Was Jane Austen's aunt a sex worker?: Jane Austen at Home, part 1

Lucy Worsley, Jane Austen at Home: A Biography, 250th Birthday Edition. Hodder & Stoughton, 2024. Image source: Jane Austen Centre, Bath

In December 1786 Jane Austen's widowed Aunt Philadelphia—sister of Jane's father George—together with Aunt Phila's 25-year-old daughter Eliza, and Eliza's 5-month-old son Hastings, came to stay at Steventon Rectory for Christmas.

Aunt Phila had seen much in her 56 years. Early in her life she, George, and their younger sister Leonora had lost their mother Rebecca shortly after Leonora's birth. Phila, the eldest child, was only 3. When their father William died just seven years later, the children were no longer welcome in their home in Tonbridge. They were sent by their stepmother to stay with their bachelor uncle Stephen Austen, a bookseller and printer in St. Paul's Churchyard in the City of London. It was not a happy arrangement for anyone, apparently. George later wrote of Uncle Stephen's "neglect" and his "determination to thwart the natural tastes of the young people." [1]

Let us guess that the natural tastes of the young people inclined towards play, and that Uncle Stephen had a business to run that involved men working with heavy trays of type, using inks that could ruin clothes, and operating presses that could crush little fingers. In any case George was soon sent back to Tonbridge School, and over the next decade he progressed so far in his studies as to matriculate at Oxford.

Meanwhile, after George's departure 11-year-old Phila and 9-year-old Leonora were left behind with Uncle Stephen; no further schooling was planned for them. Instead, they were put to work. In 1745, at 15, Phila was apprenticed to a milliner in Covent Garden, Mrs. Hester Cole. 

In Jane Austen at Home Lucy Worsley quotes Charles Horne's  Serious Thoughts on the Miseries of Seduction and Prostitution (1783): "milliners. . .mantua-makers. . .haberdashers. . .they are actually seminaries of prostitution." [2]

William Hogarth, A Harlot's Progress, Plate 1, fourth state of four, April 1732. Young seamstress Moll Hackabout is solicited to join Mother Needham's establishment. Image source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

There were, of course, milliners who did not engage in sex work on the side. And as Worsley points out, it is possible that Hester Cole's shop was perfectly respectable, although Covent Garden was a district notorious for prostitution. However, Worsley has uncovered a very suggestive circumstance. In 1748 John Cleland published the pornographic novel Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. In that novel the 15-year-old heroine comes to London and is offered a position by a milliner in her Covent Garden shop:

Here, at the first sight of things, I found every thing breathe an air of decency, modesty and order.

In the outer parlour, or rather shop, sat three young women, rather demurely employed on millinery work, which was the cover of a traffic in more precious commodities; but three beautifuller creatures could hardly be seen.

After hours the shop turns into a brothel, and the milliner into a madam. The milliner's name? Mrs. Cole:

. . .As soon then as the evening began, and the shew of a shop was shut, the academy opened; the mask of mock-modesty was completely taken off, and all the girls delivered over to their respective calls of pleasure or interest with their men: and none of that sex was promiscuously admitted, but only such as Mrs. Cole was previously satisfied with their character and discretion. In short, this was the safest, politest, and, at the same time, the most thorough house of accommodation in town: every thing being conducted so, that decency made no intrenchment upon the most libertine pleasures; in the practice of which, too, the choice familiars of the house had found the secret so rare and difficult, of reconciling even all the refinements of taste and delicacy, with the most gross and determinate gratifications of sensuality. [3]

Another remarkable coincidence, if it is a coincidence: the main character of the novel is F. Hill. Two Covent Garden millinery shops, two Mrs. Coles, two Phils: was Cleland describing in his novel a real establishment that he had known and frequented?

