The 2007 film Becoming Jane depicts Jane Austen as a penniless aspiring author who struggles to write a good courtship story until she meets the equally penniless aspiring lawyer Tom Lefroy, who determines that Miss Austen’s “horizons must be widened.”  To serve that worthy end, he offers her—besides his own dangerous presence—Henry Fielding’s bawdy, rollicking novel Tom Jones.  Whatever Austen has been reading up to this point, we are to believe, contains nothing like the sexual adventures of Fielding’s libidinous hero:  when the film shows Lefroy pulling the novel from a shelf in his aunt’s library, it implies that Austen could not have found such a work at Steventon.  Fortunately for Steventon’s reputation, we know far too much about Jane Austen’s youthful reading to take such a suggestion seriously, and the influence of Tom Jones, in particular, on Austen’s youthful (pre-Lefroy) writing is well documented.  For instance, Juliet McMaster observes that in “Henry and Eliza” (1788), Austen “presents a heroine who is a foundling, like Tom Jones, and chronicles the sowing of her wild oats with a Fieldingesque indulgence” (5).  Margaret Anne Doody argues that both Tom Jones and an earlier Fielding novel, Joseph Andrews, “are in an immediate relation to ‘Henry and Eliza,’ which picks up a number of plot points and thematic developments from them (not excluding Fielding’s own brand of irony)” (xxix).

Such insights contribute to our growing appreciation of Austen’s early works as satires and parodies of the eighteenth-century novel.  In this literary landscape Fielding stands as one of the giants—yet young Jane Austen is unafraid to take on giants, for “Fielding’s moral balances and conclusions are distorted, disturbed, even done away with, in ‘Henry and Eliza,’” as Doody argues.  In Austen’s juvenilia, “There are no moral equations, and highly balanced prose does not equal a highly balanced and harmonized civilized society” (xxix).  Young Jane Austen, we might say, delighted in playing at giant-slayer. 

That she did so within the pages of her juvenilia is beyond question.  It is possible (though far from certain) that Austen at twelve years old also played the giant-slayer quite literally, on the Steventon stage, during the March 22, 1788, family theatrical production of another work by Fielding:  a hilarious play about a tiny hero called Tom Thumb, who saves the land from a horde of giants, earning as a result the envy of men and the desire of women, only to die in an unhappy accident at the end.  This play James Austen, Jane’s oldest brother, refers to in his prologue for the Steventon performance as The Tragedy of Tom Thumb, an ambiguous title that might refer either to Fielding’s Tom Thumb: A Tragedy, a two-act afterpiece first performed in 1730, or to his significantly revised and expanded three-act version complete with a full set of mock-critical footnotes, The Tragedy of Tragedies: The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, first performed and published in 1731.1  My discussion focuses on plot elements and characters common to both, but unless otherwise specified all quotations in this paper come from the 1731 version.  Both plays are, as Fielding says, “Burlesque[s]” (Preface 80). 

Tom Thumb was the first and only burlesque to be staged at Steventon,2 and it was, I argue, a strong and direct influence on the early writing that Jane Austen began to produce within a few months either side of that landmark performance.  Whether the diminutive hero was undertaken by Jane, her younger brother Charles, one of George Austen’s younger pupils, or someone else, Jane Austen was evidently impressed enough by Fielding’s script and immersed enough in its language to fill the pages of Volume the First with exuberant and outrageous works that not only show how congenial she must have found Fielding’s burlesque style but also recall Fielding’s Tom Thumb in several particulars, including place names, plot elements, characters, and rhetorical strategies.  Yet Austen’s treatment of these recognizable features in even her earliest pieces rise beyond imitation or homage into a brilliant—and arguably protofeminist—originality. 

Burlesque and its targets 

Today the term burlesque can refer to many different things, including a certain type of choreographed dance that often (not always) involves stripping.  That sort of performance is not the subject of this essay, though Fielding’s Tom Thumb does draw attention to the sexual human body in its own way.  In the eighteenth century, as Dr. Johnson tells us, burlesque referred to a type of satire that ridicules its targets in a “Jocular” manner, “tending to raise laughter” by means of “unnatural or unsuitable language or images.”  Tom Thumb’s burlesque raises laughter by ridiculing the style of heroic tragedies, chiefly those written in the age of Dryden, which are characterized by “mad, unrestrained bombast, . . . wild sentiments of love, jealousy, and honor,” and strained borrowings from Shakespeare (Hillhouse 24; see also Hunter 23–32).  Indeed, the language and images characteristic of the heroic style are already so unnatural that Fielding’s parody need do no more than give it “a slight rhetorical push to reveal” its “underlying inanities” (Rivero 58).  For those few in his audience who might be unfamiliar with the heroic style, Fielding’s footnotes to the 1731 version provide a surfeit of examples. 

