ANOTHER useful false positive of Byrne correcting a concealing false negative of Le Faye: the truth re: James Beckford Wildman, Fanny Knight’s unliterary, slave-plantation- & Chilham Castle-inheriting beau

 Those Janeites who followed the big to-do in late 2011 about the discovery of a portrait that some claimed was of Jane Austen herself….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/12/ps-re-three-faces-of-jane.html

….may recall the BBC special which included a lively debate in which two of the three talking heads (debating the pros and cons on the portrait’s being JA or not) were Deirdre Le Faye, of course the grand old lady of Austen biography, and Paula Byrne, the brash, unconventional newcomer to Austen biography in 2013, making waves with her fresh approach in The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things.

In regard to the radically different approaches of Byrne and Le Faye to Austen biography, last summer I posted…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/07/better-false-positives-of-paula-byrne.html

…under Subject Line “Better the false positives of Paula Byrne about Jane Austen, than the false negatives of Delrdre Le Faye”. In that post, I quoted from a post I wrote earlier in 2013 about Jane Austen’s Letter 105, as follows:  “…the good work that Byrne has done…makes up for her sloppiness on other points---it's easy for an informed reader to correct a false positive, but there's no easy cure for a reader to correct a false negative (as to which there must be more than a hundred in Le Faye’s editions of the Letters, and in her Family Record)! [E.g.,] here is what Paula Byrne has to say about the Hampson family in her very recent bio of JA:

“[Jane] Austen was intimately connected with the slave trade and plantation owners. In her own family, there were the Hampson and the Walter cousins on her father’s side…Her closest connection to a plantation family was through her father’s family...The Hampson family had a plantation in Jamaica, and two of William’s sons were sent there….In other words, Jane Austen had a cousin twice removed who was called Sir Thomas and who owned a plantation in Jamaica.” END QUOTE FROM BYRNE  

…Isn’t it very curious, though, that Le Faye referred to him as a republican, but completed omitted any mention whatsoever (even in the detailed Biographical Index entry for the Hampson family) that he was a plantation owner? It’s hard (no, impossible) to believe that Le Faye was unaware of the Jamaica connection, and yet, Byrne appears to be the first JA biographer to present this crucial fact to the Janeite world….a reader of Letter 105 who could instead have been informed by a footnote that [Hampson] owned a slave plantation in Jamaica, would reasonably speculate that what JA disliked about the 7th baronet was his owning a slave plantation--and that would especially be the case if he also was alerted that JA was right in the midst of writing Mansfield Park as she wrote Letter 105!” END QUOTE FROM MY EARLIER POST

The most important sentence I wrote, above, is “It’s hard (no, impossible) to believe that Le Faye was unaware of the Jamaica connection….” And since Le Faye remains 100 times more influential in Janeite circles than Byrne, unawareness of that unseemly intimate Austen family connection to Jamaican slavery still persists among pretty much all Janeites even today!

When I wrote the above last July, I never imagined that within a year I’d be back writing about a second,  even more egregious example of where Byrne, although guilty of a factual error, nonetheless highlighted a crucial disturbing fact that Le Faye had (exactly as with Hampson-slavery data) downplayed & ignored, regarding a much larger Jamaican slavery plantation connection to Jane Austen’s family—this time, in the generation after Jane Austen’s!

My latest tale of these two strange bedfellows of Austen biography began last week when I saw the film Belle. The next day, my friend Steve Wise, who really liked the film (as I did), told me that Paula Byrne, of all people, had just published a companion bio to the film, entitled (naturally) Belle. When I browsed in Byrne’s book at amazon.com, I saw two points of great interest to me.

First, at p. 245, Byrne wrote:  “The shadow story of Mansfield Park is slavery….”  - I found it personally gratifying to see my own pet phrase “shadow story” being used so casually by Byrne, even if she did not acknowledge (and perhaps was unaware of) my having coined that very phrase vis a vis JA’s novels a decade ago, and my having used it a thousand times since then.

