Who is Henry Crawford?

The question may seem to bear a resemblance to another famous question: 'How many children had Lady Macbeth?' It does resemble it in being a question about a fictional character. But in another way it doesn't. We know from the text of Shakespeare's play that Lady Macbeth had some children, but just how many she had is a question that has no answer. By contrast, in the meaning of it that I shall come around to explaining, my question does have a determinate answer.

Henry Crawford is a character in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. I am induced to ask who he is, all the same, by something which Claire Tomalin says in her excellent biography of that writer. Tomalin devotes several pages (225-36) to a discussion of the critical reception of Mansfield Park, and she centres this on the reaction of Jane Austen's readers to the 'moral tendency' of two of her central protagonists, Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram. I will concentrate my discussion on Fanny Price in relation to Henry Crawford, and to a lesser extent his sister Mary. There have been many readers, Tomalin reports, who haven't taken to Fanny, finding her rigid in her moralism, self-righteous, priggish. Kingsley Amis is quoted by Tomalin to the effect that her and Edmund's company for an evening 'would not be lightly undertaken'. Henry and Mary Crawford, on the other hand, have been widely liked and thought to be delightful.

Others have come to Fanny's literary defence, but Tomalin makes it clear that she for her part is not persuaded by that defence. My own purpose isn't to try to adjudicate between these different responses. Personally, I am more sympathetic to Fanny Price than some others seem to be - for possessing, as it turns out, a certain strength of character when it matters, despite her diffidence and timidity (partly explicable, these, from the early life experience that sees her removed from her family home to the grand surroundings of Mansfield Park). But in any case, readers will have the reactions that they do, and since these reactions are to characters who are of many parts, and developed across a series of situations, events, comings and goings, it stands to reason that judgements will vary.

And yet, Fanny Price vis-à-vis Henry Crawford and his sister Mary... I wish to put in a word on her behalf and in qualification of their easy likeability. Excellent company as the two of them may be - and Austen undeniably presents them as having traits of good friendship and conviviality - there is on Henry's part, both at the beginning and at the end of his interest in Fanny, something rather amiss. His first intention towards her, when that interest is aroused, is to try to get her to fall in love with him for his own amusement. Remonstrating with him at first, Mary goes along with his plan, though both of them show themselves aware of the possible danger to someone vulnerable like Fanny of toying with her affections in this way. In the event, Fanny is tougher than either of them (or at that point the reader) knows. But Henry's plan, and Mary's endorsement of it, strike me as being less than admirable.

Life being what it is, Henry's plan runs into a snag. He actually falls in love with Fanny. But not loving him, she rejects his advances, though they are pressed with all the sincerity, charm and energy he can muster, and supported by the efforts of others, who are keen for Fanny to make what they see as a felicitous marriage. Now Henry starts to show some strengths of character of his own. He is not discouraged, but continues to profess his love, his willingness to wait patiently, to try to win Fanny over gradually by devotedly affectionate conduct solicitous of her situation and her needs. He shows himself a man of true constancy.

Except that suddenly the constancy runs out and he runs off with Fanny's cousin - Maria Bertram as was, now Maria Rushworth. It seems to me quite plain that Fanny's doubts about Henry Crawford are amply confirmed by the way in which his attention to her begins and the way in which it ends. Delightful company though he may be, these two episodes indicate that she has been right to take him as she does, that is, for a not altogether reliable person. The two episodes that bracket his pursuit of Fanny are not, obviously, capital crimes; but they do point to a weakness in his make-up, one which Fanny has accurately perceived. He could well be more fun than she is to hang out with, yet the overall picture of the two of them, as Jane Austen writes it, suggests that you might rather want her than him for a friend where something important was at stake.

Now then - have I lost sight of my opening question? I have not. Late on in her discussion of Mansfield Park, Claire Tomalin writes thus of Henry's running off with Maria Rushworth:

The fitting up of Henry Crawford with a piece of standard fictional delinquency - an offstage seduction, like Willoughby and Wickham before him - suggests rather less commitment to this part of the story on Austen's part than to the fully narrated chapters in which his charm, kindness and irresponsible flirting are on display.

This may be no more than an exercise by the critic of her right to say where she does and where she doesn't find the novelist's treatment of a character consistent or compelling. However, if it is meant by Tomalin to say that Henry Crawford ought to be understood and judged by us shorn of the fictional delinqency with which she says Austen has fitted him up, I think we are, as readers, bound to demur. Henry Crawford's only existence is the one he has been given by Jane Austen in Mansfield Park. For the purpose of taking a view of him and of his character, as of Fanny Price's responses to him, there is no other Henry Crawford meaningfully available. There is, in Fanny's world, no Henry purged of his late delinquency, nor of his intended recreational wooing that could have turned out to be a cruelty to the target of it, herself.

As I said at the outset, Henry Crawford is a character of Jane Austen's. He is not, consequently, the man as improved by Claire Tomalin's suggestion, a man who somehow pre-exists being 'fitted up' with a misdeed by his creator. This isn't, of course, to deny that the real Henry might actually have improved had he had a longer fictional life - in a Jane Austen sequel, say, or even one written by someone else. But that is not the Henry whose character we are called upon to estimate comparatively with Fanny Price's.

[See the several comments arising from this post: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.]