Adventures with Jane! Day V: To Worthing and Winchester

This morning we headed off once again after our last English breakfast at Culpeper’s Restaurant at the Chilston Park Hotel… for a two-hour trek to Worthing, at the seaside, and where Jane Austen stayed in September 1805 ’til at least early November [Le Faye, Chronology, 319]. I have read about this time of her life and her extended stay here – the must-read book is the Antony Edmonds’ Jane Austen’s Worthing: The Real Sanditon (Amberley, 2013):

Profusely illustrated, Edmonds tells all about the history of Worthing and what it was like in 1805 as Jane would have experienced it. She was here with her mother, sister Cassandra, Martha Lloyd, niece Fanny Austen [later Knight], and Miss Sharpe – they stayed in Stanford Cottage, now a Pizza Express, and where we were met by members of the Worthing Society. They were terrific – gave a powerpoint lecture on Austen’s time here [interesting to learn that they were here in October 21, 1805, the date of the Battle of Trafalgar and the death of Nelson [and they were likely all worried about where Frank was then located – did they know then that he was not part of the battle?]]

[Death of Nelson, by Benjamin West – Wikipedia]

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Stanford Cottage:

And this from the lecture on the route the Austens et al would have traveled to Worthing:

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Worthing was a place made famous by the arrival of Princess Amelia, youngest daughter of George III, who came here for sea-bathing to improve her health [to no avail: she died of tuberculosis in 1810]. Other notables who either visited or lived for a time in Worthing were Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Charles Lamb, the poet Robert Bloomfield, the poet and critic Horace Smith, and the actor Colonel Berkeley and actress Mrs. Bunn (Margaret Somerville, and a bit after Austen). There are a number of “Blue Plaques” scattered around town noting other people of historical interest [including Harold Pinter, who wrote “The Homecoming” while living here from 1962-64]. One an only conjecture if Austen ran into any of these people… or if she would have liked Pinter’s turn as Sir Thomas in the 1999 Patricia Rozema Mansfield Park…?]

[House where Princess Amelia stayed]

One is easily sidetracked from the main event: Jane Austen in Worthing.

I was quite taken with the town, between the seaside, the Ferris Wheel, the beach, the enchanting streets, and by the graciousness of our hosts. After the lecture, we inhaled pizza, then took a walking tour guided by our Worthing Society hosts that followed Austen’s time here:

[The Dome Cinema, 1911]

[a street just as Austen would have seen it…well, without the signs, the asphalt, the cars, the trash cans…but the buildings remains as they were then…]

And her path to the circulating library, which is now closed to walkers…

…. you can read more about the closure of this “Library Passage” [called a “twitten”] to the Circulating Marine Library that Jane would have walked: https://janeausteninvermont.blog/2012/03/01/the-library-passage-in-worthing-under-threat-of-closure-how-you-can-help/

and the followup here: https://janeausteninvermont.blog/2012/07/18/update-worthings-library-passage/

…. and the path to the water for a refreshing dip [there were 30 bathing machines at the time, and “were, according to the 1805 town guide, segregated, so that ‘every proper attention is paid to decency’.”] [Worthing Society Heritage Leaflet No. 2, “Jane Austen” (c2013, Janet Clarke)]

Venus’s Bathing (Margate):
Hand-coloured etching, 1790 By: Thomas Rowlandson
courtesy of the Wellcome Collection

All that is known about this family trip is through Fanny Austen’s notebook jottings – there are no letters from this time, and indeed no letters from Jane from 30 August 1805 until 7-8 January 1807 (Letter 48(C) is a July 24, 1806 poem to Fanny and is only a copy written out by Anna Lefroy) – what happened in those years remains a mystery … and ripe for fictional interpretation.

But Edmonds makes a strong case for Austen’s visit to Worthing as being the foundation of her last novel Sanditon – all the characters of the town are in place in her story, sadly never finished, and also ripe for fictional completions, of which there are several [as well as the over-the-top-but-beautiful-to-look-at 3-season TV series].

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You can read more on the Worthing Society here: https://www.worthingsociety.org.uk/

We thanked our new-found friends in Worthing and were then on our way to Winchester, from where we will spend the next 4 days journeying from there to take in the Jane-in-Hampshire sites…

In the meantime, dinner at our hotel, the Winchester Hotel & Spa: