Notes & Queries, 10th November, 2013: Who first wrote 'It is a truth universally acknowledged'?

 

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Professor Peter Mayne's essay, The Static Muse, ponders on those innocuous objects that become a source of inspiration for works of art and science. These are prosaic curiosities – some natural, some man-made – that one might walk past everyday without a second glance. It is precisely their unassuming nature – the fact they do not dominate the senses – that allows them to quietly impress themselves in our minds, where they stir the imagination.

A pertinent example of Mayne's theory can be found in the English village of Steventon, birthplace of the writer, Jane Austen.

The so-called ‘muse of Steventon’ is a short, broken-off sentence painted, in 4-inch-high Fishguard Latin* characters, on the interior plasterwork of the village's 12th century church. If you face in the direction of the altar, on a day when the light is good, you may be able to see this writing on the left hand wall of the chancel, just below the eves of the slanted roof. A few hundred years ago the roof was five feet higher than it is now, and the characters less prone to being swallowed up by the shadows.

The sentence, when translated, reads “It is a truth universally acknowledged.” Its ending has been sheared off by reconstruction work that was undertaken at the end of the 17th century, after the church was damaged by localised earth tremors that were blamed on a warlock who lived in the area.

No records exist of the full text. The masonry that was damaged by the earthquake was carted away and used as the foundations of a row of almshouses that were known as The Humbles. When these tumbledown dwellings were demolished at the end of the 1960s, an amateur archaeologist shifted through the underlying rubble in a hopeless search for the missing words that might solve the mystery.

If we cast our minds back through the centuries, to all those souls who have passed through the doors of Steventon church, then it is easy to imagine one or two drifting off during a sermon and perhaps idly speculating on what the ending of this sentence might be, or modifying it for their own purposes.

It is a near certainty that Austen, whose father was a rector at the church, would have done so on many occasions, given that she eventually crafted these words into what must surely be among the most well-known opening lines in English literature.

Austen was not the first resident of Steventon to make use of the sentence fragment. In 1784, 12 years prior to the celebrated author first dipping quill to ink to create the characters of Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a 13 year old girl called Rebecca Pike had scratched it into the condensation on her bedroom window, a few hours before she passed away.

Rebecca died from consumption on a cold morning in February. She was, according to her father's account, looking out across an adjacent field in the direction of Bushnel Ponds, when a terminal coughing fit caused her to slump forward in her chair. Her final breath fogged part of the diamond-patterned leaded glass, revealing part of a sentence that she must have written earlier. Her father added his own breath to that of his departed daughter's until all of the words were visible:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a soul in need of respite shall find succour in the arms of our dear Lord and Saviour.”

Rebecca's epitaph was inscribed on her memorial. These weathered words, which time has worn away from stone, are documented in the parish records.

The following morning, her father noticed many other small poems and aphorisms, written in his daughter's spidery hand, emerging in the early morning condensation on her bedroom window. He transcribed these as best he could, adding his own words, where the writing was illegible. These verses were later collected in a slender volume under the title Poems Written in Short Breaths. The book goes in and out publication even to this day, with its meagre contents often supplemented with illustrations from the period. The enduring appeal of these verses lies in the way they capture their writer's innocence of spirit; the hopes and dreams of a dying young girl on the cusp of a womanhood that she will never attain. There is an implied sadness. A sense of a child aware of her eventual fate, which she refuses to openly acknowledge and attempts to paper over with a combination of blind faith and unfounded optimism.

Jane and Rebecca were not the only people to find inspiration in the broken sentence on the church wall. There have been many others. If we were to gather together in one place all of the writing that these enigmatic words have inspired, we would perhaps see laid out before us a portrait of the human condition: an untidy map composed of wants, and needs, and hopes, and dreams.

(* Fishguard Latin is the traditional west-country dialect of fishermen and sailors. It is the tongue of that devil Blackbeard the pirate, and the saintly whaler missionary Agnes Lisle, who once held a sermon on the body of a blue whale, which she had tethered to her vessel.)