Enclosed in a blue acid-free card envelope and bound with book tape is a notebook that bears the innocuous reference number 23M93/86/6/3. It is a small, leather-covered exercise book that has been worn almost shiny with handling. The edges are stained with blue ink, carelessly knocked across a desk, and at some point in its life the little book has been used as a coaster; there is a large cup ring on the back cover. It feels like an object that has been rather cherished and passed through many hands before arriving for safe keeping at the Hampshire Record Office. Even the scribbles of a very small child on the inside cover seem more like a marker of love than of indifference or desecration.
The notebook is part of the fascinating collection that is the Austen-Leigh archive: a treasure-trove of holograph letters, poems, and diaries that have been regularly consulted over the decades to illuminate the lives of Jane Austen and her extended family. It is impossible to read any text relating to Jane Austen without finding references and links to source materials held in the archive, and many pieces from the collection have been published, either in their entirety as independent texts or as sections in other works. But this notebook has never been published, nor quoted, and only occasionally referred to. I was introduced to the existence of this notebook by Professor Kathryn Sutherland, who acknowledges it in her work on Austen’s teenage writings (10 n.9). Its title and reference number, however, appear in no bibliography, despite the extraordinary potential of its significance. Its paper pages are watermarked to 1812, and written on the front page, in a young man’s bold hand, in thick black ink, is the title: The Delightful Tales of Fairy Land, by J. E. Austen.
The title page and illustration of the Delightful Tales. Courtesy Hampshire Record Office.
(Click here to see a larger version.)
“J. E. Austen” is James Edward Austen (1798–1874), the second child and only son of Jane’s eldest brother, James. James Edward Austen was not just a favorite nephew; he was her first true biographer, publishing his Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869, by which time he had become James Edward Austen-Leigh, following a long-awaited legacy from his maternal great-aunt, Mrs. James Leigh-Perrot. During Jane Austen’s lifetime he was known as Edward and appears regularly in her letters as well as being a recipient of several important letters during the last years of her life. Throughout this essay, James Edward Austen-Leigh will be referred to as James Edward, to avoid confusion with his uncle Edward (Austen) Knight.
Many of Austen’s surviving letters are to “dear Edward” and his sisters Anna and Caroline. They document a warm and lively relationship, with Austen offering advice and critiques, as James Edward took up his own pen to try and write his own stories, alongside family news and local gossip. He was the recipient of the penultimate surviving Austen letter, and on 24 July 1817 was part of the very small funeral party who accompanied her to her last resting place in Winchester Cathedral. When, much later in life, he wrote himself into the canon of Austen studies with his Memoir, he was assisted by, among others, his younger sister, Caroline (1805–1880), who documented her memories of her aunt with a vivacity and lightness of touch that is largely absent from her brother’s final published text. It was for Caroline Austen that the five short stories and their introductory framing tale that make up The Delightful Tales of Fairy Land were written. The notebook opens with the dedication: “These little tales, written in her absence for her amusement, are most humbly inscribed by her affectionate brother, J. E. A.”
Jane Austen’s teenage writings each open with similar dedications; her experimental short stories, playlets, and sketches were sent to family members and friends with an opening message “from the author.” James Edward had access to these manuscripts, making alterations and annotations to Kitty, or the Bower, in Volume the Third at the same time as he was receiving critical support from Austen for his own writing (Sutherland 9). This known interaction with Austen’s teenage writings highlights the anomaly that Edward’s fairy tales, themselves a work of juvenilia from an author who would later fundamentally shape our understanding of Austen’s life and work, have for so long lain undisturbed, unanalyzed, and unpublished.
Caroline Austen’s memories of her childhood, captured in her own distinctive and dynamic style, became a core part of the Memoir. Anonymizing his sister, as he frequently does himself, Austen-Leigh quotes a “niece” as saying that:
as I got older, when cousins came to share the entertainment [at Chawton Cottage], she would tell us the most delightful stories, chiefly of Fairyland, and her fairies had all characters of their own. The tale was invented, I am sure, at the moment, and was continued for two or three days, if the occasion served. (Memoir 72)
Caroline was a regular visitor to Chawton Cottage from 1809 onward, but not as frequent as James Edward. A close study of Deirdre Le Faye’s Chronology of Jane Austen shows that James Edward and his father visited Chawton almost fortnightly for many years. Given the well-established interchange of texts and ideas between Jane and James Edward, it is difficult to conclude that the Delightful Tales were written in isolation from her. On the contrary, external and internal evidence suggests the possibility that they are, at the very least, James Edward’s recollections of Austen’s storytelling, and potentially something more collaborative.
The relationship between Jane and James Edward gives us a potential insight into the date of the composition of the Delightful Tales. The notebook into which they were written is clearly watermarked 1812, and it is worth taking into consideration the comparative ages of James Edward and Caroline at this point. Born in 1798, James Edward turned fourteen in 1812, while Caroline was seven. Within three years they were both writing their own stories, and, given the content and tone of the Delightful Tales, it seems reasonable to assume that both writer and reader were younger children rather than older. A letter written by Austen to Caroline on Monday, 30 October 1815, makes it clear that Caroline is by now sending her aunt her own literary efforts to review. A tired-sounding Austen writes: “I have not yet felt quite equal to taking up your Manuscript, but think I shall soon, & I hope my detaining it so long will be no inconvenience.” I would therefore propose that James Edward’s tales were written down in the notebook at a point no later than October 1815, by which time Caroline was ten, and James Edward about to turn seventeen.
The Delightful Tales of Fairy Land is made up of an introductory framing tale, followed by five further tales. They are highly moralistic with a rather didactic symbolism. In this they follow the style of contemporary, early nineteenth-century writing for children, which was primarily instructive and made extensive use of rather blunt allegorical names. In the tales we meet Happiness and Pleasure, Prince Promise, Queen Benigna, and Constantio, amongst others. These names have been key to researching the influences that helped shape the Delightful Tales. The tales are original, as far as my research has been able to tell, but have very strong lines of influence linking them to the great traditions of European fairy tale, folklore, and fable. The references and allusions made in these fairy tales reveal a network of influence demonstrating an interaction with continental and popular literature that offers significant possibilities for reassessing Austen’s mature novels.
In the framing introductory tale, we meet “Little Clementine” and her brother Cosar, who have been out for a walk one fine May morning. Lost, and unable to find their way home again, they lie down to sleep in a mossy grotto. On waking, they find themselves in a splendid apartment belonging to the fairy Queen Benigna, who tells them that they have been chosen “to hear the amusing and instructive lessons which are here repeated” for their amusement. After reassuring the worried children that their parents have been told they are safe, the Queen leads the children to a “large and magnificent apartment where sat a number of those beings called fairies.” Each fairy in turn shares a tale, and at the end of each story, Queen Benigna explains the moral to what the children have just heard. The five tales—“Happiness and Pleasure,” “Prince Promise,” “The Transformation,” “Prince Marvel,” and “Contentment”—each have their own characters and distinct setting. They are individually crafted, short narratives, linked only by the framing tale and the concluding moral at the end of each story.
This framing narrative offers the first of many insights into the influences for these tales. An identical technique is used by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) in his Decameron, as well as by Giambattista Basile (1575–1632) in his later seventeenth-century collection of Neapolitan wonder tales, The Tale of Tales (published posthumously 1634–1636). In the Decameron, a group of seven women and three men have fled plague-ridden Florence for the countryside; to amuse themselves, they decide that each day they will each tell a tale, rotating among storytellers exactly as we see in the Delightful Tales. The Decameron comprises ten sections of ten tales each, and one of the group is appointed “Queen” or “King” for each day. There is a distinct similarity to Boccaccio’s transition between tales in the closing refrain of each of James Edward’s fairy tales. For instance, in the Decameron we read, “No sooner did he receive this invitation than Panfilo began as follows . . .” (68), while in the Delightful Tales, “The Fairy in a most willing manner instantly complied and began the following story.”