A more recent definition of literary burlesque specifies that it achieves comic incongruity either by treating a serious subject in a nonserious manner or by treating a trivial subject in a serious manner, either way mixing high with low (Abrams and Harpham 37).  In Tom Thumb, Fielding does both.  He places a visibly low character—a very short person, I mean—at the center of the kind of plot that requires a hero who can reach the highest heights of both “physical powers and . . . emotions” (Hillhouse 33); at the same time, his style often treats matters of high seriousness with poetry that scrapes the bottom of the stylistic barrel.  Both these burlesque features are evident right from the opening monologue, in which the courtier Noodle celebrates Tom Thumb’s recent triumph over the giants who threatened the land: 

This Day O Mr. Doodle! is a Day
Indeed, a Day we never saw before.
The mighty Thomas Thumb victorious comes;
Millions of Giants crowd his Chariot Wheels,
. . .
While Thumb regardless of their Noise rides on.
So some Cock-Sparrow in a Farmer’s Yard,
Hops at the Head of an huge Flock of Turkeys.  (1.1; 90–91) 

Of course, Doodle speaks in blank verse, as a serious tragedy requires, and he follows convention in larding his speech with similes.  But the bombast of the monologue’s first two lines rapidly declines into a simile that—though authorized by Tom Thumb’s tiny size—is truly ludicrous, comparing the great warrior to “some Cock-Sparrow” hopping in front of turkeys. 

The Austens staged this monologue at a crucial point in Jane Austen’s development as a writer, when—already a master of novelistic conventions—she was also expressing a strong interest in burlesque.  As Peter Sabor among others has noted, the very first piece we find in Volume the First, “Frederic and Elfrida” (1787), invokes Alexander Pope’s mock-epic, The Rape of the Lock (1712):  Austen’s “Patches, Powder, Pomatum and Paint” (J 7) echoes Pope’s “Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux” (1: 138; see Sabor 378 n.31).  But Austen moves to theatrical burlesque in the next chapter of this early novel, when she describes a scene based on Addison’s Rosamond an Opera (1707).  In the opera, Queen Eleanor offers her rival Rosamond a choice between two deaths: 

Or quickly drain the fatal Bowl,
Or this right Hand performs its Part,
And plants a Dagger in thy Heart . (1.5.8–10) 

Austen’s burlesque of this scene is absurdly stagy, as Frederic and Elfrida speak in unison to offer Rebecca Fitzroy’s mother the choice between a bottle of smelling salts and instant death: 

“Consent then Madam to their union and as a reward, this smelling Bottle which I enclose in my right hand, shall be yours and yours forever; I never will claim it again.  But if you refuse to join their hands in 3 days time, this dagger which I enclose in my left shall be steeped in your hearts blood.”  (J 10) 

Addison’s Rosamond was sometimes published with The Opera of Operas, Eliza Haywood’s adaptation of the 1731 Tom Thumb.  Inspiration was all around. 

Pope’s mock-epic poem famously treats a (supposedly) trivial matter in the serious epic style; Austen treats the trivial reward of smelling salts in an elevated style.  Yet in Austen’s early novels we are just as likely to find her treating serious matters with unserious language, as in this comic epitaph in “Frederic and Eliza” for Charlotte Drummond, who commits suicide when she realizes that she has agreed to marry two different men: 

Here lies our freind who having promis-ed
That unto two she would be marri-ed
Threw her sweet Body and her lovely face
Into the Stream that runs thro’ Portland Place.  (J 9) 

Forced rhyme creates a playful mood here that hardly accommodates empathy.  We may say the same of Grizzle’s expression of a lover’s intense frustration, in Tom Thumb:  “D—n your Delay, you Trifler, are you drunk, ha? / I will not hear one word but Huncamunca” (2.10; 12).  This strategy is the reverse of that mixture of serious style with trivial content that we see elsewhere in the juvenilia and in Tom Thumb, but both types of burlesque are sustained by a keen sense of what is ridiculous in literary language as well as in human behavior. 

Austen’s epitaph for Charlotte Drummond also recalls Fielding’s treatment of Queen Dollalolla, another woman torn between two men.  Here, Dollalolla’s shabby wardrobe similes trivialize her passion for Tom Thumb: 

And whither shall I go?———Alack-a-day!
I love Tom Thumb—but must not tell him so;
For what’s a Woman, when her Virtue’s gone?
A Coat without its lace; Wig out of Buckle;
A Stocking with a Hole in’t———I can’t live
Without my Virtue, or without Tom Thumb.  (1.6; 104) 

This is no tragic struggle:  the potential loss of the queen’s virtue is as banal as a hole in her stocking. 

