by John Mullan
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.
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).7 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’.8 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 dict
ated, 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’.
