Finding a path through Sanditon

We’re navigating conspiracies, quacks, and shifting sands in a quiet seaside Regency town

Thanks for being here at the Austen Connection. You can see all of the Austen Connection conversations including the podcast here. If you are not signed up yet you can take a few seconds to sign up, below, to get all of the conversations dropped into your inbox. Thank you!

Hello friends,

So far, so good: It looks like all this democracy-and-power talk is not getting us down - or maybe it is a little bit, but we’re gathering our methods of observation and navigation and getting right back up, to forge a path through the world we’re in and to look back to that Regency world Austen is in.

And so far we can list some takeaways from Austen which involve: Questioning everything, but at the same time staying calm and not jumping to conclusions; maintaining our skepticism about how we know what we know, and staying alert to confusions, conspiracies, and chaos as we navigate around it; contemplating and observing the mechanics of power in our midst - who has it, how they’re using it, and finding our own. 

Jane Austen deals with all this stuff. And today, it’s all taking us to those shifting sands of the quiet, Regency seaside town of Sanditon. Look out!

Did we mention that heroine Charlotte Heywood is the Voice of Reason in the town of Sanditon? In Charlotte, Austen paints the portrait of an astute young woman navigating the shifting sands and baffling characters, confusions, and chaos of this town, and standing her ground. The PBS Masterpiece series runs through April 23. Photo: Courtesy PBS Masterpiece

Don’t let the quiet fool you: Chaos abounds in this town, and you can see the chaos in just about every single conversation. You can also see the fashions, superficiality, and social circles that Austen hilariously refers to as dizzying “rotary motion” - how very scientific - more on that below. But today we’re steering clear of Sir Edward and all the fashionable foppery to focus on the mere chaos, linguistic and otherwise, that Austen introduces into this story - and as always we’ll explore: What is she doing with it all, and why is she taking us here?!

Here we go, starting this Sanditon tour at the most unlikely place, which is: 

Green tea, speculation, and a carriage wreck

The confusions and misinformation of Sanditon begin right away with that fateful carriage wreck that brings the Parker family to the door of the Heywood family.

But what is baffling about this narrative is a surprisingly long and seemingly irrelevant passage. Mr. Thomas Parker, the Sanditon town champion and entrepreneur whose speculating drives the plot of this unfinished novel, insists to Mr. Heywood, the Heywood parents being possibly the most reasonable parents in all of Austen which isn’t saying much, that he has overturned in Willingden and here resides a surgeon.

Mr. Heywood insists that there is no such surgeon in proximity.

Mr. Thomas Parker reasserts his confidence that there is.

It’s a rather long passage before it’s realized that Mr. Parker indeed has mistaken the place for someplace else with a similar name (Willingden vs. Willingden Abbots in the Weald). 

Already, friends, you can be forgiven for asking Austen, the master of plotting and language: WTF. Because not only is the pettiest of all debate topics here at the very top of this novel, but these kinds of seemingly meaningless misunderstandings, debates, and corrections are continuous throughout this fragment of a novel.

But what leaps out right away in this first argument is the way Mr. Heywood asserts his authority on this information, even though Tom Parker is dead wrong and not at all in doubt - and will continue to be, we might assume, equally wrong and never in doubt for this entire story:

“Sir — said Mr. Heywood with a good humoured smile — if you were to show me all the newspapers that are printed in one week throughout the kingdom, you would not persuade me of there being a surgeon in Willingden, … your mistake is the place.”

This very first encounter in this novel, one routed in a good-natured mistake and confusion amidst a feeling of misplaced certainty on the part of Mr. Parker, sets the reader - and our heroine Charlotte - right away to be on guard against well-meaning mistakes and confusions. And we’re getting this from perhaps the most sensible dad in all of Austen.

It also brings to mind that the “kingdom” of England was and is full of newspapers and reports in a time of pamphlets, propaganda, debates, and conflict on issues that were tossing long-held views about society and how it’s structured well into the air. Immediately in this novel we are questioning our sources! Be like Mr. Heywood.

So another one of the first things going on in Sanditon is all kinds of speculation - and much of it is about money and much of it is about health. 

But anyway it’s full of people getting things wrong. And not just getting things wrong but pursuing meandering, misplaced narratives for pages and pages of wrongness that seem to be about nothing more than just that: misinformation. 

Because the entire town of Sanditon is one big development scheme, by this Mr. Thomas Parker, designed to entice wealthy people to the seaside town for recreation, relaxation, showing off, and mostly improving their health. 

And in the very introduction we encounter Mr. Parker’s religious zeal - it looks a lot like dogma, friends - for this place and for the future wealth he’s endowed it with. And his source, we are shown throughout this story, is nothing more than pure imagination rather than judgment. The words chosen by Austen point us to the underlying fantasies and imaginings that are underpinning this enterprise: 

“The sea air and sea bathing together were nearly infallible, one or the other of them being a match for every disorder …” 

What a word: infallible! An infallible beach?

