Dancing Archives - Quickstep Travel Guide

At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea.
Jane Austen letter to Cassandra Austen

Thomas Lefroy has long been thought of as the real life inspiration for Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Darcy.

Jane and Tom met in 1795 when they were both 20 years old at a dance hosted by Jane’s friend Madam Lefroy. After graduating from Dublin’s Trinity College in 1795, Tom moved to London to study law at Lincoln’s Inn. It was during this time that he visited his Uncle and Aunt for a few weeks in December of that same year.

Thomas Lefroy on display at Jane Austen House Museum

Cassandra was away visiting Edward at Kent, and fortunately the letters that Jane wrote to Cassandra survive. You can feel Jane’s happiness at falling in love with Tom, and then her disappointment when it is over. It is thought that Jane’s lack of wealth played a part, as Tom had no fortune at that time as he was also the son of a clergyman.

Jane started writing First Impressions in October 1796 a year later, and finished it around August of the following year. It would later become Jane’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice.

To Cassandra Austen: written from Steventon: Saturday, January 9th 1796:

In the first place I hope you will live twenty-three years longer. Mr. Tom Lefroy’s birthday was yesterday, so that you are very near of an age

You scold me so much in the nice long letter which I have this moment received from you, that I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I can expose myself however, only once more, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we are to have a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you. But as to our having ever met, except at the three last balls, I cannot say much; for he is so excessively laughed at about me at Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon, and ran away when we called on Mrs. Lefroy a few days ago…

We had a visit yesterday morning from Mr. Benjamin Portal, whose eyes are as handsome as ever. Everybody is extremely anxious for your return, but as you cannot come home by the Ashe ball, I am glad that I have not fed them with false hopes. James danced with Alithea, and cut up the turkey last night with great perseverance. You say nothing of the silk stockings; I flatter myself, therefore, that Charles has not purchased any, as I cannot very well afford to pay for them; all my money is spent in buying white gloves and pink persian. I wish Charles had been at Manydown, because he would have given you some description of my friend, and I think you must be impatient to hear something about him…

After I had written the above, we received a visit from Mr. Tom Lefroy and his cousin George. The latter is really very well-behaved now; and as for the other, he has but one fault, which time will, I trust, entirely remove — it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones, and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine, which he did when he was wounded.

Jane follows her first letter with another a week later..

To Cassandra Austen: written from Steventon: Thursday ,January 16, 1796:

Friday. — At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea. Wm. Chute called here yesterday. I wonder what he means by being so civil. There is a report that Tom is going to be married to a Lichfield lass. John Lyford and his sister bring Edward home today, dine with us, and we shall all go together to Ashe. I understand that we are to draw for partners. I shall be extremely impatient to hear from you again, that I may know how Eliza is, and when you are to return.

Tom married Mary Paul in 1799 who was the sister of a college friend and wealthy in her own right. The couple moved to Dublin and had eight children. Tom became a successful lawyer, eventually becoming the Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, the most senior judge in the Court of Queen’s Bench. He held this position until he was 90 when, by one account, he was still reading his newspaper without spectacles.

Shortly before he died, aged 93, Tom confessed to his nephew that he had once loved Jane Austen, though quickly added that it was ‘a boyish kind of love’.

Jane Austen in Love Exhibition

The letter that Jane wrote to Cassandra about her flirtation with Tom is on display at the Jane Austen House Museum as part of an exhibition called Jane Austen in Love.

Alongside Jane’s letter is a striking portrait of Tom as Jane would have known him. You can gaze at a handsome young man with deep eyes that hold your gaze intently.

See Jane Austen in Love at Jane Austen House Museum until March 2023.

William, Mary and Thomas Lobb left their family home in Norfolk and moved to The Vyne in Hampshire when their father inherited the estate from a distant Chute grandmother.

In order to comply with the conditions of the inheritance, the family changed their name from Lobb to Chute.

The Vyne (*Courtesy of the National Trust*)

The Inheritance

Set in 1500 acres of gardens and woodland in the parish of Sherborne St John, the Vyne is a beautiful Tudor house. It was built by William Sandys, Knight of the Garter and Henry VIII’s Lord Chamberlain. It was sold by the Sandy family to Chaloner Chute in 1653, a Parliamentarian and Speaker of the House of Commons.

