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.