Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  At first glance Jane Austen and dinosaurs make for strange bedfellows, rather like the ‘mash-ups’ (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; Mansfield Park and Mummies) which were popular a few years ago.

  But Jane spent at least one long holiday in Lyme, and probably two. It seems that both Jane and Cassandra were somewhere very close by in 1803, since one of Jane’s letters mentions witnessing a serious fire in Lyme and the only one which fits happened in November of that year.1 And we know that in the late summer of 1804 half the Austen family went there, Jane staying on at Lyme with her elderly parents while Cassandra travelled to Weymouth with their brother Henry and his wife, cousin Eliza. A letter from Jane to her sister describes sea-bathing, dancing at the Assembly Rooms, and walking on the harbour wall, the Cobb. She seems cheerful; there’s energy, vibrancy in her writing. Her frustrations are petty ones – a bad cold, a broken piece of furniture which she has to arrange to have fixed.

  Did Jane ever pass Mary Anning, then aged five, in the streets of Lyme? According to the census, the town’s population in 1811 was only around 2,000 people – the size of a largish secondary school perhaps. It would have been even smaller in 1804. Jane mentions ‘Anning’, Mary’s father Richard, by name in her letter to Cassandra – snobbishly, perhaps unconsciously so, she doesn’t do him the compliment of attaching a ‘Mr’ to his surname. In his capacity as a cabinet-maker he ‘valued’ a ‘broken lid’ – some item of the lodging house furniture which had been damaged. Did he come to the rooms the Austens had rented, or did they take the piece to him? It would have depended on what the item was. The price he asked – for repairing it, presumably – was five shillings, which the Austens thought too steep.

  But still, if we imagine Jane in Richard Anning’s workshop, her fingers hovering over the trays of fossils set out for the tourists, we’re no distance at all from the truth. If not in Richard Anning’s shop, then she would have seen fossils in other shops in Lyme, or on the beach. She could hardly have avoided it. The cliffs were no more stable then than they are now. John Feltham’s 1813 A Guide to all the Watering and Sea-Bathing Places, a sort of Regency Lonely Planet, makes a point of mentioning the geological instability of Lyme: ‘the violence of the tide […] has made great encroachments, the cliffs being composed of a kind of marl and blue clay incorporated with lime, that easily give way.’ Landslides, on the Jurassic coast, mean fossils. The town was already famous for them before the ‘crocodile’ was discovered. A History of Lyme-Regis, published in 1823, describes how ‘for many years the first visitors, in their rambles upon the beach, attentively sought after small shells, cornua ammonis [ammonites], &c., which they distinguished by the general term of “curiosities”’.

  Did the ‘curiosities’ of Lyme, the sea-lilies and snakestones, ever set Jane to wondering? She wouldn’t have been alone if they did. The newspaper report of 1812 detailing the discovery of the Lyme ‘crocodile’ ends on an almost audible gulp. The ‘petrifaction’ was dug out ‘at the depth of one hundred feet below the summit of the cliff’. The question, unspoken, but present nevertheless, is – what was it doing there?

  The writer Charlotte Smith composed a poem, Beachy Head – left unfinished on her death but published in 1807 – which asks almost exactly this question:

  Does Nature then

  Mimic, in wanton mood, fantastic shapes

  Of bivalves, and inwreathed volutes, that cling

  To the dark sea-rock of the wat’ry world?

  Or did this range of chalky mountains, once

  Form a vast bason, where the Ocean waves

  Swell’d fathomless?

  As a young woman, Jane had devoured Smith’s novels. Her favourite, as a teenager, was the first, Emmeline or The Orphan of the Castle, published in 1788 – she adored the anti-hero, Delamere.b Set partly in Bath, Emmeline features a much-courted heroine faced with choosing between two men, one almost the first marriageable man she encounters, the other unknown to her until she meets him by chance halfway through the novel; one her cousin, one a naval captain; one named Frederick, one named William. Jane clearly had Smith in mind when writing Persuasion, then.c From Jane Austen to fossils is, really, just a step.

