Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  The tendency has been to read this as a reference to Mansfield Park, which is set in the county of Northamptonshire and features a number of clergymen, including one of the central characters, Edmund Bertram. Paula Byrne, in her recent biography of Jane, suggests that it’s a joke – that Jane, realising her whole letter has been about Pride and Prejudice, picks a subject at random, as far away from that novel’s sparkling lightness as she can get.

  It’s true that Jane does jump around in her letters. Paragraphing, of course, was a waste of expensive paper and added to the cost of postage, but I think there is some association of ideas here, some connection between ‘ordination’, Cassandra’s ‘enquiries’, and ‘hedgerows’ – a connection too to Northamptonshire-set Mansfield Park. The hedgerows we’ll come back to, in much more detail, in the next chapter. For the moment let’s stay with ordination.

  Ordination is the process by which clergymen become clergymen. The rules are strictly observed in the modern Church of England – prospective members of the clergy have to be at least 24 years old, are first ordained as a ‘deacon’, a sort of junior position, and, after a year, ‘promoted’ to become a full priest.

  The Church of England that Jane knew was more flexible. It was not unheard of for the age limit to be ignored, and for the full year that was supposed to intervene between becoming a deacon and becoming a priest to be overlooked. A sense of vocation wasn’t at all necessary. The Church was a career and if you knew the right people it could be a very lucrative career indeed. ‘Livings’ – that is, the right to be a priest in a certain parish – were handed out or sold by bishops, by Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and by ordinary landowners who had no connection with the Church. Jane’s own father, for example, was given his ‘livings’ (one in Steventon, and one in the neighbouring village of Deane) by a distant cousin – the same cousin who later adopted Jane’s brother Edward. The livings were passed on to Jane’s brother James, then to her brother Henry, and later to one of her nephews. We find similarly cosy arrangements in a number of Jane’s novels. Henry Tilney gets his living from his father. Edward Ferrars is given one by Colonel Brandon, the two marrying a pair of sisters not long afterwards. The Mansfield Park estate includes two livings, both of which, by the end of the novel, belong to Edmund Bertram. The two exceptions are Mr Collins and Mr Elton, neither of whom seems to have been given a leg up by their relatives.

  What with nepotism and widespread pluralism – holding multiple livings at once, and putting poorly-paid curates into them to do the work required – it’s scarcely any wonder that non-conformist churches like the Methodists, Baptists and Quakers had an increasingly widespread following.

  But all this seems to be rather a long way from slave plantations and the Atlantic trade. Can Mansfield Park really be about both ordination and slaves? What has the Church of England got to do with slavery?

  Rather a lot, actually.

  In 2006, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, issued a formal apology for the Church of England’s involvement in slavery. At the beginning of the eighteenth century an Antiguan landowner – and slave-owner – called Christopher Codrington died. He left his collection of books to All Souls Oxford, which still boasts a Codrington Library, and he left his estate on Barbuda – a small island off the coast of Antigua – to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, to be held in trust for the furthering of the Society’s aims. These were, broadly speaking, to promote the Church throughout the British colonies. The Society was part of the Church of England; among its committee members were senior Church of England clergy. Rowan Williams’ apology was made necessary by the publication of Adam Hochschild’s book Bury the Chains which offered up a number of damning revelations about the Society, including the fact that it didn’t just keep the slaves it had inherited, but regularly bought new ones, and that it branded its slaves with the word ‘Society’ to show that they were Church property. None of this would have been revelatory for Jane, though, or for her first readers; it was common knowledge.

  For a long time, the Society saw nothing to be ashamed of in its slave plantation. But as the efforts of the abolitionists began – slowly – to gain traction, the Society became vaguely apologetic, just a touch sensitive about the whole thing. The Bishop of Chester, in a sermon published in 1783, felt it necessary to inform his readers ‘that where mention is made of estates in the West Indies belonging to the Society, it must not be supposed that we are possessed of any property there in our own right’. No – ‘we are only holders of certain lands in Barbadoes’.8 The Society (apparently) ‘has always shewn a most laudable solicitude both for the temporal and eternal welfare of the slaves employed on their plantations’. The managers are instructed to treat the slaves ‘with the utmost tenderness and humanity’. The plan is for Codrington to be ‘a model for all the West Indian islands to imitate’ – not now, not soon, but at some misty, as yet undetermined point in the future.

