Austen’s real life Mr Darcy
QUESTION Did Jane Austen ever find love? There were few authors who could write about romantic love like Jane Austen, yet she was never married.
Many have tried to assign her a romantic history. It was the subject of the 2007 film Becoming Jane, starring Anne hathaway and James Mcevoy, which weaves a mostly fictional romance around her relationship with an Irishman called Tom Lefroy.
Thomas Langlois Lefroy (1776-1869) was born in Limerick. he was called to the Irish Bar in 1797, was the MP for Dublin University, 1830 to 1841, and Lord Chief Justice of Ireland from 1852 to 1866.
In 1796 he began a flirtation with Jane, who was a friend of an older female relative. Jane wrote two letters to her sister Cassandra mentioning him. In one she described him as ‘a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man’.
In the other she expresses sorrow at their parting when he had to return to Ireland: ‘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.’
The dashing Mr Darcy in Pride And Prejudice, written around that time, may have been based on Lefroy.
While Jane was a romantic writer, her own attitude towards marriage was practical. She often made it clear she saw the benefits of marriage from a financial standpoint. At the time of their meeting, Lefroy was not wealthy — his studies had been sponsored by a great-uncle.
In Pride And Prejudice, elizabeth tells her sister Jane about when she first realised she had feelings for Darcy: ‘It has been coming on so gradually that I hardly know when it began.’ The fact he was wealthy clearly helped: ‘But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.’
Jane Austen was briefly engaged to another man, but it was not a love match.
Until 1775, she lived with her family in Steventon, hants, near the Bigg-Wither family of Manydown Park, an ancient manor in Wootton St Lawrence.
A year after moving to Bath in 1801, Jane and her sister Cassandra returned to Manydown to visit their old neighbours. harris Bigg-Wither, 21, proposed to Jane, then almost 27, on the evening of December 2, 1802.
Jane had no source of independent income and harris’s looming inheritance appealed, so she accepted him. Following a sleepless night of regret, she fled the estate after breaking it off. She was engaged for less than a day.
Though their brothers married, neither of the Austen sisters did. Cassandra was engaged, but her fiance, Thomas Fowle, died of yellow fever abroad.
Helen Morrison, Cheltenham, Glos. QUESTION Who invented the stethoscope? The stethoscope was invented in 1816 by rene-Theophile-hyacinthe Laennec (1781-1826), a Parisian physician. Named from the Greek stethos, meaning ‘breast’, and skopein, ‘look at’, it was used to diagnose various chest conditions.
Laennec wrote of his invention in his treatise De l’Auscultation Mediate in August 1819 (auscultation being the action of listening to sounds from the heart, lungs or other organs):
‘I happened to recollect a simple and well-known fact in acoustics . . . the great distinctness with which we hear the scratch of a pin at one end of a piece of wood on applying our ear to the other.
‘Immediately, on this suggestion, I rolled a quire of paper into a kind of cylinder and applied one end of it to the region of the heart and the other to my ear, and was not a little surprised and pleased to find that I could thereby perceive the action of the heart in a manner much more clear and distinct than I had ever been able to do by the immediate application of my ear.’ he noted a stethoscope avoided the embarrassment for a doctor of placing his ear against the chest of a woman patient.
The first models looked like old-style ear trumpets and consisted of a wooden tube attached to a single microphone at one end and earpiece at the other.
The first mention of a stethoscope with a fully flexible tube was in 1840 by British doctor Golding Bird, who used a single earpiece. Irish physician Arthur Leared invented a stethoscope that fitted into both ears and was first seen at the Great exhibition in London in 1851.
The following year, New York-based Dr George Cammann successfully adapted the binaural design for commercial production. Variations on his model have remained in use ever since.
Rachel Saunders, Halifax, W. Yorks. QUESTION How many British cities have an underground railway system? FoUr British cities have underground railway systems: London, Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow.
The London Underground is the biggest by far and is the oldest in the world. It dates from 1863 when the Metropolitan railway opened the line from Paddington to Farringdon.
The Mersey railway opened in 1886. It originally had underground stations at Liverpool Central, Liverpool James Street and Birkenhead hamilton Square, plus four surface stations in Birkenhead.
The Loop and Link scheme was completed in 1977. It consists of two sections of tunnel under Liverpool with stations at Moorfields and Lime Street.
The North British railway opened the Glasgow City and District Line in 1886, and the Caledonian railway opened the Glasgow Central Line in 1896. The Glasgow District Subway, which is separate from the main lines, was also opened in 1896. The Central Line was closed in 1964, but reopened as the Argyle Line in 1979.
The Tyne and Wear Metro was opened in 1980. It took over existing surface lines and has two sections of tunnel under the city, with stations at Central, Monument, haymarket and St James’s Park.
Roderick Moore, Liverpool.