  We tend to think of the war between science and religion as being a mid-Victorian affair, but the battle lines were drawn up earlier. Over the course of the eighteenth century an increasing number of scientists had begun to question whether the biblical creation story could possibly be literal truth. By the time Oxford’s first professor of geology, the Reverend William Buckland, a frequent visitor to Lyme, gave his inaugural lecture in 1819, he had to admit that it was ‘impossible’ to cram geological change into the time-spans given in Genesis. If geology showed that ‘the present system of this planet is built on the wreck and ruins of one more ancient’, that didn’t mean the Bible was wrong, just that it had left that bit out. The Good Book didn’t, after all, ever actually ‘deny the prior existence of another system of things’. Perhaps units of time lasted longer in the beginning; perhaps ‘in the beginning’ was better understood as stretching out to countless aeons.

  The twenty or thirty years before Buckland’s lecture – Jane’s teenage years, her adulthood – were twenty or thirty years of creeping, growing doubt. In the 1780s James Hutton made the first steps towards the theory of plate tectonics. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the more famous Charles, was a doctor and writer who published the first description of evolution in 1794, in his Zoonomia: ‘Would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist … that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great first cause endued with animality?’

  Did Jane read Zoonomia? We don’t know – but it’s probable that she read Erasmus Darwin’s later poem The Temple of Nature. A copy of the book showed up in 2014 in the United States, with what looks to be the Reverend George Austen’s book-plate glued into the front. It’s tempting to think that its purchase may have been inspired by the fossils of Lyme. Certainly, if it did belong to Jane’s father, it must have been bought around the time of the family’s holidays on the south coast; the book (a second edition of the poem) was published in 1803. By the end of January 1805, George Austen was dead.

  Erasmus Darwin had a restless, brilliant mind. The extensive footnotes to The Temple of Nature touch on subjects as diverse as submarine design, language acquisition, classical literature, geology, and evolution. What was a hesitant suggestion in Zoonomia is, by the time of the publication of The Temple of Nature, very much closer to an assertion:

  [N]ew microscopic animalcules would immediately commence wherever there was warmth and moisture, and some organic matter … Those situated on dry land, and immersed in dry air, may gradually acquire new powers to preserve their existence; and by innumerable successive reproductions for some thousands, or perhaps millions of ages, may at length have produced many of the vegetable and animal inhabitants which now people the earth.

  Or, as Darwin puts it in the poem:

  Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves

  Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;

  First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

  Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

  These, as successive generations bloom,

  New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;

  Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,

  And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.

  ‘Thus’, we’re told, ‘the tall Oak, the giant of the wood’; the ‘Whale’; the ‘lordly Lion’; the ‘Eagle’ – and us, ‘Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd, | Of language, reason, and reflection proud’ – all, according to Darwin, ‘arose from rudiments of form and sense’, from an ‘embryon point’, from ‘microscopic’ entities.

  Forget the American, French, agricultural, even industrial revolutions; this was the ultimate one – not just a revolution, but a bulldozing of the most deeply-rooted certainties of Western culture.
The ‘organic remains of a former world’ (to borrow the title of a book published in 1806) made this world foreign, unfamiliar; English rocks disgorging ‘skeletons and bones of various fish unknown … on our shores’, as a correspondent to the Gentleman’s Magazine described them in a letter dated May 1817. What of religion, if what was now England had clearly been underwater for far longer than the handful of months described in the book of Genesis, if the 6,000-odd years of biblical time was beginning to look absurdly, impossibly too short? What else is unreliable or fictionalised? What on earth can you be sure of, when you can’t be sure of the ground beneath your feet?

  Persuasion itself is, in some ways, not unlike a fossil. We have the scaffolding of a story, but not the complete fleshing out. There are roughnesses – detail which is missing, or where the connections aren’t altogether clear. Revelations appear with startling abruptness; characters fall in love, or run off to live together, out of the blue. At times we’re left to guess at motivations, to theorise, to jump gaps. The title may not even be Jane’s own, though the frequency with which the words ‘persuasion’ and ‘persuade’ appear in the text suggest that it must have been meant as a central theme.

  Is it fair to view Persuasion as an unfinished novel? Uniquely among Jane’s adult work, a portion survives in manuscript – the chapter which closes the book, and a variation on the second-to-last chapter. It’s dated July 1816 – a full year before Jane died. The novel didn’t appear, though, until five months after her death, so there seems to have been a delay of some sort. Persuasion probably is the work Jane describes in a letter which appears to belong to early 1817 as ‘a something ready for Publication, which may perhaps appear about a twelvemonth hence’, ‘short, about the length of Catherine [Northanger Abbey]’. She warns her correspondent – her niece Fanny – that the information ‘is for yourself alone’.2 We can do no more than speculate on whether there were second, or third thoughts; on whether Jane hesitated, or was too ill, or not quite convinced, on whether she intended to publish the book exactly as it stands.