Unsurprisingly, burlesque is a term that has been long associated with Jane Austen’s earliest works.  Her niece Caroline, writing when herself an old woman, reflected, “I have always thought it remarkable that the early workings of her mind should have been in burlesque, and comic exaggeration, setting at nought all rules of probable or possible” (qtd. in Sabor xl).  Others since then who have found the term apt include G. K. Chesterton, A. Walton Litz, and Margaret Drabble (Sabor xlvii, liii, lvi).  Few, however—Paula Byrne being an important exception—have drawn connections between Austen’s early embrace of the burlesque in her writing and the tradition of stage burlesque, especially as exemplified by Fielding’s Tom Thumb (Byrne 71–87).  “Frederic and Elfrida” and “Amelia Webster” were probably written a few months before the Austens rehearsed and performed Tom Thumb in March 1788, but the process of reading plays and selecting one to stage can begin months in advance:  in September 1787 Eliza de Feuillide was already writing to her cousin Philadelphia Walter about which plays would be put on at Steventon that Christmas (Le Faye 80).  There is a good chance, then, that Jane Austen was already familiar with Tom Thumb by the time she wrote those two early pieces.  Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Critic is another burlesque of tragic verse drama, and this play was George Austen’s favorite (Alexander xviii).  The Austens performed Sheridan’s comedy The Rivals in 1784; there is no record of their having staged The Critic, but at some early point Jane Austen became deeply familiar with it, as it is a significant influence on both “Love and Freindship” (1790) and “Lesley Castle” (1792) (Peterson, “Faints”).  Moreover, The Critic reworks the Duke of Buckingham’s earlier burlesque of heroic tragedy, The Rehearsal (1671), an important model for Fielding’s Tom Thumb.  Austen family discussions of Sheridan’s comedy would have led quite naturally to his burlesque, and from there it was just a short step to Buckingham’s and Fielding’s. 

It is not surprising, then, that besides invoking Pope and Addison, “Frederic and Elfrida” also announces Austen’s debt to Fielding’s play with the ludicrous village name of Crankhumdunberry.  Sabor is surely right to note a close “resemblance” between this name and that of Huncamunca, the princess in Tom Thumb (376 n.14; Byrne 74).3  Pammydiddle, the village in “Jack and Alice,” is another instance of polysyllabic fun that recalls Fielding’s playfully demeaning names:  besides Princess Huncamunca, Tom Thumb also has Queen Dollalolla and (in the 1731 version only) the giantess Glumdalca. 

Even more compelling are the many parallels between Fielding’s Huncamunca and Austen’s Alice, the main character in “Jack and Alice” (1790), who are both red-faced, frankly lustful, husband-hunting drunks.  When King Arthur tells his daughter that she is to wed Tom Thumb, her reaction prompts him to exclaim (in characteristically garbled metaphors), “A Country Dance of Joy is in your Face, / Your Eyes spit Fire, your Cheeks grow red as Beef” (2.4; 112).  These beef-red cheeks are akin to Alice Johnson’s high complexion, for which she is repeatedly teased by her neighbor Lady Williams—teasing that results in “Miss Johnson reddening with anger” even more (J 19).  The two young women are also equally willing to speak frankly of their desires to others, including their fathers.  When the king inquires the reason for Huncamunca’s “Grief / Unusual,” she explains that “a Maid may want, / What she can neither eat nor drink”—that is, “a Husband” (2.4; 110, 111).  She makes no attempt to minimize or disguise her passion:  “For him I’ve sigh’d, I’ve wept, I’ve gnaw’d my Sheets” (2. 4; 112).  Alice Johnson makes a similarly bold “disclos[ure]” to “her Father” of her “attachment” to the dazzling Charles Adams and requests that Mr. Johnson “propose a union between them to Charles,” which he promptly does (J 28).  These are transgressive admissions and requests that no eighteenth-century father would expect from a properly brought-up daughter and that no conduct book would countenance. 

In both texts, moreover, these father-daughter discussions have been preceded by even more frank acknowledgements of lustful obsession made to a female companion or two.  Once Huncamunca’s companion Cleora sings a love song, the princess gives vent to her anguish:  “O, Tom Thumb! Tom Thumb! wherefore art thou Tom Thumb? / Why hadst thou not been born of Royal Race?” (2.3; 109).  Alice Johnson, similarly, “seek[s] a releif for her disordered Head and Love-sick Heart in the Conversation of the intelligent Lady Williams,” as Austen’s narrator reports.  Alice “could think of nothing but Charles Adams, she could talk of nothing but him, and in short spoke so openly that Lady Williams soon discovered the unreturned affection she bore him” (J 17).  But neither heroine finds unqualified support from the women she confides in.  Huncamunca’s other attendant, Mustacha, flatly rebukes her for her interest in “That little, insignificant Fellow, Tom Thumb the Great—One properer for a Play-thing, than a Husband” ( (2.3; 109–10)).  Lady Williams tells Alice, “‘I pity you sincerely,’” but her only advice is that Alice avoid an injurious “‘first Love’” if she possibly can and instead go straight to “‘[a] second attachment,’” which “‘is seldom attended with any serious consequences’” (J 17).  This is hardly helpful. 

