One-time Irish chief justice Tom Lefroy may have been the inspiration for Jane Austen's Mr Darcy. Edmund Honohan, the Master of the High Court, considers the evidence
Opening in cinemas next week, Becoming Jane, a film about English novelist Jane Austen and Irishman, later Irish chief justice, Tom Lefroy, is likely to prompt speculation of the "what if" and "if only" varieties: were they meant for each other; would they have lived happily ever after? And were they the real-life Mr Darcy and Lizzie Bennet?
The known facts about the brief relationship of Jane Austen and Tom Lefroy during 1795 and 1796 are clear but inconclusive. We know they met that season in Hampshire and that she met his family. We know that he was the son of Anthony Lefroy, a colonel of dragoons from Co Limerick, who had travelled to London to study law in Lincoln's Inn. We know she wrote excitedly to her sister promising to fill in the details later, but of these no record remains.
And we know that he married a Co Wexford heiress in 1799. Tom and Jane didn't make a match of it. Instead, we have Pride and Prejudice. She started and wrote the book, almost in one long sitting, her creative powers apparently fuelled by recent events. Originally entitled "First Impressions", the novel was rejected by publishers in 1797 and not published until 1813. Meanwhile, for both, life moved on.
Had prejudice or pride come between them? Which of them had been prejudiced, which proud? Lefroy's subsequent life and career in Ireland may give us clues as to his character.
By the time he returned to Dublin, the Act of Union had moved Grattan's parliament to London, 1798 was history and the rule of Dublin Castle was as undemocratic as before. A US academic, Malcolm Brown, described it as follows: "After Dublin lost its function as a capital, the legal and administrative professions became largely surplus. English rule from day to day rested mainly on the parsimonious arts of authority, especially upon the ability to make capital of Irish inertia and division. Expert use of the tactics of delay wore out the disaffected."
The economy was stalled. What we would now describe as outward capital flows (via the absentee landlord) and a balance of trade that shifted in England's favour meant that investment and the industrial revolution passed Ireland by.
The native Irish were largely a peasant and rural people. This, from Philip Magnus's biography of Gladstone: "In England, squire, parson and tenant-farmer formed a closely-knit community of interest and sympathy which was undreamt of in Ireland. Irish tenants were men of straw, barely distinguishable from agricultural labourers, rack-rented and living in constant dread of eviction."
Maria Edgeworth's novel Castle Rackrent, published in 1800, "portrayed Anglo-Irish landlords as a hopelessly irresponsible class aware only of the rights of property but woefully ignorant of its duties", according to Declan Kiberd's Irish Classics. And then came the Famine, and after that, hundreds of thousands of tenants were evicted to clear the land for grazing.
It was in this dysfunctional society that the young Lefroy practised as a lawyer: a far cry indeed from Jane Austen's Derbyshire. Elected MP for Trinity in 1830, he supported Peel and his reform programme in England, but his policy prescription for Ireland was essentially Protestant and unionist. Lefroy was enthusiastic about the teaching of the scriptures, as "the common charter of Christianity as agreed by all sects", but after Catholic emancipation in 1829 the new Catholic voters (and O'Connell) successfully pressed for a national education system of separate religions and secular instruction.
If he had been radical in politics, as a judge he had to apply the agenda set by Dublin Castle. It was Peel who put him on the bench in 1841 and ultimately he became chief justice of the queen's bench (one of the so-called "four" courts). Once appointed to the bench his opportunities to effect reform were limited. The scope for judge-made law was restricted. Though they can sometimes ameliorate the harshness of law, judges can never change the law outright. They must take it as they find it.
In the 1850s, parliament started wholesale legal reforms, laying down the law for judges. London's legislative output for Ireland seems to have consisted largely of Coercion Acts suspending habeas corpus. Fortunately, the legal "agenda" in 2007 is democratic "home rule" (though not populist or media-driven: it is set by the people in the Constitution and by the Oireachtas in legislation). It was a different story when Lefroy was a judge. Though the apartheid penal laws were being dismantled, of the courts system of that era the late Prof John M Kelly wrote that "judges held office in presence of privilege, official corruption and (largely in the name of natural property rights) one of the most brutal criminal codes in Europe".