Basile’s The Tale of Tales also uses this framing motif. This later, but lesser-known work, is of key significance to the development of the European fairy tale. Nancy L. Canepa writes that “Basile’s collection heralds the entrance of the fairy tale into the ‘authored’ canon of Western literature, [and] the frame tale has the function of staging the birth of this new genre” (42). As in James Edward’s Delightful Tales, the framing tale of Basile’s work is itself also a fairy tale, opening with the desperation of a king over his daughter Zoza, who “like a second Zoroaster or Heraclitus, had never been seen to laugh” (Basile 4). What follows is dark and violent, full of black humor and a rich intertextuality, “participating fully in this period’s radical innovations in literary themes” (Canepa 69).
The Decameron is bawdy and in places downright crude, with much carrying on in grottos, cuckolding, and general riotous behaviour. I am grateful to Juliet McMaster for pointing out that there was a copy of The Decameron in Italian in the Godmersham Library—perhaps one of the books Austen devoured on her early stays at the house?
We know of another story cycle set within a framing tale that Austen (and her characters) definitely read. First published in English in 1711, Arabian Nights Entertainments: Consisting of One Thousand and One Stories was reprinted throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and there we find the famous framing narrative of the grand vizier’s clever daughter Scheherazade, who saves not just her own life but that of a thousand women, by creating stories so brilliant that her Sultan husband lets her live another night so he can hear the ending. The Arabian Nights is referred to in Emma, when Miss Bates tells Mr. Weston that he “‘must really have had Aladdin’s lamp’” to make everything perfect for the much anticipated (and narratively vital) Crown ball (348). Miss Bates’s reference is to one of the tales in Arabian Nights. In Persuasion Austen refers to the framing narrative itself when Anne Elliot defers her visit to Lady Russell to tell her what she’s learned about Mr. Elliot and instead promises to spend the day with the Musgroves: “Her faith was plighted, and Mr. Elliot’s character, like the Sultaness Scheherazade’s head, must live another day” (249). Susan Allen Ford makes a link between the two heroines: “Austen’s invocation of Arabian Nights invites a connection between Scheherazade, heroine of the frame narrative, heroic storyteller, and Anne, whose word accrues weight. Scheherazade, besides being beautiful and virtuous, courageous and witty, is a great reader” (226).
By the time of the writing of the Delightful Tales, the Arabian Nights was thoroughly embedded in popular culture (a 1799 copy says it is the nineteenth edition) (Ford 225), and as well as being known by Austen, it would also have been familiar to her nephew. Although the framing tale of Arabian Nights is central to the overarching narrative, the storyteller remains the same throughout, unlike in both The Decameron and the Tale of Tales, which like the Delightful Tales switch narrators.
In the Austen fairy tales, Queen Benigna, after introducing herself, asks one of the fairies that surround her to begin the first story, “Tale the 1st: Happiness and Pleasure.” Here we meet the eponymous sisters as well as their prospective suitors. Happiness is the elder sister and heiress to her father’s kingdom. She is a distilled Elizabeth Bennet, with “fine dark eyes . . . full of expression and animation” and has “improved her naturally good sense by reading.” Her younger sister Pleasure “is often mistaken for Happiness at a distance,” but she is “not near so handsome” and “much more volatile than her sister.” Their father trusts Happiness’s judgment and in marriage “allowed her to chose whom she thought fit.”
Tale the first: Happiness and Pleasure. Courtesy Hampshire Record Office.
(Click here to see a larger version.)