These young lovers have better luck finding comfort in a bottle:  the two unabashedly carnal heroines also share “a propensity for liquor” (Byrne 76).  The 1730 Huncamunca keeps “a Quart of Rum” under her bed (2.3; 66); the 1731 Huncamunca is recognizable by her “Brandy Nose” (2.7; 117).  It is likewise “no very uncommon case” for Alice Johnson to find “herself somewhat heated by wine” (J 17) or even just plain “drunk” (J 20).  Surely Alice is Huncamunca’s literary sister. 

These two unconventional heroines also live in literary sister cities, for what Albert J. Rivero aptly terms “the linguistic chaos of Arthur’s court” (65) finds its parallel in the linguistic chaos of Pammydiddle:  in both places we find frequent instances of language’s failure “to make appropriate connections between words and ideas” (67).  In most cases, at least, this failure is unintended by the speakers.4  Noodle is unaware that “‘an huge Flock of Turkeys’ cannot function as a suitable analogy for an army of defeated giants—at least not in a literary work that aspires to be taken seriously” (64–65).  Alice, likewise (partly because she has “partaken too freely of Lady Williams’s claret”), is unaware of the way in which the very profuseness of her compliment to her new friend Lucy empties it of any real sense: 

The perfect form, the beautifull face, and elegant manners of Lucy so won on the affections of Alice that when they parted, . . . she assured her that except her Father, Brother, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins and other relations, Lady Williams, Charles Adams and a few dozen more of particular friends, she loved her better than almost any other person in the world.  (J 25) 

The longer Alice talks, the less she means. 

Lady Williams’s discourse is often even more confusing, and this is without the excuse provided by alcohol.  Consider her dizzyingly useless response to young Lucy’s deferential request for advice regarding a marriage proposal: 

“Why do you hesitate my dearest Lucy, a moment with respect to the Duke?  I have enquired into his Character and find him to be an unprincipaled, illiterate Man.  Never shall my Lucy be united to such a one!  He has a princely fortune which is every day encreasing.  How nobly will you spend it!”  (J 30) 

Lady Williams cannot or will not resolve either Alice’s dilemma or Lucy’s, but that does not stop her from talking circles around her audience.  The more words, the less reason:  she achieves the same thing with the language of advice that Alice achieves earlier with the language of friendship.  Both are important discourses in the genres that mattered to women readers of Austen’s day, and both are exposed to ridicule here, just as the bombast and bad similes of heroic drama are exposed in Tom Thumb. 

Size and other matters 

Size matters in Tom Thumb because, as J. Paul Hunter argues, to convey the shortcomings of a debased modern culture, Fielding literalizes “the traditional metaphor of size” that represents “the ancients . . . as giants and the moderns as pygmies or dwarfs” (23, 38).  Swift literalizes this same metaphor in his description of the Lilliputians; years after the publication of Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, it was still common to refer to modern England as Lilliput as a way of signalling belief in “the continuing appropriateness of considering England’s political scene petty” (39).  Moreover, Hunter writes, “[p]hysical size as a metaphor of value had .  .  . a long and dignified history before Swift,” and Fielding’s play taps into this tradition to suggest that “modern heroism was diminutive indeed” (38, 39).  In Fielding’s view, the giants of the past include literary as well as political figures, especially Shakespeare, whose tragedies Dryden and his ilk repeatedly plunder and parrot but constantly fall short of.  Tom Thumb is so tiny that we cannot take seriously the idea of his contending with giants; neither can we take seriously as a literary contender the short play that bears his name. 

William Hogarth, Frontispiece, The Tragedy of Tragedies; or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1731).  © The Trustees of the British Museum.
(Click here to see a larger version.)

Yet I would also argue that an important source of the humor in Tom Thumb stems from Fielding’s flaunting his failure to literalize the play’s governing metaphor, a failure by which he dramatizes just “how easy [it is] to turn metaphoric flights to absurdity” (Hunter 33).  All the descriptions of Tom Thumb report a being who is physically much smaller than any child actor could be.  Mustacha compares him to a “Play-thing,” or doll; Noodle specifies that he is less than knee-high:  “Tho’ small his Body be, so very small, /A chairman’s Leg is more than twice as large” (1.1; 92).  Furthermore, Hogarth’s frontispiece to the enlarged edition agrees with these assessments:  Tom Thumb looks much more like a doll in this image than a child old enough to walk and talk.  The proportions Hogarth depicts would be impossible to replicate on stage.  