Second, and to the point of this post, at p. 247, Byrne presented the following discussion of William Bedford (1760-1844), who was, of course, in his youth the richest person in England, being heir to the most lucrative slave plantation in the British West Indies, and also famously the author of the extravagant Gothic novel Vathek:

[Byrne]: “The man Beckford principally blamed for his ruin was James Wildman, whom he called an ‘infernal rascal’. Wildman managed Beckford’s plantations in Jamaica, and purchased the ‘Quebec’ plantation from him. Beckford became convinced that he had swindled him of his fortune. Wildman fell in love with a woman called Fanny Knight, who was Jane Austen’s favourite niece. Fanny entreated him to read her aunt’s novels (one wonders what he made of Mansfield Park), and Jane wrote, teasingly, that she would like Fanny to live on his estate, Chilham Castle in Kent. Fanny would have become a plantation mistress, but in the end she refused Wildman. He was eventually forced to sell Chilham Castle because of his falling income after the emancipation of the slaves.” END QUOTE FROM BYRNE

When I read that, something was clearly off in Byrne’s assertion that the unliterary suitor for Fanny Knight at Godmersham in 1813-17 was the same man who had swindled the much older and immensely rich William Beckford out of his fortune. Sure enough, five minutes on Google confirmed that it was the father of Fanny’s beau who was Beckford’s ‘infernal rascal’. In a nutshell, the Wildman brothers of that elder generation were attorneys and agents who collectively handled William Beckford’s vast holdings for him, and then, as he believed, robbed him blind. And Fanny’s suitor’s middle name was Beckford because William Beckford was his godfather!

So Byrne hadn’t done her historical homework carefully--had she done a little more digging, as I did this past weekend, and had she considered how often first born sons had the same names as their fathers back then, she’d have realized she had identified the wrong James Wildman as Beckford’s “infernal rascal”.

But my key point here is that Byrne’s sloppiness is far, far outweighed by Byrne’s courageous going for the intellectual jugular once again, just as she had done with the Hampson-Jamaica-slavery matrix, in connecting the Austen family, with only one degree of separation, to Jamaican plantation slavery, this time with William Beckford via the Wildman family.

I am certain that Jane Austen must have been well aware of this connection, and that is why I now believe that JA in particular covertly alluded to the Beckford-Wildman fraud-drenched client-attorney relationship via the characters of Mr. Shepherd vis a vis Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion.  I’ve long  believed that Mr. Shepherd maneuvered Sir Walter out of Kellynch Hall while hoping his daughter Mrs. Clay would snare the old narcissist’s heart.

And it also makes it seem much more likely to me, that the Elliot fortune had originally been made from West Indies investments which later went sour—and perhaps Mr. Smith’s West Indies connection is not unconnected thereto.

And that is all in addition, and complementary, to my long-standing interpretation of  Mr. Shepherd as a representation of the unscrupulous attorney Hanson who, with his sadistic daughter, took such egregious advantage of his weak-minded client Lord Portsmouth, all of which we know Jane Austen knew all about.

And…JA being aware of the Beckford-Wildman scenario also puts a whole different slant on JA’s comments to Fanny about Fanny’s putting young Wildman on the spot, pushing him to give his opinions about JA’s writing. As Byrne suggested, it would indeed have been interesting to know what young Wildman thought of Mansfield Park, given its slavery shadow story. And it might be one reason why JA advised  Fanny not to mention Persuasion to Wildman—i.e., might he have recognized his own father in the character of Mr. Shepherd?

In any event, because of Byrne’s above quoted disclosure, and the above well-established and prominent historical facts about Beckford and the Wildman brothers, it is simply mind-boggling to me that Le Faye’s biographical index entry for Fanny’s young suitor, who is the “star” of two of JA’s late letters to Fanny, omits any mention whatsoever of Beckford’s anger toward James Wildman, Sr., notorious scandals, and indeed never mentions the connection of the Wildman family to the super-famous William Beckford. Here, see for yourselves:

“Wildman family of Chilham Castle, nr. Godmersham. James Wildman (1747-1816) purchased Chilham Castle 1792; his son James-Beckford Wildman (1788-1867) married 1820 Mary Anne Lushington, and had 10 children.When he succeeded his father in1816 the estate was worth L20,000/yr., but ‘overgenerous provision for members of the family’ combined with ‘mortgages raised to provide funds to work the family estates in the West Indies by machinery, after the emancipation of the slaves’ meant that the property had to be sold in 1861; Mr. Wildman subsequently lived at Yotes Court, near Maidstone, until his death. ….”