After the introduction of the sisters, we meet Happiness’s many suitors. They too have allegorical names, but one wonders how much these would have been fully understood by the young Caroline Austen and how much they are a knowing joke by an older writer. First comes Voluptas, whose Latin name means either “Pleasure” or “Delight.” The name is also found in “Cupid and Psyche,” a tale dating at least back to the second century A.D., in The Golden Ass, by the Roman author Lucius Apuleius. “Cupid and Psyche” is frequently described as the origin of the Beauty and the Beast story, or at least as the first time this particular trope was written down. In the introduction to his 1950 translation, Robert Graves writes that Apuleius “invented none of his stories, though it is clear that he improved them” (Apuleius 18). In the ancient tale Voluptas is the daughter of Cupid and Psyche, born after many challenges and tribulations. In The Golden Ass, Voluptas symbolizes sensual pleasure, a symbolism that, despite the gender change and more negative connotations, is also present in “Happiness and Pleasure.”
In the Delightful Tales, Voluptas comes seeking Happiness as a wife, but he meets Pleasure first and, believing her to be her sister, asks her to marry him. Although aware of his mistake, Pleasure quickly forces through their wedding before Happiness returns. Though infuriated that he has been tricked, Voluptas realizes that “the knot was tied, he was forever united to Pleasure.” At the end of the tale, we learn that “Voluptas lived with Pleasure for a few years happily enough. He at last got tired of her, and she in a short time died. He lingered onto a miserable existence for many years.” Here we see another echo of Pride and Prejudice in the relationship of Lydia and Wickham: “His affection for her soon sunk into indifference; her’s lasted a little longer” (429).
These allusions to the themes and motifs of Pride and Prejudice support the proposed dating of the Delightful Tales to October 1815 or before, but they also raise questions about their initial composition. Despite the close relationship between the aunt and the children and their enjoyment of her storytelling, it wasn’t until some point in 1813 that the fifteen-year-old James Edward discovered for the first time that his Aunt Jane was a published author. In keeping with family tradition, the news prompted him to write her a poem:
No words can express my dear Aunt my surprise
Or make you conceive how I open’d my Eyes,
Like a pig Butcher Pile has just struck with his knife,
When I heard for the very first time in my life
That I had the honour to have a relation
Whose works were dispersed through the whole of the nation. (Fugitive 27)
Are the Delightful Tales, then, written following a reading of Pride and Prejudice by James Edward, and do they date from 1813 on? Or did the characters and plotlines that Jane Austen was constructing and revising as she worked on the final draft of the novel spill into the tales she told her nieces and nephew, so that they instead come from an earlier period? Only further research will tell.
The character of Queen Benigna was key to beginning to decode and unravel the influences shaping the Delightful Tales. Her name is found in an eighteenth-century collection of tales called Queen Mab: Containing a Select Collection of Only the Best, Most Instructive, and Entertaining Tales of the Fairies, first published in London in 1752 and followed by four more editions by the end of the century (Duggan xxvii). It combined English translations of fairy tales originally written in French at the end of the seventeenth century by the pioneering and subversive Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy (1651–1705) with “A Fairy Tale, in the Ancient English Style by Dr. Parnell: and Queen Mab’s Song.”
The fairy Benigna appears within the text in “The Golden Bough,” a tale originally published in French by d’Aulnoy in 1697, in which the fairy enables the hero, Prince Torticoli, “an agreeable Soul lodge[d] in so disagreeable a body” to transform into the handsome, intelligent man he had always wanted to be (Queen Mab 243; Zipes 369). The English translation preserves much of d’Aulnoy’s story, but notably in the French original, the fairy is Benigne, rather than Benigna. (In the 1799 copy of Queen Mab held at the British Library, the poor quality of the print means that the last letter is an almost indecipherable blob, able to be read as either an a or an e.)
D’Aulnoy’s influence is present throughout the fairy tales, but the linking of her works with a poem on Queen Mab is of extra significance to Austen studies. In Sense and Sensibility, the horse that Willoughby so irresponsibly gives to Marianne is named “Queen Mab” (70). Queen Mab is a hazy figure from English folk and fairy tale, who most famously appears in Romeo and Juliet. She was the fairies’ midwife and drove about in a “chariot made from an empty hazelnut, harnessed by spiders’ webs” (Warner 5). Susan Allen Ford writes that Queen Mab “presides over their relationship” and “hovers over the novel” (78). By naming Marianne’s horse Queen Mab, Austen gives early indication that—despite Willoughby’s promise that “‘[w]hen you leave Barton to form your own establishment in a more lasting home, Queen Mab shall receive you’” (70)—Marianne and Willoughby’s romance will only ever be a fairy tale, and perhaps a cautionary one at that.
