The Real Jane Austen

by Paula Byrne

  Her wealthiest family relations, the Leigh-Perrots and the Knights, were childless and thus without heirs to their elegant estates. In Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Persuasion, the absence of a male heir is an important plot-line. The Dashwood sisters are forced out of Norland Park, Mrs Bennet bewails the entailment that will leave her (and her daughters) homeless. Anne and Elizabeth Elliot are exiled from Kellynch and forced into lodgings at Bath.

  Furthermore, Austen returns again and again to the theme of irresponsible custodians. While none of them is mad, like her relation Edward Leigh, several of them (General Tilney, Sir Thomas Bertram, Sir Walter Elliot) are incompetent or uninvolved landlords. Often the worthy housekeeper is portrayed in a better light than the owners. Thus at Sotherton, the dowager mistress ‘had been at great pains to learn all that the housekeeper could teach, and was now almost equally well qualified to show the house’.19 Elizabeth Bennet begins to alter her opinion of Mr Darcy when his housekeeper praises him as a worthy landlord, who looks after his estate, his workers and his family: ‘“He is the best landlord, and the best master,” said she, “that ever lived. Not like the wild young men now-a-days, who think of nothing but themselves. There is not one of his tenants or servants but what will give him a good name.”’ For Elizabeth this is praise in the highest degree: ‘The commendation bestowed on him by Mrs Reynolds was of no trifling nature. What praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant?’20 The visit to Stoneleigh, where there were more servants than at any other place she ever stayed in, focused Austen’s thoughts on many questions regarding the importance of the good stewardship of a great estate.

  Charlotte Brontë in a letter to G. H. Lewes famously calls Jane Austen’s houses ‘elegant but confined’, describing the country house in her novels as ‘an accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen.’21 This reductive and essentially unfair description plays on both a north/south and a class divide: Austen country is ‘neat’ and ‘highly cultivated’ whereas Brontë country is ‘open country’ with its ‘fresh air’ and ‘bonny becks’. But at least Brontë saw that the country house was a character in Austen’s novels every bit as important as Wuthering Heights, Thornfield Hall and Thrushcross Grange in hers and her sister’s. Jane Austen was indeed one of the first novelists to emphasize the symbolic importance of the English ancestral home. Northanger Abbey, Norland Park, Pemberley Court, Combe Magna, Rosings Park, Sotherton Court, Donwell Abbey, Mansfield Park, Kellynch Hall: the question of who will inherit them, and who cannot, is at the centre of the novels. As a visitor Jane Austen knew many English country homes well, such as Godmersham, Rowling, Goodnestone Park, Hurstbourne Park, Kempshott Park, The Vyne, Laverstock House, Scarlets and Chawton House. But the greatest of them all was Stoneleigh and the visit there in the summer of 1806 was the moment when she was most vividly forced to confront her own status. As the Leighs descended upon Stoneleigh from north and south, competing for their inheritance, she watched in semi-detachment. She was an outsider.

  In early September, lawyer Hill sorted out the minor details of Mary Leigh’s will. All that Jane Austen received from Stoneleigh was a ‘Single Brilliant Centre Ring’.22

  14

  The Topaz Crosses

  In May 1801, just as the Austens were settling in Bath, there was a daring capture of a French privateer, Le Scipio, by the British frigate Endymion in the choppy waters of the war-torn Mediterranean. The French ship was newly built and very fast. There followed an ‘arduous chase’, reported the Endymion’s Captain, Sir Thomas Williams. A junior officer, despite a fierce gale, left his own vessel in an open boat with only four men. He boarded the Scipio and held it until reinforcements arrived the next day. He was Second Lieutenant Charles Austen, and his distinguished and courageous action earned him a share in the prize money bestowed for the capture of the privateer.

