ANGLICAN MORAL THEOLOGY: SIN, RESTITUTION, AND SALVATION IN SANDITON, SEASON 3
The television show Sanditon is set at a fictional seaside resort in England during the last years of King George III’s regency. (1) The Church of England is the established religion and English common law courts are charged with righting legal wrongs. This essay assesses perspectives on sin, restitution, and salvation in Season Three, focusing on two characters who appeared in the first season: Georgiana Lambe and Sir Edward Denham.
Georgiana Lambe is the daughter of a white sugar plantation owner in Antigua and the black enslaved woman he owned. Georgiana’s father sold her mother to another slave owner when Georgiana was a baby. Prior to her father’s death, he sold his plantation and liberated the slaves, leaving her a substantial inheritance of £100,000. The shady figure Charles Lockhart, claiming to have been her father’s nephew, sued to overturn her father’s will. Once his efforts failed, he moved to Sanditon and inserted himself into Georgiana’s life.
At the start of season three, Lockhart sues in the English Court of Chancery. Evoking all the prejudices of his race, gender, and class, he argues Georgiana is a slave because her mother had been one, and that Georgiana is a woman of loose morals because she is unmarried, lives alone, and has dated men. Her inherited fortune came from slavery, but she is a hypocritical rabble-rousing abolitionist leading a sugar boycott. Finally, Lockhart claims Georgiana’s father had been a feeble man of unsound mind who had been taken advantage of by Sidney and Georgiana.
The context for Georgiana’s story lay in England’s participation in the Atlantic slave trade. The slave trade increased England’s wealth, but evangelical Anglicans were a counterforce pushing for abolition. (2) John Newton (1725-1807) had been a slave trader. After his conversion, he turned away from that sinful trade and became an Anglican clergyman. Most famously, he wrote the hymn Amazing Grace and spoke of how it saved a “wretch” like him – a reference to his past occupation. (3) Evangelical Anglicans sponsored Somerset v. Stewart, (4) the test case that determined slavery could not exist in England. In the meantime, William Wilberforce was leading the movement in Parliament to pass the Slave Trade Act in 1807 that ended England’s participation in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery didn’t end in the colonies until the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.
In Sandition, Georgiana wonders whether her inheritance had been her father’s bid for absolution. She argues that to overturn the will would only compound his sin and worsen the injustices she and her mother experienced. The judge rules that Georgiana is not a slave. The will was valid. Georgiana inherits her father’s estate and Lockhart’s case fails.
Contrary to Georgiana Lambe, Sir Edward Denham is a member of the English aristocracy. He inherited his title from his uncle, but it didn’t come with much money. His uncle’s widow is the childless Lady Denham, one of the wealthiest women in Sanditon. Early in season 1, Lady Denham urged a marriage between him and Miss Lambe. Georgiana declined. She did not want to come under the control of a fortune-hunting husband.
Sir Edward undertook several schemes throughout seasons one and two to gain Lady Denham’s fortune. His competition to gain his aunt’s favor included his stepsister Lady Esther Denham and Lady Denham’s relative Clara Brereton. At first, he and Esther conspired to discredit Clara. But when Lady Denham fell ill, he and Clara burned Lady Denham’s will. Lady Esther told Lady Denham as soon as she found out. She then disinherited him. Upon Lady Denham banishing him and Clara, Edward joined the army.
In season 2, Edward was a member of a company of soldiers visiting Sanditon. By coincidence, Clara returned as well because she was pregnant by Edward and had nowhere else to go because he refused to recognize the child. Believing their child would be a ticket to regaining his inheritance, Edward asked Clara to marry him. Next, he coerced her to join him in a plot to get Esther out of the way. They would poison her with laudanum, hoping she might be declared insane.
Clara informed Esther and Lady Denham of the plot. Lady Denham didn’t have him arrested and imprisoned. She believed she had no option but to have faith in him. Could he be reformed and redeemed? The answer lay in strategies of punishment and religious instruction to improve his moral fiber. Once he demonstrated sufficient improvement, she was going to provide him with a small allowance. Edward refused to cooperate.
After losing his military commission, Edward had no option but to return to Sanditon. Dr. Fuchs supervises drenching Edward with a hose of cold water. Regular dowsing as punishment would force his mind to resist temptation. Rev. Hankins and his sister, Miss Hankins, are responsible for his spiritual direction. They lecture Edward on the Bible and have him kneel before the altar praying for God’s grace to redeem his soul. They assign him manual labor at the vicarage, tasks a titled gentleman would not normally do. Edward is humbling himself before God. Reminiscent of John Donne and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he proposes writing religious poetry.