Unlike Shakespeare, Austen, or even her contemporary Charles Perrault, Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy is virtually unknown today. Both her name and her work have slipped into obscurity, even though in 1698 she was the first author to use the phrase “contes du fées,” which translates literally as “tales of the fairies” (Warner 47). Her personal story is fascinating, a wonder tale in itself, and her influence over the Delightful Tales is seen not just in the naming of Queen Benigna but in the entire plot of “Tale the Second: Prince Promise,” in which the hero is the “son of the mighty Sultan of the Indies by whom he had been sent in his youth to be educated in one of the most civilised country’s of Europe, & he was now returning to his native land at the age of 21.”
On his return journey, Prince Promise is shipwrecked on an island where he is quickly met by an entire tribe of talking cats, including General Mouser and King Grimmalkins, who build him a fine house and invite him to join their feasts. At the feast, the prince meets a beautiful white cat, who is a princess transformed and sent to the king’s court for her protection. After hearing her story, Prince Promise proposes marriage and is temporarily taken aback when she becomes a young woman again: “but was his chagrin at perceiving instead of the beautiful form he had expected, a plain countenance expressive of neither good sense or temper.” Tempted to break the engagement, as his beautiful cat had not turned into a beautiful woman, Promise instead keeps his word and goes ahead with the engagement. The fairy Graciousa then appears in a flash of lightning to tell Promise that he has passed the test, proving that he is worthy of the princess. At the end of the tale, Queen Benigna tells the children that “the moral . . . is so very plain that it needs no comment.”
“Prince Promise” is significantly influenced by d’Aulnoy’s “Le Chatte Blanche” (The White Cat). In d’Aulnoy’s original, as indicated by the title, it is the white cat herself that holds the agency in the story, instigating campaigns against polecats and stoats, rather than being a mere member of the king’s court, as in James Edward’s tale. D’Aulnoy’s stories are consistently centered on the female leads, with their future consorts very much in supporting roles.
D’Aulnoy’s pioneering role in the development of the literary fairy tale was quickly lost in the English-speaking world. Her tales were translated and published in England throughout the eighteenth century, but within a very few years after their creation they were being published under the name of “Mother Bunch”—a mythical Mother Goose-type figure who had her origins in a living woman who ran an ale house in Elizabethan London. D’Aulnoy’s female characters too lost their centrality. By the 1799 edition of Queen Mab, “Le Chatte Blanche” is called “Prince Lupin,” and the story, as in James Edward’s tale, focuses on the prince, not the cat.
“Tale the 3rd: ‘The Transformation,’” takes us back to the Decameron, and the two texts this time are linked through names. Two lovers, Virginia, Queen of the Persians, and Constantio, Prince of China, are transformed by the evil fairy Nebula into a hare and a hunting dog, respectively. As Woodsman the hunting dog, Constantio, with the rest of his pack, chases Virginia as a hare across the fields. The lovers are saved from their fate by the good fairy Violante.
Violante, at first glance, seems an odd name for a good fairy, but her name, from the Italian, means Violet. It is a relatively unusual name in literature, and even more so in early nineteenth-century Hampshire. The name, however, features twice in the Decameron in two separate tales, most relevantly in the eighth tale of the second day, where a brother and sister, Louis and Violante, who are nearly the same age as Cosar and Clementina in the Austen framing tale, are left by their father in England before setting off on multiple hazardous adventures (195). Although the facts of Boccaccio’s life are hazy, Violante is believed to have been the name of his daughter.