As you can see, Le Faye only mentions the Wildman slavery connection obliquely, and with much less prominence than James Beckford’s (trivial, from an Austenian perspective) marital data. I’d wager that even Janeites who have read JA’s letters carefully, as we’ve been doing, would have no idea whatsoever as to where James Beckford Wildman’s money came from, or that he inherited Chilham Castle after his father’s death within a year of JA’s last correspondence with niece Fanny about him. And indeed, no one in either Janeites or Austen L has ever previously mentioned young Mr. Wildman as being heir to a family which made its fortune from feeding at the vast financial trough of West Indian slave plantations.

In fact, and ironically, no Austen biographer prior to Byrne ever took note of the Beckford/Wildman slavery connection to Fanny Knight, as far as I can tell, and the only Austen scholar who did take note of it was Stephanie Barron---fictionally---when she wrote the following dry commentary for her fictional sleuthing Jane Austen in Barron’s recent Jane and the Canterbury Tale: Being a Jane Austen Mystery:

“Mr. James Wildman amassed his wealth in trade-through the management of a vast sugar plantation in Jamaica, owned by one William Beckford. Mr. Beckford is grown infamous in the Polite World, I understand, for having seduced at a tender age the son and heir of an earl—and for being forced to flee the country with his wife in the wake of the subsequent scandal….It is Beckford’s name that young James Beckford Wildman claims—Beckford having stood  as the boys godfather. We may assume the choice of both name and patron to signify gratitude on MR. Wildman Sr.’s part, rather than any approbation of William Beckford’s tastes or habits. The amassing of a considerable fortune must be said to sweep all prudish reserve aside—and Mr. Wildman owed his present comfort entirely to Beckford’s Jamaican plantation. He managed the Quebec Estate, as the plantation was known, so well, in fact—and Beckford proved so profligate in his building and furnishing of his absurd pile at Fonthill Abbey—that Wildman was presently able to relieve his illustrious employer’s straitened circumstances, by purchasing the plantation outright; and at a very good price, if rumour is believed.  The revenues from Jamaican sugar proved so lucrative that Mr. Wildman was gradually able to put enough by to purchase Chilham Castle when his son was but four years old. The Wildman income is thought to be in the neighbourhood of  twenty thousand a year…. “

The bottom line is that if not for Byrne, I’d never have known about this hugely interesting factual matrix, and so I look forward to her next false positive, because it really is easy to correct a sloppy mistake, but it’s very difficult to even recognize an error of omission, with which Le Faye’s writing is replete. Just add this to the very long list of concealments and omissions by Le Faye which, in aggregate, have hidden so many fruitful lines of inquiry into the shadow stories of, and allusive sources for, JA’s novels.  

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Amazing Convergence & Synchronicity of Evidence re Marianne Dashwood as Dido Elizabeth Belle from the EAST Indies!

Ellen Moody wrote: “I assume Diana Birchall will not mind if I inform all that she told me of a paper she heard by Anne Mellor where Mellor argues that Elizabeth (Belle Dido) Lindsay was not part African (negroid in genetic background) but Indian (South Asian). Look again at the painting (one of our main sources of evidence for the existence of this young woman):

http://reveriesunderthesignofausten.wordpress.com/2014/05/23/belle-a-jarring-costume-drama/

Her features are European-Caucasian as seen in South Asian people; her father was in India.

It's been turned into a story that is about negroid slavery and it is but the girl at the center is not herself part African. She would probably have had an easier time marrying into British whites because of this. British people then (and we see it in the novels of Austen too) had a way of

calling anyone not fair (blue-eyed, blonde, light skin) "black" without distinguishing real gene pools.”

