Easy Phraseology for the Use of Young Ladies, which had been originally intended for his pupil Hetty. The relationship between Baretti and Mrs Thrale, however, became so tense in 1776 that Baretti abruptly left the house and returned to London.
Last years
Baretti’s most important work of this period was the defence of Shakespeare that he published in 1777 in response to a letter written to the French Academy the year before by Voltaire, in which Voltaire denounced his countryman Pierre Letourneur for translating and publishing Shakespeare’s plays. Baretti’s Discours sur Shakespeare et sur Monsieur de Voltaire attacked Voltaire for his lack of appreciation of Shakespeare’s artistic merit, and for his limited knowledge of the English language and therefore of Shakespeare’s plays. Baretti’s decision to write the work in French (a language Johnson felt that Baretti knew as fluently as English) meant that it was accessible to readers on the continent, including Italy, where the classical tradition held sway and Shakespeare’s plays were still very little known. That year was also spent preparing a two-volume Spanish and English dictionary, which was published in London by Nourse in 1778. Baretti labelled it a second edition, since it was essentially a minor revision of the dictionary of Giral Delpino published in 1763. As was the case with his earlier Italian and English dictionary, the revision of the Spanish dictionary was mainly editorial—the expurgation of previous inconsistencies and inaccuracies—with additional vocabulary inserted primarily on the English side, where Baretti included words from Johnson’s dictionary. The Spanish dictionary, too, was well received and was republished with revisions well into the nineteenth century.
In 1779 Baretti’s output continued at the same pace. That year Nourse invited him to compile an anthology of Italian letters as a language text for students of Italian. Not satisfied with those written by earlier Italian writers, Baretti chose instead to resort to letters that he himself had previously sent, or pretended to have sent, to friends and acquaintances. The resulting Scelta di lettere familiari fatta per uso degli studiosi di lingua italiana provided students with a useful variety of topics, vocabulary, and writing styles, as well as a showcase for English readers of his opinions on Italian language, literature, and society, and of his own ability as a writer of Italian prose. Looking for another opportunity to earn some money, in the same year Baretti translated Horace’s Carmen seculare for the French musician Philidor, who set it to music and performed it with some success at the Freemasons’ Hall, but then disappeared with part of the takings. Baretti had few financial resources until 1782, when he managed to obtain a government pension of £80 annually, which, coupled with the income from his published writings, would thereafter provide him with just enough money to support himself.
Three years after her husband’s death in 1781, Mrs Thrale created a scandal by marrying the singer Gabriele Mario Piozzi, who was her daughters’ music teacher. Baretti’s animosity towards Mrs Thrale reached its peak after Johnson’s death, when she published two volumes of letters to and from Johnson, among which were passages that were offensive to Baretti. Enraged, Baretti decided to vent his anger in print, attacking Mrs Thrale in three ‘Strictures’ in the European Magazine between May and August 1788, in which he made unsubstantiated allegations about her tyrannical behaviour and about Piozzi’s background. Baretti’s decision to vent his feelings in print only worsened the reputation that he had acquired in later life as combative and ill-natured. In 1789, pressed for money and with his pension three-quarters in arrears, he began revising his Italian dictionary in the hope of gaining some income, but he was taken ill with an attack of ‘gout’ (a contemporary term that could cover a range of maladies), and died, unmarried, in London on 5 May. He was buried in Marylebone on 9 May in a cemetery that was later cleared, so that today the site of his grave cannot be traced. His executors destroyed all the papers and manuscripts in his possession.
Baretti and Johnson
Baretti claimed that Johnson was the best friend he ever had and the person to whom he was indebted for the best part of the knowledge that he had acquired. For his part, Johnson, who never managed to visit Italy, admired Baretti for his linguistic and conversational skills—praising his English, for example, for ‘its purity and vigour’—his scholarship, and his knowledge of Italian culture (Boswell, 256). At the same time he was sensitive to Baretti’s limitations, noting in 1768 that ‘There are strong powers in his mind. He has not, indeed, many hooks; but with what hooks he has, he grapples very forcibly’ (ibid., 395). Both writers had an overbearing and stubborn temperament; but each greatly respected the other. They enjoyed each other’s company for nearly thirty years until, a year before Johnson’s death, they quarrelled—not over a profound philosophical issue but about the outcome of a game of chess. Boswell’s view of Baretti, however, captured some of the less attractive qualities of the Italian: in 1766 he described him as ‘so wretchedly perverted to infidelity, that he treated the hopes of immortality with brutal levity’ (ibid., 357).
