The Real Jane Austen

by Paula Byrne

  The case was widely reported, and was generally interpreted to mean that all enslaved people in England must be ‘discharged’. Though Mansfield himself drew back from this conclusion, his judgment gave great momentum to the abolitionists. A phrase used in the trial, ‘that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in’, became a campaign slogan, echoed by William Cowper in the famous abolitionist sequence in The Task, Jane Austen’s favourite poem:

  I had much rather be myself the slave

  And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him.

  We have no slaves at home – then why abroad?

  And they themselves, once ferried o’er the wave

  That parts us, are emancipate and loosed.

  Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs

  Receive our air, that moment they are free,

  They touch our country and their shackles fall.5

  Mansfield would long be associated with freedom for slaves, not only because of the Somersett case, but also as a result of the infamous Zong case of 1781. The Zong was a Liverpool slaving vessel from which nearly 150 sick men, women and children were thrown overboard and drowned so that the owners could claim compensation for lost ‘cargo’. The court found for the owners, but in an appeal before the King’s Bench Mansfield ruled that humans could not be insured. He called for a retrial. He also ruled that there could be no compensation for the owners. At that point, they abandoned their case (though neither they nor the ship’s captain were ever brought to trial for murder). Again, this was a Mansfield ruling that gave great impetus to the abolitionist cause.

  A young girl is brought to a large country house to be raised with wealthy relations. Just as the story of Edward Austen’s adoption by the Knights must have been in the background of Jane Austen’s mind as she prepared to send a third novel to her publisher Egerton, so the famous story of Dido Belle is a shadow flickering in the background of the tale of Fanny Price. It is hard to believe it a coincidence that the Austen novel most connected with the slave trade was given the title Mansfield Park.

  Mansfield Park, the great English country house, has often been seen by critics as a symbol of England itself. The interlopers, who create havoc, are London strangers, Mary and Henry Crawford, who threaten the ways and values of the country. But the Crawfords are merely the agents of change: the real corruption rests at the door of the flawed custodians of the house, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram and Mrs Norris. Furthermore, Mansfield Park is not an ancient English home, redolent of the paternalistic English gentry, as Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice and Kellynch Hall in Persuasion are. It is a new build, erected on the fruits of the slave trade.

  George Cruikshank, caricature of ‘Midshipman William B. on the Middle Watch’ (with escaped slave on the loose)

  The shadow story of Mansfield Park is slavery, to which the Austens were fiercely opposed, despite their own family interest in plantations. Following a campaign that lasted for over twenty years, the slave trade – that is to say the carriage of slaves on British vessels – was abolished in 1807, though it continued to flourish illicitly. Emancipation of slaves within the Empire did not happen until 1833. Opinions on the slave trade in Jane Austen’s time were part of everyday conversation, as Austen suggests in Emma, where the subject is treated in a brutally casual way by the odious Mrs Elton: ‘“Oh! my dear, human flesh! You quite shock me; if you mean a fling at the slavetrade, I assure you Mr. Suckling was always rather a friend to the abolition.”’6 The phrase ‘rather a friend’ is revealingly defensive: Maple Grove, Mr Suckling’s ostentatious seat near the slave port of Bristol, would undoubtedly have been another house contaminated by the trade in human flesh.7

  Both Jane Austen’s naval brothers were involved in the interception of slave vessels. Frank was certainly pro-abolition: ‘slavery however it may be modified is still slavery, and it is much to be regretted that any trace of it should be found to exist in countries dependent on England or colonized by her subjects’.8 It was the job of the Royal Navy to enforce the abolition, though captains were permitted to act only against vessels of British ownership with slaves actually on board. But this did not stop them pursuing ships sailing under other flags: ‘Chaced a ship which proved to be a Portuguese bound for Rio Janeiro,’ Frank once noted in his log. ‘She had on board 714 slaves of both sexes, and all ages.’9

  Three of Jane Austen’s favourite writers were staunchly anti-slavery: William Cowper, Dr Johnson and Thomas Clarkson. The latter’s History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African SlaveTrade (1808) was the bible of the anti-slavery movement. In writing of another polemicist, Charles Pasley, author of An Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, Austen observed, ‘I am as much in love with the Author as ever I was with Clarkson.’10 The History of the Abolition is a brilliantly written, pacy, emotionally charged account of the author’s own conversion to the abolitionist cause. It is easy to see why Jane Austen fell in love with Thomas Clarkson.