The Chute children were of similar ages to the Austens, and it was a family that Jane knew well. Although the distance from Jane’s home at Steventon to the Vyne took more than an hour by carriage, they visited often.

Jane’s friendship with the Chute family was through her eldest brother James. The boys often went hunting with the Chute brothers, and William and James became life long friends.

The youngest son Tom was ‘full of wit and fun‘, and you can imagine the children racing around the gardens and charging through the house on their visits.

Dancing at The Vyne

Passing through the front entrance, guests were greeted by a wonderful staircase, and Jane would have climbed these stairs to the dining rooms on the first floor.

Main Staircase The Vyne National Trust — The Vyne Staircase © 2019 Emma Darlington

Dancing at The Vyne usually followed dinner parties, and the carpet would have been rolled up and the furniture pushed back. In the letters Jane wrote from Steventon, she says that dancing at The Vyne was usually more of an intimate affair,

The ball on Thursday was a very small one indeed … There were but seven couples, and only twenty-seven people in the room.

A few years later, a ball at The Vyne seemed a more lively affair,

I danced nine dances out of ten, five with Stephen Terry, T. Chute & James Digweed & four with Catherine. There was commonly a couple of ladies standing up together, but not often any so amiable as ourselves.

James Digweed was a close family friend from Jane’s childhood, and you see how handsome he was in his portrait.

A single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife

William was the eldest son and inherited the estate when his father died. Aged 19, he went to Harrow, then Cambridge, and became an MP for Hampshire in Parliament. When his sister Mary married, he effectively lost his housekeeper.

Aged 33 and single, he needed a wife. There was great speculation and gossip amongst the Hampshire ladies as to who he would choose. As Jane was only 14 years old at the time, she was seen as too young and out of the running.

On one of his visits to London, William met Elizabeth who was the daughter of the Devizes MP Joshua Smith. Known as Eliza they married in 1793 and it caused quite a stir, as she was not from one of the Hampshire families.

As such, there was great speculation as she what she looked like, and the Austen family were one of the first to meet her at a ball held at the Assembly Rooms in Basingstoke.

Elizabeth Chute Portrait © 2019 Emma Darlington

Eliza kept diaries and wrote that she was sometimes lonely, as William was usually out hunting or in London. They were childless for ten years before adopting their three year old relative Caroline Wiggett in 1803. Her father was a Norfolk clergyman and her mother had died in childbirth.

She would often play in the impressive Gallery on the ground floor which was used as her playroom.

The Gallery at The Vyne © The National Trust

A Wiggett to a Workman

Caroline had always called William and Eliza her Uncle and Aunt Chute. Around ten years later when Jane wrote Mansfield Park, it was said that Caroline was the inspiration for Fanny Price. She later married Dr Thomas Workman.

Caroline Wiggett, Later Mrs Workman Aged 17 by Augusta Smith © The National Trust

Friends for Life

When James Austen took his father’s role as the vicar of Deane from 1791-1819, he dined at The Vyne almost every week and often brought his son James Edward with him.

They would eat roast beef, plum pudding and gooseberry pies, and Edward met the Chute’s niece Emma Smith during these visits. They later married in 1828.

Edward was Jane’s favourite nephew and she writes of this in a letter,

“his Aunts… love him better & better, as they see the sweet temper and warm affections of the Boy confirmed in the young Man.”

Eliza referred to the family as ‘the James Austens‘, and wrote of these visits in her diaries that survive today. You can see them in the Jane Austen Quickstep Guide.

Tom Chute, the youngest brother was a bachelor and never married. He was an avid reader which may be why there are over 2,500 books in the Library. Some with centuries-old doodles in the margins!

Preserving The Vyne

The Chute family continued to live at The Vyne, and for brief periods part of the house was used for a girls school and later occupied by evacuees in the Second World War.

The safe keeping of The Vyne was passed by Charles Chute to the National Trust in 1956.

References:
The Vyne at the National Trust