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Jane Austen herself was fascinated from a child by crime, particularly murder and suicide, which as the Christian daughter of a clergyman she knew to be the gravest sins; but from childhood too she had a gallows humour that did not change with age. Fullerton suggests that it was her way of dealing with horrors. But she was not unmoved by suffering and Fullerton believes that Mansfield Park is primarily a novel about imprisonment — often false imprisonment: the imprisonment by class, gender, marriage or male tyranny. It was after finishing Mansfield Park that Austen paid a visit to Canterbury jail with her magistrate brother, though she says maddeningly little about it.
Another brother was Henry, who set up a cage in his village for the incarceration of felons as an alternative to the stocks. Jane Austen presumably saw it as she must have seen corpses at country crossroads on her walks, their rotting flesh held together by a macabre suit of armour. Men, women and children over seven could be hanged. Fullerton points out that women could be burned at the stake for murdering a husband. During Austen’s lifetime capital offences rose from 160 to 225. You could be hanged for stealing apples or for damaging an ornamental shrub or for consorting with gypsies. This makes silly Harriet Smith’s encounter with the gypsies in the lanes of Highbury, after which she fainted, less of a comedy than is usually thought.
Fullerton might have made more perhaps of the separate worlds of men and women. Jane Austen we know never let two men converse alone in any novel because what they said would be unknown to her, and considering their private lives perhaps it was just as well. Her brothers in the navy, two of whom became admirals, were able to authorise floggings, ‘running-the-gauntlet’ (a form of torture) and executions. All were routine and universal. But it was one of her admiral brothers who was called before the Admiralty to answer allegations about excessive cruelty aboard his ship. Fullerton points out that Mrs Croft of Persuasion, who insisted on sailing in her husband’s ship, must have known about the things that went on, even if Jane Austen didn’t.
There is a ruthless streak in the Austen family, a middle-class code that there are unpleasant things we do not discuss. There was after all the Austen brother who was in some way not quite right and who was whisked out of the parsonage into a foster home and not, so far as I know, mentioned again. He must have been healthy, for he outlived the whole family. And we can’t forget that Mrs Austen did not accompany her dying daughter on her sad journey to Winchester; nor that Mrs Leigh Perrot is said to have been the model for the dreadful Mrs Norris.
And Jane could herself be pretty savage. ‘Murderous thoughts,’ says Fullerton, ‘murderous intentions and murderous hopes abound in the mature novels, often in the most surprising places and they inevitably tell us a great deal about the characters that harbour them.’ But perhaps this is an exaggeration? Isn’t Jane Austen more intrigued by moral failure than by the penal code or criminal intent? Julia Bertram commits adultery because she is spoilt and over-praised and thought able to do no wrong by her aunt. If the book had been set in Scotland she would have gone to prison for it. Wickham goes off with Lydia Bennet because he is a rotten cad and would have left her ruined in London if Mr Darcy had not come roaring down. Austen does not seem to have thought that by running away from his regiment Wickham faced being shot.
Nor does it occur to her that she herself once faced hanging when as a young thing she scribbled over two pages of her father’s parish registers announcing her several marriages to imaginary men. Three pages and she’d have been on the way to the long drop for ‘defacing church property’.
You never know what you are going to read next in this highly informative and original book.
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