What amazing convergence of evidence, and synchronicity, among the following:

ONE: I posted a month ago about Marianne Dashwood with her brown skin and dark eyes as being a representation of Dido Elizabeth Belle:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/05/her-skin-was-very-brown-is-marianne.html

TWO: Just the other day, after seeing the film Belle,  I followed up to that earlier post with one about, among other things, Marianne as "the nicest little black bitch" Sir John Dashwood refers to:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/06/more-about-marianne-dashwood-as.html

THREE: Then just yesterday my friend Linda Walker, author of this very recent article...

http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol34no1/walker.html

“Jane Austen, the Second Anglo-Mysore War, and Colonel Brandon’s Forcible Circumcision: A Rereading of Sense and Sensibility”

...and I were chatting about my two above linked blog posts, and she responded to my posts with the very intriguing suggestion that perhaps Marianne’s brown skin was a marker of her being of East (and not West) Indian descent.

So now….

FOUR: To read Ellen’s post reporting on Mellor’s suggestion that Dido herself might have been of East Indian descent closes the circle with, as I said, incredible convergence of evidence and synchronicity!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

More About Marianne Dashwood as the biracial Dido Elizabeth Belle and "the nicest little black bitch"

After posting this morning about additional “Dido” allusions that JA hid in plain sight in S&S, it occurred to me to follow up by searching in the usual Austen archives and databases for prior comments and insights about Sir John  Middleton’s reference to “the nicest little black bitch of  a pointer”, which I claimed was actually a crude, racist and sexist, coded reference to Marianne Dashwood as a biracial “Dido”, in the same vein as Governor Hutchinson’s crude, racist comments about Dido Elizabeth Belle.

And when I did, I was not entirely surprised to find that the author of the one and only intriguing prior perspective on that passage was Anielka, who in 2011 in Janeites wrote the following: 

“Even Sir John describing John Willoughby "what sort of a young man is he?" "As good a kind of fellow as ever lived, I assure you. A very decent shot, and there is not a bolder rider in England.......and has got the nicest little black bitch of a pointer I ever ......" suddenly reminds me that at the end of the book when Sir John tells Willoughby that Marianne is nearly dying he ends the conversation with reminding Willoughby of a pointer puppy he promised him, of all the things that might be playing on both men's minds whilst Marianne was supposedly ringing down the final curtain, hunting continues to predominate.
"Sir John Middleton,.......told me that Marianne Dashwood was dying of a putrid fever .... when we parted......he reminded me of an old promise about a pointer puppy." I wonder if some day Willoughby was to be similarly reminded of his promise that Queen Mab should receive Marianne at Delaford? “

Anielka subsequently went into a detailed analysis of shadowy subtext in S&S regarding a female dog’s gestation, which I found ingenious but not entirely convincing. But what I did immediately note was Anielka picking up in those comments on a third passage in S&S about Willoughby and hunting dogs, and one which moreover is explicitly, as Anielka suggests, tagged to the first one.

So, now looking at all three of these passages in S&S as if Sir John and Willoughby are speaking in code, and the “black bitch of a pointer”  is actually a human female---specifically, Marianne Dashwood—it casts extremely suspicious light on (1) Sir John’s initial offer to the Dashwood women of a place to live at Barton Cottage, and Sir John’s making a big deal about  Brandon  being interested in Marianne, and (2) Marianne’s winding up marrying Brandon after having no interest in him whatsoever when she first meets and gets to know him.

Among Janeites, I think it safe to say that the eventual marriage of Marianne and Brandon is, along with that of Fanny and Edmund, the least romantic, and least convincing ending among JA’s 6 novels—paling in contrast to the romance that oozes out of the other 4. So, the idea of Marianne being in some sense sold to Brandon is not coming completely from left field, as we Americans say—it fits, in an oddly disturbing way.

And specifically, I am suggesting that Jane Austen is implying that Marianne, like a specially bred pointer—and like an African slave--- has been promised, as in “sold”, to a  very interested buyer —and could that buyer be Colonel Brandon? And, perhaps, Marianne in the end sells herself to save her family from poverty? 

