What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (13 page)

Austen lets us imagine the seaside town as a place of licence. We wonder why Mr Elliot, who should be mourning his wife, has been at Sidmouth (I. xii). Rum people gravitate to the seafront. There is a wonderful cameo of the bad behaviour that becomes possible in such a place in an incidental piece of dialogue in
Mansfield Park
. Thomas Bertram is boastfully describing his evidently flirtatious behaviour with the younger Miss Sneyd, whoever she be. ‘I went down to Ramsgate for a week with a friend last September—just after my return from the West Indies—my friend Sneyd . . . his father and mother and sisters were there, all new to me’ (I. v). On arrival in Ramsgate, he and Sneyd find ‘Mrs. and the two Miss Sneyds . . . out on the pier . . . with others of their acquaintance’. ‘Mrs. Sneyd was surrounded by men,’ he recalls. ‘Surrounded by men’ is an extraordinary phrase, expressing Tom Bertram’s indiscretion even as it implies Mrs Sneyd’s welcoming enjoyment of male attentions. Her preoccupation allows Tom to ‘attach’ himself to one of her daughters, and to walk ‘by her side all the way home’. The young lady is apparently ‘perfectly easy in her manners, and as ready to talk as to listen’. The point of the story for the teller is that he addressed himself to the younger daughter and thus offended the elder daughter. Inadvertently he provides a little picture of unsettling seaside gaiety, where promenading allows for all sorts of freedom.

Thoughts of the untoward things that might have happened to characters by the sea are in the heads of some of Austen’s characters. It is a choice irony that Emma cannot see the relationship between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill because she has already started building on her fantasy of a relationship between Jane and her friend’s new husband, Mr Dixon. Two young people of the opposite sex meeting at the seaside are liable to temptation, she seems to feel. What is there to do but take pleasure together? On a stroll into Highbury to survey the Crown Inn as a possible venue for a ball, Emma asks Frank Churchill whether he saw Jane Fairfax often in Weymouth. ‘Were you often in the same society?’ (II. vi). ‘At this moment they were approaching Ford’s, and he hastily exclaimed, “Ha! this must be the very shop that every body attends every day of their lives, as my father informs me.”’ He needs some blather about shopping to cover his discomposure, before he eventually returns to Emma’s questions and is able to say calmly, ‘I met her frequently at Weymouth’ (II. vi). He knew the Campbells ‘a little in town’, and once at the resort ‘we were very much in the same set’. Here is an epitome of what going to the seaside involves: visitors from London drawn together – for what? Emma, thinking of what Jane Fairfax might have been up to, supposes some very bad behaviour beside the sea. She hatches ‘an ingenious and animating suspicion’: an
amour
between Jane and the husband of the young woman, once Miss Campbell, with whom she has been brought up (II. i). There must be an ‘attachment’ between Jane Fairfax and Mr Dixon (II. ii). Perhaps it is ‘simple, single, successless love on her side alone’. Or perhaps ‘Mr. Dixon . . . had been very near changing one friend for the other’. What could be more likely, given the location? Miss Bates fuels the fantasy by telling Emma of the ‘service’ Mr Dixon ‘rendered Jane at Weymouth, when they were out in that party on the water, and she, by the sudden whirling round of something or other among the sails, would have been dashed into the sea at once, and actually was all but gone’ (II. i). The alert Mr Dixon, we hear, ‘caught hold of her habit’ and saved her from falling overboard. We presume that she cannot swim, and that, in all her clothing, she would soon disappear into the depths. Emma is happily imagining that with every seaside opportunity for flirtation, and the stimulus of this sudden act of preservation, illicit romance must have blossomed.

Frank Churchill takes the hint from Emma and supports her scandalous fantasy as a way of concealing his own attachment. When she tells him about the near-accident, he confesses that he was a member of that party of pleasure in the boat. Surely, Emma suggests, he must have noticed something between Jane and her saviour. ‘I, simple I, saw nothing but the fact, that Miss Fairfax was nearly dashed from the vessel and that Mr. Dixon caught her.—It was the work of a moment’ (II. viii). ‘Simple I’ should alert us, just where Emma is diverted: beneath this is all the implicit feeling of a man in love. Of course he notices nothing between Jane and Mr Dixon! He recalls the shock of it, and we are invited to imagine that this effect on him, rather than Jane Fairfax’s gratitude to Mr Dixon, might have hastened a declaration of affection. Emma’s theories are all as misconceived as ever, but her hunch that something amorous has taken place on the front and out in the bay is not wrong. At the seaside, it seems, people are freed from the usual restraints. At the seaside, we infer, there is no sense of established relationships or habitual forms of behaviour. No wonder that family story about Jane Austen, in her late twenties, meeting a man who was smitten by her but who died before he could pursue his interest, had a seaside setting.

