by Paula Byrne
The Peterel (under Captain Francis Austen) engages with La Ligurienne
Frank had a distinguished war record. Among his many triumphs was the capture of the French brig La Ligurienne just off the Mediterranean coast, close to Marseilles, in March 1800. Frank reported the very satisfactory outcome: ‘Peterel: Killed, none; wounded, none. La Ligurienne: Killed, the captain and one seaman; wounded, one gardemarin and one seaman.’20
Frank missed the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 by a hair’s-breadth. He was dispatched by Lord Nelson to Gibraltar for supplies and missed the great victory. This twist of fate caused him serious mental anguish. However in 1806 he was present at the Battle of San Domingo. Jane acknowledged this victory in Persuasion by having Captain Wentworth ‘made commander in consequence of action off St. Domingo’.21
When the Austen women – Jane, Cassandra and their mother, the ‘dear trio’ as brother Henry called them – fell on hard times, they were reliant upon the financial assistance of the brothers. Frank offered twice as much money as he needed to, asking that the full amount be kept a secret. He then concocted a plan to have them live with his wife-to-be Mary Gibson in Southampton. Jane also wanted Martha Lloyd, whom she had once hoped would marry Frank, to be part of the new family arrangement: ‘With Martha … who will be so happy as we?’22
Though she summered at Godmersham, Southampton was Jane Austen’s primary home for two years, from March 1807 until the summer of 1809. This large town, another popular spa, with an assembly room for dancing, a theatre, circulating libraries and a tree-lined beach walk, had many associations. It was the place where as a girl she had contracted typhus and almost died; then she had returned in 1793 to help a cousin with the birth of a new baby. Southampton was fixed upon as a suitable town, due to its proximity to Portsmouth, which was necessary for Frank.
Their leased home in Southampton was a ‘commodious old fashioned house’ in a corner of Castle Square. It hugged the old city walls and, according to Jane, contained the best garden in the town. Just as important, it had extensive views across Southampton Water. The Isle of Wight could be seen in the distance. Living in such close proximity to the sea must have felt a blessing after the confinement of Bath, the city that they had left ‘with happy feelings of escape’.23 She sometimes complained of ‘Castle Square weather’, as it was breezy, but they enjoyed living there.
The Austens made family excursions by ferryboat on the River Itchen. They saw naval sights and the Gothic ruins of Netley Abbey. Jane continued her long walks when she was in Southampton, rambling through the lovely countryside surrounding the town, beside Southampton Water and along the banks of the Itchen and Test rivers. A surviving fragment from a pocket diary belonging to her during this time notes her expenditure, which included ‘waterparties and plays’, which cost 17s 9d, and the hire of a piano, which cost £2 13s 6d.
Mary Gibson, now Frank’s wife, was in the early stages of pregnancy and suffered badly from morning sickness. It was the first time that Jane would live in such close proximity to a pregnant woman and she observed her well. Frank was away for the birth, which was painful and long, and there were some initial fears for the mother who was ‘most alarmingly ill’.24 She did recover, however, and called her baby Mary-Jane. Jane’s phobia about childbirth was not helped by Mary’s distressing confinement.
Naval matters were of course much on her mind. She was living in a place that was a hive of wartime activity and she came into close contact with Frank’s sailor friends. There’s no knowing if she read the press accounts of the court martial of Lieutenant William Berry, but she was certainly aware of another naval court martial in that same year of 1807, that of Home Popham. In protest at what she considered gross injustice, she fired off a terse satirical poem ‘On Sir Home Popham’s Sentence’. Popham was charged with having withdrawn troops and carried out a military expedition without orders from the Admiralty. It is a remarkable poem, a satire on a public event, but revealing a depth of anger and ‘spite’ that suggests her fierce interest in the conduct of the war:
Of a Ministry pitiful, angry, mean,
A gallant commander the victim is seen.
For promptitude, vigour, success, does he stand
Condemn’d to receive a severe reprimand!
To his foes I could wish a resemblance in fate:
That they, too, may suffer themselves, soon or late,
The injustice they warrant. But vain is my spite,
They cannot so suffer who never do right.25
She kept a close eye on news in the papers regarding the campaign in the Iberian peninsula against Napoleon. On 10 January 1809 she wrote to Cassandra, ‘The St Albans perhaps may soon be off to help bring home what may remain by this time of our poor army, whose state seems dreadfully critical.’26 She was referring to the notorious Battle of Corunna.
