Sanditonian

— It is fitting that all roads in the town Mr. Parker has “planned and built, and praised and puffed” (328) seem to lead to the circulating library, because Sanditonians like Parker, who has built on sand, seem immensely willing to invest in empty convention—in signs in the place of substance. […] Austen is being somewhat disingenuous here. She herself feels free to put novel slang into the mouth of a Sanditonian like Sir Edward Denham; what Anna has not learned from her aunt’s fictions, perhaps, is that in that context novel slang is always in virtual quotation marks. It is never used, and never to be read, “straight.”

— Parker himself is a model of bustling absurdity: a lover of healthful living, bathing machines, and the ‘Bracing Sea Air’ of Sanditon, a despiser of old-fashioned houses in ‘little contracted Nooks’, kitchen gardens (‘Who can endure a Cabbage Bed in October?’), and anyone who doubts the fact that Sanditon is ‘the very Spot which Thousands [seem] in need of’. On the rival attractions of Brinshore, a village down the coast, this ‘Enthusiast’ for all things Sanditonian is appropriately withering: ‘Why, in truth Sir, I fancy we may apply to Brinshore, that line of the Poet Cowper in his description of the religious Cottager, as opposed to Voltaire—“She, never heard of half a mile from home”’ (p. 326).