Mr Parker, the arch-speculator whose dream it is to make Sanditon famous, is a figure of fun, but that can be said of almost all the characters (even Charlotte Heywood's understated good sense is at times comic) in a work more farcical and fantastic than anything Austen had conceived since Volume the Third. The speculator, to the eyes of the classical economist, is the chancer who overreaches in the hope of spectacular returns, the quack among entrepreneurs. But during the war, and especially after Waterloo, property developers like Mr Parker were the order of the day, and often managed to get by, even if profits (as in the case of Regent Street) were very slow in coming. How Sanditon's inauspicious beginnings are to pan out is far from clear. Tom Parker pins his hopes on the residency of his charismatic younger brother, but since the manuscript, known to Cassandra as ‘The Brothers’, ends before Sidney Parker ever speaks in person, the reader, too, is left guessing.

Critics in search of a controlling theme have mostly fixed on the contrast between the bustling enterprise of the town-planners and the quiet traditional life of the landed gentry as practised by the Heywoods at Willingden, and indeed by the Parkers themselves before they uproot to resettle on the exposed, sea side of their sheltering hill.