Reading Jane Austen

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10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Reading Jane Austen



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Mona Scheuermann



Reading Jane Austen

reading jane austen Copyright © Mona Scheuermann, 2009.

First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-61877-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scheuermann, Mona. Reading Jane Austen / Mona Scheuermann. p. cm. ISBN: 978-0-230-61877-0 1. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817— Political and social views. 3. Social values in literature. 4. Upper class in literature. 5. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—18th century. 6. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title. PR4038.P6S35 2009 823'.7—dc22

2009005354

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: October 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.



For Peter, as always




Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: “Truths Universally Acknowledged”

1

I

A Moral Tapestry

11

1

Mansfield Park: “The real and consistent patron of the selected child”

13

2

Mansfield Park: “So long as it be a German play”

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Mansfield Park: “If tenderness could ever be supposed wanting, good sense and good breeding supplied its place”

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II

Social Grids

85

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Pride and Prejudice: “She had never . . . seen any thing that betrayed him to be unprincipled or unjust—any thing that spoke him of irreligious or immoral habits”

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Emma: “She only demands from each of you either one thing very clever . . . or two things moderately clever—or three things very dull indeed”

113

Persuasion: “The advantage of maturity of mind, consciousness of right, and one independent fortune between them”

135

III

Politics and History

167

7

The World of Jane Austen

169

6

Notes

197

Index

207



Contents




In addition to the joy of spending the last few years rereading Jane Austen’s novels, I now also get the pleasure of thanking the people who helped me in my explorations. One of the highlights of my journey with Jane was our presentation at the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies meeting in Montpellier, where the enthusiastic conversation of our audience helped to shape my ideas. And wonderful conversations about Austen were a biweekly treat in my seminars at the Free University of Berlin and the Alexander von Humboldt University, also in Berlin; my students were determined to contribute to this book, and I remember them and their work fondly. A part of this book appears in the memorial volume for Paul Korshin, the 2008 edition of The Age of Johnson. Paul was not only one of the finest scholars of eighteenth-century literature and history but also the very best mentor and friend one could have had, and I miss him in all of these roles more than I can say. Thanks go to the reader for the press, whose incisive comments on the manuscript were so helpful. My editors, Matthew Robison and Henry Whitney, have been adroit at clearing away hurdles before I could even ask them, and I appreciate their help at all the stages of the book’s production. To my agent, Michele Rubin, I can only say thank you for everything. And about my husband, Peter, a computer scientist who graciously has become expert on Jane Austen, I will repeat what I have said in earlier books: you are at the center of everything I do.



Acknowledgments




“Truths Universally Acknowledged” The ethical and social parameters of Jane Austen’s society are firmly set. The primary demand of Austen’s society is that each person should be a good human being within the boundaries of his or her class. Morality is exercised in acting respectfully to those above one in the social scale and charitably, within limits, to the poor, with appropriately quantified compassion to those on the intervening social steps. Honesty is a primary value at every class level. Almost equally important is diffidence, or modesty. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, for example, has everything in his favor, wealth, breeding, good looks—but these would be much less valuable than they are if Elizabeth did not in the course of the novel discover in him inherent modesty, even shyness. And Mr. Knightley in Emma would not be nearly as attractive to Austen or her reader if he were pompous or indifferent to his equals or his social inferiors. The rules for any situation are fixed. They are defined by decency, by morés that are designed to insure that people are not hurt. That is why Captain Wentworth in Persuasion cannot go to Anne until Louisa clearly has chosen someone else; even though the impression that he was courting Louisa is mistaken, to leave before she has rejected him would have risked harming her reputation. Readers of Emma are shocked when Emma, at the Box Hill picnic, wounds the defenseless and innocent Miss Bates with a careless remark. A harmless game—each person must say one thing very clever, two moderately clever, or three quite dull—suddenly turns deeply hurtful when Miss Bates says that she will not have any trouble finding three dull things to say, and Emma cannot resist answering that there might be a problem: the limit is only three things! Emma’s remark demeans Miss Bates, and Knightley 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


INTRODUCTION

Reading Jane Austen

is furious at Emma’s callousness. Why is this incident so central not just to Emma but to all of Austen’s work? Emma’s behavior here is deliberately hurtful, and in Austen’s novels good people do not intentionally harm others, especially not social inferiors. They may make mistakes, as Emma herself does in many other contexts, but the mistakes are in the service of helpfulness. At Box Hill, however, Emma is thoughtlessly mean, and good people simply should not act this way. The sense of decency that pervades Austen’s novels not only is basic to her vision but is at the center of the social compact of Austen’s time and place. The gentle classes—that is, the upper-middle class through the aristocracy—indeed privilege gentleness, which is tied to moral decency but includes all aspects of a civilized life. We find these assumptions formalized in the many conduct books of the period, one of which I will discuss shortly, and we see them objectified at every turn in Austen’s works. When Fanny Price in Mansfield Park goes “home” to her birth parents, she is horrified at the noise, the dirt, the lack of courtesy (her father takes the only candle to read his paper, leaving her in the dark), and the lack of even the most elementary necessities for civilized living—there are not enough teacups to go around, and those that are available are dirty. The decency, moral and aesthetic, that permeates Austen’s novels is immensely comfortable. When we enter Austen’s world we are sure of where we stand in terms of the beliefs and behaviors of the characters. I think that this is because Austen’s own ethical perspective is so assured. She writes from the core beliefs in her period, and her perspective carries the authority of her whole society. There is no question in Austen’s fiction about who is virtuous or which behavior is admirable. This assurance delimits a social structure that completely defines every aspect of life. For the reader, the social and moral grid is entirely clear. That grid is so completely accepted by Austen’s contemporaries that she can simply assume its presence as opposed to needing to construct it. Austen writes with her society’s broad consensus that each class has its own place and its own responsibilities. This is a frictionless view of the social compact—the rights and responsibilities of English men and women are agreed upon by everyone 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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who might define Austen’s society. Finally, there are very few villains in her books; if one knows his place, as everyone does in these novels, then each person fits in the social structure. Even Wickham in Pride and Prejudice fits eventually when he becomes at least a passable husband for Lydia. Austen writes for the most part about people whose class is defined by a reasonably high level of social education and, of course, of means, whether land or money. Proper education makes society function smoothly. Her books are about precisely the people her contemporaries define as the embodiment of society’s central values, the upper classes who must—and do—exhibit the behavior that Austen’s contemporary Thomas Gisborne in the title of his book refers to as the “Duties of Men.” The pattern of these moral issues, while it is present in all of Austen’s major novels, is most prominent in Mansfield Park, which is, among other things, the story of an earnest young clergyman’s search for an equally morally centered mate. Every aspect of Mansfield Park, the perspectives on social classes, the decision to put on a play and the choice of the play itself, and the relationships among the characters, develops within the moral webbing of the book. In Mansfield Park Austen lays out the moral givens of her class and time most explicitly of all her books, and thus it is Mansfield Park that gives us a context for her other three major novels. When we look carefully at the moral framework of Mansfield Park, our awareness of the moral grounding of the other novels becomes much more prominent. And so the first section of my book focuses on Mansfield Park before turning to the most popular of Austen’s novels, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion. Austen’s is a period in English culture when there is an extraordinarily homogeneous and stable perception of what constitutes a moral life. There is virtually universal agreement about the definition of morality both for the upper classes and for the lower classes. (Of course, these definitions are all upper-class; the poor and laboring classes did not leave us much record of their own musings on such subjects.1) Those comments of Austen’s about working a “little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory” or focusing on just “3 or 4 Families in 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


“Truths Universally Acknowledged”

Reading Jane Austen

a Country Village” give us a temptingly tidy measure for what Austen’s span was in her fiction, but they distract us from the immensely important social assumptions that she was objectifying. Austen’s peers knew exactly what constituted a moral person. This is an age of conduct books, and all the conduct books say the same things. The very conservative Hannah More and the radical Mary Wollstonecraft both wrote books on the education of daughters: Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education and Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct in the More Important Duties of Life. Their advice was identical; their contemporaries pointed out the similarities between them. The ubiquity of the conduct book genre itself underlines the commitment of the society to the same set of rules, for all of these books start from the same premises. The consensus is so strong that it seems perfectly logical to go beyond advice for educating children, or advice to the poor, to writing a single tome telling every man above the laborer, of every class and profession, what his duties to society are. By 1811, when Austen is writing Mansfield Park, Thomas Gisborne’s immodestly titled An Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher and Middle Classes of Society in Great Britain, Resulting from their Respective Stations, Professions, and Employments is already in its sixth edition. Gisborne’s work can serve for us as a model of the conduct book genre and the kinds of connections we can make between the models of right behavior in such books and in Austen’s novels. Gisborne clearly does not hesitate to define right behavior across all these upper reaches of society. His first class of men is a set of one, the sovereign, whose duties are systematically examined by Gisborne. Following that chapter, logically enough, is “On the General Duties of Englishmen as Subjects and Fellow Citizens” in which Gisborne examines the relationship of the citizen to his sovereign, beginning with the “Primary Duty of a Subject,” and covering such topics as “Obedience, how enforced by Christianity” and “Allegiance—all Englishmen bound to it.” The book ends with “Patriotism explained” and “Proved a Christian Virtue.” We note already the two intertwined bases of Gisborne’s template: everything has an order that begins at the highest level of society,



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that is, with the sovereign, and then continues to all citizens, and this order is supported by religion, so that the civic structure rests on a God-given and therefore unquestionable foundation. Since all relationships rest on this base, they are immutable. Morality is not relative but is fixed. This immensely comfortable paradigm assumes a social and personal model for action and thought that requires no evaluation but simply is assumed for all good people. This moral outlook is at the core of all Austen’s fiction. It informed her life as well. The fact that the social compact is based in a set of moral principles that uniformly inform society allows Gisborne to plot out the “duties” and relationships within and among classes from the top of society down as far as he finds of interest. His interests, not surprisingly, are just the same as Austen’s. From the specific duties that all Englishmen owe their king, Gisborne turns to the next step down, to look at the “General Duties of Englishmen as Subjects” and then to examine the “Duties of Peers.” From there he examines the “Duties of Members of the House of Commons,” the “Military Officers,” the “Legal Profession,” and the “Justices of the Peace and Magistrates.” Volume 2 begins with the “Clerical Profession,” then looks at the “Duties of Physicians,” “Persons engaged in Trade and Business,” and the “Duties of a Private Gentleman.” Gisborne’s last chapter is “Considerations submitted to Persons who doubt or deny the Truth of Christianity, or the Necessity of strict Observance of all its Precepts.” The remarkable aspect of a book like An Enquiry into the Duties of Men is its author’s assurance that he can plot out the duties of all Englishmen, of the king and the peers and the lawyers and the landowners. Everyone has a place in society that comes with its own requirements and responsibilities. This means that everything is in perfect order. We actually have not come too far from Alexander Pope’s famous lines in his Essay on Man: All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good:




6

Reading Jane Austen

But there are some other lines of Pope’s Essay that also are called to mind: Order is Heaven’s first law; and this confessed, Some are, and must be, greater than the rest, More rich, more wise; but who infers from hence That such are happier, shocks all common sense. Heaven to mankind impartial we confess, If all are equal in their happiness; But mutual wants this happiness increase; All nature’s difference keeps all nature’s peace. Condition, circumstance is not the thing; Bliss is the same in subject or in king.

It is this sense of order, of rightness, that gives shape to Gisborne’s map of the social structure and that underlies Austen’s world as well. Gisborne’s first chapter, “Plan of the Work Explained,” begins with a clear statement of his intent: “To apply moral truths to practical purposes; to point out their bearings on modern opinions and modern manners; and to deduce from them rules of conduct by which the inhabitants of this country in particular, each in his respective station, may be aided in acquiring the knowledge, and encouraged in the performance of their several duties, are objects of unequivocal utility.”2 If this sentence appeared at the beginning of an Austen novel, we would hear no untoward note. Gisborne goes on, “The plan proposed requires me to enter into a regular and to a certain degree minute detail of the various duties of the different classes of society, which fall within its limits” (1:2). Although each class has its particular responsibilities, all classes share a common core of duties. Especially, Gisborne, like Austen, will “discriminate the upper and middle classes of the inhabitants of this country according to the several ranks, professions, and employments into which they are distributed” (1:3–4). He comments that his work rather obviously is not “addressed to those, who are placed in the lowest ranks of society” (1:4)—his audience is the same as Austen’s, the middle and upper classes about whom they both write.



And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.

7

Gisborne’s argument is that in advanced cultures, laws and institutions regulate society (as opposed to more primitive societies such as the Indians’). His is “an ethical work” (1:16) planned explicitly to lay out the responsibilities of each class; this assumption that there can be core agreement about how such responsibilities are defined is unthinkable in our own time, but is taken for granted in Austen’s when it seems perfectly reasonable that there are, in Gisborne’s phrase, “truths universally acknowledged” (1:40). Austen of course uses this phrase with exquisite irony in the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice; Gisborne uses it with utter seriousness. What we need to recognize is two-fold: to Austen’s contemporaries there are truths that are universally acknowledged, and in fact this idea is common enough in its use so that Austen’s readers would recognize her twist on it in Pride and Prejudice. The truths universally acknowledged are moral, and Gisborne’s “treatise . . . has moral instruction for its object, and addresses itself to readers of various descriptions” (1:77). The eighteenthcentury fascination with social morality and how that morality reflects in each person’s “place” is central to the context of Austen’s fiction; it underscores, for example, the importance to Pride and Prejudice of the account of Darcy as master that his old servant gives Elizabeth when she visits Pendleton. The two chapters of Gisborne’s Duties that most remind us of Austen’s novels are those “On the Duties of Private Gentlemen” and “On the Duties of the Clergy.” When we look at the first of these, we see, essentially, what could be descriptions of Darcy and Mr. Knightley, even of Mr. Woodhouse. The chapter on the clergy illuminates the characters and their discussions about the duties and motivations of the clergy that take up so much of Mansfield Park. “Private Gentlemen” are defined as “private individuals who follow no profession, and live upon the annual incomes of their estates” (2:418). As we see in Pride and Prejudice and in Emma, men like Darcy and Mr. Knightley have clear duties to their tenants and to the wider community. Gisborne explains that “private gentlemen” must be aware not just of their actual power but of the collateral influence they wield in their neighborhoods. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann



Reading Jane Austen

The duties incumbent on private gentlemen, principally or altogether in consequence of their being possessed of landed property, will be mentioned in the first place. These duties result partly from the actual power which the landlord enjoys over his estates, and the tenants who occupy them; and partly from the influence which the possession of those estates gives to him in their neighborhood, even over persons who are not his immediate dependents. In some cases the operation of these two causes will be so blended, that their separate effects cannot easily be distinguished. The consequent duties however will not on that account be the less apparent. (2:419)

One of the “first duties” of such men is “to encourage a race of upright, skilful, and industrious tenants” (2:400); such behavior contributes directly to the welfare of the nation, as it increases the agricultural wealth of the community. Gisborne explains how to rent out land and supervise its use. The “private gentleman” must be honest and sincerely work for the good of the whole community, never using his influence unfairly to benefit from his own power—he must never, for example, cause roads to be built adjacent to his own property that would be of wider use elsewhere in the community. The “influence which he enjoys over others [is] a trust for the exercise of which he is responsible” (2:444). And on a personal level, it is his duty to marry well. This means not to marry for money, but to choose a partner who will be a good match in morality and temperament. Austen makes her points about marriage much more beautifully than Gisborne, but her viewpoint is precisely the same as his. Gisborne’s advice on choosing a partner could be a summary of Mansfield Park or any of the other major Austen novels. Let not those be surprised at finding their comforts corroded by indifference and discontent, by contrariety of views and domestic broils, who have chosen a companion for life merely or principally for the sake of personal beauty and accomplishments, of a weighty purse, of eminent rank, of splendid and potent connections: nor they who, without being altogether blinded by passion, or impelled by interested motives, have yet neglected previously



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to ascertain whether their intended partner possesses that share of congruity to their own dispositions and habits, and, above all things, those intrinsic virtues stedfastly grounded on religion, without which, in so close an union, no permanent happiness can be expected. But let them remember that the very terms of the marriage vow, independently of every additional obligation, render all the duties of the marriage state as binding upon them, as upon others who are experiencing in that state the greatest earthly felicity. (2:466–67)

Darcy and Elizabeth, Knightley and Emma, and especially, after some missteps in the direction of Mary Crawford, Edmund and Fanny, will live happily ever after. With regard to Edmund in Mansfield Park, Gisborne’s analysis of the duties of a clergyman precisely reflects Austen’s emphasis on Edmund’s choice of profession. As we will see in the next section, a central aspect of Mansfield Park is Austen’s exploration of the proper motivation for choosing the work of a clergyman. Mary and Edmund discuss his choice at length. When Gisborne warns against taking on these responsibilities from the wrong motives, he could be Edmund speaking. He who enters into the clerical profession, though not from motives of avarice, yet without duly estimating its solemn nature and momentous functions, the obligations which it imposes, and the responsibilities annexed to it; without possessing the qualifications essential to the upright performance of its duties; and without a serious purpose of habitually striving to improve in them, and to exhibit to those whom he shall be appointed to guide in the way of salvation an edifying example of piety and virtue; engages in a most important concern with a degree of presumptuous rashness little adapted to ensure the future peace of his own mind; to draw down the blessing of God upon his labours; or to leave any substantial hopes that he will labour at all with zeal and assiduity. (2:5)

The certainty of moral perspective with which Gisborne analyzes the duties of Englishmen is typical of the many men and women who wrote on moral issues in this period. There were




Reading Jane Austen

the general conduct books as well as books more focused on the education of women, and of men, productions such as Hannah More’s, for example. More, a woman who made a very impressive living from publications directed to the different classes of society from the lowest levels to the middle and upper classes, even to the princess herself, was part of the intellectual and aristocratic cream of society. She was a friend of Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and many of the highest-ranked ladies in England. She was an intimate of the Bishop of London, who in this period of social unrest asked her, in effect commissioned her, to write “a little something” to keep the poor from revolting. (The pamphlet Village Politics and the large project of the Cheap Repository Tracts were her response.) All of her writing announces the same moral platform that supports Gisborne’s work and that informs Austen’s novels. I will be making references to More’s works later in this book. So the world we see in Austen’s novels, the morality that informs her fiction, represents the core of the values of her time. Austen writes in a period of great political ferment and seemingly endless war, as my last chapter details, but so self-evident are her values for Austen that she does not write in defense of the status quo: for that to be the case, she would have had to recognize a challenge to that structure and be responding to it. As I show in my conclusion, she was aware of a good deal of what was happening in her world, at least in terms of the French Revolution and, through her brothers, the contemporary wars. But, like Gisborne and More and the vast majority of her contemporaries, she never questioned what she saw as God-given values. Her assumptions were her society’s assumptions; contemporary critics saw this relationship easily because those values anchored their lives. In the case of Austen, the opposite of “radical” or “revolutionary” is not “conservative.” There were indeed novelists contemporary with Austen who were radicals intent on reshaping society: William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Mary Wollstonecraft, to list the best known of them. But Austen is not their opposite on the political spectrum; she is not writing in defense of the status quo. Rather, she is writing about a culture where the values are so obvious that they seem to be all the world there is.



10

A Moral Tapestry



PART I




Mansfield Park “The real and consistent patron of the selected child” The representation of Austen’s moral world is especially complete in Mansfield Park; the reader must take the concerns, the assumptions, the moral judgments, even the descriptions of the countryside, at face value, for they are precise representations of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. The perspective is that of the respectable, morally centered upper class. When we recognize the accuracy of Austen’s portrayal of her society, the book no longer seems a problem novel, or even an inexplicable departure from the real Jane Austen, as so many critics over the years have labeled it, but it takes focus as an extraordinary depiction of social history. The morality at its center is the root of social and domestic concern for Austen’s class. The exploration of moral motivation, especially as it shapes social conduct, is typical of Austen’s peers, as expressed in their letters, in the periodicals (think Samuel Johnson), in both conservative and radical novels, in the ubiquitous conduct books, and even in the political writing so popular in Austen’s youth. It is central to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Age of Reason. Mansfield Park in fact can be seen as a series of set pieces in terms of moral situations. The first of course is the responsibility that the Bertrams take on for the daughter of Mrs. Price, Lady Bertram’s impoverished sister; this decision is tied to a larger discussion of the proper education of female children. The next moral testing ground is centered around attitudes toward the 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


CHAPTER 1

Reading Jane Austen

improvement of estates, which for Austen represent the moral stance of the participants. The correctness of the play production is the next piece, and, of course, the long intertwining of the various romantic pairings draws all the strands of the novel together. Fanny’s visit “home” to the Price house reflects not simply a removal to a different economic environment but to a deficient moral environment as well. Jane Austen said that she found her own Pride and Prejudice too frothy; Mansfield Park, no matter how hard it may be for the modern reader to accept Austen’s own preference, is more representative of the outlook of a woman of Austen’s class and beliefs. In this context, the extended moral explorations in the novel that seem to a modern reader to slow the action of the book become central to that action. The aspects of the novel that seem contrived, like the relocation of Fanny herself from the Price residence, similarly simply are representative of real life in Austen’s community. The same is true of the detailed discussions about the “improvement” of property. But first the improvement of Fanny’s position: in Austen’s own family, which by all accounts was close and loving, one of her brothers, Edward, “was adopted, while a boy, by his distant cousins—Thomas and Catherine Knight of Godmersham in Kent—who brought him up to be their heir,” we are told by one of Austen’s most charming biographers, Mary Lascelles.1 Lascelles points out that Edward in no way became estranged from the Austens, and after “he married and settled in a home of his own, [he was] visited often by his brothers and sisters.” There is no indication that Edward’s adoption made him any less part of the Austen family circle, or that sending him away seemed harsh or uncaring. In general, in fact, it has been noted that “English parents . . . were stoical to the point of callousness when it came to sending their children away from home.”2 Another example of this apparently commonplace social reorganization is the story of Elizabeth Ham, who lived in Somerset in the 1780s but was sent by her parents “to a cousin’s house as an infant, apparently simply because their own house was rather small, and did not take her back until she was nine years old.” It should be remembered that it was not unusual for young male children to be boarded at schools some distance from home. Thus in the novel Mansfield 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Park a young girl plucked from the poor side of the family to be raised by the well-off branch of that family simply is a reflection of reality, and although to modern readers such a move might seem only a plot construction, for Austen and her contemporaries Fanny Price’s relocation to the Bertram house would seem quite natural. As in all of the important Austen novels, one of the major social intersections in Mansfield Park is between money and morality. There is no ambiguity in these novels, whether Pride and Prejudice, Emma, or Mansfield Park, about the fact that wealth is good. Wealth should be used in the furtherance of morality, and to sacrifice other values simply in pursuing an extra-huge fortune as opposed to a very decent competence, as Maria Bertram does when she marries Mr. Rushworth, certainly is bad. But wealth in and of itself, providing as it does the means to a refined, decent life, is always positive for Austen. And so when Mansfield Park begins “About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntington, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income,” and continues “All Huntington exclaimed on the greatness of the match, and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it,”3 Austen, while being playful, is quite serious. Everything in the novel will follow from this early good luck of the young woman who becomes Lady Bertram. Her sisters do not do nearly so well. Miss Ward “found herself obliged to be attached to the Rev. Mr. Norris, a friend of her brother-in-law, with scarcely any private fortune” (5). Her match comes through the offices of her powerful brother-in-law, and her quite comfortable state comes also from Sir Thomas since he can “give his friend an income in the living of Mansfield”—in other words, he appoints him vicar of the local church. Mrs. Norris’ decent financial position allows her to join in the social circle of her sister. But the third sister’s situation is hopeless. She takes “a Lieutenant of Marines, without education, fortune, or connections.” Sir Thomas has “interest,” or influence, but it does not reach to this profession. He willingly 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


Mansfield Park

Reading Jane Austen

would attempt to find some other means of helping Fanny, but before he can do anything there is a break between the sisters. The theme of “interest” will continue throughout the novel, and quite in opposition to our instinctive disapproval of positions won through influence rather than through merit (contemporary debates about “legacy” acceptances at universities, for example, or the negative connotation of political patronage), Austen completely approves of such interventions. In fact, the exertion of “interest” not only is moral, for Austen, it is a moral imperative. It is easy to overlook on this first page of the novel the observation that “Sir Thomas Bertram had interest, which, from principle as well as pride, from a general wish of doing right, and a desire of seeing all that were connected with him in situations of respectability, he would have been glad to exert for the advantage of Lady Bertram’s sister”; as the novel goes on, and the reader understands that Sir Thomas is a pillar of morality, it is clear that his willingness to intervene in the favor of those to whom he is connected itself marks that morality.4 This is, not surprisingly, very much an upper-class, conservative perspective. Patronage is one of the major targets of angry commentary in both fiction and political writing among such radicals as Thomas Holcroft and Thomas Paine. Holcroft’s novel Hugh Trevor catalogues what Holcroft sees as the corruptions in such important areas of society as law, church, and politics; it is only by inheriting money that the eponymous hero himself can escape being corrupted by engaging in the requirements of any of these fields. And Paine, in Rights of Man, excoriates the patronage that he sees at the heart of upperclass society. Paine sees this patronage, especially in anything connected with the court and the government, as so ruinously expensive as to be the bedrock cause of poverty in the nation. If for Austen, then, Sir Thomas’ interventions are a matter of principle, her stance reflects significant moral and class boundaries. Once the breach between Mrs. Price and her sisters has occurred, however, there is nothing that Sir Thomas can do. And why the breach? Austen says that “it was the natural result of the conduct of each party, and such as a very imprudent marriage almost always produces” (6). Austen is not in favor of “imprudent marriage.” What might seem irony here at the beginning of 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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the novel, in the context of the actual visit of Fanny Price to her parents’ home is simply truth. Mrs. Price falls out with her sisters by first not telling them of her planned marriage and then, in the face of Mrs. Norris’ angry letter to her, being understandably but not profitably angry and “injured” in her turn. Some comments about the “pride” of Sir Thomas seal the break with the milder tempered Mrs. Bertram as well. But Austen makes it clear that Mrs. Price can afford her own pride only so long, for, at the end of eleven years, Mrs. Price has a “large and still increasing family, an husband disabled for active service, but not the less equal to company and good liquor, and a very small income to supply their wants” (6); she is quite eager “to regain the friends she had so carelessly sacrificed.” She writes to Lady Bertram “in a letter which spoke so much contrition and despondence, such a superfluity of children [she is preparing for her ninth birth], and such a want of almost every thing else, as could not but dispose them all to a reconciliation.” Through her imprudent marriage she has made a thorough mess of her life, and only with the help of her connections can she hope even marginally to ameliorate her condition and that of at least some of her children. Notice that there is absolutely nothing here which offers any positive result of her marriage: there is no suggestion of any affection between the spouses, the husband drinks, and she has too many babies with no means to support them properly. All she can do is ask for help. Her eldest son is ten years old: can Sir Thomas find him something, perhaps on his West Indies property, or in the East Indies. . . . Nothing is suggested for the child, but peace is restored, general advice given, and baby linen and money are contributed. A year later a much more useful idea occurs to the Bertram household: Mrs. Norris suggests that they take one of the Price children entirely off the hands of her parents. They will bring the eldest female child, Fanny, to live at Mansfield Park to be brought up in their family environment. Sir Thomas at first hesitates to take on the responsibility. Of all of them, he sees most clearly just how great a responsibility this is: “A girl so brought up must be adequately provided for, or there would be cruelty instead of kindness in taking her from her family” (7). But taking her into the environment of Mansfield Park, assuming 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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a reasonable commitment of moral and monetary support, is in itself virtually enough to make her. Mrs. Norris, who is not Austen’s favorite character, being self-centered and selfish, still is not stupid. And her analysis of the young girl’s chances—as the book’s denouement bears out—is accurate. “Give a girl an education, and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without farther expense to any body. A niece of our’s, Sir Thomas, I may say, or, at least of your’s, would not grow up in this neighbourhood without many advantages” (7). And this is entirely as it should be both for the child and for the Bertram family. Not only is it the way of the world that a family with wealth and status, and therefore with influence, should be able to raise anyone whom it embraces, but it is a morally appropriate circumstance that this is so. The problem that Sir Thomas foresees, and that Mrs. Norris recognizes in his hesitation, is that the Price girl will attract one of his sons. Obviously, Sir Thomas hopes for a good match, by which he certainly would mean one that would bring even more wealth and status to his sons, but at the end of the novel he realizes that Edmund’s choice of Fanny is perfectly acceptable. Austen sees wealth and status as important, but one of the repeated premises of the book is that there is a point of “enough.” To have money and simply to hoard it is morally reprehensible. Maria Bertram, who marries Mr. Rushworth only because he is superrich, errs and ruins her life. In these opening pages of the novel, both in the first paragraphs in which Austen sketches the financial lines of the sisters’ marriages, and in the discussion of Mrs. Norris’ monetary philosophies, Austen in quite extraordinary detail uses financial facets to build her character portraits. Mrs. Norris does suggest taking Fanny Price from her family, but she herself has no intention of contributing monetarily to her upkeep, nor does she plan to take the child to live with her in the parsonage. Although she is quite comfortable financially, even if clearly not in the same league as her sister Lady Bertram, Mrs. Norris refers to herself as “poor” (8). She is ready to act in the service of the child, but only in the cheapest way. While “Sir Thomas was fully resolved to be the real and consistent patron of the selected child,” Mrs. Norris “had not the least intention of being at any expense whatever 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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in her maintenance. As far as walking, talking, and contriving reached, she was thoroughly benevolent, and nobody knew better how to dictate liberality to others: but her love of money was equal to her love of directing, and she knew quite as well how to save her own as to spend that of her friends.” Although she had married on a “narrower income” than she might have hoped for, her sedulity in exercising monetary “prudence” had grown into such a habit that she never had lived up to her income. “Under this infatuating principle, counteracted by no real affection for [Mrs. Price], it was impossible for her to aim at more than the credit of projecting and arranging so expensive a charity [as caring for Fanny]; though perhaps she might so little know herself, as to walk home to the Parsonage after this conversation, in the happy belief of being the most liberal-minded sister and aunt in the world.” The discussion about bringing Fanny to Mansfield Park largely deals with finances, and money is one of the primary themes of the first five chapters. The rich Lord Bertram and his circle are all very conscious of what things cost and who will pay for them. These chapters introduce the theme of Lord Bertram’s estate in the West Indies and the financial problems that are serious enough to cause him to endure a year’s absence from his family in order to travel there to deal with them. Much of the discussion in these early chapters is about money itself, as we have seen, and how to use it graciously and usefully. The next chapters, from chapter six, introduce the subject of “improvements,” the much-debated eighteenth-century obsession with changing the natural landscape of an estate—often at extraordinary expense. In Mansfield Park a man or woman’s attitude toward “improvement” reflects his or her moral measure, and Austen uses conversations about “improvement,” as she does about other aspects of money and class, to develop characterizations. Sometimes even the most moral of characters can be mistaken, and what seems quite appropriate to him will change as he learns more. Sir Thomas at the beginning of the novel is concerned that the proper distinction be maintained between his own daughters and the child he is accepting into his household. “There will be some difficulty in our way,” he tells Mrs. Norris “as to the 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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distinction proper to be made between the girls as they grow up; how to preserve in the minds of my daughters the consciousness of what they are, without making them think too lowly of their cousin; and how, without depressing her spirits too far, to make her remember that she is not a Miss Bertram. . . . They cannot be equals. Their rank, fortune, rights, and expectations, will always be different” (10). Also we have seen that there is some worry that by putting this child into the family, one of the Bertram sons will be attracted to her. By the end of the novel, Sir Thomas realizes that the match between Fanny and Edmund is perfect, and he explicitly says that his earlier worry about such a match was wrong. By the end of the novel, with all the ills attendant on the misbehavior of his daughters, especially Maria’s terrible misstep with Mr. Crawford, he certainly understands the value of Fanny. Actually, he is correct in his initial caveat that Fanny does not— cannot—have the same expectations in the marriage market as his daughters. And it is quite reasonable in Austen’s view that Sir Thomas should have ambitions higher than a penniless girl for his sons. What changes the equation is Fanny’s moral substance, which makes her, indeed, the perfect match for Edmund. But this value of course cannot be seen in the ten-year-old girl who is invited to Mansfield Park. The Bertram girls are twelve and thirteen when Fanny joins the family; the boys are sixteen and seventeen. While all three girls grow up into young women at the same time, the boys are old enough to seem in a different category to the new member of their household. Already at this stage, however, each child’s character seems quite what it will be when he or she is grown: the Bertram girls are snobbish and selfish, the older son, Tom is frivolous, “with all the liberal dispositions of an eldest son, who feels born only for expense and enjoyment” (15), and Edmund is defined by his moral center. The education of Maria and Julia is precisely what we would expect for the children of Lady Bertram, “a woman who spent her days in sitting nicely dressed on a sofa, doing some long piece of needle-work, of little use . . . thinking more of her pug than her children” (16). The girls learn geography and history, music and drawing, but their education is sorely lacking at the moral level. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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“It is not very wonderful,” Austen comments, “that with all their promising talents and early information, they should be entirely deficient in the less common acquirements of self-knowledge, generosity, and humility. In every thing but disposition, they were admirably taught.” Sir Thomas, “though a truly anxious father,” is too reserved with the girls to allow them to exhibit their true characters before him and so is no help. These observations on the girls’ education are central to the discourse of the period on the education of children, a discourse that is remarkably consistent no matter where we look in the many conduct books and treatises of this time on the education of daughters. In books like Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education or Mary Wollstonecraft’s somewhat earlier Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, With Reflections on Female Conduct in the More Important Duties of Life the duties of the mother in educating her children, especially her female children, are laid out in careful detail. The moral is always the same: the upper-class mother has the major responsibility in the education of her children. She must be morally scrupulous herself, and she must be careful what kind of moral model she presents to the children. Educating her children is her primary responsibility, and she must take a very active role if the children are to grow into fine women (or men) in their turn. More goes so far as to insist that the fate of the nation lies in the hands of these upper-class women, for as they shape the moral constitution of their children, so will the nation be strengthened. Since Maria and Julia’s moral educations have been neglected, with the additional burden of the ill advice of Mrs. Norris, who encourages them in their childish pride and insensitivity, it is not surprising that the girls are morally confused. Interestingly, Austen does not talk much of the education of the boys. She makes the assumption that the eldest son will be callow and self-centered, and there is no exploration at all of how Edmund grew into such a moral paragon. Of his formal education we know that he went from Eton to Oxford (18). Sir Thomas aids Mrs. Price “liberally in the education and disposal of her sons as they became old enough for a determinate pursuit” (17), but there is no suggestion through all the years of 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Fanny’s growing up that she might want to, or even should, visit her birth family. And “nobody at home seemed to want her.” So the Price family has nothing to do with the shaping of her character or, in any other connection, her education. Only her beloved brother William visits her, but his visits, coming in the interstices of his career as a sailor, are intermittent and short. It is Edmund who really takes on Fanny’s education. He knew her to be clever, to have a quick apprehension as well as good sense, and a fondness for reading, which, properly directed, must be an education in itself. [The governess] taught her French, and heard her read the daily portion of History; but he recommended the books which charmed her leisure hours, he encouraged her taste, and corrected her judgment; he made reading useful by talking to her of what she read, and heightened its attraction by judicious praise. In return for such services she loved him better than any body in the world except William; her heart was divided between the two. (18)

The first incident in the book where Austen makes clear the real-world consequences of moral failings is in the disposition of the clerical position that falls free when Mrs. Norris’ husband, the present incumbent, dies. As I have suggested, for Austen morality is not just a personal luxury but a causative agent for changes in the outside world. In the case of the living, it should by right be held for Edmund, the younger son, against the day when he is old enough to take orders and claim it. But his elder brother has been so profligate that his extravagance has put the family’s financial status into danger; the situation is so serious that Sir Thomas is forced to sell the living to Dr. Grant in order to recoup enough money to pay Tom’s debts: “The younger brother must help to pay for the pleasures of the elder” (18). Sir Thomas could not but feel it to be an act of injustice, and he earnestly tried to impress his eldest son with the same conviction, in the hope of its producing a better effect than any thing he had yet been able to say or do.



