The Jane Austen Handbook by Margaret C. Sullivan Read Free Book Online

wheedled from the cook. One also might expect to be served tea and cake or perhaps even fruit, cold meat, or sandwiches while paying a morning call.
    Dinner .
3–5 P.M. in the country; 6–7 P.M. or later if following “town hours” in very fashionable households
.
    Tea .
An hour after dinner
. This is not the formal meal it became in Victorian times. One might be invited to a house not to dine but only to “drink tea,” which means arriving after dinner for tea, coffee, and perhaps cake.
    Supper .
9–10 P.M. if dinner is early; if dinner is fashionably late, it might be dispensed with entirely
. Supper can be a hot sit-down meal or a light snack of English muffins, toast and butter, tea and coffee, and perhaps a bit of wine mixed with water as a digestive and sleep aid. Valetudinarians such as Mr. Woodhouse will accept nothing more than a bowl of nice thin gruel.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR ESTATE
    “Had I a place to new fashion, I should not put myself into the hands of an improver, I would rather have an inferior degree of beauty, of my own choice, and acquired progressively
.
    I would rather abide by my own blunder than by his.”

—E DMUND B ERTRAM IN
M ANSFIELD P ARK
    So the old man has finally been gathered to his fathers and the estate is yours at last! For so long you have looked at his manicured, regulated gardens and gloomy interiors and dreamed of the showplace the family pile could be. Assuming you have the funds, here is how you can go about creating it.

    1. Find the perfect situation for the house. If the current house is in a low spot where no one can see it properly, build a new house on rising ground, or reshape the existing grounds to better show off the house and give a good prospect from inside.
    2. Fix the landscaping to highlight natural beauty. Root up straight avenues of ancient trees and sell them off—the price of the timber will pay for the improvements, and the tree removal will open up the view from the house. Flower gardens should appear as though flowers have sprung up naturally here and there, spilling out into the gravel walkways rather than laid out symmetrically or in straight lines.
    3. Add useless but pretty outbuildings. An Ionic or Doric temple is just the thing for private assignations, or go all out and build a tiny castle—people will come from miles around to see it.
    4. Add rustic touches. A hermitage is lovely—recruit an actual hermit to live in it for full realism. Add some ruins, a gravel walk, large rocks covered with moss, and shrubbery for private conversations or even just a shady walk on a hot day. Let sheep roam wild, preferably in groups of three or five, with a sunken fence if you’d prefer to keep them in one area without ruining the view.
    5. Use water to good advantage. If you are so fortunate as to have a stream on your property, redirect it to cross the front lawn for the most picturesque effect. Perhaps some of it can be dammed up to make a pond or lake, which can be stocked with fish.
    6. Change the look of the house. Add a new neoclassical wing to the house, or at least a new façade, with columns, domes, and windows. An Eastern influence is also quite fashionable.
    THE “PICTURESQUE”
    In the mid-eighteenth century,William Gilpin, a clergyman and amateur artist, published several travel journals that incorporated his ideas on picturesque landscape and paintings depicting it. In contrast to the common wisdom of the time, in which gardens were manicured into evenly-shaped beds, he felt a natural state was best, with no straight lines and a rough, rustic feel—a blasted tree, a moss-covered rock, a ruined castle, or other such gloomy items were desirable, arranged in the foreground, middle ground, and distance. If sheep or cows were to be part of a painting, they should be in unevenly numbered groups, with three considered particularly picturesque. If these characteristics did not appear in the landscape in front of the artist, it was perfectly