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Persuasions #11, 1989 Pages 7-12
The
Still Unknown Lover
CARL H. KETCHAM
In
an article entitled “The Unknown Lover” (Persuasions, no. 9, pp.
37-40),
Constance Pilgrim offers new evidence intended to support her thesis in
Dear
Jane (London, 1971) – that Jane Austen met William Wordsworth’s sailor
brother, John, in Devon, while John’s ship was delayed by contrary
winds, and
that John Wordsworth was the mysterious lover mentioned in several
accounts
originating with Jane’s sister Cassandra. Dear Jane appears to have attracted
little notice among students either of Jane
Austen or the Wordsworth circle, probably because the event it
speculates about
left no clear trace in Jane Austen’s biographical records and none at
all in
John Wordsworth’s. It is an ingenious book, bent on examining all
evidence which might
establish any possible links between Jane and John – a task which could
be
undertaken more easily because one of several gaps in Jane’s letters
occurs
during the key year 1797 and with two exceptions John Wordsworth’s
surviving
letters do not begin until 1800. (See Carl H. Ketcham, ed., The Letters
of John
Wordsworth, Cornell University Press, 1969, hereafter cited as JWL.)
Constance Pilgrim is thus left to provide negative proofs – to
establish that it was not impossible that Jane and John might have met
at
various times and places, beginning in Devon in 1797, and that John
might have
been the lover described by Cassandra as having shown a great interest
in Jane
and expressed a desire to see her again, a fulfillment thwarted by his
early
death. (Constance Pilgrim speculates also on a second thwarting:
not only was
Anne Lefroy, who in real life rescued her nephew Tom from Jane’s
charms,
guilty, in her fictional embodiment as Lady Russell, of having
persuaded Anne
Elliot to abandon Captain Wentworth; she was also, according to Dear
Jane [pp.
44-46] responsible for temporarily separating Jane and John.) It
is difficult to refute the bare possibility of an affair that occupies
gaps in
our records, so that no alternative course of events is available for
either
party.
Such evidence as Dear Jane does introduce is therefore, taken
cumulatively, perhaps somewhat more persuasive than it would be either
in the
face of a clear contradiction (which is not available) or in the light
of a
careful consideration of the likelihood of each of Constance Pilgrim’s
suggestions, taken one by one. Dear
Jane necessarily relies heavily on the obviously risky technique of
finding
supposed biographical data in Jane Austen’s novels, as well as in
otherwise
unexplained occurrences in her life and letters or in John
Wordsworth’s.
Constance Pilgrim, like Jane’s biographer Francis Warre Cornish,
offers
as a touchstone her sense that certain passages in Persuasion seem to
be more
intensely felt than others, hence may reflect biographical experiences.
Not surprisingly, these scenes, according to Dear Jane, centre
around
Captain Wentworth, whose name and title are perhaps the nearest
Constance
Pilgrim comes to finding support for her theory.
(The name Wentworth did, however, belong also to an accused
highwayman
who was active during Jane’s girlhood: see the article by Edith Lank
elsewhere
in this issue of Persuasions.)
The debonair, impulsive Captain Wentworth was totally unlike the
shy,
bookish, though efficient John Wordsworth, but never mind: as in
Freud’s dream
work, the hidden facts of John’s character and personality have been
slipped
into Persuasion in the person of Captain Benwick (Dear Jane, pp.
104-07).
There is no need to comment on the convenience of selecting from
an
author’s whole output the particular points which seem to match the
givens of
one’s subject (in this case the known facts about John Wordsworth)
while
ignoring both the irrelevant or contradictory aspects of a character
and the
necessities of the novel in which he appears: Captain Benwick’s
impressionable, romantic, weak personality is needed in Persuasion both
to make
Anne shine by contrast and to relieve Captain Wentworth of the Musgrove
sisters
by making possible Benwick’s emotional desertion of his lost love in
favour of
Louisa Musgrove. (This is, of course, to say nothing of the
discredit done to Jane
Austen’s ability to create intense crises in fiction without having
lived
through them.) Dear
Jane, then, must be read very cautiously, with an eye to possible
alternative
explanations and a clear awareness of probabilities.
Did Jane really refuse Harris Bigg-Wither after accepting him
because she
happened to have found and misunderstood William Wordsworth’s wedding
announcement in a York paper, then discovered the real facts in a back
file of
the Morning Post just after Bigg-Wither’s proposal?
Did she really choose the name Wasp for Captain Wentworth’s
sloop
because the stream in the Waspe valley was called Gavenne in Old French
and thus
resembles the name of the stream from which John Wordsworth’s ship was
(ultimately) named (Dear Jane, p. 127)?
Was supposed inside information concerning William Wordsworth’s
uncertainties about entering the Church a likely contribution to the
portrait of
the scoundrelly Wickham (Dear Jane, pp. 133-36)?
