] There were adoptions and adoptions..How Austens felt about giving away their son we can't know. But the fact that Mr Austen was at first against the idea of Edward spending time at Godmersham was more because he worried that the boy would lag behind in his latin grammar!

This sounds like something Mr. Bennet would have worried about had he had a son, don't you think? :)

] Was there any sorrow to see him go. Perhaps just for a short moment when he left home for good in 1783. But he was then 16, and this was not a regular adoption as we think of it. He wasn't a child separated from his family. And later on it should prove a very lucky decision to have made. The situation for the widowed Mrs Austen and and Jane and her sister would have looked very gloomy without his help.

Very true. Edward got the best of both worlds really... two families and wealth.

] He went out in 1786 and stayed out for two years. Even his older brother James went out the same year and stayed one year. He visited Holland and Spain. Interestingly it doesn't say anything about visiting France. This was a few years before the revolution broke out.
] I'm not sure what the situation was in France,but no open hostilities between England and France I think.

] I would really like to know more about the travels they made. Such tours I belive were supposed to be a mix of education and relaxation. There may exist information about them, but unpublished.

] Jane was 8 when her brother was formally adopted. It must have made an impression on her. She was 12-13 when James and Edward came back from their tours. Did she write to them? She might have. And they must have written back to the family.
] But those letters have gone for ever missing. Had they existed we would surely have known about them.

I wonder...do you think that Jane's brothers would have written to her. We know they were fond of literature - at least James was. But I would imagine that many of Edwards' letters do exist but remain with the family private estate, etc. One wonders whether young men who got to go on Grand Tours were more carefree and didn't write to their families all that much (reminiscent more of present day since letter writing isn't as much the art as it was then...) or that they felt an obligation to or of course a joy to because of all the things they were experiencing?

I wonder what Jane would've done with a Grand Tour?