The Hankins’ ministry is grounded in Anglican moral theology: “pastoral, open and concerned with…holiness, (5) the expression of piety, the search for a life of virtue, and the channeling of desire.” (6) For example, “[Jeremy] Taylor [as an Anglican ethicist] not only stressed the reality and gravity of sin, but also underlined the need for structure and direction to become holy people. Our life is to be one of holiness, where our intentions are informed by grace…Taylor united intense devotion with moral guidance. What is needed in the Christian is a meditation on one’s actions. By so doing, intent and desire can be transformed.” (7)
Yet Edward continued his typical pattern of seduction and deceit. Seizing upon a new young woman, he persuaded her to elope – until her uncle confronted him and offered the chance to marry legitimately. Yet something has changed, for Edward refuses the offer; he knows he has done wrong and should not marry her, no matter how great the financial reward. Lady Denham is surprised. Had Edward been redeemed and reformed? Perhaps he came to realize that he was selfish in taking advantage of an impressionable and lonely teenager. Does it even matter if he’d changed? Everyone knows him to be disreputable.
Sanditon and its characters are all fictional, but that doesn’t mean that its lessons of sin and redemption aren’t relevant to Anglicans today. The Episcopal Church Book of Common Prayer explains in the Catechism: “Sin is the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” (8) We learn of our need for redemption through freedom from the power of sin, “so that with the help of God, we may live in harmony with God, within ourselves, with our neighbors, and with all creation.” (9) Moreover, when we have sinned, restitution is a possibility, as indicated by the story of Jesus and Zaccheus the tax collector in Luke 19. (10) Georgiana’s father engaged in the sinful slave trade and sold away his child’s mother. His restitution lay in freeing his slaves and leaving his entire inheritance to his daughter.
Lady Denham explains that since she’d seen sufficient evidence of reformation, she was going to provide Edward with a living. Edward thinks she is crazy. He probably sees himself as a notoriously sinful man, the last person anyone would ever imagine as an Anglican vicar. Drawing upon Holmgren, these individual acts indicating improved behavior could arguably become part of a pattern of living, new habits and dispositions that might push Edward to act like a better man. He would slowly build character as he pursues a career that pushes him to change and grow in his faith. (11) The hope is that he would experience sanctification in his daily life as a clergyman: “the process of being saved from the power of sin in anticipation of our life around the throne of [God] when we ill no longer encounter the presence of sin.” (12) . At the end of the movie, Edward is in the back of a church wearing a cassock. With this third season of Sanditon being the last, viewers won’t be able to follow Edward’s journey in faith going forward. But fanfiction writers might be up to the challenge. (13)
The broadcast is a Masterpiece British historical drama inspired by Jane Austen’s unfinished manuscript of the same name, Sanditon, Season 3 | The Final Season Trailer | Masterpiece | PBS (2023).
See ie., John Piper, The Roots of Endurance: Invincible Perseverance in the Lives of John Newton, Charles Simeon, and William Wilberforce, Crossway Books, 2002.
See ie., Landon Jones, the Incredible True Story Behind ‘Amazing Grace,’ Time, June 28 2015, Amazing Grace: Song Sung By President Obama Written By Atheist Slaver | Time
Somerset v. Stewart 98 ER 499 (1772). See, The Somerset v Stewart Case | English Heritage (english-heritage.org.uk). Historians have long wondered whether Lord Mansfield’s family influenced this anti-slavery opinion. He and his wife raised Dido Elizabeth Belle, his mixed-race great-niece, the daughter of Mansfield’s nephew, Sir John Lindsay, a career naval officer. Dido’s mother had been an enslaved black woman in the Caribbean. See ie., https://content.historicengland.org.uk/content/docs/research/leafletslave1final.pdf
Peter Sedgwick, Anglican Moral Theology Today, Anglican Theological Review 2021, Vol 103 (4), 450-467, page 458.
Id. 463.
Id. For further discussions of Anglican moral theology, see ie., Stephen Holmgren, Ethics After Easter (2000). See also, Mark McIntosh, Mysteries of Faith (2000).
1979 Book of Common Prayer, p. 848.
Id., 849.
“Zaccheus stood there and said to the Lord, ‘Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor and if have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.’” Luke 19:8-9 (NRSV).
Holmgren, 105.
Id., 107. See also, McIntosh, p. 133, “Salvation means our restoration to the fellowship with God that we were created to enjoy and that alone makes us truly ourselves.”
Megan O’Keefe, ‘Sanditon’: Edward and Augusta’s Scandalous Romance Almost Didn’t Happen, The Decider, April 15, 2023, ‘Sanditon’: Edward and Augusta’s Scandalous Romance Almost Didn’t Happen | Decider. Perhaps Edward could become a reclusive vicar living and serving at the universities in Cambridge or Oxford, a C.S. Lewis type of character.
