by Helena Kelly
Now, Cowper, as I’ve already mentioned above, was a poet – the poet – of abolition. He wrote about the subject constantly. His poem Charity, published in 1782, asks, ‘Canst thou, and honour’d with a Christian name, | Buy what is woman-born, and feel no shame? | Trade in the blood of innocence, and plead | Expedience as a warrant for the deed?’ The poem Pity for Poor Africans was written to support the sugar boycott of the 1790s.k With its thumping rhymes it seems designed for mass readership, or to be set to music:
I own I am shock’d at the purchase of slaves,
And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;
What I hear of their hardships, their tortures, and groans
Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum [i.e. silent],
For how could we do without sugar and rum?
Especially sugar, so needful we see?
What? give up our desserts, our coffee, and tea!
Both here and in The Negro’s Complaint of 1788 Cowper condemns slavery explicitly as unchristian: ‘Is there, as ye sometimes tell us, | Is there One who reigns on high? | Has He bid you buy and sell us, | Speaking from his throne, the sky?’
But it was The Task which made Cowper famous. It was popular, extraordinarily so. The first edition sold out. Why was this poem so popular? In part, perhaps, because, unlike many of Cowper’s other poems, it allowed – even encouraged – its audience to see Britain, contrary to almost all the facts, as a beacon of liberty and morality:
I would not have a slave to till my ground,
To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
That sinews bought and sold have ever earned.
No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart’s
Just estimation prized above all price,
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.
That’s noble, and bespeaks a nation proud
And jealous of the blessing. Spread it then,
And let it circulate through every vein
Of all your empire; that where Britain’s power
Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too.
The Task brought all Cowper’s poems to a wider audience; his complete poems were republished five times in the space of a decade. Thinking of Cowper, then, for most of the first readers of Mansfield Park, would have meant thinking, at least for a moment or two, about slavery. Indeed, Jane doesn’t let them forget about it for long.
When Fanny, together with the other young people and the omnipresent Mrs Norris, goes to visit Sotherton, the description of the gardens – of the wilderness, with its locked gate – recalls another passage from The Task.l And it makes Fanny’s cousin Maria think of a passage from Laurence Sterne’s novel of 1768, A Sentimental Journey.
The party has drifted into groups and become separated; Fanny has been abandoned on a bench by Edmund, who’s eager to make the most of some unchaperoned time with Mary Crawford. Maria appears, accompanied by Mr Rushworth, her betrothed, and Henry Crawford; all are talking firmly about landscape improvements. Mr Rushworth is dispatched to locate the key to the locked gate and Fanny watches while Henry Crawford attempts to flirt with an unresponsive Maria. He asserts, slyly, that Maria, soon to be married and become mistress of Sotherton, has ‘a very smiling scene before’ her. Maria’s response is sharp:
‘Do you mean literally or figuratively? Literally, I conclude. Yes, certainly, the sun shines, and the park looks very cheerful. But unluckily that iron gate, that ha-ha, give me a feeling of restraint and hardship. “I cannot get out,” as the starling said.’ As she spoke, and it was with expression, she walked to the gate: he followed her. ‘Mr Rushworth is so long fetching this key!’
In a foreshadowing of the adulterous affair the two will embark on later in the novel, Maria is persuaded to abandon propriety and to strike out with Henry Crawford. The two of them clamber over the fence (with its ‘spikes’) and the ‘ha-ha’ (a concealed ditch into which Fanny is worried her cousin will ‘slip’) and wander away together. It turns out that, unlike the starling, Maria can get out.
Sterne, who also wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, isn’t read much these days; his writing, with its endless digressions and laboured double entendres, isn’t to modern tastes, but the passage Maria quotes from was among the best-known in eighteenth-century English literature.