Brighton, which Jane Austen does not ever seem to have visited, was the seaside town with the most vivid reputation. Nothing excites Lydia Bennet like the thought of it. ‘In Lydia’s imagination, a visit to Brighton comprised every possibility of earthly happiness. She saw with the creative eye of fancy, the streets of that gay bathing place covered with officers’ (II. xviii). Brighton had become a fashionable bathing place in the mid-eighteenth century under the influence of local resident Dr Richard Russell, author of the hugely influential
Dissertation Concerning the Use of Sea Water in the Diseases of the Glands
(1753).
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By the end of the eighteenth century, under the rather different influence of the Prince Regent, ‘a shift took place from therapeutic aims to hedonistic ones’.
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Kitty and Lydia’s mother finds it easy to share their excitement at the thought of Brighton. Their first scheme is to get Mr Bennet to take them for the summer, his wife expressing her longing for the place more achingly than anyone. He will not abandon his library, but is willing to let his youngest daughter go to Brighton to parade as a ‘common flirt’ (II. xviii). A young woman travelling there without her family does need to be chaperoned, and this is Mrs Forster’s job. But Mrs Forster is ‘a very young woman, and very lately married’. Presumably, being so compatible with Lydia, she is herself only in her teens, and no safeguard against the dangers of the raffish resort. Lydia and Wickham have every opportunity to develop a mutual attraction and arrange their elopement. Brighton makes it easy. After her marriage, Lydia, utterly unbowed, even recommends the place to her mother for her sisters. ‘They must all go to Brighton. That is the place to get husbands’ (III. ix).

Austen also had something particular against Ramsgate, where her sailor brother Francis was stationed in 1803–4. In a letter to Cassandra in 1813 she writes of a friend who has decided to move to Ramsgate and exclaims ‘Bad Taste!’ (
Letters
, 92). She then adds, ‘He is very fond of the Sea however;—some Taste in that.’ This is the contradiction that intrigues Austen and that makes the seaside such a fascinating place. As well as being a zone of licence and even licentiousness, it is inspiriting, heady, liberating. Whenever we get to see the sea – in
Mansfield Park
, in
Persuasion
and in
Sanditon
– the narrative breathes its pleasure in the prospect. Even among the absurdities of Sanditon, Charlotte Heywood is able to delight in the sea. Gazing from the window of her room in Trafalgar House soon after her arrival, she looks past ‘the miscellaneous foreground of unfinished Buildings . . . to the Sea, dancing and sparkling in Sunshine and Freshness’ (Ch. 4). Being by the sea can be delightful, but it is a kind of intoxication. Edward Ferrars engages himself to Lucy Steele in Plymouth: does he take seafront strolls with her? When Fanny Price walks with Mr Crawford and her sister on the Portsmouth ramparts on a mild March day, with the shadows chasing across the sea, ‘dancing in its glee and dashing against the ramparts with so fine a sound’, she feels its ‘combination of charms’ (III. xi). So much so that she is made ‘almost careless of the circumstances under which she felt them’ – those circumstances being the attentions of her would-be suitor, with whom she is arm in arm. She is tired from the walking and needs his support – and she is charmed by ‘the loveliness of the day’ and therefore the more susceptible to his attentions. Her sea-born ‘tender reveries’ give him the chance ‘to look in her face without detection’, noticing that she is ‘as bewitching as ever’ but, thanks to her family home, ‘less blooming’ than she should be.

You go to the seaside for your health, so it becomes a place for the ill.

