The two previous books Jane Austen wrote, Persuasion and Emma, both concern landowners and stewardship and subtly connect them with national stability. Given the criticism of Persuasion’s Sir Walter Eliot as a poor landlord who lets out his ancestral home, and praise for Mr Knightley, the good, traditional one in Emma, it might seem that Mr Parker, who has abandoned and rented out his family estate, set like Donwell Abbey in a sheltered valley (‘a hole’ Mr Parker calls it with ominous disrespect), is in the line of spendthrift Sir Walter.
Without a conclusive ending, where ideological clarity is often found and subversive tendencies summarily reined in, we cannot be certain. Perhaps Mr Parker is not intended as simply the butt of conservative satire. His energy is attractive, and the real sense of change and new order that blows through fresh and sparkling Sanditon makes Jane Austen’s view equivocal. The wind buffeting the cliff-top houses and deterring the timid lifts the spirits of those energetic enough to brave it – and, in Persuasion, similar sea wind restores bloom to the cheeks of drooping Anne Elliot. Although nothing suggests financial success for Sanditon, if Mr Parker does face a crash, perhaps he might be helped by his individually solvent siblings, especially the wealthy Sidney – rather than taking them down with him, as Henry had done his family. If Jane’s beloved brother is pressing against the character, it is hard to imagine generous, open-hearted and reckless Tom Parker quite humbled or condemned for his delusions.
The passion for salt water
The British love affair with sea cures began in earnest in 1753 with Dr Richard Russel’s A Dissertation on the Use of Sea-Water in the Diseases of the Glands. Believing in nature as the best healer, it claims that sea bathing eases stiff joints and helps against tuberculosis, leprosy, venereal diseases and ulcers. Sea water has the healing qualities of ‘Saltness’, ‘Bitterness’,‘Nitrosity’ and ‘Oilyness’.
By ‘bathing’ is not meant ‘swimming’, especially enjoyed by men and boys, but ‘dipping’ for a minute or two in the cold sea water from a horse-drawn wooden box or machine. This dipping for health was undertaken by both sexes, especially if they were ‘lax fibred’. For ladies, the box had a canvas modesty hood to avoid anyone seeing the bather. The contraption cost a shilling to hire and was trundled, rather uncomfortably, into the sea. Inside the box, the lady – a gentleman could dip in the nude – changed from ordinary clothes into a flannel bathing costume, attended by a ‘dipper’ who might well be fierce in ‘helping’ her patient put her body into the freezingly cold sea to ‘charge the system’.
From mid-century on, claims for sea bathing accelerated: Dr Robert Squirrel declared it efficacious for ‘Indigestion, Gout, Fever, Jaundice, Dropsy, Haemorrhages, Violent Evacuations, or any other disorder’, while ‘inspiring’ or breathing sea air recovered health more than breathing anywhere inland. The literature dwelt on miracles. A Mr Sanguinetta, paralysed from the head down, took regular dips at Margate, then ‘threw away his second crutch, and walked with a cane, took up his German flute and played’. He fathered seven children.
Coloured etching by William Heath, c. 1829
Nearer home, Jane Austen’s glamorous cousin Eliza de Feuillide, future wife of Henry Austen, carried her ailing young son to Margate for a cure in December and January, having been told that ‘one month’s bathing at this time of the Year was more efficacious than six at any other’. Remarkably, the child survived: ‘The Sea has strengthened him wonderfully & I think has likewise been of great service to myself, I still continue bathing notwithstanding the severity of the Weather & Frost & Snow which is I think somewhat courageous.’ Although it is summer in Sanditon, delicate Miss Lambe from the West Indies will still find the sea immensely cold when she finally goes through the box into the water, with vigorous Diana Parker beside her to ‘keep up her spirits’.
After half a century of seaside puffing, some medical men tried to moderate the fantastic claims for sea water. In A View of the Nervous Temperament, Dr Thomas Trotter mocked doctors who exploited illness for their own gain. Sea bathing, he wrote, was primarily ‘an exercise and amusement’, good perhaps only for nerves. Mrs Bennet, literature’s most famous possessor of nerves, believes she would be ‘set up with a little sea bathing’ in Brighton.
An engraving by R. and D. Havell from an original by George Walker: bathing at Bridlington, 1813
The supremely healthy Charlotte Heywood agrees with Dr Trotter: she enjoys sparkling Sanditon but has no need for any ailment, and by the end of the fragment has not tried sea bathing. Robust Lady Denham avoids doctors, blaming them for killing off her second husband, and is never rhapsodic about the sea. She too of course wants to benefit from sickness in others: offering her remedies of asses’ milk and an exercise chamber horse left over from her first husband.
Indeed, almost everyone in Sanditon aims to profit from the invalid or healthy body. Mr Parker seeks a doctor as a tourist attraction for his seaside resort, though, unlike Lady Denham, he does believe in the therapeutic value of sea air and bathing: he expects good breathing and ‘immersion’ to put him to rights after his carriage accident. Visiting Mrs Griffith, allowing modest sea bathing for her richest young lady, prescribes only those pills and drops in which a cousin has a commercial interest. In poems and puffing medical manuals, medicinal sea bathing could even sound useful for seduction; albeit praising the waters of the Hudson River, Samuel Low declared that ‘the fair from thy embrace more lively shall retire/And that which cools their own, their lovers’ breasts shall fire!’ Had the manuscript been longer, perhaps the egregious Sir Edward would have had time to find amorous profit from female bathing, and tune his compliments accordingly.
‘Venus Bathing in Margate’ attributed to Thomas Rowlandson. Nude swimming was in fact very uncommon for ladies
The seaside resort
Today, with so many rundown resorts around the coast of England, it is tempting to glamorise the earlier quaint fishing-village with its heroic night fishermen and welcoming wives in tidy cottages, and grow nostalgic for an older way of life – the sort epitomised for the upper orders by the stay-at-home Heywoods. The poet William Cowper, a favourite author of Jane Austen’s, looked on the new developments through conservative eyes. He believed such jumped-up places ruined old crafts through a fashion for novelty, making visitors prey to shoddy amusement, to morbid restlessness and to quacks:
But now alike, gay widow, virgin, wife,
Ingenious to diversify dull life,
In coaches, chaises, caravans, and hoys,
Fly to the coast for daily, nightly joys.
And all impatient of dry land, agree
With one consent to rush into the sea.
from ‘Retirement’
Contemplating the mushrooming sea resorts, the reforming