The British army had been sent into Spain under the command of General Sir John Moore to aid the locals in expelling the French. The British were forced to retreat through the mountains of northern Spain in the depths of winter. The forced march wreaked havoc on health and morale, resulting in the army degenerating into a rabble. Moore finally reached Corunna. His army expected to find a fleet to evacuate them but they discovered that the transport vessels that had been ordered had not arrived. The St Albans mentioned by Jane was one of the ships sent to evacuate the wounded. The British losses were terrible and Sir John Moore was fatally wounded. Jane kept up to date with the latest dispatches and upon hearing of the General’s death wrote, ‘grievous news from Spain. – It was well that Dr Moore [a family friend] was spared the knowledge of such a Son’s death.’27
Back in Britain there was much talk of Moore’s mishandling of the campaign. The Times reported it as a shameful disaster. Moore’s dignity in death was praised by most, though not by Jane Austen. His last words were reportedly ‘I hope the people of England will be satisfied! I hope my country will do me justice!’ Austen disapproved, as there was no reference to God and the afterlife: ‘I wish Sir John had united something of the Christian with the Hero in his death,’ she remarked. She then added, ‘Thank Heaven! we have had no one to care for particularly among the Troops.’28 With brothers in the navy and Henry in the militia she had good reason to be thankful that no one close to her had been involved. Frank Austen was in charge of the disembarkation of Moore’s troops at Spithead, and would have seen many of the wounded at first hand.
‘Mr B. Promoted to Lieut and first putting on his Uniform’ by George Cruikshank
Early in the final volume of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price’s brother William is promoted to the rank of lieutenant. He visits his sister at the big house, but is not allowed to show off his new uniform to her there, because ‘cruel custom prohibited its appearance except on duty’. So the uniform remains at Portsmouth, and Edmund worries whether Fanny will have any chance of seeing it before ‘all its own freshness, and all the freshness of its wearer’s feelings, must be worn away’. But then his father, Sir Thomas, tells him of ‘a scheme which placed Fanny’s chance of seeing the 2d lieutenant of H. M. S. Thrush in all his glory, in another light’: she is to go to Portsmouth herself.29
But Sir Thomas also has a darker purpose. Fanny has defied his wish for her to marry the unprincipled Henry Crawford, so she is sent ‘home’ to Portsmouth as an ‘experiment’, a ‘medicinal project’ upon her understanding. Sir Thomas Bertram’s hope is that ‘a little abstinence from the elegancies and wealth of Mansfield Park, would bring her mind into a sober state’. ‘Her Father’s house would, in all probability, teach her the value of a good income.’30
Portsmouth comes alive as a bustling, busy seaport. Fanny and William arrive and are driven through the spectacular moated drawbridge. There is the High Street with its good shops, the beautiful ramparts, the sea views to Spithead and the Isle of Wight, the Crown Inn where Henry Crawford stays, the Garrison Chapel where the Price family worship on a Sunday. In the famous Portsmouth Dockyard, which resembled a small to
wn, with dwelling-houses, offices, store-houses and lofts employing more than two thousand men, Fanny and Henry sit upon ‘timbers in the yard’ and chat. They wander aboard a stationary sloop. There is a strikingly evocative passage describing the Portsmouth seascape:
The day was uncommonly lovely. It was really March; but it was April in its mild air, brisk soft wind, and bright sun, occasionally clouded for a minute; and every thing looked so beautiful under the influence of such a sky, the effects of the shadows pursuing each other, on the ships at Spithead and the island beyond, with the ever-varying hues of the sea now at high water, dancing in its glee and dashing against the ramparts with so fine a sound.31
However, once inside the Price family home, we are given a very different picture. Jane Austen wanders into previously uncharted territory in her depiction of the lower-middle-class Price family, and her depiction of this, her first naval family, is not wholly flattering.