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“I blush for you, Tom; . . . I blush for the expedient which I am driven on, and I trust I may pity your feelings as a brother on the occasion. You have robbed Edmund for ten, twenty, thirty years, perhaps for life, of more than half the income which ought to be his. It may hereafter be in my power, or in your’s (I hope it will), to procure him better preferment; but it must not be forgotten, that no benefit of that sort would have been beyond his natural claims on us, and that nothing can, in fact, be an equivalent for the certain advantage he is now obliged to forego through the urgency of your debts.” (19)

Tom’s character flaws have done real harm to his brother. As the eldest male child he is Sir Thomas’ heir, which leaves the younger brother to find a way to support himself. But to be so extravagant as to do serious harm to the family finances, and thus to force Sir Thomas to take from Edmund’s future to pay for Tom’s present profligacies, is shameful. So we have in this incident an example of the ubiquitous commentary on the crossroad between money and morality. We have, too, a very interesting pointer to another of Austen’s themes: the fragility of financial security even for those in the upper classes. This is a concern that Austen explores in Pride and Prejudice when she centers on the urgency of the Bennet girls getting married because their father’s fortune, upon his death, is entailed to Mr. Collins. In that book she makes it clear that Mr. Bennet has absolutely no way to earn more money: when Mr. Wickham tries to blackmail Mr. Bennet into essentially paying him to marry Lydia, Mr. Bennet cannot consider complying with Mr. Wickham’s demands because he simply does not have any way to get the money. Sir Thomas, higher in class than Mr. Bennet, ought to be less vulnerable to financial worries, but clearly he is not. In fact, Austen emphasizes that Sir Thomas is very much aware of the fragility of his financial state, and that, as well, he follows his financial affairs very closely. This discussion of the need to sell the living to Dr. Grant is followed by references to two other sets of financial issues. Now that Mrs. Norris is a widow, Sir Thomas expects that she might take the burden of Fanny’s support from his household; such relief would be most opportune at this moment because of his own reverses on his Antigua estate. Mrs. Norris has no intention



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of taking on any such responsibility, and so Fanny remains on Sir Thomas’ ledger. That ledger is in some disrepair because “his own circumstances were rendered less fair than heretofore, by some recent losses on his West India Estate” (19). Mrs. Norris’ refusal to take responsibility for Fanny is transparently financial. Although it is clear that she has more than enough to live on, she frets that she has “barely enough to support me in the rank of a gentlewoman. . . . If I can but make both ends meet, that’s all I ask for” (23). She has six hundred pounds a year, a very comfortable income, but she laments that “I must retrench where I can, and learn to be a better manager. . . . I shall not be ashamed to practise economy now. . . . I must live within my income, or I shall be miserable; and I own it would give me great satisfaction to be able to do rather more—to lay by a little at the end of the year” (23). When Lady Bertram rather dryly notes that Mrs. Norris always has done this, Mrs. Norris assures her that she wants “to leave a little trifle among [the Bertram children], worth their having.” Although this excuse for Mrs. Norris’ stinginess is rebutted by Lady Bertram, Mrs. Norris still has the last word, in a comment that perhaps comes uncomfortably home: “Why, you know Sir Thomas’s means will be rather straightened, if the Antigua estate is to make such poor returns.” Another year goes by and, in fact, “Sir Thomas found it expedient to go to Antigua himself, for the better arrangement of his affairs” (25). He recognizes “the necessity of the measure in a pecuniary light.” After Sir Thomas sails, Austen’s novel turns to Romance. But it too is illumined by a pecuniary light, for the first to be struck by romantic thoughts is Maria, at the age of twenty-one “beginning to think matrimony a duty” (29). She decides to attach herself to Mr. Rushworth, whose main charm is that marriage to him “would give her the enjoyment of a larger income than her father’s.” It becomes, in fact, “her evident duty to marry Mr. Rushworth if she could.” Aunt Norris and Lady Bertram are firm supporters of the match; only Edmund can “see a fault in the business” (30). Edmund, always the moral center of the novel, does not approve of a marriage based only on a monetary motive. He “was not pleased that [Maria’s] happiness should centre in a large income,” and, in fact, finds with distinct irony that “if this 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow.” Even Sir Thomas is in favor of the match. The neighborhood is enlarged by yet another set of young people, who also are described essentially in terms of their financial standing. These are the Crawfords, the brother and sister of Mrs. Grant. They “were young people of fortune. The son had a good estate in Norfolk, the daughter twenty thousand pounds.” Mrs. Grant loves her sister, and she hopes to keep Miss Crawford with her “as long as she remained single” (31). But Mrs. Grant worries that “Mansfield should not satisfy the habits of a young woman who had been mostly used to London.” And Miss Crawford has similar doubts—“doubts of her sister’s style of living and tone of society.” It is not until Miss Crawford finds “a sister’s husband who looked the gentleman, and a house commodious and well fitted up” that she is at ease. Mrs. Grant even before Mary’s arrival has made matrimonial plans for her, and the plans are based on finances: “She had fixed on Tom Bertram; the eldest son of a Baronet was not too good for a girl of twenty thousand pounds.” Mary Crawford is “glad to find a family of such consequence so very near them, and not at all displeased either at her sister’s early care.” The fact that there is a rich family nearby is, then, important to both sisters. And Mary, whose clear object is “matrimony . . . provided she could marry well,” is delighted with her sister’s choice of Tom Bertram: “While she treated it as a joke, therefore, she did not forget to think of it seriously.” Somewhat jocularly, but nonetheless with his own approbation clear, Dr. Grant also is in on the scheme. “I would have every body marry if they can do it properly” (32), he says. “I do not like to have people throw themselves away; but every body should marry as soon as they can do it to advantage.” We should note that these conversations about the matches take place immediately upon the Crawfords’ arrival, within “three hours” (31), actually. In Austen’s perspective there is humor in such positioning so early in the game, but there is nothing unexpected. These are the normal thoughts of people in this class, whose romantic machinations virtually by definition have a financial base to them. The young people, of similar class and so with similar interests, get along very well. It is worth noting that the only people 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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of this generation who seem not to see the world in quite the same way as their peers are the two, Edmund and Fanny, who do not have immediate access to significant fortunes. Their responses are the moral measure in whatever discussion or action is underway. Austen does not approve of people basing all decisions and actions on money, but in the social world she depicts, wealthy people often define, or forget, morality in the misuse of their wealth. This misuse is central to the extended conversations about the improvements of estates that come soon after the initial interactions of the newcomers to Mansfield. And these conversations, which comprise an episode of more than five pages (and further references to improvement take place at intervals throughout the rest of the novel), are very significant within another context as well. For not only do they provide commentary on Austen’s view of the proper use of wealth, but they make direct reference to a particular area of current events, the mania for improvement of estates. Austen’s precise references to concepts and persons connected to the improvement obsession illustrate that Austen indeed was aware of the world around her: it was choice rather than ignorance that dictated what aspects of the outside world appear in her novels. Mr. Rushworth, who has been visiting a friend who lately “had his grounds laid out by an improver” (38), comes to dine at Mansfield Park. He is full of the subject, and “very eager to be improving his own place in the same way”; he “could talk of nothing else.” His estate is Sotherton Court, and the estate he has been visiting is Compton. “It is the most complete thing! I never saw a place so altered in my life. . . . The approach now is one of the finest things in the country. . . . I declare when I got back to Sotherton yesterday, it looked like a prison—quite a dismal old prison” (39). We already know Mr. Rushworth to be quite stupid—even before the conversations about improvements—so his enthusiasm for this topic is a marker that improvement along these lines is not a good idea. Yet virtually everyone in the party enthusiastically takes part in this discussion. Miss Bertram suggests to him that if he wants really good help he should enlist the services of Mr. Repton. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Everyone seems to know just what Mr. Repton costs—five guineas a day. “Well, and if they were ten,” Mrs. Norris jumps in, “I am sure you need not regard it. The expense need not be any impediment. If I were you, I should not think of the expense. . . . Such a place as Sotherton Court deserves every thing that taste and money can do.” She already sees Sotherton Court, of course, as the property of Maria Bertram. Mrs. Norris, we know by now, certainly is cheap. Yet even she has been well and truly into improvement: “We did a vast deal in that way at the parsonage; we made it quite a different place from what it was when we first had it.” Mr. Rushworth, usually not much of a talker, brings the conversation back to Mr. Repton, and the possibilities that his own very large estate presents for change. “Now, at Sotherton, we have a good seven hundred [acres], without reckoning the water meadows [meadows that sometimes are overflowed]; so that I think, if so much could be done at Compton, we need not despair. There have been two or three fine old trees cut down that grew too near the house, and it opens the prospect amazingly, which makes me think that Repton, or any body of that sort, would certainly have the avenue at Sotherton down” (41). Only Fanny and Edmund hear anything amiss in all these projections. “Cut down an avenue! What a pity!” Fanny says to Edmund, who sympathetically replies that “I am afraid the avenue stands a bad chance, Fanny.” Miss Crawford, on the other hand, is much more disposed to view the proposed plan approvingly; this approval marks her as deficient in character when compared to Fanny. Humphry Repton is a historical figure, one of the most famous landscape designers of Austen’s time; although his services did not come cheap, they were in high demand.5 But Repton’s art—or trade—had long been the object of intensely partisan disagreement between proponents and opponents of the kind of reorganization of nature that the “improvers” made so popular. One objection to these changes to house and land was aesthetic and historical; Austen alludes to this side of the argument when Miss Crawford seems to remember “that Sotherton is an old place, and a place of some grandeur. In any particular style of building?” (41). The house, we learn, “was built



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in Elizabeth’s time, and is a large, regular, brick building.” But its provenance earns it no respect. The other major argument against the fashion for improvements is the cost. Mr. Rushworth seems well able to handle the expense of any changes he might wish to put in, but this was not the case with all those who began to improve their property and found themselves unable to call a halt. Thomas Holcroft, writing a decade or so before Austen, presents just this situation in Anna St. Ives, where Anna’s father, the baronet St. Ives, is on the verge of impoverishment because his steward, Abimelech Henley, has been overseeing “improvements” to the baronet’s property for years and years—all improvements resulting in his own enrichment. Holcroft makes it clear that the whole idea of improvement to properties that are just fine in the first place is a scam offered to separate those who are well off but not too bright from the resources that they are too stupid to husband properly. Holcroft’s is not an unrecognized opinion. It has been suggested by numerous critics6 that the theme of “improvements” in Mansfield Park is largely symbolic, and that other kinds of improvements are alluded to besides those of property. But no one in the novel “improves.” The weak characters remain weak, the bad characters remain bad, and the saintly Fanny and Edmund are pure throughout. Austen is not using the theme of “improvement” symbolically, although she does use different characters’ responses to the idea of improvement of property as a signal about their moral rectitude. In talking about “improvement” as she does in Mansfield Park, she is making direct reference to the current debate on the subject. Given her subject matter, upper-class English family life in the country, it is a virtually inescapable theme if she is to be accurate in showing the concerns of her characters. The discussion of the improvement of Mr. Rushworth’s estate leads to an outing to Sotherton Court. Mr. Crawford had embarked on a series of improvements to his own estate as soon as he reached maturity, and he is now called upon to make suggestions for Mr. Rushworth’s planned works. After some jockeying for position, all the young people are included in the expedition. The day at Sotherton Court brings little in the way of useful suggestions for landscape improvement, as we might expect, but in terms of the progression of Austen’s narrative it largely blocks out 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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the moral space of each of her central younger characters. The chapter precisely expresses the most common ideas in contemporary writing on morality and especially on female behavior. We are shown that people should be courteous to each other and that the lack of such courtesies is evidence not just of social carelessness but of moral imperfection. Young ladies may be physically delicate but must be morally muscular. And perhaps most importantly, religion and those who represent it must be respected. These representatives, the clergy, must be responsible and serious in their work, seeing their work not just as a profession—especially not as a default way of making a living in lieu of law or medicine—but as a calling. And, as so often in Austen’s writing, a clear distinction is made between the city and the country, with the country unquestionably the morally superior environment. As the journey from Mansfield Park to Sotherton Court begins, the contrast between Fanny and Miss Crawford sets the tone of the expedition. Their road was through pleasant country; and Fanny, whose rides had never been extensive, was soon beyond her knowledge, and was very happy in observing all that was new, and admiring all that was pretty. She was not often invited to join in the conversation of the others, nor did she desire it. Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions; and in observing the appearance of the country, the bearings of the roads, the difference of the soil, the state of the harvest, the cottages, the cattle, the children, she found entertainment. . . . Miss Crawford was very unlike her. She had none of Fanny’s delicacy of taste, of mind, of feeling; she saw nature, inanimate nature, with little observation; her attention was all for men and women, her talents for the light and lively. (58)

Fanny’s interest in the physical world around her marks her seriousness. Miss Crawford is flippant, uncentered. Fanny’s response to nature is of course romantic, but it also is very eighteenthcentury in its attachment to the defining aspects of English country life. Fanny takes nothing for granted, neither nature nor friendship. Miss Crawford takes nothing seriously except her own desires, and in her inability to go beyond herself she is the 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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antithesis of Fanny. Maria Bertram is much like Mary Crawford, and her responses, like Miss Crawford’s, are entirely centered in her own shallow concerns. When the party approaches Sotherton Court, she sees everything through her awareness that “Mr. Rushworth’s consequence was hers. . . . She could not carelessly observe that ‘she believed it was now all Mr. Rushworth’s property on each side of the road,’ without elation of heart” (59). When we get inside the house, Fanny is attentive to detail. Not having seen many other great houses, she is duly impressed by what she is shown at Sotherton Court—except that she is rather disappointed in the chapel. “Fanny’s imagination had prepared her for something grander than a mere, spacious, oblong room, fitted up for the purpose of devotion—with nothing more striking or more solemn than the profusion of mahogany, and the crimson velvet cushions appearing over the ledge of the family gallery above. ‘I am disappointed,’ said she, in a low voice, to Edmund. ‘This is not my idea of a chapel. There is nothing awful here, nothing melancholy, nothing grand” (61). Religion is central to writers on eighteenth-century behavior. Thomas Gisborne on behavior frames his arguments within a Christian framework. Hannah More, similarly, makes Christianity the bedrock of all of her commentaries on what is proper for men and women of all classes; in fact, the primary responsibility of the upper classes is to be sure that Christianity is properly inculcated in the lower classes. Conduct books all refer to Christianity as the center of appropriate behavior; radical writers like Thomas Paine must attack the “God-given” nature of certain concepts—especially monarchy— before they can begin to challenge the status quo. Except for such radicals, virtually all eighteenth-century moral writers write in favor of the status quo. More, for example, devotes her long life precisely to trying to prevent that status quo from being threatened. So important are her efforts that they are requested, and then supported not only with approbation but with practical help by the Bishop of London as well as More’s upper class friends, and, indeed, the monarchy itself. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Christianity in the daily consciousness of the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century upper-class English man or woman. Austen’s 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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own letters are full of casual references to church-related matters. Talk about an Englishman’s duties, except within the radical context, always takes as its starting point the context of duty within Christianity. Austen’s emphasis in Mansfield Park on the seriousness of Edmund’s commitment to the church is central to her characterization of him; Fanny’s understanding of and respect for that commitment marks her as a woman of moral substance. Obviously, Miss Crawford’s disapproval of Edmund’s choice of career shapes her character as well. Fanny’s disappointment with the chapel reflects the seriousness with which she regards religion: she would have expected, in a house as elaborate as this one, a chapel that honors religion with the same magnificence as the rest of the house. Mrs. Rushworth, who has been giving the house tour, tells some of the history of the chapel, ending with “It is a handsome chapel, and was formerly in constant use both morning and evening. Prayers were always read in it by the domestic chaplain, within the memory of many. But the late Mr. Rushworth left if off ” (62). Miss Crawford’s comment on this bit of history is that “every generation has its improvements.” Fanny certainly does not find giving up regular prayers positive. “‘It is a pity,’ cried Fanny, ‘that the custom should have been discontinued. It was a valuable part of former times. There is something in a chapel and chaplain so much in character with a great house, with one’s ideas of what such a household should be! A whole family assembling regularly for the purpose of prayer, is fine!’” Fanny’s remarks are precisely as they should be, showing a strong approbation not just for religious observance but for tradition; although Fanny as a child did not have the advantages of a careful religious upbringing, she has an instinctive appreciation for the importance of family religious observance that would serve as a shining example in any eighteenth-century conduct book or manual on female education. More, for example, calls on women “to raise the depressed tone of public morals [by] awaken[ing] the drowsy spirit of religious principle. [The] virtue and happiness, nay, perhaps the very existence, of that society” depends on the moral tone women bring to it by their influence. The woman must bring to those around her the example of her own Christianity to counter those forces in the 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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fashionable world that “blight the first promise of seriousness.”7 Now note Miss Crawford’s response to the idea of regular family prayers: “Very fine indeed! . . . It must do the heads of the family a great deal of good to force all the poor housemaids and footmen to leave business and pleasure, and say their prayers here twice a day, while they are inventing excuses themselves for staying away.” Edmund, echoing all the contemporary moralists, insists that the central point here precisely is that the master and mistress must present the example: “If the master and mistress do not attend themselves, there must be more harm than good in the custom.” The gravity with which Fanny and Edmund treat the subject of religious observance finds no echo in Miss Crawford. Her lack of seriousness, as becomes ever more obvious as the novel goes on, makes her imminently unsuitable for the pious Edmund. Piety, as a character trait in Austen, is positive; it is Miss Crawford’s frivolity that is questionable. She just does not pick up on Fanny and Edmund’s sincerity: The obligation of attendance, the formality, the restraint, the length of time—altogether it is a formidable thing, and what nobody likes: and if the good people who used to kneel and gape in that gallery could have foreseen that the time would ever come when men and women might lie another ten minutes in bed, when they woke with a headach, without danger of reprobation, because chapel was missed, they would have jumped with joy and envy. Cannot you imagine with what unwilling feelings the former belles of the house of Rushworth did many a time repair to this chapel? The young Mrs. Eleanors and Mrs. Bridgets—starched up into seeming piety, but with heads full of something very different—especially if the poor chaplain were not worth looking at—and, in those days, I fancy parsons were very inferior even to what they are now.

Fanny is “too angry for speech”; Edmund takes some time to find a civil answer. Not only has Miss Crawford denigrated the importance of religious ceremony, she also unknowingly has insulted Edmund’s chosen profession—for she does not yet know that he is set to become a clergyman. It is in all respects an unfortunate speech, and it reflects many of the aspects of her character that 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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shall mark her as an unfit match for the hero of the novel. Only a little later Mary realizes her mistake, for jokes are made about Maria and Mr. Rushworth being so near the altar: it’s a pity that Edmund is not yet ordained, or the wedding could take place there and then. “Ordained!’ said Miss Crawford; ‘what, are you to be a clergyman?” (64). Miss Crawford, who has more or less picked out Edmund as her husband, is not at all happy with his choice of profession. When she next gets the opportunity for private conversation with him, she “began with, ‘So you are to be a clergyman, Mr. Bertram. This is rather a surprise to me’” (65). The two of them discuss his choice, incidentally laying out the possibilities open to second sons. It is quite clear that Mary would prefer anything else—especially that he inherit money from some source in addition to his father—and that she quite literally cannot understand his sincere calling to this profession. Mary believes that Edmund’s decision to become a clergyman must have been made in error or carelessness: he just has not looked carefully for other alternatives. “Why should it surprise you? You must suppose me designed for some profession, and might perceive that I am neither a lawyer, nor a soldier, nor a sailor.” “Very true; but, in short, it had not occurred to me. And you know there is generally an uncle or a grandfather to leave a fortune to the second son.” “A very praiseworthy practice . . . but not quite universal. I am one of the exceptions, and being one, must do something for myself.” “But why are you to be a clergyman? I thought that was always the lot of the youngest, where there were many to choose before him.” “Do you think the church itself never chosen then?” “Never is a black word. But yes, in the never of conversation which means not very often, I do think it. For what is to be done in the church? Men love to distinguish themselves, and in either of the other lines, distinction may be gained, but not in the church. A clergyman is nothing.”



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“I cannot call that situation nothing, which has the charge of all that is of the first importance to mankind, individually or collectively considered, temporally and eternally—which has the guardianship of religion and morals, and consequently of the manners which result from their influence. No one here can call the office nothing. If the man who holds it is so, it is by the neglect of his duty, by foregoing its just importance, and stepping out of his place to appear what he ought not to appear.” (66)

This is one of the most important exchanges in the book, for it lays out Edmund’s moral stance. His view clearly is Austen’s, and so his moral perspectives will be central to the novel from here on. In the episode of the play, which follows quite soon upon this expedition to Sotherton Court, Edmund’s hesitations must be taken with full seriousness. But even before that, as the conversation between Edmund and Mary in the Sotherton gardens continues, Austen’s commentary on moral centers is delineated further. Mary answers Edmund that she really thinks he is giving much more consequence to the clergyman than she can quite “comprehend.” She wonders how just a couple of sermons a week can have so much influence, as one hardly sees a clergyman otherwise all during the week. Edmund retorts that that is the London model, but that London does not represent the rest of the country. It is not a fair model of the “proportion of virtue to vice throughout the kingdom,” he tells her. “We do not look in great cities for our best morality.” The moral center of the nation resides in the countryside. Edmund goes on that it is not in the cities “that respectable people of any denomination can do most good; and it certainly is not there, that the influence of the clergy can be most felt. . . . A good clergyman will be useful in his parish and his neighbourhood, where the parish and neighbourhood are of a size capable of knowing his private character, and observing his general conduct. . . . It will, I believe, be every where found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation” (66–67). Fanny breathes a fervent “Certainly.” Miss Crawford retorts “You really are fit for something better. Come, do change your mind. It is not too late. Go into the law” (67)!



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The exploration of the place and condition of a clergyman is so important that even this long exegesis does not satisfy Austen, and she returns to the subject when she returns her characters to Mansfield Park. The young people discuss Sir Thomas’ announced return, and Mary teases Edmond that his father’s return will precipitate his taking orders. Edmund assures her that this commitment is quite voluntary, but she continues to make fun of him: “It is fortunate that your inclination and your father’s convenience should accord so well. There is a very good living kept for you, I understand, hereabouts” (77). Mary may think that this fact has biased him, but Edmund insists that to be biased in such a situation indeed is perfectly justifiable. The knowing that there was such a provision for me, probably did bias me. Nor can I think it wrong that it should. There was no natural disinclination to be overcome, and I see no reason why a man should make a worse clergyman for knowing that he will have a competence early in life. I was in safe hands. I hope I should not have been influenced myself in a wrong way, and I am sure my father was too conscientious to have allowed it. I have no doubt that I was biassed, but I think it was blamelessly. (77–78)8

Austen is once more bringing money and morality together, and in her normal perspective, she is saying that wealth, or at least competence, is always to be desired; in fact, such a desire is perfectly moral. People should be aware of financial issues; not to be so aware is to be simply irresponsible. Further, using connections to gain advancement is not only respectable, it is the moral thing to do. Fanny comments that using connections to procure a living in the church is no different from the son of an admiral going into the navy. “Nobody wonders that they should prefer the line where their friends can serve them best, or suspects them to be less in earnest in it than they appear.” There are undoubtedly clergymen who are less than diligent—such as Dr. Grant—but this lack of industriousness has nothing to do with the way that the man has come into his living. Austen has dedicated quite a long interlude to convincing her reader that Edmund’s motives for joining the clergy are impeccable and



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that, should we need further proof, his perspectives always may be safely trusted. And so, when we get to the theatricals, we must be ready to trust Edmund’s moral instincts completely, and, of course, Fanny’s instincts as well, for she and Edmund already by this point have been shown to be the moral pillars of the novel.



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Mansfield Park “So long as it be a German play” The young people at Mansfield Park—with Edmund and Fanny abstaining—decide to put on a play, and the moral seriousness with which this decision is met by these two arbiters of proper behavior has puzzled many later readers of the novel. Why indeed do Edmund and Fanny make such a fuss about this plan, and why do their objections become even more strenuous once the play to be performed actually is chosen? If the novel as a whole elicits puzzlement in many modern readers, the episode of the theatrical performance stands out as seeming particularly heavy and exaggerated. Yet as soon as we place it within its contemporary context, all difficulties I think are resolved. This chapter will explore just this context by looking at the comments of Austen’s contemporary Hannah More on the effects of precisely the sort of writing that attracts the group. After that, I will look at Lovers’ Vows, the play proposed for presentation, and finally I will talk about the episode within the context of the novel itself. What we shall see is that Austen presents precisely the conservative moral agenda that was typical of her class. There is no mystery here, and it is certainly not the case that “Austen’s enterprise in Mansfield Park is to turn conservative myth sour,” as one critic insists.1 Quite the contrary, Austen believes absolutely in the ideals and the moral position that Fanny and Edmund represent. In very significant degree, Austen’s novels present a moral template for the appropriate behavior of upper-class youth as well as for the responsibilities of their elders no less precise, and usually quite of a piece with, the myriad conduct books of Austen’s time.



CHAPTER 2

Reading Jane Austen

One of the best known of these was Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Education, which went through seven editions in the year it was published, 1799.2 As its subtitle states, it is “a view of the principles and conduct prevalent among women of rank and fortune,” and an “address to women of rank and fortune, on the effects of their influence on society.”3 That influence is primarily a moral one, exerted on all those around her in the example set by the actions of the woman as well as by the education that she gives her daughters, and also her sons. Throughout, More emphasizes the Christian context for these principles. More finds that “The general state of civilized society depends . . . on the prevailing sentiments and habits of [upper-class] women, and on the nature and degree of the estimation in which they are held” (l, 2). She calls on women “to raise the depressed tone of public morals [by] awaken[ing] the drowsy spirit of religious principle. . . . [The] virtue and happiness, perhaps the very existence, of that society” (ll, 4–5) depends on the moral tone women bring to it by their influence. Especially, it is important to help the young, male and female, to “see through the miserable fallacies of [radical] philosophy” (l, 14) and to counter those forces in the modern world that “blight the first promise of seriousness” (l, 15). “Women of rank and influence” (l, 31) must repress everything that leads to public corruption. This is the context for a lengthy diatribe against modern literature, especially those terrible imports from abroad. These works can have extremely deleterious influences on the morals of those without adequate defenses—that is to say, the young—because the immoral, un-Christian lessons the books teach are presented in the guise of enlisting the reader’s sympathy for characters whose actions actually should evoke horror and disgust in a good Christian. The most abhorrent and apparently the most dangerous of these authors is Rousseau, who challenges the values of chastity and virginity and wants to destroy marriage by making adultery sympathetic. Rousseau’s effectiveness depends on his redefinition of virtue. His evil ideas are all the more dangerous because they are presented in the guise not of an attack on Christian morality but as an expansion of personal liberty and responsibility: “He does not attempt to seduce the affections but through the medium of the 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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principles” (l, 32). By redefining virtue he changes the nature of actions; what should inspire horror and pity in a reader requires instead respect and admiration. If the value of chastity is questioned and then denied, the unchaste heroine will appear even more attractive just because she is not chaste. Rousseau “with a pernicious subtlety attempts to make his heroine appear almost more amiable without [chastity]” (l, 32). Rousseau challenges the God-given order by “corrupting the judgment and bewildering the understanding”; he has found “the most effectual way to inflame the imagination and deprave the heart” (l, 33). More expands her attack on Rousseau to include the novel of sentiment and the politically radical novels, all of which she sees as “adopt[ing] and enlarg[ing] all the mischiefs” (l, 35) of Rousseau. She insists that the “principal evil arising from [these novels] is that the virtues they exhibit are almost more dangerous than the vices” (l, 35). Such novelists raise passion to a virtue instead of discussing how to subdue it. When these books teach that chastity is only a choice, that duty is only a function of feeling, they destroy the natural relationship of God to man. Having dealt with the better-known threats, More turns to the new devils abroad, “those swarms of publications now daily issuing from the banks of the Danube, which, like their ravaging predecessors of the darker ages, though with far other arms, are overrunning civilized society. . . . [T]he Huns and Vandals [are] once more overpowering the Greeks and Romans. . . . These compositions terrify the weak, and disgust the discerning” (l, 40). More uses a footnote in this part of her discussion to remark, with disgust, that “the newspapers announce that Schiller’s Tragedy of the Robbers, which inflamed the young nobility of Germany . . . is now acting in England by persons of quality! ” (l, 40). Some years earlier, it seems, the French had been the problem: “The writings of the French infidels were . . . circulated in England with uncommon industry, and with some effect,” but, fortunately, “the plain good sense and good principles of the far greater part of our countrymen resisted the attack” (l, 40). Luckily, in England, “the subject is now so well understood, that every thing that issues from the French press is received with jealousy; and a work, on the 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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first appearance of its exhibiting the doctrines of Voltaire and his associates, is rejected with indignation” (l, 41). Sadly, however, “the modern apostles of infidelity and immorality . . . have indeed changed their weapons, but they have by no means desisted from the attack. . . . Deprived of the assistance of the French press” (l, 41), they are now using German literature! “Incredible pains have been taken to obtain able translations of every book which was supposed likely to be of use in corrupting the heart or misleading the understanding. In many of the translations, certain bolder passages, which, though well received in Germany, would have excited disgust in England, are wholly omitted, in order that the mind may be more certainly, though more slowly, prepared for the full effect of the same poison to be administered in a stronger degree at another period” (l, 42–43). These “poisons” come chiefly in the form of attacks on chastity and fidelity. Those who would destroy English society through the importation of foreign ideas, having learned their lesson in their failure with French ideas, now are with the German addressing themselves to influence women instead of men with the argument that chastity is but a choice. And women, merely by reading, by being “inquisitive after these monstrous compositions,” by allowing their minds to come in contact with such contagious matter, “are irrevocably tainting them” (l, 44–45). More’s abhorrence of German writing focuses on the imports of German drama especially. Drama is even more dangerous than other forms of writing since “because there are multitudes who seldom read” (l, 45), the drama can reach those who would not be tainted by print sources. More turns to a spectacularly dangerous play, The Stranger, to show how this evil influence works. It is a play in which not only is there an adulteress, “but she is presented to our view in the most pleasing and fascinating colours” (1, 46). The adulteress has forsaken her perfectly nice husband to live with “her seducer.” When she repents, her husband promises to forgive her and to offer her his protection and his fortune—but he refuses to allow her to resume her place as his wife. More is shocked by the author’s insistence that it is the husband who is wrong: “The talents of the poet . . . are exerted in attempting to render this woman the object not only of the compassion and forgiveness, 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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but of the esteem and affection of the audience” (l, 46–47). It is the husband who is “a savage,” although his resolution not to take his wife back is one that “every man of true feeling and Christian piety will probably approve” (l, 47). The play that the young people at Mansfield Park choose for their production is a German play. It has been translated into English by Elizabeth Inchbald, a radical playwright and novelist. Its plot precisely exemplifies the evils that Hannah More describes. And Austen, whose moral perspective is so closely aligned with More’s, is very serious in her depiction of the inappropriateness of the entire enterprise of staging Lovers’ Vows. If we do not acknowledge this seriousness, the rest of the novel, especially Austen’s emphasis on Edmund and Fanny’s morality, is not clearly focused. To put on a play at all might not be quite as problematic an issue as Edmund makes it, but to put on this particular piece is indeed very bad. Lovers’ Vows, by August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue, in German is titled Das Kind der Liebe, or Child of Love; we should know already from this title that the subject matter is not fitting for proper young people, especially a group including several unmarried girls. Precisely as More says these things are done, the play itself has been changed to make it more appealing to an English audience. Inchbald in her “Preface” to the first printed edition of her translation notes some of the many changes she has made. I could trouble my reader with many pages to disclose the motives, which induced me to alter, with the exception of a few commonplace sentences only, the characters of Count Cassel, Amelia, and Verdun the Butler—I could explain why the part of the Count, as in the original, would have inevitably condemned the whole play—I could inform my reader why I have pourtrayed the Baron, in many particulars, different from the German author, and carefully prepared the audience for the grand effect of the last scene in the fourth act, by totally changing his conduct towards his son, as a robber . . . and why, in no one instance, I would suffer my respect for Kotzebue to interfere with my profound respect for the judgment of a British audience. But I flatter myself such a vindication is not requisite to the enlightened reader. . . . [The translator hopes that] she has caught the spirit of her author,—if,



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Inchbald then explains some of the things she has changed in the play. The part of Amelia, for example, has retained all the situations that Kotzebue gave her but the forward and unequivocal manner, in which she announces her affection to her lover, in the original, would have been revolting to an English audience: the passion of love, represented on the stage, is certain to be either insipid or hateful, unless it creates smiles or tears: Amelia’s love, by Kotzebue, is indelicately blunt, and yet, devoid of mirth or sadness: I have endeavoured to attach the attention and sympathy of the audience, by whimsical insinuations, rather than coarse abruptness: she is still the same woman . . . whom the author drew, with the self-same sentiments, but with manners conforming to the English, rather than the German taste. (italics mine)

This deliberate changing of the text to attract the English audience’s sympathy is precisely what Hannah More warns her readers about. (Even this toned-down Amelia is seen by Edmund, and even by Julia, who is to play the part, as being rather too forceful for a decent young woman to portray: Julia is distinctly uncomfortable when she realizes what words and actions will be required of her in her part.)

Inchbald is aware of the conservative arguments against a text like hers, and she tries to answer them in her prefatory “Remarks.” She says that “the grand moral of this play is—to set forth the miserable consequences which arise from the neglect, and to enforce the watchful care, of illegitimate offspring; and surely, as the pulpit has not had eloquence to eradicate the crime of seduction, the stage may be allowed an humble endeavour to prevent its most fatal effects.” With this hint about the plot, we should pause here to recount the storyline of Lovers’ Vows. The play opens with Agatha, a starving, exhausted woman, being thrown out of an inn because she has no money to pay for a bed and no strength to work for food 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


in every altered scene,—still adhering to the nice propriety of his meaning, and still keeping in view his great catastrophe—she has agitated her audience with all the various passions he depicted, the rigid criticism of the closet will be but a slender abatement of the pleasure resulting from the sanction of an applauding theatre.4

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or lodging. She is discovered by a young soldier, who, it turns out, is her son Frederick. He has only enough money to buy her some wine; luckily she is taken in by kindly cottagers, and he goes off—much against his pride—to beg for money to help his mother. Before he leaves, however, we have discovered why he has come home at this time: he needs a birth certificate; with shame and sadness, his mother explains to him that there is no such document available because he is an illegitimate child. His begging does not produce much, and, in frustration, he threatens at knifepoint a man whom he has asked for help. The man, Baron Wildenhaim, has Frederick arrested. After some plot turns, the baron discovers that Frederick is his son and that Agatha is his long-lost love; he sweeps Frederick and Agatha to him, instates Frederick as his lawful heir, and vows to marry Agatha. In short, they all live happily ever after. This is precisely the sort of story that would horrify More: it seems almost to reward bad behavior. Wildenhaim and Agatha, and even their son, lose nothing because of the immorality of the love affair. As if to answer these objections, Inchbald explores the morality of the play in her “Remarks.” Not furnished with one plea throughout four acts of Lovers’ Vows for accusation, those critics arraign its catastrophe, and say,—“the wicked should be punished.” They forget there is a punishment called conscience, which, though it seldom troubles the defamer’s peace, may weigh heavy on the fallen female and her libertine seducer. But as a probationary prelude to the supposed happiness of the frail personages of this drama, the author has plunged the offender, Agatha, in bitterest poverty and woe; which she receives as a contrite penitent, atoning for her sins. The Baron Wildenhaim, living in power and splendour, is still more rigorously visited by remorse: and, in the reproaches uttered by his outcast son . . . the Baron’s guilt has sure exemplary chastisement. But yet, after all the varied anguish of his mind, should tranquility promise, at length, to crown his future days, where is the immorality? If holy books teach, that the wicked too often prosper, why are plays to be withheld from inculcating the self-same doctrine? Not that a worldly man would class it amongst the prosperous events of life,



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Inchbald’s logic here is not rigorous—are the wicked prospering or not?—but some of her arguments are quite fascinating. Inchbald sees the baron’s necessity to marry Agatha as a punishment for him: class clearly trumps love, even for the radical Inchbald! But in general she rests her argument on remorse and the suffering that the characters all have had to endure before coming to this essentially happy ending. More would say that this is not punishment enough; so would Austen. The worst aspect of the play, just as More warns, is that the sinner is made so sympathetic. With Agatha’s first speech we know her to be kind, gentle, forgiving, and deserving of good fortune rather than the evils she has endured. Oh Providence! thou hast till this hour protected me, and has given me fortitude not to despair. Receive my humble thanks, and restore me to health, for the sake of my poor son, the innocent cause of my sufferings, and yet my only comfort. . . . Oh, grant, that I may see him once more! . . . Protect his father too, merciful Providence, and pardon his crime of perjury to me! Here, in the face of Heaven . . . here, I solemnly forgive my seducer for all the ills, the accumulated evils, which his allurements, his deceit and cruelty, have for twenty years past drawn upon me.

Although we immediately know that Agatha has not been chaste, we nonetheless give her our full sympathy. As the play goes on, Agatha must be seen as a model human being, her early mistake regretted and atoned for. But if this is the case, then what do we do with our need to disapprove of her? Here we have the crux of the problem with such a play as Lovers’ Vows. And her penitence is mirrored in the extraordinary love and responsibility which Frederick feels for her. This child of disgrace is, nonetheless, a model of filial behavior. When Frederick tells her that he needs his certificate from the church-book and she confesses that he is illegitimate, he asks for the name of his father. Agatha, in the toils of her guilt, answers “my tongue is locked with remorse and shame. You must not look at me.” He replies not with anger but with love: 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


to be (like the Baron) compelled to marry his cast-off mistress, after twenty years absence.

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“Not look at you! Cursed be that son, who could find his mother guilty, although all the world should call her so.” She tells him the story of her childhood with her parents, “poor, but reputable farmers.” In a plot twist that is reminiscent of Fanny Price’s move to Mansfield Park, “The lady of that castle and estate requested them to let me live with her, and she would provide for me through life.” It is worth noticing this parallelism as another instance of the contemporary habit of moving children, especially poor children, to the household of rich relatives or acquaintances. At the age of fourteen Agatha goes to the castle, where she is raised like a lady, instructed “in all kind of female literature and accomplishments.” After three years the young son of the house returns, promises her love and marriage—but tells her that he needs to put off the marriage until after the death of his mother. He returns to his regiment. Agatha, in good sentimental fashion, returns to her dear parents, who throw her out: “My mother, indeed, wept as she bade me quit her sight for ever; but my father wished,—that increased affliction might befal me.” The baron marries a rich woman and goes to live with her on her estate in Alsace. Luckily, we find out later, his was a miserable marriage. In his favor, through the twenty years that have intervened, the baron has been trying to find Agatha, but with no success. Thus, we certainly can have enormous pity for Agatha, and, given the baron’s attempts to find and support her, we also can have some sympathy for him. One thing that particularly makes him unhappy is that his only (known) child is a girl, Amelia. He loves her entirely, yet wishes that she had been a boy because “The name of Wildenhaim will die with me. My fine estates, my good peasants, all will fall into the hands of strangers.” When he accepts Frederick as his son, he is in effect rewarded with having his fondest wish made reality. Many of the subplots of the play resonate in interesting ways against the plot of Austen’s novel. I have remarked on the parallelism of Agatha’s removal to the castle and Fanny Price’s move to Mansfield Park; there is also a parallel love story. In Lovers’ Vows, the baron’s daughter has a very rich but very shallow and stupid suitor, Count Cassel. He is seemingly an appropriate match for Amelia: rich, of the proper class, and so forth. But he is an idiot, and, in fact, rather proud of his own lack of character. There is 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


Mansfield Park

Reading Jane Austen

another lover in the picture, the kind, intelligent, moral clergyman Anhalt. Amelia loves Anhalt, and he loves her. But Anhalt refuses even to think of asking for Amelia’s hand because of the obvious differences between them of fortune and class. Amelia’s father, having lived according to the rules of his station and found his life empty, is determined to try to prevent his daughter from making the same mistake. He asks her about her feelings for Count Cassel; she assures him that she has none, except perhaps fear: “Once at a ball he trod on my foot; and I was so afraid he should tread on me again.” The baron gravely warns her that “To see you happy is my wish. But matrimony, without concord, is like a duetto badly performed.” Later, he tells Anhalt that he really does not like Count Cassel—“When you find a man’s head without brains, and his bosom without a heart, these are important articles to supply.” What then does Count Cassel have to offer? “Birth and fortune,” answers Baron Wildenhaim. But, he goes on, “If I thought my daughter absolutely disliked him, or that she loved another, I would not thwart a first affection;—no, not for the world, I would not.” And then the conversation turns to the baron’s search for Agatha, a search that Anhalt has been conducting for years. Anhalt tells the baron that he simply cannot find her, and Wildenhaim laments, “Believe me, this burthen presses on my thoughts so much, that many nights I go without sleep. A man is sometimes tempted to commit such depravity when young.—Oh, Anhalt! had I, in my youth, had you for a tutor;—but I had no instructor but my passions; no governor but my own will.” The baron’s mistakes were those of youth and upbringing; a sympathetic character now, he not only sincerely has repented of his own sins but is determined not to inflict similar damages on his daughter. Anhalt is properly reluctant even to consider himself a suitable man for Amelia, even after Amelia has confessed her love to him and forced him to confess his feelings for her. “Why do you force from me, what it is villainous to own?—I love you more than life—Oh, Amelia! had we lived in those golden times, which the poets picture, no one but you—But, as the world is changed, your birth and fortune make our union impossible—To preserve the character, and, more, the feelings of an honest man, I would not 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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marry you without the consent of your father—And could I, dare I, propose it to him?” Amelia assures him that she will broach the subject to her father; when she does she says that “birth and fortune were such old-fashioned things to me, I cared nothing about either.” Her father reminds her that “It is the custom in this country for the children of nobility to marry only with their equals; but as my daughter’s content is more dear to me than an ancient custom, I would bestow you on the first man I thought calculated to make you happy.” Both Amelia and the baron’s comments are egalitarian and therefore, radical, just the sort of thing to confuse a young reader about his or her duty to parents and to class. Austen, like More, would not approve. Austen, no matter how much she plays with romantic pairings in all of her novels, almost always ends with couples who marry within similar class lines, as when in Emma Harriet finally winds up with Robert Martin. And when there is some movement across class boundaries, as in the marriage of Emma’s governess to Mr. Weston, it is but a small step, much more a matter of economic than of class difference. In Inchbald’s version of Lovers’ Vows threats to the status quo are seen as acceptable, even admirable. Inchbald makes a point of explaining away behavior that, to more conservative eyes, should be inexcusable, as when Anhalt, trying to bring Agatha and the baron together, tells Agatha that “I do not mean to justify the Baron. But—he has loved you—and fear of his noble kindred alone caused his breach of faith to you.” And, of course, when the baron actually pronounces himself willing to marry Agatha, he is a totally redeemed man. What indeed could be less appropriate for the young people at Mansfield Park? Lovers’ Vows shows that chastity is not essential for happiness, that seduction does not necessarily blight a man’s character and even that a child born without social or legal sanction may grow up to be the respectable heir to fortune and position. Edmund and Fanny are absolutely right, and Austen means us to notice that justification. Her contemporary readers would have understood this; it is time, distance, and political correctness that make it difficult for modern readers to realize quite how properly Edmund and Fanny behave. And, as we have seen in discussing earlier parts of the novel, this kind of literalness is 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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typical of Mansfield Park. One critic got it pretty much right: Lionel Trilling wrote of the book “There is one novel of Jane Austen’s, Mansfield Park, in which [her] characteristic irony seems not to be at work. Indeed, one might say of this novel that it undertakes to discredit irony and to affirm literalness, that it demonstrates that there are no two ways about anything.”5 The primary instigators of the idea of the play are Tom, whose character as a self-centered and careless oldest son has been discredited since the very beginning of the book, and Tom’s friend, the Honourable John Yates, who “had not much to recommend him beyond habits of fashion and expense” (86). Yates is someone whose “introduction at Mansfield” Sir Thomas probably would have thought “by no means desirable.” The Bertram girls go along happily, but they too are flighty, with rather dangerous dispositions toward the socially careless; this is true especially of Maria who, although she is virtually engaged to Mr. Rushworth (the engagement cannot be formalized until Sir Thomas comes home), clearly is drawn to Mr. Crawford. There is Mr. Crawford himself, a man “not in the habit of examining his own motives” (82) and “thoughtless and selfish from prosperity and bad example.” These are the chief forwarders of the scheme. As they begin to discuss the idea of organizing a play at Mansfield, the ideas for their own theatrical become more and more elaborate. Edmund listens in increasing alarm, and when he finally comments, he locates the idea of the play on Austen’s moral grid, for with obvious disapproval he suggests just about the worst choice they could make for the play itself: “If we are to act, let it be in a theatre completely fitted up with pit, box, and gallery, and let us have a play entire from beginning to end; so long as it be a German play” (88, italics mine). This comment comes just at the beginning of the play episode, and it is meant to define our reactions to the rest of the discussion and to the reactions of the characters. Edmund is right to be “determined to prevent it.” He tells Tom, “I think it would be very wrong. In a general light, private theatricals are open to some objections” (89), but the problem is more severe in the particular circumstances that obtain at this time. Their father is away, in some degree of danger, and thus “it would show a great want of 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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feeling on my father’s account.” And, equally if not more importantly, “it would be imprudent, I think, with regard to Maria, whose situation is a very delicate one, considering every thing, extremely delicate.” Tom’s answer is that it is all to be a most private affair—essentially just family—and “we may be trusted, I think, in choosing some play most perfectly unexceptionable.” But as we know, Tom is wrong. Since the play they finally choose indeed is objectionable, it must be assumed that Tom is wrong on the first count, family privacy, as well. Edmund is not being prissy when he insists that his father “would never wish his grown up daughters to be acting plays” (90). We are told that “Fanny, who had heard it all, [had] borne Edmund company throughout the whole” (91); far from being puritanical, Fanny’s agreement here simply reinforces the correctness of Edmund’s viewpoint. The argument the sisters make, that “there could be no harm in what had been done in so many families,” is specious; in fact, it is precisely Austen’s point that although this sort of thing is quite common, it can indeed have seriously negative effects. The reader might be tempted to think that perhaps Edmund and Fanny are too strict, and that Maria and Julia do have a point here, but events—first Sir Thomas’s reaction upon his return, and then the irreparable misstep of Maria herself later on when, already married to Mr. Rushworth, she runs off with Mr. Crawford—prove Edmund and Fanny right. And if the prospect of a private theatrical in and of itself is questionable, the play chosen makes the idea all the worse. When Fanny finally picks up the volume and begins to read the play, she is shocked. She ran through it with an eagerness which was suspended only by intervals of astonishment, that it could be chosen in the present instance—that it could be proposed and accepted in a private Theatre! Agatha and Amelia appeared to her in their different ways so totally improper for home representation—the situation of one, and the language of the other, so unfit to be expressed by any woman of modesty, that she could hardly suppose her cousins could be aware of what they were engaging in; and longed to have them roused as soon as possible by the remonstrance which Edmund would certainly make. (97) 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Edmund is equally shocked when he learns what the play is to be, and Fanny’s “heart beat for him as she . . . saw his look, and felt what his sensations must be. ‘Lovers’ Vows!’—in a tone of the greatest amazement” (98) is his response to the announcement, “and he turned towards his brother and sisters as if hardly doubting a contradiction.” The most serious problem, especially given Maria’s informal engagement to Mr. Rushworth, is the women’s parts, and that is Edmund’s first question: “But what do you do for women?” Maria, who is to play Agatha, the seduced and abandoned and mother-out-of-wedlock Agatha, blushes. As soon as he gets Maria alone, he insists to her “that I think it exceedingly unfit for private representation, and that I hope you will give it up.—I cannot but suppose you will when you have read it carefully over.—Read only the first Act aloud, to either your mother or aunt, and see how you can approve it.” Maria is sure that the play is just fine, and that with perhaps a few “omissions and so forth” (99), it is “very fit for private representation.” Edmund pleads with her that she must be a model of delicacy and decorum, that, in fact, she must be the one to retire from the play, but his arguments are ignored, especially as Maria is convinced that her sister Julia would be all too happy to take this major role instead. And then an easily overlooked but very significant bit of interplay takes place. The older women, Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris, have been half-listening to this dialogue; here should be the voices of mature decency. But Lady Bertram, always only halfaware of anything that is going on around her, is more concerned with her dinner than with the propriety of her daughters—“Do not act any thing improper, my dear . . . Fanny, ring the bell; I must have my dinner” (99), and Mrs. Norris agrees with Maria that they need not be quite so picky: “If every play is to be objected to, you will act nothing. . . . I do not know the play; but, as Maria says, if there is any thing a little too warm . . . it can easily be left out.—We must not be over precise Edmund.” This is exactly how both More and Austen see lack of decorum, a very dangerous lack of decorum, sneaking into the behavior of those who are most vulnerable to its dangers. We need to remember, after all, that the episode of the play goes on for quite some pages; also, we should consider that, indeed, the play chosen is questionable. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Mrs. Norris, who does not know the play, nonetheless encourages the young people in its production. And we might note here that the character of Agatha is not the only problem; Amelia is such a “forward young lady [that she] may well frighten the men” (101). Edmund is implored to take the part of Anhalt, but he resists; Fanny also refuses to act. This reticence on Fanny’s part leads to perhaps the ugliest incident in the book. Edmund supports Fanny, telling Mrs. Norris not to harass her and insisting that Fanny’s judgment should be trusted. Mrs. Norris replies, “I am not going to urge her . . . but I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl, if she does not do what her aunt and cousins wish her—very ungrateful indeed, considering who and what she is” (103). This bald reference to Fanny’s subservient position in the household is cruel, and Fanny receives it with shock. Mrs. Norris’ treatment of Fanny here and in many other instances is abusive, and that abuse is one of the most interesting psychological aspects of the novel. Along with Mrs. Norris’ intense lack of sympathy, this instance also underscores her lack of moral stature. Yet she is one of the older people who should be watching for misdirection in the young. Only the arrival of Sir Thomas prevents the play from going on. With his arrival, Austen emphasizes that most of the young people involved also had a strong sense that putting on this play was wrong, or, at the least, would be seen as inappropriate by Sir Thomas. The Crawfords laugh at Mr. Yates, who does not realize that Sir Thomas’ arrival has put a finish to the play, and they take themselves off to the parsonage. Tom begins “to see more clearly than he had ever done before that there might be some ground of offense” (127) in the whole idea of the play. Mr. Yates, totally deficient in both sensitivity and decorum, chatters on about the play to Sir Thomas without noticing “Sir Thomas’s dark brow contract as he looked with inquiring earnestness at his daughters and Edmund, dwelling particularly on the latter, and speaking a language, a remonstrance, a reproof, which he felt at his heart. Not less acutely was it felt by Fanny. . . . Such a look of reproach at Edmund from his father she could never have expected to witness; and to feel that it was in any degree deserved, was an aggravation indeed” (128). 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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The next morning Edmund goes to his father and makes what explanations he can, insisting that they have all been more or less to blame, except for Fanny, who “never ceased to think of what was due to you. You will find Fanny every thing you could wish” (129). Sir Thomas, like Edmund and Fanny, “saw all the impropriety of such a scheme among such a party, and at such a time, as strongly as his son had ever supposed he must. . . . He did not enter into any remonstrance with his other children: he was more willing to believe they felt their error, than to run the risk of investigation.” Mr. Yates, who, as we have seen, has been thoroughly discredited, sees Sir Thomas as “unintelligibly moral, so infamously tyrannical” (132); we know then, that Sir Thomas is to be taken as appropriately moral. His return makes “a striking change in the ways of the family, independent of Lovers’ Vows.” Part of the importance of this long section of the novel is to show the centrality of Sir Thomas’ moral measure to the well-being of those around him. Austen believes completely that a moral center is an absolute necessity in society, certainly in the larger society, but especially in the family circle which forms the most important unit in that larger society. Many critics of Mansfield Park have seen the character of Sir Thomas as ambiguous, but this incident of the play shows him clearly within the right in the novel’s moral structure. Austen’s contemporary audience would have known the plot and character details of Lovers’ Vows and therefore would have understood how inappropriate the play is as a vehicle for the young people involved. The appropriate application of moral standards shuts down the production. In all Austen novels moral standards form the scaffolding for the plot, but in Mansfield Park this structure is more in the forefront than in any other of her novels. The hero of the novel is, after all, planning to be a clergyman, a clergyman who will be an exemplar of his kind. The goings on around the play allow Austen to set out the moral positions of the circle at Mansfield Park; these character portraits are expanded in the succeeding pages. I referred earlier to Mrs. Norris’ cruel treatment of Fanny, for example. In a brilliant portrait of emotional abuse, Austen shows Mrs. Norris consistently chipping away at Fanny’s self-esteem; as in so many instances of this kind of abuse, Fanny herself seems quite unaware 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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that Mrs. Norris is doing anything wrong, and Fanny keeps trying somehow to curl herself into the shape that Mrs. Norris demands. It is Edmund or Sir Thomas who sees the impropriety and the cruelty of Mrs. Norris, and in each instance when one or the other is present at one of these attacks, he intercedes for Fanny. The difference between the actions of the men and the evil of Mrs. Norris is part of the moral portraiture. One instance of the ongoing meanness is Mrs. Norris’ decision that there shall not be a fire in Fanny’s sitting room, a sure sign that Fanny is not worth as much as any other member of the household. We have looked at the vicious comment about Fanny’s difference from the rest of the family during the play preparations. These incidents are part of a pattern. When Fanny is invited to dine at the Crawfords’, for example, Mrs. Norris does everything she can to make Fanny feel insufficient. Mrs. Norris “seemed intent only on lessening her niece’s pleasure, both present and future, as much as possible” (151). She goes on and on, explaining to Fanny not only that she really is not wanted, but that her invitation certainly is to be regarded as a great stroke of fortune—and anyway, she is stepping most inappropriately out of her social boundaries. Upon my word, Fanny, you are in high luck to meet with such attention and indulgence! You ought to be very much obliged to Mrs. Grant for thinking of you, and to your aunt for letting you go, and you ought to look upon it as something extraordinary: for I hope you are aware that there is no real occasion for your going into company in this sort of way, or ever dining out at all; and it is what you must not depend upon ever being repeated. Nor must you be fancying, that the invitation is meant as any particular compliment to you; the compliment is intended to your uncle and aunt, and me. Mrs. Grant thinks it a civility due to us to take a little notice of you, or else it would never have come into her head, and you may be very certain, that if your cousin Julia had been at home, you would not have been asked at all.

But Mrs. Norris is not through yet. It is not enough to try to convince Fanny that no one wants her, and that certainly no one would want her if her cousin Julia—a proper Bertram—were at home; Mrs. Norris must remind Fanny yet again that Fanny 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Reading Jane Austen

People are never respected when they step out of their proper sphere. Remember that, Fanny. . . . The nonsense and folly of people’s stepping out of their rank and trying to appear above themselves, makes me think it right to give you a hint, Fanny, now that you are going into company without any of us; and I do beseech and intreat you not to be putting yourself forward, and talking and giving your opinion as if you were one of your cousins—as if you were dear Mrs. Rushworth or Julia. That will never do, believe me. Remember, wherever you are, you must be the lowest and last.

This emotional abuse is a continuing thread in the novel, and Austen’s portrait of Mrs. Norris is, I think, one of the most original aspects of the book. Fanny does not take umbrage at any of Mrs. Norris’ advice, and, in fact “thought it perfectly reasonable.” She “rated her own claims to comfort as low even as Mrs. Norris could,” Austen tells us in response to Mrs. Norris’ comment that Fanny should not expect the carriage to be at her disposal. Mrs. Norris is clearly villainous in these episodes, yet Fanny’s acquiescence to her own mistreatment is to be seen as a vindication of her modesty. Since Fanny never seems to estimate her own worth accurately, such modesty must be seen as part of Austen’s characterization of a virtuous woman. Like other aspects of the novel, this is not an easy part of the book for a modern reader to accept, but it is part of Austen’s web of interactions. While Fanny simply accepts or even blames herself for Mrs. Norris’ abuse, it remains always for someone else, Edmund or Sir Thomas, to set things in proper order. Fanny has the carriage to take her to the dinner party, but only because Sir Thomas insists on it, and “her uncle’s consideration of her, coming immediately after such representations from her aunt, cost her some tears of gratitude when she was alone.” Yet another example of this kind of emotional attack comes when Sir Thomas suggests having a ball for the young people at Mansfield Park. As soon as Sir Thomas begins to talk of “a 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


herself is not someone who has the right to be in company, for Fanny is, as Mrs. Norris earlier implied, part of the family only through charity and sufferance.

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dance at home” (173), Mrs. Norris interrupts, “I knew what was coming. I knew what you were going to say. If dear Julia were at home, or dearest Mrs. Rushworth at Sotherton, to afford a reason, an occasion for such a thing, you would be tempted to give the young people a dance at Mansfield. I know you would. If they were at home to grace the ball, a ball you would have this very Christmas.” Sir Thomas makes it clear that his daughters have their own pleasures, and that this dance “will be for their cousins.” Mrs. Norris cannot do anything about this vindication of Fanny and her brother, William. Moral stances are shown in small gestures, as in these discussions about the ball, and larger, in terms of the ways in which an individual views his own responsibilities within society. This last category includes Sir Thomas’ responsibilities in keeping his family solvent by attending to his finances, his estates, and even the debts of his eldest son; even more importantly, it includes Edmund’s attitude toward being a clergyman and the requirements of a living, a sense of duty that Sir Thomas carefully has nurtured in Edmund. Moderation and responsibility are key in all aspects of a socially respectable life. All of these threads come together in the many references to Edmund’s future as a clergyman that run through the second, and central, volume of the novel. Naturally, an important issue here is money, and an individual’s attitude toward financial status becomes a measure of his or her moral outlook. Edmund accepts the relative financial modesty that he will have as a clergyman; Miss Crawford’s disapproval is a strong indication that she is not a woman whose character would make her a fit wife for him. As a sort of comic prelude to these weightier issues, we have Maria’s courtship with Mr. Rushworth in which everything Maria does is done for the wrong reasons. Mr. Rushworth is a simple fool, but he is very rich. The discussion of Maria’s courtship comes very soon after the play episode, and much of the humor comes from the very obvious parallels between Count Cassel in Lovers’ Vows and Mr. Rushworth himself. In both cases, the suitor is extremely dull: he is a fop with a love of fancy dress; he has much money and is seen as a desirable suitor for this reason only; the girl he courts comes herself from a rich family, so that the additional means essentially are irrelevant; 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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and, perhaps most significant in terms of parallels, both fathers are very hesitant to have their daughters marry such obvious idiots and question the girls carefully about their desires. Sir Thomas “with solemn kindness . . . addressed [Maria]; told her his fears, inquired into her wishes, entreated her to be open and sincere, and assured her that every inconvenience should be braved, and the connection entirely given up, if she felt herself unhappy in the prospect of it. He would act for her and release her” (138). But Maria assures him that she is happy in her engagement. Unlike Amelia in the play, Maria does not have the good sense to avoid such a connection; rather, she runs toward it for all the wrong reasons. She likes Henry Crawford but feels that he toys with her, and she feels restricted by her father’s renewed presence at Mansfield Park: “Independence was more needful than ever. . . . She was less and less able to endure the restraint which her father imposed. The liberty which his absence had given was now become absolutely necessary. She must escape from him and Mansfield as soon as possible. . . . In all the important preparations of the mind she was complete; being prepared for matrimony by an hatred of home, restraint, and tranquility; by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry” (139). Edmund’s motives, in contrast, virtually always are correct. He too at first is attracted to an inappropriate mate, Miss Crawford, but he eventually realizes that she is not an admirable human being: her defects of character end the relationship for Edmund. Miss Crawford cannot take Edmund’s plans for a life as a clergyman—a sincere clergyman who plans to live on a relatively modest income and to pay full attention to his duties—as anything but a foolishly idealistic stance. Edmund teases Mary about the high costs of food in the city, and she tells him “I mean to be too rich to lament or to feel any thing of the sort. A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of ” (146). She plans to be very rich, in fact, and asks Edmund if he does not. “Do not we all?” But he is a second son, and he is intending to be a clergyman: “I cannot intend any thing which it must be so completely beyond my power to command. Miss Crawford may chuse her degree of wealth. She has only to fix on her number of thousands a year, and there can be no doubt of their coming. My intentions 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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By moderation and economy, and bringing down your wants to your income, and all that. I understand you—and a very proper plan it is for a person at your time of life, with such limited means and indifferent connections.—What can you want but a decent maintenance? . . . Be honest and poor, by all means—but I shall not envy you; I do not much think I shall even respect you. I have a much greater respect for those that are honest and rich. Your degree of respect for honesty, rich or poor, is precisely what I have no manner of concern with. I do not mean to be poor. Poverty is exactly what I have determined against. Honesty, in the something between, in the middle state of worldly circumstances, is all that I am anxious for your not looking down on. But I do look down upon it, if it might have been higher. I must look down upon any thing contented with obscurity when it might rise to distinction.

Challenged, Miss Crawford cannot think of many situations where Edmund might rise to distinction, and, finally, she hazards parliament as a possibility. Edmund, perhaps with some irritation, suggests that “as to my being in parliament, I believe I must wait till there is an especial assembly for the representation of younger sons who have little to live on” (149). The awkward circumstance of the younger son is a topic to which Austen returns repeatedly. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, Colonel Fitzwilliam is very blunt about the ways in which his status as a second son has limited his choices.6 It is difficult to make a living in eighteenth-century England, and in situations where there is not a fortune ready to hand, the nexus of decent living and adequate income sharpens many of Austen’s plot lines. We are used to thinking about the girls in Pride and Prejudice who need husbands even more urgently than most because the Bennet money is entailed to Mr. Collins; we forget that Wickham, in that novel, plays the marriage game in much the same way that the girls do, and for quite the same reason of financial need. And Mr. Bennet himself, of course, when he needs money to buy off 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


are only not to be poor” (147). The dialogue is a relatively long one, and it shows the moral character of both young people. Miss Crawford continues,

Reading Jane Austen

Wickham and save Lydia, has absolutely no means of generating it; he and Lydia are only saved by the intercession of the wonderfully rich Darcy. Austen is realistic about the advantages of having money and about the ways in which it can be gotten and cared for. The rational application of effort to obtain a decent living (“decent” in this financial context functions in Austen novels on a sliding scale) is both necessary and commendable. But there should be honest commitment to the profession chosen, not simply a desire to milk it of whatever one can. This is true for the landowner, who should be a careful landlord or master, as Sir Thomas is when he journeys all the way to Antigua (and no, there is no support for the idea that these references show Austen being concerned with the slave trade, as some recent critics have insisted) and for Darcy, Austen’s ultimate hero, in Pride and Prejudice (Elizabeth really falls in love with him when she sees his estate and talks to his servant). It is true for the soldier or sailor, although this has nothing to do with the man’s unavoidable need to have the influence of powerful friends in order to rise in his profession. And therefore, we should not be surprised that such an attitude is absolutely necessary for the moral completeness of a clergyman. The subject of Edmund’s projected income arises again a few pages later when the Crawfords observe Edmund and Dr. Grant going off for a private talk; Henry Crawford assumes that this discussion is to acquaint Edmund with ways to make his living more lucrative. Henry tells his sister that Edmund will be quite well off—he will have something like seven hundred pounds: “Seven hundred a year is a fine thing for a younger brother” (155); his sister, whose interest in the subject is not academic, chides Henry that he would not be satisfied with such a sum. Henry’s answer is that “Birthright and habit must settle the business. Bertram is certainly well off for a cadet of even a Baronet’s family. By the time he is four or five-and-twenty he will have seven hundred a year, and nothing to do for it.” But the Crawfords are not moral exemplars, and, in fact, Edmund—and Sir Thomas—have every expectation that Edmund will be more than a Sunday clergyman, even if that means that Edmund will have to move away from the family home. There is no choice, not in Edmund’s nor his father’s 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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His going, though only eight miles, will be an unwelcome contraction of our family circle; but I should have been deeply mortified, if any son of mine could reconcile himself to doing less. . . . [A] parish has wants and claims which can be known only by a clergyman constantly resident, and which no proxy can be capable of satisfying to the same extent. Edmund might, in the common phrase, do the duty of Thornton, that is, he might read prayers and preach, without giving up Mansfield Park; he might ride over, every Sunday, to a house nominally inhabited, and go through divine service; he might be the clergyman of Thornton Lacey every seventh day, for three or four hours, if that would content him. But it will not. He knows that human nature needs more lessons than a weekly sermon can convey, and that if he does not live among his parishioners and prove himself by constant attention their well-wisher and friend, he does very little either for their good or his own. (170)

Austen takes her religion seriously. A number of people in her family were clergymen, and there are extant prayers written by Austen herself.7 Edmund’s seriousness about his duties as a clergyman is a measure of his moral worth, and his father’s insistence on the proper observance of Edmund’s duties similarly marks him as an appropriately responsible patriarch. But duty does not stand alone in the consideration of profession, for the profession must provide adequate maintenance for the man. Discussions about Edmund’s projected home, Thornton Lacey, inevitably early come to “improvements,” and the Crawfords as usual are ready to suggest turning the place inside out. Henry Crawford thinks it a wonderful opportunity: “There will be work for five summers at least before the place is live-able” (166). Henry goes on for some time about all the major changes that he would implement. But Edmund has another vision. “And I have two or three ideas also . . . and one of them is that very little of your plan for Thornton Lacey will ever be put in practice. I must be satisfied with rather less ornament and beauty. I think the house and premises may be made comfortable, and given the 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


view, and in this difference of perspective Austen signals the moral worth of the people involved. Sir Thomas says,

Reading Jane Austen

air of a gentleman’s residence without any very heavy expense, and that must suffice me; and I hope may suffice all who care about me.” Certainly Austen wants us to see Edmund’s modesty and good sense. But I think there is something else here that we should note. Modest Edmund may be, but the house shall have the air of a gentleman’s residence. It need not become “a place,” as Henry Crawford would like it to be, but it must attain to the standard of a proper residence for a Bertram. This kind of class distinction is so natural for Austen that she sees Edmund’s aspirations as the model of humility. And, in this context, I might note that seven hundred pounds a year is perhaps not an extravagant fortune, but in a period when, for comparison, a working person most likely would have fewer than forty pounds a year, it is not exactly hardship level. There is throughout the Austen canon a very practical tone in regard to money. All things being equal—that is, the morality and intelligence of the person being sufficiently admirable—Austen never thinks the smaller fortune more admirable than the larger. That is why the extremely rich Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, with his ten thousand pounds a year, is the perfect Austen hero. Miss Taylor, in Emma, does very well to marry the comfortably circumstanced Mr. Weston. At all levels, money is desirable. And so Edmund, as idealistic as he is, still aspires to an adequate living for a gentleman, along with a house to match his status. Similarly, one of the major themes of the central volume of Mansfield Park is the position of Fanny’s beloved brother William, whose success in the navy will be virtually entirely dependent on whether he can be helped by some acquaintance of his family’s circle. And there is absolutely no foolish commentary suggesting that it would be better if William could make it on his own. It is true that in Persuasion Captain Wentworth seems to have made his career mostly due to his own efforts, but in William’s case, all of his good fortune comes directly through the intercession of Henry Crawford’s friend the admiral. Fanny, and so Austen, never doubts for a moment that this intercession is entirely positive. In fact, these discussions about William’s career needs are some of the incidents most directly related to current events in Austen’s novels. One conversation begins, for example, with Fanny 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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and William talking about dances; he complains that, were he at Portsmouth, he probably would not even want to go to the Assembly, for “The Portsmouth girls turn up their noses at any body who has not a commission. One might as well be nothing as a midshipman” (171). Fanny tries to encourage him that this stage will pass, “that there will come a time when you will have nothing of that sort to endure. When you are a lieutenant!—only think, William, when you are a lieutenant, how little you will care for any nonsense of this kind.” William complains that he begins to think this will never happen: “Every body gets made but me.” Fanny tries to convince him that his uncle, that is, Sir Thomas, will “do every thing in his power to get [William] made. He knows, as well as you do, of what consequence it is.” But Sir Thomas does not have the right connections for acquiring a promotion for William. Luckily, Henry Crawford’s uncle is an admiral, and it is Crawford who manages the issue. And why does Henry Crawford go to all this trouble? Only because he is in love with Fanny. It is Crawford who brings Fanny the good news: “He is made. Your brother is a Lieutenant. I have the infinite satisfaction of congratulating you on your brother’s promotion” (203). Henry has brought the letters announcing the promotion and from them we see that the whole thing is indeed a matter of the right people interceding on William’s behalf. From William being introduced to the admiral by Henry, to the admiral liking him, to the admiral using his own influence, it all is a matter of whom you know. The first [letter] was from the Admiral to inform his nephew, in a few words, of his having succeeded in the object he had undertaken, in the promotion of young Price, and inclosing two more, one from the Secretary of the First Lord to a friend, whom the Admiral had set to work in the business, the other from that friend to himself, by which it appeared that his Lordship had the very great happiness of attending to the recommendation of Sir Charles, that Sir Charles was much delighted in having such an opportunity of proving his regard for Admiral Crawford, and that the circumstance of Mr. William Price’s commission as second Lieutenant of H. M. sloop Thrush, being made out, was spreading general joy through a wide circle of great people.



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Reading Jane Austen

It should be noted that nowhere in these communications is there any reference to William’s qualifications. The promotion is accomplished because Sir Charles wants to prove his regard for Admiral Crawford. And how was all this set in motion? Henry explains that he was really sorry not to have been able to finish the business while he was in London, although he stayed on purposely to try to do so. It was complicated. But though my uncle entered into my wishes with all the warmth I could desire, and exerted himself immediately, there were difficulties from the absence of one friend, and the engagements of another. . . . My uncle, who is the very best man in the world, has exerted himself, as I knew he would after seeing your brother. He was delighted with him. I would not allow myself yesterday to say how delighted, or to repeat half that the Admiral said in his praise. I deferred it all, till his praise should have proved the praise of a friend, as this day does prove it. Now I may say that even I could not require William Price to excite a greater interest, or be followed by warmer wishes and higher commendation, than were most voluntarily bestowed by my uncle, after the evening they passed together.

William’s promotion, then, was entirely contingent on the fact that he and the admiral passed a pleasant evening together. And Austen sees nothing out of the way in this; it is simply the way of the world, so natural as to be unremarkable.8 William owes everything to the fact that Henry, being in love with Fanny, went out of his way to organize this meeting with his uncle. There is no suggestion whatever in this case that all of these actions are less than perfectly appropriate, perfectly moral. Austen’s is a very practical view. Being practical about making one’s way in the professions, just as in making one’s way in marriage (a theme more stressed in such novels as Pride and Prejudice and Emma), is very much the moral thing to do. What is not appropriate is to try to use one’s ability to help friends for one’s own advantage.

And so it is very wrong of Henry to use this moment of announcing William’s promotion and his own part in that promotion to ask Fanny to marry him. Mr. Crawford’s proposal causes Fanny a great deal of trouble. He is seemingly a great conquest for her: Fanny, the poor relation, 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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upon marrying Henry would be the equal of anyone, and, in fact, considerably higher in the social hierarchy than most. A “mediocrity of condition . . . seemed to be” (212) Fanny’s lot, Sir Thomas tells her; he even excuses Mrs. Norris’ treatment of Fanny as “misplaced distinction” between Fanny and his own children, but meant with best intentions to educate her in preparation for her relatively modest future. Sir Thomas asks Fanny to remember this context for Mrs. Norris’ actions and not to hold any grudges in later years. But Austen makes it clear that Sir Thomas is wrong here, for Mrs. Norris always has acted badly toward Fanny, and in this situation of Mr. Crawford’s proposal she does again: “Angry she was, bitterly angry; but she was more angry with Fanny for having received such an offer, than for refusing it. . . . [Mrs. Norris] disliked Fanny, because she had neglected her; and she would have grudged such an elevation to one whom she had been always trying to depress” (225). Sir Thomas’ judgment fails entirely in the matter of the proposal, for he is so taken by Crawford’s status that he entirely misses the character deficits of the man. He is not the only one who takes the measure of the situation wrongly; even the almost irreproachable Edmund sees the match as very desirable: “He was, in fact, entirely on his father’s side of the question” (227). Fanny has no such blindness, but her own good sense is seen as a prideful stubbornness by the rest of the family, and she is packed off to her parents in an attempt to bring her to her senses. The contrast in circumstances between the Mansfield Park where Fanny has grown up and the family house, Sir Thomas reasons, will make her understand the value of Crawford’s proposal.



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Mansfield Park “If tenderness could ever be supposed wanting, good sense and good breeding supplied its place” The upper-class Hannah More and her sisters took on the burden of educating the poor in the area of Cheddar by setting up Sunday schools, which were intended to bring Christianity to the natives. More was horrified by the state of the poor: they were dirty, ignorant, and, of course, almost without religion. In fact, she writes to a friend that she has found the poor in these neighborhoods to be “more vicious and ignorant than I could have conceived possible in a country which calls itself Christian.”1 To another friend she writes that “the land is almost pagan. . . . But how we shall be able to keep up these things [the educational program] with so much opposition, vice, poverty, and ignorance, as we have to deal with, I cannot guess” (ll, 213). In the Mendip Annals, Patty More’s diary of the educational project undertaken by Hannah and her sisters in these poor areas of England, a vignette, illustrates the wonderful progress they have been able to make in civilizing these people and the means used to bring about the changes. There is a tea-party, preceded by a visit to church. More and a group of her friends meet, as planned, with a group of their Cheddar clients. They set off for church, the ladies in white, and many of the savages in white also; the whole preceded by the Sunday-school children. The bells were set a-ringing, the singers assembled, and a band of musicians very gallantly stepped forward, and played ‘God save the King’ before



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us. After service was over, and Mr. Jones had preached a sermon, we returned in the same order. . . . After tea (during which, to do them justice, they all behaved incomparably, and I believe this day’s associating with their betters, as it is called, has brought them forward at least ten years in civilization), we read them a little exhortation, explaining to them the contrast between their situations and blessings now, and what they were two years before. They have so little common sense, and so little sensibility, that we are obliged to beat into their heads continually the good we are doing them; and endeavouring to press upon them, with all our might, the advantages they derive from us. It is really true, and oftentimes it is with difficulty that we can keep from downright laughing” (italics mine).2

The horror of low-class living that More evinces is typical of upper-class reaction to life on the lower levels. Life among the very poor is dirty, coarse, and unchristian. Austen’s vision, given her class and conservative stance, not surprisingly is precisely articulated in More’s observations. When Fanny goes “home” she is horrified by her family and their circumstances. Fanny’s family of course is many levels above the bottom-level poor to whom More is ministering, but Fanny’s family also is many levels below the opulence of Mansfield Park, and they are low enough down so that all the graciousness of life that Austen so much prizes is missing from their existence. Fanny does not want to be critical of them, but she cannot help herself; Austen makes it clear that life in such circumstances is simply awful. It literally is enough to make Fanny ill. The social commentary in this section of Mansfield Park is remarkable in a number of ways, but most significantly in its depiction of the dreadfulness that Austen perceives in lowerclass life. This is the only time in Austen’s novels that she actually shows, rather than hints at, the difference between a civilized upper-class existence and the scrambling, inevitable coarseness of the financially deprived. In other novels Austen talks about what can happen to a person, generally a woman, who is not properly provided for; in Emma, for example, both Emma’s former governess and Miss Fairfax are threatened with such a fate, but in both



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cases the women never actually are subjected to this change in station. And the Misses Bates, although not well off, do not fall from gentility. But here in Mansfield Park Austen actually shows us life below, and it is depressing and dehumanizing. There is an illuminating moment when Fanny finally consciously realizes that “home” is not this horrid place with her parents but is Mansfield Park. Sir Thomas quite deliberately sends Fanny to Portsmouth: “It was a medicinal project upon his niece’s understanding, which he must consider as at present diseased.”3 Fanny, he thinks, simply has been too long at Mansfield Park to be able to realize that all of life is not like the one she is living there. “A residence of eight or nine years in the abode of wealth and plenty had a little disordered her powers of comparing and judging. Her Father’s house would, in all probability, teach her the value of a good income; and he trusted that she would be the wiser and happier woman, all her life, for the experiment he had devised.” Fanny is delighted to be “returning for a couple of months to the scenes of her infancy.” William happens to be visiting at Mansfield Park at this time, and so she will have the pleasure of his company home and until he must sail. And further, Fanny is looking forward to being with her warm mother. The description here is a bit of wonderful psychology: Fanny’s mother had never been warm to her before, but Fanny, as all abused children would, assumes that somehow this must have been her own fault. Fanny wrote to offer herself; and her mother’s answer, though short, was so kind, a few simple lines expressed so natural and motherly a joy in the prospect of seeing her child again, as to confirm all the daughter’s views of happiness in being with her— convincing her that she should now find a warm and affectionate friend in the ‘Mamma’ who had certainly shewn no remarkable fondness for her formerly; but this she could easily suppose to have been her own fault, or her own fancy. She had probably alienated Love by the helplessness and fretfulness of a fearful temper, or been unreasonable in wanting a larger share than any one among so many could deserve. . . . Now would be leisure and inclination for every comfort.” (251–52)



Mansfield Park

Reading Jane Austen

When she arrives at the house in Portsmouth she feels that “would they but love her, she should be satisfied” (256). Her mother greets her “with looks of true kindness,” but is immediately distracted by William, who reproves her “Come, mother, you have hardly looked at your own dear Fanny yet” (257). So Fanny gets another kiss from her mother and an offer of tea. When Mr. Price comes in, he ignores Fanny entirely. Fanny finds herself “undistinguished in the dusk, and unthought of. With a friendly shake of his son’s hand, and an eager voice,” Mr. Price welcomes William at length, telling him that his ship has sailed, that he has been missed, and where the ship is. Again, William must call the attention of the parent to Fanny: “But here is my sister, Sir, here is Fanny.” With this prompt, Mr. Price acknowledges “that he had quite forgot her . . . and, having given her a cordial hug, and observed that she was grown into a woman, and he supposed would be wanting a husband soon, seemed very much inclined to forget her again. Fanny shrunk back to her seat, with feelings sadly pained by his language and his smell of spirits; and he talked on only to his son.” The emotional climate is disappointing and the physical surroundings equally bad. When Fanny first walks into the house, she is “taken into a parlour, so small that her first conviction was of its being only a passage-room to something better, and she stood for a moment expecting to be invited on” (256). The house is small, but that is not the worst part; the truly painful aspect of her home is the commonness of its inhabitants. The noise level is so high that Fanny feels ill. But though she has seen all the members of the family, she has not yet heard all the noise they could make. . . . William was soon calling out from the landing-place of the second story. . . . Mrs. Price, Rebecca, and Betsey, all went up to defend themselves, all talking together, but Rebecca loudest . . . the whole of which, as almost every door in the house was open, could be plainly distinguished in the parlour, except when drowned at intervals by the superior noise of Sam, Tom, and Charles chasing each other up and down stairs, and tumbling about and hallooing. . . . Fanny was almost stunned. The smallness of the house, and thinness of the walls, brought every thing so close to her, that . . . she hardly knew how to bear it. (259) 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Her father sits reading the newspaper, with the sole candle between himself and the paper—disregarding Fanny’s convenience entirely. But Fanny in any case “was glad to have the light screened from her aching head, as she sat in bewildered, broken, sorrowful contemplation” (260). Fanny is home, but it has been a disappointing homecoming. It was not such a home, she had not such a welcome, as—she checked herself; she was unreasonable. What right had she to be of importance to her family? She could have none, so long lost sight of. . . . Yet to have so little said or asked about herself—to have scarcely an enquiry made after Mansfield! . . . She only was to blame. Yet she thought it would not have been so at Mansfield. No, in her uncle’s house there would have been a consideration of times and seasons, a regulation of subject, a propriety, an attention towards every body which there was not here.

We should note Fanny’s habitual way of taking on herself the blame for others’ deficient behavior—she has been well and truly emotionally abused. But even within this context, she is quite aware that there exists a propriety at Mansfield that is absent in her parents’ home. The tea things finally arrive; the meal seems to consist entirely of buttered toast. When an unexpected guest turns up—William’s friend Mr. Campbell, the surgeon of William’s ship—he is found a chair, “with some contrivance” (261), but in order to give him tea there must be “some hasty washing” of a cup and saucer. There are not even enough cups to go around! When he leaves, William goes with him, and Mr. Price “walked off at the same time to carry back his neighbour’s newspaper.” The Price family cannot afford its own newspaper. Fanny sits remembering her sister Mary, who died during the time Fanny was at Mansfield Park. But all Mary seems to mean to anyone else in the room is someone who had left her legacy of a pretty knife to one sister and not to the other, and while Fanny’s mother tries to make some sort of peace between the girls, “Fanny was quite shocked. Every feeling of duty, honour, and tenderness was wounded by her sister’s speech and her mother’s reply” (262). 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Finally, Fanny is “thankful to accept the first invitation of going to bed.” It is a poor bed that she finds. “There was nothing to raise her spirits in the confined and scantily-furnished chamber that she was to share with [her sister] Susan. The smallness of the rooms above and below indeed, and the narrowness of the passage and staircase, struck her beyond her imagination. She soon learnt to think with respect of her own little attic at Mansfield Park, in that house reckoned too small for anybody’s comfort.” Austen comments that if Sir Thomas had seen Fanny at the Prices’, he would have been most “delighted with his own sagacity” (264). The physical deprivation seems to reflect the emotional barrenness. “It was the abode of noise, disorder, and impropriety. Nobody was in their right place, nothing was done as it ought to be.” But perhaps worse, “She could not respect her parents, as she had hoped.” She had known that her father was not much, but he is even less than she had expected. “On her father, her confidence had not been sanguine, but he was more negligent of his family, his habits were worse, and his manners coarser, than she had been prepared for.” He is morally and physically foul. Notice in Austen’s description of Fanny’s father the echoes of Hannah More’s disgust as More talked about the poor: “He swore and he drank, he was dirty and gross.” And emotionally, Fanny finds a complete blank: “She had never been able to recal anything approaching to tenderness in his former treatment of herself. There had remained only a general impression of roughness and loudness; and now he scarcely ever noticed her, but to make her the object of a coarse joke.” But her mother is the worse disappointment, for “there she had hoped much, and found almost nothing.” Fanny simply is not important to her mother. “Every flattering scheme of being of consequence to her soon fell to the ground.” Instead of the bond growing warmer, it turns out that the very modest show of interest on the first day was the highpoint of their relationship. “The instinct of nature was soon satisfied, and Mrs. Price’s attachment had no other source. . . . [S]he had neither leisure nor affection to bestow on Fanny. Her daughters never had been much to her. She was fond of her sons, especially of William, but Betsey was the first of her girls whom she had ever much regarded. . . . William 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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was her pride; Betsey her darling; and John, Richard, Sam, Tom, and Charles, occupied all the rest of her maternal solicitude. . . . These shared her heart; her time was given chiefly to her house and her servants” (264–65). This is a devastating portrait, most of all for what it says about Fanny’s emotional background. We can understand now why Fanny is so retiring, so shy, and so unsure of herself. She never had the kind of parental love that any child needs, although Austen tells us that Fanny, like almost all children starved of their parents’ affection, still had hopes of finding things somehow different. We understand now why Fanny always feels that whatever lacks appear in others, it is her fault for perceiving them that way. But as an adult encountering these parents, especially her mother, she is forced to see the truth. Fanny must notice not only her mother’s emotional failings toward her, but Mrs. Price’s failings as a matriarch as well. Fanny “might scruple to make use of the words, but she must and did feel that her mother was a partial, ill-judging parent, a dawdle, a slattern, who neither taught nor restrained her children, whose house was the scene of mismanagement and discomfort from beginning to end, and who had no talent, no conversation, no affection towards herself; no curiosity to know her better, no desire of her friendship, and no inclination for her company that could lessen her sense of such feelings.” The portrait of Mrs. Price is even more devastating than that of her husband. Austen explicitly contrasts Fanny’s Portsmouth home with Mansfield Park, where we also have seen a rather marked lack of emotional warmth. Austen has commented repeatedly about Sir Thomas’ seeming coldness to Fanny, especially in the years before he left for Antigua. Lady Bertram sits dreaming on the couch, and Mrs. Norris always has been indifferent, if not hostile, to Fanny. The only sources of emotional warmth were, in more or lesser degree, the two male cousins, Tom and, especially, Edmund. So Mansfield Park provides only limited support for an emotionally deprived child. And yet Mansfield Park in comparison with Portsmouth is heaven to Fanny. Austen is explicit on the difference, and her remark is absolutely central to an understanding not just of this novel but of all her writing. “If tenderness could ever be supposed wanting [at Mansfield], good sense and good breeding 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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The living in incessant noise was to a frame and temper, delicate and nervous like Fanny’s, an evil which no super-added elegance or harmony could have entirely atoned for. It was the greatest misery of all. At Mansfield, no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; every body had their due importance; every body’s feelings were consulted. . . . Here, every body was noisy, every voice was loud. . . . In a review of the two houses, as they appeared to her before the end of a week, Fanny was tempted to apply to them Dr. Johnson’s celebrated judgment as to matrimony and celibacy, and say, that though Mansfield Park might have some pains, Portsmouth could have no pleasures. (266-67)

The entire society in Portsmouth Fanny finds “under-bred.” She is tormented by “the evils of home.” Those evils are exacerbated when Mr. Crawford visits Portsmouth, for although Fanny does not want to marry him, she still feels humiliated at having to meet him in such circumstances. He introduces himself to the family as a friend of William, so no one else except Fanny is embarrassed by his real motive for the visit. Luckily Fanny’s father is out when Mr. Crawford comes to call, and Fanny is thankful for at least this favor, “for to her many other sources of uneasiness was added the severe one of shame for the home in which he found her. She might scold herself for the weakness, but there was no scolding it away. She was ashamed, and she would have been yet more ashamed of her father, than of all the rest” (272). This reaction is not weakness or snobbery in Fanny; Austen makes no suggestion that Fanny is acting unreasonably. And when the young people decide to go out for a walk and unluckily meet her father, “It was soon pain upon pain, confusion upon confusion; for they were hardly in the High Street, before they met her father, whose appearance was not the better from its being Saturday. Ungentlemanlike as he looked, Fanny was obliged to introduce him to Mr. Crawford.” Fanny is sure 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


supplied its place” (266). In the world Austen creates, harmony and good manners are as important as, if indeed not more important than, emotional fulfillment. She is explicit about this:

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that Mr. Crawford must be so disgusted that he will give her up, and while this is precisely the outcome she has been hoping for, it is certainly not the way she wanted to achieve it. But the catastrophe Fanny fears does not come about. Mr. Price, responding to Mr. Crawford’s manners, is himself improved. This is an important point. Manners are important because they are universally civilizing. We recognize the sentiment: it is the same perspective that More brought to her discussion of the tea-party for her “clients,” and it is a mainstay of Austen’s class. Fanny notes that “her father was a very different man, a very different Mr. Price in his behaviour to this most highly-respected stranger, from what he was in his own family at home. His manners now, though not polished, were more than passable; they were grateful, animated, manly; his expressions were those of an attached father, and a sensible man” (273). Good manners produce good manners. And good manners can smooth over social discomforts in many ways. Mr. Crawford is far too careful of Fanny’s feelings to accept an invitation to dinner at the Price house; each time such an invitation is tendered, he makes an excuse, thus saving Fanny immeasurable perturbation. “To have had him join their family dinner-party and see all their deficiencies would have been dreadful. Rebecca’s cookery and Rebecca’s waiting, and Betsey’s eating at table without restraint, and pulling every thing about as she chose, were what Fanny herself was not yet enough inured to, for her often to make a tolerable meal. She was nice only from natural delicacy, but he had been brought up in a school of luxury and epicurism” (277). This is a proper response from Fanny. Austen finds nothing sympathetic in the disorderliness of the Price household—everything in the novel insists that the civility of Mansfield Park is at the center of the civilized life that its denizens enjoy. Austen does not suggest that a better-run Price household would be a poorer but sufficient replacement for the luxuries of Mansfield Park. The assumption, on the contrary, is that the relative poverty of the Price residence sets up the conditions for the anarchy of its lifestyle. Repeatedly Austen comments that Mrs. Price is very much like her sister Lady Bertram; were she situated as her rich sister is, she too could while away her hours on the couch while the household functioned smoothly about her. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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It is the financial situation that causes her life to be so unpleasant. When Sunday finds the family “in their cleanest skins and best attire, . . . [Mrs. Price] did not look so very unworthy of being Lady Bertram’s sister as she was apt to look. . . . [W]here nature had made so little difference, circumstances [had] made so much.” The contrast with the inhabitants of Mansfield Park is not subtle: one never would need to comment on the cleanliness of the skin at Mansfield. The appropriateness of upper-class behavior is a constant theme here. Henry Crawford, although we later find his actions unforgivable when he allows Maria to run off with him, nonetheless in terms of his duties as a landowner seems to be suitably upstanding. In fact, as with Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, Crawford is seen to greatest advantage in terms of his relations with his tenants. Crawford lets Fanny know that he has been conducting estate business recently, and a bit later, that he shall have to return to that business. This work is seen by Fanny as entirely virtuous and admirable. For her approbation, the particular reason of his going into Norfolk at all, at this unusual time of year, was given. It had been real business, relative to the renewal of a lease in which the welfare of a large and (he believed) industrious family was at stake. He had suspected his agent of some underhand dealing—of meaning to bias him against the deserving—and he had determined to go himself, and thoroughly investigate the merits of the case. He had gone, had done even more good than he had foreseen, had been useful to more than his first plan had comprehended, and was now able to congratulate himself upon it, and to feel, that in performing a duty, he had secured agreeable recollections for his own mind. He had introduced himself to some tenants, whom he had never seen before; he had begun making acquaintance with cottages whose very existence, though on his own estate, had been hitherto unknown to him. . . . To be the friend of the poor and oppressed! Nothing could be more grateful to her. (275)

This is precisely the proper role of the landlord. It is his duty to pay attention to what takes place in his domain, and it is his duty to safeguard the welfare of those who depend upon 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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his good will. One does not want to be among the poor and oppressed—for oneself, one does not even want to fall below the level of a very comfortable income—but the responsible upperclass person has a definite duty to watch over the poor and to help them, as long as they are deserving. This is a theme that is common among Austen’s contemporaries. Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts make this point repeatedly. So do the many treatises on education, which discuss in various contexts the treatment of those over whom the upper-class person will have power, and the economic tracts, such as Joseph Townsend’s A Dissertation on the Poor Laws.4 In terms of social history, it as important to note the emphasis here on the deserving nature of the tenants—were they not good, hard-working people they would have no right to help—as it is to observe the emphasis on the duty of the landowner. Crawford is half-disposed to go into Norfolk again. “I will be master of my own property” (280), he tells Fanny. If an overseer is not carefully monitored, not only can those below him be harmed; his employer is harmed by inappropriate conduct as well. “The mischief such a man does on an estate, both as to the credit of his employer, and the welfare of the poor, is inconceivable.” Crawford, as a landlord, is fully cognizant of his responsibilities, and he is willing to act upon them—especially since he knows that such actions will earn him esteem from Fanny. He also wants to help Fanny, for he sees that she is not doing well in Portsmouth. Her time there, in fact, is making her ill. Crawford notes that she is pale and that she seems physically weak. Fanny cannot have her accustomed exercise in Portsmouth. Crawford, concerned about Fanny’s health, tells her sister Susan that he finds “the confinement of Portsmouth unfavourable” (279). Fanny “ought never to be long banished from the free air, and liberty of the country.” For Austen the country represents everything good: it is clean, it is wholesome, and it is, somehow, more refined than the city. It is no accident that Austen chooses to put her contrasting family, the Prices, in the city, while the ideal, Mansfield Park, of course is the country. Fanny is seriously deprived in Portsmouth, not only of exercise, but even of food. When Crawford says his goodbyes and goes off 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Their general fare bore a very different character; and could he have suspected how many privations, besides that of exercise, she endured in her father’s house, he would have wondered that her looks were not much more affected than he found them. She was so little equal to Rebecca’s puddings, and Rebecca’s hashes, brought to table as they all were, with such accompaniments of half-cleaned plates, and not half-cleaned knives and forks, that she was very often constrained to defer her heartiest meal, till she could send her brothers in the evening for biscuits and buns. After being nursed up at Mansfield, it was too late in the day to be hardened at Portsmouth; and Sir Thomas, had he known all, might have thought his niece in the most promising way of being starved, both mind and body, into a much juster value for Mr. Crawford’s good company and good fortune, he would probably have feared to push his experiment farther, lest she might die under the cure. (280–81).

Austen is not being ironic. Fanny really is not doing well either physically or mentally here. It is not just that the food is coarse, or ill served. But it is dirty. The plates are dirty; the knives and forks are dirty. We have seen the various hints about the lack of personal hygiene of the family. This is the same horror of the uncivilized lower class that we saw in the quotation at the head of this chapter. Only Susan, of all the family, can be exempted from the disappointment that is Fanny’s family; only Susan “had an innate taste for the genteel and well-appointed. . . . Poor Susan was very little better fitted for home than her elder sister” (284), and Fanny becomes conscious that when she returns to Mansfield Park, she will be very sorry to leave Susan behind. “That a girl so capable of being made, every thing good, should be left in such hands, distressed her more and more.” Fanny on this account regrets that she cannot accept Mr. Crawford, for if she could, she could take Susan from these very unfit surroundings. After three months at Portsmouth, Fanny feels that her days have been “passing in a state of penance” (292). She had thought of Portsmouth as home when she was at Mansfield Park, and the word “home”



to “the best dinner that a capital inn afforded” (280), Fanny has dinner at the Price house.

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had been very dear to her; “it still was, but it must be applied to Mansfield. That was now the home. Portsmouth was Portsmouth; Mansfield was home.” When Tom falls ill, and the family at Mansfield Park needs Fanny, she regrets Tom’s illness, of course, but she is delighted that she is needed at “home.” Home calls forth in her mind all that she has been missing in Portsmouth. In a heart-felt paean to the country life, Austen details Fanny’s feelings. The author here is very little hidden behind the character: It was sad to Fanny to lose all the pleasures of spring. She had not known before what pleasures she had to lose in passing March and April in a town. She had not known before, how much the beginnings and progress of vegetation had delighted her.—What animation both of body and mind, she had derived from watching the advance of that season which cannot, in spite of its capriciousness, be unlovely, and seeing its increasing beauties, from the earliest flowers, in the warmest divisions of her aunt’s garden, to the opening of leaves of her uncle’s plantations, and the glory of his woods.—To be losing such pleasures was no trifle; to be losing them, because she was in the midst of closeness and noise, to have confinement, bad air, bad smells, substituted for liberty, freshness, fragrance, and verdure, was infinitely worse. (293)

Fanny wants to go home to the people who need and want her, and she wants to go home to the countryside that supports the life that is ordered, clean, and elegant. Even before she can be escorted back to Mansfield Park, however, some of the order of life there is shattered: Maria has run off after six months of marriage. Fanny’s father finds the news in the newspaper, so the scandal of Maria and Crawford is out in the open for everyone to see. “Fanny seemed to herself never to have been shocked before. . . . [It seemed] scarcely possible for [the Mansfield Park family] to support life and reason under such disgrace” (300). Immediately following on this news comes the report of Julia’s elopement to Scotland with Mr. Yates. Fanny knows that she is much needed at Mansfield Park. Edmund writes that he will call for her the next day. And even in the midst of their pain, the Bertrams act generously: Susan is invited to come



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to stay, much as Fanny had been invited years before. Fanny leaves Portsmouth and her parents’ house in quite the same way she had entered it three months before: “She was dismissed from it as hospitably as she had been welcomed” (302). Fanny is full of joy and gratitude as she leaves the town. Susan is ecstatic. It had been February when Fanny left Mansfield Park; when she arrives there once more, “her eye fell every where on lawns and plantations of the freshest green; and the trees, though not fully clothed, were in that delightful state, when farther beauty is known to be at hand, and when, while much is actually given to the sight, more yet remains for the imagination” (303). Austen’s depiction of Fanny’s homecoming is first of all a return to the nature of the land, a return to a “freshest green.” The long, much detailed interval in the novel that Fanny spends at her parents’ home is central to the book’s meanings. For it is in the contrast between life at the Price house and life at Mansfield Park that Austen aims to make her reader understand just how important to an ordered, decent society is the upper-class life exemplified in the world of Mansfield Park. Austen’s celebration of a decorous life is repeated in novel after novel, but nowhere else, not in Pride and Prejudice and not in Emma, does she set out for the reader an explicit contrast in life styles. Mansfield Park really is as much about life lived in a certain way, with clean skin and clean dishes, with gentle voices and decorous pursuits, as it is about the characters themselves. That is why the episode of the play is so important. It is not immoral that the young people put on a play, that they take apart Sir Thomas’ home without his permission, but it is inappropriate. It does not show respect. The people at Mansfield Park do not overflow with powerful emotions—but that does not much, if at all, take away from the positive force of their lifestyle. Fanny is not washed in emotion at Mansfield Park, but she is bathed in gentility. It is not usually noticed that the Portsmouth episode is really the last in which anything happens. After Fanny comes back to Mansfield Park, there are only eighteen pages of the novel left, and almost all of these are given over to simple exposition, to the tying up of plot ends. Portsmouth is so important to the novel because it shows us an alternate universe where a lack of financial means 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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leads to a breakdown of social order, to a world without decorum. And Mansfield Park is a novel about decorum. In the last pages of the novel, Austen explicitly delineates how and when and where each character acted properly or improperly, thus leading to these final arrangements of happy or infelicitous social organizations. The various prodigals are dealt with in quick succession. Tom, having survived his serious (although unspecified) illness, “was the better for ever for his illness. He had suffered, and he had learnt to think, two advantages that he had never known before” (313). At the age of twenty-six “he became what he ought to be, useful to his father, steady and quiet, and not living merely for himself.” Julia’s elopement, it turns out, was not quite as disastrous as it had seemed at first. She and Mr. Yates, having married, truly wish to be returned to the family. “She was humble and wishing to be forgiven, and Mr. Yates, desirous of being really received into the family, was disposed to look up to [Sir Thomas] and be guided. . . . [A]t any rate, there was comfort in finding his estate rather more, and his debts much less,” than had been feared. Julia’s situation presents the only real loss, as her actions preclude her reinstatement into decent society. Thinking of her truly disturbs Sir Thomas, for he feels bitterly that the mistakes of his daughters, especially Julia’s, are a result of his failures in educating them: “The conviction of his own errors in the education of his daughters, was never to be entirely done away” (314). Such a comment in an early novel must lead to explorations that would not be out of place in a conduct book, and Austen does not disappoint her reader: Too late he became aware how unfavourable to the character of any young people, must be the totally opposite treatment which Maria and Julia had been always experiencing at home, where the excessive indulgence and flattery of their aunt had been continually contrasted with his own severity. He saw how ill he had judged, in expecting to counteract what was wrong in Mrs. Norris, by its reverse in himself. . . . Here had been grievous mismanagement; but, bad as it was, he gradually grew to feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his plan of education. Something must have been wanting



Mansfield Park

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within. . . . He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting, that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers, by that sense of duty which can alone suffice. They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments . . . could have had no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition. (314)

To this defective education had been added his own lack of judgment, in the case of Maria, in allowing her to marry just because he was a rich man she despised. Sir Thomas, in hindsight, realizes how much of Maria’s fatal misjudgment had been the result of his own misperception of his responsibility as a mentor. His daughters needed active guidance and serious models in religion; without these, they grew up with all the accomplishments favored in polite society but without a moral core. Austen presents these flaws as irreparable, especially in the case of Maria. Only exile from the decent society of Mansfield Park is possible for her; Sir Thomas even says that he would not, by bringing her back to her home, inflict her on the families in the neighborhood. As a fortunate by-product of her exile, he also is freed from the presence of Mrs. Norris. He had thought Mrs. Norris a lifetime burden; when she chooses to leave the environs of Mansfield Park to form a household with Maria, her leaving “was the great supplementary comfort of Sir Thomas’s life” (315). Mrs. Norris “was regretted by no one at Mansfield” (316). As for Maria herself, she clearly deserves her disgrace. Everything “was the result of her imprudence” (317), and so we are to waste no sympathy on her. As for Mary Crawford, she has no trouble putting Edmund out of her mind. Part of his attraction had been the fact that his brother was seriously ill, and that Edmund might yet be the heir to Mansfield Park. She is now “perfectly resolved against ever attaching herself to a younger brother again” (318); with her own 20,000 pounds, she can afford to wait for “an idle heir apparent,” although it might take her awhile to find someone who “could satisfy the better taste she had acquired at Mansfield.” 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Obviously in terms of the plot of the novel, getting Edmund and Fanny together is the most important order of business, and Austen attends to this right after she brings Fanny back to Mansfield. It is Edmund’s comprehension of his own feelings that needed to become clearer. Before he could commit himself to Fanny, he needed to understand the failings of Miss Crawford. In a long talk with Fanny he explains the evolution of his final vision of Miss Crawford’s delinquencies. Miss Crawford, he tells Fanny, showed no horror at the actions of her brother and Maria. She saw the desertion of a husband and the illicit relationship of the two lovers as nothing more than “folly” (308); Edmund had been horrified by her reaction. “No reluctance, no horror, no feminine—shall I say? no modest loathings!—This is what the world does. For where, Fanny, shall we find a woman whom nature had so richly endowed?—Spoilt, spoilt. . . . She saw it only as folly, and that folly stamped only by exposure. . . . [I]t was the detection in short—Oh! Fanny, it was the detection, not the offence which she reprobated” (308–9). So much for Miss Crawford: “The charm is broken. My eyes are opened.” And once Edmund sees that Miss Crawford’s character is irreparably flawed, he is ready to slip from the brotherly love he has felt for Fanny to something else. “Fanny’s friendship was all he had to cling to,” Austen tells us archly; within a few pages, Edmund has realized that Fanny means more to him than mere friendship. “Loving, guiding, protecting her, as he had been doing ever since her being ten years old, her mind in so great a degree formed by his care, and her comfort depending on his kindness, an object to him of such close and peculiar interest, dearer by all his own importance with her than any one else at Mansfield, what was there now to add, but that he should learn to prefer soft light eyes to sparkling dark ones” (319). Everything about Fanny, especially her moral and intellectual disposition, is perfect. “She was of course only too good for him; but as nobody minds having what is too good for them,” nothing stands in the way of the happiness of Edmund with Fanny. Sir Thomas, when he brought Fanny to Mansfield Park, had feared that one of his sons might be attracted to this girl with no fortune; now he knows better. He is delighted with Edmund’s 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Sick of ambitious and mercenary connections, prizing more and more the sterling good of principle and temper, and chiefly anxious to bind by the strongest securities all that remained to him of domestic felicity, he had pondered with genuine satisfaction on the more than possibility of the two young friends finding their mutual consolation in each other for all that had occurred of disappointment to either; and the joyful consent which met Edmund’s application, the high sense of having realised a great acquisition in the promise of Fanny for a daughter, formed . . . a contrast with his early opinion on the subject. (320)

In fact, “Fanny was indeed the daughter that he wanted.” Austen does not forget the apparent coldness of Sir Thomas to the child Fanny, but his relationship with the adult Fanny shall have nothing of restraint in it. “He might have made her childhood happier; but it had been an error of judgment only which had given him the appearance of harshness, and deprived him of her early love; and now, on really knowing each other, their mutual attachment became very strong.” She settles with Edmund not too far from Mansfield Park, at Thornton Lacey, and for Sir Thomas “the object of almost every day was to see her there, or to get her away from it.” Austen in these last pages details the relationship between Fanny and Sir Thomas in almost as much detail as that between Fanny and Edmund, for to Austen the relationship of the individual to the larger family and community circle is almost as important as that between the man and wife. The novel ends with a summary of the new family as it closes into a tight, humanly and professionally successful circle. Sister Susan is woven seamlessly into the life of Mansfield Park, becoming “the stationary niece— delighted to be so! . . . Susan could never be spared. First as a comfort to Fanny, then as an auxiliary, and last as her substitute, she was established at Mansfield, with every appearance of equal permanency” (321). The texture of the family, then, continues unchanged, even as Fanny moves on to become Edmund’s wife.



choice: he appreciates Fanny’s value, and he also realizes that money is not so important.

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William, too, brings pleasure and respect to the family “in continued good conduct, and rising fame.” Everything is in place, with warm and supportive relationships providing a net of interleaving social relationships that are mutually enhancing. In addition to Susan and William, “in the general well-doing and success of the other members of the family, all assisting to advance each other, and doing credit to his countenance and aid, Sir Thomas saw repeated, and for ever repeated reason to rejoice in what he had done for them all.” Love is not enough; it must be supported by a social network and adequate financial means to support a comfortable though not necessarily opulent lifestyle. It is in emphasizing these relationships among decency, “friends”—by which Austen means the extended family and its contacts5—and financial ease, that Austen chooses to end her book: “With so much true merit and true love, and no want of fortune or friends, the happiness of the married cousins must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be.—Equally formed for domestic life, and attached to country pleasures, their home was the home of affection and comfort.” And if that was not quite perfect enough, the living of Mansfield becomes vacant on the death of Dr. Grant, “just after [Fanny and Edmund] had been married long enough to begin to want an increase of income, and feel their distance from the paternal abode an inconvenience.” And so, in the last paragraph of the novel, Fanny and Edmund move back to Mansfield Park, bringing the circle joyfully tighter.



Mansfield Park




Social Grids



PART II




Pride and Prejudice “She had never . . . seen any thing that betrayed him to be unprincipled or unjust— any thing that spoke him of irreligious or immoral habits” The moral base of family and social circles is just as important in Austen’s other three major novels, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion, as in Mansfield Park. As Mansfield Park ends with the drawing together of the Bertram family, Pride and Prejudice closes with the joyous friendship of Elizabeth and Darcy with Elizabeth’s cousins, the Gardiners. The aristocratic Darcy’s warm acceptance of the Gardiners is a significant marker in his characterization. Pride and Prejudice is a courtship novel, but oddly enough the novel focuses at least as much on family relationships as it does on romantic ones. Certainly the relationship between Elizabeth and Jane is fleshed out far more fully than that between any pair of lovers in the book. Every important player in the courtship game is enmeshed in a set of family relationships. Most significantly, a remarkable amount of the talk between and about lovers concerns moral issues—particularly this is true between Darcy and Elizabeth. We see these issues throughout the novel as Elizabeth considers Darcy’s behavior in trying to keep her sister and Bingley apart, as he deals with Wickham, and, perhaps most notably, in the “romantic” scene in which the lovers come to their understanding, a scene which essentially is a discussion of various outstanding moral issues and misunderstandings. Bingley, as many critics have pointed out, becomes truly a responsible member of 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


CHAPTER 4

Reading Jane Austen

his society when he decides to buy an estate, thus attaching himself definitively into society.1 One’s relation to society has to do not just with property but with all forms of wealth, both in terms of having wealth and of course with how it is used. It is a maxim of upper-class morality in Austen’s time that the proper applications of wealth are part of the moral integrity of the wealthy person. Wealth is bound up with class, and all of Austen’s major novels deal with the very real problem of economic situations or misfortunes that threaten to push people out of the comfortable upper classes into or beyond the fringes of polite society. There also are people, like Harriet in Emma, who should not be in polite society and who, rightfully, by the end of the novel are returned to the lower-class level where their family background should place them. Austen juxtaposes wealth and family right at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice. So brilliant is that first line, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,”2 that we might forget its immediate context, a conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. The first characters we meet in the novel are not any of the several pairs of lovers but the parents of the girls, and while their conversation is about the arrival of the young bachelor Bingley, Austen stops to describe the parents’ characters and the dynamics of their relationship. “Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news” (4). Thus before we come to know any of the girls, we have seen that Mrs. Bennet is a woman of “mean understanding” who reacts illogically and rather neurotically when she does not get her own way. Her husband clearly does not respect her and in fact finds amusement in making sport of her; most of the time, since she is not very quick, she does not even realize that she is playing the fool. It is an amusing picture certainly, but disturbing because of the shadow of meanness 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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implicit in a man regarding his wife with such disrespect—even if the woman is as foolish as Mrs. Bennet. All the important characters in Pride and Prejudice very soon after we meet them are set at the intersection of two axes, social position and moral measure. The first of these does not often change, but perceptions of placement along the second axis in Pride and Prejudice mark much of the novel’s action, most obviously with Darcy and Wickham. The first time we have a meaningful discussion between Jane and Elizabeth, very early in the book, Austen gives us a character sketch of Jane that remains the review of record for the whole novel. Jane is much flattered by Bingley’s “asking me to dance a second time” (10) at their first ball together. “I did not expect such a compliment,” she tells Elizabeth. Elizabeth insists that Bingley’s attentions were only natural since Jane is so pretty, and then she adds, “you are a great deal too apt you know, to like people in general. You never see a fault in any body. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in my life.” And indeed, as the novel goes on, Jane always is prepared to see the good in everyone, to put the best possible interpretation on anyone’s behavior. This is not because she is naïve or lacks understanding; rather, her outlook naturally tends “to take the good of every body’s character” (11). Elizabeth, “with more quickness of observation and less pliancy of temper than her sister” is not ready to see everyone in so positive a light as Jane, and so, for example, she is much less ready to embrace Bingley’s sisters, focusing much more than Jane does on the unpleasantness in their personalities. Jane’s good-heartedness is contrasted almost immediately with the self-involvement of the Bingley sisters, who live only to please themselves, and do even that badly. They are “proud and conceited,” and although they have a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, “were in the habit of spending more than they ought.” One infamous way the rich manage to spend more than they should, by Austen’s time long commented on by moralists, is to not pay their bills so that it is their tailors and their servants who suffer. By spending so liberally, ladies and gentlemen can live above their incomes and “associate with people of rank.” Austen makes a point of noting that the Bingley sisters indeed consider that they 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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were “in every respect entitled to think well of themselves, and meanly of others,” especially since they manage to ignore the fact that “their brother’s fortune and their own had been acquired by trade.” Austen has it both ways here, for while making fun of the Bingley sisters’ snobbery, Austen herself points to the difference between old money and new. It does not detract from Darcy’s charm that everything about him is truly aristocratic, including, of course, the origins of his fortune. But for Austen true aristocracy inextricably is tied to social responsibility, and that is why Elizabeth’s famous interview with Darcy’s old servant is so pivotal in her view of Darcy himself. For almost the entire novel Bingley is happy to rent an estate rather than to buy one. It is only at the end of the novel, when he indeed does buy, that he takes on the entire set of responsibilities that a man of his wealth should have if he is to be a full member of his society. So important is this distinction that discussion of Bingley’s position with regard to property—even his father’s position—is itself Austen’s essential first description of the man. Mr. Bingley inherited property to the amount of nearly an hundred thousand pounds from his father, who had intended to purchase an estate, but did not live to do it.—Mr. Bingley intended it likewise, and sometimes made choice of his county; but as he was now provided with a good house and the liberty of a manor, it was doubtful to many of those who best knew the easiness of his temper, whether he might not spend the remainder of his days at Netherfield, and leave the next generation to purchase.

Austen’s introduction to Bingley and his sisters, as it goes on, continues to be an analysis of their social position as defined by property. This seems not at all remarkable in context, until we remember that most introductory descriptions of characters tell the reader what they look like, or what they favor, or what they dream of. But perhaps Austen’s description here is not so odd, for she does tell us the wish for the future of Bingley’s married sister Mrs. Hurst, and that wish has to do with social placement. It seems that the “sisters were very anxious for [Bingley] having 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Mr. Bennet’s property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters, was entailed in default of heirs male, on a distant relation; and their mother’s fortune, though ample for her situation in life, could but ill supply the deficiency of his. Her father had been an attorney in Meryton, and had left her four thousand pounds. (19)

The entail is at the center of the plot, for should Mr. Bennet die, the estate will pass out of the family, and the only support for the four daughters and Mrs. Bennet will be the totally inadequate interest on her inheritance of four thousand pounds. We should note too that Mrs. Bennet’s father had been an attorney— a respectable but certainly not an aristocratic source. Austen refers to the attorney’s work as a “business” (20); Mrs. Bennet’s brotherin-law had been her father’s clerk and had succeeded him. Mrs. Bennet’s brother, whom we later meet, is Mr. Gardiner, and he is “settled in London in a respectable line of trade.” Mrs. Bennet’s family, then, is perfectly decent, but has none of the cachet of the aristocratic class. Austen does not disparage those who make their livings in such ways, but, as we see at the end of the book, the attractiveness of Darcy is enhanced by his aristocratic lineage combined with a fine moral stance. On the other side, a family with comparatively little money but, even worse, an obvious lack of breeding and intelligence, rather obviously is not attractive. When Miss Bingley notices Darcy appreciating Elizabeth’s charms—and he admits to “the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow” (19)—she wishes him joy, and teases that “You will have a charming motherin-law, indeed, and of course she will be always at Pemberly with you.” Nasty the remark may be, but not inaccurate. Some days later Jane is invited to dine with the Bingleys, and Mrs. Bennet refuses her the coach in the hope that it will rain and Jane will be forced to stay over at Bingley’s house. It indeed does 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


an estate of his own.” And either of them will be quite happy to preside over his table, owner or renter. The analysis of the Bennet family’s financial state also is set out in the early pages of the novel.

Reading Jane Austen

rain, Jane catches cold, and Elizabeth the next day walks across the wet fields to see her. While the sisters are upstairs in Jane’s room, they are being discussed below in much the same terms as Miss Bingley’s remark to Darcy at the ball. This time it is Bingley’s other sister, Mrs. Hurst, who begins “I have an excessive regard for Jane Bennet, she is really a very sweet girl, and I wish with all my heart she were well settled. But with such a father and mother, and such low connections, I am afraid there is no chance of it.” “I think I have heard you say, that their uncle is an attorney in Meryton.” “Yes; and they have another, who lives somewhere near Cheapside.” (25)

Bingley defends Jane and Elizabeth, “if they had uncles enough to fill all Cheapside . . . it would not make them one jot less agreeable,” but it is Darcy’s comment that is most interesting. “But it must very materially lessen their chance of marrying men of any consideration in the world.” Darcy is being realistic, and Austen means his remark to represent not an unpleasant side of his character but an accurate perspective on social relations. As the ending of the novel shows, it indeed is not impossible that worthy women such as Jane and Elizabeth will marry well, but their family’s lack of any sort of distinction makes their situation more difficult than it would otherwise be. What the sisters both do have to offer in addition to the usual girlish charms is moral excellence, and since this is an eighteenth-/ early nineteenth-century novel, and an Austen one at that, it is this moral level that determines events. In Pride and Prejudice, as in all Austen novels, morality is the cord that holds the plot together. Morality and good breeding are very much connected, as we will see in all of the major moments of the novel. We see this tie even in an offhand remark. When Miss Bingley pretends to be interested in books, lamenting that her own father “left so small a collection of books” (26), she compliments Darcy: “What a delightful library you have at Pemberly.” His answer is worth noting: “It ought to be good . . . it has been the work of many generations.” Darcy 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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considers it his duty to continue to build on what he has been gifted with. “I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these.” Bingley, on the other hand, feels no obligations of this sort: “Whatever I do is done in a hurry . . . and therefore if I should resolve to quit Netherfield, I should probably be off in five minutes” (29). When he decides to leave for London, he just picks up and goes, seemingly with no regret for any ties that might have begun to form at Netherfield. Manners and ethics in Jane Austen’s real world, as well as her fictional one, are tightly bonded. Appropriate behavior is a part of moral behavior. When people like Mr. Bennet do not act honorably or responsibly, they do not uphold social ties, and the same is true for servants in their own sphere. It is central to the novel that everything be properly in place, and this coherence rests on the fundamental good character of each individual as he—or she— interacts with others. All the major romantic crossroads of the novel—Darcy’s proposal to Elizabeth, his letter to her, her visit to Pemberly, and the final reconciliation of the lovers—are discussions of moral issues. The moral and ethical weave of Pride and Prejudice supports the romantic plotline of the novel. The series of complex courtship moves, especially between Darcy and Elizabeth, is based in moral explorations. The two main incidents in their courtship, the letter Darcy slips to Elizabeth during her visit to Charlotte and the moment when the lovers finally come to their understanding, are both explanations of moral issues. And between these two points in the novel, most of the important conversations between Elizabeth and Jane, not to mention Elizabeth’s private musings, have to do with moral issues as well. The delightful aura of calm, of a world well-ordered, comes from the assurance of an unquestioned moral agreement. The moral values in Pride and Prejudice are never in doubt; they present a fixed, immutable system that gives shape and connection to whatever happens in the novel. The sense we have as readers that Austen’s world in Pride and Prejudice is based on a small circle of like-minded, good people is anchored in this moral grid. In this Austen is representative of the contemporary upper-class response to private and public worlds. For Austen the moral code of her society is not something that needs to be thought about, let alone 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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enunciated, because it is so integral to that society. Morality is a matter of decency far more than of religion: religion is the background, but it is a self-understood Anglicanism. (Interestingly, it is in the novels either of Catholic or Dissenting writers such as Elizabeth Inchbald or Robert Bage that religion becomes itself an issue for discussion.) But if religion in Pride and Prejudice is self-understood, decency is a major theme. And now we can come back to the first pairing off in the novel, Charlotte’s marriage to Mr. Collins. Mr. Collins is the man on whom the Bennet estate is entailed. In his pretentious, rather idiotic way he decides that he will make up the loss of the estate to the family by marrying one of the daughters—no one of whom he has met until this first visit to the Bennet household. He fixes first on Jane, the eldest. When he learns that she is not available, he goes down the line to Elizabeth, but much to her mother’s disappointment, she has no interest in him. Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth’s friend, quite premeditatedly encourages Mr. Collins to court her, and since “The stupidity with which he was favoured by nature, must guard his courtship from any charm that could make a woman wish for its continuance” (83), Charlotte, “who accepted him solely from the pure and disinterested desire of an establishment,” marries him with little fuss. Charlotte, in marrying him, was tolerably composed. She had gained her point, and had time to consider of it. Her reflections were in general satisfactory. Mr. Collins to be sure was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her husband.—Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want. This preservative she had now obtained; and at the age of twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good luck of it. (83–84)

Elizabeth sees her own response to Charlotte’s marriage as an ethical dilemma. Elizabeth cannot accept the terms of Charlotte’s bargain; Jane is not so opinionated, and her response to 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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the practical nature of Charlotte’s decision is simply to hope for the best. It is Jane who is right. When Elizabeth visits Charlotte and her husband, she finds not the misery she had feared and expected, but a quite contented woman who has organized her life so that it is as comfortable and pleasant as possible and who seems satisfied with her bargain. Having turned over the sunny parlor to Mr. Collins so that she will see less of him, she spends her time comfortably in the other with no one to bother her. When the engagement between Charlotte and Mr. Collins was announced, Elizabeth had had the “distressing conviction that it was impossible for that friend to be tolerably happy in the lot she had chosen” (86), but she was wrong. After her first day with the Collinses, Elizabeth “had to meditate upon Charlotte’s degree of contentment, to understand her address in guiding, and composure in bearing with her husband, and to acknowledge that it was all done very well” (105). No one is hurt by Charlotte’s compromise in marrying Mr. Collins, and it seems that both mates get from the marriage what they need. The much more egregious case is the Bennet marriage, which indeed has much in it that morally is compromised. “Had Elizabeth’s opinion been all drawn from her own family, she could not have formed a very pleasing picture of conjugal felicity or domestic comfort” (155), Austen comments. Mr. Bennet had married carelessly: “Captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour, which youth and beauty generally give, [he] had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind, had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her.” All the things that are important in a marriage are gone: “Respect, esteem, and confidence, had vanished for ever; and all his views of domestic happiness were overthrown.” Mr. Bennet takes his comfort in the countryside and in his books—and in finding entertainment in his wife’s “ignorance and folly.” Mr. Bennet’s treatment of his wife, especially as he exposes his perceptions of Mrs. Bennet to her children, is blameworthy. “Elizabeth . . . had never been blind to the impropriety of her father’s behavior as a husband. She had always seen it with pain; but respecting his abilities, and grateful for his affectionate treatment of herself, she endeavoured to forget what she could not overlook, and to 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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banish from her thoughts that continual breach of conjugal obligation and decorum which, in exposing his wife to the contempt of her own children, was so highly reprehensible.” The Collins marriage does not harm anyone, and therefore it is not ethically dubious, but Mr. Bennet’s treatment of his wife is harmful to her and to the children. Goodness is important not just to the individual but to the larger society. Jane and Elizabeth are good people, as is Bingley and, especially, Darcy, and their characters bring stability to the social structure around them. Most obviously this can be seen in the relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy. Darcy’s goodness actually recasts the disaster set in motion by Lydia’s careless running off with Wickham into little more than a bump in the road to a respectable if not desirable marriage. The goodness of Elizabeth and Jane cements not only their relationship but orders the circles around them, including their immediate family as well as their other relatives. Darcy’s ethical plumb line is at the center of the courtship; he, in turn, is attracted in earnest to Elizabeth when she visits her sick sister, showing her own love and generosity. While Bingley’s sisters try to make Elizabeth look silly, or even uncouth, for getting herself flushed and her petticoats dirty in her walk across the fields, both Bingley and Darcy remark on Elizabeth’s physical glow and her sisterly kindness. Darcy becomes more and more attracted to Elizabeth, quite against his desire, because he finds the girl herself kind and admirable although he is put off by her family. Early on, we find that “Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her. He really believed, that were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger” (35). Some pages later, as the young people mingle at Bingley’s house, Darcy “began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention” (40). But danger or not, Darcy finds himself drawn more and more to Elizabeth. Wickham turns up in the local militia and quickly Elizabeth finds her “head full of him” (58). He has a disturbing history to relate about his relationship with Darcy and Darcy’s family. Wickham’s story is that he was a favorite of Darcy’s father, who had promised him a living when it became vacant. When the 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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elder Darcy died and the time came for the transfer of the position, Darcy maliciously refused it to Wickham. Thus he ruined Wickham’s prospects in direct contradiction to the senior Mr. Darcy’s wishes. All of this seems to fit precisely into the character Elizabeth has been building of Darcy, whose shyness and reticence already have alienated her. Wickham quickly becomes Elizabeth’s favorite, while she sees Darcy as a complete villain. Jane, always much more positive than Elizabeth, insists that there must be some misunderstanding, but Elizabeth is determined in her reading of Darcy’s character. Looking forward to the ball at Netherfield, “Elizabeth thought with pleasure of dancing a great deal with Mr. Wickham, and of seeing a confirmation of everything in Mr. Darcy’s looks and behaviour” (59). Wickham stays away from the ball in order to avoid Darcy, but Elizabeth attributes Wickham’s absence to Darcy’s villainy. At the ball itself Elizabeth absently accepts Darcy as a partner, only to regret her mistake, telling Charlotte that “To find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate” (62) would indeed be “an evil.” Even Miss Bingley, normally no great friend of Elizabeth’s, tries to tell her the truth about Wickham. He was the son of old Wickham, the late Mr. Darcy’s steward. Let me recommend you, however, as a friend, not to give implicit confidence to all his assertions; for as to Mr. Darcy’s using him ill, it is perfectly false; for, on the contrary, he has been always remarkably kind to him, though George Wickham has treated Mr. Darcy in a most infamous manner. I do not know the particulars, but I know very well that Mr. Darcy is not in the least to blame, that he cannot bear to hear George Wickham mentioned, and that though my brother thought he could not well avoid including him in his invitation to the officers, he was excessively glad to find that he had taken himself out of the way. His coming into the country at all, is a most insolent thing indeed, and I wonder how he could presume to do it. I pity you, Miss Eliza, for the discovery of your favourite’s guilt, but really considering his descent, one could not expect much better. (65)

