Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  In Mansfield Park, she not only marries first cousins to each other but does so after she has made it clear that adding a sexual element to pre-existing relationships is a horribly messy and undesirable thing to do. When Fanny finds out that her cousin Maria has run off with Henry Crawford – the very man who has proposed to her – her first reaction is visceral disgust:

  A woman married only six months ago; a man professing himself devoted, even engaged to another; that other her near relation; the whole family, both families connected as they were by tie upon tie; all friends, all intimate together! It was too horrible a confusion of guilt, too gross a complication of evil, for human nature, not in a state of utter barbarism, to be capable of!

  From the very first chapter of the novel, the possibility of a sexual or romantic relationship between Fanny and either of her male cousins has been acknowledged, and acknowledged as an evil. Mrs Norris announces that it will be ‘morally impossible’ if Fanny is brought up with them, ‘always together, like brothers and sisters’, and it ought to be so. It isn’t, as it turns out, impossible; whether it’s moral, or psychologically healthy for either party, is another question altogether.

  Jane doesn’t gloss over these issues; we get to see Fanny being brought up with her cousins, with all the intimacy of siblings. The action of Mansfield Park is set over a far longer time period than is covered by Jane’s other novels. Fanny is ten when we first meet her. By the time the novel ends she must be nineteen or twenty if not a little more (Jane announces her intention to ‘purposely abstain from dates’). Sense and Sensibility, with the next longest action, is set over three years. The norm is a year or thereabouts.

  Mansfield Park really isn’t like Jane’s other books.

  Even the title is a departure from her normal practice; from her childhood onwards she tended to pick for her titles either names (The Beautifull Cassandra, Frederic and Elfrida, Susan) or set phrases (Love and Freindship, First Impressions, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice). Jane’s next novel, Emma, returns to this. There seems to be something quite fundamental, quite important, about the words ‘Mansfield Park’ – something Jane wants library subscribers to see when they’re looking through the catalogue, something she wants to confront her readers with every time they pick the book up, and to have printed alone, in large lettering, at the beginning of each of the three volumes in which the novel was published.

  There’s a tantalising scrap of a letter which turned up in the 1960s, date and addressee both unknown. On one side are a few lines that make little or no sense out of context, and on the reverse is a postscript:

  Perhaps before the end of April, Mansfield Park by the author of S & S. — P. & P. may be in the World. — Keep the name to yourself. I shd not like to have it known beforehand. God bless you. — Cassandra’s best Love. Yours affec:ly

  J. Austen

  If this really is part of a letter written by Jane, then perhaps we ought to read this as a fit of assumed or real modesty, or a desire to do things in the proper, professional way. Or perhaps it’s a sensible precaution in an age when pressure was often brought to bear on publishers to prevent politically or personally damaging material ever seeing the light of day.

  As a number of critics have remarked over the years, there had been a person called Mansfield, a prominent person: Lord Mansfield, the man who – without quite intending to – succeeded in making slavery illegal in England.

  Lord Mansfield – William Murray – was born into an aristocratic family in Scotland in 1705.e His father and two of his numerous siblings were attached to the Catholic Stuart cause, opposing the usurpation of the British throne by the Protestant, Hanoverian Georges. This was a handicap for a young man of ambition, and William took an unusual way of dealing with it, leaving for England at the age of fourteen and cutting off contact with his more embarrassing relations. He was a scholar at Westminster School and went from there to Christ Church Oxford, making a number of useful acquaintances at both. After toying with the idea of the Church, he went in for law, and did extremely well. He rose to the very top of the legal and political trees, closely intertwined in England, holding in turn the positions of Solicitor-General, Attorney-General, and chief justice of the King’s Bench – Lord Chief Justice. He became a privy councillor, a member of the body which advised the king. He occasionally filled, for short periods, the offices of Lord Chancellor, of deputy speaker and even speaker of the House of Lords. He was an influential and powerful man.

