What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (12 page)

It is hard to know what to make of a certain casualness in Austen’s own treatment of deaths in her letters. ‘Mr Waller is dead, I see;—I cannot greive [
sic
] about it, nor perhaps can his Widow very much’ (
Letters
53). She says this to Cassandra in passing, in between a list of family engagements and news of harvesting on her brother Edward’s estate. Cassandra must have known just the reasons for the widow’s possible lack of grief, but we never will. Had Mr Waller, whom they knew in Southampton, been a wife-beater? Or just a dull dinner companion? On the death of Mrs Wyndham Knatchbull in 1807 she wrote, ‘I had no idea that anybody liked her, & therefore felt nothing for any Survivor, but I am now feeling away on her Husband’s account, and think he had better marry Miss Sharpe’ (
Letters
, 50). Not taking deaths very seriously was part of life. Thus the force of her comment on news of the Battle of Albuera in 1811. ‘How horrible it is to have so many people killed!—And what a blessing that one cares for none of them’ (
Letters
, 74). There is a grimly comic honesty in such remarks that should sensitise us to some of her characters’ casualness about the deaths of those about whom they do not care. In
Mansfield Park
, the Honourable John Yates complains that his theatrical pleasures were interrupted by the sudden death of Lord Ravenshaw’s grandmother (I. xiii). ‘It is impossible to help wishing, that the news could have been suppressed for just the three days we wanted.’ It ‘was suggested’ – after all, she was ‘only a grand-mother’ and did live ‘two hundred miles off’.

Mary Crawford exhibits her deep, cold carelessness when, misjudging Fanny as ever she does, she jokes in a letter about the possibility of Tom Bertram’s death – an eventuality that would leave Edmund as the heir to the title and the estate. ‘To have such a fine young man cut off in the flower of his days is most melancholy. Poor Sir Thomas will feel it dreadfully. I really am quite agitated on the subject. Fanny, Fanny, I see you smile, and look cunning, but upon my honour, I never bribed a physician in my life’ (III. xiv). She writes this when she believes Tom’s death likely and is acknowledging, in some sophisticated way, the benefit that might come to her from it. By a flourish of irony, she tries to recruit Fanny to her own sense of the desirability of Tom’s death. Soon she is speculating about the consequences for Edmund, who would be suddenly and desirably presented with ‘wealth and consequence’. Mary Crawford treats cynically the precariousness of life, a fact that presses on all Austen’s characters. Her first readers were aware of this precariousness in a way that we must rediscover as we read. Very few people die in her stories, but all her novels are shadowed by death.

SIX

Why Is It Risky to Go to the Seaside?

‘I have been long perfectly convinced, though perhaps I never told you so before, that the sea is very rarely of use to any body. I am sure it almost killed me once.’

Emma
, I. xii

If bad things do happen at the seaside, one of Austen’s heroines is safe. Emma Woodhouse (unlike her father, quoted above) has never seen the sea. We find this out when she intervenes to halt a dangerous-tending disagreement between her father and her sister about the merits of sea bathing. ‘I must beg you not to talk of the sea. It makes me envious and miserable;—I who have never seen it!’ (I. xii) She is being tactful, but she is also being truthful. It is a satisfying touch, telling us something essential about Emma: all-powerful in Highbury, but incapable of reaching out beyond it; fearless in her little world, but timid about what might lie outside its closely hemmed borders. By a carefully managed irony, however, she cannot escape the seaside. She is the unknowing witness, even the abettor, of an amorous relationship that was born at the seaside. Early in the novel we hear, from Mr Woodhouse, that Frank Churchill’s much-vaunted letter to Mrs Weston congratulating her on her marriage to his father is written from Weymouth (I. ii). Much later, we hear from Miss Bates that Jane Fairfax has been in Weymouth (II. i). When Jane Fairfax arrives in Highbury and meets Emma, we are told that ‘She and Mr. Frank Churchill had been at Weymouth at the same time. It was known that they were a little acquainted’ (II. ii). During his first visit to Hartfield after his arrival, Frank Churchill says that he is obliged to pay a visit to the Bates household (he pretends to have trouble remembering the name) because of his acquaintance with ‘a lady’. Mr Weston guilelessly seconds his purpose. ‘True, true, you are acquainted with Miss Fairfax; I remember you knew her at Weymouth, and a fine girl she is. Call upon her, by all means’ (II. v). His son seems to hesitate – ‘another day would do as well; but there was that degree of acquaintance at Weymouth which—’ – before his father eggs him on.