As seen through the eyes of Fanny Price, who has been reared in luxury at Mansfield Park, the tiny, terraced house is cramped and dirty. The walls are marked with greasy hair oil, ‘half-cleaned plates, and not half-cleaned knives and forks’, dust motes circle in the glare of the sunshine, china is ‘wiped in streaks’, ‘the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue’.32
Fanny’s father, Lieutenant Price, ‘disabled for active service’, is presented as little more than a thug: ‘he read only the newspaper and the navy-list; he talked only of the dock-yard, the harbour, Spithead, and the Motherbank; he swore and he drank, he was dirty and gross’. His home, where he drinks grog with his sailor friends and makes his daughter the object of ‘coarse jokes’, epitomizes the life of the vulgar tar: ‘it was the abode of noise, disorder, and impropriety’.33 Fanny’s mother is a slattern who cannot control her many children and her useless maid. Other than the depiction of midshipman William Price, who is drawn with great charm, the navy in Mansfield Park has little to recommend it.
Interestingly, Jane Austen’s sailor brothers did not mention the Portsmouth scenes in their responses to Mansfield Park, unlike James and Edward who singled them out for special praise. Jane wrote that Admiral Foote (a close friend of Frank’s) was ‘surprised that I had the power of drawing the Portsmouth-Scenes so well’,34 but one wonders if her sailor brothers were offended by her depiction of the navy. Her portrayal of naval families in Persuasion was drawn with a kindlier and more respectful eye perhaps as a form of atonement.
Captain Harville, living in his rented rooms in Lyme Regis, is the master of a tiny, cramped home, but it is cosy, tidy and clean. Here Harville and his wife have made the best of ‘the deficiencies of lodging-house furniture’. He has barricaded the windows and doors against the winter storms, and his treasures from the West Indies furnish the room. Unlike Fanny Price, who compares her father’s house unfavourably to Mansfield Park, Anne has no such views: ‘how much more interesting to her was the home and friendship of the Harvilles and Captain Benwick, than her own father’s house’.35
When Anne returns to Kellynch Hall she realizes that Admiral and Mrs Croft are worthy tenants in comparison to her father: ‘she could not but in conscience feel that they were gone who deserved not to stay, and that Kellynch-hall had passed into better hands than its owners’.36 They have respected the spirit of the place and the only substantial change they have made is the removal of the vain Sir Walter’s many looking-glasses. She knows that the ‘strangers’ who have made their own way by hard work and courage are far more worthy of Kellynch than her own ‘ancient family’. Anne rejoices in this: she is happy to enter the ‘wooden world’ that comes with being a naval wife and to escape Sir Walter and his obsession with the baronetage.
In Mansfield Park, the well-bred but selfish Bertram children fare much less well than the Price children who have endured the squalor and alcohol fumes of the little house in Portsmouth:
In her [Susan Price’s] usefulness, in Fanny’s excellence, in William’s continued good conduct, and rising fame, and in the general welldoing and success of the other members of the family, all assisting to advance each other, and doing credit to his countenance and aid, Sir Thomas saw repeated, and for ever repeated, reason to rejoice in what he had done for them all, and acknowledge the advantages of early hardship and discipline, and the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure.37
Jane Austen admired the discipline of the navy because of its bracing effect on character formation.
For all his merits, William Price is not the hero of Mansfield Park. But in the portrayal of Captain Wentworth, we see Jane Austen’s most deserving self-made hero. He is indeed her only truly romantic hero. He has risen in society not through inheritance but by hard work, courage and enterprise. If Sir Walter represents ‘old money’ and the decaying gentry, Wentworth is the embodiment of the new, the confident and the professional:
Captain Wentworth had no fortune. He had been lucky in his profession, but spending freely, what had come freely, had realized nothing. But, he was confident that he should soon be rich; – full of life and ardour, he knew that he should soon have a ship, and soon be on a station that would lead to everything he wanted. He had always been lucky; he knew he should be so still.38
If you had a commission and the right luck, there was money to be made on the high seas in both the West and the East.
There is a moment in Mansfield Park when Edmund Bertram says that his cousin Fanny ‘will be taking a trip into China’. ‘How does Lord Macartney go on?’ he asks.39 Fanny is obviously reading a recently published ‘great book’, John Barrow’s two-volume Some Account of the Public Life and a Selection from the Unpublished Writings of the Earl of Macartney (1807), which included the text of Lord Macartney’s Journal of the Embassy to China. This was a key moment in the history of trade relations with China. More specifically, it was the period when opium was being shipped by the ton from Bengal to China.
