A Memoir of Jane Austen

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Explanatory Notes 203
the possibility of his having omitted to make an entry of such interest to
him. I can only suppose that the child died elsewhere (possibly having
been sent somewhere for his health) or that by the desire of his family
he was buried elsewhere’ (HRO, MS 23M93/84/1). George Austen’s
elder sister Philadelphia had gone out to India in 1752 in search of a
husband and there married Tysoe Saul Hancock, a surgeon and associate
of Hastings. Hastings became a close family friend of the Hancocks
and stood godfather to their daughter Elizabeth, for whom he subsequently
made generous financial provision. It would be a natural
reciprocal gesture for Philadelphia to recommend little George Hastings
to her brother’s charge in England. Further speculations by
Austen scholars, that Warren Hastings may have known Mrs Cassandra
Austen through a childhood link with her cousins, the Adlestrop
Leighs, or the conjecture of a boyhood association between George
Austen and Hastings, remain just that, speculation, with no substantial
proof (see Fam. Rec., 15; and Maggie Lane, Jane Austen’s Family
through Five Generations (1984), 39). However, the record becomes
more tangled, with suggestions that Mrs Hancock’s daughter Eliza,
George Austen’s niece, was her love-child by Hastings and not by her
husband. Tucker (39–41) treats the family scandal (if such it was) cautiously,
while David Nokes (Jane Austen: A Life (1997), 31–3, 48–50) is
far more sensationalist and, though without proof, unequivocal. Certainly
Hastings’s interest in the welfare of the Hancock women, mother
and daughter, remained strong, and his association with the Austens
survived little George Hastings’s death. But Deirdre Le Faye, whose
biography of Eliza is forthcoming, has found no evidence at all to
confirm Hastings’s paternity or the scandal. JA’s brother Henry, who
became cousin Eliza’s second husband in 1797, wrote to congratulate
Hastings on his acquittal for impeachment in 1795 and maintained an
occasional and obsequious correspondence with him thereafter. Hastings
also used his influence with the Admiralty in Frank Austen’s
favour in 1794. (Austen Papers, 153–4, 176–8, 226–7; Keith Feiling,
Warren Hastings (1966), 39–40; Robin Vick, ‘The Hancocks’, Jane
Austen Society Report (1999), 19–23. JEAL refers to G. R. Gleig,
Memoirs of the Life of Warren Hastings (1841).)
Mary Russell Mitford: (1787–1855), letter-writer, poet, dramatist, but
best known for her popular sketches of village life, collected in Our
Village (5 vols., 1824–32). Her grandfather, the Revd Dr Richard Russell,
was rector of Ashe until 1783, at which time the Revd George Lefroy and
his wife Anne, who was to become JA’s great friend, took up residence
there. At several points in the Memoir JEAL makes comparisons between
JA and Mary Mitford, as near contemporaries and observers of Hampshire
village society. The likely connections between their two families
provided the source for an obviously malicious (but not necessarily false)
representation of JA in The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, ed. A. G.
L’Estrange (3 vols., 1870), to which JEAL alludes in Ed.1 of the Memoir,