Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  Persuasion, by contrast, is tied tightly to historical fact. We’re never allowed to forget exactly when these fictional events are taking place, and against what backdrop. The temporal setting isn’t just clear – it’s precise, almost to the week. The novel begins in the summer of 1814, when the characters are still adjusting to ‘this peace’ – the abdication of Napoleon and the (in fact only temporary) cessation of the war which had dominated everything in Britain for the past twenty years. Anne and Wentworth are reunited in the last week of February 1815; the very same week, in fact, that Napoleon escaped from Elba and, landing in France, began to gather an army about him again. Jane chooses to place the entire action of the novel during the ‘false peace’ of 1814–15. Time matters in Persuasion.

  Jane chooses, too, to open the novel in a way unprecedented in her writing, with not just dates, but almost a whole page of them. Having produced for her readers the figure of ‘Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-Hall in Somersetshire’, she reproduces an extract from his favourite book, the Baronetage:

  ‘ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH-HALL.

  ‘Walter Elliot, born March 1 1760, married, July 15 1784, Elizabeth, daughter of James Stevenson Esq. of South Park, in the county of Gloucester; by which lady (who died 1800) he has issue Elizabeth, born June 1 1785; Anne, born August 9 1787; a still-born son, Nov. 5 1789; Mary, born Nov. 20 1791.’

  Precisely such had the paragraph originally stood from the printer’s hands; but Sir Walter had improved it by adding, for the information of himself and his family, these words, after the date of Mary’s birth — ‘married, Dec. 16 1810, Charles, son and heir of Charles Musgrove Esq. of Uppercross, in the county of Somerset,’ — and by inserting most accurately the day of the month on which he had lost his wife.

  Some of this is satire. Sir Walter, penning in the dates of deaths and marriages, is treating the book like a family Bible; this is his bible – the book he turns to not only for ‘occupation’ but also ‘consolation’ – but, like the multitude of mirrors in his dressing room, it offers him a delightful sense of his own superiority rather than any spiritual sustenance. There’s also something more complicated at work here.

  The Baronetage is almost certainly Debrett’s Baronetage of England, first published in 1808. It was popular, and quickly became a standard work of reference. Each entry begins with information on the current holder of the title before going on to trace, as Jane says, ‘the history and rise’ of the family. What it doesn’t have, or certainly not in such profusion as this fictional entry, is dates. There are only years of birth for children, particularly those who aren’t in line to inherit, and there’s certainly no reference to still-born offspring. So why does Jane claim that the paragraph had stood ‘precisely such … from the printer’s hands’? Why put dates – and so many dates – here?

  Well, we know that one date at least is significant – 16th December, the wedding anniversary of Mary and Charles Musgrove, is Jane’s birthday. It’s also the anniversary of the death of Anne Lefroy.

  The coincidence preyed on Jane’s mind for years. In 1808, she even wrote a poem about it, entitled To the Memory of Mrs Lefroy who died Dec:r 16 — my Birthday. It’s not all that good, but then heartfelt poetry seldom is. It begins:

  The day returns again, my natal day;

  What mixed emotions with the Thought arise!

  Beloved friend, four years have pass’d away

  Since thou wert snatch’d forever from our eyes. —

  The day, commemorative of my birth

  Bestowing Life and Light and Hope on me,

  Brings back the hour which was thy last on Earth.

  Oh! bitter pang of torturing Memory! —

  The poem ends:

  Fain would I feel an union in thy fate,g

  Fain would I seek to draw an Omen fair

  From this connection in our Earthly date.

  Indulge the harmless weakness—Reason, spare.—

  The day that Jane picks for Anne Elliot’s birthday is 9th August, the day, in 1798, that her cousin Jane Cooper had been killed.h Unless this is a wild coincidence, then in the first paragraphs of Persuasion we find Jane hiding references to the sudden, violent deaths of two of her relations. Why commemorate them here? Surely because Persuasion, set at a turning point in history, located partly in Lyme, is a novel about instability, about things being overturned, about loss, destruction, and change.