And finally, here is what I wrote a year ago in my post about the veiled allusion to As You Like It in S&S, in which, without realizing the racial subtext, I detected Jane Austen emulating Shakespeare’s Orlando’s drawing a parallel between himself and a farm animal (a metaphor we know JA used in her letters to describe pregnant wives):

“Shortly said, we have Orlando making the same symbolic connection between beasthood and victimization, that I claim is present in all of Jane Austen’s novels, in 1.1 of AYLI:

“for my part, he keeps me rustically at home, or, to speak more properly, stays me here at home unkept; for call you that keeping for a gentleman of my birth, that differs not from the stalling of an ox? His horses are bred better; for, besides that they are fair with their feeding, they are taught their manage, and to that end riders dearly hired: but I, his brother, gain nothing under him but growth...””
And now look at the resonance of Orlando’s complaint to Sir John’s conflating canine female with human female:  [‘black bitch of a pointer’  etc]” 

When the racist subtext is factored in, the metaphor is much more powerful, because JA is clearly bringing into the theme of female subjugation in S&S the subliminal imagery of African slaves, who of course were (tragically) human beings in her world who were LITERALLY bought and sold like nonhuman animals.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Willoughby never “DIED O-f a broken heart” like….DIDO; instead he took solace in his “little black bitch of a pointer”—Jane Austen’s Veiled Critique of Racism

I finally saw the new film Belle, a fictionalized account of the real life Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, the biracial great-niece of Lord Mansfield, and I may in the next few days post some additional reactions. Suffice for now to say that I enjoyed Belle very much as a film in its own right, and would give it a strong thumbs up. It was moving, well-written and well-acted, especially by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, playing Belle, and Tom Wilkinson, playing Lord Mansfield.

But, as an Austen scholar with a particular interest in the way Jane Austen alluded to Dido Elizabeth Belle in the characters of both Fanny Price and Marianne Dashwood, I did have purist reservations about its significant divergences from historical fact on several key points (making Dido the heiress and her white “sister” Elizabeth dowerless; turning Dido’s real life husband,  John Davinier, into an abolitionist lawyer-idealist behaving suspiciously like the real life Granville Sharp who was the lawyer who brought and won the landmark 1772 Somersett slavery case decided by Lord Mansfield; portraying Lord Mansfield in a more favorable light as a reforming jurist than was factual) .

All the same, again, the film worked really well on its own terms, and mine are quibbles of little interest to most of those who would want to see the film. It is a worthy film.

But now, back to the Jane Austen aspects of Belle. There is a Chinese Box sort of nesting going on with the interaction of Jane Austen’s allusions to both the historical Dido Elizabeth Belle, and also to the classically literary, and also possibly historical, Dido Queen of Carthage, whom Aeneas famously abandons, inducing her to kill herself in wild grief.

In that regard, in the aftermath of seeing Belle, it occurred to me last night to briefly revisit my post of one month ago….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/05/her-skin-was-very-brown-is-marianne.html

…in which I bolstered  my 2011 post picking up on Cathy Janofsky’s original suggestion that Marianne Dashwood was based in part on the dark-skinned Dido Queen of Carthage in Ovid’s Heroides (in turn a feminist version of Vergil’s Dido).

That is so Austenesque, for JA to allude to both Didos, picking up on their parallel names as an opportunity to take note of parallels between the lives of Queen of Carthage and the great-niece of Lord Mansfield, and JA’s feminist take on both.

Specifically, I wondered whether JA might, in her characteristic authorial way, have given additional clues to her readers of her allusions to the two Didos with some clever hidden wordplay into the text of either Mansfield Park or Sense & Sensibility.

It took me a few minutes to find the following passage, at the end of S&S, in which, it is obvious to me, JA ironically paints Willoughby as a Dido who wasn’t tragic, in much the same deflating ironical way that JA repeatedly undercuts the idea of Catherine  Morland as a heroine in Northanger Abbey:

“Willoughby could not hear of [Marianne’s] marriage without a pang; and his punishment was soon afterwards complete in the voluntary forgiveness of Mrs. Smith, who, by stating his marriage with a woman of character, as the source of her clemency, gave him reason for believing that had he behaved with honour towards Marianne, he might at once have been happy and rich. That his repentance of misconduct, which thus brought its own punishment, was sincere, need not be doubted;—nor that he long thought of Colonel Brandon with envy, and of Marianne with regret. But that he was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or DIED Of a broken heart, must not be depended on—for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.”