  Mansfield and his wife had no children of their own, but they informally adopted three of his great-nieces, Anne and Elizabeth Murray, and Dido Elizabeth Belle – illegitimate, mixed-race, the daughter of an African woman and Mansfield’s nephew, John Lindsay. Mansfield seems to have been fond of Dido. He gave her a generous allowance and left her money in his will. Someone – perhaps Mansfield – also commissioned a portrait of Dido with her cousin Elizabeth. It’s rather charming. Granted, Dido is holding an armful of leaves and fruit (nature) while her cousin sits with a book open on her lap (culture), and she’s pointing to her own brown, dimpling face with one finger, but she’s beautiful – vital, smiling. She’s dressed in white silk, with what look like pearls round her neck and sparkling earrings in her ears. She’s hurrying somewhere (a gauzy scarf billows behind her), and her cousin reaches out a hand to restrain her. The eyes of the two girls are almost identical. Just the way the artist painted brown eyes, or a family resemblance, faithfully depicted?f

  Jane met Elizabeth Murray several times. Elizabeth had married, becoming Lady Finch-Hatton and a Kentish neighbour of Jane’s brother Edward. The Finch-Hattons also owned Kirby Hall in Northamptonshire, where the 1999 adaptation of Mansfield Park was filmed. Kirby Hall is entirely the wrong period to have served as a model for ‘spacious, modern-built’ Mansfield Park, but it’s another connection between the book and Lord Mansfield. Mansfield Park, Jane tells us, is not far from the town of Northampton.

  In his long and varied legal career, Mansfield would have come across a number of cases relating to slavery in one way or another.g There were plenty of cases to be had.

  Dozens upon dozens of West Indian islands belonged to Britain – Jamaica, Bermuda, Grenada, Barbados, Antigua, the Bahamas. Until 1775, Britain also owned most of the eastern seaboard of America. British-owned slaving ships endlessly traced the Atlantic ‘triangle’, taking rum and sugar and cotton to Britain, manufactured goods from Britain to the west coast of Africa, and slaves from Africa to the West Indies and America. Merchants from the ports of Plymouth, Liverpool, Bristol and London grew rich. Britain grew rich. The historian Adam Hochschild estimates that around the turn of the century 30 per cent of British imports came from the West Indies. On average, more than 40,000 people were transported across the Atlantic every year.

  The Atlantic crossing was dangerous, but that didn’t stop the people who owned estates and businesses in the West Indies from travelling to Britain. Often they brought slaves with them. Some of those slaves had children of their own. Some ran away. By the time Jane was born, London’s black population was large enough to hide in – 5,000 strong at least, and probably closer to 10,000.2

  In 1769, a man called Charles Stewart came to Britain from Virginia, bringing with him a slave, James Somerset. Stewart settled in London, in Cheapside; in what was then and still is the heart of the business district. Cheapside is where Elizabeth Bennet’s favourite uncle Mr Gardiner lives in Pride and Prejudice, though Jane makes a point of stating that his is a ‘respectable line of trade’, presumably not connected with slavery, or not directly, at least. In September 1771, Somerset vanished. Stewart, with difficulty, traced him. Somerset was abducted while walking through Covent Garden and taken, shackled, to a ship that was about to set sail for Virginia, where he was to be sold. Anti-slavery activists managed to obtain a writ of habeas corpus, meaning that Somerset’s jailers had to produce him, in court, and explain precisely why they were holding him. The case was heard early in 1772, before Lor
d Mansfield.

  Mansfield’s Jacobite parents and siblings had been a source of embarrassment for most of his life. Now his great-niece was to become another. A year earlier, in 1771, Mansfield had refused to make any formal judgement in a case very similar to Somerset’s. The decision of a jury didn’t bind any later court, but any formal pronouncement by so senior a judge would have been at least strongly persuasive to anyone coming afterwards. Mansfield really didn’t want to have to make a judgement this time round, either. But at length (the case was dragged out for months) he cut through some of the tangle of contradictory statutes and case law and most unwillingly pronounced that: ‘Contract for the sale of a slave is good here; the sale is a matter to which the law properly and readily attaches, and will maintain the price according to the agreement. But here the person of the slave himself is immediately the object of inquiry, which makes a very material difference.’3 Stewart had rights, but so did Somerset. The imprisonment was illegal; Somerset must be released.