  Those dates were for Jane herself, perhaps, too, for her family and close associates. But there’s another date which she deliberately puts into the text to bring the same topics to the forefront of her readers’ minds; the date on which the Elliot son is still-born – 5th November 1789. 1789 was the year in which the French Revolution began. 5th November, as British readers will know, is Bonfire Night. All over the country, people let off fireworks, munch on toffee apples, burgers and sausages, and watch as a ‘guy’ is burned to ashes on top of a bonfire. A guy is an effigy, a rough figure stuffed with straw or newspaper, and usually dressed up as an unpopular figure of the moment (Tony Blair and George W. Bush were both favourites during the early 2000s). It used to represent a man, Guy Fawkes, one of the conspirators who, in 1605, attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament, together with the king, James I. They intended to place one of the young princesses on the throne, educating her as a Catholic and marrying her to a Catholic prince. The conspiracy was discovered on 5th November, and the conspirators tortured and executed in the usual gory fashion. The following year, an Act of Parliament was passed, requiring that clergymen preach a thanksgiving sermon on 5th November.i That Act wasn’t repealed until 1859.

  In 1688 James II, grandson to James I, was deposed, in what used to be called the ‘Glorious Revolution’. He was replaced by his daughter and son-in-law, who took the throne as joint monarchs – William and Mary. James II had made a series of mistakes, chief among which were his attempts to reintroduce Catholicism to Britain. So badly had he mishandled matters that parliament decided to get rid of him, and of his son and rightful heir, and invite James’s eldest daughter and her husband to seize the throne instead. William and Mary deliberately delayed their invasion in order that they could land in Britain on 5th November, and present an act of dynastic overthrow as rescuing the nation from the ‘Popish’ threat. 5th November 1789 is a very loaded date indeed.

  Let’s turn back to the Elliot entry in the Baronetage, looking this time at names. The Elliots are not an imaginative lot when it comes to naming. There have been at least three Sir Walters, and the heir presumptive, ‘William Walter Elliot Esquire’, also has it as a middle name. The current Sir Walter has three daughters – Elizabeth, Anne, and Mary. Of these, our heroine Anne appears to be the odd one out, since a feature of the ‘history and rise of the ancient and respectable family’ is ‘all the Marys and Elizabeths they had married’ along the way. Anne may perhaps be named for her godmother Lady Russell, a practice which was very common. Only the youngest of the daughters, Mary, is married, to ‘Charles, son and heir of Charles Musgrove Esq. of Uppercross’. We’re also given the name of Anne’s maternal grandfather – James Stevenson.

  Jane, as we’ve seen, is conservative in christening her characters. She’s far more restrained than either her own family or other novelists of the period. Her heroines in particular are given plain names – just like her: Catherine, Elinor, Elizabeth, Anne. Fanny, Marianne, and Emma are as exotic as it gets. This is a far cry from the kind of names other novel heroines had – Camilla, Belinda, Evelina, Ethelinde, Celestina, Monimia.

  Often Jane seems to select names almost at random, and she doesn’t hesitate to re-use them. The heroine of Northanger Abbey, remember, was presumably once called Susan rather than Catherine, since the work was sold to Crosby under that title; Susan Price is Fanny’s younger sister in Mansfield Park. John and Isabella Thorpe and John and Isabella Knightley have little or nothing in common; nor do Mary Bennet and Mary Crawford.