If you search an e-text of
Emma
, it is possible to follow the seventeen mentions of Weymouth scattered through the novel and find a sure trail. Reconstructing events, you can see that even while Emma was contriving her fantasy courtship of Harriet Smith by Mr Elton, a true
amour
was being pursued on the Dorset coast. Emma’s ignorance of what it might be like by the sea takes on an added significance. She does indeed know nothing of this zone of love. Every mention of the place name should be, to the Regency reader, a clue to a likely romance. For is love not more likely by the sea? In Austen’s novels, seaside resorts are places for flirtations and engagements, attachments and elopements, love and sex. The seaside is naturally the place for honeymoons. In
Sense and Sensibility
Lucy Steele marries Robert Ferrars and they go on honeymoon to Dawlish in Devon. In
Mansfield Park
Mr Rushworth and Maria go on their honeymoon to Brighton – ‘almost as gay in winter as in summer’ (II. iii). And to cap it all, Emma and Mr Knightley, once engaged, plan a ‘fortnight’s absence in a tour to the sea-side’ following their marriage (III. xix). The resort is unspecified, suggesting that they have only got as far as agreeing that the seaside must be the thing. You might say that once Emma has really discovered love she is bound, at last, for the seaside. It will be by the sea that she and Mr Knightley begin a sexual relationship.

This last, projected trip to the sea should be enough to suggest that seaside resorts were not inherently disreputable destinations in Austen’s fiction. It would be wrong to think that these towns, increasingly dedicated to the leisure of their genteel and affluent visitors, were necessarily suspect places in the early nineteenth century. Thanks to the patronage of the Prince Regent, Brighton, it is true, acquired a certain louche reputation that it has never quite lost. Other resorts, however, were highly respectable. Many readers would have known that Weymouth was the favourite resort of George III and his family. They visited for the first time in 1789, stayed more than two months, and came regularly until 1805.
¹
The King’s presence in the town was a major feature of its public life: he ceremonially bathed, promenaded on the seafront, and attended events at the assembly rooms. The King’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester, first came to Weymouth in 1765 and by the 1780s had built a grand house on the front; it was eventually purchased by the King.
²
It is important that Jane Fairfax has contracted her secret engagement at a respectable resort (if she and Frank Churchill had become attached at Brighton the implications would have been more worrying). Charlotte Palmer in
Sense and Sensibility
has, before her marriage, been husband-hunting in Weymouth: she is empty-headed, but Austen would not have let her go where her morals were in danger.

‘Weymouth is altogether a shocking place I perceive, without recommendation of any kind,’ Jane Austen wrote to Cassandra in September 1804 (
Letters
, 39). But this was a joke in reply to her sister’s report that ice was unobtainable in the town – a lament later put into the mouth of Mrs Elton in
Emma
(II. xvi). Jane was in Lyme Regis with her parents while Cassandra had travelled down the coast to Weymouth with their brother Henry. There she had evidently hoped to see the royal family board their yacht, the
Royal Sovereign
, a little spectacle for the patriotic tourist. Mr Knightley does number Weymouth among ‘the idlest haunts in the kingdom’, but his disapproval is unreliable: the canny reader will see that it is one of those glimpses of his jealousy that we are allowed in the first volume of
Emma
.
³
‘We hear of him for ever at some watering-place or other. A little while ago, he was at Weymouth’ (I. xviii). So it must be a dubious place. Mr Knightley’s moral judgement comes when Emma is teasing him about his disapproval of Frank Churchill’s conduct, ‘taking the other side of the question from her real opinion’. Mr Knightley is riled, in advance of his competitor actually appearing. In this brilliant, redundant dialogue Emma is unconsciously exciting Mr Knightley to more and more eloquent denunciations of Frank Churchill’s conduct. ‘You seem determined to think ill of him,’ she accurately observes. ‘Me!—not at all,’ he replies, ‘rather displeased.’ He is determined to think ill of Weymouth too.

