Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1850) is today remembered as the author of ‘Our Village’, a selection of sketches of country life based mainly on Three Mile Cross, the small settlement near Reading where she lived for over thirty years.

Although she spent most of her adult life in Berkshire, Mary was born in Alresford in Hampshire. This was a fact of great interest to me when I was researching the history of the town for the recent book, ‘Alresford Through Time’. Was it possible that she had left her impressions of Alresford? It seemed unlikely because she was a tiny child of four when she and her family moved away. But, tucked away in long-forgotten books, there proved to be many recollections of Alresford both in passages of autobiography and within the semi-fictional sketches for which she became famous.

Hampshire Chronicle: Dr George Mitford in later life

For good and ill, Mary’s father was the centre of her world throughout her life. He came to Alresford in 1787 as a handsome young physician and entered into a medical partnership with Edward Bradley as surgeons and apothecaries. He met and married Mary Russell, a very wealthy, gentle, uncomplaining woman ten years older than himself. With his wife’s large fortune at his disposal Mitford proceeded to spend extravagantly. Soon after Mary’s birth he bought one of the handsomest houses in the town and they moved there from Broad Street. But in 1792 the partnership broke up and the handsome house and its luxurious contents were put up for sale. Mitford had run up large debts and had evidently proved an unreliable partner. They could no longer remain in Alresford.

The family was then rescued from debt by an astounding piece of good fortune, a lottery win with a prize of £20,000, well over a million pounds today. It made it possible for Mary to attend an excellent London school and, in a typical piece of extravagance, for her father to build a handsome new mansion near Reading. But Mitford continued to gamble and speculate, ran into debt and was for a time confined to the debtors’ prison. Their last resort was to move to a cottage in Three Mile Cross with Mary as the family’s bread-winner, writing late into the night after seeing to her father’s needs.

Hampshire Chronicle: The handsome Alresford house at the end of East Street to which the family moved soon after Mary’s birth

Mary’s autobiographical recollections of her Alresford childhood are scattered through her many books and published letters. Her father doted on her as a child and, although she knew his faults, she adored him and never complained. Gifted with a remarkable memory, she recalled precious moments with him.

She was a precocious child and he loved to show off her reading skills to his friends by standing her on the table and getting her to read from one of the Whiggish newspapers he favoured. He had his saddle adapted so that she could ride with him on his horse when he went on his doctor’s rounds. On one occasion he took her to an evening performance of Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ in a candle-lit barn, an experience, she said, which sparked her love of drama. She never forgot ‘the black face and the spangled turban, and the breathless interest of the rustic audience.’ Her maid was especially fond of her and when Naomi came to be married to a local farmer she chose Mary as her bridesmaid even though she was a little child of three. She remembered the jollity of the wedding feast and the attention paid her by the best man, a hulking blacksmith who danced with her in his arms.

Mary Russell Mitford wrote about 140 sketches of the kind reprinted in ‘Our Village’, most of them originally published in the ‘Lady’s Magazine’. Some celebrated the natural beauty of the countryside, some described local events such as Maying or a cricket match but perhaps the most interesting are her character portraits. In composing these sketches, unlike the passages of autobiography, she was working on the borderline between fact and fiction, blending the two to achieve the desired artistic effect. They are drawn from real life but the identity of actual persons and places is generally disguised by the use of fictional names. Reading becomes ‘Belford Regis’ and Alresford is usually re-named ‘Cranley’.

Hampshire Chronicle: Mary Russell Mitford as a child

We see this in the opening passage of ‘A Country Barber’ where she speaks of “the little primitive town of Cranley, where I spent the first few years of my life — a town which but for the distinction of a market and a post office, might have passed for a moderately sized village.” Unusually, in this sketch two real persons can be identified from the town directory: the barber of the title was ‘William Skinner, peruke maker’ and his client, the rector, was Rev William Buller. Jenny Wren, the Swan’s flirtatious barmaid and her would-be suitor, the churchwarden, are evidently inventions.

In ‘A Country Apothecary’, Alresford is renamed ‘Hazelby’ and moved to Dorsetshire. In this sketch Mitford replicated distinctive features of Alresford while completely changing others. The Swan, Alresford’s largest inn over many years, is there under its own name and as in Alresford in those years it accommodates an assembly room, a market room and the magistrates’ bench. Even more striking is the town’s street-plan which is exactly like Alresford’s: “It was originally built in the shape of the letter ‘T’; traversed by a straight, narrow, horizontal street.” The story also describes the construction of two of Alresford’s 18th century houses which still exist: Langton House and Arlebury Park (originally known as New Place) at either end of the town.

The longest and one of the most intriguing of Mitford’s Cranley sketches is ‘Hester’ (in the Belford Regis series) which is a tale that is a direct echo of her own life-story and reveals how the memory of Alresford was deeply imprinted on her mind. Nat is a spendthrift lawyer from Cranley now living in Belford (Reading) who like her father fritters away a fortune. He then (like her father) marries a rich heiress from Cranley Park (Arlebury Park) and fritters her fortune away as well. She is alienated by her family who disapprove of the match, and cut her off entirely when she agrees to adopt Hester, who is evidently Nat’s illegitimate daughter from a casual affair. After Nat’s death and having endured poverty and sorrow there is a loving reconciliation brought about by the peerless qualities of Hester herself and a return to the idyllic peace of Cranley Park. It is obvious that Hester stands in a very similar position to Mary herself, the daughter of a much-loved but spendthrift father and an infinitely long-suffering mother. Her eventual loving acceptance at Cranley Park has the air of an idealised home-coming and suggests that, as the scene of the happiest and only truly carefree days of her life, Alresford had a special hold on Mary Russell Mitford’s imagination.

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