Commander George Thomas Maitland Purvis: Jane Austen’s Great-Nephew in the Royal Navy

George Thomas Maitland Purvis was born into a family already deeply connected with both Fareham and the Royal Navy.

He was the eldest son of Commander George Thomas Maitland Purvis and Mary Jane Austen. His mother was the daughter of Admiral Sir Francis Austen, making the younger George a great-nephew of the novelist Jane Austen. He was baptised at Fareham in February 1829.

He followed the family tradition and entered the Royal Navy. A naval biography of his father, written while George was still young, already records him as a midshipman in the Navy.

George remained in naval service and eventually reached the rank of commander. Later Royal Navy lists identify him as George Thomas Maitland Purvis RN, born in 1829, serving at commander rank.

His family connections were unusually rich. His father was a Fareham-born naval officer and magistrate of Blackbrook. His mother belonged to the Austen family. His grandmother Rhenira Charlotte Maitland Purvis is also remembered in the Fareham story, while several of his brothers followed military or naval careers of their own.

In 1855 George married Jane Pragnell at Portsea. His life then continued within the wider nineteenth-century naval world, which increasingly stretched beyond Europe and the Atlantic into East Asia.

That international career eventually brought him to Japan.

George died at Yokohama on 12 February 1882, aged about fifty-three. Yokohama had only been opened to foreign trade a little over twenty years earlier and by the 1880s had become one of the principal centres of Britain’s commercial and naval presence in Japan. His death there places another member of this Fareham family within the rapidly changing world of Victorian East Asia.

His memorial at St Peter & St Paul therefore links several remarkable stories together. Through his mother he was part of Jane Austen’s family; through his father he belonged to a long Fareham naval dynasty; and through his own career his life stretched from Hampshire to Japan.

The Purvis memorials show how one local Fareham family became connected with the Royal Navy, Jane Austen and the expanding global world of nineteenth-century Britain.