Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  All three of the Austen women, ‘Mrs Austen’, ‘Miss Austen’ and ‘Miss Jane Austen’, are included in the list of subscribers drawn up at the first meeting of the Basingstoke chapter of the SPCK. So far as we’re aware, it’s one of only three occasions that Jane’s name appeared in print during her lifetime. Edward, we know, attended the meeting, together with the local priest, Mr Papillon.r Did he subscribe on behalf of his mother and sisters? He may well have done so; he might not even have asked. And even if he did ask, even if he was acting with Jane’s full approbation, this could easily be one of her outbreaks of queer humour – like signing her letter to the publisher Crosby with the initials ‘M.A.D.’, or (as we’ll see in the next chapter) sneaking some less than complimentary references to the Prince Regent into Emma, a novel which she had been invited to dedicate to him.

  Whatever the truth behind Jane’s subscription to the SPCK, whatever her real ideas about evangelicals, these were not matters she was ignorant of. Her two favourite nieces, Fanny and Anna, were both romantically involved with men who were keen members of the Bible Society; if the subject wasn’t openly debated within the family then it must have been rather a large elephant in the room.s Just as with her choice of the name Mansfield for her title, and her selection of loaded vocabulary, just as with her decision to use literary references which bring up slavery and race, we have to assume that Jane is alluding to Norris and his societies on purpose. Otherwise we’re dealing with a truly impossible number of coincidences.

  Readers in 1814 would, I think, have registered Norris as a name from Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, but it would have been more immediately familiar to them as a name they frequently saw in their newspapers – the subscriber to and organiser of charity, the opponent of the Bible Society, the defender of the Church. Jane chooses the name Norris as a way of reinforcing her central symbol, her central point – the chain and the cross, the Church and slavery. Norris, for Jane and her readers, means both a man who claimed to be an abolitionist but in fact lied to support the slave-trade, and a churchman who was, in his role as a leading light of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, a slave-owner.

  Christianity itself is not to blame – Fanny’s ‘amber cross’, a gift her brother William has brought back for her from Sicily, is, in itself, guiltless; it remains guiltless on the occasion when, we’re told, Fanny ties it round her neck with ‘a bit of ribbon’. It would remain guiltless still even if she wore it with the necklace which Mary Crawford slyly offers her as a way of facilitating Henry Crawford’s courtship. That necklace may in fact be a chain but Jane is careful always to call it a ‘necklace’. The morality of the Crawfords is suspect, it’s damaging, but it isn’t the only – or the most – damaging morality in this novel.

  It’s the Church of England which is tainted; the Church which taints. Edmund is only days away from his ordination as a clergyman when he buys ‘a chain for Fanny’s cross’; the item is never particularised in any other way – at one point Jane even calls it ‘the real chain’. From the moment Edmund makes the decision to embark on his career in the Church, he is guilty by association.

  But Edmund – Edmund is surely the hero of Mansfield Park, isn’t he?

  Well yes, but only really in the sense that he marries the heroine. Like his near-namesake Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, Edmund is, frankly, not much cop. He is – supposedly – ‘uniformly kind’ to Fanny, ‘true to her interests, and considerate of her feelings’. He makes sure there is a horse in the stables which she can ride – so necessary for her health – and he recommends books to her, and talks to her about them. But his kindness for Fanny doesn’t go so very deep. Nor does his consideration. Almost as soon as Mary Crawford appears on the scene, Edmund ceases to think much about Fanny at all. Mary expresses a desire to learn to ride, and straightaway Edmund co-opts the horse which was originally meant for Fanny. Fanny wants to go stargazing, but Edmund would rather listen to Mary singing with his sisters. At Sotherton, Fanny wants to see the avenue of trees which is to be cut down in the planned landscape improvements, but Edmund abandons her to sit entirely on her own while he goes walking with Mary. He knows that he’s the only friend Fanny has at Mansfield, the only person she can confide in – but Fanny, like Anne Elliot in Persuasion, is one of those people whose ‘convenience was always to give way’.