What about the considerable evidence (see JWL, pp. 24-26) that
John had
at least a warm sentimental attachment to Mary Hutchinson, the woman
whom
William Wordsworth later married, just when the John-Jane affair was
supposed to
be at its height after his return from Calcutta in 1800 (Constance
Pilgrim [Dear
Jane, pp. 49-51] envisions Mary suggesting to John how to approach
Jane); or
that Jane, instead of entering an artistic decline in 1797, was at work
on First
Impressions during the time when she and John were supposed to be
meeting, and
continued to write at least into the following year; or what about
Louisa
Lefroy’s precise description of the love affair in Devon as having
taken place
at Sidmouth in 1801, and involving not John Wordsworth (who was drowned
in 1805)
but a clergyman who died shortly after the romance?
These are a few examples of questions that need to be asked
about
Constance Pilgrim’s book, especially since she has been intriguingly
thorough
in her pursuit of speculative possibilities.
The present article, however, is not the place for an exhaustive
study of
Dear Jane. Instead,
I should like to respond to the points raised in “The Unknown Lover.” Constance
Pilgrim’s article establishes that (1) John Wordsworth was known to
Charles
William Johnson, a young man who travelled to Calcutta on the Duke of
Montrose
when John was second mate, and whose life was reportedly saved by
John’s
quelling of a mutiny; (2) Jane Austen was a friend of Charles William
Johnson’s aunt, Mary Johnson Furse (or possibly, on the basis of the
evidence,
of Johnson’s mother); (3) William Johnson Cory, Charles William
Johnson’s
son (and, through his father’s marriage to a cousin, the grandson of
Mary
Johnson Furse) recorded the above facts and added, perhaps on the basis
of
information from his grandmother, that Captain Wentworth was Jane’s
lost
lover. His record is found in The Letters and Journals of William
Johnson Cory,
author of “Ionica” (London, 1897), edited by Cory’s friend Francis
Warre
Cornish, who later, as noted above, wrote a life of Jane Austen
(English Men of
Letters series, 1914). Cory,
then, does at least mention the names of Jane and John in the same
book; and on
this basis Constance Pilgrim speculates as to how his remarks might
lend support
to the idea that Jane and John met in Devon while John’s ship was
delayed
there by contrary winds. In Dear Jane (p. 37), the scenario had
been that John went to visit his
brother William during the latter’s brief return to Racedown in July,
and
perhaps met Jane while he was passing through Lyme.
Now there is a new scenario: John rescued Charles Johnson from
the
mutineers before the Duke of Montrose reached Tor Bay; Mary Furse and
her friend
Jane took advantage of the ship’s long delay to visit Mary’s nephew,
who of
course introduced them to the mate who had saved his life – and during
the
subsequent weeks when John was at leisure he and Jane fell in love. William
Johnson Cory is clearly a sound witness when he mentions his
grandmother’s
friendship with Jane and when he identifies John Wordsworth as the mate
of the
Duke of Montrose and goes on to speak of him as “the Wordsworth of the
Daisy,” with reference, of course, to William Wordsworth’s elegiac poem
To
the Daisy (“Sweet Flower! belike one day to have / A place upon thy
Poet’s
grave”), first published in 1815.
It is only when we examine Cory’s statements in their context
that they
lose some of their interest for Austen or Wordsworth fans.
First of all, we do not know when or how well Cory’s grandmother
knew
Jane Austen: Cory says only that Jane “was a real lady (my grandmother
knew
her).” Mary Furse (or the other grandmother) cannot be shown to
have known
anything about Jane’s love life; if she did know that there was a lover
and
that he was not only a naval captain but specifically John Wordsworth,
why
didn’t she say so – and if she did say so, why didn’t her grandson in
his
chatty letters mention the fact when he was talking about Captain
Wentworth as
Jane’s “own lost lover” (p. 545, to A. D. Coleridge, July 22, 1889), or
about John Wordsworth himself (p. 551, to F. Warre Cornish, February 2,
1890)? The
two passages cited are quite unrelated to each other except that both
happen to
deal with popular impressions of the character and activities of ships’
officers. The letter to Coleridge, by all odds the more
interesting to
investigators of the Lost Lover and John Wordsworth theories, begins,
“Of
course your friend looks at Nelson as he appears in Mrs. Tench’s
Journal,
drunk, vain, &c.” and, after giving some evidence in favour of
Nelson’s
considerateness and “imaginative affection” for his officers, concludes
by
saying, “No man should presume to write of those days without first
sweetening
his idea of the sea-captain in a careful perusal of Jane Austen’s
Persuasion.