  But in Persuasion there’s a definite trend – these ar
e names which belonged to the Stuarts, the dynasty that ruled first Scotland, and later the whole island of Britain. The Stuart dynasty takes its name from Sir Walter Stewart – son-in-law to one king and father of another. After two and a half centuries ruling Scotland, the Stuarts succeeded to the English throne as well when Elizabeth I died childless. The names of the Stuart monarchs of Britain? James, Charles, Charles, James, Mary, William, and Anne. After Anne’s death, and in defiance of even the vaguest adherence to dynastic succession, the crown ended up with the House of Hanover – the Georges, who give their name to the ‘Georgian’ era.j

  Reminders of the Stuarts – of Stuart history – crop up quite a lot in Persuasion. The Elliots were evidently Royalists during the English Civil War. The title – ‘dignity of baronet’ – was, we’re told, a reward granted by Charles II for their ‘exertions of loyalty’.k The ‘first year of Charles II’ is probably meant to be 1660, the year of the Restoration, but of course he became king the moment his father, Charles I, was beheaded by parliament in 1649. ‘Exertions of loyalty’ indicates the earlier date, ‘dignity of baronet’ points to the later. The double reference, the deliberate uncertainty Jane creates here, glosses over the years of parliamentary rule, but it leaves the gap visible.

  This is far from being the novel’s only reference to the instability which marked the later years of the Stuart dynasty. In 1685 the Duke of Monmouth, an illegitimate son of Charles II, attempted to seize power. He landed his invasion forces on the Cobb at Lyme – that fact, and the fossils, were the two things that everyone knew about the town.l

  One of the earliest casualties of the English Civil War, illegally tried for treason by parliament and sacrificed by Charles I, was the Earl of Strafford, whose family name was Wentworth. Jane means us not to miss this. She makes Sir Walter comment explicitly on the coincidence of names, when he affects to have forgotten all about his former neighbour, Captain Wentworth’s brother:

  ‘Wentworth? Oh! ay, – Mr Wentworth, the curate of Monkford. You misled me by the term gentleman. I thought you were speaking of some man of property: Mr Wentworth was nobody, I remember; quite unconnected; nothing to do with the Strafford family. One wonders how the names of many of our nobility become so common.’

  And the novel’s insistent reminders of dynastic instability – of dynastic failure – stretch further back. Mary, Elizabeth, and Anne are the names of the only English queens who’d ruled in their own right by the time Jane was writing. Mary I and Elizabeth were half-sisters, the two daughters of Henry VIII. Mary II – who deposed her own father – was succeeded first by her husband, William, and then by her sister Anne. Every one of these queens also failed, and failed personally, being female, in the first duty of any monarch – to secure the succession by producing healthy, legitimate heirs.m The Tudor dynasty ended with Elizabeth, and the Stuart dynasty with Anne.

  Jane knew this. Her own History of England which, incidentally, mentions Thomas Wentworth, the Earl of Strafford, reads as Stuart hagiography. It’s a mocking imitation of history books with political agendas, and it’s never entirely clear quite how serious her love of the Stuarts is. Nevertheless, she does claim to love them, especially Mary, Queen of Scots, the mother of James I of England. She professes herself shocked that the people ‘dared to think differently from their Sovereign, to forget the Adoration which as Stuarts it was their Duty to pay them’, and claims that the ‘one argument’ which will convince ‘every sensible & well disposed person’ about the rightness of Charles I’s conduct, ‘is that he was a Stuart’.

  The names Jane gives the characters in Persuasion really aren’t random; nor is the preoccupation with succession.

  There were plenty in Britain who’d objected to the House of Hanover as foreign, as not understanding the country and the people, as favouring their German dominions. The second Jacobite rebellion in 1745, which aimed to return the Stuarts to the throne in the person of Bonnie Prince Charlie, swept from Scotland through England as far south as Derby, only just over a hundred miles from London. The way Jane knits the Elliots into recent British history might make us wonder what the family’s politics were during 1745. Sir Walter’s ‘contempt’ for ‘the almost endless creations of the last century’ suggests snobbery, but perhaps also a lingering family tradition of disliking Hanoverian rule. It might even be an additional factor in his original disapproval of Frederick Wentworth as a prospective son-in-law. Frederick is a German Christian name; Frederick’s sister, Mrs Croft, is called Sophy – a name she shares with Sophia, Electress of Hanover, the woman through whom the House of Hanover traced its dubious claim to the British throne. These names, too, are undoubtedly done for effect. It isn’t just that we know Mrs Croft’s first name – this happens with a handful of Jane’s other married women – it’s that we read it over and over again, because Admiral Croft invariably (and unusually) calls her by it.