The disjunction is so extreme that the tragic hero’s death scene must be kept off stage.  Noodle reports: 

I saw Tom Thumb attended by the Mob,
Twice Twenty Shoe-Boys, twice two Dozen Links,
Chairmen and Porters, Hackney-Coachmen, Whores;
Aloft he bore the grizly Head of Grizzle;
When of a sudden thro’ the Streets there came
A Cow of larger than the usual Size,
And in a Moment—guess, Oh! guess the rest!
And in a Moment swallowed up Tom Thumb.  (3.10; 142) 

In the 1730 version, Tom Thumb’s ghost then rises, only to be stabbed through and killed a second time in the bloodbath with which the play concludes, piling corpse upon corpse and absurdity upon absurdity in a moment that, reportedly, caused Jonathan Swift to laugh for only the second time in his life.  In the 1731 version, Tom Thumb stays “swallowed up” and the bloodbath proceeds without him.  Either way, a large cow kills at once the character of Tom Thumb and the audience’s suspension of disbelief in the actor’s representation of that character—all in one fell moo. 

Austen follows Fielding with her own early experiments in testing the limits of imagery.  Consider this oft-quoted passage in “Jack and Alice,” which describes events at a masquerade: 

The Company now advanced to a Gaming Table where sat 3 Dominos (each with a bottle in their hand) deeply engaged, but a female in the character of Virtue fled with hasty footsteps from the shocking scene, whilst a little fat woman representing Envy, sate alternately on the foreheads of the 3 Gamesters.  (J 15) 

As Virtue and Envy morph from literal masquerade costumes into personifications of abstract qualities (or is it the other way round?), the scene becomes impossible to picture; instead of achieving either allegory or realistic description, the language ceases to signify and meaningful description flees the scene.  Symbols and metaphors, like Virtue, must be handled with care. 

Austen’s early writing, then, reveals the extent to which she appreciated Fielding’s burlesque and shared his pleasure in ridiculing language that violates common sense.  It also points to Tom Thumb as a significant source of what Jill Heydt-Stevenson aptly terms the juvenilia’s “revolutionary, libidinous, and unforgiving humor” (22).  Yet I do not see evidence that—even when she was at the height of her enthusiasm for burlesque (roughly from 1787 to 1790)—Austen ever accepted Fielding’s masculinist assumption that nonsense is essentially effeminate.  Tom Thumb, as we have seen, was written with the aim of upholding literary giants and burlesquing their Lilliputian imitators, which is all very well as far as it goes.  Fielding’s play also, however, strongly suggests that this aim can be understood as upholding manly literature and burlesquing its effeminate imitations—great literature and manly literature being, in Fielding’s view, one and the same.  Not content with describing Tom Thumb as a strutting “Cock-Sparrow,” Noodle’s opening monologue quickly devolves into a dig at Tom Thumb’s sexual inadequacy when he repeats the oft-whispered rumor “[t]hat this mighty Hero / . . . hath not a Bone / Within his Skin, but is a Lump of Gristle” (1.1; 91–92). Tom’s lack of proper genitals is mentioned almost as often as his height—that other deficiency in size. 

Even Huncamunca is worried about what we might euphemistically term Tom’s “thumb.”  As the two lovers consider their wedding night, she expresses anxiety with another convolutedly incoherent metaphor in which she compares first Tom Thumb, and then herself, to an “unhappy Sempstress”: 

                                      . . . you’re so small
That were you lost, you’d find your self no more.
So the unhappy Sempstress once, they say,
Her Needle in a Pottle [bundle], lost, of Hay;
In vain she look’d, and look’d, and made her Moan,
For ah, the Needle was forever gone.  (2.9; 122) 

In this nightmare scenario, either Tom Thumb or his phallus is the missing Needle, lost in the haystack of Huncamunca’s body:  a disaster that results in Huncamunca’s “Moan” of sexual frustration.  She begins expressing concern for him, but it quickly becomes clear that what really worries her is not his ability to find himself but her ability to find and claim his “Needle.”  What remains unclear is whether the Needle in question is “so small” or completely “gone.”  In an earlier scene Mustacha refers to Tom Thumb as a “Nothing,” a “Thing without Substance” (2.3; 110).  Many Shakespeare scholars read the term nothing as a slang term for vagina. 

Such jokes are heightened for an audience when Fielding’s diminutive hero is played by a girl, a frequent practice in the eighteenth century (Macey 413–14) and one that began with the opening performance at the Haymarket Theatre in 1730, when Tom Thumb was played by one Miss Jones.  But whether Jane Austen played Tom Thumb—a question I take up below—she refused to follow his example when it came to playing phallic lack for laughs. 

