If the date and the reference to the writer's relations with the dramatist had been suppressed the letter might have been given as one of Jane's own without arousing suspicion in any but a confirmed "Boswellian." "David" is Garrick, of course, while "Doddy" is Dodsley, author of the play, and the fortunate recipient of the Langton pheasant is the author of _Clarissa_, another of Jane's favourites more than thirty years after, when she had had time to be born and grow up.
Richardson, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth (after 1800), Scott (as poet), Johnson, Crabbe, and Cowper, then, afforded the more solid literary nourishment of Jane Austen. She had studied the essayists of Queen Anne's time and their emulators, and was not unfamiliar with Fielding, and she did not neglect the ordinary books that came from the circulating libraries of the day. "Mrs. Martin," she writes of a bookseller in her neighbourhood who had started such a library, "as an inducement to subscribe tells me that her collection is not to consist only of novels, but of every kind of literature, etc. She might have spared this pretension to _our_ family, who { 61} are great novel-readers, and not ashamed of being so; but it was necessary, I suppose, to the self-consequence of half her subscribers." Unhappily, this "high-class" venture was a total failure.
The novels supplied by "Mrs. Martin" and others, forerunners of those which now go forth from the Strand and Oxford Street, are frequently referred to in Jane's letters, and some of them, if we are so disposed, we can read at the British Museum. There was, for example, Sarah Burney's _Clarentine_, which Jane and her mother read for the third time (in 1807), and "are surprised to find how foolish it is ... full of unnatural conduct and forced difficulties"; there was _Self-Control_, a book "without anything of nature or probability," but which Jane feared might be "too clever," and that she might find her own work forestalled by it; there was the _Alphonsine_ of Madame de Genlis, which "did not do. We were disgusted in twenty pages, as, independent of a bad translation, it has indelicacies which disgrace a pen hitherto so pure"; and there was _Margiarna_, which the Austens were reading in the winter of 1809, at { 62} Southampton, and "like very well indeed. We are just going to set off for Northumberland to be shut up in Widdrington Tower, where there must be two or three sets of victims already immured under a very fine villain."