Jane Austen at 250: Kitchens, History, and the Dogs Who Worked the Fire

Today, 16th of December 2025, my favourite author, Jane Austen, would have been 250 years old. To celebrate her, I decided to write a blog about a particular dog that was around when she was alive, and how those amazing dogs might have crossed paths with such a talented woman.

At the time, true Brits would only roast meat on a spit-roast, before an open fire. We have long forgotten those traditions and are happy to have roast meat from an air fryer these days, however, our beloved Jane Austen would have experienced the Regency ways of cooking.
So, roasting meat on a spit would have been the way to go in her time, the Regency and Victorian era.

To fully honour this part of history, we are going to take a step even further back in time, to the Tudor era, when meat was roasted on a spit turned by muscly men who were often picked for this job because of their brilliant stamina, but supposedly, not too brilliant brains (not my opinion, as I obviously was not around back then!).

However, at some point between 1485 and 1603, during the Tudor period, someone had the idea of building a wooden wheel in the kitchen and had dogs running in them. The wooden wheel would have been connected to the spit by a chain, so when the dog, or dogs, were running in the wheel, the spit would rotate, roasting the meat over the fire. And so, the Turnspit Dogs were created.

Normally, those wheels were fixed high on a wall near the fireplace, so that they wouldn’t be in the way of the kitchen workers; to keep the heat at a distance from the dogs, not to burn them or risk heatstroke; and also preventing the dogs from escaping the wheels and, therefore, stopping the roast from cooking or even burning the meat altogether.
However, the concern over those dogs was possibly very little to do with the love and affection we feel for dogs these days, but more to do with the fact that turnspit dogs were effectively workers in the household, and while replaceable, they were still needed. Moreover, they were cheap labour, considering their wage was some of the meat they worked so hard to roast.

When the dogs first started working in the wheels, as it was an invention, the type of dogs selected were crossbreeds that could fit in the wheels, which came in different sizes, but never enormously big. In time, this practice became so commonly used that people started breeding dogs for this specific purpose.

The Turnspit dogs had short, sturdy legs, a rather long body, with a curled-up tail and standing-up ears, so as not to get caught in the slats of the wheel or make it tricky to run in such a contraption. Those dogs would have had either long or short fur, and we know that the colour of their fur would have been a shade of grey.

As mentioned before, the wheels came in different sizes, and it is my guess that the size of the wheels would depend on the size of the house and how many people the kitchen would have had to cater for. The more people, the more meat, therefore a bigger spit and wheel to go with it.

Jane Austen and her family were not wealthy, nor did she live in houses big enough to even consider having a wheel with a turnspit dog in the kitchen.
Edward Austen, Jane’s brother, who was adopted by the wealthy Knight family, ended up inheriting the Chawton Estate in Hampshire, and he then gave his sisters and mother the nearby cottage, Chawton House, for them to live in.

I needed to know whether Jane would have come across a Turnspit dog in her daily life, so I took it upon myself to visit the Chawton Cottage and the Chawton Estate, which are both now museums.

The kitchen in the cottage, where Jane lived between July 1809 and May 1817, is situated downstairs and, while it is part of the cottage, it is also somewhat separated from the rest of the house. It is also rather small, with a relatively low ceiling, making it nearly impossible to have a wheel and dogs to run in.

Moreover, as pointed out earlier, Jane, her sister Cassandra and her mother (also called Cassandra), were not rich and wouldn’t have been able to afford the whole contraption, the dogs, or as much meat to even justify having a turnspit. Also, because of their economic situation and the size of the cottage, I think it was rather unlikely they would have had many people over for meals that often.

The Chawton Estate, however, is much bigger and oozes wealth, richness and privilege.
The kitchen is so big it is now a lovely tearoom, with a small but delicious menu, lovely staff and visiting tourists who try, like me, to get a glimpse of Jane’s life.
Having said all that, the ceiling in the Chawton Estate’s kitchen is still relatively low and the way it is laid out would have made it really tricky to have a wheel to turn the spit there.
I also did not find any evidence of a wheel ever having been there, and the staff I talked to also believed there never was such a cooking device there.

I was also incredibly lucky to meet Jane’s fifth great-niece, Caroline Jane Knight, who had lived at Chawton Estate for many years and has written a beautiful memoir about it, Jane & Me: My Austen Heritage, which I highly recommend reading.
In her book, Caroline never mentions the kitchen having changed so much from the previous owners as to have had a wheel removed, giving me further proof that at Chawton Estate, there never were Turnspit dogs.

I carried on my search and thought of all the travels Jane had been on and from the letters left behind, we know she did travel a lot and that she visited the stupendous Stoneleigh Abbey near Coventry in Warwick.

Stoneleigh Abbey is a great estate with almost 700 acres of grounds, and its grand presence is believed to have inspired Northanger Abbey.
The estate, these days, is often used for weddings or other grand celebrations, and I sadly did not get to see the kitchen to find out whether they had a wheel there, but from my research, if there ever had been one there, it is long gone, just like the Turnspit dog breed, luckily.

As a dog behaviourist and dog trainer myself, I am very happy to know that those amazing little dogs who served humans in their kitchens for a few centuries started to become extinct around the 1850s, and we can now see a stuffed Turnspit dog called Whiskey only at the Abergavenny Museum, Wales. It is believed that Whiskey, while being the last known example of this breed, might also not be the best example indeed, as it appears to be looking a little 'weird'. It is therefore believed that the stuffing of this dog was done in a way that he could fit in the specific wheel he is displayed in, which was smaller than the one Whiskey would have used.

Turnspit dogs served humans with cooking and warmed them up during Sunday church, but they were mostly overworked, and there are stories that talk about Turnspit dogs hiding when they knew their time in the wheel was due to start, a clear sign the dogs were not keen to get in there.

Going back to our beloved Jane Austen and whether or not she would have had meat roasted by a Turnspit dog, I cannot be certain, but Jane travelled a lot, visiting inns and other forms of accommodation, so it is very likely that at some point in her life she might have sent her compliments to the chef, who would have barked a 'thank you' back.

Sources:
Historian David J. Eveleigh
Jan Bondeson, Amazing Dogs
C.I.A. Richie, The British Dog
Dr John Camus, De Canibus Britannicis
Abergavenny Museum, Wales

Author of this article:
Debby Lucken
Dog Behaviourist, Dog Trainer and Author
Founder of Kids Around Dogs®

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