  Edmund is a truly terrible judge of character, just like his father, and like his father he tries to browbeat Fanny into marrying Henry Crawford. But Edmund – who, remember, admits to having had doubts about Henry’s behaviour, and who’s had the opportunity to watch Henry playing the Bertram girls off against each other – goes on at Fanny for pages, longer than Sir Thomas does, longer even than Henry does himself.

  Edmund is easily persuaded to act in a way contrary to his beliefs and morals – though at the same time clinging to the belief that his morals put him in a position to judge others. He allows Mary Crawford to influence him – he is powerfully attracted to her – he intends to marry her – but all the while he continues to dissect her faults of character with Fanny. ‘How many a time have we talked over her little errors!’ he says. Having protested vehemently against the acting plan, he changes his mind. He does not ‘like being driven into the appearance of such inconsistency’, but his motivation is (of course) purer, different. He is not like other people.

  He’s a towering hypocrite, perfectly suited to a career in the Church of England. He admits that he chose the Church not out of any deep sense of vocation, but because he knew he would be well provided for:

  [T]he knowing that there was such a provision for me probably did bias me. Nor can I think it wrong that it should. There was no natural disinclination to be overcome, and I see no reason why a man should make a worse clergyman for knowing that he will have a competence early in life […] I have no doubt that I was biased, but I think it was blamelessly.

  Fanny protests that it is ‘the same sort of thing … as for the son of an admiral to go into the navy, or the son of a general to be in the army’, but in a novel which includes detailed discussions about the problems that patronage and nepotism create within the navy, Jane doesn’t mean us to read this as an excuse.

  She doesn’t give Edmund an easy ride. She doesn’t make him likeable or heroic. Rather, she deliberately associates him with the sins of the Church – with slavery, and also with lesser errors.

  Before Edmund is ordained, both he and his father take it for granted that he will live in the parsonage house at Thornton Lacey. Jane has Sir Thomas expound on the advantages – even the necessity – of a clergyman being ‘constantly resident’, on the idea that ‘human nature needs more lessons than a weekly sermon can convey’ and that if Edmund ‘does not live among his parishioners, and prove himself, by constant attention, their well-wisher and friend, he does very little either for their good or his own’. This necessity, though, appears to vanish at the end of the novel. When Edmund reacquires the Mansfield living, nothing is said of giving up Thornton Lacey, or of exchanging from one living to the other. The parishioners in Thornton Lacey do not, after all, seem to need Edmund’s constant attention and example.

  Jane’s first readers couldn’t have missed this – just as they couldn’t miss the fact that the Thornton Lacey parish has recently been subjected to enclosure: the removal of access to common land, constraining and impoverishing Edmund’s parishioners. When we go on to look at Emma in the next chapter we’ll see what a destructive effect enclosure had on the rural economy, and on living standards.

  In Mansfield Park, enclosure and pluralism are there as additional pointers, if any are needed; they’re Jane’s reassurance to her readers that they really haven’t misunderstood, that she really is criticising the Church directly – for many things, but more than anything for the unforgivable sin, for throwing a veneer of Christian respectability over slavery, for making it acceptable to own slaves, provided those slaves are kept out of sight.

&n
bsp; Jane grew up in a Church of England vicarage. Her father was a Church of England clergyman, as were two of her brothers, her godfather, cousins, the man her sister would have married, had he lived. But, still, she could see the Church for what it was. Only one out of all the clergymen in Jane’s novels is presented as an actively good man – Captain Wentworth’s brother in Persuasion, who, we’re told, refused to prosecute a local man who broke into his orchard. Most readers will barely recall him.

