Chapter 1: Preamble
Jane Austen and Sanditon
As for background to Matthew Fagg, the man who actually built the house, here the key text is Jane Austen’s Sanditon. I remember reading this with a shock of recognition soon after moving into Exmouth House. Sanditon is said to be set between Hastings and Eastbourne, and it is being developed by Mr Parker, who has built an elegant residence there called Trafalgar House, sounding just like Exmouth House, located ‘on the most elevated spot on the Down’.2 Mr Parker constantly waxes eloquent about the merits of the up and coming resort with its healthy sea breezes and the like. So here was Exmouth House, built almost exactly at the time when Jane Austen was writing her sadly incomplete novel (she died in July 1817, leaving it unfinished), and looking very like the house that she there describes. What is more, the name fits exactly. Mr Parker is slightly regretful about the name of Trafalgar House, feeling that ‘Waterloo’ would have been a more topical name for it.3 But in fact ‘Exmouth’ would have been better still, commemorating the bombardment of Algiers in an attempt to end Christian slavery there by Edward Pellew, Baron Exmouth, on 27 August 1816, for which he was created 1st Viscount Exmouth on 10 December that year.
2 Jane Austen, Fragment of a Novel. Written… January to March 1817. Now First Printed from the Manuscript (Oxford, 1925), p. 55.
3 Austen, Fragment, p. 44.