8 College Street, Winchester.

No 8, College Street, Winchester. 

 A few weeks ago, I was very privileged to see inside No 8, College Street, Winchester, the house where Jane Austen spent her last few weeks. 

Her family hoped that a town doctor, Dr Lydford, might be able to effect a cure for her illness (the cause of which is still not known for certain). 

Jane wrote to her nephew James Edward Austen, 'Our lodgings are very comfortable. We have a neat little drawing room with a bow window overlooking Dr Gabell’s Garden'. 

The bow-window at 8 College Street. 

The left image is the current view through the bow window on the first floor; on the right is the view of the same room from the far end. 

Below you can see how the room looks at the far end; there's a fireplace at both ends of the room.

Jane was still writing almost until the end; her last composition was a comic verse on Winchester horse races. 

She died on 18 July 1817. 

I was very moved to finally see inside the house; I have often seen it from the outside over the years. Of course, I was more sad than excited. How young Jane was! She was still only 41 years old. 

After Jane's death, her sister Cassandra wrote mournfully to their niece Fanny Knight: 'I have lost a treasure, such a sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed. She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow; I had not a thought concealed from her, and it is as if I had lost a part of myself'.

Winchester College has renovated the interior, and carefully matched the paint on the walls to traces found during the restoration. The house is currently open to visitors until the end of August (although you may have to wait for a cancellation). 

'Your Irish' Linen

My latest feature for Jane Austen's Regency World (July/August issue) is on linen manufacture. 

Flax-drawing and flax-breaking. 

In a letter to Cassandra, (16 September 1813), Jane Austen wrote, ‘Fanny bought her Irish [linen] at Newton’s in Leicester Square, and I took the opportunity of thinking about your Irish, and seeing one piece of the yard wide at 4s…it seemed to me very good’.   

Linen was made from flax; it required a great deal of processing -  'dressing' - to turn the plant's woody stems into yarn for weaving. In the late 1780s, the first flax-spinning factories appeared in Britain. Scotland and Yorkshire were important linen manufacturing areas. 

An enormous flax mill was also opened near Shrewsbury. Ditherington Flax Mill (1796) was the first ever fireproof mill in the world. 

Ditherington Flax Mill

Linen was used for items like ladies’ shifts, nightwear, underwear, and dressing-gowns, and of course, table and bed 'linen'. 

Images:

Top: Flax-drawing in a factory (left) and flax-breaking (right). Charles Knight, Knight’s Pictorial Gallery of Arts, Vol. 1, London Printing and Publishing Co., c.1858. Author’s collection. 

The Spinning Mill at Shrewsbury Flax Mill Maltings, built c.1796. Formerly Ditherington Flax Mill, it was converted to a maltings in the late nineteenth century. © Sue Wilkes. 

The Power of the Press

My latest feature for Jane Austen's Regency World (May/June issue) is on the advent of printing newspapers and books by steam-power, instead of a printing press worked by hand. On 29 November 1814, the first ever copy of The Times newspaper entirely printed by machine appeared. 

The new printing-press, invented by Frederick Koenig, required just two child workers to tend the machine and feed it with paper, instead of two highly trained printers.

By the late 1820s, an improved version of Koenig's press, designed by Edmund Cowper and Augustus Applegarth, could print 5,000 newspaper pages every hour. 

Image: An Applegarth and Cowper printing machine, with child workers. This machine was used for printing books. Luke Hebert, The Engineer’s and Mechanic’s Encyclopedia, Vol. II, Thomas Kelly, London, 1836, Nigel Wilkes Collection. 

'Hot-Pressed Paper'

My latest feature for Jane Austen's Regency World (March issue) is on the art of paper-making. Paper was needed, of course, for Jane's letters, and for her books to be printed on. 

Paper was commonly made from cotton or linen rags. Some of the process was already mechanized and powered by water - there were already paper-mills in the mid-eighteenth century - but it was a slow process. It could take up to three months to make one sheet of paper by hand, depending on its quality. 

