Emma Yandle, Curator and Collections Manager, writes: This rare first edition of William Cowper’s Poems, published in 1782, once belonged to Jane Austen’s brother Edward Austen Knight and was very likely read by Austen herself during her visits to her brother’s Kent estate. Edward inherited the estates of Chawton in Hampshire and Godmersham Park from wealthy relatives of his father; when he was made heir he took the name of Knight.
Jane Austen visited her brother at Godmersham Park on six occasions over a fifteen-year period, from 1798 to 1813, staying there for a total of about ten months. She regularly used the library, her favourite room: ‘I am now alone in the Library’, she wrote to Cassandra in 1813, ‘Mistress of all I survey’. In 1809 Jane, her mother and sister were given a home at Chawton Cottage, in the grounds of Chawton House, by her brother.
Cowper was Jane Austen’s favourite poet according to her brother Henry, who wrote in his “Biographical Notice” that her ‘favourite moral writers were Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse’. She mentioned him in her letters and repeatedly referenced him in her novels, most famously in Mansfield Park, which she wrote during stays at Godmersham. The protagonist Fanny Price passionately reacts to the proposed felling of an avenue of trees on a neighbouring estate: ‘Cut down an avenue! What a pity! Does not it make you think of Cowper? “Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited”’.
What is so significant about this copy is that it was in the Godmersham Library at a time when Jane Austen visited. The present volumes appear in the 1818 Godmersham Park library catalogue compiled by Edward Knight (South Case, col 1 shelf 3) and contains the bookplate of Jane Austen’s great-nephew George Montagu Knight, whose father merged the Godmersham and Chawton libraries when he moved the family to the Chawton estate. It has been carefully read, and numerous passages marked (see image above), especially in the poems quoted by Austen, though presumably not by Austen herself. As well as being a first edition, this particular copy contains the notoriously rare suppressed Preface by John Newton, the reformed slave trader and writer of the Christian hymn “Amazing Grace”.
We are delighted to have enabled Chawton House to recover the Chawton copy of William Cowper's Poems. This first edition of the two volumes of Cowper’s poems, bearing the Knight family shelfmark and the later bookplate of Montagu George Knight, is perhaps one of the most important books originally in Edward Austen Knight’s library at Godmersham Park to have been separated from the rest of that library, now held at Chawton House. Given the amount of time that Jane Austen spent at Godmersham, and what we know of her use of the library there, this important edition of her favourite poet is a vibrant link between poet and novelist. FNL Trustees applaud the efforts being made to trace and where possible recover books from the Godmersham library that Austen knew so well, as recorded in the www.readingwithausten.com website.
