The “real” Meryton? (Updated)
Steve wrote to ask,
Do you know of anywhere where I might find more information on the theory of Harpenden as Meryton?
We were not even aware that WAS a theory, though it sounds vaguely familiar…anybody else have any idea?
ETA: Steve sent us another e-mail to say that he read of the theory in an essay in Persuasions 27, pp. 234-241. On the way out the door, we grabbed that issue of Persuasions and Deirdre Le Faye’s wonderful book, Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels, which has been referenced in the comments, and read up on the two theories during our train trip.
The essay in Persuasions is by Dr. Kenneth Smith, a lecturer in criminology, so presumably he’s into all that CSI stuff. 
He starts it off with a sentence that we think is just perfect to keep in mind:
Pride and Prejudice is a work of fiction, of course, and the Bennet family no more actually lived at Longbourn than Sherlock Holmes lived at 221b Baker Street.
Very true! That being said, Dr. Smith presents some very interesting information. We are told that Meryton is a market town and is about a mile from Longbourn. Another nearby market town is given the usual “Blank” name, and Elizabeth, Jane, and Maria Lucas pass through it on the way from London to their homes. Since they don’t pass through Meryton on the way back from the trip, Dr. Smith posits that Longbourn lies closer to London, likely south or southwest of Meryton. While Jane is vague on the details of the country villages and towns, she places the Gardiners’ London home on Gracechurch Street, which is a real street. Furthermore, when Elizabeth and the Lucases travel to Kent, they break their trip at the Gardiners’ house, which we are told is a trip of twenty-four miles. Harpenden lies twenty-four miles from Gracechurch Street. Also, there is a village about two miles away from Harpenden called Redbourn, which Dr. Smith posits might have inspired the name of Longbourn; though the hamlet of Harpenden Bury, which no longer exists, was probably a better location for Longbourn, being only a mile from Harpenden.
Dr. Smith also points out that a village and great house called Kimpton — the same name as the clerical living held for Wickham — is in about the same location that Netherfield Park would have been if Harpenden were indeed Jane Austen’s inspiration for Meryton.
Steve adds in his note that a family called Bennet owned a small estate in the Harpenden area. (We personally think that Jane got the name Bennet from Fanny Burney’s Cecilia, from which she took the title Pride and Prejudice and, we think, some other inspiration; though it’s quite possible that she chose the name Bennet from the family in the area since it was already in this book that she so enjoyed.)
Deirdre Le Faye adds a further clue in her book, that Longbourn lies within ten miles of the Great North Road, now called the A1000. She wrote that if the towns of Meryton and Blank lie to the west of this road, they are likely Hemel Hempstead and Watford; if they lie to the east, they are likely Hertford and Ware. Later in the book, she says, we can deduce that they lie to the east, so Meryton is Hertford and Blank is Ware. Ms. Le Faye also says that it is unlikely that Jane Austen ever visited Hertfordshire herself, but she had family connections in the area that could have told her about it; and we think it is quite likely that she used maps to keep the geography more or less straight in her head.
While these kind of mental exercises are a lot of geeky fun, we caution our Gentle Readers to not read too much into them. However, we find this sort of thing useful while writing fan fiction, and other writers likely will as well.
June 30th, 2008 at 3:17 am
It’s not Harpenden. Meryton is based on Hertford.
See
# Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels, 2003, ISBN 0711222789, p. 179: “… and it can be deduced later on that Meryton is, in fact, Hertford …”
# ^ “The fictional town of Meryton [...] is likely to have been based on the real town of Hertford, according to Deirdre Le Faye”, http://janeaustensequels.blogspot.com/2008/01/hertford-possible-setting-for-meryton.html
Jane Austen set her wonderful novel, Pride and Prejudice, in Hertfordshire. The fictional town of Meryton, which is about a mile from Longbourn where the Bennets live, is likely to have been based on the real town of Hertford, according to Deirdre Le Faye. I am very lucky to live on the edge of London and yet am close to the countryside, in the market town of High Barnet in Hertfordshire. Hertford is a market town also and having been on shopping visits and research trips to the museum, I found it easy to picture the Bennet sisters wandering around the shops. It was very inspiring for imagining where the girls might have shopped and where Lydia might have visited her friend, Harriet Forster, the colonel’s wife.
Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice between October 1796 and August 1797. Deirdre Le Faye mentions the fact that the Derbyshire Militia came to Hertfordshire in the winter of 1794-5 and that the troops were stationed in Hertford and Ware. We do not know whether Jane visited Hertford but her father had a cousin who lived there and he may have supplied her with information for her novel.Perhaps the Derbyshire connection inspired Pemberley to be set in that county.
Hertford would not be recognisable today. It’s just a bypass, I can understand the confusion, Harpenden has retained most of its old world town, but could benefit from a bypass - but built a bit more sympathetically than the dreadful Hertford one!
June 30th, 2008 at 4:18 am
I’d just like to add that although it is possible to imagine how Hertford might have looked, because of the addition of new buildings it doesn’t have the ‘chocolate box’ quality of some towns and villages in the area, or look anything like the village of Laycock or the town of Stamford which were used in the last adaptations. Hertford was famous for its malting industry, which used the locally grown barley.
Deirdre Le Faye’s research is very interesting and is accompanied by contemporary portraits to illustrate the characters, which she chose herself. She also managed to track down the picture that Jane Austen saw in 1813 of a young woman who was her very idea of Jane Bennet.
June 30th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Bit confused by Laycock as it is 200 miles north of Hertford in Yorkshire. Might as well be in a foreign country for the differences between the two.
Stamford is 70 or 80 miles north of Hertford and again very different in architecture and geography..
Maybe we are getting confused between the village or town that inspired Jane Austen to describe Meryton in the way she did and the location for a modern movie??
June 30th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Peter, I think Jane just meant that Harpenden isn’t as modernized as Hertford, giving one more scope for the imagination to picture it as Meryton, rather like Lacock has not been modernized, which is why it is often used for filming when a period look is desired.
ETA: and just reread yours–I’m pretty sure she means Lacock in Wiltshire, which was used for location filming of Meryton in P&P95, as was Stamford for P&P05.
I have some more info and will be updating the post shortly.
June 30th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
I grew up in Hertfordshire, so leapt on Dr Smith’s article when it appeared in Persuasions, and then sent it over to my retired English Lit teacher who happens to live in Harpenden. She was doubtful and implied there were as many good theories identifying other Hertfordshire villages as Meryton, and in fact Dr Smith has some facts and distances wrong.
To add some additional wrinkles to this tale, there is the following quote on a site for a book called “Hertfordshire memories” regarding my old hometown of Hatfield, Hertfordshire: “In ‘Pride and Prejudice’ Jane Austen calls Hatfield ‘a busy little street that leads to my Lord Salisbury’s house’.” Well, I can find nothing to back this up - no such mention in P & P that I could find. Does anyone have any other information? Anyway, the site for the book has one feature of interest in that it contains a number of photos of Hertfordshire villages, including Harpenden.
http://www.francisfrith.com/pageloader.asp?page=/shop/books/bookdetail.asp&bookcat=&isbn=1-85937-524-3&start=&subcatid=
July 1st, 2008 at 7:17 am
Yes, sorry, I did mean Lacock and Mags intrepreted what I was trying to say perfectly, as well as stating also quite sensibly that whilst all this conjecture is great fun, Pride and Prejudice, is after all, a work of fiction! I’m not sure Jane had anywhere so specific in mind but it does help when you are writing a sequel to have places in your head on which to hang descriptions and place the characters. I always enjoy the research into the areas that Jane wrote about, even if she is not specific. It’s even more fun when she does write about specific places such as Bath. Isn’t it wonderful to walk in Anne Elliot’s steps in Bath, for instance?
July 1st, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Personally I believe it’s simply based on the then market town of Basingstoke where she regularly attended the balls/assemblies when she lived at Steventon.
July 1st, 2008 at 3:55 pm
“Pride and Prejudice is a work of fiction, of course, and the Bennet family no more actually lived at Longbourn than Sherlock Holmes lived at 221b Baker Street.”
WHAT??!!