To Fielding, modern heroic tragedy is the effeminate weakling, while Shakespeare (and every other author Fielding admires) is the manly Mr. Big.5  Adolescent Jane Austen is just as keen as Fielding is to criticize a popular contemporary genre—the novel, in her case—“for inadequately representing reality” (Parker 41), but as we know this young lover of novels does not embrace the Augustans’ commitment to the superiority of classical authors to modern.  She also rejects the idea that man’s grasp on reality is superior to woman’s, which we may know from her early refusal to equate either mental or physical capacity with biological gender.  Consider the passage in “Henry and Eliza” where our heroine’s two hungry children bite “off two of her fingers” (J 43).  Recall that this heroine was found in a “Haycock”—not lost (J 38).  Born a girl, Eliza never had the phallic “bone” that Noodle worries about; when placed next to Tom Thumb and viewed through the lens of Huncamunca’s fear, Eliza’s loss of fingers reads like a symbolic castration.  Yet although she loses two appendages, this double loss (on top of the original lack) makes no difference to her power.  Her story, post-amputation, ends where Tom Thumb’s begins:  Eliza raises an army and leads it to victory over the enemy.  And so Austen’s narrative laughs away all such anxieties as Huncamunca’s—or Fielding’s. 

“the small Hero of our infant Stage” 

The question remains:  did Jane Austen herself play Tom Thumb, or some other character, in her family’s production?  Did that experience help motivate her writing?  We know the names of a few of those who acted in the Steventon theatricals, but no record of the cast for this one has yet come to light, so I do not have a final answer to that question.  But there are so many good reasons why Jane Austen might have acted in Tom Thumb that the possibility cannot be ruled out. 

Entertaining the possibility requires us, first and foremost, to question the early and influential statement of Jane Austen’s first biographer, her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, who many decades after the events in question wrote that “Jane was only twelve years old at the time of the earliest of these [theatrical] representations, and not more than fifteen when the last took place.  She was, however, an early observer” (28).  By this he implies that Jane was both too young and too reserved to act, contrasting Jane, the “observer,” with her cousin Eliza de Feuillide, the performer, who supposedly “took the principal parts in the family theatricals” (28).  But there are several errors of fact here.6  Eliza was not always present, for one thing; in fact, I can only verify that she was in two plays, the ones staged at Steventon over Christmas and New Year’s 1787–88.7  Jane was also quite a bit younger during the theatricals than her nephew states:  she was only six when the Austens staged Matilda in 1782, and the last five theatricals that we have records of all took place between December 1787 and January 1789, when she was twelve to thirteen.  Perhaps Austen-Leigh is also mistaken in depicting Jane as a mere “observer.”  It is possible that he suppressed knowledge to the contrary out of his Victorian “reticence” (Sutherland xxxv). 

Yet Claire Tomalin is one of only a few biographers to date to suggest that Jane Austen did in fact perform.  Regarding the Austens’ performance of The Rivals in July 1784, Tomalin invites us to “speculate boldly that Jane Cooper and Cassandra played Lydia and Julia, and even that Jane Austen may have been given Lucy the maid” (40).  Jane is known to have been an “an excellent mimic” (Alexander ix), and she had—as we can all agree—an astonishingly retentive memory.  So why not accept Tomalin’s invitation to conjecture that Jane played the pert Lucy?  And having done so, why stop there? 

Robert Dodd, after Hogarth’s 1732 depiction of Dryden’s The Indian Emperor (1792). 
© The Trustees of the British Museum.
(Click here to see a larger version.)

Henry William Bunbury, Miss Williams Wynn as Viola (1785). © Amgueddfa Cymru–Museum Wales.
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Neither Jane’s age nor her gender was an obstacle.  In fact, getting children of both genders up onto the stage was a common goal of private theatricals at this time, and such events were eminently respectable, as illustrated by Hogarth’s painting of a children’s theatrical performance in 1732.  The child actors on stage are from aristocratic families, and there are royalty in the audience.8  A few years later, “In 1749 and 1750 the royal princes and princesses, children of Frederick Prince of Wales, . . . acted in Cato and Lady Jane Grey. . . . The future George III played Portius in the former.”  He “was then only ten and his little sister Princess Elizabeth, who played Lucia, was eight” (Rosenfeld 11).  Cross-dressing was not forbidden to upper-class actors in private theatricals either, as illustrated by this 1785 image of Miss Williams Wynn playing Viola in Twelfth Night at Wynnstay. 

According to theater historian Sybil Rosenfeld, “the years 1770 to 1810 were the golden age” of family theatricals, during which time puritanical objections only smouldered, and periodicals were just as likely to publish “fulsome flattery” as criticism (15, 13).  In Hogarth’s painting the children are performing Dryden’s The Indian Emperor (1665), a heroic tragedy that remained popular despite Fielding’s burlesque of the genre; but Tom Thumb was a popular choice in this era, too.  It was performed at Wynnstay in 1782 (Rosenfeld 85); it was performed at Holland House in April 1762 with Lady Sarah Lennox, aged about nineteen, and the future politician Charles Fox, then aged thirteen, “as the star performers” (Rosenfeld 124).  The clever, well-educated, and artistically ambitious Austen children could surely do the same or more, and all evidence suggests that they had their parents’ full, enthusiastic support.  After all, the Rev. Austen allowed the actors to use his barn—on a working farm—as their summer theater, and as Eliza de Feuillide reported to a fearful Philadelphia Walter, trying to persuade her to take on two small roles in the upcoming December 1787 production at Steventon, Mrs. Austen “declares ‘She has not room for any idle young people’” (qtd. in Le Faye 80).  With two roles still unclaimed and everyone working to help fill them, it is highly unlikely that Jane Austen would have been permitted to stay “idle.” 

