A History of England in 34 Pages

I don’t normally blog about what I’m reading in my spare time, but I’ve found a gem that deserves a wider audience. Jane Austen’s The History of England is a light-hearted pocket history of England from Henry IV to Charles I, as recounted by a chatty, bitchy, biased pro-Stuart narrator. I laughed out loud at lines like:

His Majesty died and was succeeded by his son Henry whose only merit was his not being quite so bad as his daughter Elizabeth.

One of Edward's Mistresses was Jane Shore, who has had a play written about her, but it is a tragedy and therefore not worth reading.

I wonder if Sellar and Yeatman were aware of this work when they wrote 1066 And All That?

But the best bits are the drawings by Austen’s sister Cassandra Austen, which I think were originally done in watercolour. The style reminded me a lot of the brilliant Kate Beaton.

I stumbled across The History of England in a collection of Austen’s juvenilia, published by Hesperus Classics and also including the epistolary story Lesley Castle and the novella Catharine. I borrowed it from Witney Library and it doesn’t seem to be in print any more.

The History... is on Project Gutenberg as part of a different selection of juvenilia, but sadly without the images. Wikipedia has Cassandra’s drawings of Henry IV and Mary, Queen of Scots. I’d be interested to hear about other sources of Cassandra’s work.