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Jane Austen Society of Australia At the seaside | Portsmouth | Southampton | Brighton | Seduction at the seaside
Jane Austen’s unerring sense of place ensured that she always chose the most appropriate and believable settings for the actions of her characters. This is certainly the case with the seductions and illicit romances which occur in her novels. Almost all of them take place at the seaside, and there were very good reasons why this should be so. Throughout the 18th century there developed in England a successful leisure industry in seaside towns. People, in holiday mode, needed entertainments and in towns such as Brighton, Ramsgate and Weymouth, assembly rooms, public promenades and concert rooms were rapidly created to satisfy this demand. These facilities enabled the leisured classes to walk, dance and mingle, making new acquaintances as they did so. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that seducers and matrimonial adventurers such as Wickham, Willoughby and Sir Edward Denham saw such towns as happy hunting grounds. Mr Knightley, with good reason, calls Weymouth and seaside towns like it, ‘the idlest haunts in the kingdom’. Young ladies with nothing to do but fall in love, were easy victims for rakish men who wanted sex out of wedlock, or who needed to catch an heiress quickly to pay off pressing debts. The dangers of such places were well known to the men and women of the Regency. To Jane Austen’s steady, moral characters or to her characters of the older generation, this reputation is a deterrent. Lady Catherine de Bourgh, we are told, ‘made a point of sending two men servants’ with her niece when she went to Ramsgate (the servants do not, however, manage to guard 15 year old Georgiana from the mercenary advances of Mr Wickham). Elizabeth Bennet warns her father of the ‘double danger’ of a watering place and a camp when Lydia plans to go to Brighton, but he is too indolent to heed her warning. For young men and women in search of excitement, it was this slightly raffish reputation which formed a large part of the attraction. Lydia fondly imagines herself surrounded by attentive officers. Lady Lesley in the juvenile story Lesley Castle goes to Brighton because it is one of her ‘favourite haunts of Dissipation’, Mrs Jennings’ daughter Charlotte stays with an uncle at Weymouth when she is searching for a husband, and the Miss Beauforts in Sanditon equip themselves with new clothes and parade their ‘shewey figures’ at public places and windows so as to attract the notice of passing gentlemen. They succeed! Arthur Parker goes out of his way ‘for the sake of a glimpse of the Miss Beauforts’. They even use props to help attract attention, seating themselves ‘at the low windows upstairs, in order to close the blinds, or open the blinds, to arrange a flower pot on the balcony, or look at nothing through a telescope’. Seduction, flirtation and romance were very much on the agenda in seaside resorts. Jane Austen’s characters follow this agenda. The fresh sea air goes to the heads of her weaker characters and several dubious relationships are formed at the seaside. Tom Bertram first meets his pleasure-seeking friend Mr Yates at Weymouth; Edward Ferrars, in a fit of youthful enthusiasm, shackles himself to Lucy Steele in the seaside town of Plymouth; Louisa Musgrove tries to jump into the arms of Captain Wentworth at Lyme, but soon ends up in the arms of Captain Benwick; and Edward Denham sees himself as seducer in residence, ‘quite in the line of the Lovelaces’, in the newly formed resort of Sanditon. Mr Elliot is heard of as travelling from Sidmouth, another resort town, when he passes through Lyme and while we are not told of his activities there, as he will soon run off with Mrs Clay we have to be suspicious! Robert Ferrars has a strong association with the Devonshire resort of Dawlish and travels there with Lucy for their honeymoon, and Wickham attempts seduction first at Ramsgate and later (successfully) at Brighton. Even morally upright Jane Fairfax forms an illicit engagement at the seaside. As this romance was ‘kept a secret from everybody – not a creature knowing it but themselves’, one is forced to wonder at the freedom the young couple must have had to walk, dance and be alone with each other, when even Colonel Campbell and his daughter have no inkling of the relationship. It would seem that Jane’s chaperonage was virtually non-existent. Bath, while not a seaside town, had the same sort of holiday atmosphere and just the same reputation for romantic opportunities. Willoughby seduces Colonel Brandon’s ward Eliza in Bath, and clearly didn’t find it hard to gain access to his willing victim as she and a school friend ‘range over the town ... making what acquaintances they chose’. Willoughby continues to visit Bath after his marriage to enjoy its various pleasures. Mrs Clay and Mr Elliot form their illicit liaison in Bath, and Isabella Thorpe visits it with the sole aim of catching a husband. Bath could not offer the ozone of sea air, but it had its own waters and it certainly had plenty of public promenades and facilities where young people could meet. Nor was it only the young – Sir Walter Elliot displays himself in Bath’s Bond Street and ogles all the passing females under the pretence of looking for a good complexion. Miss Hawkins, growing concerned at not having snared a husband in seaside Bristol, tries Bath and there succeeds in catching Mr Elton after a whirlwind courtship. Mr and Mrs Austen may well have moved to Bath with their two unmarried daughters, Cassandra and Jane, in an attempt to find them husbands, but if they did, their plans did not succeed.
These ladies have gone out on a windy morning for a walk
at a Seduction at the seaside clearly interested Jane Austen enough for her to make it a major theme in her last uncompleted work, Sanditon. We do not know exactly what she had in mind for the plot in this novel, but with a pretty unmarried heroine who has been whisked off to the seaside, with Mr Parker who longs to ‘get a young heiress’ into Sanditon to act as a bait to bachelors, with the hint of intrigue surrounding Clara Brereton, and with Sir Edward Denham, whose ‘great object in life was to be seductive’, the stage is set for some intriguing seduction at the seaside, which we will, tragically, never be able to enjoy. Susannah Fullerton
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