  Jane – perhaps frustrated by the apparent critical indifference to Mansfield Park – collected the opinions of her acquaintance on it, and on Emma. This is how we know that some of Jane’s readers thought that her portraits of clergymen were deliberately incendiary. Mr Sherer, vicar of Godmersham, was ‘displeased with my pictures of Clergymen’. A Mrs Wroughton ‘thought the Authoress wrong, in such times as these, to draw such Clergymen as Mr Collins and Mr Elton’. And this is also how we know some, at least, of Jane’s readers recognised that Mansfield Park was about the hypocrisy of the Church of England, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Readers mention the ‘moral Tendency’ and ‘higher Morality’ of the novel, talk of its ‘pure morality’, and how it is preferred by ‘all who think deeply & feel much’. ‘Pure morality’ is a phrase with a distinctly evangelical flavour – one seldom found outside evangelical writing. Evidently the references to Henry Norris, and to the hypocrisy of the Church, hadn’t passed these readers by.

  It’s possible that it was Jane’s references to Norris in Mansfield Park which drew the attention of the Prince Regent. The ‘Regent’ had, according to his personal librarian, ‘read & admired all’ of Jane’s publications, but it was only at the end of 1815 that she was invited to dedicate her next novel to him.16 The Prince Regent was frequently at odds with his prime minister, Lord Liverpool, and might perhaps have enjoyed taking the opportunity to publicly show his approval of the authoress who had made such uncomplimentary allusions to Liverpool’s protégé Henry Handley Norris.

  And what of Norris – philanthropist, apologist for slavery, magazine-owner and editor? The British Critic reviewed five of Jane’s six novels when they were first published. It’s the only literary journal that did so, making its omission of Mansfield Park all the more pointed. The owners, editors, and printers of the British Critic were all heavily invested in the Church of England – none of them, Norris least of all, had a reason to promote a novel which exposed the Church.

  That they were aware of the fact isn’t, I think, in doubt. The British Critic review of Emma is short, faintly praising the novel as ‘inoffensive’; a ‘pleasing tale’ constructed from ‘slender materials’. The final paragraph of the review, though, changes tack, announcing abruptly: ‘We are not the less inclined to speak well of this tale, because it does not dabble in religion; of fanatical novels and fanatical authoresses we are already sick.’

  ‘Fanatical’ usually at this point implied non-conformist, critical of the Church of England. Leafing back through the pages of the British Critic for 1814 and 1815 we find an occasional reference to novels by women which deal with religion. Discipline has ‘some slight tinge of fanaticism’ while Display by Jane Taylor reveals the workings of religious conversion and ‘accomplished fanaticism’. But the British Critic is much taken by Rosanne, A Father’s Labour Lost, which details the awakening to Christianity of a girl who has been raised as an atheist, finding in it ‘no fanaticism’ but only ‘pure, affectionate, and genuine Christianity’.

  So far as the British Critic is concerned, then, women can write novels which ‘dabble in religion’, provided the religion is entirely in line with Church of England thinking. But there hadn’t been some great rush of women writing religiously-themed novels. There’s no reason at all for the reviewer of Emma to start writing about ‘fanaticism’ or religion. The final paragraph of the review has nothing to do with Emma; but the talk of ‘fanatical novels’ and ‘fanatical authoresses’ applies very much better to Jane’s previous book. The reviewer seems to want Jane to know that he has understood – and heartily disapproved of – what she was doing in Mansfield Park.

  It’s fitting, perhaps, that the reviewers refused to discuss a novel which points out the ‘dead silence’ that opens up around slavery in polite drawing rooms, which aims to show that however much Britain might plume itself on abolishing the slave trade, slavery is still wound tightly about the whole structure of society. Jane’s intention, in Mansfield Park, is to force her readers to face what they already know, to see what’s been hiding in plain sight.

  Fanny Price never manages to do this. It’s part of what makes Mansfield Park such a deeply troubling novel.