Closer to home and more relevantly, Violante was also the name of the character in The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret played by Eliza de Feuillide at Steventon over the Christmas holidays in 1787 (Clery 210), a performance that took place more than a decade before James Edward was born. The Wonder! was also the play for which the barn at Steventon was first fitted up as a theatre (Gay 4); its rehearsals potentially influenced Austen’s Henry and Eliza as well as, many years later, Mansfield Park. The theme of a frightened hare hunted and seeking refuge is echoed in John Gay’s famous and influential poem “The Hare and Many Friends,” which we know to have been read by Jane Austen, as allusions to it appear in both Northanger Abbey and Emma.
Further references to the characters of the Steventon plays are found in “Tale the 4th: Prince Marvel,” in which the hero is fostered by a “husbandman who by Merlin’s assistance had obtained a son the size of his thumb some years before.” This linking of Tom Thumb and Merlin is part of a tradition of retellings of an ancient folk tale with ambiguous origins, which developed through chapbooks and oral storytelling. In 1730, Henry Fielding wrote a theatrical version of the story, which he revised and republished a year later as The Tragedy of Tragedies; or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (Bauer). Fielding’s play, a “rollicking farce with a cast of giants and midgets,” was also performed in the barn at Steventon, in March 1788 (Gay 5).
The theatricals in the barn at Steventon seem to have been a fond memory for the Austen siblings, and we can assume that they remained so, especially for James Austen. But two references to characters from the Steventon plays in the Delightful Tales, especially ones that we know had a long-lasting impact on Jane Austen, raise the question: are these names coming through in James Edward’s notebook through his father’s influence, or through that of his aunt? Did James Austen show his young son the scripts, prologues, and epilogues he had worked on as a young man, or did Jane Austen tell tales for the next generation using the names and narratives of her own childhood? Neil Philip supports this latter possibility in his argument that “parents and nannies feeding the child’s never-ending hunger for story have always created new narratives for themselves as well as transmitting ones they themselves were told or found in books” (xxxvi). It is Jane, however, rather than her brother James, who is recorded as telling stories to the Austen children.
“Prince Marvel,” the fourth tale, is a rich blend of folk and fairy tale traditions. The names and settings used throughout reference British history and mythology. It is rather darker than the other tales, with death and double dealing as well as marvellous deeds. Despite being the only son of the “King of Brittan,” the eponymous hero has a challenging start in life. After his mother’s death in childbirth, Prince Marvel’s nefarious uncles conspire with the baby’s nurse to tell the King that his son has also died. Although one uncle wants to kill the baby, the other insists that they abandon the child instead, well wrapped up and in a basket, with the sign: “Who-so ever will take this infant and breed him up will find fifteen guineas annually near his house.” As with the other tales, there is a richness in language and layered detail as well as a rhythmic emphasis that hints at an oral origin for the tales.
The baby is picked up by a husbandman and his wife, who bring him up as their own son. It soon becomes clear that there is something special about the boy being raised in these humble circumstances: “The boy . . . shew’d from the first dawn of reason the greatest love of literature and when able to work all the money he could save from what he gave to his supposed and affectionate parents, he spent in purchasing books of different descriptions.” Once Marvel is grown, the tale takes a turn, becoming a slightly different type of fairy tale. One day, returning from working the fields, Marvel comes across the beautiful daughter of the local duke being menaced by an “immense wolf.” He kills the wolf with his pickaxe and escorts the maiden, Elfrida, back to her father’s castle. Offered a reward by the Duke for saving Elfrida’s life, Marvel asks to marry her. The Duke refuses to let a peasant marry his daughter and instead sets Marvel the seemingly impossible task of turning a milk-white horse coal-black. Despite Marvel’s consulting all the “Chymists” in the land, in the end his favorite horse manages the feat, drinking from a filthy farmyard pond and turning itself from white to black. Marvel (by this time revealed as the Prince) is free to marry Elfrida, and the tale ends happily.
An excerpt from the Delightful Tales. Courtesy Hampshire Record Office.
