eBay find: Knights at Chawton photo album
A friend whom I just visited before the New Year sent a link to a Daily Mail article. An EXTRAORDINARY find, indeed!
News coming out of Ireland, where Edward Austen Knight’s daughters settled after marriage, concerns an eBay purchase of a Victorian photo album – bought for the research potential, by Karen Ievers.
Readers of Sophia Hillan‘s biography, May, Lou & Cass: Jane Austen’s Nieces in Ireland, will be familiar with the cast of characters whom Ievers has uncovered in these 19th century images. It also shows that publication can later bring important related material to light (though evidently NOT providing an inkling to the seller).
There is even a later-in-life photograph of Fanny Knight (Lady Knatchbull), as well as a host of the next generation – including a wedding at Chawton House!
I’ve written about the GOSLING link to the Hill family via JAMES CRUMP in this blog post.
More can be read about Edward Austen Knight and Chawton in Linda Slothouber’s book:
UPDATE:
- an article from The Telegraph with further photos from the album
- Karen Iever’s own website, with her Instagram link & several more photographs; included: news that her name is erroneously set down as Karen Levers in the newspapers!
- A History of Karen Iever’s Album, Times of Israel
- A brief look at the meaning behind the G. Jones watermark
It is likely the “manuscript pages” with the watermark were paper for letterwriting, used, and bound up with the photographs. For a book on Papermaking in Britain: A Short History, 1488-1988.
- “Daughter of the House: Cassandra Hill, Jane Austen’s Irish great-neice,” an article by Sophia Hillan (Dec 2018)
Two Teens in the Time of Austen 
Downshire House, Roehampton | Two Teens in the Time of Austen said,
July 10, 2019 at 1:10 pm
[…] Interesting, if brief, post by Roehampton University on the history of one of their buildings, Downshire House. This was once owned by Arthur Hill, 2nd Marquess of Downshire. It was the widowed Marchioness who engaged James Crump – a man who later went to work as her neighbor’s butler – to accompany two sons on a Continental tour. The Hill family have a Jane Austen connection, one that at the beginning of this year (2019) had news of a surprising eBay find: a photo album now owned by Karen Ievers. […]