  The Bishop dwells fondly on this imaginary model plantation, and on the idea of ‘a little society of truly Christian Negroes’ who will go about

  their daily tasks with alacrity and fidelity; looking up to their masters as their friends, their protectors and benefactors; and consoling themselves for the loss of their liberty and their native land, by the care taken to ‘make their yoke easy, and their burden light’, to civilize their manners, to enlarge their understandings, to reform their hearts, and to open to them a prospect into a better and a happier country, where all tears shall be wiped from their eyes, and where sorrow and slavery shall be no more.

  A decade later, Bryan Edwards – an able special pleader who had spent much of his life in Jamaica before becoming MP for a rotten borough in Cornwall – suggested that some slave-owners, including the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, were almost to be pitied:

  [M]any persons there are, in Great Britain itself, who … find themselves possessed of estates in the West Indies which they have never seen … the Reverend Society established in Great Britain for propagating the Gospel in foreign parts, are themselves under this very predicament. That venerable society hold a plantation in Barbadoes … and they have found themselves not only under the disagreeable necessity of supporting the system of slavery which was bequeathed to them with the land; but are induced also, from the purest and best motives, to purchase occasionally a certain number of Negroes, in order to divide the work, and keep up the stock.9

  For the anti-abolitionists, the existence of the Codrington plantation was an absolute godsend. As Robert Norris – Clarkson’s old bête noire – pointed out in his book A short account of the African slave trade, slave-owners had no reason to suppose that they were doing anything wrong:

  The Adventurers in this Trade, who have seen for near a Century past, the Society for propagating Christianity, composed of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and many pious Doctors of the established Church, deriving, as Masters, a yearly income from the Labour of their Negroe Slaves in the West Indies, could not consider it as contrary to the Spirit of the Scriptures, or to the Principles of Morality.10

  For Gilbert Francklyn, the fact that ‘my Lords the Archbishops, Bishops, Noblemen, and Gentlemen, who are members of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts’ are among those ‘who purchase negroes in the West Indies’ casts a cloak of decency over the whole trade. Clarkson is upbraided by name, painted as a ‘rash and arrogant young man’ who verges on blasphemy in attempting ‘to attribute the hurricanes and tempests in the West Indies to the anger of God against the inhabitants of those islands, for possessing slaves … although you do not produce a single command of God by which it is forbidden?’.11

  The Church of England – the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel – saw slavery as perfectly godly, as perfectly Christian, as, at any rate, an inevitable evil. For many ordinary citizens, it was a case of out of sight, out of mind; there were no slaves in Britain any more, and the Caribbean, the West Indies, we
re other countries, far away and seldom to be thought about. But for plenty of people, increasing numbers of people, slavery stained everything and everyone it touched, it made a web of moral contagion – sugar and rum, the fine carriages and the London houses bought with the coin of human suffering, the merchants and slave-owners, the members of parliament and every Church of England clergyman who stood up in the pulpit to preach morality to his English congregation knowing full well what his colleagues and superiors were responsible for in Codrington.

  It’s into these muddy, churned-up waters that we find Jane wading in Mansfield Park.

  What she builds up to, with all those references to slavery, is, unusually for her, a symbol. It’s not a difficult one to interpret. On the contrary, it’s clear as daylight. She puts slavery and the Church right next to each other – quite literally. Her heroine, Fanny, dressing for her coming-out ball, joins together ‘the chain and the cross’ – a gold chain and an amber cross. They are, Jane reminds us, in case we miss the significance of the moment, ‘memorials’ and ‘tokens’; they stand for something, they are there to remind us. For Fanny, they represent her favourite brother and her favourite cousin, ‘the two most beloved of her heart’. For the reader, the associations are, or should be, by this point in the novel, very different.