As my Subject Line revealed, it is JA’s little joke that Willoughby never “died of” a broken heart, the way DIDO Queen of Carthage did! Instead, he finds solace in hunting, and so is it just a coincidence that much earlier in S&S, we read the following exchange about hunting?:

"And yet two thousand a-year is a very moderate income," said Marianne. "A family cannot well be maintained on a smaller. I am sure I am not extravagant in my demands. A proper establishment of servants, a carriage, perhaps two, and hunters, cannot be supported on less.

Elinor smiled again, to hear her sister describing so accurately their future expenses at Combe Magna.

"Hunters!" repeated Edward—"but why must you have hunters? Every body does not hunt."

Marianne coloured as she replied, "But most people do."

Do you see the two bits of wordplay near the end, that point to Dido? The first is “EveryboDY DO-es not hunt” è DY-DO è DIDO; the second is that Marianne COLOURED—and of course, “coloured” was a common term for black people, so it fits with Marianne’s brown skin. Taken together, we have what I think is, in all of the above context, a clear multi-part allusion to the biracial Dido Elizabeth Belle!

And now, finally I am wondering for the first time, in light of all the above, about the following passage just after Marianne’s romantic first encounter with Willoughby:

"And is that all you can say for him?" cried Marianne, indignantly. "But what are his manners on more intimate acquaintance? What his pursuits, his talents, and genius?"

Sir John was rather puzzled.

"Upon my soul," said he, "I do not know much about him as to all THAT. But he is a pleasant, good humoured fellow, and has got the nicest little black bitch of a pointer I ever saw. Was she out with him today?"

But Marianne could no more satisfy him as to the colour of Mr. Willoughby's pointer, than he could describe to her the shades of his mind.”

Oh, my! How audacious was Jane Austen in that comment by Sir John, which always sounded strange and disturbing to my modern ears. But now, when viewed through the lens of Marianne Dashwood as a representation of the biracial Dido Elizabeth Belle, it’s clear that Jane Austen very much intended to disturb us about casual racism!!

I am eerily reminded of the racist comments that Hutchinson, the Royal Governor Massachusetts Colony, made about Dido Elizabeth Belle’s influence on Lord Mansfield’s personal life and judicial philosophy:

“A BLACK came in after dinner and sat with the ladies and after coffee, walked with the company in the gardens, one of the young ladies having her arm within the other. She had a very high cap and her wool was much frizzled in her neck, but not enough to answer the large curls now in fashion. She is neither handsome nor genteel- pert enough. I knew her history before, but My Lord mentioned it again. Sir John Lindsay having taken her mother prisoner in a Spanish vessel, brought her to England where she was delivered of this girl, of which she was then with child, and which was taken care of by Lord M., and has been educated by his family. He calls her Dido, which I suppose is all the name she has. He knows he has been reproached for showing fondness for her — I dare say not criminal.

A few years ago there was a cause before his Lordship bro’t by a Black for recovery of his liberty. A Jamaica planter being asked what judgement his Ldship would give? “No doubt” he answered “He will be set free, for Lord Mansfield keeps a Black in his house which governs him and the whole family.”

She is a sort of Superintendant over the dairy, poultry yard, etc, which we visited. And she was called upon by my Lord every minute for this thing and that, and shewed the greatest attention to everything he said.”

Wow….and finally, Hutchinson’s ugly comment about Dido’s “frizzled” hair not being fashionable also makes me wonder about Frank Churchill’s comments about Jane Fairfax’s hair:

"I believe I have been very rude; but really Miss Fairfax has done her hair in so odd a way—so very odd a way—that I cannot keep my eyes from her. I never saw any thing so outree!—Those curls!—This must be a fancy of her own. I see nobody else looking like her!—I must go and ask her whether it is an Irish fashion. Shall I?—Yes, I will—I declare I will—and you shall see how she takes it;—whether she colours."

….whether she COLOURS….oh my…..

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter