Austen's Crime & Punishment
Where is the crime in Austen’s novels?
I laugh now when I think that I got the idea for my first book while sitting on a bus.
I was on the No. 389 bus going into the city from my Paddington home, and the bus was held up at the traffic lights just near the old Darlinghurst Gaol in Sydney.
While I waited, my mind wandered to a hanging that took place outside that prison on a warm summer’s day, with the gruesome punishment watched by a crowd of over 10,000 people.
The criminal, who had murdered an elderly woman, was connected to Jane Austen’s family. John Knatchbull was a relative of Sir Edward Knatchbull who married Jane Austen’s favourite niece, Fanny Knight. He was a ‘black sheep’ of that family and was transported to Australia for financial crimes.
However, punishment failed to reform him, and the judge decided that death by hanging was the only suitable punishment for such a hardened man. The hanging took place in 1844, well after Jane Austen’s death, so she never knew of this shameful episode in the family into which her niece had married, but the small Australian connection got me thinking, as I waited for the bus to move on.
Perhaps, I thought, I could prepare a talk for the Jane Austen Society of Australia on this tiny criminal connection that my favourite novelist had with our country? She’d also had an aunt tried for shoplifting and in serious danger of transportation, so that was another link to this country, which was also a criminal one. But then I began to wonder about other crimes … were there crimes mentioned in the novels? How would they have been punished, and what did Jane Austen herself know of crime? By the time the bus pulled up in Elizabeth Street, I had jotted down ideas in a notebook.
What was planned as a talk then morphed into a book, as I began to research in order to find answers to my own queries. Was eloping to Gretna Green a crime? And if so, how could irate fathers like Mr Bennet punish a daughter’s seducer? Was gambling a crime? What about giving birth to a bastard child? A duel takes place in Sense and Sensibility – was upright Colonel Brandon committing a hanging offence by duelling, or would he have been fined or imprisoned? I knew there was murder and suicide in Jane Austen’s juvenile writings, so clearly she had an interest in crime, and I learned she had even gone to visit a gaol in Canterbury, so I wrote to the gaol to learn more about what she’d have seen there.
It took me some years to write this book (I still had young children at the time) but I had enormous fun doing so. It was published in 2005 by the Jane Austen Society of Australia and was reviewed in several Australian papers and also internationally. Jane Gardam, a very fine novelist who died recently, gave my book high praise, while biographer and Austen scholar Claire Tomalin called it “essential reading for every Janeite”. Crime novelist Reginald Hill (creator of the Dalziell and Pascoe novels, turned into a popular TV series) kindly wrote a Foreword to the book, while Austen scholar Maggie Lane wrote that the book showed her a different side to an author she knew so well. The book was picked up by a U.S. publisher and printed there, and has been through a few editions.
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Read it now to explore Austen’s world from a thrilling new perspective!
I feel very proud of my first book! It examines criminal activities which we no longer regard as illegal (elopements, illegitimate babies, suicide, gambling) and also looks at crimes such as poaching, duelling, and theft which were treated by the law with a harshness that we do not emulate today. I think my book teaches those familiar with Jane Austen’s fiction and world that there can be new ways of looking at her work. Jane Austen does have her darker side!
Selected links for relevant websites, books, movies, videos, and more. Some of these links may lead to protected content on this website, learn more about that here.
Susannah Fullerton: Jane Austen and Crime
Susannah Fullerton: John Knatchbull is hanged
State Library of NSW: A huge crowd for a hanging: the end of John Knatchbull
Australian Dictionary of Biography: John Knatchbull (1792–1844)
Jane Austen Centre: Fanny Austen Knight (Knatchbull)
Susannah Fullerton: Lots of Jane Austen links