Note: This piece was written by Emma Butler, a PhD researcher in English Literature at Edge Hill University. Learn more about Emma here or on her instagram @19thcenturyem.

Jane Austen’s Sanditon is an unfinished, twelve chapter gem of a book. In it, Austen satirises the 19th Century trend for seabathing, portraying a range of invalid sufferers (some with hypochondriac-esque complaints).

She also builds on political views she first addressed in Mansfield Park by including mixed-race heiress Miss Lambe in Sanditon, a character in the book that we do not get to meet.

Using water for health purposes became fashionable with spa resorts, like Bath, in the eighteenth century, which led to the craze for the seaside resort into the latter half of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century. In the novel, Tom Parker describes the resort of Sanditon as being a haven for the invalid sufferer:

“‘The Sea Air and Sea Bathing together were nearly infallible, One or the other of them being a match for every Disorder, of the stomach, the lungs or the blood; They were anti-spasmodic, anti-pulmonary, anti-sceptic, anti-bilious and anti-rheumatic. […] They were healing, softening, relaxing – fortifying and bracing.”

In Austen’s novel, Arthur Parker and the Parker sisters, Diana and Susan, are examples of hypochondriacs and/or invalids within Sanditon. In the 2019 TV series adaptation of the novel, Susan is omitted from the narrative – seemingly to instead poke fun at a dramatic Diana and campy Arthur.

In both the novel and the adaptation, Arthur has a comic conversation about his illnesses (and likely hypochondria – given his ailments are often fixed with hot cocoa, wine and, according to the series, about six pieces of toast). After declaring that the damp air gives him rheumatism, Arthur asks Charlotte whether she also suffers from the complaint.

On her denial, he follows up with ‘that’s a great blessing. But perhaps you are nervous?’. Charlotte once again replies that she is not afflicted by her nerves. Arthur declares ‘I am very nervous. To say the truth, nerves are the worst part of my complaints in my opinion’, following up that his tendency to sweat signifies that he must be suffering with his nerves, for there ‘cannot be a surer sign’ of nervousness than perspiration.

Arthur and Charlotte’s back and forth about the extent of Arthur’s complaints and Charlotte’s lack of any is increasingly humorous the longer it goes on. Arthur’s emphasis that his nerves are his major complaint implies that his hypochondria and other symptoms may be exaggerated. However, Arthur’s clear propensity for nervousness may not eliminate him from the category of ‘invalid’ altogether. Even if Arthur is not a ‘proper’ invalid, he does still suffer in some capacity.

Despite the symptoms that Arthur suffers from, he is primarily portrayed as a humorous character. He is a comedic, rather camp, character but one who is kind and gentle (and perhaps feminized). In the novel he is lumped in together with his sisters, it is often referred that ‘The Parkers’ as a whole are invalids, seemingly not much differentiated from each other.

Arthur’s sickness (exaggerated or not)  differentiates him from the more traditionally masculine characters in Sanditon, and becomes even more apparent within the TV series. 

In episode two of the first series, Arthur complains that he can no longer be carried in a sedan chair and must instead walk to Lady Denham’s house with the rest of his family.

Sydney Parker, his brother, rides past in a carriage accompanied by his two friends Lord Babington and Mr Crowe, jeering at Arthur as they ride past without him.  Arthur is left to walk with his sister, sister-in-law, and Charlotte. Despite being a so-called invalid, Arthur is not able to ride in the carriage with his brother and is left in an ideologically female state. Arthur laments to Diana that ‘the fellows with the sedan chairs refuse to carry me’, followed up with his (clearly incorrect belief) that he is, quote, ‘practically wasting away’.

The TV adaptation of Sandition, however, ignores my favourite part of the book – Susan’s leech treatment. In comparison to her siblings, poor Susan Parker’s ailments in the book are much more severe.

Susan never ever speaks in the text, and all traces of her are presented through her sister Diana and her letters. Perhaps her lack of speech in the novel is what caused her character to be cut out of the adaptation. In what I have dubbed the ‘leech scene’, Diana tells her brother Tom that:

‘[Susan] has been suffering much from the headache, and six leeches a day for ten days together relieved her so little that we thought it right to change our measures, and being convinced on examination that much of the evil lay in her gum, I persuaded her to attack the disorder there. She has accordingly had three teeth drawn’.

Apothecary George Horn writes, in his book An Entirely New Treatise on Leeches (1798), that when using leeches to treat a headache, to ‘receive the most instantaneous, effectual and permanent relief, [apply] to the temples, two, four or six, according to the violence of the complaint.¹

Horn advocates for the use of leeches to help cure ailments and complaints quickly, and clearly Susan’s suffering is severe if six leeches are being used for such a length of time. However, the sudden change in tactics by Diana indicates that Susan’s suffering is so severe that even  the strongest suggested treatment of leeches is not enough for the extent of Susan’s illness.

Austen uses the duality of horror and comedy to portray how far the Parkers will go in the questionably genuine belief that they are sick. It is ridiculous in its extremity. Diana, who claims herself to be an invalid, takes on the role of a crusader and by her own account ‘attacks’ the illness that she claims has plagued her sister.

The implications here can be read in either of two ways: 

• Either Diana decided that her sister’s headache was caused by her gum, convincing both Susan and a doctor that the correct decision was to pull out three teeth; 
• Or the more horrifying scenario – that Diana herself removed three of her sister’s teeth, after subjecting her to blood-letting for almost two weeks.

 I am drawing my ideas of the ridiculous invalid from the ideas presented in Andrew McInnes and Rita J. Dashwood’s book, Reading the Romantic Ridiculous.  McInnes and Dashwood argue that ‘the ridiculous, like comic theory more generally, can be inflected with social prejudice as well as offering more progressive perspectives on nature and culture’². 

Part of the invalid’s ‘ridiculous’ or comic nature is due to the precarity of the invalid’s status, and that invalid characters are often used as comedy in nineteenth-century fiction – as Davies does in his adaptation of Sanditon.

As well as the invalid being portrayed as a satirical, amusing figure, the invalid can also be portrayed as a figure of tragedy or even horror.

The concept of the ridiculous here, then, allows for a reading of the social ideas of how the invalid was perceived in nineteenth-century culture, and in turn presented in literature. The ‘invalid’ becomes a ridiculous figure – trapped between readings of horror, humour, and a product of the medical practices of the time.

This dual identity of the invalid – as both ridiculous and horrific – complicates the reading of health and sickness at the seaside in Austen’s writing and offers alternative views on how disabled characters are represented in the nineteenth-century literary imagination – and in turn, how such characters are still played for humour in modern period drama adaptations.

Arthur’s camp feminized invalidism is ridiculous, though I’d argue that his ending in the adaptation is less so. Overall, Sanditon in both its forms represent the so-called ‘ridiculous’ invalid, as well as how the seaside acts as a space where both sexiness and illness exist in a strange cohabitation – even more overtly so thanks to Davies’ interpretation of Austen’s unfinished novel.

Bibliography

1. George Horn, An Entirely New Treatise on Leeches (London: H. D. Symonds, 1798), p. 23. ↩︎
2. Andrew McInnes and Rita J. Dashwood, Reading the Romantic Ridiculous (New York: Routledge, 2024,) p. 19. ↩︎