So it's not surprising that we start with a prejudice against him. He was a lawyer: that's not a good start. The law is not universally accepted as one of the caring professions. Worse, he became a judge and his portrait hangs in King's Inns. He was an establishment insider, a former MP, and a government appointee to the bench enforcing laws for an undemocratic and unequal society.
BUT NOTE ALSO that he was appointed, it is suggested, to a surprisingly modest judicial office initially; he wasn't knighted, nor, unlike so many of his contemporaries, was he elevated to the House of Lords. Yet he was a published legal author and clearly more than capable. In a pamphlet critical of the bench published by the Irish bar in 1850, entitled The Reign of Mediocrity, Lefroy was singled out for his "astuteness and erudition".
Was he, perhaps, a little too independent of Dublin Castle? In Vaughan's catalogue of Landlords and Tenants of Mid-Victorian Ireland he is not listed, but interestingly, we find a reference to his son acting on behalf of tenants in a major stand-off with their landlords, the trustees of Trinity College, his father's old constituency. Does the apple fall far from the tree?
Note also that the country seat he built at Carriglass in Co Longford was no Pemberley. It was a modest but unmistakably Victorian country house complete with gothic detailing, asymmetry and turreting, and with a floor plan designed to work like a machine, "enabling the Victorian gentleman to attend fully to his Christian and moral responsibilities of family estate staff and tenantry". There are very few examples of these houses in Ireland. The landed gentry had no capital for building, and even if they had, Ireland was no longer the location of choice. Lefroy was ahead of his time, and the house was his investment and vote of confidence in the future of Ireland.
In a parliamentary debate in 1856 about concerns as to the capacity of three Irish judges, including Lefroy, still sitting in their eighties, Disraeli said: "I have not heard that any corruption is imputed or any inefficiency alleged in the present instance. We have not had a petition. We have not had a public complaint. We have not, strange to say, even had an anonymous slander."
SO PERHAPS THE prejudice is, after all, misjudged. His family later recalled Lefroy's "unalterable cheerfulness" and his "habit of always looking at the bright side of things".
His strongest character witness is surely Jane Austen herself. He fired her creativity. They were clearly well suited intellectually. And while Jane has great fun at the expense of clergymen in her novels, she goes easy on lawyers.
Does the novel give us vital clues? Lizzie was prejudiced and Darcy proud: is that how Tom and Jane had been? In Jon Spence's book Becoming Jane Austen, it is suggested that Austen cleverly reversed the characters; that the reality was that she, Jane, was the proud one and he, Tom, the one too quick to judge. Surely not! Jane may have had her pride, but she was too interested in character to ignore a man of prejudice: good material for a book. Also, their friendship was brief but not so brief as to suggest that a mismatch appeared obvious to him. In those times it would surely have been the man who engineered the meetings: any prejudice would have caused him to distance himself. And is it not the act of a person who belatedly acknowledges her prejudice to write later - perhaps even a novel - to set the record straight?
So why did they not marry? Are we not all apt to jump to the conclusion, negative or positive, that we think best suits us at the time? With a bit of luck we can be spot-on, but first impressions and crossed wires can be fatal when pride and prejudice are in the mix.
Lizzie and Darcy found a way through, but Tom and Jane did not. Perhaps they were, both of them, proud and prejudiced in equal measure and understood this too late, leaving a lifelong regret at the loss of a soul mate. He remembered her more than 60 years later, after all. That there had been no contact between them in the interim could be evidence either way, depending on how close they had been. She evidently thought it close, and a complete silence after such a friendship suggests a painful break-up.
Writing to her sister in 1813, after visiting an exhibition of Joshua Reynolds's portraits, Jane Austen noted "there was nothing like Mrs D . . . I can only imagine that Mr D prizes any picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. I can imagine he would have that sort of feeling - that mixture of love, pride and delicacy". Is this how Austen still saw Lefroy almost 20 years on?
She had several suitors, one of whom she accepted one evening only to withdraw her acceptance the following morning. It must surely be significant that she never married - more significant, even, the fact that Jane was the name Lefroy gave his firstborn.