Provenance

Jane Austen died in July 1817 and, by the terms of her will, her sister Cassandra (1773-1845) inherited her manuscripts. In compliance with the annotation to the notebook’s front pastedown,⁴ Volume the First went at Cassandra’s death to their youngest brother Charles (1779-1852), and it remained in his family, descending to his eldest daughter, Cassandra Esten (1808-1897), and then to Cassandra Esten’s nieces, the daughters of his son Charles John Austen. Three of these daughters – Jane, Emma Florence, and Blanche Frederica Austen – all impoverished spinsters, sold various Jane Austen manuscripts in the 1920s, though Volume the First does not appear listed among them.⁵ There is some uncertainty surrounding its ownership when Chapman tracked it down in November 1932 and arranged its purchase by the Friends of the Bodleian Library, for £75. The sale was completed in January 1933 but Chapman retained possession of the notebook for several months, during which time he transcribed and edited the contents for the Clarendon Press (pp. ix. 140, 5 shillings).

The notebook

The manuscript is written into a shop bought late eighteenth-century quarto stationer’s notebook impossible to date precisely. It is bound with quarter tanned sheep over boards sided with marbled paper. The edges of the leaves are plain cut and sprinkled red. The text-block comprises six quires of 16 leaves each. Quire 5, with 18 leaves, has an extra bifolium which may be a binder’s mistake. The three outermost leaves of both the first and sixth quires are used as pastedowns. The paper used is laid and of a single stock with an undated watermark and countermark (figure of Britannia and the royal cipher ‘GR’ surmounted by a crown).⁶

Dimensions: 204 x 161 x 20 mm. (Text-block 199 x 160 x 16 mm.)

Foliation: iv + 180 pages.

The manuscript

The manuscript is written and corrected throughout in a variety of brown iron-gall inks and with some variations in the hand. The left board has a large inscription ‘Volume the First’, in dark brown iron-gall ink. There is a pencil inscription at the head of the left pastedown ‘For my Brother Charles’ and a piece of off-white wove paper (102 x 49 mm.) pasted below this. This scrap of paper displays the annotation ‘For | my Brother Charles. | I think I recollect that | a few of the trifles in this | Vol: were written express | :ly for his amusement. | C. E. A.’ in brown iron-gall ink. An un-paginated sheet (A,A^v) of cream laid machine-made paper (199 x 158 mm.) was tipped to page i after the manuscript’s arrival at the Bodleian, this in turn has a printed label tipped to it (‘Printed notices of this MS. occur in’). The label is blank apart from the shelfmark in blue-black ink and ‘= Arch. F e. 32 | (4 Feb. 1989)’ in pencil, in the hand of Dr Bruce Barker-Benfield, Bodleian Library curator. The first four pages of the manuscript, unpaginated by Jane Austen, contain: Contents list (p. i, p. ii), blank recto (p. iii), ‘To Miss Lloyd’ [Dedication] (p. iv). The roman numbering i-iv of these preliminaries is in the hand of Dr Bruce Barker-Benfield. Thereafter the manuscript is paginated in the top right (recto) or left (verso) hand corner of the page by Austen p. 1-p. 180, with the following irregularities: p. 144 was originally inscribed in error p. 143, but this was immediately corrected by overwriting; a similar overwriting (of ‘14’) occurs at p. 151; p. 167, however, has been erroneously numbered p. 177 and was only corrected (in pencil alongside the error) much later; p. 175 is not numbered.

Pagination and physical structures as they are recorded in the digital edition: front (left) board; front (left) pastedown (2 images); A, A^v; p. i-p. iv; p. 1-p. 166; [p. 167]; p. 168-p. 174; [p. 175]; p. 176- p. 180; back (right) pastedown; back (right) board; spine; fore-edge.

See also the conservation report.