Richard Musgrove

If you are familiar with Jane Austen's letters, you will know that she had a bit of a thing about the name Richard. Of one acquaintance with that name, she notes that his marriage is postponed, presumably until he has found himself a better christian name. Another time, she suggests that she would accept any John or Thomas rather than a particular Richard. All three are contemporary south-of-England euphemisms for 'penis' (Richard=Dick=dick=).

Jane Austen conceived one of her minor male characters as (literally) a dick.  The passage, which occurs early on in Persuasion - p76, Penguin Classics edition - is the most calculatedly, deliberately spiteful and vindictive she ever wrote. She does not use the word 'dick' explicitly, of course, but one has to supply it mentally in order to make sense of the passage. 

His name is Richard.  He has died even before the story begins. He had been "a very troublesome, hopeless son", and his parents had had "the good fortune to lose him before his twentieth year". He was "stupid and unmanageable", and "very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved". He was "nothing better than a thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove, who had never done anything to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name, living or dead".

After eviscerating his character and vilifying his memory, the author concludes that he was, in plain words, a dick; a total dick; and nothing but a dick.

Losing a son before his twentieth birthday is good fortune? Christ. Jane's cousin Eliza de Feuillide's son was severely handicapped, but dearly loved till the day he died; Richard Musgrove was, at least, a functioning adult. The hatchet job is unbelievably savage, and very unusual for Jane Austen. Nothing in the plot of Persuasion necessitates so vicious an assault She might equally well have made Richard Musgrove a likeable, well-meaning simpleton who tried hard without ever succeeding. Was she using the cover of fiction to vilify a detested real person? It would be interesting to know the circumstances behind this, but I don't suppose we ever shall.