Austen and Abolition

Celebrated for her romantic plots and social satire, Jane Austen’s novels largely avoid direct engagement with the turbulent political issues of her time, such as the transatlantic slave trade. However, slavery is not entirely absent from her work. It appears on the margins, through subtle allusions and contextual details that indicate that Austen may have had some sympathy with the Abolutionist movement. Robert Morrison explores this theme in recognition of Black History Month. Image above shows Crystal Clarke as Georgiana Lambe in Sanditon season 3; Image: Courtesy of Joss Barratt, © Red Planet Ltd

Slavery is not a topic commonly associated with Jane Austen. Her name is far more likely to evoke thoughts of social comedy, provincial domesticity, romantic courtship, and reassuringly love-conquers-all endings. Yet there are dark misgivings and Gothic anxieties in all of Austen’s novels, and one of the great merits of her art is the way in which she is able to blend these two impulses, weaving social realism through fairy-tale romance, and wish fulfilment around incisive cultural critique. Austen did not put slavery at the centre of any of her novels. But the issue is clearly visible on the periphery of several of them.

Britain formally outlawed the slave trade in 1807, thanks in large part to years of vigorous campaigning by leading religiously-inspired abolitionists such as Hannah More and William Wilberforce, both of whom lived in Great Pulteney Street in Bath when Austen herself resided just around the corner at 4 Sydney Place, her home from 1801 to 1805. In 1808, another key abolitionist, Thomas Clarkson, published his pious History of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, which Austen read with approval. All six of her published novels appeared in the decade that followed while Wilberforce, Clarkson, More and many others continued their fight against slavery, pushing hard to ensure that every effort was made to enforce the new legislation of 1807, urging other countries to follow Britain’s lead, and organising support for the abolition of slavery itself, finally achieved in 1833, the year of both More’s and Wilberforce’s death.

Austen’s family was certainly conscious of the issue of slavery. In 1760, her father, the Rev. George Austen, became a co-trustee of the marriage settlement of his former student James Langford Nibbs, who owned a sugar plantation in Antigua. But George Austen’s role was essentially a legal formality: he was charged with helping to administer the disbursement of the estate and its profits after Nibbs died. He played no part in the actual running of the plantation and it is almost certain that he did not benefit from its revenues. Three of Jane Austen’s brothers, however, took a more determined stance against slavery. Most notably, Austen’s brother Henry, a banker-turned-clergyman, was a delegate at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840.

Some of Jane Austen’s own opinions on slavery show the impress of her age. Like several other writers who spoke out on the issue without firsthand knowledge of the conditions in places such as Jamaica, she equated slavery abroad with various forms of slavery at home, downplaying the evil by making it seem as bad in Britain as it was in the West Indies. In Emma, Jane Fairfax links the ‘slave-trade’ and the ‘governess-trade’, which are ‘widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on’, but ‘as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies’. Such comparisons ignore ­the harrowing differences between women in Britain subjugated and mistreated based on incipient notions of female autonomy and selfhood and the centuries-old African slave trade, which was founded on the conviction that racial others were sub-human or even non-human.

Austen did not condemn the profits that flowed to those in Britain who had investments in West Indian sugar plantations. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot’s old school friend Mrs Smith is a widow who lives in Bath, a city with strong connections to the slave trade, and home for 20 years to William Beckford, novelist, art collector, and politician, whose phenomenal prosperity came from Jamaican sugar estates. Mrs Smith, on the other hand, lives in Westgate Buildings, far down the social hierarchies from Beckford, but with the assistance of Anne’s husband Captain Wentworth she is able to recover property in the West Indies that belonged to her dead husband, greatly ameliorating her financial situation. Austen seems to regard the source of Mrs Smith’s new wealth as the lesser of two evils. ‘Single Women’, she observed in a letter of 1817, ‘have a dreadful propensity for being poor’.

Similarly, in Mansfield Park, the Christian gentleman Sir Thomas Bertram has financial interests in the West Indies, and early in the novel he travels to his slave-labour plantation in Antigua ‘for the better arrangement of his affairs’, which toward the end of his two-year stay are ‘prosperously rapid’. What did Sir Thomas do in Antigua? Reorganise his estate in response to the new legislation of 1807? Look into the possibilities of buying more property? Put down some kind of slave revolt? Did Austen model Sir Thomas on her father’s student James Langford Nibbs, who also owned a sugar estate in Antigua? She does not tell us. When Sir Thomas returns to Mansfield Park, his reserved but observant niece Fanny Price asks him ‘about the slave-trade’. His response: ‘dead silence’. Perhaps he is quiet out of a sense of guilt, or instead because of an imperturbably clear conscience. Many commentators have felt that Fanny’s own piety inclines her toward the abolitionism of Christian conservatives such as Wilberforce and More.

In normalising Miss Lambe’s status … Austen challenges racial prejudice and offers a glimpse of a society that … in some instances … warmly accepts people from different cultures, countries, and races

Sanditon is Austen’s most provocative and progressive treatment of the many issues surrounding slavery. Left incomplete at her death, the novel features a 17-year-old heiress from the West Indies named Miss Lambe, who is ‘half mulatto’ [now considered offensive – the term was historically used to describe someone of mixed race]. The introduction of a young woman of colour into the world of Sanditon has caught many readers by surprise. But Austen herself is untroubled. She calmly folds Miss Lambe into the action of the novel, and no character in it expresses surprise or alarm at her arrival. She has a maid of her own. She is given ‘the best room in the lodgings’ at Sanditon. She is ‘always of the first consequence in every plan’ of her chaperone, Mrs Griffiths. Miss Lambe attracts attention because of her wealth – an inevitability in an Austen novel – and Lady Denham is quick to view her as a potential wife for her rakish, impecunious nephew Sir Edward Denham, Baronet of Denham Park. In normalising Miss Lambe’s status within the English community she is satirising, Austen challenges racial prejudice and offers a glimpse of a society that at least in some instances warmly accepts people from different cultures, countries, and races.

Not all Austen’s references to slavery have worn well. But in Sanditon she appears remarkably modern. The novel opens up questions about diversity, inclusivity, foreignness, and colonialism, and lays the foundation for much more recent cultural productions such as the Austen-era Netflix series Bridgerton, which features a Black man as the Duke of Hastings and a Black woman as Queen Charlotte, and which provokes similarly pressing questions about social elites, interracial relationships, cultural stereotypes, and historical injustices.

Austen’s comments on slavery are brief but they often illuminate both her world and ours.