Chapter 2: Matthew Fagg

Why Hastings, what was the house built for and why was it called ‘Exmouth House’? As we have already seen, Hastings was by this time a rising seaside resort, part of a broader trend towards the provision of such facilities around the coast of Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As far as Hastings was concerned a pioneer had been Edward Capell, whose house, East Cliff House, can be claimed to be the very first seaside house.11 By the time Fagg arrived, such development had proliferated at Hastings, not least through the provision of large houses for military personnel based in the town during the Napoleonic wars, and 1794 saw the publication of the earliest guidebook to the town, James Stell’s The Hasting’s Guide, the first of a succession of such publications. There was also a proliferation of hotels, lending libraries ‘and all the other accoutrements expected of a seaside resort’.12

We also have the background of Jane Austen’s Sanditon, which has already been mentioned. As noted in the Preamble, Mathew Fagg sounds just like Mr Parker, and Exmouth House just like the elegant residence he had built, Trafalgar House -- ‘a light elegant Building, standing in a small Lawn with a very young plantation round it, about an hundred yards from the brow of a steep, but not very lofty Cliff’.13 This had recently been erected as part of the speculative development for which Parker and others were responsible, and which forms one of the chief themes of the novel, along with Mr Parker’s constant adulation of the merits of the resort, with its healthy sea air and potential for bathing. Not only was Exmouth House built almost at the moment when Jane Austen was penning her incomplete novel -- she left it unfinished when she died in July 1817 -- but the name is highly topical, as we have already seen. Mr Parker is slightly apologetic about the name that he had given his house, feeling that ‘Waterloo’ (1815) would have been more appropriate than ‘Trafalgar’ (1805).14 But in fact ‘Exmouth’ would have been even better: as we saw in the Preamble, the name evidently commemorates 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.

11 See Michael Hunter, ‘The First Seaside House?’, Georgian Group Journal, 8 (1998), 135-42.

12 See Nicholas Antram and Nicolaus Pevsner, Sussex: East, with Brighton and Hove (New Haven and London, 2013), pp. 422 and 436ff. passim (though the originality of East Cliff House is rather underrated).

13 Austen, Fragment, p. 55. For the reference to the ‘cliff’ as meaning a slope, see Antony Edmonds, Jane Austen’s Worthing: The Real Sanditon (Stroud, Gloucs., 2015), p. 59. Edmunds illustrates Jane Austen’s acquaintance with Worthing and makes much of the links with Sanditon, though he admits that many details in the novel reflect Jane’s imagination (p. 62); these include the point about Trafalgar and Waterloo.

14 Austen, Fragment, p. 44.