Richard Musgrove

Richard Musgrove, known more familiarly as Dick, is the late, unlamented son of Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove of Uppercross, a young man whose chief legacy in the novel is the ironic contrast between his family's belated grief and his actual worthlessness. He was a thick-headed, unfeeling, and unprofitable son, who had been sent to sea because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore. His death abroad, two years before the main events of the story, was scarcely regretted at the time, and his family had seldom heard of him during his life. His only distinction was a six-month stint on board Captain Frederick Wentworth's frigate, the HMS Laconia, during which, under the captain's influence, he wrote the only two disinterested letters his parents ever received from him—the rest having been mere applications for money. In those letters, he spoke well of his captain, but the name made little impression until a chance remark by the Crofts triggered Mrs. Musgrove's memory, leading her to re-peruse the letters and, in a burst of retrospective sentiment, to grieve for him more intensely than she had at his actual death. This manufactured grief provides a moment of awkward comedy when Mrs. Musgrove, sitting beside Captain Wentworth on a sofa, pours out her sorrow over a son whom, alive, nobody had cared for, while Wentworth, with studied self-command, listens with a sympathy that Anne Elliot alone recognizes as a performance. Richard Musgrove thus functions as a minor but telling figure: a foil to the genuine worth of the naval officers, a catalyst for the re-introduction of Captain Wentworth into the Uppercross circle, and a vehicle for Austen's quiet satire of parental sentimentality.