So what was the story of these three children – Philadelphia, known to the family as Phila, George and Leonora – born in rapid succession in May 1730, May 1731 and January 1733? It is a tale of siblings separated, an uncaring stepmother and the prospect of penury or worse.
Perhaps one of the reasons why George Austen grew up to become such a loving, kind and attentive father, and to fill his house with children, was that his own childhood had been one of neglect and misery. His mother, Rebecca, died shortly after giving birth to Leonora. Their father, William Austen, a surgeon, remarried, but he too soon died. Little George was just six.
The stepmother was not interested in the three young children. William Austen’s will had established his two brothers as trustees for the orphans. One of these uncles, Stephen, was a bookseller at St Paul’s in London. He and his wife took in their nephew and two nieces. According to family tradition, the children were neglected, even mistreated.7 But one can never be entirely sure how much to trust what one branch of a family says about another. The neglect cannot have been total, since little Leonora stayed in the household. Presumably she would have had the same kind of status as Fanny Price at Mansfield Park. Hardly anything is known of her later life, other than that she became a lady’s companion. George, meanwhile, was sent to live with an aunt at Tonbridge in Kent. He went to the long-established school there and proved himself a clever boy, winning a scholarship to Oxford.
Philadelphia did not have such educational opportunities. When she was fifteen, she was apprenticed to a milliner in Covent Garden. She would have been set to work making shirts and shifts, aprons and neckerchiefs, caps and cloaks, hoods and hats, muffs and ruffles, trim for gowns. Apprentice milliners led tough, unhealthy lives with long hours and poor conditions. Many of them died young, but there was always a stream of young girls available to take their place. Some, especially those as attractive as Phila, were tempted or forced into another profession. The term ‘Milliner of Covent Garden’ was slang for a prostitute. In that part of London, the dividing line between different kinds of working girl was very thin.
Phila needed to get out. Having finished her apprenticeship and come of age, she inherited her small portion from her father’s estate. In November 1751, she made a bold move, petitioning the Directors of the East India Company for leave to go to India aboard their ship, the Bombay Castle.
She set sail on 18 January 1752, together with ten other ‘young beauties’. They all had the same ambition: to find a husband among the lonely white businessmen, soldiers and administrators who worked in the East Indies. In the colloquial language of the English in Bengal, women of this kind would become known as ‘the fishing fleet’.
One of the other girls, Mary Elliott, had named the same two gentlemen as Phila in the role of ‘sureties’ to support her application, so it may be assumed that they were friends before they went aboard. Another, who would also become a good friend to Phila, was Margaret Maskelyne. Only sixteen, the orphaned and impoverished daughter of a minor civil servant, she was escaping a life of boredom with her maiden aunts in Wiltshire. The army had taken her wild brother Edmund to India and he reckoned he had lined up a match for her: a letter had arrived in England with the information that he ‘had laid out a husband for Peggy if she chooses to take so long a voyage for one that I approve of extremely, but then she must make haste, as he is in such a marrying mood that I believe the first comer will carry him’.8
The beauties bound for Bengal finally arrived at Madras Harbour in early August. All eleven had survived the conditions aboard ship, described by Jane Austen as ‘a punishment that needs no other to make it very severe’.9 Many people died in the passage. What must it have been like for these girls? Homesickness at leaving England coupled with the terrors of the voyage, seasickness, weeks upon weeks of cramped conditions, stink from the bilge, coldness on deck and heat below. Always the threat of shipwreck. If the girls were wealthy they could be wined and dined by the captain, but this came at a high price and many East India captains charged exorbitant sums and steep rates of interest if credit was required. The captains also acted as general suppliers of goods such as clothes, delicacies, even furniture, which they sold both to their passengers and to the inhabitants at their destination.
Their first sight of India was the long, low line of the Coromandel Coast. The contrast in journeying from a freezing English mid-winter to August in Madras (now Chennai) can readily be imagined: the heat and humidity, but also the glorious mountains and sea, the white buildings, the endless sky, the smell of Madras, with its mixture of hot dust, burnt dung and spices. From the deck, as the hot breeze hit them, they saw the battlements of Fort St George, with the steeple of St Mary’s Church rising gracefully behind it. The church was a brilliant white, the surface covered with chunam, a cement that was made of burnt sea-shells. It glowed in the setting sun. To the right of the Fort was the native or ‘Black Town’, to the left was the old Portuguese settlement of Thome. Surrounding it all was golden sand and green palm-trees.10
The girls were taken to the Sea Gate of the Fort in a flimsy masula boat. From there, they would be swept into a whirl of concerts, balls and picnics. Their quest for husbands was under way. Margaret Maskelyne was duly introduced to the man her brother had lined up for her. He was the Governor of Bengal, and within six months she had married him. He would go on to achieve fame under the name Lord Clive of India.
In 1745, the year when Phila began her apprenticeship in Covent Garden, a man called Tysoe Hancock, seven years her senior, set sail for the East Indies. Hancock held the post of Surgeon Extraordinary for the East India Company in Madras, but he was also involved in the shipment of diamonds and gold. And he was in search of a wife. He knew all about both the prospects and the perils faced by the ‘fishing fleet beauties’. ‘You know very well’, he wrote in a letter, ‘that no Girl, tho’ but fourteen Years Old, can arrive in India without attracting the Notice of every Coxcomb in the Place, of whom there is very great Plenty at Calcutta, with very good Persons and no other Recommendation … Debauchery under the polite name of Gallantry is the Reigning Vice of the Settlement.’11
Phila’s wealthy uncle Francis, a well-to-do gentleman who made his money practising law and buying land at Sevenoaks in Kent, was Tysoe Hancock’s lawyer and business agent. This connection brought them together. In February 1753, just over six months after her arrival in India, Jane Austen’s aunt became Mrs Tysoe Hancock. At Fort St David, where she settled down to married life, she must have felt a million miles away from her days as a penniless seamstress for fine ladies. She was now the mistress of a large household of servants, including personal maids called Diana, Silima, Dido and Clarinda. She wore fine silks and muslins. The garden, shaded by rows of the evergreen tulip tree, was full of pineapples and pomegranates. The only thing she lacked was a baby. After six years of marriage the couple still remained childless.
In 1759 they moved to Fort William in Calcutta, at the request of Lord Clive. Here they became part of the elite British Bengal community, meeting and befriending Warren Hastings. Hastings had joined the East India Company in 1750 as a clerk, and by 1773 he would rise to become the first Governor-General of India. Hastings and Hancock entered into a business relationship, trading in salt, timber, carpets, rice and Bihar opium. Phila was reunited with her friend from the voyage out, Mary Elliott. She too had succeeded in making a quick match soon after arriving, but it had ended abruptly when her husband had the misfortune of being among the British soldiers who died when incarcerated in the Black Hole of Calcutta. With rather indecent haste, Mary married Warren Hastings just a few months later. In December 1757, she gave