William Hogarth, A Harlot's Progress, Plate 3, third state of three, April 1732. Moll Hackabout is visited by justice of the peace Sir John Gonson and several bailiffs investigating houses of ill repute. The empty punch bowl, the envelope (probably containing banknotes) in the punch bowl stand's open drawer, the discarded and broken clay pipes on the floor, Moll's crumpled stockings draped over the stretchers of the table next to the bed, and the gold watch she holds (probably picked from the pocket of her client) are all circumstantial evidence of the previous night's assignation. Image source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In January 1752, having turned 21 and her apprenticeship with Mrs. Cole at an end, Phila was shipped out to India by her rich Uncle Francis, William Austen's brother. The object, as everyone understood of a single woman travelling to India, was to find a husband. This may be another piece of evidence about the true nature of Mrs. Cole's establishment: in India, British women and men with wayward lives could wipe clean the slate of the past and reinvent themselves. And since there were so few British women in India, the British men there were less particular about whether their bride possessed a dowry or an irreproachable sexual history.

Two hundred days after her departure from London, after a voyage of 11,000 nautical miles down the coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean, Phila disembarked from the East Indiaman Bombay Castle in Madras (now Chennai) on India's southeast coast. There, probably by design, 22-year-old Phila met the 28-year-old Tysoe Saul Hancock, one of her Uncle Francis' legal clients. [4]

Hancock was a surgeon in the employ of the East India Company, and a bachelor seeking a wife. Six months after their first acquaintance, in February 1753, Hancock married Phila. Since Phila seems to have been sent to India expressly to wed Hancock, we might wonder that it took so long. Perhaps Phila was hoping for a better catch, or perhaps Hancock was exercising prudence and ensuring that Phila wasn't already pregnant when she arrived in India.

Miniature on ivory of Mrs Philadelphia Hancock, by John Smart, ca. 1765–68. Image source: Jane Austen House CHWJA:JAH23

It was evidently not a love-match, certainly not on her side. In 1792, then 16-year-old Jane Austen wrote "Catharine," a story in which a major character, Cecilia Wynne, seems to be based on Aunt Phila:

The eldest daughter had been obliged to accept the offer of one of her cousins to equip her for the East Indies, and tho' infinitely against her inclinations had been necessitated to embrace the only possibility that was offered to her, of a maintenance; yet it was one, so opposite to all her ideas of propriety, so contrary to her wishes, so repugnant to her feelings, that she would almost have preferred servitude to it, had choice been allowed her—. Her personal attractions had gained her a husband as soon as she had arrived at Bengal, and she had now been married nearly a twelvemonth. Splendidly, yet unhappily married. United to a man of double her own age, whose disposition was not amiable, and whose manners were unpleasing, though his character was respectable. [5]

Phila had been sent in quest of a husband to Madras, not Bengal, but in 1759 she and her husband relocated to Calcutta (now Kolkata). There they met Warren Hastings, whose story was as remarkable in its way as Philadelphia's.

Hastings was born in England, and his mother died soon after his birth. Before nine months had passed his father had remarried, abandoned the children and moved to Barbados with his new wife. Hastings was raised by his grandfather Penyston and his uncle Howard Hastings, who sent him to Westminster School in London, where he excelled. He left school prematurely on his uncle's death, and his new guardian arranged for him to join the East India Company as a clerk. When he turned 18 he sailed for Calcutta, arriving there in August 1750. Through sheer ability and drive he rose quickly through the company ranks, and by 1760 he was the right-hand man of the British Governor of Bengal, Henry Vansittart, who had just replaced Robert Clive in that office.

By this time Hastings had also amassed a personal fortune through side-trading. While this would seem to be a blatant conflict of interest, making money by trading on inside information and connections was a common practice among employees of the East India Company, and was likely an expected benefit. [6]

Warren Hastings, by Joshua Reynolds, 1766–67. Image source: National Portrait Gallery London NPG 4445

Hastings befriended Hancock and offered him an opportunity to join him in some of his lucrative dealings. Hastings, who had been widowed within the past year, had also noticed that Hancock had an attractive younger wife, perhaps one reason he brought Hancock in on some of his trades. And perhaps all the money Hancock was suddenly making enabled him to look the other way when Hastings and Phila began an ill-concealed affair. It would not be the first time a complaisant husband tolerated or even encouraged a sexual relationship between his wife and another man in order to reap social and financial benefits for himself.