Henry Crawford knows what the sea can do, for he has his sister write a letter beginning with happy recollection of ‘the balmy air, the sparkling sea, and your sweet looks and conversation’, all blended in ‘the most delicious harmony’ (III. xii). We know that this is well-nigh dictated, because near the end of the letter she is telling Fanny to leave Portsmouth: ‘Those vile sea breezes are the ruin of beauty and health.’ Her aunt ‘felt affected, if within ten miles of the sea’. This suggests an impossible sensitivity, but presumably her aunt’s hatred of her seafaring husband gave her this special aversion. It is a nicely peculiar expression of feeling, as Austen’s contemporaries were used to thinking of the seaside as a kind of tonic. Sea bathing was one of the prescriptions in the fashionable doctor’s armoury. In a letter of August 1805 Austen tells her sister that their eleven-year-old nephew Edward (eldest son of their brother Edward) is ill and that Dr Wilmot is to be consulted: ‘If Sea-Bathing should be recommended’ he will stay with them in Worthing (
Letters
, 45). The novelist expresses no scepticism about this proposed treatment, even though enthusiasm for sea bathing in her novels is made to seem absurd. ‘A little sea-bathing would set me up forever,’ declares Mrs Bennet idiotically in
Pride and Prejudice
, seconding Lydia’s wish to be in Brighton (II. xviii). Kitty claims that her aunt Mrs Philips has told her that bathing in the sea ‘would do
me
a great deal of good’. For these two, the supposedly health-giving influences of the sea would be the excuse for a pleasure trip. For Emma Woodhouse’s sister Isabella the influences are real. Mr and Mrs John Knightley have not visited Highbury during the summer because the holiday ‘had been given to sea-bathing for the children’ (I. xi). She and her father, fellow hypochondriacs, energetically debate the relative merits of Southend and Cromer and the good or bad effects of sea air (I. xii). Mr Wingfield (her apothecary) is supposed to recommend it; Mr Perry is supposed to doubt its efficacy. The daughter’s celebration of the delights of Southend (where Austen’s brother Charles lived for a time) is the less convincing for her assurance that they ‘never found the least inconvenience from the mud’ (I. xii). Mr Woodhouse thinks ‘the sea is very rarely of use to any body. I am sure it almost killed me once.’ Yet, despite the sea’s near-fatal properties, Mr Woodhouse is prepared to contemplate one resort. ‘You should have gone to Cromer, my dear, if you went any where.’ Why? Because Mr Perry has been there and thus told his rich, weak-headed patient that it is ‘the best of all the sea-bathing places’.

The superstitious faith in the efficacy of the seaside is at its most extreme in the opening of
Sanditon
, where Mr Parker, who has just sprained his ankle when his coach overturned, assures his wife that, once back at home, ‘we have our remedy at hand you know.—A little of our own Bracing Sea Air will soon set me on my feet again’ (Ch. 1). The enthusiasm of Mr Parker is imitated in the narration. ‘Nobody could catch cold by the Sea, Nobody wanted Appetite by the Sea, Nobody wanted Spirits, Nobody wanted Strength’ (Ch. 2). The fortunes of Sanditon seem founded on its capacity to attract invalids and hypochondriacs. As Tony Tanner puts it, ‘The invention and promotion of Sanditon is inseparable from the invention and promotion of sickness.’
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You go to the seaside for your health, so it becomes a place for the ill. As Mr Parker delights in saying, ‘Never was there a place more palpably designed by Nature for the resort of the Invalid’ (Ch. 1). Sea air and sea bathing are ‘healing, softing, relaxing—fortifying and bracing—seemingly just as was wanted’. Mr Parker’s faith in the curative powers of air and bathing knows no limit. ‘The sea air and sea bathing together were nearly infallible, one or the other of them being a match for every disorder of the stomach, the lungs or the blood’ (Ch. 2). Yet all this talk of health is not such nonsense after all. A late afternoon stroll and a morning walk by the sea are apparently enough to transform Anne, whose ‘very pretty features’ reappear, ‘having the bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine wind which had been blowing on her complexion, and by the animation of eye which it had also produced’ (I. xii). Both the unknown ‘gentleman’ walking down to the beach, and Captain Wentworth himself, seem to notice.

Lyme, though, has a special status, being granted a strangely sub-travelogue descriptive paragraph by the author, who strays well away from what her characters can observe to detail the charms of the surrounding countryside. ‘Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more its sweet retired bay . . . the woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme . . . Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks . . .’ (I. xi). The touristic prose expresses some need to do justice to the allure of this place, where Anne is to be rekindled but where excitement is also to produce such folly. For this is not the seaside of assemblies and
flâneurs
and relationships in flux, where elopements and engagements are always likely. This is the seaside of visceral excitement or melancholy, of rocks and cliffs and chasms, such as are documented in Austen’s peculiar paragraph. It is a place where the visitors spend time ‘wondering and admiring’ and it is just the place for Captain Benwick to walk and recite Byron or Scott to himself. In the other novels the seaside resort is a place of parade; in autumn and winter, Lyme is a place of ‘retirement’ for the Harvilles and Captain Benwick. There is a time to go to the seaside. Those who go out of season find a very different place. (Think of Mrs Croft, having to spend a winter in Deal while her husband was at sea – the only time in her life ‘that I ever fancied myself unwell’ (I. viii).)