  Perhaps we’d do better to view the abrupt shifts, the gaps which open up in the text, as thematic. Persuasion features a lot of sudden drops and breaks. The words ‘fall’ and ‘fell’ appear more often in this short book than they do in Jane’s longer novels. The heroine Anne’s nephew falls from a tree and breaks his collarbone. Her headstrong rival in love, Louisa Musgrove, falls and cracks her skull on the Cobb at Lyme. Sir Walter and his eldest daughter Elizabeth, scrambling to maintain their social position, take a house on a street in Bath where planned building work had been halted because of landslides.

  For half a century or more after Jane’s death, critics agreed (broadly) on what her best novels were. Pride and Prejudice was ranked first, then Emma and Mansfield Park more or less together. Those who strongly preferred one tended to think less of the other; as time went on, Emma gradually edged ahead and Mansfield Park fell behind. The other three novels, among them Persuasion, were also-rans – with Persuasion, for some, hardly making it out of the starting gates. The British Critic pronounced that Persuasion was ‘in every respect a much less fortunate performance’ than Northanger Abbey, which was published alongside it. Under the ownership of the Reverend Norris, self-appointed guardian of the Anglican Church, editorial policy would naturally have disapproved of the obviously evangelical Anne, who is ‘no card player’ and strongly disapproves of ‘Sunday travelling’. A critic of 1859 judged the novel to be the ‘weakest’ of the six – not a view which many modern readers share.3

  Rather than find artistic merit in the novel, critics were keener to view it as an autobiographical work, and to see in Anne Elliot a self-portrait – Jane herself. Anne is a far more desirable portrait of the authoress than poor, snubbed, middle-aged Miss Bates the vicar’s daughter, particularly for male critics.

  ‘Into one particular character, indeed’, claims an alarmingly enthusiastic reviewer of 1823, ‘she has breathed her whole soul and being; and in this we please ourselves with thinking, we see and know herself. And what is this character? – A mind beautifully framed, graceful, imaginative and feminine, but penetrating, sagacious, profound.’ Anne/Jane is ‘pure in morals, sublime in religion’, ‘sweet soother of others’ affliction, – most resigned and patient bearer of her own’, with ‘smiles, that would arrest an angel on his winged way’. The review goes on and on in the same vein.4

  A century later, the writer Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book, of muscular, imperialist tales of India, and of the short story called The Janeites, wrote a poem about Jane – and Persuasion.d It’s called Jane’s Marriage. In it Kipling sends Jane ‘to Paradise’, as is ‘only fair’. The paradise is, naturally, marriage. He insists that there must have been a real ‘Captain Wentworth | The man Jane loved!’ and that Persuasion tells ‘the plain | Story of the love between | Him and Jane’.

  Now, I’ve been working quite hard in this book to convince you that Jane is an artist, that her work is carefully considered, structured, themed, that she uses her writing to examine the great issues of her day. But there’s a grain of truth in Kipling’s poem, and even in the 1823 review.

  It isn’t often that we can put Jane in precisely the same place as her heroines; in Persuasion, which uses largely real-life locations, we can. We know that Jane walked on the Cobb at Lyme in 1804 when she was 28 years old – almost exactly the age Anne Elliot is, when she retraces her creator’s footsteps. Anne, like Jane, visits Lyme in the autumn; like Jane, she goes on to spend the winter in Bath. Anne’s visit to Lyme ends abruptly with Louisa’s fall; not long after Jane left Lyme, in December 1804, her close friend (and distant cousin) Anne Lefroy fell when her horse bolted with her, sustaining fatal injuries. It was the second time Jane had lost someone she’d been close to in a violent accident. In 1798 her cousin and namesake Jane Cooper, who’d been at school with her and Cassandra, was killed when her carriage overturned. Only one of Jane’s heroines, it’s worth noting, is ever actually shown venturing out on horseback. Oddly, this one is timid Fanny Price – whether we can draw any conclusions about her creator’s attitude to her from this is another question.e