The narrator of A Sentimental Journey (Sterne himself, thinly disguised) is travelling through France. Stopping at an inn, he hears a voice in the corridor, complaining that ‘it could not get out’. It turns out to be ‘a starling hung in a little cage’:
I stood looking at the bird: and to every person who came through the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approach’d it, with the same lamentation of its captivity. ‘I can’t get out,’ said the starling.—God help thee! said I, but I’ll let thee out, cost what it will; so I turned about the cage to get to the door: it was twisted and double twisted so fast with wire, there was no getting it open without pulling the cage to pieces.—I took both hands to it.
The bird flew to the place where I was attempting his deliverance, and thrusting his head through the trellis pressed his breast against it as if impatient.—I fear, poor creature! said I, I cannot set thee at liberty.—‘No,’ said the starling,—‘I can’t get out—I can’t get out,’ said the starling.
The next paragraph but one begins with the words, ‘Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery! said I,—still thou art a bitter draught! and though thousands in all ages have been made to drink of thee, thou art no less bitter on that account.’
Jane would have been safe in assuming that her readers knew that this was how the passage continued. The whole section, including the reference to slavery, is reproduced in the Elegant Extracts, the two collections, verse and prose, which were continually reprinted through Jane’s lifetime. The selected passages (‘useful and entertaining’) were intended to be set as recitation exercises for children, both at school and in the home. The starling extract would have been part of the mental furniture of every educated or even half-educated person.m The leap from starling to slavery is one that readers’ brains would have made on their own, almost without any conscious thought.
If these are coincidences then they’re two among many.
Early in the novel the youthful Maria and Julia Bertram are lamenting how poorly educated Fanny is. ‘I am sure I should have been ashamed of myself, if I had not known better long before I was so old as she is’, says one.
‘How long ago it is, aunt, since we used to repeat the chronological order of the kings of England, with the dates of their accession, and most of the principal events of their reigns!’
‘Yes,’ added the other; ‘and of the Roman emperors as low as Severus; besides a great deal of the heathen mythology, and all the metals, semi-metals, planets, and distinguished philosophers.’
Clearly the girls haven’t learned a complete list of the Roman emperors (they’ve only gone ‘as low as Severus’) and so Jane presents her reader with two questions – which of the girls is speaking here, and which of the three Roman emperors called Severus are they referring to? The second and third ruled only for very short periods of time, late in the imperial age. The first, Septimius Severus, ruled for far longer. He came to Britain intending to subdue Caledonia (Scotland) and died at York. He had a wife called Julia – it’s presumably she who is speaking, and not Maria. And, as a reference book of the period mentions, Severus ‘was by birth an African’n – a black Afr
ican, as is obvious from statues and coins.
Why mention the name Severus at all? It doesn’t add anything, other than making the image of a black man appear in the reader’s mind.
There’s a continual drip of these kind of reminders, of this sort of mind manipulation.
When the idea of performing a play at Mansfield is first raised there’s much discussion as to which play should be chosen. Two of the three Shakespeare plays to feature explicitly non-white characters are suggested – Othello, with its ‘Moorish’ tragic hero who refers in Act One, Scene 3 to having been sold into slavery, and The Merchant of Venice, in which a ‘Moorish’ prince courts the heroine Portia. ‘Moor’, in Shakespeare’s writing, can mean a Muslim person from North Africa. It’s also, of course, short for ‘blackamoor’, someone of, more specifically, black African extraction. It’s worth keeping the point in mind.
One of the more modern plays considered is The Wheel of Fortune, by Richard Cumberland, first performed in 1795, which features a character called Tempest, governor of the fictional ‘Senegambia’. The French and British struggled for control of the Senegal and Gambia rivers for decades. Hundreds of thousands of people – perhaps millions – were sold into slavery from the local markets.