(Click here to see a larger version.)
Once again, we can see that names matter in the decoding of the Delightful Tales, offering glimpses and suggestions of links with other texts and key influences. Like Violante, Elfrida is not a common name in literature, but it is significant to Austen’s writerly apprenticeship. The first of Austen’s teenage writings is Frederic and Elfrida, a satire on the cult of sentimentality and sensibility, with its titular characters being cousins who fall in love and, after trials and tribulations, eventually marry. Like all of Austen’s teenage writings, the tale has a dedication, in this case to Martha Lloyd, James Edward Austen’s aunt. (Martha’s younger sister, Mary, was James Edward’s mother.) When the teenage James Edward came to look through Austen’s teenage writings as part of his own creative writing apprenticeship, then, he was looking not just at the documentation of Austen’s experimentation with style, character, and narrative but also at a set of texts that were a testimony of his own family history and the relationships between his mother and aunts.
The final story in Delightful Tales is “Contentment,” and it is told by Queen Benigna herself. In many ways it is more of a fable or parable than a fairy tale, teaching the art of being happy with one’s station in life and cautioning against envy. The tale opens with the young hero, Philomon, a happy peasant with a thriving farm, rejoicing in his humble, rural isolation until he sees the King on progress—an experience that causes him to rail against his own social position and to wish for something “better.” Helped by Queen Benigna, he becomes first a King and, when he wearies of that, a general, and, finally, a holy hermit who protects a priest. When even this last occupation has paled, Queen Benigna reappears and asks him to make a choice for his future: “Man, Oh Philomon is not born for himself. . . . [N]ow take your choice, will you be in the highest of stations with every blessing but contentment to enjoy them, or will you remain a peasant happy in the love of your family and freed from the misery of [envy] and poverty.” Philomon chooses, of course, to remain a peasant (it is “almost useless to add,” the narrator tells us, that he “joyfully accepted” this proposal), waking up to find that it has all been a dream. He collects his sheep and “never more troubled his head” with ideas above his station.
This tale in many ways is more parable than fairy tale. Its lesson might not have sounded out of place preached from the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century pulpits of Steventon and Chawton. The four stations in life that Philomon experiences closely mirror those of the feudal system: royalty at the top, with the military might of the nobility just below; the holy hermit representing the Church, with his hiding of the fugitive priest echoing the ancient right of sanctuary. Philomon chooses to remain in the lowest of the feudal positions, the peasantry.
By the 1810s, the rigid feudal system had long been disrupted. The power of the Church was reduced, and the once blank mass of the peasantry had seen both the rise of the middle class and an increased stratification of the working classes. The blood and riots of the French Revolution caused mass anxiety across Europe, particularly among the ruling classes, who, afraid of losing both their positions and their heads, were keen to limit access to literacy for the working classes and to reinforce the idea that social stratification was both natural and just. Andrea Wulf tells us that the Prime Minister “Pitt . . . raised taxes on printed materials and ordered that printing presses must be registered,” measures designed to limit both the means of production and access to revolutionary and incendiary ideas in England (200). The tale of Philomon the peasant, content with his lowly position in life despite having experienced three alternatives, chimes with the contemporary messaging and policies aimed at preventing revolution.
When we come to analyze the names in “Contentment,” there are two potential sources for Philomon. In both, the name is spelled as “Philemon,” and both sources would have been familiar to Jane and James Edward Austen. The first, the fable of Baucis and Philemon, comes from Book VIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; the second reference is to the letters of St. Paul in the New Testament. Paul’s letter concerns a slave, Onesimus, who has left the service of his owner, Philemon. Onesimus has instead come to Paul, who has found him useful and would like to keep him but asks for Philemon’s permission:
For perhaps he has been separated for a while for this very reason, that you may have him back for ever, no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, as a beloved brother. He is such to me, but how much more to you as a human being and in the Lord. . . . Confident of your acquiescence, I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I ask. (Philem. 15–16, 21)
Joseph A. Fitzmeyer writes that there are two ways that these verses can be read. They might indicate that Philemon will go beyond treating Onesimus as a “brother in Christ” and will grant him his freedom; thus Paul “mildly criticis[es] the social structure of slavery and strongly implies the emancipation of Onesimus.” Or, these lines might equally suggest that Paul makes no attempt to challenge the wider status quo but is merely emphasizing an unemancipated Onesimus’s usefulness to the cause (35).