  Mansfield didn’t intend to outlaw slavery in England. He hadn’t actually done so, but what Mansfield had intended and what he had done paled into insignificance alongside what everyone thought had happened. Even the fiercest defenders of slavery, people like Edward Long, author of the History of Jamaica, bewailed the Mansfield judgment as putting an end to slavery not just in England, but everywhere the British ruled: ‘I cannot well comprehend’, wrote Long, ‘how the master can exercise a right of perpetual service, without restraining the Negroe [sic] of his personal liberty, his power of locomotion, or of removing his person wheresoever his inclination may direct.’4 How could slavery function when the law – in the person of Lord Mansfield – had removed the practical basis on which it rested?

  In vain did Mansfield protest that the judgment had been misunderstood. In vain did he insist, in the later case of the ship Zong, that the deliberate drowning of dozens of slaves could be tried only as insurance fraud. The abolitionists celebrated the Somerset case as a triumph. In America, escaped slaves fled to the coast, to claim sanctuary on British ships. When war broke out, the British commanders, ever expedient, promised freedom to any slave who fought for them. It was too late – the genie was out of the bottle.

  It would have been unforgivably careless of Jane to attach Mansfield’s name, out of all the names she could have chosen, to this novel unless she meant her readers to think about him and about slavery. In Persuasion, Mrs Smith is restored to prosperity by regaining her husband’s estate in the West Indies. The ‘slave trade’ is mentioned, briefly, in Emma. In Mansfield Park two characters – the forbidding Sir Thomas Bertram and his oldest son Tom – actually travel abroad to the Caribbean. And they go, Jane tells us specifically, to oversee the management of their estate in the sugar island of Antigua.

  Slavery wasn’t some distant, abstract notion for Jane. It couldn’t be. Jane’s own family had ties to the Caribbean. Her oldest brother, James, had a slave-owning godfather: James Nibbs, an Oxford acquaintance of the Reverend George Austen.h Nibbs sent his son to the little boarding school which Jane’s father ran at Steventon, indicating a close and continuing relationship between the families. James Austen went on to marry a woman whose father had been born in Antigua. Charles, the baby of the Austen family, married a pair of sisters from Bermuda – Frances and Harriet Palmer.i One of Jane’s aunts – the wife of her mother’s brother, James Leigh-Perrot – had been born in the West Indies, in Barbados, and was shipped to England as a child. The Leigh-Perrots, we know, kept a black servant called Frank. Jane mentions him in a letter of 1799, and again in 1801.

  But what did Jane herself think? We know that she had read Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, detailing his experiences over decades of campaigning against slavery. She even describes herself as having been ‘in love’ with Clarkson – a love which tells us far more about her than her feelings for any of her supposed suitors do.5

  She paid Clarkson a peculiar compliment. Mrs Norris – Fanny’s vicious, bullying aunt – shares her name with a real-life slave-trader and anti-abolitionist: Mr Norris of Liverpool, the man Clarkson cast as chief villain in his book.

  Norris first appeared when Clarkson was touring the port towns, trying to find someone who had experience of slave-trading but was willing to testify against it in front of a forthcoming parliamentary committee. Norris offered himself, appeared an enthusiast for abolition, asserted that his former way of life, his former employment, made him sick to the soul. He then entered the committee hearing as a witness for the other side, and started lying through his teeth. In his book Clarkson recounts some of the evidence given by Norris.

  […] Mr Norris had painted the accommodations on board a slave-ship in the most glowing colours. He had represented them in a manner which would have exceeded his attempts at praise of the most luxurious scenes. Their apartments, he said, were fitted up as advantageously for them as circumstances could possibly admit: they had several meals a day; some, of their own country provisions, with the best sauces of African cookery […] After breakfast they had water to wash themselves, while their apartments were perfumed with frankincense and lime-juice. Before dinner they were amused after the manner of their country: instruments of music were introduced: the song and the dance were promoted: games of chance were furnished them: the men played and sang, while the women and girls made fanciful ornaments from beads, with which they were plentifully supplied. They were indulged in all their little fancies, and kept in sprightly humour.

  It’s laughable, or it would be if we had no idea of the horrors that lie beneath it – the clinking of chains, the stench of bodies pressed together in their own urine and faeces and vomit, the ceaseless movement of the sea, what waited at journey’s end.