In the spring of 1761 Phila became pregnant, and in December she gave birth to a daughter. Although it cannot be known for certain, there are many indications that Hastings was the girl's father, not Hancock:

• It was Phila's first pregnancy after eight years of marriage, an unusual circumstance which may suggest a lack of sex between husband and wife, or that Hancock was infertile.
• The girl was named, not after anyone in Hancock's or Phila's families, but after Hastings' infant daughter, who had died within a month of her birth, and who was herself named after Hastings' Aunt Elizabeth, his guardian uncle Howard's wife. 
• Hastings stood as Elizabeth's godfather at her christening. While this was something good friends commonly did for one another's children, it's also true that "natural" fathers, particularly when they had superior social or economic status, would often stand as godfathers for their offspring as a cover for providing support.
  
• In 1772 Hastings created a trust to ensure that Eliza (who was then called "Betsy" or "Bessy") would have financial independence and, should she choose to marry, good prospects. He endowed the girl with £5,000, and then on the death of Hancock three years later, doubled it. The combined sum was enough to give her the very substantial income of £500 a year. Jane Austen's father George was one of the two trustees. To put this income in perspective, when George Austen became rector of Deane in 1773 with a growing family, he received £110 a year. To settle such an enormous sum as £10,000 on a teenaged girl seems like an extravagant gesture to make for a friend's daughter.
• Finally, there is the testimony of Lord Clive. In a 1765 letter to his wife he urged her, "In no circumstances whatever keep company with Mrs Hancock, for it is beyond a doubt that she abandoned herself to Mr Hastings." [7]

Tysoe Saul Hancock and his wife Philadelphia (née Austen) with their daughter Elizabeth and their Indian servant Clarinda, by Joshua Reynolds, 1765–66. Collection: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

At the end of 1764 both Hastings and Hancock resigned their posts with the East India Company, and in January 1765 set sail together for England, along with Phila, Betsy, and Clarinda, the name by which the Hancocks referred to their Indian maidservant. Hastings' son George had been sent on ahead to England as a 4-year-old in 1761 to be raised and educated. 

Hastings expected to reunite with his son, who, he believed, was living with George and Cassandra Austen. Cassandra was the youngest daughter of the Leigh family and had been born in Adlestrop, a town in the Cotswolds on the border of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. The Hastings family lived just a mile away in neighboring Daylesford. When Cassandra became Mrs. George Austen in 1764, she and her new husband had taken in the young George Hastings as a foster child. (Between 1761 and 1764 George had probably been staying with Hastings' sister, who was the wife of John Woodman, the other trustee of Betsy's fortune.) Unfortunately in the fall of 1764 George Hastings had died of "putrid throat," probably diphtheria, and word from the Austens had not reached India before Hastings' departure. [8]

Arriving in London in June, six months after embarking in Calcutta, Hastings and the Hancocks rented homes not far from one another. It's not clear whether the affair continued, but later developments suggest that it did. By 1768 Hancock found that the wealth that had seemed inexhaustible in India did not go nearly so far in London. He decided to return to India to try to restore his fortune, leaving Phila and Betsy behind.

A year later Hastings followed, embarking for Madras in March 1769. He fell ill on board and was nursed back to health by the 22-year-old Maria von Imhoff. She was travelling to India with her husband, Baron Carl von Imhoff, and their oldest boy (a younger son stayed in England). The Baron was joining the East India Company army in Madras as a cadet officer; he was also a painter of miniatures.

