This post is about "Sanditon", the novel that Jane Austen left unfinished at her death in 1817; and what it might tell us about Eastbourne in the years before the railway came (in 1849), and before the Duke of Devonshire started his great building spree.
Of course, the fictional town of the title is most likely not intended as a representation of Eastbourne. Or rather, Jane Austen wanted readers not to think of it in that way. She describes her town as a newly developed coastal resort somewhere between Eastbourne and Hastings. But she also says some of its houses are built on downland, which would seem to make that location unlikely. This lack of precision contrasts with the book's otherwise careful approach to the detail of Sussex's geography.
Some of the local landscape depicted certainly could describe the Eastbourne of Jane Austen's time - before all the houses came; before the town took the shape we recognise today. There's the big estate, the farms, the scattered villages and the occasional new building. We've seen this topography in some of the early landscape paintings of the town.
But what about the visitors? The hotel? The houses built for holiday accommodation?
Well, we know that there were such visitors to Eastbourne. And we also know there were some basic facilities provided. The Brighton historian, Sue Farrant, pointed this out in a paper we looked at a few weeks ago. And the novel's opening sequence certainly encourages the Sanditon-Eastbourne association. Its carriage accident takes place in a village Jane Austen names as Willingdon.
But we should not get too excited over this. Once the travellers get moving again, the journey onwards to Sanditon seems to cover more than just a couple of miles. Others have suggested that Worthing is Jane Austen's more likely inspiration - since it's documented she was well-acquainted with that town.
In the end, this can only be speculation. Sanditon is most probably an imagined combination of several seaside settlements, drawing together characteristics Jane Austen had either witnessed or heard about. All to serve of course her sadly unfulfilled fictional purpose.
These characteristics include the nervous local landowners, seeking to increase their fortunes through property speculation; waiting for well-to-do visitors, whether from the West Indies, or from a London school, to take houses and apartments, and pay their rents.
They include the acute class consciousness of all those in the town, the need to be seen, and, more importantly, be seen with the right people, during the self-conscious walks they take along the seafront, towards the headland.
There's the in-fashion neurosis about health and dubious health remedies, including the milk of Lady Denham's milch asses.
And finally, the circulating library - an institution certainly present in Eastbourne at the time - with its books and periodicals for loan, and trinkets and curiosities for sale.
So I'm going to conclude that you would have found all of this this and more in the Eastbourne of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and leave it at that. I'm pleased to have read Sanditon. I'd been put off for years. Some of it is written in fragments and notes, that's true. Some of the characters are undeveloped caricatures. But occasionally the writing takes off, and you know you're reading Jane Austen (whether or not she's writing about Eastbourne).