Elizabeth replies angrily that “his guilt and his descent appear by your account to be the same,” and ignores all the rest. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Thus as Darcy grows ever fonder of Elizabeth, Elizabeth herself is committed to finding Darcy undesirable, and his fault clearly—albeit mistakenly—for Elizabeth is moral. After several boring months at home Elizabeth goes off to visit Charlotte. Jane has been in London some time, but has had no visit from Bingley, and this disappointment for her sister also is put to Darcy’s account; by the time he appears at his aunt’s house, Elizabeth has built up quite a case against him. Darcy visits surprisingly often at Charlotte’s house. Elizabeth intensifies her feelings against him by rereading Jane’s less than ebullient letters from her London visit. And then Darcy comes calling, to make perhaps the most awkward proposal of marriage in literature. “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you” (125). Elizabeth, not surprisingly, finds this formulation less than compelling. In response to Darcy’s shock at her rejection of his generous proposal, Elizabeth asks him “why with so evident a design of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character?” (126). As Elizabeth goes on to explain, her feelings about Mr. Darcy are based on her moral assessment of him: “Do you think that any consideration would tempt me to accept the man, who has been the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the happiness of a most beloved sister?” She continues, “No motive can excuse the unjust and ungenerous part you acted there.” Even worse has been his treatment of Wickham. “You have reduced him to his present state of poverty” (127), she accuses Darcy. Darcy’s only answer at this point is to freely admit that he did try to keep his friend Bingley from what seemed to Darcy an inappropriate alliance, and to accuse Elizabeth of hiding behind these moral issues when her real accusation is that Darcy simply was too honest in his expression of his feelings about her family. “Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?” Darcy is unfair here, as he will later realize: Elizabeth is absolutely honest in her moral indignation. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Darcy’s answer to Elizabeth’s rejection is his famous letter explaining his actions with regard to Bingley and, much more importantly, explaining the situation with Wickham. Elizabeth’s charge, he says, “Wilfully and wantonly to have thrown off the companion of my youth, the acknowledged favourite of my father, a young man who had scarcely any other dependence than on our patronage, and who had been brought up to expect its exertion, would be a depravity, to which the separation of two young persons, whose affection could be the growth of only a few weeks, could bear no comparison” (129–30). He deals first with the easier accusation, admitting that the “total want of propriety” shown by Elizabeth’s family certainly is negative, but it was combined with his sincere belief that Jane was indifferent to Bingley—in the light of Jane’s supposed indifference, Darcy’s attempts to prevent his friend from forming what seemed to him so unsuitable an alliance can carry no blame. Having disposed of the Bingley issue, Darcy turns to the far more complicated story of Wickham. We learn that Darcy had acted honorably and generously in every aspect of this case, and that in fact it is Wickham who is in all respects to be censured. Yes, there was a living planned for Wickham, but Wickham wrote to Darcy specifically telling him that he did not wish to be a clergyman, and requesting funds in addition to those bequeathed to him by Darcy’s father so that he could study law. “He resigned all claim to assistance in the church, were it possible that he could ever be in a situation to receive it, and accepted in return three thousand pounds. All connection between us seemed now dissolved” (132). Darcy had hoped the whole relationship was at an end, but Wickham’s study of law was just a pretense, and three years later, when the living became free, Wickham decided he wanted to be ordained and to take this position that he willingly had renounced earlier. Wickham is refused, and he abuses Darcy. Some time later he connives to remove Darcy’s fifteen-year-old sister from school and to talk her into an elopement. Luckily the child lets Darcy know what is happening, and Darcy saves her. Darcy comments that “Mr. Wickham’s chief object was unquestionably my sister’s fortune, which is thirty thousand pounds; but I cannot help supposing that the hope of revenging himself on 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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me, was a strong inducement. His revenge would have been complete indeed” (133). Thus Darcy’s letter bears entirely on moral issues. Darcy has acted with perfect good will in a just and ethical manner in every situation where circumstance or mischief had caused Elizabeth to doubt him. Thinking back, Elizabeth realizes that “she had never, in the whole course of their acquaintance which had latterly brought them much together, and given her a sort of intimacy with his ways, seen any thing that betrayed him to be unprincipled or unjust—any thing that spoke him of irreligious or immoral habits” (136–37). This being the case, then, Elizabeth has an epiphany about herself: “How despicably have I acted! . . . I, who have prided myself on my discernment!—I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust.—How humiliating is this discovery!—Yet, how just a humiliation!” (137). Her thoughts lead her to the understanding that “till this moment, I never knew myself.” This is one of the most important moments in the book in terms of the delineation of Elizabeth’s character but also in terms of Austen’s perfect expression of contemporary values. For what Elizabeth exemplifies here is that morality not only is a means of defining others but a means of understanding oneself. As every conduct book would say, as every tract by Hannah More or Elizabeth Inchbald would show, morality is the illuminating center of the person. This is where the courtship stands until Elizabeth’s meeting first with Pemberly, Darcy’s estate, and then once more with its owner. When Elizabeth comes to Pemberly, sees the estate and listens to Darcy’s old housekeeper, the estate and the interview illustrate a moral order that defines the man. Everything belonging to Pemberly pleases Elizabeth, as well it should, for everything is precisely at the highest standard of conservative late eighteenth-century taste in physical and moral parameters. As we saw in our discussion of Mansfield Park, one of the earnestly debated issues of the day in upper-class circles is “improvement” of estates, the changing of the natural landscape, often to the extent that the natural features are distorted so much that the landscape is spoiled and the fortune of the landowner is 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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seriously depleted. “Improvement” of this sort is seen by many, Austen among them, as wasteful, silly, and reflective of a frivolous character. Pemberly lies in its magnificence virtually untouched, and where it is crafted, the change is modest and almost imperceptible. For example, in front of the magnificent house itself “a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance” (159). Elizabeth “had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste.” These remarks immediately are followed by Elizabeth’s thought that “to be mistress of Pemberly might be something!” Needless to say, the indoor aspect of the house exhibits the same values as the outside: “Elizabeth saw, with admiration of his taste, that it was neither gaudy nor uselessly fine; with less of splendor, and more real elegance, than the furniture of Rosings.” The good taste shown in the physical Pemberly suggests an owner who is level-headed, restrained, and sensible, a man without the arrogance of such people as Darcy’s aunt at Rosings. Everything Elizabeth sees at Pemberly implies that its owner is a man of excellent character. And everything she hears supports that judgment. Elizabeth and the Gardiners are given a tour of the inside of the mansion by the housekeeper—a courtesy that in Austen’s time would be expected by visitors to an estate like Pemberly. The housekeeper is a stock late-century figure, the lower-class person whose respect and love for her upper-class employer radiates in everything she says and does. Austen’s portrait of Darcy’s housekeeper merits some of our attention, for in this characterization Austen exemplifies the upper-class conservative view of the ideal lower-class person. We can find these attitudes laid out in extraordinary detail in the remarkably popular stories of Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts. They are delineated as well in the many tracts on the poor and in letters written by such people as Horace Walpole, Elizabeth Montagu, Hestor Chapone, and so many others. For example, these attitudes are at the heart of the debate over Anne Yearsley, a milkmaid, whose poetry seemed amazingly good to Hannah More. More, along with her friends, helped Yearsley to be published and 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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reacted with horror to the “Milkmaid Poet’s” insistence that she be allowed to manage her money, and her further publishing, herself; this attitude seemed unspeakably ungrateful to Yearsley’s upper-class mentors.3 The measure of a good lower-class person is that he be satisfied with his place, be absolutely loyal to and appreciative of his betters, and be aware of every gesture of kindness that comes down the social ladder from above. These attitudes define Darcy’s housekeeper, and her presence in Pride and Prejudice not only allows Austen to explore Darcy’s good character, but gives us as well a fine window into Austen’s view of class relations. Darcy’s housekeeper is a very satisfied servant. She cannot say enough about how wonderful her master is. Isn’t he handsome, she asks Elizabeth when Mrs. Gardiner lets slip that Elizabeth has met Darcy. “I am sure I know none so handsome” (160), the housekeeper assures Elizabeth. And Darcy’s sister? She is “the handsomest young lady that ever was seen; and so accomplished! She plays and sings all day long.” Mrs. Reynolds, the housekeeper, “either from pride or attachment, had evidently great pleasure in talking of her master and his sister.” Mrs. Reynolds loves and admires her master, as an ideal servant should. She would like it if he married, but “I do not know who is good enough for him” (161). Elizabeth responds that “It is very much to his credit, I am sure, that you should think so,” and Mrs. Reynolds insists “I say no more than the truth, and what every body will say that knows him.” Elizabeth, who from the beginning has believed that Darcy is rather bad-tempered, “listen[s] with increasing astonishment” as Mrs. Reynolds continues “I have never had a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him ever since he was four years old.” Mr. Gardiner comments on Mrs. Reynolds’s luck in having such a master, and the housekeeper fervently agrees. “Yes, Sir, I know I am. If I was to go through the world, I could not meet with a better. But I have always observed, that they who are good-natured when children, are good-natured when they grow up; and he was always the sweetest-tempered, most generoushearted, boy in the world.” Darcy’s father was a good man, “and his son will be just like him—just as affable to the poor. . . . He is the best landlord, and the best master . . . that ever lived. Not 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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like the wild young men now-a-days, who think of nothing but themselves. There is not one of his tenants or servants but what will give him a good name.” These last two comments are particularly important because as so many conservative eighteenthcentury moralists insist, while the poor have the responsibility to be good poor people—that is, hard-working, loyal, and unquestioning of their place in society—the rich have duties toward the poor as well, and foremost among these for the rich man is to be a good master, which essentially means providing work and, when necessary, support for the poor who are dependent upon him. In the larger social context the issue of the relative duties of poor and rich has many reverberations in Austen’s period, for as we will see in my last chapter, this was a time of great social dissonance, with the radicals pushing for change and the conservatives working perhaps even harder to keep the lid on a simmering social pot. In conservative circles most of the time social discord is not addressed: instead, the relationship between rich and poor is presented in ideal, pastoral terms. Darcy’s housekeeper idealizes Darcy; Austen idealizes her. The housekeeper’s picture of Darcy primarily emphasizes his good character. He is kind; he has been good-natured all his life. He is responsible, as she knows firsthand. And thus, of course, he is ethical. It is here that Elizabeth’s opinion of Darcy truly turns around: his letter to her had reshaped her perspective, but in the housekeeper’s account Elizabeth has direct proof of Darcy’s goodness. It is his goodness that attracts Elizabeth, a goodness objectified in the well-run estate and the explicit happiness of those in his care.4 As Elizabeth studies a portrait of Darcy himself, Austen makes all this explicit: There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth’s mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original, than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance. The commendation bestowed on him by Mrs. Reynolds was of no trifling nature. What praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant? As a brother, a landlord, a master, she considered how many people’s happiness were in his guardianship!—How much of pleasure or pain it was in his power to bestow!—How much of good or evil



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must be done by him! Every idea that had been brought forward by the housekeeper was favourable to his character, and as she stood before the canvas, on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before; she remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression. (162)

Elizabeth had been assured that Darcy would not return to Pemberly before the next day, but he arrives just as Elizabeth and the Gardiners are about to set off on a tour of the grounds. The gentleness with which he treats Elizabeth and her friends surprises Elizabeth. Darcy does whatever he can to help Elizabeth and the Gardiners to feel at home, even inviting Mr. Gardiner to return to Pemberly for some fishing any time he might find convenient. The Gardiners are the family in trade who make up some of the people “against whom his pride had revolted, in his offer to herself ” (165). Elizabeth is pleased, even triumphant: “It was consoling that he should know she had some relations for whom there was no need to blush. She listened most attentively to all that passed between them, and gloried in every expression, every sentence of her uncle, which marked his intelligence, his taste, or his good manners.” But Elizabeth has no real cause to be so surprised, for Darcy’s pride was largely a matter of Elizabeth’s misperception. Where it is reasonable to step back, as from the nonsense of the elder Bennets, he does. But the Gardiners are intelligent and well mannered—to shun them simply would be snobbery, and this is not part of Darcy’s character, although Elizabeth wrongly had assumed it was. Darcy brings his sister to meet Elizabeth the very day she arrives at Pemberly. This again reflects on Darcy’s character, for his bestowing of such an honor on Elizabeth is truly generous. Elizabeth’s “uncle and aunt were all amazement” (168). The sister is not proud, only shy, and as for Darcy, he expresses himself with “unaffected cordiality” (169). A modern reader takes such person to person behavior as simply normal, but we must remember that for Austen these class distinctions are very serious: Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner are correct in seeing more than an expected courtesy here. Elizabeth herself remarks these expressions of friendly respect and is very pleased. She by now has come 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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to like Darcy very much, although she has not yet quite admitted this to herself. Good order is a sign of morality, and everything around Darcy is in the best of order. The estate, the grounds, the relationship with his servants, with the poor: everything is proper. Chaos, then, as in the news that interrupts Elizabeth’s visit to the neighborhood of Pemberly when she hears of Lydia’s elopement with Wickham, represents not just disorder but immorality. Before we turn to these scenes, we should pause a moment to watch as the visit of Darcy and his sister plays out. The visit lasts “above half an hour” (171). This is important, for the duration of a visit is significant in Austen’s time; half an hour marks a serious commitment of time, a real visit, as opposed to merely dropping by. In other words, all due respect has been paid to Elizabeth and her friends. In addition, an invitation is extended by Darcy and his sister for a return visit. These details are all part of a recognized set of social rules. The social rules also include attitudes toward servants, and in the light of Darcy and his sister’s visit Austen returns to the housekeeper’s comments. “There was now an interest,” Austen comments, “in believing the housekeeper; and they soon became sensible, that the authority of a servant who had known him since he was four years old, and whose own manners indicated respectability, was not to be hastily rejected” (171). Similarly, when the Gardiners inquire among their Lambton friends about Darcy, all reports are positive. “It was acknowledged . . . that he was a liberal man, and did much good among the poor” (172). Doing good among the poor is part of a decent rich person’s obligation, and we are not surprised that Darcy fulfills these obligations. The good order of Pemberly is emphasized again when Elizabeth and the Gardiners return Darcy’s visit. They are shown into the saloon, “whose northern aspect rendered it delightful for summer. Its windows opening to the ground, admitted a most refreshing view of the high woody hills behind the house, and of the beautiful oaks and Spanish chestnuts which were scattered over the intermediate lawn” (173). In this perfect place they are received with becoming courtesy by Darcy’s sister. Conversation is a bit strained until the food is brought in when, as Austen 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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comments, if not everyone is comfortable talking, everyone can eat. The food also shows good order, luxury not ostentatious but certainly welcoming. The servants enter with “cold meat, cake, and a variety of all the finest fruits in season. . . . There was now employment for the whole party; for though they could not all talk, they could all eat; and the beautiful pyramids of grapes, nectarines, and peaches, soon collected them around the table” (174). Austen often uses food to illustrate order or disorder: we can contrast this lovely scene at Pemberly with the shocking tea served in Fanny’s maternal home in Mansfield Park. Darcy’s courtship continues in a most gentle fashion—until the news reaches Elizabeth that stupid Lydia has run off with Wickham. Darcy happens to find Elizabeth just after she has received the letter from Jane; he can see that she is ill with shock. Elizabeth tells him everything, quickly gathers the Gardiners, and almost immediately departs. Jane’s information is that Lydia has run off with Wickham but apparently not to be married. Darcy seems to retreat into his own thoughts, a response that Elizabeth assumes is his reaction to her and her disgraced family. It is at this moment that she “so honestly felt that she could have loved him . . . when all love must be vain. But self, though it would intrude, could not engross her. Lydia— the humiliation, the misery, she was bringing on them all, soon swallowed up every private care” (180). Elizabeth is anxious to be at home, to share with Jane the burden of “a family so deranged; a father absent [he has gone to London in search of Lydia], a mother incapable of exertion” (181). The word “deranged” carries all the weight of the disordered Bennet family. Lydia’s situation seems bleak indeed, for as worthless as Wickham is, the only desirable outcome to this elopement is for him to marry her. A financial deal is struck, however, and a marriage takes place under the close supervision of the Gardiners and Darcy. Darcy’s participation in the enterprise is the surprise, since at first the happy solution seems all Mr. Gardiner’s doing, but Elizabeth learns from Mrs. Gardiner that it was Darcy who had paid Wickham’s debts, bought him a commission in the regular army, and made the other financial agreements. Darcy’s public reason for doing all this is his sense of responsibility for not making Wickham’s iniquities more common knowledge; Elizabeth 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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and her aunt and uncle have some suspicions of another motive as well. Bingley returns to the neighborhood and very soon makes a visit to the Bennets. He is accompanied by Darcy, who seems to act rather more formally than he had at Pemberly. Bingley and Jane, much to everyone’s delight, become engaged. Darcy’s aunt makes a short but ringing visit to Elizabeth to demand that she promise not to marry Darcy, a promise that Elizabeth of course refuses to make. As we learn a bit later, it is Elizabeth’s response to Lady Catherine that convinces Darcy to propose once again. The last section of the novel, from Darcy’s proposal to the end of the book, is full of wit and gentleness. Perhaps oddly, for the end of a love story, it contains much more philosophy than romance. Particularly, this is true of the conversation, including the proposal itself, in which Darcy and Elizabeth come to their understanding. This is much more a moral than a romantic discussion. Morality for Austen’s class is the glue that allows society to hold its shape, especially in the face of all the threats to the social order. Elizabeth, as she reminds Lady Catherine, is a gentleman’s daughter, but certainly Mr. Bennet and Mr. Darcy are not equals. A shared moral outlook reinforces the social grid, and part of that grid is good manners. As we have seen, for Austen, decorum is part of morality. Formality even between young people such as Elizabeth and Darcy is a natural manifestation of good manners, which explains at least in part the tone of this conversation. It begins with Elizabeth, at her earliest opportunity alone with Darcy, acknowledging her debt to him for his help with Lydia. Her tone could hardly be more formal: “Mr. Darcy, I am a very selfish creature; and, for the sake of giving relief to my own feelings, care not how much I may be wounding your’s. I can no longer help thanking you for your unexampled kindness to my poor sister. Ever since I have known it, I have been most anxious to acknowledge to you how gratefully I feel it. Were it known to the rest of my family, I should not have merely my own gratitude to express” (238). He replies that he had not intended this information to be passed on, and Elizabeth explains that it came from a hint dropped by Lydia. She goes on, “Let me thank you again and again, in the name of all my family, for that generous compassion 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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which induced you to take so much trouble, and bear so many mortifications, for the sake of discovering them.” Darcy responds in a voice equally serious: “If you will thank me, . . . let it be for yourself alone. That the wish of giving happiness to you, might add force to the other inducements which led me on, I shall not attempt to deny. But your family owe me nothing. Much as I respect them, I believe, I thought only of you” (238–39). Darcy goes on, “You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.” And so he finally has proposed, in gentle language, but certainly not romantic language. The language that Austen continues with between the lovers as they experience and express their feelings is very distanced, moving back away from dialogue to an authorial commentary. Elizabeth “immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand, that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure, his present assurances.” Darcy’s response too is provided from a distance: “The happiness which this reply produced, was such as he had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do.” But we are not privy to what these statements are, to what these feelings are. It is as if Austen does not want to intrude on her characters’ most intimate moments. We understand that they are happy; we understand that they are in love; we know, because Austen tells us, that they are awkward about expressing their feelings, but we know all these things at a remove. It is only after all the important things have been said and done that we rejoin their conversation when we learn in Darcy’s own words that he and Elizabeth owe some of their happiness to his aunt, whose account of her fury at Elizabeth’s refusal to agree never to marry Darcy convinced Darcy that he might still hope. “I knew enough of your disposition to be certain, that, had you been absolutely, irrevocably decided against me, you would have acknowledged it to Lady Catherine, frankly and openly.” Once the lovers finally have come to their understanding, they throw themselves into each other’s arms. Her head on his 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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shoulder, they dream dreams of their life together at Pemberly, of the glorious afternoons strolling the grounds wrapped in sunshine and each other’s embrace. No, not in Pride and Prejudice. Whatever Wordsworth and Coleridge had articulated in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Austen certainly is not ready for the overflow of powerful emotion, and in this she is very much an eighteenth rather than a nineteenth-century author even if her novels chronologically fall into the nineteenth century. Having come to their understanding, the lovers have a philosophical discussion, defining their relationship in the social norms that have shaped and will shape their life together. As we have seen, a sincere commitment to propriety gives coherence to the social structure. One of the most telling passages in the book is Elizabeth’s comment to Darcy that since the beginning of their relationship she hopes that they “have both . . . improved in civility” (240) and his response that I cannot be so easily reconciled to myself. The recollection of what I then said, of my conduct, my manners, my expressions during the whole of it, is now, and has been many months, inexpressibly painful to me. Your reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: ‘had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner.’ Those were your words. You know not, you can scarcely conceive, how they have tortured me;—though it was some time, I confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice.

That Darcy had not “behaved in a more gentleman-like manner” is very painful to him because such a lapse fails not only their private relationship but his responsibility to the larger society. We saw earlier in our discussion of his place in the larger economy of Pemberly and its surroundings how widely his responsibility reaches. The talk between Darcy and Elizabeth in which they come to terms with all the turns and misdirections of their relationship goes on for pages, and the tone—remember that this is the first exploration of their successful courtship—remains calmly analytic throughout. They discuss his letter. Darcy confesses that “When I wrote that letter, . . . I believed myself perfectly calm and cool, but I am since convinced that it was written in a dreadful bitterness 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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of spirit” (240). And Elizabeth charmingly soothes his remorse: “The letter, perhaps began in bitterness, but it did not end so. The adieu is charity itself.” Darcy looks back on his entire life and sees a person who always had been proud and overly conscious of his own worth. He had been spoiled by his parents and by his place in society. But from Elizabeth he has learned humility, and he is very grateful to her. Unfortunately an only son, (for many years an only child) I was spoilt by my parents, who though good themselves . . . allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing, to care for none beyond my own family circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I was, from eight to eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You shewed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased. (241)

He discusses her visit to Pemberly in the same formal terms: “My object then, . . . was to shew you, by every civility in my power, that I was not so mean as to resent the past; and I hoped to obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your ill opinion, by letting you see that your reproofs had been attended to. How soon any other wishes introduced themselves I can hardly tell, but I believe in about half an hour after I had seen you.” The remaining pages of the book contain some of the most charming passages in English literature. Once Elizabeth and Darcy have come to an understanding, Elizabeth must face the various members of her family, none of whom, of course, have any idea that Elizabeth’s feelings about Darcy have undergone quite some change. The loveliest scenes of confession are between Elizabeth and Jane, followed by Elizabeth’s discussion with her father. Jane is incredulous and worried that Elizabeth does not love Darcy but simply is overcome by the glamour of his wealth. Between the sisters, unlike between the lovers themselves, love, rather than behavior, is the topic: “And do you really love him 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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quite well enough? Oh, Lizzy! do any thing rather than marry without affection” (244). Elizabeth jokes that she loves Darcy even better than she does Bingley, that she has loved him ever since seeing Pemberly! But she soon satisfied her sister, Austen tells us, with “her solemn assurances of attachment.” Again, not quite a powerful overflow of emotion, but it is all the reader is going to get. Once again we are distanced from the actual emotive terms. One of Austen’s amazing talents, indeed, is to make readers aware of powerful feelings without involving us in those feelings. We understand how strongly Elizabeth loves Darcy (and he loves her), and we are touched as well by the love between Elizabeth and Jane. But this is mostly expressed out of our sight; the girls spend “half the night . . . in conversation,” but we, already knowing what happened, paint the joy of that conversation for ourselves. Mr. Bennet, having given Darcy his consent, in his interview with Elizabeth asks her the same questions that Jane had posed. Do you love him? Is the attraction only more and fancier carriages than Jane will have? He begs Elizabeth not to give him “the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life” (246), clearly alluding to his own marriage. Elizabeth repeatedly assures him “that Mr. Darcy was really the object of her choice.” Mrs. Bennet is delighted, seeing not only a husband for her daughter but a very rich one at that. The novel approaches its close with a series of lovely, witty letters announcing the good news to various family members—the most charming is Elizabeth’s letter to her aunt thanking her for changing the original travel plan for the Lake District and taking her to Pemberly instead, although Mr. Bennet’s note to Mr. Collins is quite wonderful too: “I must trouble you once more for congratulations. Elizabeth will soon be the wife of Mr. Darcy. Console Lady Catherine as well as you can. But, if I were you, I would stand by the nephew. He has more to give” (250). The novel ends with a comment about the Gardiners. “With the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them” (254). This is a light, romantic reminder of the twists and chances that are part of the courtship process, but it is also a reminder of 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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what we already knew from Darcy’s dealings with the Gardiners in the matter of Lydia’s elopement: as a decent and rational human being, he can value and love those who are of like character, even if they are not his class equals. Austen’s seemingly insular novel here in its conclusion, as earlier in the book, reflects facets of the shifting social grid in which she places her characters. These comments about the Gardiners are part of a social commentary that runs through the last section of the novel from Elizabeth and Darcy’s engagement until the end of the book. Elizabeth’s situation is quite modern. Both her father and her sister demand to know if she really loves Darcy quite enough. She must insist to her father that Darcy is the “object of her choice” (246), and in fact Mr. Bennet’s worry is not that she does not have a choice, but that she will choose badly, as he had. Austen is showing us that happiness or unhappiness in marriage is not a matter of gender but of a rational engagement of emotion. It is not the man who automatically is the more powerful partner in a marriage relationship, or even the more happy. Darcy is not condescending to Elizabeth by marrying her, and it never occurs to him that favor is his to give. On the contrary, he explicitly says that he might still have been the narrow character he had been until he learned from her to be more. “What do I not owe you!” (241) he insists. This is a moment of extraordinary social comment in the history of the novel, for Austen is marking a human equality that is part of the social mobility of the period. It is perfect for this novel that deals so largely with social ties that it ends with focus not only on Darcy and Elizabeth but on the Gardiners, who stand as a kind of fulcrum as society moves about them.



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Emma “She only demands from each of you either one thing very clever . . . or two things moderately clever—or three things very dull indeed” The relatively elastic nature of class interplay that we see in Pride and Prejudice is less marked in Emma, but reappears as an important theme in Austen’s last novel, Persuasion. In all of these novels social position is based on rank in society, but it also is based on wealth, and there can be considerable movement up and down these two intersecting scales. The first pages of the novel set up this pattern, with the comings and goings of Miss Taylor, Mr. Weston, Frank Churchill, and Mr. Elton. Emma opens with the marriage of Miss Taylor, or rather its sad aftermath in the Woodhouse home. Emma Woodhouse, downcast herself at the removal of her friend, must put on a cheerful face to keep up the sunken spirits of her father. Mr. Woodhouse laments that Miss Taylor, the woman who had lived with them so long, first as Emma’s governess and then simply as their friend, had married Mr. Weston. “What a pity it is that Mr. Weston ever thought of her!”1 he tells Emma. Emma counters that Mr. Weston is a fine man and that as Mrs. Weston, Miss Taylor now has “a house of her own.” When Mr. Knightley comes over to keep Emma and her father company, he rings the same theme: Knightley knows that Emma and Mr. Woodhouse cannot be feeling terribly cheerful about the loss of their dear friend, but surely Miss Taylor is better off married to Mr. Weston. “When it comes



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to the question of dependence or independence,” he tells them, “it must be better to have only one to please, than two” (5). The marriage “is to Miss Taylor’s advantage.” At “Miss Taylor’s time of life” it is very important “to be settled in a home of her own,” he insists. Mr. Knightley is always the voice of reason, as we learn in the course of the novel. Knightley’s observations about Miss Taylor’s good fortune in becoming Mrs. Weston are explored at length when Austen devotes the next chapter to the story of Mr. Weston himself. Miss Taylor is Weston’s second wife. Austen begins with the history of Mr. Weston’s “respectable family, which for the last two or three generations had been rising into gentility and property” (7). The emphasis here is on the social movement so pronounced in Austen’s day by which increasing wealth in the middle classes moves people into the upper classes when money is turned into acquired property, and property in turn confers varying degrees of gentility on its holders. This transformation is not immediate, but over the course of a number of generations, the family’s status in the class hierarchy of English society changes along with its finances. For example, the money of the Bingley family in Pride and Prejudice, Austen pointedly reminds us, is quite recently from trade—as opposed, of course, to Darcy’s wealth, which truly is of aristocratic origin. Mr. Weston’s family has been rising; it is respectable and comfortable, but certainly neither aristocratic nor hugely wealthy. Mr. Weston, not desirous of joining the more “homely pursuits” of his brothers, enlists in the militia of his county, and when the attractive Captain Weston meets “Miss Churchill, of a great Yorkshire family,” Miss Churchill falls in love with him. Her brother and sister-in-law, “who were full of pride and importance,” are scandalized. When Miss Churchill insisted on marrying Captain Weston, her family “threw her off with due decorum” (8). Miss Churchill brings with her a significant fortune, but it bears “no proportion to the family estate.” One might assume that Mr. Weston gets the advantage in this marriage, as Miss Churchill clearly is superior to him in fortune, but Austen insists that “Mrs. Weston ought to have found more in it,” for she had a husband who dearly loved her. That, however, is not enough for her, for although she loves her husband, she 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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still misses the luxury of her former home even as she and Mr. Weston live beyond their income. Austen’s comment that “it was an unsuitable connection, and did not produce much happiness,” is true on several levels, for not only are the pair from different backgrounds, but it is the woman whose fortune is superior. We have seen in novel after novel that although Austen often plays the games of social mixing, as in the balls in Pride and Prejudice, it is always imperative that at the end of the evening everyone goes back to his or her social place. And so it is in Emma, with the marriage of Miss Churchill and Mr. Weston as our first test case. The match, instead of being lucrative for Mr. Weston, in fact turns out to be a bad bargain. After three years Mrs. Weston dies, leaving Mr. Weston rather poorer than he was when he married. Their son Frank is taken in by Mr. and Mrs. Churchill, who undertake the complete care of the child. Frank on his coming of age even takes the Churchill name. We have seen this arrangement of moving children about in Mansfield Park when Fanny is sent to be with her rich relatives, and we talked there about the real-life cases in Austen’s own family that prove the realism of such fictional examples. After the end of his marriage, Mr. Weston goes on to a career in trade, facilitated by the fact that his brothers already are earning their own livings in this way. He maintains his home in Highbury and after a pleasant twenty years or so, he has a more than adequate living. He moves up from his small house to purchase “a little estate adjoining Highbury, which he had always longed for” (8), and he has “enough to marry a woman as portionless even as Miss Taylor.” Austen’s commentary on this marriage is quite detailed, and for the student of social life and morality in Austen’s work it is fascinating. In Mr. Weston’s first marriage it was the woman who had the economic and social advantage; Mr. Weston had moved up socially in this match, but he had suffered for it with social discomfort and also with a degrading of his economic position. With Miss Taylor, all the advantage is on his side, and he finds it “a great deal better to chuse than to be chosen, and to excite gratitude than to feel it” (9). This is in all respects a more appropriate match, for unlike in his first marriage, here there is no crossing of 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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class barriers. The governess Miss Taylor and the man who made his decent fortune in trade are equals, even it if is Mr. Weston who has the money. In fact, Austen carefully emphasizes, although he had been fond of Miss Taylor for some time, “it had not shaken his determination of never settling till he could purchase Randalls, and the sale of Randalls was long looked forward to: but he had gone steadily on, with these objects in view, till they were accomplished. He had made his fortune, bought his house, and obtained his wife.” Miss Taylor in the Woodhouse home must always have been there on sufferance; now she has a home— and a carriage—of her own. As Knightley insists to Emma and her father, Miss Taylor has been very fortunate to attain such an establishment. From the very first page of the book Austen sets up the social grid of the novel. Immediately we are introduced to Emma herself: “handsome, clever, and rich” (1). The village of Highbury “afforded her no equals. The Woodhouses were first in consequence there. All looked up to them” (2). Mr. Knightley, “a very old and intimate friend of the family,” and the elder brother of Isabella Woodhouse’s husband, is in the same class as Emma. His estate, Donwell Abbey, is in the adjoining parish. There are of course servants. We hear about James, who will not mind at all taking the Woodhouses to Randalls, Mr. Weston’s house, “because of his daughter’s being housemaid there” (3). The fact that James’ daughter is a housemaid there is a great favor Mr. Woodhouse did for his servant: “You got Hannah that good place,” Emma tells her father, “Nobody thought of Hannah till you mentioned her—James is so obliged to you!” (3). Mr. Woodhouse agrees. “It was very lucky, for I would not have had poor James think himself slighted upon any account; and I am sure she will make a very good servant.” There is no suggestion, no comment by Austen in her own voice, that these benevolent musings are less than just. That some people are servants is a fact of life. Good people treat their servants with thoughtfulness, and may even try to get family members jobs relatively near one another, but there is no suggestion that James might prefer to have his daughter with him, or that she might prefer not to be a servant at all. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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The next two chapters entirely are devoted to carefully placing almost all the remaining characters in the book on the social scale. Chapter three deals with Mr. Woodhouse’s circle. It embraces a range of people; all of them of course are genteel enough to socialize with him, but most of them are not his equals. There is Mr. Elton, the clergyman, a socially ambitious young man who has an eye on Emma. The Westons and Knightley we already have met. “After these came a second set; among the most come-at-able of whom were Mrs. and Miss Bates and Mrs. Goddard, three ladies almost always at the service of an invitation from Hartfield” (11). The Bates ladies are described in what is surely one of Austen’s most socially astute passages. Mrs. Bates, the widow of a former vicar of Highbury, was a very old lady, almost past every thing but tea and quadrille. She lived with her single daughter in a very small way, and was considered with all the regard and respect which a harmless old lady, under such untoward circumstances, can excite. Her daughter enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married. Miss Bates stood in the very worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favour; and she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her, into outward respect. She had never boasted either beauty or cleverness. Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible. And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good-will. It was her own universal good-will and contented temper which worked such wonders. . . . The simplicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful spirit, were a recommendation to every body and a mine of felicity to herself. (12)

Later in the book, in the Box Hill incident, Emma’s callousness toward Miss Bates leads to the central moral epiphany in the novel. The harmfulness of Emma’s response to Miss Bates is directly tied to Miss Bates’ position as a social inferior, as Knightley explains to Emma. The last in Mr. Woodhouse’s social circle is Mrs. Goddard, the mistress of a successful school for girls—“not of a seminary, 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality upon new principles and new systems—and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity—but a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.” This “plain, motherly kind of woman” had “worked hard in her youth,” and now enjoys “the occasional holiday of a tea-visit” at the Woodhouses’. In Austen’s descriptions of all three women social position and character are equally emphasized: the social position, in fact, inextricably is bound into the portrait. Miss Bates would be quite another person were she high-born or rich; without these attributes, and with no personal qualities to make up for their lack, she is generally vulnerable. Mrs. Goddard, whose income is both certain and more adequate than Miss Bates’, enjoys a more assured social position as a concomitant of her income. All three, of course, are women of unquestioned high moral standing. Along with them on this occasion comes Harriet Smith, a girl whose social rank is unclear. In Emma it is not possible to define a person’s character without being able to place him or her on the social scale. Just as, for example, in Pride and Prejudice Darcy’s character cannot be separated from the social requirements of his rank, so in Emma, people’s places on the social scale shape what we expect of them morally. The first words of the description of Harriet emphasize that she cannot be placed on the social grid, for “Harriet Smith was the natural daughter of somebody” (13). “Somebody” had placed her at Mrs. Goddard’s school and recently had raised her to a boarding student there. More than that simply is not known about her. The only friends she seems to have—in eighteenthcentury usage, as we have discussed, “friend” includes all sorts of familial as well as social ties—are acquaintances she has made at Highbury. Austen emphasizes Harriet’s socially amorphous state. The girl is pretty in a way that appeals to Emma but that seems rather unexceptional to the reader. She is sweet but not 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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particularly bright. Some time before she met Emma, Harriet had spent a very happy summer with the Martin family. The Martins are quite comfortably-off farmers; their home has two lovely parlors, and they have employed a housemaid for twenty-five years. The first major incident of the book revolves around Mr. Martin’s proposal of marriage to Harriet and Harriet’s refusal of that offer. Austen devotes much commentary and many pages to it. Only in retrospect do we understand that Austen has set out most of her important themes here. The discussion of Mr. Martin’s proposal focuses not on romance but on class. Not even the twenty-one-year-old Emma talks about the match in terms of romance, and certainly Knightley sees the issue in terms of social status. Even before Mr. Martin’s proposal, Emma makes his social status vis-à-vis herself and Harriet quite clear; a young farmer, Emma insists, can be of no interest to her— “a degree or two lower” (17)—and she might be of use to his family, “but a farmer can need none of my help, and is therefore in one sense as much above my notice as in every other he is below it.” Emma finds Harriet’s fondness for the Martins inappropriate because Emma insists on seeing Harriet as upper-class. Emma’s argument against Mr. Martin and his proposal is that he is not good enough for Harriet. Emma insists (with no evidence) that Harriet is a gentleman’s daughter. She tells Harriet that “you must support your claim to that station by every thing within your own power, or there will be plenty of people who would take pleasure in degrading you” (18). She warns Harriet against friendship with the women in the Martin family, especially the wife Mr. Martin might someday take. “I would have you so firmly established in good society, as to be independent even of Hartfield and Miss Woodhouse. I want to see you permanently well connected.” To that end, Emma warns Harriet of “odd acquaintance.” When Harriet finally introduces Emma to Robert Martin, Emma laments that he has an “entire want of gentility” (19). Emma is wrong about the situation between Harriet and Mr. Martin, but as we understand from Mr. Knightley—first in his conversation with Mrs. Weston and later with Emma herself— the problem is not that Emma is being snobbish here, but that she is misjudging the relative social status of Harriet and Mr. Martin. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Robert Martin is above Harriet in all ways, and it is Harriet who should be grateful for Mr. Martin’s attention. Mr. Knightley has a precise class scale. He laments to Mrs. Weston that Emma’s intimacy with Harriet “will only put her out of conceit with all the other places she belongs to. She will grow just refined enough to be uncomfortable with those among whom birth and circumstances have placed her home” (23-24). When Mr. Martin proposes to Harriet, Emma pretends to allow Harriet to make up her own mind, but of course it is Emma who decides that Harriet should reject him. Once the issue is settled, Emma is forthright with Harriet. If Harriet had married Mr. Martin, Emma tells her, “It would have been the loss of a friend to me. I could not have visited Mrs. Robert Martin, of Abbey-Mill Farm.” . . . Harriet had not surmised her own danger, but the idea of it struck her forcibly. “You could not have visited me!” she cried, looking aghast. “No, to be sure you could not; but I never thought of that before. That would have been too dreadful!—What an escape—Dear Miss Woodhouse, I would not give up the pleasure and honour of being intimate with you for any thing in the world.” “Indeed, Harriet, it would have been a severe pang to lose you; but it must have been. You would have thrown yourself out of all good society. I must have given you up.” (33)

