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 birth to a son called George. Then in 1758 she had a daughter called Elizabeth, who did not survive. The friends who had once been part of the fishing fleet did not have long together, for Mary Hastings died in July 1759, just weeks after Phila had moved to Calcutta.
Calcutta was grander and more luxurious than the Coast. Great mansions resembling Italian palazzi lined the river front. It was more like a European city than Madras, as its houses and public buildings were not all crammed into the confines of the Fort but were mingled on the streets of the town itself. Armenians mixed with Portuguese, providing the English with cooks and servants. Many of the English lived in large one-storey villas reached by outdoor stairs, boasting handsome verandas on which to sit in the cool of the evening. Walls were not papered but whitewashed and, the climate being too hot for carpets, the floors were covered in matting. The rooms were large, cool and airy, furnished with European imports. Many of the English had a ‘garden-house’ out of town, where they retired at the weekends, escaping the intense heat of the city. Siestas were necessary, the heat being so great that the ladies would retire wearing ‘the slightest covering’. Only in the cool of the evening would everyone dress in their finery and go out into society. One of the most popular meeting places was Holwell’s Gardens, where the British gathered together for supper parties and for their children to play. In early 1761 Philadelphia discovered that she was at last pregnant.
***
Phila’s new life could hardly have been more different from that of her brother George, Jane Austen’s future father. After Oxford, he was ordained deacon and became a master at his old school in Tonbridge. After his second ordination, as a full clergyman, in 1755 he resigned his schoolteaching post and returned to Oxford where he became assistant Chaplain at St John’s College.
In 1762, George Austen met Cassandra Leigh. They married two years later and were accompanied on their honeymoon by a sickly seven-year-old boy called George Hastings. The worlds of India and England were colliding again: the first child to come into the household of Jane Austen’s father was the son of Warren Hastings.
Jane Austen’s aunt Phila
George Hastings had been sent to England in 1761, at the time when Phila Hancock was pregnant. He was initially entrusted to the Leigh family of Adlestrop, who were old friends of Warren Hastings. In this sense, he came as part of the marriage package when George Austen proposed to Cassandra Leigh. George was rewarded with a salary from Hastings, and expenses incurred on behalf of the boy were reimbursed. After the honeymoon, the boy moved in with the newly married couple at the parsonage in Deane, Hampshire, where the Reverend George Austen had been granted a living. But the boy was in very poor health. He died of diphtheria in the autumn. According to family tradition, Cassandra Austen reacted as badly as if George had been her own child.
Meanwhile in Calcutta, sister Phila’s seven barren years came to an end. On 22 December 1761, she finally gave birth to a daughter. This was Eliza Hancock, the little girl who would bring colour, danger and excitement into Jane Austen’s world.
The Austen family still possesses an Indian rosewood writing desk that, it is said, was given as a present by Warren Hastings to Phila Hancock, in order to thank her for nursing his dying wife. The gossip among the British in Calcutta was that Phila had very quickly become much more than a nurse and a friend. It appears to have been an open secret in the community of the East India Company that Eliza was the illegitimate daughter of the great Warren Hastings. He was her acknowledged godfather, and Eliza was named after Hastings’s daughter Elizabeth who had died in infancy. She in turn would name her only child, a son, after him: Hastings.
The gossip raged, fuelled by a jealous secretary of Clive’s called Jenny Strachey. Lord Clive himself wrote to his wife, demanding that she dissociate herself from her fellow-traveller on the fishing fleet: ‘In no circumstance whatever keep company with Mrs Hancock for it is beyond a doubt that she abandoned herself to Mr Hastings.’12
Warren Hastings remained profoundly loyal to Phila and her little girl, who quickly became known as Betsy. He settled a fortune of five thousand pounds on the child, later doubling the amount, giving her more than enough for a dowry to enable her to make a good marriage. The source of the money was a bond for forty thousand rupees made over to Hastings to be paid in China, which he then passed over to Eliza in English money. Sums of that kind coming from the India–China connection at this period always carry the smell of opium.
Hastings was famously generous and well known for his love of children, but his private letters to Phila are unusually affectionate and revealing: ‘Kiss my dear Bessy for me, and assure her of my tenderest Affection. May the God of Goodness bless you both.’13