The “infallibility” of the sea air and the sea bathing, we readers can be sure, are inviting us to question everything when it comes to Sanditon.

Tom Parker vs. Charlotte Heywood

But in all these shifting sands and fallibility we are introduced in this book to two people at odds. Yes, there are two opposing people in this situation who might not seem opposed to a casual observer because they are both so friendly and appear to be on the same side. But when it comes to their approach to information and the deployment of information to direct their life choices, these two are on opposite sides indeed: They are Mr. Thomas Parker, speculator, and Miss Charlotte Heywood, heroine. 

[W]hen it comes to their approach to information and the deployment of information to direct their life choices, these two are on opposite sides indeed: They are Mr. Thomas Parker, speculator, and Miss Charlotte Heywood, heroine. 

In every instance given, the perfectly genial Mr. Parker takes every opportunity to ignore the facts and to be overtaken by his own wishful thinking, as his zeal and his wishing increase in proportion to the stakes being raised by continued investments in the scheme that is Sanditon. 

While alternately our gentle and also-amiable heroine Charlotte Heywood, on her first trip from home, takes every opportunity to do the opposite: All of her conclusions are drawn from empirical evidence that she sizes up and weighs before us. This evidence-weighing is so impressive from a Regency heroine in a novel, and it all leads her to either 1) sound conclusions or 2) baffled questions, which are sometimes the only rational approach to take, especially in a place like Sanditon.

Austen is reminding us here that sometimes the only thing to be is baffled - don’t trust someone who is certain about everything all the time (and that includes just about every politician you’ve ever heard, ever, even your favorite one).

Charlotte Heywood’s controversial position on green tea

Another funny instance of this is Charlotte’s intellectual position on green tea.

This scene takes place with the invalid Arthur Parker. Yes, another Parker - Sidney’s and Tom’s and Diana’s brother. Our narrator describes this as a “family of imagination and quick feelings” and that they are “always busy for the good of others” or ailing intensely and resorting to “quack medicine” for their remedies. 

This is not a very optimistic portrait of the Parkers, friends. 

But meanwhile Arthur insists, as the tea is being poured out, that green tea is poison to himself and he expresses astonishment that Charlotte can have two helpings of it.

It’s a very long passage about green tea, but we must replay it here because, what the heck and also because it demonstrates Charlotte’s Mood throughout this story - one of bemused rationality amidst chaos and absurdity. 

Take it away, Arthur:

“Do you venture upon two dishes of strong green tea in one evening? —What nerves you must have! — How I envy you. – Now, if I were to swallow only one such dish — what do you think its effect would be upon me? —

“Keep you awake perhaps all night” — replied Charlotte, meaning to overthrow his attempts at surprise, by the grandeur of her own conceptions.

“Oh! If that were all! — he exclaimed. — No — it acts on me like poison and would entirely take away the use of my right side, before I had swallowed it five minutes. — It sounds almost incredible — but it has happened to me so often that I cannot doubt it. — The use of my right side is entirely taken away for several hours!

“It sounds rather odd to be sure’ — answered Charlotte coolly — but I dare say it would be proved to be the simplest thing in the world, by those who have studied right sides and green tea scientifically and thoroughly understand all the possibilities of their action on each other.”

Why oh why are we being dragged through this absurd conversation about green tea when even our patient heroine who’s in this novel - unlike us, she can’t put it down - is dying of boredom. Rather risky of a novelist, when you think about it, to subject her readers to conversations that are by definition absurd, irrelevant, and boring just to show us that they are.

Rather risky of a novelist, when you think about it, to subject her readers to conversations that are by definition absurd, irrelevant and boring just to show us that they are.

So we could, and at some point we should, explore the philosophical schools that promote the deconstruction of meaning and language and that call attention to the impermanence, the infallibility - the shifting sands if you will - of the values and truths we hold dear. Concepts like rationalism, epistemology, nominalism, semiosis, theories and studies of how we know what we know and how reality and knowledge are represented.

Miss Georgiana Lambe, right, has the wealth and the power to help the town of Sanditon. Pictured are actors Crystal Clarke (right) as Georgiana Lambe and Rose Williams (left) as Charlotte Heywood in the Masterpiece series. Photo | Courtesy PBS Masterpiece

But the quick version is: Austen is always and very much in Sanditon forcing us to examine all of the above - the sources of our knowledge, our assumptions, and the names and values we subscribe to and substitute for empirical knowledge, and how it all translates into what we do, how we act, and who we love on a given day.