  Even before Clarkson’s character assassination of him, Norris seems to have been an unpopular individual. Some of the short notices of his death which appear in the papers are positively gleeful. The Chester Chronicle, a newspaper local to Liverpool where Norris lived, announced with spiteful enjoyment that Norris’ death ‘was in consequence of having lain in a damp bed, on his return from London, where he had been in favour of the slave-trade!’ (their italics).6 Once Clarkson’s book had appeared, Norris was a name associated not just with slavery, but with the lies and blatant hypocrisy which surrounded it.

  Most critics stop with the observation that Mansfield and Norris are both names connected with slavery, that the estate owned by the Bertrams in Antigua is presumably run on slave labour, and that we’re told that Fanny asks her uncle about ‘the slave trade’. Most of them seem to feel that this is all there is, that the ‘dead silence’ that meets Fanny’s question means that there is, quite simply, nothing else to see, or say.

  But remember, this is a novel of Jane’s maturity, a novel written over a much shorter space of time than the ones we’ve looked at so far. If Jane is a great writer, a talented artist exercising her craft at its fullest power, shouldn’t there be more? Wouldn’t a reader of 1814 have expected more, in this book which trumpets its subject on the title page?

  They would have done, and they’d have found it – just as we can, if we look properly.

  Mansfield Park opens with the words, ‘About thirty years ago’, and over the course of the first few chapters Jane runs us through the first twenty of those thirty years quickly and – apparently – without much thought for precise dating. But all of this is less vague than it looks. Jane doesn’t begin the novel with, ‘about twenty-five or thirty years ago’ or ‘about thirty years or so ago’. She writes ‘about thirty years ago’. There’s not much more than a year’s flexibility in either direction, certainly not more than two. In this novel published in 1814, then, the reader is directed to begin by casting their mind back to 1783–5. In 1783 the British were finally driven out from their American colonies. In fact a lot of the novel’s early incidents map closely onto major world events. The ‘half a dozen years’ which intervene between Lady Bertram’s marriage an
d the marriages of her sisters take us to the period of the French Revolution. The ‘eleven following years’ of estrangement between Fanny’s mother and her family runs up to the temporary peace between Britain and France.

  And Jane’s first readers, primed by the title, might remember other dates in those decades, milestones on the long, slow struggle towards abolition. 1783 saw British troops leave New York with liberated slaves, who they took to Nova Scotia. These were slaves who had run away to join the British army because of the Somerset judgment.j It also saw Mansfield’s ruling in the Zong case. In 1785 the abolitionist poet William Cowper published his long, mock-epic poem The Task – a poem which contains some of the most eloquent and moving lines written against slavery. The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was established in 1787; in 1791 – around the time, according to the novel’s chronology, that Fanny must be born – the French slaves in Haiti revolted. They held the island for years against overwhelming military force. With the outbreak of war with France in 1793, the abolitionists lost some of the momentum they had been gaining. Little progress was made for the next fifteen years or so – and these are years which are, for the most part, skimmed rapidly over in Mansfield Park. The Act of Parliament which made slave-trading illegal for British-owned ships was passed in 1807, and it is around 1807 or 1808 that Sir Thomas leaves for Antigua – to future-proof his estate, we understand. It’s at this point that the novel slows down, and the main action begins. The effect is subtle, but sustained.

  But Jane doesn’t confine herself to subtle hints. In Mansfield Park she doesn’t use the miniaturist’s tools she’s usually credited with, but a broader brush and more definite strokes.

  Fanny, the heroine of Mansfield Park, is a reader, like lots of Jane’s heroines. She’s quiet, studious, finding an escape from the petty tyrannies of Mansfield in books. Her favourite poet, or at least the only one she quotes from, is William Cowper. When her cousin Maria’s betrothed, the stupid but fabulously rich Mr Rushworth, is explaining the planned landscaping improvements at his estate, Sotherton, Fanny is saddened that an avenue of trees is to be sacrificed. She turns to her cousin Edmund and quotes some lines from Cowper’s The Task: ‘Cut down an avenue! What a pity! Does not it make you think of Cowper? “Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited.”’