*goes into shock*
Heh, heh… just kidding. As far as the Hertford-Harpendon-Basingstone argument, I guess it depends on how you define what ‘based on’ means. It seems to me difficult to ‘base’ a fictional village you create on one you have never even visited. On the other hand, Jane’s extreme scrupulousness in matters of landscape, geography and travelling has been noticed by very many scholars. It could well be that her Meryton and what it was like was based on her memories of Basingstoke, but I can also well imagine her poring over a map and ‘placing it’ in her imagination - for accuracy’s sake - somewhere that was the proper number of miles from London.
July 3rd, 2008 at 3:04 pm
I think while writing it also helps to have a map to work with so you know, for instance, how long it would have taken them to travel from home to London or Kent or Derbyshire. So while Harpenden and Hertford aren’t necessarily Meryton (and as has been pointed out, for the specifics Jane could have been inspired by Basingstoke), it seems quite logical to me that Jane used those or some other places on the map to aid in her novel plotting. I think that’s the point of all these articles–not that she had a definite, specific place in mind, but it gives a little insight into how Jane’s writing process might have worked.
July 4th, 2008 at 1:41 am
I hope that readers of this blog are not planning a Jane Austen pilgrimage to England based on the above geographical information.
Basingstoke is renowned in the UK as a sad joke. It is a supreme example of appalling modern town planning. It is quite simply now a dreadful place.
All English towns must have been pleasant in their way, but many people over sentimentalise. Charles Dickens’ London is far from reality - it was grubby and unpleasant.
Most English towns and cities have evolved from villages dating back 100s of years. Most have attractive town centres or ‘old towns’ still - apart from Milton Keynes which is a 20th century monstrosity built on green fields with no heritage.
Jane Austen was probably inspired by parts of many English towns, some of which still stand. For this exercise I recommend you “Shut Your Eyes And Think Of England” (which is in a different literary genre) - in other words I recommend being an armchair traveller to avoid disappointment in real life. But do visit Harpenden, it’s much the same as it was! I live here.
July 4th, 2008 at 2:29 am
Trust me, there are lots of other Austen-related places to see, like Steventon, Chawton, Bath, even Portsmouth–all of which I’ve visited and have tons of interest to Janeites. We don’t need to be hunting out Meryton. It’s really all just an intellectual exercise.
July 4th, 2008 at 5:43 am
This book may be a help. [The link is to] an on-line review. The words “Austenian” and “Janeites” made me visibly wince however.
July 4th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Peter, thank you for the reference, but please don’t copy THE WHOLE THING, especially since it’s online–just put a link to it, as I’ve done above. There are copyright issues involved. Certainly you can copy and paste a paragraph or two, but not the whole thing. For instance, I liked this bit:
Yes, exactly–there are people who are indeed interested in that sort of trivia. I tend to read Jane Austen from a writer’s perspective as well as a reader’s, and it interests me to get a glimpse of her process, as I said above.
(to make the boxed quotation as I did, type <blockquote> before the quotation and </blockquote> after it.)
I’m sure I don’t know why “Austenian” and “Janeites” would make you wince. Let’s not pull bonnets over perceptions of what a “Janeite” might be or start with the “I like Jane Austen but I’m not a JANEITE” nonsense. I’m a Janeite, and proud to be one.
July 4th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
I just want to add two things to the confusion;
1) Hertford (the town) and Ware have between them a real house called Netherfield.
2)Ware was the main staging town despite the fact that Hertford was actually more important (as the county town) in Jane Austen’s time. And it was Ware that historically had an inn called “The George”- the same name as the place where Lydia and Kitty ordered a load of food and then couldn’t pay for it…
One other thing…it’s my personal theory that our authoress deliberately mixed up features of various towns and villages in order to create her fictional ones. Whether she just liked to imagine them, or whether she did it so that she wouldn’t get sued by anyone I leave up to others to discover.
What I do know, as an Englishwoman, as a geographer , and as a former resident of a small village near Basingstoke is that the busy, pretty, Basingstoke that Jane Austen knew (and which doesn’t exist, now)could easliy be part of the mix. I am even more certain that it got plundered to the be the Surrey town of D________ for The Watsons, too. But that is another argument.
Mags, you are right- all this is pie in the sky. But it is fun!