Case 4 2013/14: a gold and gem-set ring, Jane Austen

Expert adviser’s statement

Reviewing Committee Secretary’s note: Please note that any illustrations referred to have not been reproduced on the Arts Council England Website

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. Brief Description

Gold ring set with a turquoise (figs. 1, 2, 3). Made probably in the eighteenth century, possibly about 1760-80. In a nineteenth-century case bearing the name of T. West, goldsmith of Ludgate Street, London. Accompanied by papers documenting the history of the ring within the family of Jane Austen.

Ring: width 17.5 mm.; height 8 mm.

The ring is in excellent condition. It is fitted with a patent 9-carat gold device, probably late nineteenth or early twentieth-century, to reduce the size of the band, which does not affect the integrity of the ring. It could readily be removed, but might also be seen as part of the history of the ring.

2. Context

Provenance

According to a note written by Eleanor Austen in November 1863 (sold with the ring; fig. 4), the ring belonged to Jane Austen (1775-1817). From Jane it passed to her sister, Cassandra, who gave it to her sister-in-law Eleanor Austen, second wife of the Revd. Henry Thomas Austen (brother of Jane and Cassandra), ‘as soon as she knew that I was engaged to your uncle’. Eleanor and Henry were married in 1820. From Eleanor (died 1864) the ring passed to her niece Caroline Mary Craven Austen (1805-1880), daughter of the Revd. James Austen, another of Jane’s brothers.

According to a note written by Mary Dorothy Austen-Leigh in 1935 (sold with the ring), she received the ring from her aunt Mary A. Austen-Leigh (1838- 1922). The latter ‘probably received it from her aunt Caroline’, the recipient of the note from Eleanor Austen. The ring is sketched in Mary Dorothy Austen- Leigh’s note and is described as ‘a bright blue turquoise Ring – mounted in a band – not a gipsy ring’.

According to a later note, written by Mary Dorothy Austen-Leigh in 1962 (sold with the ring), Mary A. Austen-Leigh received the ring from her mother Emma Austen-Leigh (1801-76), rather than direct from Caroline as her note of 1935 had suggested. The difference between these two notes does not appear to be significant to the history of the ring.

Mary Dorothy Austen-Leigh gave the ring to her sister Winifred Jenkyns on 27 March 1962.

Sotheby’s, London, 10 July 2012, lot 59 (£152,450, including premium). The ring is understood to have been sold by another family member.

Key references

Elizabeth Jenkins, ‘16th December. Sagittarius’, in Jane Austen Society Collected Reports, 1949-65 (1967, reprinted 1996), pp. 153-5 [Annual Report of 1959]: mention of turquoise ring in the possession of the Austen-Leigh family. A reference in the same article to a garnet ring also said to have been owned by Jane Austen was corrected by Elizabeth Jenkins to being a ring owned by a member of the family (Annual Report, 1960, p. 171).

3. Waverley Criteria

It is proposed that the ring meets the third Waverley criterion because there are reasonable documentary grounds to believe that it was owned by Jane Austen. Thanks to her stature as a novelist, and the affection as well as respect in which she is held, this elegant and appropriately simple ring has caught the public imagination as a rare and intimate object associated with one of the greatest English writers. The ring has been almost entirely unknown for many years. It is likely that it will be illustrated in future biographies.

DETAILED CASE

1. Further description

The ends of the hoop of the ring curve round underneath the bezel (fig. 2), rather than forming shoulders which join directly to the edge of the bezel. Taken in conjunction with the thin hoop and the simple oval bezel, this may indicate a date of about 1760-80, judging by dated mourning rings of similar construction at the Victoria and Albert Museum and, drawing on examples kindly provided by Judy Rudoe, at the British Museum.

The ring is contained in a rectangular leather case (29 x 19 x 25 mm). However, the ring sits too loosely to suggest that the case was fitted to receive it. The case appears to be nineteenth rather than eighteenth-century in type, and this is supported by the style and the content of the printing on the silk: ‘T. WEST, / Goldsmith. / Ludgate Street / near St Pauls’. References from directories, baptismal records, Old Bailey trials, newspapers and insurance records, including material generously supplied by John Culme, indicate that Thomas West was not in business in Ludgate Street in late 1813 but was there from at least 1818, when the baptism was recorded of Thomas West, junior, born in 1815. Thomas West was listed at 3 Ludgate Street in 1820 and 1825, but by late 1830 he had presumably died, since Esther West, his wife, was listed as goldsmith and jeweller at the same address. By 1838 Thomas West junior was at the helm, and by late 1841 the business was at 18 Ludgate Street, an address for which there are several subsequent references. In 1867 an Old Bailey trial records Thomas West at 3 Ludgate Hill (formerly Ludgate Street).

In short, the case is significantly later than the ring and does not appear to shed any light on the ring’s association with Jane Austen. It is possible that Eleanor Austen kept the ring in the case or put it into the case when she bequeathed the ring to Caroline Austen.

