The city of Southampton makes no one’s list of England's top Jane Austen sites. Although she briefly attended school there as a child and returned for more than two years of her adulthood, the landmarks of Austen’s life happened elsewhere: in Steventon, where she was born; in Winchester, where she died; and especially in Chawton, where her creative life flourished.
But its status as a second-tier Austen pilgrimage site hasn’t stopped Southampton from getting in on this year’s Austen 250th birthday action—most recently with the unveiling of not one but two guided walking tours of the city’s Austen-linked sites. (The tour schedules are complementary, rather than competing, so at least from the outside, it doesn’t look like there’s bad blood in the Southampton-Austen-walking-tour world.)
One of the two--“Austen’s Southampton”--starts from God’s House Tower, an arts venue that recently displayed Jane Austen’s writing desk. That tour starts at 2 pm, lasts ninety minutes, is being offered on eight Saturdays between April and August, and costs £12 (about $15.50); proceeds benefit God’s House Tower’s work on Southampton history.
The second tour—“In the Footsteps of Jane Austen”—is sponsored by the Southampton Tourist Guides Association and starts from the Bargate, a medieval gatehouse in the city center. This tour, also 90 minutes, is being offered on 26 Fridays or Saturdays between April and September, with a start time of 2 pm on Friday and 11 am on Saturday. It costs £9.90 (about $13).
And that’s not even to mention the self-guided Jane Austen Heritage Walking Trail, featuring eighteen sites with (sometimes tenuous) Austen links. It’s an expanded version of a nine-stop heritage trail that Southampton inaugurated back in 2017 (scroll down), for the bicentennial of Austen’s death. Among the stops on both trails is the historic Dolphin Hotel, where Austen attended three balls and which—as blog readers will recall--is soon to be converted into college-student housing, despite scattered Janeite protest.
All this walking around can’t, alas, disguise the sad fact that the Southampton house where Austen lived in 1806-09 with her mother, her sister, her friend Martha Lloyd, and her brother Frank’s family is long gone—not to mention that Austen seems to have written nothing but letters while she lived there.
Still, who can grudge Southampton its shot? Every scrap of information about Austen’s under-documented life is worth a look—or a walk.
But will there be “Stinking Fish” T-Shirts???