In the early spring of 1809, Captain Frank Austen said goodbye to his wife, his mother and his sisters. He set sail on the St Albans. His destination was China, in support of a convoy of East Indiamen. He ended up on Canton river, engaged in a very tricky encounter in the pirate-infested islands known as the Ladrones. Having negotiated a satisfactory settlement with the local Mandarin authorities, he negotiated his way back across the China Seas to Madras. By July he was on his way home, sending Chinese presents to his brother Charles from aboard ship. He safely sailed the St Albans back to London, where his cargo was unloaded: ninety-three chests of treasure ‘said to contain 470,000 Dollars or Bullion to that amount’ (the dollar was the coin adopted by traders in the Dutch East Indies). For his pains, Frank Austen was rewarded with over £500 for the escorting of the convoy and offered freight money of just over a thousand pounds – a sum that he negotiated up to £1,500 by claiming a percentage on the value of the treasure.40 The modern equivalent for his total earnings from the voyage would be about £1o0,000 or $150,000. There can be little doubt that this was opium money.
There is no explicit reference to opium in Persuasion, but Captain Wentworth, like Jane Austen’s sailor brothers, successfully reconciles duty – the ‘national importance’ of the navy in time of war, as the last sentence of the novel has it – with material success. Frank Austen later served in the North America and West Indies Station in 1844 and was promoted an Admiral of the Red in 1855. He died in his fine house, Portsdown Lodge, above his beloved Portsmouth, ten years later. His sister would have wished analogous prosperity and longevity upon that most deserving fictional naval couple, Frederick and Anne Wentworth.
15
The Box of Letters
‘Miss Woodhouse,’ said Frank Churchill, after examining a table behind him, which he could reach as he sat, ‘have your nephews taken away their alphabets – their box of letters? It used to stand here. Where is it? This is a sort of dull-looking evening, that ought to be treated rather as winter than summer. We had great amusement with those letters one morning. I want to puzzle you again.�
�
Emma, VOL. 3, CH. 5
It is an educational toy, but also a popular game among adults, to while away the time in a world without television and computers. Any number of people can play. The hand-painted bone or ivory counters are marked with capital letters on one side and lower case on the reverse. The aim is to mix up the letters and make as many words from them as possible, or as long a word as possible. It was a simple version of Scrabble. Sometimes the ivory squares or circles were bought blank and the purchaser would draw letters on them, as Emma Woodhouse does in a beautifully elegant hand. Equally well, the box of letters could be used to teach a child to spell and to broaden her vocabulary.1
Frank Churchill placed a word before Miss Fairfax. She gave a slight glance round the table, and applied herself to it … The word was discovered, and with a faint smile pushed away … The word was blunder; and as Harriet exultingly proclaimed it, there was a blush on Jane’s cheek which gave it a meaning not otherwise ostensible … These letters were but the vehicle for gallantry and trick. It was a child’s play, chosen to conceal a deeper game on Frank Churchill’s part.2
The adults in this scene are playing with children’s toys, which uncover a deeply unpleasant adult psychological game. Most of them, in particular Frank Churchill, are behaving like children. The same could be said of Emma’s behaviour in the scene at Box Hill when she insults Miss Bates. Emma is the novel most interested in games, especially mind-games and manipulation.
Jane Austen’s vision of how human beings behave in society is built on disguise and role-play, equivocation and mystery. She was one of the first authors to use games – riddles, conundrums, play at cards – to reveal (often) dubious social conduct. In Mansfield Park, she uses the gambling card game Speculation, one of her own favourites, in an important scene involving the main characters. The scene is loaded with symbolism. The object of the game is to hold the highest trump card, when all cards in play have been revealed. Cards can be bought or sold with other cards. The game, of course, is played on more than one level. Jane Austen played Speculation with her nephew George, and pretended to be cross when her nephews showed a preference for another card game, Bragg: ‘it mortifies me deeply, because Speculation was under my patronage’.3