  Anne Elliot, we’re told, associates Bath with the loss of her mother; Jane, too, associated the city with the loss of a parent. It was in Bath, in January 1805, only a few weeks after Anne Lefroy’s violent death, that Jane’s father died. He was well into his seventies, but, apart from occasional bouts of fever, enjoyed good health. His death was a shock. ‘It has been very sudden!’ lamented Jane, in a letter breaking the sad news to her brother Frank, ‘— within twenty four hours of his death he was walking with only the help of a stick, was even reading!’5

  Persuasion, for Jane, exposed the kind of feelings which never really stop being raw. Might she, nevertheless, have been tempted to put her name to it, if she’d lived? She’d published four novels already, she’d received favourable reviews for Emma; the dedication to the Prince Regent was a compliment, even an endorsement. As early as 1813 she’d acknowledged that her anonymity was unlikely to last for ever, especially since Henry, ‘in the warmth of his Brotherly vanity & Love’, was fond of informing total strangers that his little sister had written Pride and Prejudice. ‘He, dear creature, has set it going so much more than once’, sighs Jane. ‘The Secret has spread so far as to be scarcely the Shadow of a secret now’; she must try ‘to harden myself’.6

  And by 1816, when she was writing Persuasion, she must have begun to harden. She puts her own birthday in it. It’s right there, in the third paragraph of the novel – ‘December 16th’.

  We find hardly any dates in Jane’s other novels. Very little is fixed, as to time. The weeks and months slip by, Christmas comes, Easter goes, the workings of the plot dovetail smoothly together, but references to a particular day in a particular month are vanishingly rare, and there’s no very obvious relevance attached to them when they do appear. We’re informed that Mr Collins arrives at Longbourn on Monday 18th November, which tel
ls us nothing we couldn’t work out from elsewhere. The fact that Harriet Smith’s birthday is 24th June ought to be important given the mystery which surrounds her birth, but having brought it up Jane never mentions it again. Letters are seldom dated with anything other than the month.f Nor is it possible, despite the best efforts of quite a number of eminent critics, including Chapman, Jane’s early-twentieth-century editor, to determine a timeframe with the assistance of almanacs and perpetual calendars; the dates mentioned simply aren’t sufficiently consistent.

  Some of this may be deliberate. In her teenage History of England, Jane announces that she has included the dates ‘which it is most necessary for the Reader to know’; there are only four, one of which is teasingly vague, one wrong, and another the date she finished writing it. Dates aren’t actually necessary to understanding or enjoying the early novels. They may not have been there; if they were, publishers may have suggested they be removed. Jane, remember, refers to having ‘lop’t and crop’t’ Pride and Prejudice, a process which might easily have included erasing date markers from the text in an attempt to make the novel feel fresher. Mansfield Park must be set around the time of the abolition of the slave trade, but, as we saw in Chapter 5, Jane goes to quite a lot of trouble to direct the attention of readers to that period without making the temporal references any more precise. To be honest, the novel courted quite enough trouble without opening itself up to claims that the Bertrams, with their gambling son and adulterous daughter, were based on a real slave-owning family.

  And the timeframe for Emma, published in 1815, actually makes no sense at all. There’s one scene indicating that travel to Europe is possible for the characters – Frank Churchill expresses a desire to ‘go abroad’ and to see some of the places in ‘Swisserland’. These, for almost a whole generation, were accessible only through books. With the exception of the short period of armistice in 1802–3, travel in Europe was out of the question for two decades. And since European tourism seems to be a possibility for Frank, there are three options. One option is that the novel is set in what was, for Jane, the near future. Another is that the novel is set during the 1802–3 armistice. This would make sense of Miss Bates’ possible reference to the 1801 union between Britain and Ireland (‘different kingdoms, I was going to say, but however different countries’), but complete nonsense of Mrs Elton’s defensiveness about an ‘abolition’ which wouldn’t yet have happened. A third possibility is that Emma may be set contemporaneously with its composition – 1814 into 1815. But there were some earth-shattering historical events in 1814 and 1815 – the restoration of the French monarchy, Napoleon’s confinement to the island of Elba in summer 1814, his escape in February 1815, his final defeat at Waterloo – and not one is referred to by any of the characters. The effect is oddly disturbing; despite its painstakingly realistic world-drawing, the novel as it stands is impossible, uncoupled from history. It can’t have happened like that.