if he goes to the East Indies; and I shall give him a commission for any thing else that is worth having. I wish he may go to the East Indies, that I may have my shawl.’ She hesitates for an instant, then ends with characteristic indulgence: ‘I think I will have two shawls, Fanny.’4
When Jane Austen saw or wore or wrote about an Indian shawl, she entered a whole new realm of cross-cultural exchange, a world far from that of her own Hampshire village. Through her family connections, she became aware of that wider world and it entered subtly into her imagination, shaping her novels to a far greater extent than is often realized. Thanks in particular to a charismatic female cousin, there is a thread connecting Jane Austen to places we do not usually associate with her: not only the East Indies, but also the streets of revolutionary Paris.
The East India Company, with its many trading activities, was developing into a significant economic and political force within the global economy. Cottons and silks, indigo dyes and spices, not to mention diamonds and opium, were imported in vast quantities. As goods came west, so people went east. The Indies became the place to make your fortune when hope was lost at home.
A young woman, an orphan called Cecilia Wynne, leaves her home in England for Bengal. Her journey to the East Indies takes six months, the passage fraught with dangers and privations. She is going with one object in mind: to find a husband. Left penniless by her father, she is travelling at the behest of a rich relation who is eager to marry her off. The girl’s younger sister, also destitute, has been offered a placement as a lady’s companion in England.
When Cecilia arrives in the East Indies, her good looks ensure that she soon finds a rich husband. He is older than her, and very respectable: she is considered to be ‘splendidly but unhappily married’. Back in England Cecilia is regarded by those who know her as a lucky girl. All except one friend, who harbours no such romantic illusions: ‘Do you call it lucky, for a Girl of Genius and Feeling to be sent in quest of a Husband to Bengal, to be married there to a Man of whose Disposition she has no opportunity of judging till her Judgement is of no use to her, who may be a Tyrant, or a Fool or both for what she knows to the Contrary. Do you call that fortunate?’ Another girl replies, cynically, ‘She is not the first Girl who has gone to the East Indies for a Husband, and I declare it should be very good fun if I were as poor.’5
This story is fictional. It is called ‘Catharine, or the Bower’ and it was written by the young Jane Austen in 1792 when she was sixteen. But the facts of the story replicate almost exactly the fate of her own aunts: Philadelphia, elder sister of the Reverend George Austen, did indeed go to the East Indies for a husband, while Leonora, his younger sister, became a lady’s companion at home in England. Even in her teens, the young Jane Austen was preoccupied with the hardships faced by women reduced to a state of absolute dependence on relations who often prove to be unkind and unfeeling. Her interest in the plight of impoverished women and the harsh realities of the Georgian marriage market never left her. She once advised her niece Fanny that ‘Single Women have a dreadful propensity for being poor – which is one very strong argument in favour of Matrimony.’6 The women sent out to the East Indies to find husbands because they had no dowry and little chance of finding an English match were but extreme examples of a widespread phenomenon.
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