And we can only assume that Austen is going somewhere with this and keep a sharp lookout for where that might be, and as always look closely when she shows us something interesting. And perhaps what we’re being shown here is way more interesting than the conversation taking place on the surface: Perhaps we’re being shown that absurdity is rife in this town, and that the rational person in our midst - Charlotte Heywood - is highly skeptical and not buying into or buying literally any of it. 

Austen is always and very much in Sanditon forcing us to examine all of the above - the sources of our knowledge, our assumptions, and the names and values we subscribe to and substitute for empirical knowledge, and how it all translates into what we do, how we act, and who we love on a given day.

And also she is of all things appealing to science  - yes, we have here a Regency heroine invoking science, and don’t let the humor shield you from what you’re being shown as our heroine asks, simply: How about we let the people who are experts in green tea and experts in sides (lol) figure this out?! Why must you base it all on conjecture and paranoia? Why indeed.

And Charlotte Heywood is asking this and invoking science at a time when science as we know it is hardly a thing. Charles Darwin is about 8 years old and probably dreaming about barnacles somewhere when Austen is creating this character that is a young woman drinking tea in a drawing room appealing to us to judge according to our observations, according to science, empiricism, and reason.

Sisters in circles and ‘rotary motion’

But the standout conspiracy of Sanditon is Sanditon itself.  Its sand, its sea, as “Nature had marked it out,” we are told.

And we are told it by Sanditon’s biggest disciple, Tom Parker, who is betting his life, his family, his future, and that of many other innocents on his feelings and imaginings - no facts in sight - about this place.

In case it sounds like an exaggeration and we’re being overly harsh on Mr. Parker, let’s revisit what Sanditon’s narrator says about Tom Parker’s approach to his speculation, and it’s honestly rather chilling to read:

“Sanditon was a second wife and four children to him — hardly less dear — and certainly more engrossing. — He could talk of it for ever. — It had indeed the highest claims; — not only those of birthplace, property, and home, — It was his mine, his lottery, his speculation and his hobby horse; his occupation, his hope and his futurity.”

Friends, this is not going to turn out well.

And on top of this we already have been treated to one of the saddest views in any Austen carriage journey as Mrs. Parker, who is not equal to talking sense to her husband and so will share in his likely downfall, travels past the comfortable inherited family home the family has vacated for Sanditon, and she looks longingly at its humble majesty and mourns for its fruitful gardens. 

Who do we think Austen meant to end up living in that old well-cared for and beloved house and its gardens? 

Perhaps it’s a Miss Charlotte Heywood and her plus-one, but meanwhile here come the Beaufort sisters. 

Not since Lucy and Anne Steele has Austen been so amused and disgusted by a pair of sisters, and here our narrator gets straight down to business describing their character and letting us know they are “very accomplished and very ignorant.”

Also, when you read closely this is hilarious: “the Miss Beauforts were soon satisfied with ‘the circle in which they moved in Sanditon’ … for everybody must now ‘move in a circle’, —to the prevalence of which rotary motion, is perhaps to be attributed the giddiness and false steps of many.”

Did you catch that meaning delivered by a narrator deftly stepping in for a quick word? Those of us caring about the “circles” we move in are likely to get dizzy! And giddiness and false steps will bring us down.

And the Beauforts are dizzy. 

But crucially and intriguingly these sisters arrive with a Certain Someone of most consequence to Sanditon and they are in fact held up to be in direct contrast to the quiet “chilly and tender” heiress in their company. 

And even as this arrival is heralded we see that Sanditon is about Information - how we get it and what we do with it. It is also, as we have explored in other posts in this series, about power. Information is power, in a sense. 

And what we are told in Chapter 11 is that the preceding 10 chapters have all been one big confusion. It’s been a confusion about two wealthy families with a very rich guest who needs the healthy air of Sanditon. And the comic Miss Diana Parker, sister of both speculator Thomas and potential heart-throb Sidney, has been the purveyor of this information that has up to now been misinformation but is now, with the arrival of the Beauforts, about to be cleared up.

Here’s how our Sanditon narrator breaks it down - and as you read keep a lookout for key words like ignorance, blunder, vigilance, clear-sighted, and again that word infallible, all terms that invite us to consider how we know what we know in this town:

“All that had the appearance of incongruity in the reports … might very fairly be placed to the account of the vanity, the ignorance, or the blunders of the many engaged in the cause by the vigilance and caution of Miss Diana Parker. Her intimate friends must be officious like herself, and the subject had supplied letters and extracts and messages enough to make everything appear what it was not. Miss Diana probably felt a little awkward on being first obliged to admit her mistake. … and much worse than all the rest, must have been the sort of sensation of being less clear-sighted and infallible than she had believed herself.”

And, drum roll please, all of the conjecturing and the imagining about the two families with a wealthy heiress much anticipated over 10 chapters comes down to one intriguing young heiress who has just arrived with the Beauforts to Sanditon: 

Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Georgiana Lambe.