  His interest was sparked at Cambridge when he wrote and won a prize for an essay on slavery. After reading the essay aloud at his college he returned to London determined to abandon his calling as a clergyman and dedicate his life to the cause: ‘I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end.’11 Clarkson raised money to fund his calling to write his history and went to Liverpool and Bristol to interview and amass information from both slavers and freed slaves. He spared no detail in his description of the conditions aboard the vessels and the atrocities committed, including the notorious Zong case. He gave speeches in which he used visual aids to great effect, such as shackles and irons, including the horrific ‘speculum oris’: slaves aboard ship so often refused to eat that a device was invented to pry their jaws open so that the sailors could force-feed them.

  He also amassed a collection of African goods of astounding beauty and workmanship: carved figures, different types of wood, items made of ivory, leather, gold and cotton, swords and daggers fashioned from iron, four different kinds of pepper, even a tooth-whitening paste. His point was that trade should be in goods, not people. To help his cause, snuff boxes were made with the emblem of a freed slave, and ladies wore brooches so that ‘fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honourable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity, and freedom’.12

  Clarkson quoted Cowper as a friend to the cause, printing his ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ in the History and exclaiming how its popularity spread throughout England, and became a popular song in every right-thinking person’s drawing room. And of course he made much of Mansfield’s famous judgment in Somersett’s case.

  The root of Clarkson’s passion for the cause of abolition was his deep Christianity. He also argued that the slave trade was highly destructive and dangerous to the Royal Navy – in time of war, there should be no distractions from the defence of the realm. Christianity and the navy: these things were also most dear to Jane Austen’s heart.

  Austen was intimately connected with the slave trade and plantation owners. In her own family, there were the Hampson and the Walter cousins on her father’s side, and the Leigh-Perrots on her mother’s (as well as being a kleptomaniac, Mrs Leigh-Perrot was heir to an estate in Barbados). What is more, the first wife of her brother James was the daughter of the Governor of Grenada.

  Her closest connection to a plantation family was through her father’s family. Jane’s father had a half-brother by his mother Rebecca Hampson, who had previously been married to a William Walter. After the latter’s death she married William Austen (Jane’s grandfather), who inherited a stepson, William Hampson Walter, who became close to his step-siblings (George, Philadelphia and Leonora Austen). As was common in this age of premature deaths, the extended family resulting from the second marriage rubbed along very well
together. William Hampson Walter lived in relative comfort and had a large family of six children.

  The Hampson family had a plantation in Jamaica, and two of William’s sons were sent there. It was their sister Philadelphia Walter (named after their aunt) who preserved Eliza de Feuillide’s letters, which we have seen to provide a great source of information about the Austens. This was the girl who refused to partake in the Steventon theatricals, much to the chagrin of Mrs Austen. In one of her few surviving letters, Mrs Austen wrote to Phila Walter, whom she considered her ‘third niece’, complaining that ‘You might as well have been in Jamaica keeping your Brother’s House, for anything that we see or are likely to see of you.’13

  In 1773 Mrs Austen wrote to Susannah Walter to say that she was sorry to hear about Sir George Hampson’s accident and that she hoped he would still be able to take Susannah’s son George back to Jamaica with him the following spring. Sir George, the sixth Baronet of Taplow, was Rebecca Hampson’s nephew. He married Mary Pinnock of Jamaica and was succeeded by his son, Sir Thomas Hampson. In other words, Jane Austen had a cousin twice removed who was called Sir Thomas and who owned a plantation in Jamaica.