Johnson’s influence on Baretti’s writings is indisputable. Johnson’s presence can be found in many of Baretti’s works, either explicitly, in the dedications and prefaces that he wrote for the Italian’s publications, or implicitly, in the input of Johnson’s ideas on language and literature, and in the kinds of works that Baretti chose to publish. To say, however, as Foscolo did, that Baretti simply aped Johnson, or to conclude, with a more recent scholar, that Baretti totally lacked originality (C. J. M. Lubbers-Van der Brugge, 1–3), does not do him justice. Rather, Baretti’s long-term contact with Johnson confirms how much they had in common in terms of both temperament and literary tastes. The relationship assisted Baretti to mature intellectually, broadened his outlook on art and literature, introduced him to English writing and culture, and allowed him to make a living and achieve fame as an author, without having to resort to a Maecenas or patron; Johnson, similarly freed from the need for literary patronage, noted that Baretti had been the first author to receive ‘copy-money’ in Italy for his works (Boswell, 846). In England his publications helped to promote a renewed interest in Italian language and literature, including the works of Dante. In Italy his works encouraged the study of writings by English authors, especially Shakespeare. Of the eighteenth-century critics he is the Italian best remembered in the English-speaking world.
Desmond O’Connor
Sources
L. Collinson-Morley, Giuseppe Baretti, with an account of his literary friendships and feuds in Italy and in England in the days of Dr Johnson (1909) · C. J. M. Lubbers-Van der Brugge, Johnson and Baretti: some aspects of eighteenth-century literary life in England and Italy (1951) · Thraliana: the diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776–1809, ed. K. C. Balderston, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (1951) · The letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3 vols. (1952) [incl. letters from Mrs Thrale] · N. Jonard, Giuseppe Baretti (1719–1789): l’homme et l’œuvre (Clermont-Ferrand, 1963) · G. Baretti, Prefazioni e polemiche, ed. L. Piccioni, 2nd edn (Bari, 1933) · M. L. Astaldi, Baretti (Milan, 1977) · M. Cerruti and P. Trivero, eds., Giuseppe Baretti: un piemontese in Europa (Alessandria, 1993) · B. Anglani, Il mestiere della metafora: Giuseppe Baretti intellettuale e scrittore (Modena, 1997) · G. Baretti, Epistolario, ed. L. Piccioni, 2 vols. (Bari, 1936) · D. O’Connor, A history of Italian and English bilingual dictionaries (Florence, 1990) · D. Bucciarelli, ‘Appunti per la storia di un problema critico: i rapporti tra Giuseppe Baretti e Samuel Johnson’, Italianistica [Milan], 8/2 (1979), 319–32 · M. Fubini, ‘Baretti, Giuseppe’, Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome, 1964) · DNB · I. Crotti, Il viaggio e la forma: Giuseppe Baretti e l’orizzonte dei generi letterari (Modena, 1992) · M. Fubini, Dal Muratori al Baretti, 2 (Rome, 1975), 269–333 · Giuseppe Baretti: scritti, ed. E. Bonora (Turin, 1976) · J. L. Clifford, ‘Johnson and foreign visitors to London: Baretti and others’, Eighteenth century studies presented to Arthur M. Wilson, ed. P. Gay (1972), 97–115 · J. Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, rev. J. D. Fleeman, new edn (1970) · R. J. Steiner, Two centuries of Spanish and English bilingual lexicography (1590–1800) (1970) · J. Prior, Life of Edmond Malone, editor of Shakespeare (1860), 391
Archives
BL, manuscript notes in English written in the margin of H. Lynch Piozzi, Letters to and from the late Samuel Johnson (1788)
Likenesses
J. Reynolds, oils, 1773, priv. coll. [see illus.] · J. Watts, mezzotint, pubd 1780 (after J. Reynolds), BM, NPG · T. Banks, relief medallion, 1789, St Mary’s parish church, Marylebone, London · oils (after J. Reynolds, 1773), NPG
Wealth at death
died impoverished and without estate: Collinson-Morley, Giuseppe Baretti, 351–3.
*************
The problem with using the Austen films to picture the Austen family is the films make then super-rich and elegant. They also do not picture women living alone. Gross distortions. This still of the Austen family listening to Edward (Hugh Grant) read aloud will make my point.
Jane’s Austen novels are strongly like those of French women of the
later 18th century, from their appreciation of realism to their sense of strong decorum.. . Sometime pick up a novel by de Charriere. It’s
uncanny.
I delivered a long paper to a conference a number of years ago where I
argued this. I was told to revise it and develop it to just one woman with
lots of other stuff to change so I just put the paper on the Net:
http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/JAAmongFrenchWomen.html
See especially:
Sophie Cottin’s *Amelia Mansfield* [*Amélie
Mansfield*]combines
an amalgam of character types, plot-designs and themes which are
closely analogous to those found in all six of Austen’s novels except
perhaps *Emma*. The theme (and word) “sensibility” [“sensibilité”] and an
exploration of “pride,” “prepossession,” and “hatred” [“l’orgueil” “la
prevention” and “la haine”] occur repeatedly in thematicized scenes which
anticipate key scenes in *Pride and Prejudice*. Sophie
Cottin’scentral
plot- design dramatizes the separation of a self-contained upper
caste male, Ernest de Woldemar, very much a Darcy type, characterized as
“proud,” resentful, self-important but generous to servants, from the lower
caste heroine, Amelia [Amélie], with whom Woldemar has gradually and
despite himself fallen desperately in love. The separation is effected by
the older hardened woman, Madame de Woldemar, who combines characteristics
of a Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Lady Russell; the terms associated with
Madame de Woldemar are “prejudiced” and caste arrogant. Amelia [Amélie]
combines characteristics of Fanny Price and Anne Elliot and anticipates
Goethe’s Ottilie in *Elective Affinities*. Through reading *Pride and
Prejudice* in the context of *Amelia Mansfield* [*Amélie Mansfield*], we
perceive the radicalism of Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and how Elizabeth is
pitted against the inhumanity of hierarchy and intrasexual antagonisms in
the context of her era.
