OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS SANDITON JANE AUSTEN was born in 1775 in the village of Steventon, Hampshire, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. The Austens were cultured but not at all rich, though one of Austen’s brothers was adopted by a wealthy relative. Other brothers followed professional careers in the church, the Navy, and banking. With the exception of two brief periods away at school, Austen and her elder sister Cassandra, her closest friend and confidante, were educated at home. Austen’s earliest surviving work, written at Steventon while still in her teens, is dedicated to her family and close female friends. Between 1801 and 1809 Austen lived in Bath, where her father died in 1805, and in Southampton. In 1809, she moved with her mother, Cassandra, and their great friend Martha Lloyd to Chawton, Hampshire, her home until her death at Winchester in 1817. During this time, Austen published four of her major novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816), visiting London regularly to oversee their publication. Her two final novels, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, were published posthumously in 1818. Sanditon, a new novel, was left unfinished at the time of her death. KATHRYN SUTHERLAND is Professor of English Literature and Senior Research Fellow, St Anne’s College, Oxford. Her recent publications include Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (2005) and, with Marilyn Deegan, Transferred Illusions: Digital Technology and the Forms of Print (2009). She is the editor of Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts: A Digital Edition (2010) and the expanded print edition, 5 vols (2018). In the Oxford World’s Classics series she has also published editions of Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet and Waverley, of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, and of Jane Austen’s Teenage Writings. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles—from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS JANE AUSTEN Sanditon Edited with an Introduction and Notes by KATHRYN SUTHERLAND Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Editorial material Kathryn Sutherland 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. 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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. CONTENTS Introduction Note on the Text Further Reading A Chronology of Jane Austen SANDITON Explanatory Notes INTRODUCTION THE scene is set. A gentleman and lady (as yet unnamed) are travelling home from London to the south coast. They leave the main road to follow a rough, unmade track. Their carriage overturns. The gentleman scrambles out, helping his companion to safety. He finds he has sprained his ankle. The reason for their diversion: he is looking for a doctor. But the track leads nowhere. There is no road; there is no doctor —dead end on two counts. As beginnings go, this is not encouraging. As the beginning of a novel by Jane Austen, it upsets all our expectations, much like that overturned carriage. We know how her novels open, and it is not like this. Austen’s openings are remarkably similar: biographical, descriptive, and static—a snapshot or tableau introducing a named family or family member, captured at a particular moment in their history before the action starts. Not only does this new novel open with movement, that movement is hazardous and observed with forensic detachment. Warm biographical detail is noticeably withheld. In its place, the reader is offered a police incident report: ‘A Gentleman and Lady travelling from Tunbridge’, ‘The accident happened’, ‘their Driver’, ‘the said House’, ‘the said Proprietor’ (pp. 3– 4). Only one paragraph in, we know that Sanditon will be unlike any other novel Austen wrote. Another gentleman, Mr Heywood, a farmer, witnesses the incident and comes to the assistance of the travellers. They spend the next fortnight, while the ankle heals, among the numerous Heywood family before continuing their journey, taking with them for an extended visit Miss Charlotte Heywood, ‘a very pleasing young woman of two and twenty’ (p. 14). By now we are into Chapter 2, the gentleman has become Mr Parker and the lady his wife, Mrs Parker, and his character, so enigmatically introduced, has been pretty much decided: he is ‘an Enthusiast’ (p. 11). Mr Parker’s enthusiasm (a word with a keener edge then than now) borders upon delusion and is certainly obsessive in nature. His every waking moment, all his energy, and his fortune are dedicated to Sanditon, his home and the fishing village he means to transform into a fashionable health resort. Sanditon is to Mr Parker ‘a second wife and four Children … hardly less Dear—and certainly more engrossing’ (p. 12). The seaside holiday was invented in the eighteenth century, with resorts springing up along England’s extensive coastline, from Blackpool and Scarborough in the north to Brighton and Lyme Regis in the south, to take advantage of the fashion for salt-water bathing. Their attractions were boosted by influential treatises like Dr Richard Russell’s Dissertation Concerning the Use of Sea Water, published in Latin in 1750 and quickly issued in English. Demand for his treatments (he recommended drinking as well as bathing in sea water for a range of glandular ailments) encouraged Russell to build in Brighton in the mid-1750s a substantial residence for the reception of patients.1 By the early 1800s, medical and pseudo-medical books and pamphlets advised sea air and bathing for a surprising variety of diseases—Mr Parker’s faith in their being ‘nearly infallible … for every Disorder, of the Stomach, the Lungs or the Blood’ (p. 13) scarcely exaggerates—and every tourist guidebook had its promotional paragraphs in praise of the unique health benefits of one particular resort or another. John Anderson, Physician to and Director of the General Sea-Bathing Infirmary at Margate, assured his readers, after extensive research among local guides, of bathing being considered ‘a certain specific’ ‘for the bite of a mad dog and other rabid animals’, warning that the patient might bark ‘much like a dog’ when first dipped into the sea.2 As William Cowper, Austen’s favourite poet, put it in 1782: ‘all impatient of dry land, agree | With one consent to rush into the sea’.3 By 1800 seaside holidays were here to stay. Sanditon is a fictitious location on the Sussex coast, a rival in Mr Parker’s besotted view to the longer-established neighbouring resorts of Brighton, Eastbourne, and Worthing. By the late eighteenth century, arguments for the superiority of the Sussex coast—its shelter from northerly winds, the luminosity of its air, and its sunny aspect—were well rehearsed. This is not the first time Austen has imagined her characters by the sea. In her fourth novel, Emma (1816), fearful, complaining Mr Woodhouse disputes with his elder daughter Isabella the pros and cons of two resorts—South End (on the Thames Estuary in Essex) and Cromer (in north-east Norfolk)—for health and sea bathing, their conversation only serving to make Emma, who has never seen the sea, ‘envious and miserable’ (ch. 12). We learn here, too, that it was at Weymouth, a south-coast resort, fashionable since George III patronized it in 1789, that Jane Fairfax first made the acquaintance of Frank Churchill. In Weymouth, Jane narrowly escaped drowning (ch. 19). In Persuasion, finished only months before Sanditon, and published posthumously in 1818, the seaside again proves dangerous when Louisa Musgrove’s foolish leap from the stone breakwater or Cobb at Lyme Regis in Dorset leaves her concussed (ch.