This letter was a source of potent argument and counterargument during the abolitionist debate. For slavery supporters, it became known as “the Pauline Mandate,” Paul’s lack of criticism becoming a biblical endorsement of slavery (Fitzmeyer 19). Abolitionists, struggling too with Paul’s clear acceptance of Philemon’s dominance over Onesimus, argued that Onesimus was not, in fact, a slave but rather a servant, or perhaps even an illegitimate brother. The currency of the name in the abolitionist debate both supports and is supported by the dating of the Delightful Tales between 1812 and 1815. During these years Jane Austen was writing Mansfield Park and Emma, two novels that engage with the contemporary abolitionist debate. During these years James Edward would have been beginning to study both Latin and Ovid. As the well-read children of clergymen, the name Philemon would have been familiar to the Austens, from both its classical and biblical sources.
“Tale the 5th: Contentment” concludes the Delightful Tales. Philomon is back in his Arcadia, a happy peasant who know his rightful place. Throughout the tales Little Clementina and Cosar have been silent listeners to the stories told by the fairies. We do not hear their responses, nor even whether they returned home safely. Instead, we have a closing moral, and a rather dramatic sign-off:
“And may you my children” continued the fairy, “lay up in your little minds the moral of this and the foregoing little tales when in succeeding years temptation of which you have been forewarn’d by us wise [fairies]. remember and profit by the lessons of Fairy land. Remember we are constant and not unconcerned spectators of your future actions. Away! Away!”
This last paragraph mingles the sinister with the charming. Fairies in the Middle Ages and into the early modern period had been seen as dangerous beings, apt to curse the milk and cause havoc—a belief that hadn’t quite evaporated even by the late eighteenth century. But the fairies in the Delightful Tales are more like fairy godmothers, protective creatures who care, intervene, and instruct.
In the Memoir, when looking back on his childhood, James Edward repeatedly associates Jane Austen and the fantastic, specifically with fairies. He describes his childhood memories of staying with the Austen women in Southampton and looking out on to Castle Square with a real sense of wonder:
It was a delight to me to look down from the window and see this fairy equipage [the Marchioness of Lansdown’s phaeton] put together. . . . Like other fairy works, however, it all proved evanescent. Not only carriage and ponies, but castle itself, soon vanished away, “like the baseless fabric of a vision.” (Memoir 66–67)
The quotation at the end here is from The Tempest, further enhancing this sense of magic and wonder. Later in the Memoir, he describes the housewife (sewing kit) that Austen made for his mother, Mary Lloyd, as “the kind of article that some benevolent fairy might be supposed to give as a reward to a diligent little girl” (79). It is just this sort of benevolent and benign fairy that we meet in the Delightful Tales. When one considers the household first at Southampton and then Chawton, made up as it was of storytelling, charade-writing, poetizing women, the gathering of benevolent “fairies” to tell and share stories for children’s benefit and amusement might not be as much of a stretch of the imagination as it seems.
When I first opened the notebook that contains the Delightful Tales of Fairy Land, I had little idea of the research adventure on which I was about to embark—though after being introduced to their existence by Professor Kathryn Sutherland, I had long believed that they had the possibility to be hugely significant for our understanding of the work not just of James Edward Austen but also of his famous aunt Jane. For me, this notebook, and the Delightful Tales offer an entirely new angle on the reading and cultural hinterland of the extended Austen household, revealing an engagement with texts previously unconsidered and unthinkable but which, when read and explored with Jane Austen’s finished texts in mind, generate new possibilities, new interpretations, and new understandings.