There is also reason to believe that James Austen, who spearheaded the private theatricals at Steventon, valued and relied upon his two sisters’ contributions.  Austen-Leigh claims that James was a mentor to Jane with “a large share in directing her reading and forming her taste” (16), and her dedication to James of her two-act comedy “The Visit” implies that she saw him as a theatrical mentor as well.  It is also highly suggestive (though not conclusive) that whenever Cassandra and Jane were away at school, there were no plays at Steventon.9  The girls may have been indispensable from the first. 

We can be reasonably certain that the Austen production of Tom Thumb featured a fairly young actor in the title role.  James’s prologue, apparently written for himself to speak, takes a strongly protective stance towards his young star: 

Let not the judgment keen of riper age,
Mock the small Hero of our infant stage.
Though small indeed the Hero of to-night,
He can, like other Heroes, love & fight;
Can sigh in sentiment, in passion roar,
And Philip’s son10 himself did little more.
For him who thus, (your goodness not unknown)
Stands forth his comrade’s champion, & his own . . .  (109–16) 

Clearly, this performance featured someone “small indeed” in the title role.  It is an unusual move for James to defend a particular actor in one of his prologues or epilogues; typically, he defends the choice of play and the cast’s collective efforts.  Here, however, he instructs the audience to expect an actor significantly smaller than the rest of the cast, and he asks them not to let their “riper age” lead them to “Mock the small Hero.” 

James also notes that this hero’s capacity to “love & fight” goes no further than superficial appearances:  he only “Can sigh in sentiment, in passion roar.”  In other words, his masculine capacities are just an act.  Is this a sly acknowledgment that the actor is not male?  Possibly, though not necessarily; the lines are also appropriate for a boy.  The word champion, as used here to describe the role of a man who commits to defending someone weaker than himself, could suggest a knight defending his lady, but comrade implies male friendship.  James also describes himself here as “his own” champion, and he was not one to belittle his own masculinity.  Ultimately, the Prologue intrigues, but it does not reveal who played Tom Thumb at Steventon. 

At age twelve Jane may have already been too big to play Tom Thumb; she had a pleasing singing voice, so she would also have been a good choice for Cleora.  Ultimately, she would have become deeply familiar with Fielding’s script no matter what her contribution, whether on stage or off:  the rehearsal process is such an intense, immersive experience that even Fanny Price, that most reluctant of participants, ends up helping poor Mr. Rushworth so much that she learns “every word of his part herself” (MP 194).  In this, Mansfield Park’s fictional depiction of the rehearsal process is highly realistic. 

Nevertheless, we should not be in too much of a rush to consign Jane to Fanny’s place behind the scenes, because to do so is to replicate a false distinction—false at Steventon in the 1780s, and generally false in Georgian England—between private writing and public performance.  As recent scholarship on the juvenilia makes clear, home theatricals, charades, writing, and reading aloud were all part of the same family culture at Steventon in which voices were regularly raised and creativity regularly shared with an admiring audience.  Jane Austen’s early novels, tales, and plays—as well as their dedications—reflect the fact that their young author was very much a participant in this culture.  Kathryn Sutherland and Freya Johnston stress that these pieces “were written and prepared for sociable reading and for circulation and performance among family and friends” (xi); Christine Alexander notes that “[m]uch of the material of the juvenilia, especially the early burlesques . . . , echoes [the] comic theatre and the high spirits and repartee practised by the talented community of young readers, writers and actors at Steventon rectory” (xx).  Young Jane Austen was not scribbling in introvert isolation; as a member of this “talented community” she was a performer, and this performer was confident of encouragement from her appreciative audience.  The question then becomes not whether she might have acted in any of the Steventon plays but what reasonable grounds there could possibly be for deciding she did not. 

Understanding this social context helps us to appreciate why Jane Austen did not need to wait for Tom Lefroy to explain the facts of life.  As Sutherland and Johnston point out, Jane “may well have been producing and performing her early works for a group including young male lodgers, since her father took in boys for tutoring,” and “it is easy to see how such a domestic arrangement could prove congenial to highly charged, flirtatious performances.”  It is easy, as well, to imagine how such an audience might respond with “hysterical laughter whenever a hint of sexual impropriety emerged” (xxviii).  No wonder Jane Austen learned early to decode a double entendre. 