Her Wentworth is her own lost lover, and a sweet knight of the
quarter-deck.” Cory,
then, had heard of the lover, and believed that he entered into Jane’s
portrait of an eight-years-lost (but ultimately surviving) sea-captain,
a rank
which John eventually held (though not, of course, in the navy).
Even here, a careful analysis might point out that Cory’s
emphasis in
the passage where he identifies Wentworth as the lover is the sweet
knightliness
of the fictional character, a character who can sweeten the reader’s
idea of
sea-captains generally. Given this context, Jane’s love for
Wentworth’s original seems to
have been introduced partly, or mainly, because it suggests a reason
for her
portraying Wentworth as sweet and knightly. As to the reality of
the lover’s naval captaincy, we cannot tell how
much Cory knew about that; it may have been as fictional as Louisa
Musgrove, and
certainly Jane’s naval-captain brothers could have provided her with
plenty of
data on naval captains, if not (to proceed for a moment with free
speculation)
with a lonely brother officer. Indeed
Cory, as Dear Jane indicates, was not the first to appear in print with
the
identification of Jane as Anne Elliot, nor to associate her (if that
was his
intention) with a real naval officer. James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A
Memoir of
Jane Austen, first published in 1870, summed up, rather vaguely, the
stories of
a lost lover originating with Cassandra Austen, and noted the
recollection of a
Mrs. Barrett that “Anne Elliot was herself [Jane]; her enthusiasm for
the
navy, and her perfect unselfishness, reflect her completely” (Dear
Jane, p.
19). And in 1886 the poet Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, whom Cory
mentions (p.
562) as having been “kind to me,” published his Reminiscences and
Opinions,
1813-1885, in which he tells a dramatic tale about a young naval
officer who met
Jane in Switzerland, began a mutual love affair, promised to meet her
at Chamonix, but died of brain fever on the way.
These accounts were available to Cory as well as whatever his
grandmother
may have told him; and it should be noted that all of them could have
been
derived either from Cassandra’s various tellings of the lost-lover
story or
from Persuasion, given the natural tendency to hear an autobiographical
ring in
it. Cory’s testimony is interesting, but not necessarily a source
of new
information. John
Wordsworth himself, as he appears in the second passage from Cory, is
by no
means a “sweet knight” but a “dour carle who quelled a mutiny, and
saved
my father’s life thereby.” Here the context is Cory’s wish to
“get some ‘humane’
reminiscences” of John Keate, whose reputation for flogging during his
years
as headmaster of Eton was legendary.<
One approach that Cory suggested was to “point out how our good
grandsires were forced to do honour to ferocity, because of the [naval]
mutinies.” There follows a list of sea-captains who “for some
eight or ten
years” “were tempted into terrible fierceness.” Amidst several
references apparently taken from naval histories, Cory
draws briefly on his own family’s experience to mention the mate John
Wordsworth’s quelling of the mutiny. The description “dour carle”
(possibly an echo of Keats’
“melancholy carle” in his lying “Character of Charles Brown”), though
hardly descriptive of John Wordsworth as his family and friends
remembered him,
might fit him well enough in his capacity as disciplinarian, the only
role in
which Cory’s father knew him. (At one point, infuriated by the
cutting of some trees near his favourite
walk in Grasmere, John growled, “I wish I had the monster that cut them
down
in my ship & I would give him a tight flogging” [JWL, p. 104].
The description, however, lends no support to any identification
with the
“sweet knight” Captain Wentworth as described in the earlier letter. The log, or journal, of the Duke of
Montrose during John Wordsworth’s voyage as
second mate is preserved in the India Office records.
It is not much help in establishing John’s exact whereabouts on
a
day-to-day basis, but such evidence as it does afford tends to run
somewhat
counter to the particulars of the 1797 meeting as imagined by Constance
Pilgrim. First,
the matter of the mutiny. There is no doubt that the crew of the Duke
of
Montrose shared at one point the rebellious spirit of the times (John
was
obliged to quell an incipient mutiny as captain of his own ship in
1803), and it
is interesting to find that, perhaps
together with the other petty officers, John also played a
significant
role in quelling an uprising on the voyage to Calcutta.
However, as the ship’s journal records, there were two sets of
rebellious activities on board the Duke of Montrose.
The first appears to have been a mere protest, only technically
a mutiny.
Alarmed by reports of a serious leak in the vessel, the crew,
“soberly
and in a decent deportment,” refused to weigh anchor at the start of
the
voyage at Portsmouth until the leak was stopped.
