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The Bint Family of Shinfield
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Parish records however do not at present show that Hannah Bint, London Jack or Isaac the mole-catcher, the subjects of the two stories at the bottom of this page, as being anything other than fictional characters. We may though, through these pages, capture a more romantic glimpse of 1820s country life and perhaps ignore for a brief period how tough just existing would have been for our Shinfield and neighbouring Arborfield farm labouring ancestors. Additionally I do have a suspicion that a modern 'shrink' would find some similarities in Mary's own relationship with her father and the fictional one of Hannah Bint and London Jack.
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| The ladies seem to take it as a matter of course that Mary's father should speculate and gamble at cards, and indeed do anything and everything he fancied, but they beg him at least to keep to respectable clubs. He is constantly away. His daughter tries to tempt him home with the bloom of her hyacinths. 'How they long to see him again!' she says, 'how greatly have they been disappointed, when, every day, the journey to Reading has been fruitless. The driver of the Reading coach is quite accustomed to being waylaid by their carriage.' Then she tells him about the primroses, but neither hyacinths nor primroses bring the Doctor away from his cards. Finally, the rhododendrons and the azaleas are in bloom, but these also fail to attract him. | ||||
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Shinfield Literary and Historical notes - August 1936 |
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Mary Russell Mitford (1787 - 1855) Mary Russell Mitford was born on the 16th of December 1787. She was the only child of her parents, who were well connected; her mother was an heiress. Her father belonged to the Mitfords of the North. Mary was a very precocious child. She describes herself as 'a puny child, with an affluence of curls which made her look as if she were twin sister to her own great doll.' She could read at three years old and she learnt the Percy ballads by heart almost before she could read. In 1797, she drew a prize in the Irish Lottery worth £20,000. The child herself insisted on choosing the number, 2224, because its digits made up the sum of her age. On the strength of this, Dr. Mitford built a fashionable town house on the London Road in Reading before moving to 'Bertram House', a small country estate in nearby Grazeley.
Between 1798 and 1802, Mary was in a good school at 22 Hans Place, London, kept by Mrs. St.Quintin, a French refugee, where Lady Caroline Lamb had been an earlier pupil. In 1802, Mary settled at home with her parents and her literary taste began to develop. She read enormously. In 1806, she mastered fifty-five volumes in thirty-one days and, in 1810, appeared her first published work, 'Miscellaneous Poems.'
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Mary aged 3 |
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| The next two or
three years were brilliant enough; for the family must have lived at the
rate of three or four thousand a year. Their hospitality was profuse,
they had servants, carriages, they bought pictures and furniture, they
entertained. Cobbett was among their intimate friends. The Doctor
naturally enough invested in a good many more lottery tickets, but
without any further return.
Long after, she used to describe how she first studied her beloved ballads in the breakfast-room lined with books, warmly spread with its Turkey carpet, with its bright fire, easy chairs, and the windows opening to a garden full of flowers,--stocks, honeysuckles, and pinks. It is touching to note how, all through her difficult life, her path was (literally) lined with flowers, and how the love of them comforted and cheered her from the first to the very last. In her saddest hours, the passing fragrance and beauty of her favourite geraniums cheered and revived her. Even when her mother died she found comfort in the plants they had tended together, and at the very last breaks into delighted descriptions of them. |
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By March 1820, Dr. Mitford's spend-thrift irregularities had reduced his family to the utmost poverty and it was necessary for Mary to turn to literature for their means of livelihood. The household moved to Three Mile Cross, Shinfield, a village on the turnpike road between Reading and Basingstoke, and lived there in "an insufficient and meanly furnished labourer's cottage". The largest room was about eight feet square. Miss Mitford resided there for more than thirty years, allowing herself only one luxury - a flower garden. She wrote much for the magazines, but soon grew convinced that her talent lay in tragedy, a view in which Coleridge, on reading 'Blanch of Castile,' had encouraged her. Her mother died on 1st January 1830, and was buried in the parish church at Shinfield, while her father's increasing extravagances kept her poor. She confessed to Miss Barrett that "although want, actual want has not come, yet fear and anxiety have never been absent."
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An older Mary |
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This series of sketches of village scenes and vividly drawn characters was based upon life in Three Mile Cross, a hamlet in the parish of Shinfield, near Reading where she lived. Shinfield had also featured twice in the works of Thomas Hardy, who called it Gaymead. Its principal appearance was as the setting for The Son’s Veto from Life’s Little Ironies. Sophy, the chief character, even married the local rector in the church there. Later, Hardy wrote of Jude the Obscure working as a decorator in a church near Gaymead, though its exact location is uncertain. Mary Russell Mitford is one of those lively, unpretentious writers who-without knowing it, since she could not foresee the changes of the next hundred and fifty
years - has left us some precious glimpses of a vanished past. Her style is so simple and natural that she could be thinking aloud by the parlour fire, or writing a long and cheerfully familiar letter.
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The house at Three Mile Cross |
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| ON JANE AUSTEN
Mary
Russell Mitford who knew a thing or two about
writing a sharp and pointed letter, had this to say about the young Jane
Austen and her physical appearance. The report is based on the observations of
her mother, who had lived in the Steventon neighbourhood when Jane was growing
up. "Mama says she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers." she goes on to add, in a bravura performance of downright maliciousness, that Jane had by then (1815):"stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn piece of 'single blessedness' that ever existed" and until Pride and Prejudice came out, "she was no more regarded in society than a poker or a fire screen or any other thin, upright piece of wood or iron that fills its corner in peace and quiet. The case is very different now; she is still a poker, but a poker of whom everyone is afraid." |
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Jane Austen in 1815 |
Two stories from "Our Village"
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HANNAH BINT
indeed in our parts he was commonly known by the cognomen of London Jack), was a drover of high repute in his profession. No man, between Salisbury Plain and Smithfield, |
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THE MOLE-CATCHER There are no more delightful or unfailing associations than those afforded by the various operations of the husbandman, and the changes on the fair face of nature. We all know that busy troops of reapers come with the yellow corn; whilst the yellow leaf brings a no less busy train of ploughmen and seedsmen preparing the ground for fresh harvests; that woodbines and wild roses, flaunting in the blossomy hedgerows, give token of the gay bands of haymakers which enliven the meadows; and that the primroses, which begin to unfold their pale stars by the side of the green lanes, bear marks of the slow and weary female processions, the gangs of tired yet talkative bean-setters, who defile twice a day through the intricate mazes of our cross-country roads. These are general associations, as well known and as universally recognised as the union of mincepies and Christmas. I have one, more private and peculiar, one, perhaps, the more strongly impressed on my mind, because the impression may be almost confined to myself. The full flush of violets which, about the middle of March, seldom fails to perfume the whole earth, always brings to my recollection one solitary and silent coadjutor of the husbandman's labours, as unlike a violet as
possible - Isaac Bint, the mole-catcher. |
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