Jealous Mr Knightley is not the only Austen character to voice disapproval of seaside resorts. Shortly before she died, Austen had begun work on a novel named after such a place.
Sanditon
opens with the blameless Heywood family encountering a man who calls himself ‘Mr. Parker of Sanditon’ and waxes enthusiastic about this ‘young and rising Bathing-place, certainly the favourite spot of all that are to be found along the coast of Sussex’ (Ch. 1). The ‘well-looking Hale, Gentlemanlike’ Mr Heywood observes that ‘Every five years, one hears of some new place or other starting up by the Sea, and growing the fashion’. He is convinced that they are ‘Bad things for the country’. His declaration discourages Mr Parker not a jot. Sanditon has none of the drawbacks, he assures his new acquaintance, of ‘your large, overgrown Places like Brighton, or Worthing, or East Bourne’. Sanditon is the exception to his antipathy. And perhaps Mr Heywood’s jaundiced views are not so very strong, for they do not stop him allowing his daughter to go on a trip to Sanditon with the proud Mr Parker. By the late eighteenth century, the annual seaside holiday had become a badge of genteel status.
⁴
Austen herself had often holidayed by the sea and had stayed in several of the resorts visited by her characters. She spent the summer of 1801 in Sidmouth, with her parents and sister. (It was in Sidmouth, according to Cassandra Austen, that her sister met an alluring gentleman who died before he could seek her out again).
⁵
In 1802 they took their holiday in Dawlish, while in both 1803 and 1804 they stayed in Lyme Regis. In 1805 she went to Folkestone and to Worthing.
⁶
There were no further seaside jaunts, it is true, but she hardly had personal reasons for thinking maritime sinful.

The sense of the seaside town as a dangerous place is, however, insistent in her fiction. If you were to gather the examples of risky behaviour by the sea, you might suppose that the author did have a poor view of the seaside. Louisa Musgrove’s self-precipitation from the Cobb in Lyme Regis is but the last of a series of foolish or bad actions. Lydia Bennet elopes with Wickham when the two of them encounter each other in Brighton. The near-seduction of Mr Darcy’s sister Georgiana is staged in a seaside resort: with the help of the perfidious ex-governess Mrs Younge, Wickham has lured her to Ramsgate, where, we infer, she is at his mercy. Only her brother’s last-minute arrival thwarts him. In
Mansfield Park
, feckless Tom Bertram is a haunter of seaside resorts. On his return from Antigua, he does not come straight home to his mother and siblings (as he dutifully should), but goes to Weymouth (I. xii). With his father still in the West Indies, he should, as the eldest son, be returning to oversee the estate, but the lure of the shore is too strong. In Weymouth he meets the foolish, expensive Hon. John Yates (I. xiii). Yates leaves Weymouth only for ‘a large party assembled for gaiety’, and comes away from this to Mansfield with his dangerous scheme for amateur theatricals. Later in the novel Julia Bertram accompanies Mr and Mrs Rushworth to Brighton where she meets up with Mr Yates. In easy but devilish chat in front of Fanny, the Crawfords muse on Mr Yates’s presence in the resort. ‘Mr. Yates, I presume, is not far off,’ says Henry (II. v). His sister brushes him off with ‘I do not imagine he figures much in the letters to Mansfield Park; do you, Miss Price?’ – which makes her brother’s guess sound worse: Julia must be consorting with her admirer secretly. Julia’s eventual elopement with Mr Yates proves their hints well founded.