  Another intriguing connection was the Nibbs family, who were very close to the Austens. James Nibbs was taught by George Austen at Oxford and sent his son, George, godson to George Austen, to be tutored at Steventon. James owned a plantation in Antigua. In 1760 George Austen was made a trustee of Nibbs’s Antiguan property called Haddon’s or Week’s plantation, containing 294 acres with slaves and stock. George Austen was one of the parties to the marriage settlement of James Nibbs and his cousin Barbara. This meant that if Nibbs had died early, George Austen would have been responsible for the plantation and its slaves. George Nibbs grew into a wild and troublesome boy and his father eventually took him to Antigua to separate him from undesirable company, a plot-line Austen used in Mansfield Park when Sir Thomas removes his son, Tom, from bad connections.

  In 1801, Jane Austen, in talking about her house move to Bath, mentions a picture of Mr Nibbs hanging on the walls at Steventon. It’s very possible that George Nibbs had a map of Antigua in Steventon. Such maps gave the names of the plantation owners. It may not be a coincidence that many of Austen’s characters’ names – including Willoughby, Wickham, Lucas and Williams – are the same as those of West Indian plantation owners.14

  Another Steventon/Antigua connection came via the tenants of Ashe Park, who came to the area in 1771. Mrs Austen gave a warm welcome to these ‘two very young single gentlemen’.15 They were William and James Holder, who had made their fortune in the West Indies. James Holder took to handing on his newspaper to his neighbours at Steventon.

  Yet another Hampshire connection was William Beckford. His father, Alderman Beckford, was the richest plantation owner – he held over twenty thousand acres – in the West Indies. He was known as the ‘uncrowned king of Jamaica’. His son William inherited, when he was just ten, a fortune of a million pounds in cash (£150 million or $225 million today), together with estates and plantations worth millions more. He was a Gothic novelist, travel writer, art collector, builder of the extraordinary Fonthill Abbey and an infamous bisexual. His daughter’s shocking elopement was mentioned by Jane Austen, who called her ‘our cousin Margaret’ and noted that she had been disinherited by her father.

  There were other connections with the Caribbean. Jane’s youngest brother Charles, ‘our own particular little brother’, got married in Bermuda to Fanny Palmer, the youngest daughter of the island’s former AttorneyGeneral. When she died, he married her elder sister, Harriet. ‘We do not call Bermuda or Bahama, you know, the West Indies,’ says Mrs Croft in Persuasion, casually revealing Austen’s intimate knowledge of the distinction between the various Caribbean islands.16

  Given all these associations, it is hardly surprising that Jane Austen’s novels reveal her interest in plantations and the slave trade in the years following the 1807 Act. In Emma, it is made clear that Augusta Hawkins (later Mrs Elton) is the daughter of a Bristol slave trader. Bristol was second only to Liverpool as a slaving port and dealt primarily in slave-produced commodities such as sugar. Jane Austen gives a clear hint about the trade of Mrs Elton’s father: ‘Miss Hawkins was the youngest of the two daughters of a Bristol – merchant, of course, he must be called.’17 The dash of hesitation indicates that ‘merchant’ is a euphemism for ‘slaver’. Moreover, the name Hawkins had obvious resonance, since the Elizabethan mariner John Hawkins was the father of the English slave trade.

  It is, however, in Mansfield Park that Jane Austen shows her support for the abolition of slaves and her disapproval of plantation owners. The background to the plot of the novel is Antigua and the problems that Sir Thomas is having with his ‘poor returns’. Why are his estates in trouble? Antigua’s main crop was sugar, the production of which was labour intensive, dependent upon a large slave force. The American War of Independence greatly disrupted the sugar trade, so much so that in the first quarter of the nineteenth century sugar exports fell by a third.18 Furthermore Antigua, as one of the oldest colonies, was suffering from soil exhaustion as well as competition from other sugar islands.19 There was also periodic unrest among the slaves.