The play finally chosen is Lovers’ Vows, an English translation of Das Kind der Liebe (‘The Love-Child’) written by the prolific German dramatist August von Kotzebue. It’s what would, in Jane’s time, have been called ‘warm’, with one character an unmarried mother and another a young lady who propositions her clergyman tutor. It’s also revolutionary; the faithless baron is obliged to marry the servant he ruined, the bastard son is recognised, the peasant woman condemns the lax morals of the upper classes. Sir Thomas Bertram, on his return, burns every copy of the play he can lay his hands on. What, one wonders, would have been his reaction if he’d discovered one of his children blacking up to perform Shakespeare or The Wheel of Fortune, or if they’d chosen to perform another of Kotzebue’s plays, perhaps the one in which the abolitionist William Wilberforce is mentioned by name, Die Negersklaven – The Negro Slaves?
The references, large and small, are everywhere.
The only time that the fashionable, frivolous Mary Crawford ventures on a quotation, she selects an oddly obscure poem. ‘Do you remember Hawkins Browne’s “Address to Tobacco”, in imitation of Pope?—’ she asks her sister, before reciting a couple of lines and then composing her own parody of them. The poem may be obscure, but the name of the poet – Hawkins Browne – is a memorable one, and it’s one that, like the name Norris, appears in Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade. Clarkson, invited to dinner at the house of an abolitionist, finds a party there that includes ‘Mr Wilberforce’, the artist Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Boswell, the friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson. Also there is ‘Mr Hawkins Browne’, Isaac Hawkins Browne, the son of the poet, a member of parliament. ‘After dinner’, Clarkson tells his readers:
the subject of the Slave-trade was purposely introduced. Many questions were put to me, and I dilated upon each in my answers, that I might inform and interest those present as much as I could. They seemed to be greatly impressed with my account of the loss of seamen in the trade, and with the little samples of African cloth, which I had procured for their inspection. Sir Joshua Reynolds gave his unqualified approbation of the abolition of this cruel traffic. Mr Hawkins Browne joined heartily with him in sentiment; he spoke with much feeling upon it, and pronounced it to be barbarous, and contrary to every principle of morality and religion.
It’s probable that Hawkins Browne, who had married into a West Indian family and repeatedly voted against abolition, was merely being polite; but it’s this passage that Jane’s audience would have recognised the name from.
When Maria marries Mr Rushworth, the newlyweds take a house in London, in Wimpole Street. We’re told this a number of times – ten, in fact. It’s clearly a detail Jane didn’t want her readers to miss. According to Mary Crawford it’s ‘one of the best houses in Wimpole Street’. In a letter intended as much for Edmund as for Fanny, to whom it’s addressed, Mary remarks airily that she has seen the house before: ‘I was in it two years ago, when it was Lady Lascelle’s.’ Lady Lascelles existed. She had married into a notorious slaving family, and though she didn’t actually live on Wimpole Street, other members of the family did. It was a street which attracted West Indian families and people with connections in the West Indies. A family called the Pinneys, who had estates in St Kitts and Nevis, lived there; so too did the Beckfords, who owned huge swathes of Jamaica. William Beckford, who inherited the majority of the family money, was at one point the richest man in England. He wasted a good deal of the money on building Fonthill Abbey, before he was disgraced by a same-sex scandal and forced into exile with his wife Margaret.o A cousin of Margaret Beckford was for a time a neighbour of Jane’s, renting Edward’s house at Chawton. Admiral Cornwallis, who had served in the Caribbean, lived on Wimpole Street; Jane’s brother Francis had sailed with Cornwallis as a midshipman. The Knatchbulls, cousins of Edward Austen’s adoptive mother, also owned a house on Wimpole Street. It’s not impossible to imagine that Jane might have visited there herself. She puts Maria, the daughter of a West Indian plantation owner, among her own kind.
In this novel even an apricot tree works to remind readers of slavery. In Volume 2 Mrs Norris, wife of the former vicar of Mansfield, gets into an argument with the new vicar, Dr Grant, over an apricot tree in the parsonage garden. Mrs Norris is very insistent that Dr Grant should understand that the apricot is ‘a Moor Park, we bought it as a Moor Park, and it cost us—that is, it was a present from Sir Thomas, but I saw the bill—and I know it cost seven shillings, and was charged as a Moor Park’.