In March of 1788, when Tom Thumb was staged at Steventon, she was not just emerging as a writer; she was emerging as a performer of some sophistication—a performer, moreover, whose work was as grounded in her own embodied subjectivity as it was in the texts she read.  We cannot fully appreciate the early roots—or the protofeminist originality—of Austen’s “bawdy/body humor” (Heydt-Stevenson 7) without situating her early juvenilia in the context of the culture of performativity that characterized life at Steventon in Austen’s early years and, more specifically, in the context of Henry Fielding’s theatrical burlesque.  Whether or not Jane Austen played Tom Thumb on stage, she clearly knew the play intimately—knew just how much size matters and just how little a metaphor can mean—knew it, moreover, so well that she was able to use Fielding’s own tools to challenge his brand of masculinist satire in her early juvenilia.

NOTES

1The first version was a success—it went through three editions in 1730 alone—but subsequent editions and adaptations were based on the 1731 version, which remained popular throughout the remainder of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth.  Nevertheless, the much larger dramatis personae of the 1731 version (sixteen speaking roles instead of eleven) and the added battle scenes might have made it impracticable for the Austens to stage, so we should not rule out the possibility that they took the 1730 version as their text.  See Hillhouse’s Bibliography of separate editions, collected editions of Fielding’s works, publications in miscellaneous collections, and adaptations (200–03).  I agree with Penny Gay that Kane O’Hara’s two-act burletta of Tom Thumb (1780), which was also popular into the nineteenth century, probably had in it too many songs for the Austens (169 n.11). 

2The Steventon theatricals took place between 1782 and January 1789.  First was a tragedy:  Francklin’s Matilda (1775), staged in 1782 sometime after February 13.  Three full-length comedies followed: Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), Centlivre’s The Wonder! A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714), and Fletcher, Buckingham, and Garrick’s The Chances (1773), staged July 1784, December 1787, and January 1788 respectively.  Next was Tom Thumb in March 1788; the theatricals ended with farces in December 1788 and January 1789:  the first was most likely (though not certainly) Townley’s High Life Below Stairs (1759), paired with Jane Austen’s own “The Visit” (1788?); the final one was Bickerstaffe’s The Sultan (1775).  See Byrne, Gay, and Selwyn for discussions of this timeline. 

3Another young woman writer who took inspiration from Fielding’s names was Beatrix Potter, who gave the names Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca to the protagonists of her Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904). 

4The Physicians in Fielding’s 1730 version are a notable exception; with Lady Williams it is sometimes difficult to know whether her contradictory and confusing language is the result of incompetence or cunning. 

5As one example of this, Jo Alyson Parker notes that “When Fielding, who proudly affixed his name to his novels, asserts his authority against ‘the Authors of immense Romances or the modern Novels and Atalantis Writers’ (187), his singling out of the work of Mrs. Delariviere Manley counterposes the implicitly masculine epistemological validity of his text to the implicitly feminine falsifications of hers” (42). 

6Austen-Leigh’s daughter Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh stated of her father that of Austen’s “earlier and gayer experiences, he probably knew nothing” (qtd. in Sutherland xliv). 

7Eliza de Feuillide’s subsequent absence helps explain the switch from full-length comedy to much shorter burlesque and farce.  She was in France for the first two theatricals in 1782 and 1784; she was at Steventon for Christmas 1786–87, with her six-month-old son, but there were no theatricals that year, though Mrs. Austen did organize “a very snug little dance in our parlour” (qtd. in Le Faye 75).  Following the 1787–88 performances, she returned to London; by the time her cousin arrived to visit her in the first week of April 1788, Eliza was well settled into her “racketing life” there (84), so it is unlikely she was at Steventon for Tom Thumb in late March.  By Christmas 1788–89 she was back in France (Le Faye 92). 

8Prince William, “Duke of Cumberland, . . . stands on the left with the Princesses Mary and Louisa beside him; the Duke of Richmond is shown in the left foreground, leaning over his wife's chair, . . . the performers are Lord Sempster as Cortez, Lady Caroline Len[n]ox as Cydaria, Lady Sophia Fermor as Almeria, and Miss Catherine Conduitt, afterwards Lady Symington, as Alibech” (“Description”).

9After staging Matilda some time in 1782, the Austens did not stage another play until The Rivals in July 1784.  In 1783, between spring and October, Cassandra and Jane were away at Mrs. Cawley’s boarding school.  After The Rivals, there were no theatricals again until December 1787.  Cassandra and Jane were away at Abbey House Boarding School from spring 1785 to December 1786; James Austen was traveling on the Continent from November 1786 until autumn 1787.  For more on the amount of drama the sisters probably studied at the Abbey School, see Peterson, “Jane Austen’s Dramaturgy.” 

10“Philip’s son”:  Alexander the Great, son of Philip II of Macedon.