There is an implication of snobbery here, as if Austen finds such class lines offensive, but in fact Austen’s ending contradicts that implication, for at the end of the novel Austen is very explicit that Harriet and Emma will live in quite separate and not intersecting worlds after they are married, and that such an outcome not only is inevitable but fitting. As we see in Knightley’s furious response to Emma’s meddling, Austen completely accepts a tightly drawn class structure. This does not mean that people cannot be friends across classes, especially when they share common interests, as Mr. Knightley and Mr. Martin do, but that such friendship is more unlikely than among people of the same class. Mr. Martin, Knightley tells Emma, made a visit to him to ask his advice about marrying Harriet—Martin “considers me as one 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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of his best friends” (37). Knightley “had no hesitation in advising [Mr. Martin] to marry.” When Emma tells him that Harriet had refused the proposal, he is shocked. Emma defends her part in the outcome, insisting that she “cannot admit [Mr. Martin] to be Harriet’s equal” (38). The conversation is a very heated one, especially on Mr. Knightley’s side. Mr. Martin is Harriet’s superior in both “sense and situation. . . . What are Harriet Smith’s claims, either of birth, nature or education, to any connection higher than Robert Martin” (38), he demands. Harriet has no parents to give her social status, and probably no fortune coming to her. Robert Martin has a respectable social station, a successful farm—and a much greater intelligence than Harriet, who not only has “no respectable relations” but is “not a sensible girl, nor a girl of any information” (39). Knightley certainly is not saying that class does not matter. Rather, Mr. Martin in all ways, social position, financial position, and common sense, outclasses Harriet. Mr. Knightley is very aware of where Harriet belongs on the social scale—she has been left to be educated by Mrs. Goddard and then left “to move . . . in Mrs. Goddard’s line. . . . Her friends evidently thought this good enough for her; and it was good enough” (40). She was happy with the Martins; only Emma has given her a sense of dissatisfaction with the milieu in which she belongs. This kind of misperception is very dangerous for Harriet; if she rejects the class in which she rightfully belongs, she will not be able to find a spouse. Without either social privilege or outstanding personal qualities, she will, in effect, simply price herself out of the market. Knightley guesses that Emma has Mr. Elton in mind for Harriet, and he tries to disabuse her of the idea that Elton would marry imprudently. Elton “knows the value of a good income as well as anybody. Elton may talk sentimentally, but he will act rationally. . . . I have heard him speak with great animation of a large family of young ladies that his sisters are intimate with, who have all twenty thousand pounds apiece” (42). In other words, class and money cross on the matrimonial grid, and a successful pairing requires that one or the other match. This is a long and involved dialogue between Knightley and Emma, perhaps one of the longest in the novel and certainly one of the most significant. It clearly lays out Austen’s awareness of 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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class barriers, and because Knightley, always Austen’s voice in the novel, accepts without any question the rightness of class and fortune layerings, we know that this is Austen’s own position. We have seen this patterning repeatedly in the novels: people of different classes can mix socially, but they do not intermarry. One cannot categorize this stance as particularly conservative, for it is simply the usual perspective for Austen’s time and place. Knightley’s analysis of Emma’s manipulation of Harriet is correct: it is irresponsible, even immoral, to cause Harriet to forego her best chance for happiness. As for Mr. Elton, he had no interest in Harriet at all, although he certainly is interested in Emma. When Emma gives Elton to understand that she had hoped to pair him with Harriet, he is furious, retorting that he certainly would not throw himself away on such a girl. “Every body has their level: but as for myself, I am not, I think, quite so much at a loss. I need not so totally despair of an equal alliance, as to be addressing myself to Miss Smith!” (86). Emma, on her side, is “insulted” (88) by Elton’s presumption to her. “He wanted to marry well, and having the arrogance to raise his eyes to her, pretended to be in love, but she was perfectly easy as to his not suffering any disappointment that need be cared for. There had been no real affection either in his language or manners. . . . He only wanted to aggrandize and enrich himself; and if Miss Woodhouse of Hartfield, the heiress of thirty thousand pounds, were not quite so easily obtained as he had fancied, he would soon try for Miss Somebody else with twenty, or with ten” (88). Emma is furious that Elton “should suppose himself her equal in connection or mind!” He looks down on Harriet, “so well understanding the gradations of rank below him,” but is “so blind to what rose above” as to believe that Emma would be interested in him. Emma is very conscious of her own social and financial rank: “He must know that in fortune and consequence she was greatly his superior” (89). Elton must know, Emma indignantly considers, “that the Woodhouses had been settled for several generations at Hartfield, the younger Branch of a very ancient family—and that the Eltons were nobody.” Austen exactly places Emma at the intersection of the land/wealth axis: “The landed property of Hartfield certainly was inconsiderable, being but a sort of notch 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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in the Donwell Abbey estate, to which all the rest of Highbury belonged; but their fortune, from other sources, was such as to make them scarcely secondary to Donwell Abbey itself, in every other kind of consequence” (89). For most of the book, Emma is not a reliable judge of herself or of others, but her analysis of her own social status as compared with Mr. Elton’s is spot on. A modern reader might be inclined to read these passages as ironic, with Emma simply being snobbish, but this would be incorrect. Mr. Knightley, always articulating Austen’s perspective, sees these kinds of relative positionings precisely as Emma lays them out here. And we must not forget that at the end of the novel, as I pointed out earlier, the friendship of Emma and Harriet withers as each rightly stays mainly in her own social circle. Austen completely accepts the class structure that defines the gradations of her society. That this stratification is defined not only by privilege but by responsibility is a continuous theme in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century writing, as we have seen. The scene in which Emma visits her poor neighbors places Emma in terms of social status as precisely as any of the social markers that Austen uses to delineate class relations in the novel. It is intimately connected to the much more famous Box Hill incident later when Emma wounds Miss Bates. As the girls are on their way to make “a charitable visit . . . to a poor sick family, who lived a little way out of Highbury” (54), Harriet asks Emma why she is not married and seems to have no intention of marrying. Emma says that indeed she has no such intention, that “if I were to marry, I must expect to repent it” (55). She goes on in a remarkably clear-sighted explanation that short of really being in love, she has absolutely no reason to marry because her social and living conditions could not possibly be better than they are in her current position. “I have none of the usual inducements of women to marry,” she says. Without love, “I am sure I should be a fool to change such a situation as mine. Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want: I believe few married women are half as much mistress of their husband’s house, as I am of Hartfield; and never, never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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always right in any man’s eyes as I am in my father’s.” Harriet is somewhat horrified—“to be an old maid at last, like Miss Bates!” Emma explains to her that there could be no similarity between her position and Miss Bates’, except in being unmarried, because Miss Bates is poor, and it is poverty only that marks a woman who has not married as unfortunate. We have come, then, to one of the most significant social comments in the book, and Austen explains the distinction between Emma’s position and that of the less endowed spinsters very carefully. Emma says, “I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public! A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable, old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls; but a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable” (56). Emma comments that this danger does not apply to Miss Bates, who is “to the taste of everybody, though single and though poor.” But as we will see in the Box Hill incident, Miss Bates indeed is vulnerable to precisely this sort of treatment, even from such a well-meaning person as Emma herself. By the time this conversation is over, Emma and Harriet have arrived at the poor cottage which is their destination, and Austen has used this discussion about the poor old maid as a segue into the scene of Emma’s generosity to the local poor. The centrality and seriousness of a visit to the poor by a character of means in a novel of this period cannot be overstressed. It is a requisite of good character for someone of Emma’s social and financial position to show attention to the poor. It would not be adequate merely to send help—the requirement for adequate benevolence is to give not only of one’s money but of oneself. Austen’s contemporary William Wordsworth in his poem “The Old Cumberland Beggar” talks about his need for the beggar, who has been part of the narrator’s life from his youth, as an object for his benevolence. There is no hint of the idea that perhaps something more permanent than occasional charity would be useful. Rather, the emphasis throughout the poem is on the good that the narrator derives from this recurring opportunity to practice his own benevolence. Just so, in the Cheap Repository Tracts of Hannah More, the well-off are taught what their duties are to the poor in the course of teaching the poor how to be good, productive poor 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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people who cheerfully limit their pretensions not only to what they can earn but to how much it is Christian for them to accept. We will return to More shortly, but first let us rejoin Emma and Harriet as they “were . . . approaching the cottage” (57). Austen tells us that “Emma was very compassionate; and the distresses of the poor were as sure of relief from her personal attention and kindness, her counsel and patience, as from her purse.” This willingness to give advice as well as material support is emphasized in virtually every contemporary treatise on the responsibility of the well-off to the poor. Emma “understood their ways, could allow for their ignorance and their temptations, had no romantic expectations of extraordinary virtue from those, for whom education had done so little.” The poor, in other words, can be expected to be less than their betters—less in manners and understanding. It is one of the duties of someone like Emma to try to advise as well as monetarily support them. She “always gave her assistance with as much intelligence as good-will.” Emma remains “there as long as she could give comfort or advice.” Up to this point in Emma’s charitable excursion, Austen has been quite serious in her descriptions. Only as Emma and Harriet begin to leave the scene does irony creep in. Emma tells Harriet, “These are the sights, Harriet, to do one good. How trifling they make every thing else appear!” This is just the way she should feel—a large part of the value of going to visit the poor, as we have seen, resides in the moral improvement to the benefactor of the act of benevolence. But although Emma, and then Harriet echoing her, mouths the correct sentiments, neither of them is serious enough to experience the appropriate feelings properly. Emma says, “I feel now as if I could think of nothing but these poor creatures all the rest of the day; and yet, who can say how soon it may all vanish from my mind?” and Harriet responds, “Very true. . . . Poor creatures! one can think of nothing else.” Just after Emma and Harriet have these fine thoughts, the girls take a bend in the road and catch sight of Mr. Elton, who at that point in the novel still is the object of romantic interest for both of them. Emma, with something of an admirable perspective on her own feelings, comments that the philosophical depth of their benevolent adventure has not lasted very long at all: “Ah! Harriet . . . I hope it may be allowed that if 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


Emma

Reading Jane Austen

compassion has produced exertion and relief to the sufferers, it has done all that is truly important. If we feel for the wretched, enough to do all we can for them, the rest is empty sympathy, only distressing to ourselves.” Only because Mr. Elton had been on his way to visit this same poor family is the subject not immediately forgotten, but now, as he changes course to walk with the girls, it becomes a topic for easy conversation. Emma, in fact, sees this shared topic as something of an aphrodisiac: “To fall on with each other on such an errand as this, . . . to meet in a charitable scheme; this will bring a great increase of love on each side.” And so we quickly have slipped away from the deep importance of the benevolent act for both benefactor and object. Emma here has acted and felt precisely as a woman of her station should, except, perhaps, as she herself notices, in terms of how long the effects of her own observation last. Emma tries to let Mr. Elton and Harriet go on a few steps ahead of her, on the pretense that she needs to adjust her boot. Emma is overtaken by a child coming from the poor cottage, “setting out, according to orders, with her pitcher, to fetch broth from Hartfield” (58). Buried as it is in the middle of the paragraph, Emma’s encounter with the child is not emphasized by Austen except as a means of keeping Emma back a few steps from her friends. The child’s mission, to fetch broth from Emma’s house, for Austen simply is a realistic detail that does not require any comment. The modern reader might be struck by the fact that the child is going to Hartfield for a pitcher of broth, i.e., cooking water! But here too Austen precisely reflects the ethos of her class. Let us return to Hannah More, specifically to one of the earliest stories in the Cheap Repository Tracts, “The Way to Plenty; or the Second Part of Tom White. Written in 1795, the Year of Scarcity.” In this story, Tom White is a wealthy farmer and leader of the community. The focus of the story is the way that rich and poor should interact with each other in times of difficulty for the poor. Mrs. White is portrayed as a great benefactress of the poor, teaching them, for example, how to make nourishing meals for almost no money. In terms of direct aid to these poor people in this time of difficulty, “Mrs. White was so considerate, that just at that time she lessened the number of her 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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hogs, that she might have more whey and skim-milk to assist poor families; nay, I have known her to live on boiled meat for a long while together, in a sickly season, because the pot liquor made such a supply of broth for the sick poor.”2 Austen, similarly, makes no suggestion that Emma’s offer of broth is not adequate: actually, Emma’s offer for the poor lowclass family is so normal that it requires no comment. We should notice in this context that for Austen there is a totally different scale of charity for those who are low-class and those who are of the gentle classes but do not have money. To the Bates women, with no particular occasion to warrant her generosity, Emma sends a full hindquarter of a recently slaughtered pig. As we have noted repeatedly in surveying Austen’s novels, social status is determined by the crossing point on a grid of wealth and class. Those who are well bred but have slipped down the scale because of lack of money like the Bates women or Jane Fairfax must be treated by people of Emma’s standing with even more care than those who are her equal. Emma does not like to visit Mrs. and Miss Bates because she finds them boring. But in not paying them the proper respect she is much in the wrong, just because their social position is so fragile. The same is true of Jane Fairfax—the care that should be taken in social intercourse with her as a member of the Bates family is entirely different from the kind of status she automatically had as part of Colonel Campbell’s family, although of course as a person of breeding and intelligence she herself has not changed. These social responsibilities are referred to repeatedly in Emma. As are the other novels we have been talking about, Emma is a novel about morality, and in this context we might consider the incident at the Box Hill picnic as the most central of the book. For at Box Hill Emma makes the only really serious moral error she commits in the novel—her attack on Miss Bates is not remediable. And Mr. Knightley chastises her. The injustice Emma commits centers on class. We have in the Box Hill incident not only a microcosm of this novel but of the world of Austen’s novels. Emma and a large part of her circle set off for a lovely day of picnicking, but somehow the party grows quiet and rather boring. In an attempt to liven things up Frank Churchill makes up a 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


Emma

Reading Jane Austen

game, claiming it to be Emma’s invention. Miss Woodhouse, he announces, demands from each person one very clever thing, two moderately clever things, or three very dull ones. Miss Bates selfconsciously says that she herself is sure to say three dull things as soon as she opens her mouth, and Emma simply cannot resist this opening. “Ah! ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me— but you will be limited as to number—only three at once” (243). Miss Bates, whose kindness and good nature have been emphasized throughout the book, is not offended. Rather, in her gentle way, she reacts with shock and pain. “Ah!—well—to be sure. Yes, I see what she means,” she says, turning to Mr. Knightley, “and I will try to hold my tongue. I must make myself very disagreeable, or she would not have said such a thing to an old friend.” No one but Miss Bates seems to notice Emma’s hurtful comment, as the rest of the party goes on to play the game (or in Mr. and Mrs. Elton’s cases superciliously to refrain), but as the party breaks up, Mr. Knightley seeks out Emma. “Emma, I must once more speak to you as I have been used to do: a privilege rather endured than allowed, perhaps, but I must still use it. I cannot see you acting wrong, without a remonstrance. How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation?—Emma, I had not thought it possible” (245). He is horrified at Emma’s misbehavior; Emma tries to laugh off her callousness by insisting that Miss Bates did not even understand her comment, but Knightley insists that Miss Bates not only understood, but spoke of the comment to him— not with anger, of course, but with “candour and generosity. I wish you could have heard her honouring your forbearance in being able to pay her such attentions, as she was for ever receiving from yourself and your father, when her society must be so irksome.” Emma tries to defend herself: “I know there is not a better creature in the world: but you must allow, that what is good and what is ridiculous are most unfortunately blended in her” (246), and this brings Knightley to the point; they are blended, he says, and “were she prosperous, I could allow much for the occasional prevalence of the ridiculous over the good. Were she a woman of fortune, I would leave every harmless absurdity to take its chance, I would not quarrel with you for any liberties of manner. Were 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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she your equal in situation—but, Emma, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done indeed!” Emma’s moral fault is directly connected to her social position relative to Miss Bates. It is because Emma and Miss Bates are of the same class (daughters of gentlemen) yet so far removed in fortune that Emma must be especially careful to protect her. Knightley’s rebuke is very specific in its terms. Just as part of the duty of a woman of Emma’s social position is to encourage the poor with good advice and a pitcher of broth, it is part of her duty to be sensitive to the nuances of social vulnerability among her friends and acquaintances in her own class. The failure to have such sensitivity is a large part of Mrs. Elton’s character, especially when she pushes Jane Fairfax to accept a position as governess—we certainly do not expect it from Emma. And this is part of Austen’s brilliance as an artist, for although we do not expect it, suddenly, in a careless moment such as any of us might experience, it is there. And Emma herself, having her fault made clear to her by Knightley, is mortified when she understands her own callousness. At the center of the novel there is very little feeling that life can be dangerous, that one who is living a comfortable, privileged life suddenly can fall into a different life entirely. The kind of vulnerability shown by Anne Elliot in Persuasion is not a major fulcrum in Emma; we are never afraid for the heroine Emma. But on the outer edge of the novel a chasm lurks that gives depth to the utter security of the life of someone like Emma. Miss Bates’ position in society is relatively secure only because of the kindness of her neighbors (a safety net that in the Box Hill incident Emma so egregiously threatens), but Miss Fairfax, not woven into the social fabric at the many points of social contact that help to secure Miss Bates, is much more at risk. Because she is young, without financial resources (not even in the minimal amounts that keep the Bates ladies afloat), and because she is not part of the community as they are, her entire existence wobbles on the hope of a marriage to someone who can support her. As Emma notes with more discernment than she usually shows, Jane’s vulnerability rests entirely 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


Emma

Reading Jane Austen

on her unprotected social status: she is without funds to support her and, as a woman, she has few options to earn money. Her position in society is not based on personal attributes such as good character, education, or even physical beauty and social charm, all of which she has in abundance; it rests solely on her lack of means and her unmarried state. When Frank runs off from Highbury back to Mrs. Churchill, Emma ponders the difference in the status of Mrs. Churchill and Jane Fairfax. “The contrast between Mrs. Churchill’s importance in the world, and Jane Fairfax’s, struck her; one was every thing, the other nothing—and she sat musing on the difference of woman’s destiny” (252). Jane deserves respect and compassion because she is a member of the gentle classes, but without the status of either wealth or a good marriage—which of course would bring her wealth—she inevitably must fall out of her class into a lower social status. Given the very limited number of options open to her, she inevitably will become a governess, as she puts it, a slave of the mind. But again we need to be careful not to misread these truths as a commentary on the need for more equality among the classes, for Austen never intimates that class does not matter. In fact, her emphasis throughout her works, and repeatedly in Emma, is that class distinctions must be respected.3 As Frank says when he is arranging the ball, people can be brought together for a party, and then each will return to his proper place the next morning. With the comment about Mrs. Churchill, Austen is not suggesting that Jane is socially the equal of Mrs. Churchill, for Jane has no support. Mrs. Churchill herself earlier in the book has precisely been pinned on the social chart by Mr. Weston. Her pride, he rather acerbically notes, “is arrogance and insolence! . . . [S]he has out-Churchill’d them all in high and mighty claims: but in herself, I assure you, she is an upstart” (203). An upstart she may be, but her money trumps her lineage. Emma’s argument throughout the book in support of her pretension for Harriet to a marriage higher than Robert Martin has been that Harriet must be the daughter of a gentleman; Knightley has argued all along that Emma’s assumption simply has no evidence to support it. When at the end of the novel we find out that Harriet is the daughter of a tradesman, everything about her 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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was most joyful, and every day was giving [Emma] fresh reason for thinking so. —Harriet’s parentage became known. She proved to be the daughter of a tradesman, rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been her’s, and decent enough to have always wished for concealment. —Such was the blood of gentility which Emma had formerly been so ready to vouch for! —It was likely to be as untainted, perhaps, as the blood of many a gentleman: but what a connexion had she been preparing for Mr. Knightley—or for the Churchills—or even for Mr. Elton! —The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed. (317)

Austen is not being ironic. No matter how worthy Robert Martin is, no matter how much the two lovers may be compatible and happy with each other, a significant part of Austen’s happy ending is that Harriet and Robert Martin indeed are well matched in social rank. Even Knightley, who has championed Robert Martin’s personal worth at every turn, is acutely aware of Martin’s precise social position. When Knightley tells Emma about Harriet’s engagement, he thinks that Emma still is disturbed by Robert Martin’s social standing, and Knightley commiserates with her perceived anxiety. “His situation is an evil—but you must consider it as what satisfies your friend. . . . As far as the man is concerned, you could not wish your friend in better hands. His rank in society I would alter if I could; which is saying a great deal I assure you, Emma. —You laugh at me about William Larkins; but I could quite as ill spare Robert Martin” (311). These are very significant comments, especially as they come from Knightley. He wishes for Emma’s sake, and for Harriet’s, that Robert Martin had a higher social rank, because social rank is important (that is why it is so satisfying when we learn that Harriet’s father is in a moderate level of commerce and that she in fact is not marrying down). But we must pay attention to the latter part of Knightley’s comment as well: if he could, he would raise Robert Martin, but such a change indeed would be a loss 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


clicks firmly into place, and her match with Robert Martin takes on an assured appropriateness that it did not have before the revelation. Harriet’s engagement

Reading Jane Austen

to Knightley himself. He needs Robert Martin just where he is; Robert Martin as a business associate and even a friend—across the class distinction—has a significant place in the working of the larger social structure. This is a tremendously important idea among those in the gentle classes: everyone has a useful place in society, from the poor to whom Emma brings her charity and about whom Wordsworth writes glowing descriptions, up through the various classes. Each class must know its place and be happy to stay within its boundaries. The exception to this set of static relationships is the slow movement of the successful commercial or professional classes into the landed upper class as money translates into property. Still, there is a distinction to be made between old money and new, as we saw most emphatically in Pride and Prejudice between the new money of the Bingleys and the true aristocracy of Darcy. Friendships like that between Knightley and Robert Martin exist on a level of respect and mutual usefulness, but they are not of the same intimacy as those among people of the same class. Austen, who throughout Emma has teased her reader with ironic comments about class, at the conclusion of the book, as she ties up the loose ends, makes it very clear that Harriet and Emma will not, and rightfully will not, share their lives from this point on. “Harriet, necessarily drawn away by her engagements with the Martins, was less and less at Hartfield; which was not to be regretted. —The intimacy between her and Emma must sink; their friendship must change into a calmer sort of goodwill; and, fortunately, what ought to be, and must be, seemed already beginning, and in the most gradual, natural manner” (317–18). For Austen, what Knightley calls “equality of situation” is central to a proper intimacy among friends and especially between spouses. Mr. Weston, in his first marriage to Miss Churchill, was not happy. But in the cluster of marriages that end Emma, each couple is precisely matched. When Knightley talks about how he envies Frank Churchill his incredible luck of finding so perfect a mate by the young age of twenty-three, he comments explicitly on their “equality of situation—I mean, as far as regards society, and all the habits and manners that are important; equality in every point but one” (281). That “one” is Frank’s ability to give Jane all 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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the advantages she has not had—“A man would always wish to give a woman a better home than the one he takes her from.” It had been precisely the absence of this ability that had soured Mr. Weston’s first marriage. Austen, typically of the conservative writers of her time—which is to say the majority of her contemporaries—has an unquestioned moral compass. She evinces no doubts about right and wrong behavior, and her readers, if not her characters, always know what the standard of good behavior is. That assurance is what allows Emma to work as a novel: we know, as Emma must learn, what is proper behavior. (This is the dynamic as well of a novel like Mansfield Park, where the reader understands the moral equivocations inherent in the putting on of the play, even if most of the actors do not.) It is the moral vision that holds Emma together, and that vision, as we have seen, is specifically that of the upper classes in England at late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. It is a vision that centers on class as a natural—God-given—arbiter of behavior. This moral level is most obviously emphasized in Mansfield Park and Persuasion, but it shapes all the novels. There is no question, there are no ambivalences, about moral behavior in Emma. People must be kind, and they must care for each other, and these requirements are rather easily satisfied because everyone is of the same background and therefore shares the same ideas of what is correct behavior. The lies, overt or implied, that Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax contrive in order to keep their engagement secret subverts the code of assumed openness among the members of the Woodhouse circle, and it is by far the worst transgression against the social code in the book. Fortunately, in the end, since no one actually is harmed by the subterfuge (Emma, for example, did not fall in love with Frank), it can be forgiven, although we should note that both Frank and Jane are acutely aware of their wrong-doing and apologize in elaborate penance for their transgression against the social code. One of the reasons that their dishonesty is disturbing is that the social code itself is so interwoven in every aspect of life in Emma that failing to meet its requirements threatens the trust that facilitates the ease with which the characters interact with each other. With the exception of the Eltons, who really are two of a kind, good will is the coin of 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


Emma

Reading Jane Austen

Austen’s realm. It is not religion only that shapes people’s behavior, although that is a large part of the foundation of the moral base, but a secular sharing of ties. That is why Emma’s ending, with Mr. Knightley going to live in Mr. Woodhouse’s home, is so right. It would be hurtful for Emma to move from Highwood, even if only to Donwell Abbey, and therefore it should not, and will not, be done. The charm of Austen’s novel, of her fictional world, is that the moral code is so warmly encompassing. Just as her characters do, we feel safe in Emma’s world.



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Persuasion “The advantage of maturity of mind, consciousness of right, and one independent fortune between them” PERSUASION is the darkest of Jane Austen’s novels; it begins and ends on a note of faint fear, as if the world of the character, whether Sir Walter Elliot or Anne Elliot herself, currently is in balance but may unbalance at any moment. And indeed in the course of the novel we see many lives topple from security and happiness to various states of distress, sometimes to recover, as Anne’s does, but always to remain changed. There is much loss in Persuasion, eight years gone in Anne’s and Frederick’s lives, several dead spouses, and less serious but nonetheless important, the loss of Sir Walter’s place at Kellynch Hall. Persuasion takes as its province people caught in the movements of a shifting, often frightening, society, unstable and therefore treacherous. Like other of Austen’s novels, Persuasion concerns itself with money and class, but here the social and economic counters are constantly shifting. The novel begins with Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch-hall happily surveying his favorite book, the Baronetage. His own entry is most beloved: “Walter Elliot, born March 1, 1760, married, July 15, 1784, Elizabeth, daughter of James Stevenson, Esq. of South Park, in the county of Gloucester; by which lady (who died 1800) he has issue Elizabeth, born June 1, 1785; Anne, born August 9, 1787; a still-born son, Nov. 5, 1789; Mary, born Nov. 20, 1791.”1 To the printed entry he has added the date of Mary’s marriage and the social coordinates of her husband, as well as the day of 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


CHAPTER 6

Reading Jane Austen

the month his wife had died. There is a dual sense here both of stasis and of unavoidable flux, for the printed notice is fixed, as if forever, but even though the reality seems unchanging, life and death continue to make emendations to the text. The reader’s attention is first brought to matters of rank in Persuasion, as opposed to money in, for example, Pride and Prejudice, but money almost immediately rings in as a central fact of life when it becomes clear that Sir Walter does not have the economic wherewithal to support his estate properly. The whole first chapter lays out the details of the family’s relationships in terms not only of external rank but of internal rankings within the family itself. Financial status is an important criterion in these sortings. Sir Walter’s fascination with his own lineage is presented as a character failing: “Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character; vanity of person and of situation” (47). The vanity of person—Sir Walter is good looking and is very aware of his own handsomeness—is silly in a man, especially not a very young man. By making the two vanities parallel, Austen emphasizes the ridiculousness of his pride in his rank. It will not be in Persuasion, as it was in Pride and Prejudice, that the fairy-tale prince comes with a pedigree. Sir Walter had the luck to attract a woman “of very superior character to any thing deserved by his own,” and Lady Elliot’s good sense had kept the household in order for the seventeen years of the marriage: her financial care had “promoted his real respectability” for all those years. When she died, she left three daughters, the oldest then sixteen and fourteen. This “silly, conceited father” luckily had a family friend, Lady Russell, who could supervise the girls. Lady Russell, a widow “of steady age and character, and extremely well provided for” (47), has had no wish to marry, and Sir Walter also has remained single for the thirteen years between his wife’s death and the period of the current story. We notice Austen’s careful insertion of the important phrase characterizing Lady Russell: she is “extremely well provided for.” In Austen novels, and Persuasion is no exception, how people are “provided for” is a central question. Certainly it is so here: Anne’s engagement to Frederick was cut off precisely because it was not clear that he could provide for her. And Austen never suggests 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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that, eight years later, he indeed would be an appropriate match for her had he not, in fact, made his fortune in the meantime. Sir Walter is not a good father to Anne. He respects his eldest child, but the other two children “were of very inferior value” (48). Anne, with “elegance of mind and sweetness of character,” is the most unimportant: “her word had no weight; her convenience was always to give way;—she was only Anne.” So Anne, though a sibling, is treated much like Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. All of the Elliots, except for Anne, value rank above everything else. Mary, having married into “an old country family of respectability and large fortune . . . had therefore given all the honour, and received none” (48). This is why it is so important that Elizabeth marry suitably, and who could be a more suitable spouse than her father’s heir, already inscribed in the Baronetcy, “Heir presumptive, William Walter Elliot, Esq.” But Mr. Elliot has other ideas, and in fact “had purchased independence for himself by uniting himself to a rich woman of inferior birth” (50). Sir Walter “had resented it,” and Elizabeth, “whose strong family pride could see only in him” a proper match for her because he is her “equal,” harbors resentment as well. Mr. Elliot’s marriage, having been childless, could have been forgiven, but Mr. Elliot has been speaking ill of the family as well. Thus he seems, finally, out of consideration as a match for Elizabeth. At the age of twenty-nine, having presided for thirteen years over her father’s house, Elizabeth is beginning seriously to consider that she must find a suitor. And in addition to Elizabeth’s unmarried state, there is a farther, even more immediate threat to the family’s place in society: “Her father was growing distressed for money” (51). The estate simply is not providing income equal to what the family is spending. Austen has visited this problem before, both in Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park; in the latter, we remember, Sir Thomas Bertram actually has to leave his family for a year to make the arduous trip to the West Indies to put his affairs in order there. And in that novel the eldest son, Tom, spends so carelessly that Sir Thomas is forced to sell the living he should be saving for the second son, Edmund, because Tom has brought the family finances to such a difficult state. Here in Persuasion it is Sir Walter 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


Persuasion

Reading Jane Austen

himself whose profligacy results in financial distress. While his wife was alive, her “method, moderation, and economy . . . had just kept him within his income.” It is worth pausing to note how directly Austen goes against the eighteenth-century cliché of the wife spending her husband into ruin. Here it is Sir Walter who has no self control; from the period of his wife’s death, “he had been constantly exceeding” his income: “It had not been possible for him to spend less; he had done nothing but what Sir Walter Elliot was imperiously called on to do; but blameless as he was, he was not only growing dreadfully in debt, but was hearing of it so often, that it became vain to attempt concealing it longer, even partially, from his daughter.” Sir Walter is a fool, of course, but his favorite daughter, Elizabeth, is not much better, for when called upon to retrench, after serious thought she suggests cutting off “some unnecessary charities” (52) and not refurnishing the living room. These means unfortunately will not solve the problem, for the Elliots must not “compromise their dignity” or relinquish “their comforts in a way not to be borne.” In other words, they simply perceive themselves as victims. Very little of Sir Walter’s estate is alienable—that is, he cannot sell even if he would. And he already has mortgaged “as far as he had the power.” They turn to their friends for advice, especially to Lady Russell, the same Lady Russell, we find out later, who convinced Anne to break her engagement to Frederick. So it is important that we stop here, as Austen herself does, to analyze the character of Lady Russell. Lady Russell is described as a thoughtful, good woman, “benevolent and charitable. . . . She had a cultivated mind, and was, generally speaking, rational and consistent” (53). But, like Sir Walter himself, she is overly impressed by rank. “She had prejudices on the side of ancestry; she had a value for rank and consequence, which blinded her a little to the faults of those who possessed them. Herself, the widow of only a knight, she gave the dignity of a baronet all its due.” She takes Sir Walter’s sensitivities very seriously. With Anne, Lady Russell lays out a scheme of economies that should make for “release from debt” and “justice and equity.” Relatively modest measures should allow all debts to be paid within seven years. Anne “considered it as an act of indispensable duty to clear away the claims of creditors.” 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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But none of the carefully thought out economies are to be tried: “What! Every comfort of life knocked off! Journeys, London, servants, horses, table,—contractions and restrictions every where. To live no longer with the decencies even of a private gentleman! No, he would sooner quit Kellynch-hall at once, than remain in it on such disgraceful terms” (54). Thus arises probably the most practical idea: to leave Kellynch-hall for a time, thus allowing the family to live more modestly without actually changing their life style. They decide to go to Bath; there it will be possible to “be important at comparatively little expense” (55). This is not Anne’s choice. She, like Austen, dislikes Bath and would prefer a small house in the country. As always in this novel, Anne’s wishes are not considered by her family. The decision, then, is made to rent Kellynch-hall—although this is to be kept quiet. The house certainly will not be advertised, but should an appropriate tenant hear of it accidentally . . . And indeed the availability of the house comes to the attention of Admiral Croft who seems to be, and as it turns out, in fact is, an ideal tenant. The coming together of renter and tenant is preceded by an extended passage that, in the context of Austen’s references to contemporary events, is one of the most explicit in the canon of her novels. Sir Walter’s lawyer, Mr. Shepherd, observes “that the present juncture is rich in our favour” (57). The juncture to which he alludes is the peace that followed Napoleon’s abdication in 1814. Allusions in Persuasion to the navy, and to the peace that brings the naval officers home, come throughout the book. Persuasion is the only one of Austen’s novels to have such frequent and direct references; the soldiers in Pride and Prejudice present an opportunity to get the wily Wickham into the plot, but Austen in that novel shows no interest in their lives as soldiers or their professional necessities. In Persuasion, however, the realities of the sailor’s life, both in terms of hardships and rewards, are explored in significant detail. Often, the emphasis in these discussions is on the financial realities of the naval officer’s life: in other words, on the navy as profession. Mr. Shepherd continues, “This peace will be turning all our rich Navy Officers ashore. They will all be wanting a home.” This is a good time, then, for Sir Walter to be looking for a responsible tenant. Indeed, “Many a noble fortune has been made during 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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the war.”2 Austen, perhaps thinking of her own brothers, puts significant words of praise for these men into the novel in Anne’s comment that “the navy, I think, who have done so much for us, have at least an equal claim with any other set of men, for all the comforts and all the privileges which any home can give. Sailors work hard enough for their comforts, we must all allow” (59). Sir Walter, however, concerned as always with hereditary rank, dislikes the navy because it allows men to rise by talent—and even in some cases allows such men to command others whose pedigree is higher than their officers’. Admiral Croft and his wife, who rent Kellynch-hall, are in fact suitable by Sir Walter’s standards, for in addition to the admiral’s naval qualifications, he is “of a gentleman’s family” (61), as Sir Walter is assured by Mr. Shepherd. Anne adds, “He is a rear admiral of the White. He was in the Trafalgar action, and has been in the East Indies since; he has been stationed there, I believe, several years” (61–62). Again, we should note the specifics of Austen’s references. The three main units into which the navy was divided were the Red, White, and Blue. The Battle of Trafalgar, of course, was the great British naval victory that essentially neutralized the French fleet. The references to social rank come one after the other in this chapter, so that the reader always is aware of the social grid— even if most of the comments come from Sir Walter, clearly the stupidest and most vain character in the novel, they still call our attention to the social hierarchy. Admiral Croft, it turns out, is the brother of Mrs. Wentworth, the wife of Frederick’s brother. Mr. Shepherd, trying to recall the name, alludes to the “gentleman who did live amongst us once” (62); Sir Walter cannot imagine who he means. When Anne recalls the name for them, Sir Walter answers “Wentworth? Oh! ay, Wentworth, the curate of Monkford. You misled me by the term gentleman. I thought you were speaking of some man of property: Mr. Wentworth was nobody, I remember; quite unconnected” (63). Admiral Croft, on the other hand, falls precisely where he ought on the social grid in order for him to be a perfect tenant for Sir Walter. He has some social standing in terms of his professional achievement, but an admiral, while he “speaks his own consequence . . . at the same time, can 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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never make a baronet look small. In all their dealings and intercourse, Sir Walter Elliot must ever have the precedence” (64). This discussion of money and rank precedes and colors the chapter devoted entirely to the story of Anne’s relationship with Frederick. Frederick Wentworth at the time Anne first met him was a young officer, recently promoted to commander, who came into her neighborhood to stay with his brother for some months until he was appointed to a ship. As a commander, Frederick could captain small ships, and thus begin to demonstrate his talents as well as to claim prize money. But getting a ship could take time, especially if the man did not have some recommendation from influential family or friends. We remember this theme of “interest” from Mansfield Park and the efforts of Lord Bertram on behalf of so many in his circle. Frederick, without such influence, can expect to wait longer than someone who has “friends.” He is everything attractive to a young woman: “a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit and brilliancy” (65). Anne is “an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling.” Once acquainted, they were “rapidly and deeply in love,” and soon they are most happily engaged. But Sir Walter and Lady Russell are not happy with this match for Anne. Sir Walter finds it a “very degrading alliance,” and Lady Russell sees it “as a most unfortunate one.” Lady Russell is wrong, but Anne allows herself to be persuaded to break off the engagement, and even years later, when she and Frederick finally get together again, Anne insists that she had no choice but to honor the wishes of Lady Russell. Lady Russell essentially has taken the place of a mother for Anne, and so Lady Russell has a moral influence over her. “Lady Russell, whom she had always loved and relied on, could not, with such steadiness of opinion, and such tenderness of manner, be continually advising her in vain” (66–67). The argument against Frederick is entirely economic: “Captain Wentworth had no fortune. He had been lucky in his profession, but spending freely, what had come freely, had realized nothing.” He has hopes; he has confidence in his own talents and his own good luck and is sure “that he should soon be rich,” that he soon would have a ship and that that “would lead to everything he wanted. He had always been lucky; he knew he 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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should still be so.” His self-confidence and his fearlessness signal danger to Lady Russell, and Anne finally is convinced that to take Frederick would be to do him a disservice: she believes herself to be “prudent, and self-denying, principally for his advantage” (67). Lest the financial focus be in any doubt, Austen tells us that Anne indeed had had another offer of marriage, “and Lady Russell had lamented her refusal.” Who is this young man? “Charles Musgrove was the eldest son of a man, whose landed property and general importance, were second in that country, only to Sir Walter’s, and of good character and appearance.” Charles Musgrove is suitable because of his financial status and his class: the personal characteristics come as an afterthought. One of the most touching passages in the novel is the paragraph in which we are given Anne’s thoughts on what had happened between her and Frederick seven years earlier. She thinks about whether or not she had acted appropriately, and she feels that although she cannot blame Lady Russell for her advice, if some young person were to come to Anne herself in such a situation, Anne would give different guidance. “She was persuaded that under every disadvantage of disapprobation at home, and every anxiety attending his profession, all their probable fears, delays and disappointments, she should yet have been a happier woman in maintaining the engagement, than she had been in the sacrifice of it; and this, she fully believed, had the usual share, had even more than a usual share of all such solicitudes and suspense been theirs” (68). But Anne’s musings do not stop there, for the sentence continues, “without reference to the actual results of their case, which, as it happened, would have bestowed earlier prosperity than could be reasonably calculated on.” The passage goes on. All his sanguine expectations, all his confidence had been justified. His genius and ardour had seemed to foresee and to command his prosperous path. He had, very soon after their engagement ceased, got employ; and all that he had told her would follow, had taken place. He had distinguished himself . . . and must now, by successive captures, have made a handsome fortune. She had only navy lists and newspapers for her authority, but she could not doubt his



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It is, inevitably, this last bit that makes Anne’s musing so poignant. Frederick indeed did become rich. Everything would have been alright. So even here, in this passage that retraces feelings, misperceptions, love—the circle comes round to money. One cannot help but feel that Anne might well find her early decision easier to accept had Captain Wentworth in fact turned out to be the unsuccessful man whom Lady Russell had predicted rather than the gallant man of wealth who reenters Anne’s life seven years after she had ended their engagement. When the rest of the family moves to Bath, Anne goes to stay with her sister Mary at Uppercross Cottage. Anne dislikes cities, and she has no desire at all to remove to Bath; her sister Mary, bored and spoiled, wants Anne to keep her company. Anne, “glad to be thought of some use, glad to have any thing marked out as a duty, and certainly not sorry to have the scene of it in the country, and her own dear country, readily agreed to stay” (72). It is determined that Anne will spend two months with Mary: “She had no dread of these two months. Mary was not so repulsive and unsisterly as Elizabeth” (80). This is quite strong language; it represents in yet another way what seems an acerbity rather unique to Persuasion among Austen’s novels, almost a lack of patience with the stupidities and meannesses of flawed social, especially familial, relationships. Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice was silly, but Austen would not have used a word like repulsive to describe her; even Lady Catherine de Bourgh in that novel, certainly a woman of little human value, does not call up such an epithet. There are many aspects of Uppercross and the relationships there which carry sadness. There is a strong sense of mortality in Persuasion which has not been obvious in earlier Austen novels. Things change; people change. People age, they decay, they get sick, they even die. The interlude at Uppercross begins not with a reference to a person, but with a description of the village itself. The village has been evolving—it is difficult to say whether the changes are for better or worse: things are just different, and 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


being rich;—and, in favour of his constancy, she had no reason to believe him married.

