‘Query: What Might Have Led Christopher Wordsworth to Intercept a Letter Written by Charles Austen?’

Abstract

CHRISTOPHER WORDSWORTH. Information on the rationale which might have led Christopher Wordsworth, later Master of Trinity College Cambridge, and younger brother of the poet William, to intercept a letter from ‘Captain Austin R.N. of his Majesty’s ship Namur’ (i.e. Charles Austen, younger brother of the novelist Jane Austen) would be enlightening. The reference was discovered in a letter of (it is to be assumed) October 1813 from Wordsworth to the Reverend Henry Handley Norris, held in the Bodleian Special Collections, which I came across during my research for a forthcoming book, Jane Austen, the Secret Radical.1 The correspondence between the two orthodox churchmen deals largely with their opposition to the upstart Bible Society, which offered competition with, and criticism of, the proselytizing efforts of the Church of England; a reference to Charles Austen in this context may perhaps offer a complication to the generally accepted notion that Jane Austen’s immediate family were rigidly loyal to the religious establishment. Norris was, from circa 1812, an editor of the British Critic, raising the possibility that Jane Austen’s anonymity may have been compromised earlier than previously thought, and adding another angle to the journal’s marked avoidance of Mansfield Park (1814), a novel which focuses on a clergyman hero, and which was the only one of Austen’s six works not reviewed in the British Critic on publication.