‘Moor Park’ is a particular type of apricot tree – one you can still buy now. A gardener’s catalogue of 1795 lists no fewer than nine kinds of apricot.7 ‘Moor Park’ is also known as Dunmoor, Peach, or Lord Anson’s. Is Jane really using this name, and this kind of apricot tree, out of all the alternatives, by accident? Is it just coincidence that it’s the same word Shakespeare uses to describe the ethnicity of black Africans, and that ‘Moor Park’ echoes ‘Mansfield Park’?
Jane is never sloppy with her writing, but she becomes ever more sensitive to the freight attached to certain words. In Pride and Prejudice Lizzy Bennet casually and contemptuously dismisses the easy-going Mr Bingley in her own mind as ‘the slave of his designing friends’; in Mansfield Park it is only the unlikeable characters, the repellent Mrs Norris or the amoral Mary Crawford, who can treat the issue so lightly, the one talking about how she has been ‘slaving’ herself, the other unwilling to be ‘the slave of opportunity’. In the earlier novels Jane uses a word like ‘plantation’ neutrally; by the time she gets to Emma, it appears only when Mrs Elton – a character from the port town of Bristol who is quite extraordinarily sensitive about slavery – is speaking.
The word ‘plantation’ is used five times in Mansfield Park, more often than in any of Jane’s other novels. Mansfield Park includes repeated references to ‘pheasants’, game birds which were difficult to buy and which (like slaves) couldn’t be legally recovered if they got away, and so had to be carefully kept and carefully bred to maintain an adequate population. Jane barely mentions pheasants elsewhere in her writing. When Edmund gives Fanny a glass of wine as a pick-me-up for what sounds like a migraine, he picks Madeira – a fortified wine from the island of that name, the first European slave plantation. This wine is mentioned only in Mansfield Park and Emma. Jane repeats the joke she had made in the opening of Pride and Prejudice, about men being considered ‘property’ – repeats it twice. The joke is, of course, at heart entirely unfunny in a world where women, and some men too, could be owned.p
The word with the darkest and most inescapable connotations, though, is one which comes up once in Sense and Sensibility, once in Emma, not at all in Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion, and no fewer than thir
teen times in Mansfield Park. This is a novel weighed down – with chains.
It’s not a word which Jane ever treats neutrally. In Sense and Sensibility it appears explicitly as the reverse of liberty (‘Her mind was inevitably at liberty; her thoughts could not be chained elsewhere’). In Emma it’s associated, like ‘plantation’, with Mrs Elton (Mr Weston’s attention is ‘chained’ while she talks about his son).
So the title, the literary and historical references, the pointed vocabulary Jane selects – all of them point in one direction, and one direction only. Mansfield Park is about slavery. The subject isn’t just brought up once or twice; it appears over and over again. It’s relentless. The effect, on any reasonably acute reader of 1814, would have been to produce a state of hyper-awareness, to get them anxiously looking for the point that all of this is building towards.
How, though, do we square this with the letter in which Jane seems to say that the novel is about ‘Ordination’?
Jane mentions Mansfield Park in quite a few of her letters. What appears to be the first reference comes in a letter of January 1813, written to Cassandra, one we’ve glanced at already. Jane had just received Pride and Prejudice (‘my own darling child’) from London. She tells Cassandra all about the copies which are to be sent to relations, and how ‘the Advertisement is in our paper to day for the first time’. She gloats that she has read ‘half the 1st vol.’ aloud to an unsuspecting neighbour. The edition itself comes in for some writerly anxiety – there are one or two ‘errors’ in the printing and ‘the 2d vol. is shorter than I could wish’. Having filled a side and a half of paper, Jane announces she ‘will try to write of something else; — it shall be a complete change of subject — Ordination. I am glad to find your enquiries have ended so well. — If you cd discover whether Northamptonshire is a Country of Hedgerows, I shd be glad again.’