Cottin’s subplot closely parallels characters in Austen’s *Northanger Abbey*:
Cottin’s Albert, brother to the heroine, Amelia [Amélie], suffers more than
James Morland does from a shallow flirt Blanche who enjoys being mean
because Albert is gifted with the kinds of perception we find in Henry
Tilney but is nonetheless intensely attracted to Blanche and wants to marry
her. Blanche is a softened version of Isabella Thorpe, and we see her
persuaded into acting more kindly. In *Amelia Mansfield* [*Amélie Mansfield*]
types which align themselves with Austen’s subplot in *Northanger
Abbey*are examined with a thoughtful precision and full emotional
seriousness
that brings out why Austen’s subplot, light as it seems, has such resonance.
23
Manners, conversations and inward nuances in the novels of French and
English women bring out sophisticated psychological and sexual awareness
and social inferences latent in Austen’s underdetermined hints. We
underestimate Austen when we see her writing in response to the
lesson-scenes of Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis’s *Adelaide and Theodore* [*Adèle
et Théodore*] and *Tales of the Castle, or Stories of Instruction and
Delight* [*Les Veillées du Château*] as if Austen took them literally as
realizable psychological training. We do more justice to Austen, and her
allegiance to Genlis based on recognition, by studying the nuanced
“sentiments” of Austen’s own characters’ conversations as referring to
issues explicitly debated in Genlis’s adult novels. In *Mansfield
Park*Fanny Price speaks out against Mary Crawford’s assumption that
another
woman would have so little “consideration” for herself as to jump at any
man’s offer. To realize the full meaning of this line we need to go to
Genlis’s *Madame de Maintenon*, another story of an apparent prude who
defends her behavior in language closely similar to Fanny’s and that of
Austen’s Emma defending her decision to part Harriet from Mr Martin. The
line of argument for all three female characters runs in the same groove
and uses the same family of words. For example, Madame de Maintenon
counsels the reader that a preference for “consideration” [“la
consideration”] over immediate pleasure and vanity is what gives a woman
power.
It’s very hard to get English language journals and staff to publish on
French books and vice versa. The language is a barrier. But in the later
18th century the two countries were constantly interchanging novels and
memoirs and they were translated or sold in the original almost
immediately.
Or:
Isabelle de Charrière’s *Letters from Lausanne* [*Lettres écrites de
Lausanne*] and Adèle de Souza’s *Adela de Senange* [*Adèle de Sénange*].
Souza’s “avant-propos” could preface *Emma*:
j’ai voulu seulement montrer, dans la vie, ce qu’on n’y regarde pas, et
décrire ces mouvements ordinarires du coeur qui composent l’histoire de
chaque jour. Si je réussis à faire arrêter un instant mes lecteurs sur
eux-mêmes, et si, après lu cet ouvrage, ils se disent: Il n’y ai rien là
noveau, ils ne sauraient me flatter davantage.
[I have meant to show what doesn’t call attention to itself in life, to
describe the ordinary movement of the heart which constitutes the history
of each of our days. If I succeed in making my readers stop for a moment to
look at themselves, and if, having read this work, they say to themselves:
There is nothing new there, they could not flatter me more. My translation].
Edgeworth said Emma was boring, nothing was happening. Souza would not have
read it that way.
From Charrier’s Letters de Lausanne (just the English translation)
[‘You asked me, mamma,’ she said, if I should be happy unmarried. It seems
to me that that would depend entirely on the kind of life that I was able
to lead. I have already often thought that if I had nothing to do but to be
a spinster among folk who had husbands, wives, mistresses, lovers and
children I might find it very sad and might covet sometimes, as you said
the other day, the husband or lover of my neighbour; but if you were
willing to go to Holland or to England to keep a shop or to open a pension,
I believe that, being always busy and in your company, and not having the
time either to go into society or to read romances, I should envy and
regret nothing, and that my life might be very sweet. Hope would supply
what was lacking in reality. I should flatter myself with the belief of
becoming one day sufficiently rich to buy a house surrounded with a meadow, an orchard, and a garden somewhere between Lausanne and Rolle, or perhaps between Vevey and Villeneuve, and of passing the rest of my life with you
there.’
Ellen
According to Nokes, Frank spent the winter of 1807-8 mapping anchorages of Cape Town Bay and taking notes on the trade of the inhabitants; Austen had been at Manydown for Xmas where she took part in a 12th Night performance of Sheridan’s School for Scandal (as Mrs Candour). In February Frank went to St Helena.
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