  The heroine is happy – ‘very happy’ – at the end only because she refuses to acknowledge the truth of what has happened, and is still happening, around her. She insists on seeing her uncle, Sir Thomas, as a benevolent patriarch, rather than a cold, distant man who looked on while she was bullied, who admired her body, and attempted to force her into a marriage against her will. She doesn’t ask about slavery any more. She forgets that she’s her husband’s second choice, and that the house in which she ends the novel, Mansfield Parsonage, had previously been home to two women – her aunt and her love rival – who disliked her and tried to do her harm.

  Earlier in the novel, moved to vexation against Edmund, Fanny exclaims that: ‘He is blinded, and nothing will open his eyes; nothing can, after having had truths before him so long in vain.’

  The tragedy of Mansfield Park is that Fanny wilfully – willingly – blinds herself. The parsonage house at Mansfield, always a source of ‘some painful sensation of restraint or alarm’, soon becomes ‘thoroughly perfect in her eyes’.

  Thoroughly perfect, though two of her cousins have been driven out, though she has married a man who doesn’t love her, who is a fool and a hypocrite.

  Thoroughly perfect, though the Moor Park apricot tree is still in the vicarage garden, a reminder of the evil that everyone knows about and no one is willing to discuss, a tree not of knowledge, but of forgetfulness. With every spoonful of apricot jam, every apricot tart that’s served up on the parsonage table, Fanny will eat the fruits of slavery.

  And the tree will keep on growing.

  Footnotes

  a Based on Jane Austen’s letter to Cassandra Austen (16th September 1813).

  b Kathryn Sutherland, in her article ‘Jane Austen’s Dealings with John Murray and his Firm’, Review of English Studies (2012), points to references in letters in the Murray archive which indicate a tentative approach quite soon after the publication of Mansfield Park.

  c 750 copies of the second edition of Mansfield Park appeared in February 1816. Five years later more than 400 still hadn’t been sold.

  d The intensity of William’s reaction suggests that we are dealing here with cropped hair and not just short front ringlets. In a letter of 1808 which has since disappeared, Jane seems to refer to a niece – Anna – having cut off her hair, a decision ‘much regretted’ by some of the family, though Jane herself took the philosophical view that hair grows and that ‘two or three years will restore it again’ (Wednesday 15th–Friday 17th June 1808).

  e Apparently no relation to the publisher John Murray.

  f Dido married a man called John Davinier, a ‘steward’, and gave birth to three sons. For more information see Paula Byrne’s Belle. The 2013 film Belle, directed by Amma Asante, compresses events together and takes considerable liberties with the few facts we have.

  g Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings gives a comprehensive overview; so does Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains.

  h One biographer, Claire Tomalin, includes this information in an appendix about attitudes to slavery, almost as if she thinks the issue doesn’t really have anything to do with Jane or her writing.

  i Frances Palmer died in 1814; Charles later married her sister Harriet. This was not illegal at the time in England (though it became so in 1835, and continued to be illegal until 1905), but it was
frowned upon. Mr and Mrs Palmer attested to Jane’s will, which had been unwitnessed, meaning that her signature had to be sworn to. As a former Attorney-General of Bermuda, Mr Palmer presumably enjoyed high standing.

  j Simon Schama’s book relates what happened to them afterwards.

  k Adam Hochschild has a detailed discussion of the boycott – so early an example of organised consumer pressure that it predates the coining of the word.

  l The one which begins, ‘Now we are passed into a cooler clime …’

  m In Emma, Harriet Smith’s suitor, the largely self-taught Robert Martin, often reads aloud from the Elegant Extracts of an evening.

  n See the entry for Septimius Severus in A biographical history of the Roman Empire; from its foundation to the final overthrow of that once great and memorable commonwealth (Bath, 1790). The fact is also remarked on in Edward Gibbon’s vast Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776 onwards).

  o The kinder among Beckford’s biographers make much of the fact that no prosecution for sodomy was ever brought against him, but the relationship between him and the sixteen-year-old William Courtenay was, by any standards, wildly inappropriate.