  Captain Tom Williams was both friend and patron to Charles. He was also a relation by marriage, as he had married Charles’s first cousin Jane Cooper in 1792. Tom and Jane had been married at the Austen home at Steventon after a whirlwind courtship, and the marriage was extremely happy until Jane was tragically killed in a road accident on the Isle of Wight in 1798. Charles Austen and Tom Williams were drawn even closer. Tom must have been delighted by the brave conduct of his cousin. Charles was given £30 in prize money, and expected a further ten. In his delight and good fortune, he made a purchase of two gold chains and beautiful amber crosses, made out of topaz. They were for his sisters, Cassandra and Jane. The crosses are not identical: one is in the traditional crucifix shape, the other with the symmetry of a saltire. We do not know which went to Cassandra and which to Jane.

  Jane was delighted by the present and wrote to Cassandra of her joy and pride, but with characteristic irony: ‘of what avail is it to take prizes if he lays out the produce in presents for his Sisters. He has been buying Gold chains and Topaze Crosses for us; – he must be well scolded … I shall write again by this post to thank and reproach him. – We shall be unbearably fine.’1

  Cassandra and Jane treasured the crosses and they can be seen today at Chawton Cottage. Topaz was all the rage, but the fact that Charles chose crosses rather than lockets is significant, alluding as it does to his sisters’ deep Christian faith as well as marking their delight in fashion. Jane repaid the gesture by using the crosses as a present sent by another sailor brother, the fictional William Price in Mansfield Park.

  The ‘how she should be dressed’ was a point of painful solicitude; and the almost solitary ornament in her possession, a very pretty amber cross which William had brought her from Sicily, was the greatest distress of all, for she had nothing but a bit of ribbon to fasten it to; and though she had worn it in that manner once, would it be allowable at such a time in the midst of all the rich ornaments which she supposed all the other young ladies would appear in? And yet not to wear it! William had wanted to buy her a gold chain too, but the purchase had been beyond his means, and therefore not to wear the cross might be mortifying him.2

  Jane Austen’s sailor brothers were an important influence on her work. In Mansfield Park and Persuasion she pays tribute to Frank and Charles Austen. While writing Mansfield Park she asked Frank’s permission to include the name of his ship, the Elephant.3 Lieutenant Price’s naval jargon perfectly captures the voice of ‘Jack Tar’, the affectionate nickname given to sailors:

  Have you heard the news? The Thrush went out of harbour this morning. Sharp is the word, you see. By G—, you are just in time … I have been to Turner’s about your mess; it is all in a way to be done. I should not wonder if you had your orders tomorrow; but you cannot sail in this wind, if you are to cruise to the westward … with the Elephant. By G—, I wish you may. But old Scholey was saying, just now, that he thought you would be sent first by Texel. Well, well, we are ready, whatever happens.4

  Midshipman William Price owes not a little to Charles Austen, ‘our own particular little brother’. Charles was a brave and plucky sailor, who longed for serious action and promotion (and prize money, of course). In the absence of a sweetheart to buy presents for, Charles (like William) buys for his sisters. Charles Austen, like William Price, loved dancing. His navy report for 1793–4 noted ‘Dances very well’.5 The ballroom was the place to be when on leave, particularly a ballroom with pretty girls in it. Jane remembered how on one leave Charles ‘danced the whole Evening, and to day is no more tired than a gentleman ought to be’.6

  Later in the war Charles was ‘charged with the regulation of all the men raised for the navy in the river Thames and eastern ports, as also with the detail of manning the ships of war fitted out in the Thames and Medway’.7 He was then given command of a thirty-two-gun frigate called the Phoenix and in the brief
period of renewed hostilities in 1815 following Napoleon’s escape from Elba he did valuable work mopping up the remnants of the French fleet in the Mediterranean. He eventually rose to the rank of rear-admiral and commanded the British expedition during the Second Anglo-Burmese War. He died of cholera aboard ship on the Irrawaddy river in Burma on 7 October 1852, at the age of seventy-three – quite a contrast to his brother Edward, the adopted gentleman, who died in his sleep, aged eighty-five, in the big house at Godmersham a few weeks later.

  Jane Austen also used details from her other naval brother, Frank, to flesh out William Price’s back-story. As we have seen, Francis, nicknamed Fly, was described by his sister as ‘Fearless of danger’ with ‘warmth, nay insolence of spirit’, a boy of ‘saucy words and fiery ways’.8 He was small of stature, but had great energy. Like his brother Charles, he was enrolled in the Royal Naval Academy at Portsmouth.