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Uppercross was a moderate-sized village, which a few years back had been completely in the old English style; containing only two houses superior in appearance to those of the yeomen and labourers,—the mansion of the ’squire, with its high walls, great gates, and old trees, substantial and unmodernized—and the compact, tight parsonage, enclosed in its own neat garden, with a vine and a pear-tree trained round its casements; but upon the marriage of the young ’squire, it had received the improvement of a farmhouse elevated into a cottage for his residence; and Uppercross Cottage, with its veranda, French windows, and other prettinesses, was quite as likely to catch the traveller’s eye, as the more consistent and considerable aspect and premises of the Great House, about a quarter of a mile farther on. (74)

Austen is very specific here, I think, because she does not like such changes. The village, one feels, would be better off without the makeover, but perhaps not. . . . When she comes a few pages later to talk about the Musgroves, she makes the parallel between place and people explicit. “The Musgroves, like their houses, were in a state of alteration, perhaps of improvement. The father and mother were in the old English style, and the young people in the new” (77–78). It is not to say whether the change, again, is for better or worse: it is simply there. Even the empty-headed young misses, like others in their thousands, are no better or worse than these many others; and yet—there is some sense after all that perhaps there was more to be respected in their less elegant elders. The theme of money, as we expect by now, runs through these descriptions of quiet country intercourse. Mary’s marriage, for example, could use a bit of a financial infusion: Mary and Charles Musgrove “were always perfectly agreed in the want of more money, and a strong inclination for a handsome present from his father” (80). These Musgroves, however, along with Charles’ parents, are much better off than their cousins down the road. Austen, as so often fine-tuning her economic distinctions (we remember the gradations in finances between Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park), supplies for contrast “a family of cousins 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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within a walk of Uppercross, in less affluent circumstances, who depended on the Musgroves for all their pleasures” (83). These cousins would come at any time to fill out an impromptu little ball, to dance, to listen to music. Whose music would they listen to? It was not Anne who would dance; it was Anne, “very much preferring the office of musician to a more active post, [who] played country dances to them by the hour together” (83). This should remind us of Fanny in Mansfield Park, who also serves others but is never, in the years of her growing up, at the center of things. Used to being outside the center of importance, Fanny feels discomfort when she is brought forward, as at the ball Sir Bertram arranges. Just so, and for much the same reason of family displacement, Anne is set to the fringes of the parties, and, like Fanny, finds her comfort there. For when she plays, unlike the Miss Musgroves, for example, she has “no fond parents to sit by and fancy themselves delighted. . . . She knew that when she played she was giving pleasure only to herself; but this was no new sensation: excepting one short period of her life, she had never, since the age of fourteen, never since the loss of her dear mother, known the happiness of being listened to, or encouraged by any just appreciation or real taste” (83). The images of the orphaned Anne are touching, but as anyone who has met Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice knows, Austen is not sentimental about the mother-child tie. Not only mothers can be idiotic; children can be rather useless too, and Austen is quite politically incorrect enough to say so. One of the most delicious passages in Persuasion details the sadly comic story of “poor Richard” Musgrove, who had served for some period under Captain Wentworth but, alas, had not returned to his family after the war. He is sentimentally missed by his doting mother now that he is dead, for the Musgroves had had “the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year” (86). Austen explains acerbically that the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; . . . that he had been sent to sea, because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he



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deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross, two years before. He had, in fact, though his sisters were now doing all they could for him, by calling him “poor Richard,” been nothing better than a thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove, who had never done any thing to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name, living or dead.

The filial tie, easy enough to celebrate, especially in the absence of a most forgettable object, is deconstructed to its bones here. There is an extraordinary clarity about what constitutes the family relationship—at least in cases where the people, or at least one of those involved, simply are not worth having—and what Austen finds is an empty space demarcated by social forms. We can go back to the respect that Fanny in Mansfield Park gives to the horrid Mrs. Norris for another example of this sort of authorial clarity unclouded by any of the normal social platitudes. Sometimes in what is almost a throwaway description (the comments about Dick Musgrove and his mourning mother in no way advance the plot) Austen can be just magnificent. When we do return to the plot, Anne actually meets Frederick again after their eight-year separation, and we learn the details of how that separation came about. The meeting is so brief as almost not to have happened; a quick nod, little more than an acknowledgment of Anne’s presence, and Frederick is off with the others to go hunting. Anne tries to reason with herself. All must have changed: eight years must have altered everything. “How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals,—all, all must be comprised in it; and oblivion of the past—how natural, how certain too! It included nearly a third of her own life” (94). But feelings do not necessarily adhere to the lines of reason. “Alas! with all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.” If the novel talks much about change, it also talks much about feelings and values that are changeless. Anne’s “retentive feelings” are quite the 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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same, it would seem, as they had been when she had, eight years before, made the decision to give up her love. Austen looks at the refractions of the different aspects of change, both physical and emotional, in this short but compelling scene. Frederick in an offhand comment has noted that Anne was “so altered he should not have known [her] again,” as Mary reports, but for Anne, Frederick has not “altered, or not for the worse.” Women change; they lose the bloom of youth, Austen reports repeatedly in Persuasion, while men grow more mature and attractive. Anne thinks “the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom3 had only given him a more glowing, manly open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages.” As the novel goes on, Anne regains her healthy glow, the implication being that a woman is more fragile emotionally than a man, perhaps because while Frederick has been making his way in the world, Fanny has had no recourse to resources beyond herself. Austen very early in the novel makes this point when she comments that a change of place and persons would have been very good for Anne, but no one had thought to take her out of the environment of her great disappointment. It is never entirely clear what Anne thinks about her decision to abandon her engagement to Frederick. She does regret it; explicitly she remarks that if any young person were to ask her advice in such a matter, she would be on the side of chancing the future with the loved one. Here she says, “She had used him ill; . . . she had shewn a feebleness of character . . . which his own decided, confident temper could not endure. She had given him up to oblige others. It had been the effect of over-persuasion. It had been weakness and timidity” (95). But later, when she and Frederick have come to an understanding, she explains that really she had had no choice but to abandon the relationship because Lady Russell had so advised her, and Lady Russell stands in place of her mother. Austen’s psychology here is subtle; Anne, having won her object, finds consolation for the eight lost years in a sense of moral duty. But there is a long bridge to be passed between the breakup and the new promise. From this point in the novel, more than a third into the book, Anne and Frederick are “repeatedly in the same circle” (96). At first they are “as strangers; nay worse 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement” (97). We have been aware of the outside world throughout the novel, especially in the references to Admiral Croft, and also in repeated allusions to making a profession in the navy. Since in Persuasion, as in all Austen novels, adequate financial means are an inherent aspect of the suitability of a mate, it is not surprising that Austen gives us an explicit record of Frederick’s career. The naturalness with which discussion of the specifics of naval engagement enter into country-house conversation—including the idea that the naval-list should be part of the library—emphasizes that in these circles naval matters, like clerical matters, would be of direct interest to people. That is, these are both careers that men of this class would follow. The clerical career, as we see in Mansfield Park, inherently focuses within the community, but the naval career brings the outside world well into the parlor. And so the Miss Musgroves, hoping to trace the career of Frederick Wentworth and to see at what point Frederick and their brother had intersected, go to fetch “the navy-list,—(their own navy list, the first that had ever been at Uppercross), and sitting down together to pore over it” (97) want to look for the ships Frederick had commanded. Austen, in Anne’s voice, gently makes fun of those who have little knowledge of how sailors live. Anne comments to herself on the general lack of knowledge about the lives of sailors; Austen herself, with brothers in the navy, knows that the life can be quite civilized, but Anne can remember when “she too had been accused of supposing sailors to be living on board without any thing to eat, or any cook to dress it if there were, or any servant to wait, or any knife and fork to use.” The girls trace Frederick’s career ship by ship, with Admiral Croft looking on benignly. There was the first ship, the Asp, an “old built sloop” (98) that was more or less at the end of its service but that provided Frederick with his first opportunity to make money. Without “interest,” that is, anyone to intercede in his behalf, Frederick considers himself fortunate to have had such a ship for his first command. He was lucky enough to have had good weather all the time he sailed in her, for he well knows that had he been caught in a serious storm, he “should only have been 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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a gallant Captain Wentworth, in a small paragraph at one corner of the newspapers; and being lost in only a sloop, nobody would have thought about me” (99). But indeed he had good weather, and his luck included the “taking privateers enough to be very entertaining”—to be financially very lucrative. To top things off, on the way home he captured just the French ship he had hoped for, and thus his time with the Asp gave Frederick a firm foundation in terms both of military and monetary success, which Austen makes clear are virtually synonymous for a naval officer like Frederick. We should note that Frederick himself talks about his naval adventures almost exclusively in terms of their financial outcomes for him. His next ship is the Laconia: “Ah! those were pleasant days when I had the Laconia! How fast I made money in her” (100). As the rest of this paragraph makes clear, it is the money, rather than, say, military glory, that is important: “A friend of mine, and I, had such a lovely cruise together off the Western Islands.—Poor Harville. . . . You know how much he wanted money—worse than myself. He had a wife.—Excellent fellow! I shall never forget his happiness. He felt it all, so much for her sake.—I wished for him again the next summer, when I had still the same luck in the Mediterranean.” The “luck” Frederick refers to is financial. For officers like Frederick, the navy is a business career almost like any other. There are a few other aspects of this relatively long conversation that we might also note. Here, as in Mansfield Park, the navy-lists are discussed often, certainly more often than the general newspapers; in light of the relative disinterest that Austen seems to manifest in the world beyond her characters’ daily lives (certainly his ships are part of Frederick’s daily life), this emphasis perhaps is not surprising. Also, we should remark the precision of Austen’s discussions of the ships and shipboard life. Frederick and Admiral Croft, for example, have a friendly argument about whether women should be on board ship. Frederick does not like the idea because it is “impossible . . . with all one’s efforts, and all one’s sacrifices, to make the accommodations on board, such as women ought to have” (101). And his sister responds “But I cannot believe it of you.—All idle refinement!— Women may be as comfortable on board, as in the best house in England. I believe I 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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have lived as much on board as most women, and I know nothing superior to the accommodations of a man of war. I declare I have not a comfort or an indulgence about me, even at Kellynch-hall . . . beyond what I always had in most of the ships I have lived in; and they have been five altogether” (102). The argument is that navy wives and their children need to have conveyance at times so that they may be with their husbands. Mrs. Croft is irritated by Frederick’s chivalry: While we were together, you know, there was nothing to be feared. Thank God! I have always been blessed with excellent health, and no climate disagrees with me. . . . The only time I ever really suffered in body or mind, the only time that I ever fancied myself unwell, or had any ideas of danger, was the winter that I passed by myself at Deal, when the Admiral (Captain Croft then) was in the North Seas. I lived in perpetual fright at that time, and had all manner of imaginary complaints from not knowing what to do with myself, or when I should hear from him next; but as long as we could be together, nothing ever ailed me, and I never met with the smallest inconvenience. (103-4)

The admiral comments that when Frederick “has got a wife, he will sing a different tune. When he is married, if we have the good luck to live to another war, we shall see him do as you and I, and a great many others, have done. We shall have him very thankful to any body that will bring him his wife.” It is that phrase “if we have the good luck to live to another war” that is so striking. Another war for a naval officer is not to be feared but to be welcomed, for only in wartime does the opportunity come to earn significant amounts of money. It is bounty that makes an officer wealthy. If we have been used to seeing little of the world outside of gentry England in Austen’s other novels, in Persuasion our picture enlarges extraordinarily, interestingly enough in the accounts not of the admiral but of Mrs. Croft who, “though many women have done more” (103), explains that “I have crossed the Atlantic four times, and have been once to the East Indies, and back again; and only once, besides being in different places about home—Cork, and Lisbon, and Gibraltar. But I never went beyond the Streights [sic]—and never was in the West Indies. We do not call Bermuda 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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or Bahama, you know, the West Indies.” And, she remarks, “the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship.”4 As long as she could be with her husband, nothing disturbed her, for luckily her health is such that no climate disorders her. Health and climate, then, are to be considered; war, in its bloody aspect, enters into the equation of comfort not at all. Throughout this long passage from its various perspectives, the navy is simply a profession like any other—or almost. When Mrs. Musgrove tells Mrs. Croft that she quite understands her—when Mr. Musgrove attends the assizes, she is “so glad when they are over, and he is safe back again” (104), a dusting of irony brings a suggestion of real danger to all the foregoing conversation. There is little more than such an indirect reference to danger in all the passages having to do with the navy. Later on, when we meet Frederick’s friends and fellow officers, Captain Benwick and Captain Harville, it is true that we find Captain Harville “a little lame” and not looking well, but there is no detail to fill out our knowledge of how he became lame. The more serious injury seems to have been to Captain Benwick, and here we get quite a lot of detail. His loss involves death itself, and although there is no direct causal relationship, we are left with the feeling that the real tragedy lay in the postponement of his marriage due to his having to await promotion. During the period of “a year or two waiting for fortune and promotion” (126), his fiancée, Fanny Harville, had died. “Fortune came, his prize-money as lieutenant being great,—promotion, too, came at last; but Fanny Harville did not live to know it. She had died the preceding summer, while he was at sea.” This passage is quite moving, but the tragedy comes mainly from the irony that decrees that the young couple indeed were given the preferment and wealth that they needed— but Fanny already was dead. The only tragedy that we see, then, in this novel that talks so much about military affairs, is one of a civilian death that takes place while the lovers are waiting for promotion. The world intrudes irrevocably into the romance, but it is not a military death that Austen gives us; certainly the one military death that we do hear of, “unprofitable Dick Musgrove,” is carefully delimited so as to carry no pathos at all. The emphasis in the story of Captain Benwick, then, as with Frederick, is 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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on the military as career, a career that sometimes, unfortunately, can progress too slowly. It is interesting that there are indeed a number of illnesses, a serious accident, and deaths in the novel, but most victims are civilian and female. In Persuasion it seems more dangerous by far to jump a stile than to take part in a naval engagement. This is perhaps Austen’s way of sanitizing her discussion of naval affairs, of keeping them in the same contexts of social affairs as the rest of the novel. This context is emphasized when the chapter devoted to Frederick’s naval career is followed by one devoted almost entirely to depiction of the civil social grid where the familiar themes of class and money are set against the courtship of Charles Hayter and Henrietta Musgrove. His mother and Mrs. Musgrove are sisters. They had each had money, but their marriages had made a material difference in their degree of consequence. Mr. Hayter had some property of his own, but it was insignificant compared with Mr. Musgrove’s; and while the Musgroves were in the first class of society in the country, the young Hayters would, from their parents’ inferior, retired, and unpolished way of living, and their own defective education, have been hardly in any class at all, but for their connexion with Uppercross; this eldest son of course excepted, who had chosen to be a scholar and a gentleman, and who was very superior in cultivation and manners to all the rest. (106)

Austen’s differentiation of the social standing of the two families could not be more precise if she were describing military ranks. The two families get along perfectly well, and although Charles would not be “a great match for her,” it is fine with her family if Henrietta chooses Charles. We should note yet another example of cousins courting. It is not only the elder set who are aware of comparative fortunes, but the young people themselves. Charles, Henrietta’s brother, likes Captain Wentworth, and he is quite aware of Frederick’s financial situation, particularly when he, Anne, and Mary discuss which of the Musgrove girls, Henrietta or Louisa, is more likely to be Frederick’s choice. “Charles ‘had never seen a pleasanter man in his life; and from what he had once heard Captain Wentworth himself say, was very sure that he had not made less than twenty thousand pounds by the war. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Here was a fortune at once; besides which, there would be the chance of what might be done in any future war; and he was sure Captain Wentworth was as likely a man to distinguish himself as any officer in the navy. Oh! it would be a capital match for either of his sisters’” (107). The reality of the class gradations is superbly etched. And we should be aware that while this commentary is couched in informal chat, it is most serious matter for the participants. Austen analyzes in equal detail the way “fortune” is to be earned in the navy, that is, in a profession, and “earned” via inheritance. The social and monetary grid is carefully ruled: Austen gives us precise parameters of “interest,” of how one gets on in the world, and of property. We see these lines drawn in the discussion between Mary and her husband about a potential match between Henrietta and Charles Hayter. “You know . . . I cannot think him at all a fit match for Henrietta; and considering the alliances which the Musgroves have made, she has no right to throw herself away. I do not think any young woman has a right to make a choice that may be disagreeable and inconvenient to the principle part of her family, and be giving bad connections to those who have not been used to them. And, pray, who is Charles Hayter? Nothing but a country curate. A most improper match for Miss Musgrove, of Uppercross” (108). But she finds no agreement, for her husband, like Charles Hayter, “was an eldest son, and he saw things as an eldest son himself.” His argument is based entirely on the financial potential Charles has in terms of his likelihood of inheriting property from various offshoots of the family. The emphasis here is on property, not money in itself. Charles has a very fair chance, through the Spicers, of getting something from the Bishop in the course of a year or two; and you will please to remember, that he is the eldest son; whenever my uncle dies, he steps into a very pretty property. The estate at Winthrop is not less than two hundred and fifty acres, besides the farm near Taunton, which is some of the best land in the country. . . . [W]henever Winthrop comes into his hands, he will make a different sort of place of it[,] . . . and with that property, he will never be a contemptible man.



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Charles Hayter and Frederick Wentworth are both fine matches, each with his own cache of wealth. For the first time in an Austen novel old wealth, or wealth tied to property, is not valued more highly than earned wealth. This shift of perspective is an extraordinary change for Austen. To measure just how extraordinary a change, we can look back to Pride and Prejudice and Emma, in each of which a large part of the hero’s charm, indeed of his characterization, is the landed property that largely defines him. In Pride and Prejudice Mr. Gardiner is a fine man, but he could not possibly be the equal of Mr. Darcy because his maintenance comes from a profession, not from property. And Bingley in that novel, we remember, only becomes fully vested in society when he buys, rather than rents, his estate. This passage in Persuasion, then, with the relative merits of Charles Hayter and Frederick Wentworth coming up quite equal, is pivotal in Austen’s development, and marks yet another of the important ways in which the perspectives of Persuasion differ from those of the novels that precede it. The introduction of Mr. Elliot into the family, and especially the attempt of the Walter Elliots to be introduced into the Dalrymple family, emphasize the hollowness of rank and wealth when they are not accompanied by inherent personal value. Both Mr. Elliot and the Dalrymples have only their position in society to give them status. To take Mr. Elliot first, he had cut off relations with the Walter Elliot family at his marriage. Now the family learns the excuse: his wife, though not a woman of rank, had lots of money. Sir Walter is quite ready to let Mr. Elliot off the hook. Sir Walter is a fool, we know; Austen makes it quite clear that there is no extenuation to be found in these attempts to explain away the years-long rudeness. When it later turns out that Mr. Elliot is quite a vile person, the revelations about his character only reinforce Austen’s ironic view of Sir Walter. But it is in Sir Walter’s pursuit of the Dowager Viscountess Dalrymple that he most obviously makes a total fool of himself. Austen comments gently that “Anne had never seen her father and sister before in contact with nobility, and she must acknowledge herself disappointed. She had hoped better things from their high ideas of their own situation in life, and was reduced to form 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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a wish she had never foreseen—a wish that they had more pride” (169). The families had been in contact in earlier years, but when Lord Dalrymple died, Sir Walter had been ill and unable to send condolences. Intercourse between the families ceased. But now Sir Walter is desperate to renew the acquaintance, and he writes a groveling letter to the Dowager Viscountess, who answers with a brief acknowledgment—and so “the sweets began” (170). But Lady Dalrymple and her daughter have absolutely no personal attributes to commend them, “no superiority of manner, accomplishment, or understanding” (171). Only Anne is disgusted by her family’s pursuit of these relations. Even Lady Russell agrees that “it was an acquaintance worth having.” Unlike the comment in Emma about everyone rejoining his own place after a ball, in Persuasion Austen rejects rigid class lines, emphasizing instead the value of the individual. Anne, discussing the new connection with Mr. Elliot, insists that “My idea of good company . . . is the company of well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation.” The exposition here on the emptiness of rank is reinforced in the next chapter when Anne, absenting herself from the upperclass circles, prefers to spend time with her friend Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Smith is a school friend of Anne’s. She had been particularly kind to Anne when, at the age of fourteen, Anne had been sent away to school still freshly grieving the death of her mother. Miss Hamilton, three years older than Anne, “had been useful and good to her in a way which had considerably lessened her misery” (173). That description of “useful,” in the context of Austen’s discussion of other useful members of society—the naval officers—needs to be noted. Miss Hamilton had married a man of fortune, but now she is “a widow, and poor. Her husband had been extravagant; and at his death, about two years before, had left his affairs dreadfully involved.” In addition to her financial problems, Mrs. Smith has had a severe fever which “had made her for the present a cripple.” Sick and without money, she is “of course almost excluded from society.” Anne, hearing about the situation of her old friend from her former governess, sets off as soon as she can to pay a visit. The twelve years since the two have met inevitably have brought great changes. Austen’s themes of loss and of change are encapsulated in 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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her description of the meeting. Anne had been a “silent, unformed girl of fifteen” (174); she is now “an elegant little woman of seven and twenty,” with “every beauty excepting bloom.” Everything is in order for Anne, yet of course something is missing. Mrs. Smith, who in earlier years had “all the glow of health and confidence of superiority,” has become “a poor, infirm, helpless widow.” And yet, in good upper-class conservative style, Mrs. Smith has no complaints; quite the contrary: “She had weathered [her awful situation] and it had done her good.” This is a familiar formula. Hannah More in her Cheap Repository Tracts talks often about adversity and how the muscularly moral person deals with it. In one of the most famous stories, “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain,” we meet a poor shepherd and his wife. The wife “is a very sickly woman,”5 whose health is not improved by the rain that leaks through the thatch of their cottage while she lies abed. But she has no complaints. Rather, she insists that she is multiply blessed. The shepherd finds her “not only the most tidy, notable woman on the plain . . . [but] the most contented, thankful Christian that I know.” Her illness, severe rheumatism, was “caught by going to work too soon after her lying-in.” She becomes paralyzed, losing all but the use of her hands. This is truly a blessing, as both she and her husband see it, for not even able to turn in her bed, she still can “contrive to patch a rag or two for her family. . . . She was always saying, had it not been for the great goodness of God, she might have had her hands lame as well as her feet, or the palsy instead of the rheumatism, and then she could have done nothing; but nobody had so many mercies as she had” (3:410). The tone of thankful resignation, of appreciation for the smallest alleviation of painful debilitation as a gift from a benevolent God, is part of the mind-set in these social circles. A letter from one of More’s correspondents could have served, and perhaps did, as the template for the shepherd’s analysis of the blessings of his wife’s situation. As we will see shortly, it could as well be the model for Mrs. Smith. The letter, from a Mr. Newton to More, dated December 30, 1790, recounts the last illness and the eventual death of his wife. Her illness lasted two years; after this time, she became almost incapable of eating, weakened significantly, and took to 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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her bed. She was “soon after, I suppose from some defect in the spine, deprived of all locomotive power. She could neither move herself, nor without the greatest difficulty be moved. . . . But the case was mingled with many merciful alleviations. Her patience was wonderful—her natural spirits as good as when she was in health. . . . When she could not move her body, she was thankful that she could move her hands. . . . And when I once said, ‘You are a great sufferer,’ she replied, ‘I do suffer, but not greatly’” (italics mine).6 Austen’s Mrs. Smith finds that her adversities—“she had caught cold on the journey [to Bath], and had hardly taken possession of her lodgings, before she was again confined to her bed, and suffering under severe and constant pain; and all this among strangers” (175)—had only “increased her comforts by making her feel herself to be in good hands.” Her nurse especially had proven to be a gem. Mrs. Smith tells Anne that the nurse “besides nursing me admirably, has really proved an invaluable acquaintance.—As soon as I could use my hands, she taught me to knit, which has been a great amusement; and she put me in the way of making these little thread-cases, pin-cushions and card-racks, which you always find me so busy about, and which supply me with the means of doing a little good to one or two very poor families in this neighbourhood ” (italics mine). The tone of cheerful resignation, the emphasis on the gift of the slightest ability to function, and the reference to the disadvantaged helping those even worse off, are all precisely representative of the ideals of Austen’s class. The clouds that seem to hover over the characters in Persuasion, especially over Anne, drift away in the last third of the book, oddly enough, as Anne gets to know better her old friend Mrs. Smith. At first we feel sorry for Mrs. Smith, a widow and an invalid at the age of thirty-one, but the presumably pathetic Mrs. Smith has so much strength of character that we, and Anne, hardly seem to have the right to pity her. The strength she has in her hands, as we have seen, she can use to help the poor in her neighborhood, and this work gives her the means to keep up at least her moral position in society. One of the most interesting aspects of Anne’s conversations with Mrs. Smith deals with class. Anne’s friendship with the impoverished Mrs. Smith in itself is meant to show the heroine’s lack of snobbery; even more is Anne democratic when 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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she agrees with her friend that Mrs. Smith’s caretaker, Nurse Rooke, is a worthwhile source of conversation. “Women of that class have great opportunities, and if they are intelligent may be well worth listening to” (176), Anne tells Mrs. Smith. Anne’s comment here about Nurse Rooke underscores Austen’s emphasis in this novel on individual, as opposed to class, worthiness. Anne’s family, when they learn about Mrs. Smith, find Anne’s attention to her ridiculous, and this is yet another of Austen’s ways of showing the lack of character of Sir Walter and those like him. Lady Russell, unlike Sir Walter, approves of Anne’s relationship with Mrs. Smith, thus showing that, although Lady Russell certainly was wrong about Frederick, she has an understanding that is open to the individual worth of a person—and therefore we can hope that she will accept Frederick now even if she did not do so before. But in the meantime Lady Russell has her sights set on Mr. Elliot for Anne, and she tries to interest Anne in Mr. Elliot as a potential suitor. Lady Russell points out that since Mr. Elliot will inherit Kellynch-hall, should Anne marry him, she would be mistress of the estate. And in a moment of wonderful psychological acuity, Austen tells us that Anne is very moved by the picture of herself “becoming what her mother had been” (180). In fact, “for a few moments her imagination and her heart were bewitched.” But then she remembers that the package includes Mr. Elliot, and under this circumstance even being mistress of Kellynch-hall loses its glow. We should remember that Captain Wentworth’s appearance in Bath is still a thing of the future, so Anne’s consideration of Mr. Elliot—brief as it is—is at least reasonable for the young, unattached woman. But Anne is not attracted to Mr. Elliot. It is not that she can find anything overtly wrong with Mr. Elliot’s character; she simply does not feel that she can trust him. And the devil is in the details, especially the details that would be recognizable to anyone of Austen’s class and background. It is telling for Anne, for example, “that there had been bad habits; that Sunday-travelling had been a common thing.” And Mr. Elliot’s character does not appeal to Anne in other ways: he is polished, discreet—“but he was not open.” He never acts without forethought; he is lacking in “warmth and enthusiasm.” Although Anne cannot trust 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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him, Mrs. Russell does. When later Anne learns more from Mrs. Smith about the true character of Mr. Elliot, we realize how good Anne’s instincts are. Lady Russell, on the other hand, although her motives are good, always in the matter of matches for Anne is wrong. Anne’s generosity not only in forgiving Lady Russell for convincing Anne to break off her engagement to Frederick, but her conviction in retrospect that she had had to accept Lady Russell’s intercession, is meant by Austen to seem warm and responsible. The Crofts arrive in Bath, and the tone of the novel changes. The remainder of the book is a fairy tale, a gentle quest in which the lovers finally truly and forever find each other. The last eighty or so pages of the novel are among the most charming that Austen wrote. The arrival of the Crofts is heralded in a letter that Mary writes to Anne, the same letter that brings the news that Louisa Musgrove is safely home—and engaged to Captain Benwick! Anne is delighted, for Louisa had been the most likely object for Captain Wentworth’s attentions. This unlikely pairing of the ebullient Louisa and the quiet, bookish Captain Benwick seems, somehow, to bode well for Anne. How well, we find out only later. The letter itself comes compliments of the Crofts, thus announcing their arrival in Bath. Anne gets to see them a good deal, and everything about them, especially their interactions as a married couple, delights her. In fact, Austen’s depiction of the Croft’s marriage is lovely, and it foreshadows the domestic delight awaiting another prospective naval pair, Anne and Frederick. The Crofts do everything together. They walk, they drive in their buggy, they socialize—and everything they do, because they are doing it together, is joyful. The Crofts have as much acquaintance in Bath as they could wish for, but they stick to their usual routine in spending as much time together as they can. Admiral Croft has been ordered to Bath to ward off illness. The Crofts “brought with them their country habit of being almost always together. He was ordered to walk, to keep off the gout, and Mrs. Croft seemed to go shares with him in every thing, and to walk for her life, to do him good” (186). Anne sees them out almost every morning. “Knowing their feelings as she did, it was a most 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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attractive picture of happiness to her. She always watched them as long as she could; delighted to fancy she understood what they might be talking of, as they walked along in happy independence, or equally delighted to see the Admiral’s hearty shake of the hand when he encountered an old friend, and observe their eagerness of conversation when occasionally forming into a little knot of the navy, Mrs. Croft looking as intelligent and keen as any of the officers around her” (187). Austen depicts two people not only in love, but capable of sharing everything, including the professional interests of the admiral. When Anne meets the admiral in the street one day without his wife, he walks Anne home, talking about acquaintances he sees along the way, but mostly about his dear wife who, unfortunately, is home with “a blister on one of her heels, as large as a three shilling piece” (188). He tells Anne how happy he and Mrs. Croft are in Bath: It suits us very well. We are always meeting with some old friend or other; the streets full of them every morning; sure to have plenty of chat; and then we get away from them all, and shut ourselves in our lodgings, and draw in our chairs, and are snug as if we were at Kellynch, ay, or as we used to be even at North Yarmouth and Deal. We do not like our lodgings here the worse, I can tell you, for putting us in mind of those we first had at North Yarmouth. The wind blows through one of the cupboards just in the same way.

The admiral’s speech presents a portrait of an ideal marriage. This emphasis on the closeness and warmth of the relationship between the successful military man and his wife is meant to show the human side of the military. Where one might expect coarseness or harshness, one finds precisely the opposite in the military man. Admiral Croft and his wife present a sweet counterpoint of mature marital felicity through the rest of the novel as Anne and Frederick work their way to each other. As Anne and Admiral Croft are walking across Bath discussing Frederick’s marked lack of response to the news of Louisa and Captain Benwick’s engagement, Frederick already is on his way 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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to Bath. And the fairy tale begins. The first time Anne sees Frederick, she hardly can control her responses. And when Frederick enters the same shop, he too is “struck and confused” (193) when he first sees Anne. He turns “quite red.” She, having had time to prepare for the meeting, has been able to overcome “All the overpowering, blinding, bewildering, first effects of strong surprise” (194). Still, her feelings are a wonderful mix of “agitation, pain, pleasure, a something between delight and misery.” The lovers, together for the first time since Louisa has been spoken for, not surprisingly are awkward. A couple of days go by before Anne gets to see Frederick again, for the Elliots must spend their evenings not in the theater or the public rooms, but in what Austen acerbically calls “the elegant stupidity of private parties” (197). When Frederick and Anne do meet, their conversation is about the time spent at Lyme, and especially of Louisa’s unfortunate accident, for which Frederick takes the responsibility. But for Louisa herself he seems to have no feelings, or, more explicitly, only a sense of wonder that Captain Benwick could find in her mind and character enough to draw him to her. Anne discerns in her conversation with Frederick all that she could hope for. His choice of subjects, his expressions, and still more his manner and look, had been such as she could see only in one light. His opinion of Louisa Musgrove’s inferiority, an opinion which he had seemed solicitous to give, his wonder at Captain Benwick, his feelings as to a first, strong attachment,—sentences begun which he could not finish—his half averted eyes, and more than half expressive glance,—all, all declared that he had a heart returning to her at last; that anger, resentment, avoidance, were no more; and that they were succeeded, not merely by friendship and regard, but by the tenderness of the past; yes, some share of the tenderness of the past. She could not contemplate the change as implying less.—He must love her. (202)

He must love her—she spends the first part of the performance where they have met in a daze of happiness. Yet Frederick does not return to her at any of the intermissions. Then a brief farewell at the end of the evening signals that there must still be some obstacles to the lovers getting together. Anne discerns that Frederick is 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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jealous of Mr. Elliot. “Jealousy of Mr. Elliot. . . . Could she have believed it a week ago—three hours ago! For a moment the gratification was exquisite” (207). But the problem remains of how to let Frederick know that his fears about a relationship between Mr. Elliot and Anne are misplaced. At this point Anne still thinks that Mr. Elliot’s intentions are honorable, and so she feels that she should be gentle with him. On the other hand, of course, the extraordinary wonderfulness of the beloved Captain Wentworth trumps all. In fact, as Anne tries to figure out how to deal with both her wanted and unwanted suitors, “Prettier musings of high-wrought love and eternal constancy, could never have passed along the streets of Bath, than Anne was sporting with from Camden-place to Westgate buildings. It was almost enough to spread purification and perfume all the way” (208). This description of Anne’s feelings is a rare instance of pure sweetness in an Austen text, for I think that there is no irony implied here. Anne has suffered many years to earn this moment of joy, and Austen gives it to her with an undelimited generosity generally rare in her writing. Anne’s current joy is earned in another way too, for it is a measure now of maturity and good sense. Frederick is, in fact, a model human being. His exemplary nature is underscored in the interview that follows immediately upon Anne’s musings when she meets once again with her friend Mrs. Smith, with the subject of their conversation the Mr. Elliot who seems to Anne’s friends so desirable a match for her. It is in some ways a rather strange conversation, for Mrs. Smith, under the misconception that Anne is likely to marry Mr. Elliot, praises him to her and wishes her happiness; when Anne makes it clear that she has no intention of pursuing the relationship with Mr. Elliot, Mrs. Smith tells her the sordid history of Mr. Elliot’s perfidy as she intimately knows it. Mr. Elliot, in fact, “is a man without heart or conscience; a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only of himself; who, for his own interest or ease, would be guilty of any cruelty, or any treachery, that could be perpetrated without risk of his general character. He has no feeling for others. Those whom he has been the chief cause of leading into ruin, he can neglect and desert without the smallest compunction. He is totally beyond the reach of any sentiment 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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of justice or compassion. Oh! he is black at heart, hollow and black!” (213). Mr. Elliot was a long-time friend of Mr. Smith, whose money he had no scruple in spending. Meanwhile, he had chosen to make his fortune by marrying a woman with significant resources—he marries “completely for money” a woman whose “father was a grazier, her grandfather had been a butcher . . . and not a difficulty or a scruple was there on his side, with respect to her birth. . . . His chance of the Kellynch estate was something, but all the honour of the family he held as cheap as dirt. I have often heard him declare, that if baronetcies were saleable, any body should have his for fifty pounds, arms and motto, name and livery included” (216). Mr. Elliot’s choice of wife is so low as to skirt parody. To marry a woman of such background (there is no suggestion of love) shows that Mr. Elliot has no standards at all. Taken together with his contempt for the honor of the family, and his contempt for the entire institution of aristocracy, Mr. Elliot’s actions and attitudes constitute a clear indictment of his character. It is important to emphasize how negative this history of Mr. Elliot is meant to be: Austen has some fun with Sir Walter and his fascination with the Baronetcy, but she does not degrade the concepts of class and aristocracy. Mr. Elliot’s lack of respect for the institutions that should order his society is a moral failing. Men of inherent worth like Captain Wentworth who make their fortunes by their own hands in socially acceptable professions such as the navy are one thing; a grazier’s daughter is quite another. In Persuasion a made fortune is certainly as good as an inherited one, but the man who makes his own way must begin from a decent level of society. This already is a democratization of Austen’s viewpoint—in Pride and Prejudice, for example, Mr. Darcy’s old money clearly is superior to Bingley’s new money—and it is quite as far as she is prepared to go. For Austen, when Mrs. Smith describes the father and grandfather of Mrs. Elliot by their jobs, no further comment is needed. Mr. Elliot’s disrespect for his own lineage, detailed in the same paragraph, underlines his perfidy. Mrs. Smith produces a letter Mr. Elliot had written to her husband. Its tone of contempt for family and class speak clearly of Mr. Elliot’s character failings: “At present, believe me, I have no need of your services, being in cash 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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again. Give me joy: I have got rid of Sir Walter and Miss. They are gone back to Kellynch, and almost made me swear to visit them this summer, but my first visit to Kellynch will be with a surveyor, to tell me how to bring it with best advantage to the hammer. . . . I wish I had any name but Elliot. I am sick of it” (217). Mr. Elliot, having at last secured a fortune for himself, still prefers to spend other people’s money, and he leads the Smiths into extravagances far beyond their means. When Mr. Smith dies, the full extent of the financial calamity becomes clear; only effective action in the case of some property Mr. Smith had in the West Indies can save the day. Mr. Elliot, the executor of the will, refuses to be bothered to act. Mrs. Smith, ill and helpless, cannot deal with the situation. Mrs. Smith’s problems are depicted as being almost entirely Mr. Elliot’s fault (Austen should attach some of the blame to the Smiths, but she does not). How could Mrs. Smith, then, have encouraged a marriage between her friend Anne and Mr. Elliot? She presumed it was too late to intervene by the time she and Anne again had become intimates, and she hoped that Anne’s character could call forth a better result than might otherwise be expected. It is a weak excuse and a failing in Austen’s moral exercise. But the reader is reassured that Anne’s choice of Captain Wentworth is the correct one. And now the way is open for the resolution of the fairy tale. The lovers meet casually in all sorts of social settings. At one point Captain Wentworth, supposedly writing something for Captain Harville, takes his courage rather literally in hand and slips a note to Anne telling her his feelings. Invited already to her father’s house that evening, he tells her that he awaits a sign from her of whether he is welcome or not. She, naturally, is overwrought—her friends think that she is ill and dispatch her home with Charles. They are overtaken by Captain Wentworth himself, and Charles, fortunately with business in the opposite end of town, leaves her to Frederick’s protection. In the course of this walk all the misperceptions and accidents of the intermediate years are dealt with, and by the time the walk is over, Anne and Frederick ecstatically are reconciled. As in all Jane Austen novels, however, the story is not quite over at this point, for the lovers must be carefully placed in the social 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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grid. Just as Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice must be knit into the fabric of Elizabeth’s family, Anne and Frederick must be tied into the circles of kin and friends that will hold them in safety and order in society. These social expectations are crucial: Frederick explains to Anne that he thought he was lost to her because his actions toward Louisa were misconstrued by those around her as intentions of marriage. Luckily, Louisa fell in love with Benwick, and only then did Frederick feel free to pursue Anne. It is less dangerous, but still necessary, that he be brought to Anne’s family where, in the current state of affairs, there can be no objections. The lovers have “the advantage of maturity of mind, consciousness of right, and one independent fortune between them” (254) and must prevail. Sir Walter has no objection, and Elizabeth only can look on coldly. “Captain Wentworth, with five-and-twenty thousand pounds, and as high in his profession as merit and activity could place him, was no longer nobody. He was now esteemed quite worthy to address the daughter of a foolish, spendthrift baronet, who had not had principle or sense enough to maintain himself in the situation in which Providence had placed him, and who could give his daughter at present but a small part of the share of ten thousand pounds which must be hers hereafter.” Frederick’s moral worth is not only greater than the silly baronet’s, but his financial standing is far better. And anyway, Austen remarks ironically, Sir Walter notices that Frederick is a fine-looking man, and so Sir Walter “at last” can “prepare his pen with a very good grace of the insertion of the marriage in the volume of honour” (255). Lady Russell wants to see Anne happy: “She loved Anne better than she loved her own abilities; and when the awkwardness of the beginning was over, found little hardship in attaching herself as a mother to the man who was securing the happiness of her other child.” As for Anne herself, like Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, she “had no other alloy to the happiness of her prospects than what arose from the consciousness of having no relations to bestow on him which a man of sense could value. There she felt her own inferiority keenly” (257). That she brings him so little financially bothers her not at all: “The disproportion in their fortune was nothing: it did not give her a moment’s regret.” Again as in Pride and Prejudice, 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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the handsome, honorable and rich suitor saves the maiden—not the one he courts, but someone near to her, Mrs. Smith here, and Lydia in Pride and Prejudice. Captain Wentworth takes care of the details of Mrs. Smith’s West Indian property “by writing for her, acting for her, and seeing her through all the petty difficulties of the case, with the activity and exertion of a fearless man and a determined friend.” And so they all live happily ever after—we hope. For unlike the endings of the thoroughly sunny novels such as Pride and Prejudice and Emma, Persuasion in its very last sentences brings back the themes of vulnerability and potential loss that prevail for most of the story. Anne has her beloved Captain Wentworth, and they revel in each other’s attention. But “the dread of a future war” (258) hangs over the end of the novel. Anne “gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance.” So ends the novel. The last sentence is a salute to the men, like Austen’s brothers, who venture their lives for the nation. But it reminds us as well that the happiness that Anne and Frederick have—based so squarely on his self-made fortune—is vulnerable to the real dangers of the very profession that has given him his success. The reader at the end of Persuasion shares Anne’s happiness, but also is aware, perhaps more than the heroine, that because of Frederick’s profession Anne’s happiness is relatively tenuous.