You can’t underestimate the importance of Miss Lambe, very early on described as “richer than all the rest,” both in the town of Sanditon and within the context of the story, as the narrator spells it out explicitly:

“Of these three, and indeed of all, Miss Lambe was beyond comparison the most important and precious, as she paid in proportion to her fortune. — She was about seventeen, half mulatto, chilly and tender, had a maid of her own, was to have the best room in the lodgings, and was also of the first consequence in every plan ....”

As it turns out, it is Miss Lambe who has been talked about, theorized about, speculated about, and hoped for - for in Sanditon she is the stuff dreams are made of.

Miss Georgiana Lambe is described in Jane Austen’s ‘Sanditon’ as ‘beyond comparison, the most important and precious.’ She is played by Crystal Clarke in the PBS Masterpiece series of ‘Sanditon’, airing each Sunday through April 23.

And because Georgiana Lambe is a biracial heiress arriving from the West Indies in an iconic Regency novel, we are still talking about Miss Lambe and drawing on this character for knowledge and context to the backdrop of Jane Austen’s stories. A character like the very young, innocent, and precious Miss Lambe is still fueling our discussions about the stories behind the stories of this era. And here she is, in Sanditon

As it turns out, it is Miss Lambe who has been talked about, theorized about, speculated about, and hoped for - for in Sanditon she is the stuff dreams are made of.

She emerges spectacularly into the confusion of Sanditon as someone who has the power to deliver Tom Parker the developer and speculator, and crucially also his young family who rely on him and who have given up their comfortable home and gardens to follow his gamble on this town. 

We don’t know what will happen - although the PBS Masterpiece series is imagining an ending. 

Meanwhile, what our narrator seems at pains to let us know is that all the confusion has been caused by wishful thinking, by misinformation, by elitism, by need, by greed, by hopes and dreams and senselessness. 

And not a thread of reason or rationality in sight. Just a lot of collective hope pinned to a young, innocent, biracial woman arriving to town and bringing with her wealth and power, but also arriving from the frontlines of British oppression.

And now we know where all the paths in Sanditon have been leading: These sands are whispering to us about the schemes, and exploitations, and misguided dreams of the Regency.

And now we know where all the paths in Sanditon have been leading: These sands are whispering to us about the schemes, and exploitations, and misguided dreams of the Regency.

We are left on high alert and with high hopes - that the very young, very rich and very precious Miss Lambe and the highly astute and skeptical Charlotte Heywood as individuals will be able to navigate it all and emerge on the other side of these shifting sands and shattering dreams, of Sanditon. 

---

Who here is watching the PBS series? How do you feel these themes are playing out, if at all, in the drama? And how do these “high alert” sign-posts of information, disinformation, confusion, and clarity play out for you in this novel or others?

Let us know your thoughts on this novel fragment - have you read it? - or the Masterpiece series, are you watching?

And thank you for being here, friends!

Hope your Sunday and your week bring not a lot of confusion or chaos and quite a lot of clarity and skepticism, and lots of story and meaning.

Your truly,

Plain Jane

Cool links and community

• Quotes are from the Penguin Classics 1974 edition with an introduction and notes by British author Margaret Drabble. 

• PBS Masterpieces’ Sanditon series runs through April 23. The Passport access that allows you to watch all episodes at once of this and many other series is well worth the investment - support public media! 

• If you’re interested in the character of Georgiana Lambe, you might enjoy this podcast interview with author Vanessa Riley, whose historic fiction illuminates hidden histories and real lives of biracial and Black women of the Regency era and colonial Caribbean.

• Also check out: author Gretchen Gerzina’s work on Black lives of the Regency and beyond, including her BBC series on Britain’s Black Past and her podcast conversation with the Austen Connection.

• Dido Elizabeth Belle is a historic biracial heiress of the Regency and Austen’s time - the movie Belle is based on her life.

• Where have we been, and where are we headed?

  Our discussion on Austen and Democracy has included three previous posts in case you missed them: our introduction to the series in the post We’re talking about Austen and democracy, next up was the post Henry is wrong and Catherine is right, which was all about the importance of questioning your sources, and Emma is about power, which tackled the discussed portraits of power in Emma and Knightley. Coming up: Look out for upcoming posts on Jane Austen, dogma, and identity politics and Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and the pursuit of happiness. When you’re subscribed, they’ll come right to your inbox. 

• Substack’s new thing: Notes - Y’all, it feels like the new internet back in the 90s when we were suddenly discovering all the fandom and nerd communities, and it’s basically another way that we can all connect, and also connect with similar Substack writers and followers. Check it out, and see you there! 

If you enjoy the Austen Connection, feel free to share it with a friend!