  We learn quickly that a large part of Sir Thomas’s income is ‘unsettled’, exacerbated by Tom’s gaming habit. The money problems have cost Edmund a valuable church living. From the opening pages, we hear of Sir Thomas’s ‘West Indian property’ in Mrs Price’s desperate wish that her son William might be of use to Sir Thomas. As with Jane Austen’s cousins George and William Hampson, it was common practice for impoverished young relatives to be sent out to assist in the running of plantations. Though William Price becomes a midshipman, like the Austen boys, the possibility is raised here of an alternative narrative in which he would have been constantly sending Fanny letters from the West Indies.

  We are also introduced in the opening paragraph of Mansfield Park to Mr and Mrs Norris. Mrs Norris is Jane Austen’s most unremitting portrait of meanness and corrupted power. Fanny, initially timid and weak, is an easy target for her bullying instincts, and we cringe at her heartlessness. Fanny’s early life is made a misery by this unpleasant adult, who treats her like a slave. But it is Mrs Norris’ power in the Bertram household that causes the real damage. It is one of the supreme ironies of the novel that Sir Thomas goes to Antigua to sort out the problems in his plantation, only for his house in England to be thrown into chaos and subversion by his absence. During that absence, with Lady Bertram comatose on her sofa like some Chinese opium addict, the house is left under the dangerous guardianship of Mrs Norris. Eventually, Sir Thomas comes to see the error of his ways. Like Shakespeare’s Prospero, he acknowledges that Mrs Norris is his Caliban, a monster that he has created: ‘His opinion of her had been sinking from the day of his return from Antigua … He had felt her as an hourly evil, which was so much the worse, as there seemed to be no chance of its ceasing but with life; she seemed a part of himself, that must be borne for ever.’20

  If the name of Mansfield was synonymous with the cause of abolition, then that of Norris was its opposite. Any reader familiar with Clarkson’s History of the Abolition would have known the infamous Robert Norris. He was a slave trader in West Africa turned ‘merchant’, who was a key figure in Clarkson’s account. When Clarkson went on his first research trip to Liverpool, Norris was charming and helpful, claimed that he deplored the slave trade, abhorring the cruelty with which its victims were treated. But Norris was a hypocrite. He provided Clarkson with valuable testimony, promised to serve the cause of abolition and then betrayed him.

  When it came to a parliamentary inquiry, instead of testifying in support of the abolitionists he argued against them, brazenly proposing that the slave trade had positive effects in Africa, as the poor were more humanely treated as slaves abroad than they were in their barbaric homeland. ‘There was a great accession of happiness to Africa since the introduction of the Trade,’ Norris insisted. In Clark
son’s opinion, Norris’s testimony greatly damaged the abolitionists’ case. Clarkson exacted his revenge on Norris when they later met face to face in the chamber and Norris was discredited for his duplicity: ‘Norris seemed to have no ordinary sense of his own degradation; for he never afterwards held up his head, or looked the abolitionists in the face, or acted with energy as a delegate, as on former occasions’.21 We will never know how self-conscious Jane Austen was in her choice of names, but there can be little doubt that the vile Norris lodged himself in her mind when she read Clarkson and emerged as the perfect name for the villain of Mansfield Park.

  To make clear the connection between the great house and Sir Thomas’s ill-gotten gains in Antigua, Fanny describes Mansfield Park’s grounds as ‘plantations’ – a not so subtle reminder of where the money for the house and grounds came from. And it is Fanny alone who is brave enough to ask the intimidating Sir Thomas about the slave trade:

  ‘Did not you hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?’

  ‘I did – and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.’

  ‘And I longed to do it – but there was such a dead silence!’22

  Fanny Price – a reader, a thinker, a close observer of the world – is no coward or weakling. She speaks truth to power and asks of England the question that dared not speak its name elsewhere in the novel: ‘we have no slaves at home – then why abroad?’ She, not the adulterous Maria or the flighty Julia Bertram, is the true daughter of Mansfield.