Once again, it’s time to cue a chorus of “If I Were A Rich Janeite”: another Austen artifact is on the market, set to be auctioned on Wednesday in New York.
This time, it’s a September 1813 letter (#88 in Deirdre Le Faye’s standard edition of Austen’s correspondence) that Jane wrote to her sister Cassandra at Chawton while visiting their brother Henry in London.
In the letter, Austen reports on her nieces’ hair-raising visit to the dentist -- Regency dental care: another reason to be glad we don’t live in Austen’s world -- and describes the purchase of a china dinner service that is still on display at Jane Austen’s House Museum, aka Chawton cottage.
Along the way, there are minute discussions of London shopping expeditions and some tidbits of news about family and friends. If it’s not quite the “Incredible, Intimate Austen Letter” promised in one news headline, it is certainly a more substantial missive than the 1814 letter-fragment that the museum bought over the summer, with the help of a successful crowdfunding campaign.
With so few Austen letters extant, it's rather a fluke to have two changing hands in the same year. Alas, however, the latest letter seems unlikely to make it into the museum’s collection.
Bonhams, the firm handling the auction, is projecting a sale price of £63,000 to £94,000, or $80,000 to $120,000, roughly two or three times the £35,000 negotiated price of the previous letter. “If the present owners had consulted privately with us, of course we would have been happy to try to reach a mutually fair accommodation,” Austen scholar Kathryn Sutherland, a museum trustee, told the Guardian newspaper, “but auction house prices do not sit well with what public institutions can in most cases afford to offer.”
A quixotic GoFundMe effort launched by the moderator of Facebook’s Jane Austen Fan Club page had raised only $785 as of this morning. “It's so important to keep these pieces of history in their home country,” one contributor to the GoFundMe effort opines.
Laudable as that sentiment may be, however, the fact remains that this particular letter hasn’t lived in its home country for well over a century. Jane Austen’s great-nephew, Lord Brabourne, sold it at auction in 1891 to New York businessman and literary collector Louis J. Haber; in 1909, Haber sold it at auction to another New Yorker, Cleveland H. Dodge, a copper baron and philanthropist. It’s the Dodge family who are now auctioning the letter for the third time – likely to yet another rich Janeite with a substantial private collection.
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