Refusal of duty was a serious matter, but there is no indication
that
anybody’s life was endangered by it, even when the passengers tried in
vain to
help get the ship underway. Two groups of ten seamen each, the
second described as “refractory,”
were sent ashore (a mild enough safeguard, hardly a fit punishment for
mutiny);
but the rest of the crew seem to have listened to and been satisfied by
the
Company surveyor’s report that the leak was only a little over an inch
an
hour, and the voyage proceeded uneventfully, with the crew routinely
performing
their daily tasks, after some new and, as it turned out, dangerous
hands were
shipped at Portsmouth. Not long afterward came the long delay at
Tor Bay caused by contrary
winds, a circumstance which I should like to discuss a little later. The
Duke of Montrose left Tor Bay on September 22, 1797, and it appears
from the
journal that not until a month after she sailed did a really dangerous
mutiny
erupt. At 7 a.m. on October 29, “Jno. Stevens seaman” was given
six lashes
on the breech “for neglect of duty in the Main Top, & not answering
when
the Top was haild & other instances of insolence, such conduct
having become
frequent with him.” Stevens’ insolence had apparently become
widespread: an hour later two
other crewmen were punished “for mutinous conduct and inflammatory
expressions.” These overt rebellions brought to the surface a
problem which had been
developing for some time. On October 31, the journal records:
“Finding a spirit of disaffection & Mutiny to have prevailed
for
some days amongst several of the People who were shipped at Portsmo[,]
that
flogging rather encreased the number of the Party[,] that the Petty
Officers
were become in constant dread of Assassination in the Night &
reflecting
that a number of Men in Irons is not only a Nuisance but a source of
irritation
& Disturbance – It was judged proper in a consultation of the
Commander
& Officers to separate the Ringleaders & accordingly with the
approbation of Capt. Carruthers the Senior Comre who has Kings Troops
on board,
sent three….on board of his Ship.
In the Consultation of the Comre & Officers it was also
determined to
punish the above before they were turned out of the ship; but to this
Capt.
Carruthers objected – ” Almost certainly this was the mutiny
that
threatened the lives of the passengers on board the Duke of Montrose,
as it had
threatened the lives of the mates, and that was quelled by the mates’
discipline, both in the concerted action recorded in the journal and,
probably, in other unrecorded actions in response to the crew’s
defiance.
John Wordsworth may have stood out somehow in Johnson’s memory
as
active in repressing the revolt; he probably would not, in 1797, have
commanded
attention as the brother of the author of An Evening Walk and
Descriptive
Sketches. But Constance Pilgrim’s theory that Jane was introduced to
John in
Devon because he had saved the nephew of her friend Mary Furse (the
friend whom
Jane might or might not have met again in the summer of 1797) does not
seem to
fit the facts: the mutiny in question did not take place until the ship
had left
Devon for Calcutta. Finally,
even if we knew that Jane was available to meet John in the way
imagined (and we
have not a scrap of evidence for such a meeting) there is no indication
that
John had leisure to conduct a love affair during the weeks of delay in
Tor Bay.
In Dear Jane, p. 35, Constance Pilgrim speaks of “eight weeks of
enforced idleness,” during which John might have been given leave to
visit his
brother. This is an understandable misconception: her source (JWL, p. 18) states
that the East India Fleet “waited” during the unfavourable winds, but
the
journal of the Duke of Montrose (on which the account in JWL is based)
makes
clear that the wait was a period of more or less constant activity,
with the
ships’ crews kept busy with routine tasks (among other pieces of
make-work,
they were always washing the gun deck), while keeping in readiness for
a fair
wind if it came. (On September 10 the wind shifted to the east
and “The Commodore made
the signal to remove,” but a heavy contrary swell sent the fleet back
to
anchor.) It was also necessary to wait for a warship to be ready
to sail with the
fleet as convoy; on August 21 and again on September 3, John Wordsworth
was sent
on board H.M.S. Polyphemus, which had signalled for convoy to the
westward, and
received sailing instructions. (They came to nothing, however,
and the fleet finally left under convoy
from the Indefatigable.) Meanwhile there had naturally been
visiting between the ships of the
fleet, and presumably some brief chances to go ashore or receive shore
visitors,
but all such activities seem to have been restricted by the chance that
the
winds might suddenly become favourable, which, as the journals show,
they failed
to do day by day. On Friday, August 11, “Comre made the signal
for all persons to repair
on board their respective ships” – a clear indication that no one had
gone
far away. Altogether, it appears that if John did any courting
during this period,
it was done in spite of an apparently full schedule of routine duties. Jane,
then, evidently did not meet John that summer in Devon, certainly not
because he
had saved her friend’s relative.
That she met him at all remains, at best, a supposition on which
to
exercise entertaining speculation, and one that obviously lacks
substance
compared to her known relationships with Tom Lefroy, Edward Bridges,
Samuel Blackall, and Harris Bigg-Wither, or perhaps even with the mysterious
clergyman
at Sidmouth. The unknown lover must, despite Constance Pilgrim’s
ingenuity and her
new sources, rest in the category of the unknown.
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