'Hot-pressing', as mentioned in Jane's novels, involved heating a sheet of writing-paper between cast-iron plates to give a nice smooth finish. 

Louis-Nicholas Robert's 'continuous wire process' (1798) made it possible to make much larger sheets of paper by machine. Within a few years, the first paper made in a single continuous roll was made at Frogmore Mill in Hemel Hempstead. 

The paper was also cut by machinery, tended by child workers. 

And the more paper was made, the more novels could be printed!

Images from the author's collection:

Top left: Paper making by hand at Hollingworth's Turkey Mill, Maidston, Penny Magazine, 1833. 

Centre: Paper-cutting machine with child workers, Monthly Supplement of the Penny Magazine [96], 31 August to 30 September, Charles Knight, London, 1833. 

Image right: Dennison (Denison) and Harris’s Patent Paper-Making Machine, patented 1 January 1825. Luke Hebert, The Engineer’s and Mechanic’s Encyclopedia, Vol. II, Thomas Kelly, London, 1836, Nigel Wilkes Collection. 

The Last Child Chimney Sweep To Die At Work

A blue plaque is planned for George Brewster, a climbing boy (child chimney sweep) who died on 12 March 1875 after swallowing a large amount of soot while sweeping the flues at Fulbourn Lunatic Asylum, Cambridge. 

His master, William Wyer, was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to six months in jail with hard labour. 

George's death was just one of many which shamed the British nation. 

Politicians and philanthropists of various hues like Jonas Hanway had been attempting to ban the use of child chimney sweeps since the late eighteenth century. 

Impoverished parents actually sold their children to chimney sweeps to use as apprentices (their small size meant they could climb up inside chimneys to clean them of soot). 

But George's horrific death finally sparked the impetus for change, and it's thought that he was the last child to die while sweeping chimneys.

Lord Shaftesbury (the 7th Earl), after several unsuccessful previous attempts, finally piloted the Chimney Sweepers' Act, 1875, through parliament. The Act required chimney sweeps in England and Wales to be licensed annually, and gave the police powers to enforce the law. 

You can read more about the story of the child chimney sweeps in my new release Young Workers Of The Industrial Age, which is still on special offer on the Pen and Sword website. 

Charles Lamb, plus Early Locomotives

 

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you all had a peaceful Christmas and New Year. 

The January/February 2025 issue of Jane Austen's Regency World has two features by me, on two very different subjects.

The first feature is on the tragic life and career of the author Charles Lamb. 

Charles Lamb was well known for his comic essays; but his life was marked by deep personal tragedy. 

Very sadly, the Lamb family suffered from mental illness, especially his sister Mary. 

Charles's life was changed forever after Mary, while very distressed, fatally stabbed their mother. 

Nevertheless, Lamb steadily forged a writing career, publishing plays, novels, poems, and essays (under the sobriquet Elia). He also collaborated with Mary on their Tales from Shakespeare (1807), which is still in print today.

My other feature, part of my continuing series on the industrial revolution, is on the advent of railway engines, including Richard Trevithick's ground-breaking 'Catch-Me-Who-Can', and his 'tram-engine' (1804) which hauled minerals at Pen-y-Darren ironworks, South Wales.  

Images from author's collection:

Top left: ‘Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’. Illustration by Archibald Standish Hartrick (1864–1950), The Letters of Charles Lamb, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. Ltd, London, c.1903. 

Image centre right: Interior of the Bell at Edmonton, from a sketch by J. White. A friend from the country had called upon Lamb.

Bottom. Exterior of the Bell at Edmonton, in Charles Lamb’s time. W. Carew Hazlitt, Mary and Charles Lamb: Poems, Letters and Remains, Chatto & Windus, London, 1874. 

Image Left: Trevithick's High Pressure Tram-Engine, The Engineer’s and Mechanic’s Encyclopedia, Vol. II, Thomas Kelly, London, 1836.

Happy Christmas Everyone!

Happy Christmas! I hope you all have a wonderful, peaceful Christmas and New Year. 

Image from the author's collection.