  The Elliots’ removal from Kellynch, the arrival of the Crofts and Sophia Croft’s brother, Frederick Wentworth, replays the dynastic break, the replacement of the Stuarts with the Hanoverians. But the adult Jane isn’t starry-eyed or romantic about Britain’s disinherited kings. Anne experiences ‘pain’, ‘severe’ pain, in seeing her home occupied by ‘strangers’, but the pain comes from the conviction that ‘they were gone who deserved not to stay, and that Kellynch Hall had passed into better hands than its owners’.

  And besides, dislike of the House of Hanover, doubts over its real legitimacy, were one thing; the prospect of it ending was another. And the dynasty wasn’t in great shape at the time Jane was writing Persuasion. George III had descended again into one of his periodic bouts of madness. Though he’d fathered fifteen children by his wife, he had only one legitimate grandchild, Princess Charlotte. The succession was hanging by the slenderest of threads – the life of a young woman who might easily die in childbirth (and who in fact was fated to do so, though Jane didn’t live to know it).

  Modern republicans love to point out that it would be more accurate to refer to the current British royal dynasty, the House of Windsor, by its pre-First World War name, the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In fact modern royals have a far lower proportion of foreign blood than some of their predecessors did. Princess Charlotte’s mother was from Brunswick, in Germany. Her father, the Prince Regent, later George IV, came from almost exclusively German stock.

  ‘Remember that we are English’, scolds Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey. Emma, too, eulogises her own country, its ‘English verdure, English culture, English comfort’. Readers sometimes perceive Jane’s ‘Englishness’ as equally unthinking; robust and straightforward, self-explanatory. But it’s nothing of the kind. Jane’s two naval brothers sailed all over the world. She had a French cousin, born in India; she had a sister-in-law from the West Indies, an aunt too. In the early, absurd Love and Freindship, a Spanish-born, French-educated heroine with Irish-Scottish-Italian heritage bounces around Britain. In Lesley Castle, a more serious early effort, the castle itself lies ‘two miles from Perth’, in Scotland. Another of the characters Jane created as a teenager is on the verge of embarking for India, just as one of her aunts had done in real life. In the last novel Jane ever worked on – the fragment known as Sanditon – she was about to introduce a mixed-race character.

  Mr Darcy, son of Lady Anne Fitzwilliam, nephew to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, isn’t English in any straightforward way. In Emma, Jane Fairfax’s foster-sister marries and goes to live in Ireland. Crawford is a Scottish name. So is Elliot. And since the name Walter is also markedly Scottish, ‘Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall’ is designed to seem almost aggressively un-English, long before we arrive at his Irish cousins, the Dowager Viscountess Dalrymple and the Honourable Miss Carteret. At Kellynch Hall, even the gardener isn’t English. He’s Scottish; his name is ‘Mackenzie’.

  ‘The Dalrymples’, we’re told, ‘were cousins of the Elliots’, sufficiently close to send ‘letters of ceremony’ until the accidental omission of a condolence letter put an en
d to the correspondence. Sir Walter has ‘once been in company with the late viscount but had never seen any of the rest of the family’; recall that he is 54. What is the relationship, exactly? How far does it go back? Are we to imagine an Elliot daughter, Sir Walter’s aunt, or great-aunt, marrying an Irish viscount? Was one of the ‘Marys and Elizabeths’ born in Ireland, making Sir Walter partly Irish as well as Scottish? How Irish are the Carterets, anyway? Dalrymple is another Scottish name, but Carteret sounds French. Jane’s Carterets may be a deliberate reference to the real-life Channel Island family of the same name, or we may be meant to read them more generally as descendants of the Norman invaders of the twelfth century, as some members of the Irish nobility were. On the solitary occasion Jane allows us to hear Lady Dalrymple speak, she is as mindlessly patriotic as Henry Tilney or Emma Woodhouse, but for Ireland, not England, or even Britain.