Free Jane Austen by Valerie Grosvenor Myer Page A

scene.’
    Drunkenness was common, and not only among men. This scene took place a few days after Jane’s arrival in Bath when the family took up residence there in 1801. ‘The waters’ at Bath were considered good for gout, a common eighteenth-century complaint. Symptoms are painful swelling of the joints, restlessness, irritability, cramp, indigestion, constipation and thirst. It is commonly associated with heavy drinking, especially of port, but though its eighteenth-century prevalence may have been due to the drunken habits of the time, it has more recently been suggested that, like the gravel and kidney stones which also afflicted Jane Austen’s contemporaries, gout may be in part caused by dietary deficiencies. Teetotallers can and do get gout. Whatever his drinking habits, Jane’s maternal uncle James Leigh-Perrot suffered from gout, which was his original reason for visiting Bath. He had added ‘Perrot’ to his name in order to inherit a house and land. He knocked down the house, sold the land and built a new house, Scarlets, near Maidenhead.
    Scandal of another kind touched the ultra-respectable Austen family when Mrs Leigh-Perrot was arrested for shoplifting on 8 August 1799. She walked down Stall Street, Bath, from their home in Paragon to Smith’s haberdashers on the corner of Bath Street. Mrs Leigh-Perrot bought some black lace to trim a cloak. She gave the man a five-pound note. He took it with the goods to the back of the shop while she turned from the counter to the door to look for her husband. When the purchase was wrapped and her change given to her, she took the parcel out of the shop. She walked towards the route her husband generally took on his way to drink the waters and soon met him. They stopped to pay a tradesman’s bill and were on their way to the Post Office to post a letter when they passed Smith’s, where Mrs Leigh-Perrot had bought her black lace an hour previously. Miss Elizabeth Gregory, part-proprietor of the shop, dashed out into the street.
    ‘I beg pardon, madam, but was there by mistake a card of white lace put up with the black you bought?’
    Mrs Leigh-Perrot said that as she had not been home and the parcel had not been out of her hand, Miss Gregory could examine it herself. Miss Gregory opened the parcel and found not only the black lace but a card of white edging which she took out and said, ‘Oh, here it is.’ She went back into the shop. Mrs Leigh-Perrot, writing to her cousin Mountague Cholmeley, said this did not surprise her as she assumed a mistake had been made in the shop. On the corner of Abbey Churchyard the young man who had taken the black lace away to wrap approached, stopped the couple and insisted on taking Mrs Leigh-Perrot’s name and address. In some alarm, she gave it. Hearing nothing, she concluded a mistake had been cleared up but a few days later she received an anonymous, undated letter through the mail, addressed to ‘Mrs Leigh-Perrot, Lace dealer’. It said, Tour many visiting acquaintance, before they again admit you into their houses, will think it right to know how you came by the piece of lace stolen from Bath Street a few days ago. Your husband is said to be privy to it.’
    Miss Gregory and her assistant had been to the Guildhall and laid charges of attempted theft against her, swearing they had seen her take the lace, worth one pound, and had found it in her possession. The Mayor and magistrates, who knew the couple, acted according to the letter of the law and Mrs Leigh-Perrot was committed to Ilchester Jail to await her trial at Taunton Assizes. The charge was serious as punishments for offences against property were heavy. If found guilty, this woman of fifty-five, deaf and bronchitic, could suffer the death penalty. In practice, the sentence would probably be commuted and she would be transported to Australia, then a giant penal colony, for fourteen years.
    Her husband, two years older and accustomed to gentlemanly comfort, declared