  The juxtaposition of the chain and the cross – of slavery and the Church – might have been jarring (or tactless) for the first readers of Mansfield Park, but they couldn’t very well deny its truthfulness.

  They could hardly, in 1814, have been ignorant of the existence of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The SPG and its sister-society, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, which worked to promote Anglicanism within Britain, were engaged in a very public turf war with the new and energetic Bible Society. The Bible Society welcomed Christians of most denominations. Prominent among its members were establishment figures – bishops, members of parliament – but also Methodists, Baptists, and Quakers. It was ecumenical, evangelical. Its aim was to give the greatest number of people access to the Bible, across the world, and to that end it printed and distributed translations into a whole variety of languages. It recruited – actively. There was scarcely a town in the country which didn’t have a branch.

  For the SPG and the SPCK, the Bible Society was a dangerous mix of naive do-gooders and those who actively wanted to undermine the authority of the established Church for their own ends. Chief among their concerns was that giving people unmediated access to the Bible, without any priests to explain it to them properly, or any comforting hierarchy of bishops and archbishops to keep control, might lead to blasphemous misinterpretations – among which, of course, was included anything which didn’t happen to suit the Church of England, British commercial interests, or the government. If the Bible Society started shipping Bibles off around the world, wasn’t there a very real risk that – for example – slaves in the Caribbean and the West Indies might get tired of waiting for merciful death and the shores of Beulah, and look to other parts of the Bible for guidance instead – to the Book of Exodus, perhaps, in which Moses leads the Hebrews out of slavery?

  The Church of England had reason to be anxious about attacks on its influence and power. Almost from the very beginning, it had been subjected to numerous challenges as an institution. In the 250 years since its foundation by Elizabeth I, it had faced the English Civil War, a Roman Catholic monarch, one Calvinist usurper, and one Lutheran one. During Jane’s lifetime its status was being threatened again, by the rise of non-conformist religion, by the gradual relaxation of anti-Catholic legislation, by farmers complaining bitterly about the tithe system, under which priests were entitled to a tenth of everything produced in the parish. Questions were beginning to be asked about exactly how priests – and for that matter bishops and archbishops – were chosen, and about the practice of holding numerous parishes simultaneously. Yet again, the Church was on the defensive.

  And its chief defender, its attack dog against the incursions of the Bible Society, of would-be reformers and evangelicals, was a man called Henry Handley Norris.q

  This Norris was born in Hackney, now a very urbanised area of east London, but occupied in the eighteenth century largely by people who had made their fortunes in trade and moved a little way out of the city in order to enjoy them in a quasi-rural setting. Norris’ father was a merchant who traded with Russia and left his son very well off. The young Henry, however, chose to follow his maternal grandfather into the Church. Not for him, though, the quiet life of a parish priest. He became private chaplain to the Earl of Shaftesbury, a member of the chapter of Llandaff cathedral and, finally, of the chapter of Westminster cathedral. He enjoyed the patronage of the prime minister, Lord Liverpool. Norris was a great one for organising things. He sat on the boards of the Russia Company and the Eastland Company (which was interested in trade with Scandinavia and the Baltic), was active in the establishment of Church of England schools, and was a prominent member of the committees for the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.

  Norris was also a philanthropist, never, it seems, happier than when he was paying money out to those less fortunate than himself, or organising other people into paying it. His name was constantly in the newspapers as a subscriber to good works. From around 1812 Norris was one of the owners of the literary journal the British Critic, and even after editors had been appointed he continued to take a close personal interest. He was a writer himself. The Influence of the Female Character upon Society, published in 1801, complains about female fashions. He kept up a full and busy correspondence with all sorts of people, much of it, in the 1810s, connected to what he saw as the dangers of the Bible Society. In 1813, he published a whole book made up of letters on the subject – A practical exposition of the tendency and proceedings of the British and Foreign Bible Society, later described as ‘a farrago of illiberality, bigotry, and ill-nature’.12 It’s a thorough and determined attack on every aspect of the Bible Society, approaching from every angle. Norris objects to the structure of the Society (identical, he says, to that adopted by the Puritans before the English Civil War, or the rebel Irishmen of the 1790s); he objects to its membership; he objects to the fact that it takes money which might otherwise have been donated to the societies he himself was closely involved with, the SPCK and the SPG. He also objects to the Bible Society’s decision to publish and distribute Bibles without any explanatory notes, and to neglect the authorised Anglican prayer book.