2. Significance

2.1 Rarity

Jane Austen’s House Museum at Chawton exhibits only two pieces of jewellery as having been owned by Jane Austen. A turquoise bead bracelet previously belonged to Mary A. Austen-Leigh. A topaz cross is identified as the one which Charles Austen sent to Jane in 1801.1 It has been taken to be the model for the amber cross given by William to Fanny Price in Mansfield Park.2 Jane Austen’s modest means and her early death mean that objects associated with her of any kind are rare. Even her letters were in part destroyed by her family.

2.2 Relevance to Jane Austen and her novels

The simple elegance of the ring has been eloquently described by the auction cataloguer and by commentators on the web as according well with Jane Austen’s taste.3 The locket she bought for her sister Cassandra was ‘neat and plain, set in gold’.4 In Mansfield Park Edmund, who has commissioned his brother to find a chain for the amber cross mentioned above, tells Fanny Price ‘I have endeavoured to consult the simplicity of your taste’.5

Both in her life and in her novels Jane Austen showed an appreciation of the significance of jewellery in personal relationships. She described a pair of bracelets sent by Cassandra as ‘everything I could wish them to be’.6 She welcomed a brooch as a ‘very kind & welcome mark of freindship (sic)’.7 She left notes requesting that after her death one of her gold chains should be

1 Letter to Cassandra Austen, 26-27 May 1801, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (4th edn., Oxford, 2011), p. 95. 2 Mansfield Park, vol. 2, ch. viii. 3 On the web, see in particular Diana Birchall, ‘Jane Austen’s Ring’, published June 21, 2012 http://austenauthors.net/jane-austens-ring. She raises the question of whether Jane Austen, born on Saturday 16 December, might have been aware that turquoise was her birthstone. There is no evidence that she was, and the allocation of turquoise to December has not been the general rule over the centuries. While the list given by the Parisian jeweller J.H.P. Pouget in 1762 gives turquoise or malachite as birthstones for December (Traité des pierres précieuses et de la manière de les employer en parure, Paris, 1762, p. 5), he appears to link them to Capricorn (22 December-20 January). 4 Letter to Cassandra Austen, 24 May 1813, Letters, ed. D. Le Faye (2011), p. 221. 5 Mansfield Park, vol. 2, ch. ix. 6 Letter to Cassandra Austen, 9 December 1808, Letters, ed. D. Le Faye (2011), pp. 162-3. 7 Letter to Cassandra Austen, 7-9 October 1808, Letters, ed. D. Le Faye (2011), p. 151. given to a God-daughter and a lock of hair to Fanny Knight, who was asked by Cassandra whether it should be set in a brooch or a ring.8

In the novels, rings reflect the characters of their wearers. In Pride and Prejudice, Lydia in the folly of her precipitous marriage tells her mother how she had lowered the window of her carriage, as she overtook the curricle of William Goulding, removed her glove ‘and let my hand just rest upon the window frame, so that he might see the ring; and then I bowed and smiled like anything’.9 The empty-headed Mrs Hurst is ‘principally occupied in playing with her bracelets and rings’.10 Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey foresees the day when as a married woman she would be the envy of new acquaintances and old friends ‘with a carriage at her command, a new name on her tickets, and a brilliant exhibition of hoop rings on her fingers’.11

However, jewels are much more than symbols of vanity and excess. In Mansfield Park the giving of a jewel is minutely explored. For Fanny Price, an amber cross is at first a treasure of the love of her brother William who had small resources and remembered her when serving abroad. But William could not afford a chain so it becomes an anxiety as well as a pleasure when the pendant must be worn at a ball for which a simple ribbon for suspension would be inappropriate. She seeks advice from Miss Crawford, who she finds has anticipated her need, and offers her a choice of chains. She wishes to select the least valuable, but which is it? And yet the chain she feels encouraged to choose turns out to have been a gift from the man whose advances she wishes to decline. The excellent Edmund turns out to have ordered for her the perfect simple chain and yet insists on her wearing the one from the fascinating, but dubious, Miss Crawford. Nevertheless the fancier chain turns out not to fit the suspension loop of the cross, so she ends by wearing Miss Crawford’s chain as a necklace and Edmund’s chain with the cross.12

It is precisely because Jane Austen understood so minutely the pains and pleasures of a jewel, and because jewellery has such potency as an intimate possession, that a gold and turquoise ring with a reasonable claim to have been owned by her aroused such interest when it was put up for auction last July. Whether the ring was a gift from an older relative or a younger friend remains pleasant speculation, but the essence is that it appears to have been the ring of one of the greatest and best loved of all English novelists.

The ring was little known to the present generation of Austen scholars and entirely unknown to the great majority of her readers when its auction was announced. It is placed before the Reviewing Committee on the grounds that the third Waverley criterion, which is defined in the Guidance to Expert Advisers as including ‘connection with a person’, encourages the possibility that such a numinous object should remain in Britain. The ring is of national

8 Letter from Cassandra Austen to Fanny Knight, 29 July 1817, Letters, ed. D. Le Faye (2011), p. 364. 9 Pride and Prejudice, vol. 3, ch. ix. 10 Ibid, vol. 1, ch. xi. 11 Northanger Abbey, vol. 1, ch. xv. 12 Mansfield Park, vol. 2, chs. viii, ix importance because of Jane Austen’s stature as a novelist, and of particular local importance to those villages and towns, notably Chawton and Bath, where she lived.