Captain Benwick's Reading

'Is it the loss of his beloved Fanny which has turned Captain Benwick to poetry and melancholy?' ask John Sutherland and Deirdre Le Faye in the literary quizbook So You Think You Know Jane Austen? Their answer to this 'factual but tricky' question is: 'His taste (unlike the Austen heroine's traditional preference for Cowper) is for very recent, 1810 and after, poetry (Scott's Lady of the Lake, Byron's tales), so it would seem that this was a deciding factor'.¹ Such opinions of the taste for poetry encountered in Persuasion are regularly found: 'Unimpressed by Romantic poetry Jane Austen had mocked it in Persuasion, and in a letter to her sister about a Byron poem: "I have read the Corsair, mended my petticoat, & have nothing else to do"'.² William Deresiewicz has recently indicated why this remark need not denigrate Byron's poem: 'It is the "triviality" of writing to Cassandra, not of The Corsair, that is being sent up'.³ Moreover, Sutherland and Le Faye's explanation for Benwick's reading does not quite square with two pieces of information given in Jane Austen's last completed novel.

Before the visit to Lyme Regis, speaking of his friend James Benwick, Captain Wentworth is said to have 'considered his disposition as of the sort which must suffer heavily, uniting very strong feelings with quiet, serious, and retiring manners, and a decided taste for reading' (p. 90).⁴ Benwick has been affianced to Fanny Harville for the 'year or two' (p. 90) that the narrative sketchily mentions, while Wentworth's acquaintance with him goes back to 'some time ago' when he had been 'first lieutenant of the Laconia' (p. 90). These time indicators mean that during their engagement, while Benwick was working for fortune and promotion so as to marry, he was no longer with Wentworth. Benwick sails into Portsmouth on the Grappler to be informed of his loss by the same Wentworth of the Laconia who takes leave and travels from Plymouth to that end. This points to Benwick's 'decided taste for reading' having developed before the engagement to Fanny and her sudden death.

In their house at Lyme Regis, Captain Harville has 'fashioned very pretty shelves, for a tolerable collection of well-bound volumes, the property of Captain Benwick' (p. 92). The sailor does not have a gentleman's library, but needs more than one shelf to house his books. That they are well bound indicates a care that will have cost money, and may have been required for them to survive his voyages. He is later described as 'evidently a young man of considerable taste in reading, though principally in poetry' (p. 93). Too much, or not quite enough, has been made of that 'though'. Austen's 'evidently' indicates that the word is her heroine Anne Elliot's perception, not necessarily shared by her author. The phrase 'considerable taste' might suggest that Benwick has literary refinement, but only within a narrow range. Yet it could equally mean that he has read both widely and deeply.

Benwick and Anne 'talked of poetry' and 'the richness of the present age' (p. 94). The 'present age' hardly suggests only books published between 1810 and 1814, the latter being the year in which most of Persuasion's action takes place. The new acquaintances have 'gone through a brief comparison of opinion as to the first-rate poets' (p. 94), which can't mean they've mentioned just Scott and Byron. Four works by these two authors are then discussed and Benwick is revealed to have lyrics and passages by heart. This draws attention to his grieving and prompts Anne's response that she hopes he doesn't only read poetry. It also shows that he has sufficiently internalised the recent works of two major writers as part of a wide familiarity with the contemporary poets to have opinions about those that are first-rate and those that are not. Without this implicit context of knowledge, the tacit compliment to Sir Walter Scott, the reviewer of Emma, and to Lord Byron, another of her publisher John Murray's authors, would...