I am relatively confident that many of you who read this blog already know this: The New York Times in 2018 had this interesting piece on the discovery by a University of Pennsylvania Ph.D student, which has thrilled Austen scholars. (I also liked the aside that Austen’s publisher made her “punch up” her terse book dedication to the Prince.) However, as we just celebrated the 250th Anniversary of Austen’s birth last year, I thought many of you might still be on an “Austen high.”

Full story is this LINK.

Jane Austen’s novels may epitomize Regency England, but she did not think much of the man for whom the period was named. This purchase, made on October 28, 1811, predated the novel’s public advertisement by two days. The discovery of this transaction, documented in a bill of sale, was made in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. Nick Foretek’s discovery in the Georgian Papers Programme archives that the likely first purchaser of Austen’s first novel was none other than the Prince Regent. 

You can actually see a copy of the bill of sale on Penn Today. The Smithsonian Magazine also has a lovely article on the Prince Regent’s purchase.

Like many of her compatriots, Austen loathed the Prince Regent, once railing in an 1813 letter against the man whose gluttony, profligacy and infidelities scandalized the nation. In 1815, when she was strong-armed into dedicating her fourth novel, “Emma,” to the future George IV, she produced a tribute so strained that a scholar called it “one of the worst sentences she ever committed to print.”

But now, in a delicious irony that Austen herself might have appreciated, it turns out that the man who was counted among her most reviled readers might also have been one of her very first.

In the article above, a graduate student working in the Royal Archives in Windsor Castle came across a previously unknown 1811 bill of sale from a London bookseller, charging the Prince Regent 15 shillings for a copy of “Sense and Sensibility,” Austen’s first novel. Oddly, as mentioned above, the transaction took place two days before the book’s first public advertisement — making it what scholars believe to be the first documented sale of an Austen book.

A man on the Janeite list discovered that Princess Charlotte wrote to her friend some time after this praising Sense and Sensibility. The question was asked perhaps whether the books were bought for his daughter. Some Gothic novels were also purchased at that time which do seem more to the taste of Princess Charlotte than her father.

The same man, as mentioned above, also remembered that Princess Charlotte praised the novel to a friend shortly after the book was published. She compared herself to Marianne.

It could be that this set and the horror novels, also purchased, were for Charlotte and not himself.