  Two days before Christmas in 1789, the fifteen-year-old Frank set sail for the East Indies on board the Perseverance. The voyage took seven months and the men were plagued with scurvy. There were so many rats aboard their sister ship, the Crown, that the sailors caught them with fish hooks, stabbed them with forks and ate them. Frank stayed for four years and arrived back home at Steventon in November 1793, summoned back by the Lords of the Admiralty to assume war duties. Jane Austen accordingly did not see the brother closest in age to her from her fourteenth birthday until a few weeks before her eighteenth. There still survives a moving and beautifully written advice letter to Frank from his father, a letter he treasured for all of his long life. We have no way of knowing Jane’s feelings, since her earliest surviving letter dates from 1796, but we can gauge them from Fanny Price’s feelings in Mansfield Park when William Price returns from the West Indies after an absence of five years. The sister waits impatiently for the moment to arrive: ‘watching in the hall, in the lobby, on the stairs, for the first sounds of the carriage which was to bring her a brother’.9

  The naval brothers: Captain Charles Austen in 1809 (left) and Captain Francis Austen in 1806 (right, with his decoration as Companion of the Bath, awarded 1814, painted in at a later date)

  William Price keeps the family enthralled with his stories of naval life: ‘Young as he was, William had already seen a great deal. He had been in the Mediterreanean – in the West Indies – in the Mediterranean again … and in the course of seven years had known every variety of danger, which sea and war together could offer.’ The details of sea and war – ‘such horrors’ – even move to action the lethargic Lady Bertram: ‘Dear me! how disagreeable. – I wonder anybody can ever go to sea.’10

  For the rich, idle rake Henry Crawford, William’s tales ‘gave a different feeling. He longed to have been at sea, and seen and done and suffered as much.’ His ‘heart was warmed, his fancy fired, and he felt a great respect for a lad who, before he was twenty, had gone through such bodily hardships, and given such proofs of mind’. It is William who inspires in Henry an attack of conscience and self-knowledge: ‘The glory of heroism, of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance, made his own habits of selfish indulgence appear in shameful contrast; and he wished he had been a William Price, distinguishing himself and working his way to fortune and consequence with so much self-respect and happy ardour, instead of what he was!’11

  William’s only complaint is that as a lowly midshipman the young girls won’t give him a second look: ‘The Portsmouth girls turn up their noses at anybody who has not a commission. One might as well be nothing as a midshipman.’12 Charles and Frank Austen may well have suffered the same romantic indignities, though it wasn’t long before Frank obtained his lieutenant’s commission. He was just eighteen.

  In some cases, early promotion led to discontent among the crews, particularly when over-enthusiastic young officers meted out punishments to their inferiors. Logbooks taken from Frank’s ships show the severity of the punishments. Forty-nine lashes would be given for theft and a hundred for insolence to a superior officer. One midshipman was punished by having his uniform stripped and his head shaved in full view of the crew. Mrs Lefroy was embarrassed when a lad called Bob Simmons whom she got into the navy through Charles Austen and Tom Williams turned out to be a thief. The boy was punished by the severest whipping Captain Williams had ever inflicted on a man under his command. It seems that she was corresponding with Charles Austen, as she later told her son that Charles had informed her that Prince Augustus had witnessed the lashing. On another occasion she recalled that Charles had leave of absence from his ship in order to appear as a character witness in a trial at Winchester for a Lieutenant Lutwich, who was accused of murder as a result of striking a sailor with the tiller of the boat, which fractured his skull.13

