Sanditon: Austen's pre–post Waterloo

Abstract

Written in 1817 and not published until 1925, Austen's posthumously published novel fragment, Sanditon, has always enjoyed a privileged relation to temporal discontinuity. My essay re-examines the question of Austen and history by engaging Sanditon in relation to a historicity of participant-witnessing and productive anachronism. I take as my starting point a particularly rich example of one of those oblique, sparing, and, consequently, ironically overdetermined world-historical signifiers that inhabits Jane Austen's textual world – a passing reference to Waterloo by the Speculator, Mr Parker, which satirically marks the commodification of history and the new cultural obsolescence of Trafalgar that obtained in the wake of the summer of 1815, when the battle of Waterloo ended the twenty-two year war with France. Mr Parker's bubble of Waterloo registers the contemporary practice of souveniring relics from the field of Waterloo, and enacts capital's strange prerogative for spatial and temporal disjunction that blooms post-Waterloo when commerce is liberated from the protection of national borders. The essay examines these new spatio-temporal logics of commercial speculation that characterize the post-Waterloo moment, as witnessed in Austen's posthumously published fragment, with its seaside milieu of invalids and projectors who are producers and consumers in a service economy of domestic tourism predicated upon the commercial exploitation of nostalgia and the pleasures of corporeal debility. Relating the nostalgic futurity of Mr Parker's commercial projections for “sad invalids” to the enigma of a retrospective style in this belated text – its original moment of production projected still in the extant manuscript unique to Austen's mature oeuvre – I consider Sanditon as a participant-witness to this pre-post-Waterloo moment marked by the somatic and commercial activity of a nostalgics of speculation and a preposterous anticipation of retrospection.