  Coming back to Jane and to Mansfield Park, we can pick out quite a number of correspondences between the real-life Reverend Mr Norris and the fictional Mrs Norris, widow of a clergyman. Like her namesake, Mrs Norris disapproves of modern female fashions (‘That Mrs Whitaker is a treasure! … she has turned away two housemaids for wearing white gowns’). Then too, Mrs Norris fancies herself as a philanthropist, ‘projecting and arranging’ the ‘expensive … charity’ of adopting Fanny. ‘As far as walking, talking, and contriving reached’, Jane tells us, Mrs Norris ‘was thoroughly benevolent, and nobody knew better how to dictate liberality to others; but her love of money was equal to her love of directing, and she knew quite as well how to save her own as to spend that of her friends’.

  There are – surely – shades of Norris here.

  Jane also shows her Mrs Norris thinking about the distribution of prayer books. Fanny, sent home to Portsmouth in disgrace for rejecting the approaches of Henry Crawford, hears her mother complaining that the youngest daughter Betsey doesn’t have ‘such a good godmother’ as Mary, another of the Price children, had. Betsey’s godmother is of course Mrs Norris. Fanny – and Jane – both evidently agree:

  Fanny had indeed nothing to convey from aunt Norris, but a message to say she hoped that her god-daughter was a good girl, and learnt her book. There had been at one moment a slight murmur in the drawing-room at Mansfield Park about sending her a prayer-book; but no second sou
nd had been heard of such a purpose. Mrs Norris, however, had gone home and taken down two old prayer-books of her husband with that idea; but, upon examination, the ardour of generosity went off. One was found to have too small a print for a child’s eyes, and the other to be too cumbersome for her to carry about.

  The joke here is Mrs Norris’ almost pathological meanness – mentioned elsewhere in the novel – but it also looks a lot like a reference to the real-life Norris, and to his energetically-expressed anxieties about prayer books. Norris’ societies – the SPCK and the SPG – had had decades to organise the distribution of Bibles and prayer books and they hadn’t really done it very well. The message Mrs Norris sends, via Fanny, to say that she hopes Betsey ‘learnt her book’, means her prayer book; she says that it’s of vital importance for Betsey to familiarise herself with Anglicanism, but doesn’t actually do anything to make it happen.

  Quite where Jane’s own religious beliefs lay, whether, as Henry declared in his first – and occasionally downright dishonest – biography, ‘her opinions accorded strictly with those of our Established Church’, is difficult to pin down. At different times, and when writing to different people, she expresses directly contrary views. In 1809 she announces to Cassandra, ‘I do not like the Evangelicals’.13 In 1814, in a letter of advice to her niece Fanny about her relationship with Mr Plumptre, a Bible Society member teetering on the verge of evangelicalism, she remarks that she is ‘by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals, & am at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason & Feeling, must be happiest & safest’.14 But in 1816, not long after she made Anne Elliot, clearly one of the quieter sort of evangelicals, the heroine of the novel we know as Persuasion, she wrote a letter explaining that ‘We do not much like Mr Cooper’s new Sermons, — they are fuller of Regeneration & Conversion than ever — with the addition of his zeal in the cause of the Bible Society’.15 Though we know that Jane didn’t much like ‘Mr Cooper’ (her cousin Edward), these views might not be her own. Elsewhere ‘we’ sometimes indicates that she is quoting a third party; perhaps, here, her mother.