  There were other transgressions, too. Wherever males live in close quarters for extended periods (prison, ship and boarding school) consensual and non-consensual homosexual behaviour will occur. Naval sodomy was a hanging offence. Article 28 of the Royal Navy’s Articles of War (1757) stated the facts clearly: ‘If any person in the fleet shall commit the unnatural and detestable sin of buggery and sodomy with man or beast, he shall be punished with death by the sentence of the court martial.’ Of course it is difficult to judge the number of incidences in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars. Some officers turned a blind eye, others punished men for the less serious crime of ‘uncleanness’. Captain George Moore, brother to Sir John Moore, who was known to the Austen family,14 kept a journal in which he wrote of having to flog a man ‘who had acted in a manner disgraceful to the character of an Englishman’.15 But some were indeed given a court martial and hanged. Officers were not exempt. Captain Henry Allen of the Rattler was executed for sodomy in 1797. Perhaps the most notorious case, which reached the press, was that of Lieutenant William Berry, who was hanged in 1807 for sodomizing a young boy. Berry, the press reported, was a handsome young lieutenant aged twenty-two and over six feet in height (this in an age when average heights were well below what they are now). His affair with Thomas Gibbs, a young tar, was reported in the eyewitness account of a young girl called Elizabeth Bowden, who had peeped through a keyhole. She had apparently been on board for eight months, disguised as a boy. Berry, who was due to be married, acted with great honour and dignity in the days leading up to his death. He accepted his punishment and endured a horrific death by hanging as the rope slipped over his chin, and he had to be weighed down to finish the job. It took more than fifteen minutes before he died.

  In 1798, men on Frank’s ship, the London, were flogged for ‘insolence, mutiny and an unnatural crime of sodomy’: the sentence was recorded in the ship’s log.16 Given this context, it is perfectly plausible that Jane Austen showed her awareness of the issue when she allows her anti-heroine, Mary Crawford, to make her most shocking pun.

  ‘Miss Price has a brother at sea,’ said Edmund, ‘whose excellence as a correspondent makes her think you too severe upon us.’

  ‘At sea, has she? – In the king’s service of course?’

  Fanny would rather have had Edmund tell the story, but his ‘determined silence’ obliges her to relate her brother’s situation: ‘her voice was animated in speaking of his profession, and the foreign stations he had been on; but she could not mention the number of years that he had been absent without tears in her eyes’. Miss Crawford civilly wishes him an early promotion:

  ‘Do you know anything of my cousin’s captain?’ said Edmund; ‘Captain Marshall? You have a large acquaintance in the navy, I conclude?’

  ‘Among Admirals, large enough; but,’ with an air of grandeur, ‘we know very little of the inferior ranks. Post captains may be very good sort of men, but they do not belong to us. Of various admirals, I could tell you a great deal; of them and their flags, and the gradation of their pay, and their bickerings and jealousies. But, in general, I can assure you that they are all passed over, and all very ill used. Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears, and Vices, I saw enough.
Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.’

  Edmund again felt grave, and only replied, ‘It is a noble profession.’17

  Edmund’s shock and his defence of the nobility of the profession show that he is deeply offended. The fact that Mary draws explicit attention to her crude pun by pretending not to have made it does make it seem that she is referring to sexual vices involving rears. But the ‘I saw enough’ is interesting. Mary’s cynicism is given context – what exactly did she see at her home with Admiral Crawford? What has made her so jaded about the navy? We know that Admiral Crawford has brought a mistress under his roof, but Mary hints at ‘seeing’ evidence of particularly shocking sexual behaviour. It is worth remembering that in Mansfield Park flogging is directly connected with sexual misbehaviour when ex-marine Lieutenant Price suggests ‘giving the rope’s end’ to Maria Bertram for her adultery.

  Frank, the most pious of the brothers, was known for lacking a sense of humour. He was a ponderous and serious-minded sailor. In the Austen family his letters were famous for their length and their mundane detail. A family anecdote recalled his character perfectly. A naval colleague went swimming in the tropics. Frank observed calmly and slowly, ‘Mr Pakenham you are in danger of a shark – a shark of the blue species.’ The captain thought it was a joke, but was told by Frank, ‘I am not given to joking. If you do not return immediately, soon the shark will eat you.’18 Jane, who lived for jokes, continued to tease him in her own letters, ‘I hope you continue beautiful and brush your hair, but not all off.’19 Given his lack of humour, it is remarkable that – as noted in my prologue – he seems to have recalled the ‘Rears, and Vices’ joke nearly forty years after his sister wrote it.