And another thing

25 October 2008

Jane Austen knew all about a banking crisis

In times of anxiety, I always turn to Jane Austen’s novels for tranquil distraction. Not that Jane was unfamiliar with financial crises and banking failures. On the contrary: she knew all about them from personal experience. As a young girl she seems to have regarded bankers as rather glamorous figures. In Lady Susan, written when she was 22, she observed: ‘When a man has once got his name in a banking house, he rolls in money.’ So when her favourite brother, Henry, decided to become a banker, and set up his own bank, she was delighted.

Henry was four years older than Jane. He was clever and self-assured, with beautiful manners, and a man of the world. His outstanding characteristic was optimism, and he could be relied on to spread cheer when others were sad. He was closer to her novel-writing than any other member of the family. He took upon himself the business of getting her published, and succeeded. He also acted as her agent and made her a bit of money. Henry had been a fellow of his Oxford college, St John’s, which then meant he could not marry unless he became a clergyman and took a college benefice. But he threw over academic life and became an officer in the military, thus providing copy for Jane’s Pride and Prejudice. In 1798 he married a widow ten years older. Elizabeth Hancock was a fussy, talkative, flirtatious lady, very fond of parties and gossip. She was actually the daughter of Warren Hastings, the great Indian nabob, persecuted by Edmund Burke, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and other Whigs, and subjected to a ten-year trial for alleged irregularities in India, at the end of which he was triumphantly acquitted. He did not publicly acknowledge Eliza’s paternity, but he set up a trust fund for her. She married a French aristocrat, Count Jean de Feuillide, and had one son by him, significantly called Hastings (the boy died aged 15 in 1801). The Count was guillotined at the height of the Paris Terror in 1794, and Eliza came to England, her husband’s property having been confiscated.

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