Jane Austen activities at Dorset Museum and Art Gallery

The free activities will run every Wednesday until August 27, offering a blend of history, creativity and seaside charm.

The sessions celebrate the museum’s major exhibition, ‘Jane Austen: Down to the Sea’.

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The exhibition marks the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth and explores her personal and literary relationship with the sea.

Visitors can enjoy a variety of activities, including the Jane Austen Duck Trail, where ducks dressed as Austen’s characters are hidden throughout the museum.

Families can also enjoy dressing up in Regency-style costumes.

Object handling sessions offer a chance to explore life in Austen’s time through touch, curiosity and discovery.

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There are also craft sessions where children and adults can make their own miniature bathing machines, a nod to the leisure inventions of the Georgian seaside.

The exhibition highlights how the seaside influenced Georgian fashion, leisure, health and entertainment.

Focusing on the Dorset towns Austen visited or wrote about, it explores how she used the sea in her fiction as a setting for romance and a space of danger and transformation.

Highlights of the exhibition include a first edition of her final novel Persuasion, on loan from her home in Chawton and a rare pink feather cockade worn by Austen herself.

Also on display are Regency guidebooks, postcards, paintings, evening dresses and period games, illustrating how people of the time enjoyed their coastal getaways.

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Two immersive installations by students from the Design for Costume and Performance course at Arts University Bournemouth add a layer of theatricality to the experience.

In ‘Take a Dip’, visitors can explore what it felt like to plunge into the cold sea at a Georgian resort.

Dressing for the Ball invites guests to enter a Regency dressing room, try on eveningwear, and dance across a recreated ballroom floor to the sound of a waltz.

No booking is required for the activities, which are included with museum entry.

Children go free when accompanied by a full-paying adult.