Mrs. Imhoff and Child, by by William Dickinson, published by Carington Bowles, after Robert Edge Pine, 1770. Image source: National Portrait Gallery London NPG D36438

Over the long months at sea, the intimacy of the sickroom apparently led to other sorts of intimacy, and Hastings and Maria von Imhoff began an affair which continued at Madras. In late 1770 the Baron resigned his commission in the army and moved to Calcutta, where he set up as a portrait painter. Maria remained in Madras, living in Hastings' house. After a year she joined her husband; four months later in February 1772 Hastings also relocated to Calcutta on his appointment as Governor of Bengal. In March, the Baron received an order from the East India Company to leave British India in consequence of not fulfilling his contracted military service; when the Baron returned to Europe, Maria stayed behind with Hastings.

Hancock wrote to Phila in 1772 that the pretty and vivacious Baroness von Imhoff was Hastings' "favourite among the ladies." [9] No sooner had Phila received this news than she announced to her husband her plan to return to India with Betsy. He responded at length, forbidding her to come. She was obviously concerned that both she and their daughter would be replaced in Hastings' affections by the Baroness and her sons. It was at this time that Hastings set up the trust for Betsy as reassurance that she would not be abandoned.

Warren Hastings, his wife Marian, and an Indian servant at Alipore, 1784, by Johann Zoffany. Image source: Pinterest

Hastings vastly increased his wealth and consequence by his return to India. In 1773 the three governorships of British India (Bengal, Madras, and Bombay) were united under Hastings as governor-general, making him the de facto ruler of all British India—a position he held and profited from for the next 11 years. [10]

Hancock was not so fortunate. His position required him to make hazardous journeys across India. Isolated from the lucrative trading centers for months at a time, and with the country in the grip of a famine, Hancock struggled financially. He wrote to Phila, "All my expectations are vanished like a dream & have left me astonished." [11] On 5 November 1775 he died of disease in Calcutta; 45-year-old Phila and 13-year-old Betsy would have to make their way in the world on their own, assisted by Hastings' remarkable generosity.

Next time: Eliza Hancock de Feuillide, Jane's "outlandish cousin"

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1. Quoted in Lucy Worsley, Jane Austen at Home: A Biography, St. Martin's Press, 2017, p. 11.
2. Quoted in Worsley, Jane Austen at Home, p. 56.
3. John Cleland, Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Penguin, 1985, pp. 131–132.
4. Worsley states that he was "six years older" than Phila (p. 56) at their meeting, which would make him 28, but in Jane Austen: A Life (Knopf, 1997), Claire Tomalin says that he was 42 (p. 17). Most other sources I've found give Hancock's birthdate as 1723, making him six and a half years older than Phila; Tomalin may have been basing her estimate of Hancock's age on Jane Austen's story "Catharine" (see note 5), where Cecilia Wynne's husband is described as "double her own age."
5. Jane Austen, "Catharine," in R.W. Chapman, editor, The Works of Jane Austen, Volume VI: The Minor Works, revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 194, 203–205.
6. Hastings would later be impeached in the House of Commons for corruption during his time as Governor-General from 1773 to 1784; he was acquitted in the House of Lords.
7. Quoted in Worsley, Jane Austen at Home, p. 57.
8. James Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen by her Nephew, 2nd edition, 1871, Folio Society reprint, 1989, p. 6. Austen-Leigh states that the George Hastings was sent to stay with George Austen in 1761, three years before his marriage. It seems unlikely that as a bachelor Proctor at Oxford University, as he was then, George Austen would have been able to take on the foster care of a young boy. More likely is the scenario in Tomalin's book: that 7-year-old George Hastings was sent to the Austens shortly after their marriage in 1764 after they had relocated to Deane. He must have been cared for elsewhere from 1761 to 1764.
9. Quoted in Tomalin, Jane Austen, p. 21.
10. Hastings would go on to marry Maria, whom he called Marian, in 1777 after she was divorced by her husband. Their marriage lasted 41 years, until his death at 85 in 1818. Marian lived to be 90, dying in 1837.
11. Quoted in Worsley, Jane Austen at Home, p.58.