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PART III




The World of Jane Austen England from the 1790s was a jittery nation. The upper classes were terrified that the radical ideas from France were going to take root in their society. The lower classes were increasingly squeezed by enclosures, the forces of the new industrialization, and, towards the end of the decade, near famine conditions (brought on by freak weather but attributed by many to governmental policy); they seemed to be moving ever closer to the revolt that the upper classes feared. These currents would have been part of the perceptions of anyone in Austen’s circle. Whether Austen was especially conscious of social movements or not, whether the people around her were socially conscious or not, so pervasive were these social realities that Austen had to have been aware of them. Austen’s adolescence was punctuated by the French revolution (she was fourteen in 1789), and her adulthood was marked by the seemingly endless years of the war with Napoleon’s France, repeated references to which we have just remarked in Persuasion. This overview looks at the historical circumstances of the period from 1789 to the end of the Napoleonic wars. It was a period that saw some of the greatest unrest in England since the era of the Glorious Revolution more than one hundred years earlier and saw as well a period of political repression so severe that Habeas Corpus was suspended and men could be jailed for selling a pamphlet— if it were a pamphlet that frightened the government. It was a period of spies wandering through diverse segments of society and reporting back to the government some truth and much exaggeration. And then, of course, after the period of internal fear came



CHAPTER 7

Reading Jane Austen

the external threat from France, so that the two layers of anxieties were merged at many points. Even before the French Revolution the aristocratic elite had felt distinct discomfort as the lower classes shifted and changed in terms of the economics of labor and the social dynamics of class. The artisans and craftsmen, as well as less skilled laborers, became much more politically conscious than they had been earlier, largely as a result of the mutually reinforcing confluence of the industrialization of England and the connected move into towns and cities of large numbers of people. H. T. Dickinson notes that “the population of Britain was rising rapidly in the late eighteenth century and much of this increase was concentrated in the larger urban centers. London grew to contain nearly one million inhabitants, while Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Southwark all increased to between 50,000 and 85,000 inhabitants. A further ten towns grew to between 25,000 and 50,000 inhabitants, and at least twenty more had a population of over 10,000. Population growth and urban expansion were sustained by significant economic expansion in agriculture, commerce and industry.”1 The newly rich were uneasily dependent on the landed class, whose policies could have significant results on their economic welfare. At the same time, these newly economically powerful families were changing the patterns of the landed gentry in another direction, for alongside their economic concerns came the desire for social recognition, that is, for social status to attach to their economic success. This social dance was the subject of Evelina, Fanny Burney’s most important novel; Burney is perhaps Austen’s closest literary precursor.2 Another force at work in pre-1789 England is the push coming from the Dissenters for repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts that limited many activities and offices to Anglicans. The Dissenters were among the most successful of the new industrialists, and therein lies another tie between the changing economic landscape and political disquiet.3 After the social unrest came the wars. The first thing to do is to match up some dates. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, France declared war on England on February 1, 1793. Except for the brief respite of the Peace of Amiens, during which war preparations and fears continued virtually without respite, war went on 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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continuously until the second abdication of Napoleon after the battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815. By the time it was over, there had been twenty-three years of fighting. This is precisely Austen’s generation. Austen was born in 1775 and died in 1817. The period from the French Revolution and then through the wars was perhaps the most politically, socially, and economically cataclysmic for England until the First World War. Some estimates put loss of life among servicemen proportionately higher between 1794 and 1815 than between 1914 and 1918.4 There was social unrest; there were food riots; there were press gangs; there was fear of invasion; there were taxes upon taxes upon taxes. By putting Austen and her novels into her social and historical contexts, I hope to bring Austen and her work into a sharper perspective. Those quiet novels that she produced during this period of extraordinary tumult deliberately leave out many of the stressors of her time; she is writing romances, in the sense that we use the word today, that is, escapist fiction that, quite opposite to our perceived view of Austen’s works as detailing a bucolic existence of a slice of England, quite deliberately omit much of the reality of which she had to be aware.5 This chapter explores some of those contexts. The threats to the stability and to the safety of England were first internal—and possibly a matter more of upper-class perception than of actual danger—and then, with the advent of war, both internal and external. It must be emphasized that the war’s dangers to England did not defuse the home-grown threats. In fact the concomitants of war—dislocations and new taxation—in addition to food shortages exacerbated internal conflicts during this period. In terms of how threats were perceived it does not matter whether the uprisings, as in the 1797 Naval Mutinies or the Luddite disturbances, were essentially or uniquely economic or whether they were political as well: they would be seen as the latter. When the Fleet, in the face of the French threat, in 1797 wants to sail to France to give the French the British ships, that had to be frightening to government and upper classes. Austen’s later teenage years and her adult years were lived in the midst of the political unrest at home and the war with France. The English reaction to the French Revolution, particularly after it becomes 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann



Reading Jane Austen

the Terror, divides at the professional class, which is allied with, married to, and socially engaged with the lesser and greater gentry, and on up into the aristocracy: in other words, everyone who has a reasonable amount of property or is in a position to ally himself or herself with someone who does. This group would take in virtually everyone in Austen’s novels, from the Gardiners in Pride and Prejudice to Emma and Knightley in Emma, Anne Elliot in Persuasion, and so on. As the French Revolution turned into the Terror, the English upper classes were markedly apprehensive that the social unrest across the Channel would be mirrored by response from their own lower classes. And they had a good deal to fear, although in the event there was no widespread revolt in England. There was a great deal of unrest among the lower orders during these years, unrest that carried straight through the nineties and further on even through the war years; often enough this unrest existed just alongside the patriotic fervor such an external threat naturally would stir up. The period from the French Revolution through the Napoleonic Wars would have seemed largely a holding action for the British upper classes. Frances, Lady Shelley, directly says that “the awakening of the labouring classes, after the first shock of the French Revolution, made the upper classes tremble.” Burke cautions that for the laboring poor only “Patience, labour, sobriety, frugality and religion, should be recommended to them.”6 His friend Hannah More devoted much of the next twenty years to delivering just this message to them in the form of the dialogues, stories, poems, and little sermons that were published to be distributed to this audience of working and poor men and women. Her pamphlet Village Politics and the much larger project of the Cheap Repository Tracts sold in, or at least were distributed in, numbers that dwarfed even the numbers for Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, which itself sold in phenomenal amounts. These are the years during which Austen comes of age. By 1790 she is fifteen; by 1800, she is twenty-five. For anyone these are crucially formative years, but for the intellectually precocious young woman whose early version of Sense and Sensibility, “Eleanor and Marianne,” was probably written in 1795, whose “First 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Impressions,” the early version of Pride and Prejudice, already by 1797 had been sent to the publisher Cadell, whose early version of Northanger Abbey, “Susan,” was probably completed by 1799, they are clearly pivotal. Surely the woman who had completed versions of three important novels is adult enough to be as aware as others of her class of what is happening in her world. “French principles” not only are dangerous, but they seem to be spreading unchecked through the lower reaches of society. These are the social strata where people like Austen are most uncomfortable. We see this discomfort, for example, in Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price when she returns to her birth family, and we are made aware of the uncivilized nature of life at their social level and below it. The benevolent Hannah More, providing schooling to the poor, also sees them as frightening, as savages. Even after educating the rural poor, More describes them as beings almost outside the civilized pale; a certain wonder infuses her description of the good her own civilizing influence has had in bringing these people to something like proper human behavior. She describes a tea-party, preceded by a visit to church: the ladies in white, and many of the savages in white also; the whole preceded by the Sunday-school children. . . . After tea (during which, to do them justice they all behaved incomparably, and I believe this day’s associating with their betters, as it is called, has brought them forward at least ten years in civilization), we read them a little exhortation, explaining to them the contrast between their situations and blessings now, and what they were two years before. They have so little common sense and so little sensibility, that we are obliged to beat into their heads continually the good we are doing them; and endeavouring to press upon them, with all our might, the advantages they derive from us. It is really true, and oftentimes it is with difficulty we can keep from downright laughing.7

Hannah’s sister Patty More “writes of the rural poor as if they were an alien race,” one modern critic points out; Patty comments on the people in the parishes of Shipham and Rowberrow that “the people [are] savage and depraved almost even beyond Cheddar, brutal in their natures and ferocious in their manners.”8 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann



Reading Jane Austen

This fearful sense of the savage nature of the underclass is widespread. Hannah More’s first biographer, Henry Thompson, in discussing the More sisters’ mission among the poor reflects quite the same perspective. He comments that the women’s work “has produced a material alteration in the condition of the Cheddar peasantry” although “some traces of their former barbarism are still in existence.”9 There is a tremendous fear of change in Austen’s social class; the seeming timelessness of her world, where social life and social conditions are delightfully static and the serious problem presented is the proper pairings off of couples, is wishful thinking, a picture not of a world assured to those who inhabit such social grids but of a society that seems to be isolated from change. Austen is shaped by what E. P. Thompson calls the “counter-revolutionary decades.” He comments, “The sensibility of the Victorian middle class was nurtured in the 1790s by frightened gentry who had seen miners, potters and cutlers reading Rights of Man. . . . It was in these counter-revolutionary decades that the humanitarian tradition became warped beyond recognition.” In the face of the threats of the French Revolution to England, real and perceived, for the upper classes any change seemed pernicious. “Sir Samuel Romilly, in the first decade of the 19th century, found that his efforts to reform the criminal law were met with hostility and timidity; the French Revolution had produced (he recalled)— ‘among the higher orders . . . a horror of every kind of innovation.’”10 In an important sense, this could be a description of all of Austen’s novels; what readers so often have seen as a bucolic stasis represents not a lasting moment of peace but an attempt to hold still a particular, threatened—or perceived to be threatened—way of life. “Everything rung and was connected with the Revolution in France. Everything, not this thing or that thing, but literally everything, was soaked in this one event,” a contemporary laments.11 Austen surely knew what was happening in France: her cousin, Eliza de Feuillide, was especially close to her; the cousin and her French husband traveled back and forth between England and France. Trying to safeguard his property, the Compte de Feuillide went back to France, found himself in trouble with the authorities, and was beheaded. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Cousin Eliza was married in 1781 and visited relatives in England in 1786 with her infant son. Austen’s brother Edward visited Eliza in France just before she went to England. Henry stayed with her in London in 1787.12 Eliza and her husband travel back and forth between England and France for the next four years under increasingly difficult conditions. In January 1791 Eliza, staying in Margate, hopes to be reunited with her husband, but he cannot leave France; sometime later he manages the trip but returns to France when, as Eliza explained, he “received accounts from France which informed him that, having already exceeded his leave of absence, if he still continued in England he would be considered as one of the Emigrants, and consequently, his whole property forfeited to the Nation. Such advices were not to be neglected, and M. de F. was obliged to depart for Paris.” He became embroiled in a friend’s fight against an accusation of conspiracy and was guillotined in February of 1794. Roberts suggests that it is possible that Eliza was at Steventon when she received news of her husband’s death. In any event, the Austens were wellinformed of the comte’s difficulties in France after he returned to protect his property in 1792. Eliza visited the Austens in August or September 1792, when the French Revolution was entering its most violent stages. . . . She was at Steventon on 26 September, when she wrote of the upheaval in Paris. “I can readily believe that the share of sensibility I know you to be possessed of would not suffer you to learn the tragical events of which France has of late been the theatre, without being much affected. My private letters confirm the intelligence afforded by Public prints, and assure me that nothing we there read is exaggerated. M. de F. is at present in Paris. He had determined on coming to England, but finds it impossible to get away. (20)

Thus the Austens had first-hand knowledge of the trauma of the Revolution. The French Revolution and domestic unrest are inextricably linked in the minds of upper-class Englishmen because homegrown dissidents—who were active before the events in France— after the Revolution take the upheaval in France as a model. Paine’s Rights of Man, the most spectacular proclamation of the relevance of French ideas to English society, seems to the upper classes to be overtly dangerous. The government makes selling Rights of Man 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann



Reading Jane Austen

a crime. But Paine does not initiate the sense of social unease, although he is revolution’s most articulate spokesman. Between 1760 and 1810 sixty-three capital offenses were put on the books: “Throwing down fences when commons were enclosed and firing corn ricks . . . were to be punished by death,” Thompson reminds us. “The commercial expansion, the enclosure movement, the early years of the Industrial Revolution—all took place within the shadow of the gallows . . . The poor lost their rights in the land and were tempted to crime by their poverty[;] . . . The small master or tradesman or master was tempted to forgery or illicit transactions by fear of the debtor’s prison. . . . The greatest offense against property was to have none” (61). From the 1760s onward, riots broke out periodically, “occasioned by bread prices, turnpikes and tolls, excise . . . strikes, new machinery, enclosures, press-gangs and a score of other grievances” (62). The protests have direct consequences not just in the towns but in the countryside. “Something in the nature of a war between the countryside and the towns grew up. The people in the rural districts believed that their corn would be sent to the cities, while they would be left to starve. The farmers refused to send grain to market, for fear it would be sold at the popular price. In the ports grain ships were stopped, since the people believed that factors were sending it abroad. . . . Loads of wheat were stopped in Cambridge, and sold off in the market place” (66). Emsley points out, The most important single element in both the diet and budget of most families in Britain during the eighteenth century was bread. . . . [T]he average per capita consumption in the last decade of the century appears to have been about one pound a day. . . . On several occasions from the mid-sixties onwards large imports were made to offset shortages, for shortages, or the fear of shortage of bread or any other necessity of life, led to crowds fixing prices in markets, preventing the movement of particular foodstuffs out of their locality, and attacking the person or property of a suspected profiteer—usually a miller or a farmer. The Corn Law of 1791 attempted both to encourage and protect the farmer by offering bounties on wheat exports when the price in the home market was forty-four shillings a quarter or less, and by putting high tariffs on foreign imports until the price was fifty-four shillings or more. (7)



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In fact, grain repeatedly was seized from those who produced it by those who would be its consumers. The goods were commandeered, taken to the market place, and sold at what were considered fair prices. These proceeds then were given to those from whom the grain had been taken. Such food riots often were on-going and well-ordered movements, climaxing in the food riots of 1795. The situation in that year, precipitated by widespread crop failure and scarcity throughout England (and the continent) called forth numerous pamphlets, among them More’s “Tom White the Postilian, part two” and “A Cure for Melancholy: Showing the Way to Do Much With Little Money, Written During the Scarcity of 1794.” The first part of “Tom White” shows how a poor young man through diligent application to his tasks can rise to become an independent and responsible member of society; in this case, young Tom goes from being a post-boy to the ownership of a fine farm. In the second part of the story (many of More’s stories were published serially), Tom is one of the leaders of his community, and in that role one of his foremost concerns is the behavior of the poor. This story is titled “The Way to Plenty; or, the Second Part of Tom White. Written in 1795, the Year of Scarcity.”13 Scarcity, for the poor, is not necessarily a bad thing; viewed properly, that is, within a religious perspective, scarcity presents the opportunity for the poor to show humility and gratefulness for what little they do have. In fact, Tom understands “that a time of public prosperity was not always a time of public virtue” and so “when he lately saw signs of public distress coming on, he was not half so much frightened as some others were, because he thought it might do us good in the long run; and he was in hopes that a little poverty might bring on a little penitence” (19). No matter what their situation, the poor should feel grateful for whatever God chooses to give them. And the richer people in the community can help the poor a good deal, mostly by giving them good advice on how to manage better. When a laborer complains that he cannot afford a bit of meat, Farmer White explains that this is the man’s own fault. Is he planning to make holiday on Easter Monday and Easter Tuesday? Why not work on these two days instead? If Tom works these two days, he will earn four shillings. Add to that the 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann



Reading Jane Austen

three shillings that he would spend on drink with his fellows if he was not working, and he has seven shillings—“Tom, you often tell me the times are so bad that you can never buy a bit of meat. Now here is the cost of two joints at once; to say nothing of the sin of wasting time and getting drunk” (23–24). Farmer White’s advice doesn’t stop there: a shoulder of mutton left over from Saturday’s market will be cheaper than if bought fresh, and Farmer White even tells Tom how to cook the meat so that it goes far. Bake it in a “deep dish of potatoes. . . . [Y]ou need not give the mutton to the brats; the potatoes will have all the gravy, and be very savoury for them” (24). Mrs. White is even more generous than her husband. “I have known her to live on boiled meat for a long while together, in a sickly season, because the pot-liquor made such a supply of broth for the sick poor” (28–29). That Mrs. White consistently eats meat while the poor get the cooking water does not seem less than generous to More. (Remember the poor child’s broth in Emma.) There are still more actions that the rich can take to help the poor. Farmer White favors allowing the poor to plant potatoes or turnips (which take up less room) in the waste corners of the fields, and when the crops do come in better than expected, the better-off in the community “subscribe for a large quantity of rice, which was to be sold out to the poor at a very low price. . . . After their day’s work was over, all who wished to buy at these reduced rates were ordered to come to the farm on the Tuesday evening” (33). But the story makes it very clear that aid is entirely dependent on the good behavior of the poor. Any sort of political unrest will cut off the support. This threat is explicit. Those who incite or participate in “riot and drunkenness, double the evil which they pretend to cure” (33), and “riot will complete our misfortunes, while peace, industry, and good management, will go near to cure them” (33–34). Farmer White tells them that “we are now raising a fresh subscription for you” (39), and he sets out the rules immediately. He begins with moral and behavioral conditions, but soon passes, much more ominously, to political issues. “We will not give to sots, gamblers, and Sabbath-breakers,” and those who come only for the dole but not for the Church services will be “mark[ed]” (39–41). Men who are suspected of political action will get no help in any form. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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“But there is one rule from which we never will depart. Those who have been seen aiding or abetting any riot, any attack on butchers, wheat-mows, mills, or millers, we will not relieve” (41). The reference to contemporary riots is direct; the tone is coldly threatening. “A Cure for Melancholy,” written the following year, continues along the same lines. The upper classes are the best friends of the poor: as long as the poor heed the advice of their betters, they will be just fine. “Advice” is the operative word. The better-off need not actually give the poor anything except their counsels; instructions on how to nourish their families with little—but wholesome—food is as good as, even better than, actually giving them money or goods, for the advice will stay with the poor but goods will be used up. Much of the story, in fact, consists of recipes for cheap dishes. When the local squire passes by one of Mrs. Jones’ cooking lessons, he is pleased to discover that “your pot really smells as savoury as if Sir John’s French cook had filled it” (289). Mrs. Jones even takes home some of what she has cooked for her own dinner, to show the poor that she does “not think any thing good enough for the poor which is not clean, wholesome and palatable, and what I myself would not cheerfully eat, if my circumstances required it” (290). Everything in these stories is designed to convince the poor that they should be quiet in their station; if, in addition, it reinforces the feelings of easy benevolence and virtue in the rich, that is a bonus. More’s stories to the poor are deliberate attempts to reinforce the platform of social stability that many in her class see menaced by the various threats, internal and external, to what seems to them a God-ordained order. This is the same order that gives shape to Austen’s world. The threats that More addresses so directly lie just outside the bounds of Austen’s novels and of what is left of her letters after their expurgations at various hands, but they had to be part of her consciousness. Crop failures and food shortages, not to mention food riots, surely made the news. Even closer to home was the war itself in the persons of Austen’s military brothers. Military references in the novels, as we have seen, provide some of the most direct links to current events in Austen’s fiction. In fact, soldiers and sailors are very popular in Austen’s novels. The girls in Pride and Prejudice are delighted 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann



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to have all those men billeted down the road, and the heroes of Persuasion are certainly the sailing men. As so often, Austen’s perspective is upper class, and even within this framework represents only part of this class. Certainly the lower strata of society, for reasons both philosophical and practical—that is, from a fear of a standing army and from a fear of being personally impressed into service—were highly suspicious of, even outright hostile to, the army and navy. This was true both in peacetime and in wartime, before, during, and after the French wars. One need only look at Paine’s comments on the uses to which monarchs devote their armed forces, and the bounty to society that a cessation of such expense would assure, to see in its most articulate form one side of the philosophical underpinning of this view. Thompson sets the popular suspicion of a standing army within the context of the traditional English belief in the limits of arbitrary government: “The stance of the common Englishman was not so much democratic, in any positive sense, as anti-absolutist. He felt himself to be an individualist, with few affirmative rights, but protected by the laws against the intrusion of arbitrary power” (80). The lower-class Englishman “claimed few rights except that of being left alone.” This background is directly linked to the common view of soldiers and soldiering: “No institution was as much hated, in the 18th century, as the press gang. A standing Army was deeply distrusted. . . . The profession of a soldier was held to be dishonourable” (81). Even more frightening to the upper classes, the soldiers and sailors were themselves often on the edge of insubordination. War would be declared between England and France in 1793. In the summer of 1792 the “Secretary at War considered the situation serious enough to send the Deputy Adjutant-General on tour to ascertain the disposition of the troops and their dependability in time of emergency.” He found “seditious doctrines” and “seditious machinations” (102–3) overwhelmingly prevalent. By November one of Pitt’s correspondents sends him word of “seaman’s strikes and riots . . . in terms bordering on panic”; the mob “at this moment are driving some seamen or officers that have discovered a reluctance to comply with their mode of proceedings naked through the town before them” (102–3). In November of 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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1792 the Sheffield Register reports local demonstrations held to celebrate the victories of the French armies. Clearly, not everyone was as bemused by an English uniform as the Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice. It is important to realize, on the contrary, that the upper classes perceived significant instability in society, and part of this was expressed in their attitudes toward the military and toward the government’s wars. It is fascinating to read the novels against this background. The unchanging nature of society in the novels gives us as readers a feeling of comfort and security. Emma’s world, in which effective match-making is the major preoccupation (and even disastrous misperceptions along these lines have no permanent repercussions) is remarkably soothing. It is also, as we have noted, a romantic rather than a realistic rendering, since the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first fifteen years of the nineteenth is a period of extraordinary change in Austen’s England. Some historians attribute the flux to changes connected to the Industrial Revolution; others talk about the French wars or about a combination of causes. The twenty-two years of war between France and England, with the interludes only of the Peace of Amiens and the shortlived Restoration of Louis XVIII, ended with Napoleon’s second abdication in July of 1815. Commenting on the length and the intensity of the conflict—“the French Revolution created the atmosphere for a crusade”—Clive Emsley reminds us that “Britain’s participation in this struggle put enormous strains on her government, her economy, her finances and her manpower. The demands for men and especially money affected all ranks of society, albeit in varying degrees. Indeed, if there was a common experience shared by all Britons in the last decade of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth centuries, it is to be found in the changes resulting from the industrial revolution and more in the demands of war.”14 We shall look soon at the imprints of the war on society, but it is important to remember that whatever those effects were, the upper classes were much more concerned with fear of popular disturbances than the war in terms of perceived danger to themselves. Emsley’s explanation for this is relatively simple: “Armed conflict between 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann



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states was a fact of life” (11). He reminds us that “at the height of the Seven Years War Laurence Sterne could travel to France to recuperate from illness and overwork and be idolized by Parisian society. Even more surprising, during the American War of Independence Sir George Rodney was detained in France, not because he was an English admiral, but simply because he was a debtor. The French Marechal de Biron generously paid Rodney’s debts and he was permitted to return to take command of an English fleet which subsequently smashed its French rival off the Iles des Saintes.” On the other hand, an immediate threat was perceived by upper-class Englishmen from England’s own working and poor men. The government was so nervous that it constructed a net of spies to report on the radical movements in the country, especially in London but in many other areas as well. Even discounting the natural tendency for such spies to exaggerate their findings, there was quite enough for them to report on. In January of 1792 nine men met in a London tavern; the self-educated shoemaker Thomas Hardy, founder and first secretary, collected the first weekly subscription. Within two weeks there were twenty-five members, and six months later, Thompson tells us, “more than two thousand were claimed.” These were the beginnings of the London Corresponding Society. The primary requirement for membership was the willingness to agree “that every adult person, in possession of his reason, and not incapacitated by crimes, should have a vote for a Member of Parliament” (17). As Royle and Walvin point out, “Impoverished artisans and working men—like Hardy himself— traditionally beyond the pale of politics, entered the LCS. . . . Skilled craftsmen and journeymen from the trades rubbed shoulders with small-scale employers (themselves, of course, working men) and with the human beasts of burden, the porters and ballast men of the riverside communities. Shoemakers, watchmakers, weavers, shopkeepers and publicans found themselves in political harmony with their skilled or labouring neighbours throughout the capital” (52). The London Corresponding Society is the best known such organization, but it had many sister groups, perhaps the largest of which was the Sheffield Constitutional Society. These organizations “did not seek a violent revolution, but they failed to convince their opponents of this” (Emsley, 14). Their 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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principle text, Paine’s Rights of Man, certainly had enough material in it that was frightening to the upper classes. We should pause in this narrative to point out some of what was so frightening in Paine’s pamphlet. There was, for example, Paine’s view that there is no such thing as Divine Right and that, if we take away this traditional justification for a monarchy, we see clearly that the king and all his court not only are of no use to the nation but are an inexcusable encumbrance upon it. Monarchy is merely “human craft to obtain money from a nation under specious pretences.”15 It is in fact the enormous cost of government (in England, this expense basically supports the king and his entourage, since the actual work of government is carried on at the local level by what is for the most part volunteer labor) that has pushed so many to the edge of poverty or actually into poverty. Paine explores the current level of taxation and the history of taxation in England, and finds that the taxes have gone up enormously for the nation but do not fall equally on all classes: the upper classes, controlling the making of laws, see to it that the taxes impact others but never themselves. For example, land taxes have not gone up proportionally to, say, taxes on beer, because the House of Lords, an association of landowners, has seen to its own interests. But other classes do not have their own “houses,” and so their interests are disregarded. Commodity taxes obviously fall disproportionately on the poorer classes, and so it is they who support the extravagances of the rich. Paine simply argues that kings serve no purpose—in fact, most of them are idiots anyway: “It is impossible to make wisdom hereditary” (Paine, 167). At the same time “part of [each man’s] daily labour goes towards making up the million sterling a year, which the country gives the person it stiles a king” (Paine, 171). A hereditary government, Paine argues, is not even legal. It begins when someone conquers the nation by force; the nation is then handed down, through the generations, as a farm or other holding would be, complete with the human beings in it. The nation in effect is first stolen and then treated as hereditary goods. Even if the first generation has accepted this king, or this government, no future generations are bound by the compact, for no generation has the right to make this decision for future 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann



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generations. “There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controuling [sic] posterity to the ‘end of time,’ or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed” (90). “Divine right” is a “fraud” which “in imitation of the Pope, who affects to be spiritual and temporal, and in contradiction to the Founder of the Christian religion, twisted itself afterwards into an idol of another shape, called Church and State. The key of St Peter, and the key of the Treasury, became quartered in one another, and the wondering cheated multitude worshipped the invention” (121). In Anglican England, it would be quite acceptable to attack the Pope, of course; paralleling the iniquity between pope and king has the logical force of using the socially acceptable distaste for the Catholic Church to support the argument against the power of the king. Paine argues against any form of inherited power, and this includes the principle of primogeniture, which he sees as unnatural and dangerous. It too is socially expensive, for all those younger sons of the aristocracy need somehow to be supported, and, he argues, they go on the public dole. Not that they wind up on the parish, as the poor do; no, they are much more expensive to support, for they must be kept in the manner born. They become hangers on to the government, with important jobs like “Placeman, Pensioners, Lords of the bedchamber, Lords of the kitchen, Lords of the necessary-house, and the Lord knows what besides [who] can find as many reasons for monarchy as their salaries, paid at the expence of the country, amount to” (177). Titles like “Duke, or Count or Earl [are] rattle[s]” (132), words without meaning, unlike “Judge” or “General.” All men are equal and “every individual is born equal in rights with his contemporary. . . . The equality of man, so far from being a modern doctrine, is the oldest on record” (118). Man is born with “natural rights” which he can and does exchange for “civil rights” so that he may have the advantages that civil society brings him. But it is a voluntary exchange of rights that takes place: in fact, civil rights exist to protect natural rights. Paine deliberately brought his argument to the lower classes, to the laborers and the poor whose potential for revolt so frightened 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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the upper classes. The publishing history of Rights of Man is extraordinary. Rights of Man was published in two parts. The government was wary of the first part even before publication; Joseph Johnson, the publisher, was repeatedly visited by government agents even before the book was ready for sale.16 Although he had published other books critical of the government, Johnson somehow realized that Paine’s was more dangerous than these earlier works and stopped sales only four hours after they began; over a hundred copies already had been sold.17 J. S. Jordan agreed to take on the publication, and Paine literally carted the already printed pages from Johnson to Jordan. A new edition was brought out by Jordan three days after the first: it sold out in hours. By May a sixth edition was published, and fifty thousand copies had been sold. It has been estimated that the book reached four million people out of a ten million population in Britain: “Based on those figures, one reader in ten purchased a copy of Rights of Man. Even that figure is misleadingly low if pirated and serialized editions are taken into account. . . . Rights of Man was read aloud and talked about to the illiterate on an unheard-of scale.”18 By April 1791 Paine had authorized cheap editions of the pamphlet all over Britain and had decided “to print a very numerous edition in London, under [his] own direction.” For Rights of Man, part the second (1793) Paine was forced to turn to yet another publisher, Thomas Chapman, but before the book was published, Chapman too withdrew in fear. Paine went back to Johnson and Jordan, who agreed to sell the book as long as they did not have to put their names on the volume: Paine would be the “publisher.” This book too had a phenomenal distribution, especially to the working classes.19 Throughout Rights of Man Part One and Part Two Paine makes positive references to the French, to their Revolution, to their constitution, to their system of taxation. Paine’s book was frightening, and, as we have seen, it seemed to his contemporaries to be inciting more and more radicalism when there already seemed to be dangerous movements enough domestically. It was not only Paine’s theoretical discussion of the advantages of the French system that seemed dangerous, but what was perceived as the alarming intercourse between the British radicals and the representatives of the post-revolutionary French government. Although the British 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann



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societies were created and maintained in the cause of parliamentary reform, to the government they represented a clear danger to the stability of the political state, especially as Paine’s pamphlet was circulated ever more widely while overtures from the British societies to the French—probably considerably less ominous than the government interpreted them as being—seemed threatening indeed. Perhaps the most overtly frightening gesture was the societies’ messages to the National Convention in France on the occasion of the French victories over the Prussians at Valmy and over the Austrians at Jemappes. Emsley reminds us that In November 1792 fraternal delegates from Britain took congratulatory addresses to the new National Convention in France. “Frenchmen,” declared the London Corresponding Society, “you are already free, but the Britons are preparing to be so.” The encouragement given to the French was not merely verbal. The delegates of the Society for Constitutional Information . . . —a more genteel society than the LCS and one which had its origins in the radical wing of the Association Movement—were able to tell the Convention that a thousand pairs of shoes for the “soldiers of Liberty,” paid for by a “patriotic donation,” were now at Calais, “and the Society will continue sending a thousand pair a week for at least six weeks to come.” (Emsley, 14)

The French successes were a source of serious concern to the British government, at the time involved in difficult negotiations with France. Many in Britain took the French Decree of Fraternity promising “fraternity and assistance to all people who wish to recover their liberty” as defining an intention to incite disorder in Britain, and the exchanges with the British radicals seemed to support such suspicions. The vast network of spies and provocateurs seemed to have plenty to report. As early as September the British government had received reports of French agents in the Country for “wicked purposes,” and of subsidies to opposition newspapers. In November and December rumours of French spies and saboteurs mingling with émigrés from France led to Bow Street police officers being sent to carry out investigations in towns on the main roads from the coast to



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London. The government did not take such reports or rumours lightly; many came from respectable sources. Lord Auckland, the ambassador at The Hague, for example, reported that he had received information of “two hundred or three hundred emissaries from the Propagande, with allowances to life in taverns, coffee houses and ale houses to promote disorder”. . . . At the beginning of December Pitt’s government, fearful of some kind of insurrectionary disorder in London, ordered that the fortifications of the Tower of London be strengthened, brought troops into the metropolis, and called out a substantial part of the militia. (15)

All of this suspicion and social turmoil—turmoil real, exaggerated, or even imagined, is in place before the nation goes to war with France; none of it abates during the periods of actual warfare, so that England is fighting two wars at the same time. The domestic tumult was the more long-lasting, having begun to pick up energy even before the 1790s and continuing throughout and beyond Austen’s lifetime. Even before the events in France, the Dissenters, allied with liberal Anglicans, were arguing against the Test and Corporation Acts which prevented the Dissenters from holding public office and from going to Anglican schools (a positive outgrowth of this limitation was the development of the Dissenting Academies which nurtured so many of the architects of the Industrial Revolution). The demand for religious and civil liberties was expressed in political campaigning. It has been suggested that this campaign underlies the various streams leading into the movement for universal manhood suffrage.20 This is significant within the context of the discomfort of the upper classes with radical activity because it brings in the middle classes as well as those who, having earned a great deal of money in the new industrialization, still are not otherwise sharing in the power of the aristocracy. Interestingly, these are issues that Fanny Burney’s Evelina presents—at least from the social side as the middle-class Evelina learns her way in the social world of the upper classes—and that Austen also addresses, although not as directly as Burney does. There was, then, a plethora of levels at which the lower gentry and those above them could find things to discomfort, often actually to




Reading Jane Austen

frighten them in Georgian England, but they are for the most part unremarked in the world of Austen’s novels. The war with France does appear in Austen’s work, but, as I have suggested, the war when it shows up even in Persuasion is more opportunity for the characters than frightening upheaval. In British life and politics the war, at least in the lead-up and early stages, was not viewed by many of Austen’s contemporaries as a threat but rather as an opportunity—not only to make one’s personal way, as the war allows the charming Captain Wentworth to develop into a man of sufficient means to be a viable husband for Anne, but as a means to crush the domestic radical threat. In 1792 and early 1793 the radical movements were met not just with governmental measures (outlawing Rights of Man, the suspension of Habeas Corpus, limits on the right to congregate), but with the conservative equivalents of the London Corresponding Society and other radical organizations. This is in addition to the governmental and private campaigns to tame the lower classes. There was, for example, the Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers, founded in November of 1792. Emsley suggests that for Pitt “these associations were marshalling loyal opinion.” He notes that war was not seen as a negative by the government. “Throughout December and January there was a growing expectancy of war against France. The opponents of reform and of the French Revolution in Britain looked forward to it; according to The Times it was to be a struggle for the preservation of the British Constitution against vagabonds, atheists, freebooters and Levellers; furthermore, because of the sorry internal state of France, it was bound to be a short war” (16). The official outbreak of war did not unite the nation. Those who welcomed confrontation with France saw the opportunity to beat down the godless beasts; those who had been agitating for the extension of political rights domestically continued to do so. Even the army and navy were not united behind the war, as evidenced by the various mutinies throughout the war years. The imprisonment of the king and queen in France, followed by their executions, had deeply shocked many in the upper classes. We can follow the trajectory of horror in the letters of Horace Walpole. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Walpole’s attitude towards the upheavals in France at first was not entirely negative, although he does voice some serious hesitations. Walpole writes on September 10, 1789, about the fall of the Bastille that “I always hated to drive by it, knowing the miseries it contained.” But “the destruction of it was silly, and agreeable to the ideas of the mob.”21 His sympathy for those inside is tinged by his distaste for the “mob” that has set them free; he predicts a return of power to the nobility, for “a revolution procured by a national vertigo does not promise a crop of legislators” (324). By September 29, 1791, the Revolution is viewed with fear and urgency, and the explicit fear is that the chaos in France will be imported to England by the English radicals themselves. A later letter bitterly describes a France where “a whole nation of monsters is burst forth” (371). The horrors visited on the king and queen and their followers outrage and frighten Walpole: “Even the Queen’s women were butchered in the Thuilleries, and the tigers chopped off the heads from the dead bodies.” The king and queen were “shut up in a room without nourishment for twelve hours” (372), with the queen sitting trembling on the floor. By the end of March 1793, Walpole cannot contain his fury. “That bloody chaos seems recoiling on themselves! It looks as if civil war was bursting out in many provinces, and will precipitate approaching famine—when till now could one make such a reflection without horror at one’s self!—but alas! Have not the French brought it to the question whether Europe or France should be laid desolate? Religion, morality, justice, have been stabbed, torn up by the roots.” And perhaps his greatest anger is reserved for the English radicals who would import such misery to England herself; that Joseph Priestley, for example: “Well! I am glad to hear he is going to America—I hope he will not bring back scalping—even to that National Assembly of which he was proud of being elected a member!” (385).22 The fear of home-grown radicalism became the impetus for the repressive laws and literature designed to keep the domestic threat in check; the shock of the chaos in France became a kind of license for full-scale attack on France itself: essentially, to go to war with France was to fight for civilization.23 On the other side, there were many who rejected the idea that the internal upheavals in France gave England the moral right to 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann



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go to war. The war threatens to become a war of principle, logically only to be ended when the last Frenchman is killed. William Frend, a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, protested that “if all the kings on the continent were put to death by their subjects, it is not our business to punish their conduct. We [only] should be indignant at their presuming to change our government.”24 The Morning Chronicle argues the danger that “we must go on killing as long as there are any Frenchmen left to kill, or leave their opinions, as all who ever made war upon opinions have hitherto left them, invigorated and exasperated by the conflict.” In the event, it was the Convention that declared war. The British government reacted, as it had been doing for some time before the declaration of war, with various repressive measures. Weeks before the declaration of war in February, a new Alien Act demanded that foreigners register at the Customs Office and wait for a passport. Any alien who had landed after the first of January 1792, had to obtain a passport if he wished to change residence. These acts can be seen as logical outgrowths of the war climate. But the measures against British nationals were far more drastic and hardly nuanced to the threat at hand: selling governmentally disapproved pamphlets (specifically Paine’s) was an offense punishable by prison, treason could be defined as a conversation among three men, and of course Habeas Corpus was suspended. It is true that the government made laws and the juries of good Englishmen found ways around those laws (as in refusing to find Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, and John Thelwell guilty of treason), but nonetheless severe challenges to long established English freedoms were made by the English government as it reacted to what it perceived as the domestic threat. Part of the problem was that in some cases sympathy for the French was blown into treason, with disastrous results for those accused. A 1793 meeting of delegates from the Scottish and English Corresponding Societies “was closed by the Edinburgh authorities and several of its leaders, including the two delegates from the London Corresponding Society, were given savage sentences of transportation.” Emsley continues that “Probably only a few hotheads in the societies hoped for armed insurrection and bloody revolution, but in spite of this, and in spite of the continual protestations by the 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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societies of their abhorrence of violence and civil disorder, many members made declarations which, at the time, seemed inflammatory and threatening to both the government and a majority in Parliament. . . . The Reports of the Committees of Secrecy, which ploughed through the publications and the seized correspondence of the societies in May and June 1794, are full of quotations to support their beliefs that the societies’ intentions were treasonable and posed a threat to the Constitution” (24–25). Thompson sees an even more direct confrontation between the radicals and the government and an even more hysterical response from the government. “What is remarkable is the very dramatic change which took place in the twelve months between February 1792 and February 1793. At the beginning of this year Pitt confidently expected ‘fifteen years of peace’” (106). Three factors changed the government’s (and hence the upper classes’) perspective: the radicalism of the French Revolution after the September massacres; the threat to British influence posed by the expansionist new Republic; and the perceived relationship of the Revolutionary spirit in France and the Jacobin activity at home. “It is the third of these factors—the depth and intensity of the democratic agitation in England—which is commonly underestimated. The panic, and the counter-revolutionary offensive, of the propertied in Britain commenced some months before the arrest of the King and the September massacres in France; and when the latter did take place, every organ of authority [in England] used every means to publicize the sufferings of the victims of the guillotine, and of French émigrés, not only from a sense of shock and compassion but also—and, perhaps, mainly—as a means of counteracting English Jacobin propaganda.” (107) We already have looked at Paine and at the response to Paine. In a sense, then, this survey has pulled all the threads together of what the upper classes saw at the beginning of the war: the threat was, as I have shown, more domestic than foreign. Military revolts exacerbate this situation. There was a widespread, and not unfounded, fear that England was going to be invaded by the French fleet. On December 21, 1796, thirty-five French ships with 12,000 men appeared off the coast of Ireland; unfriendly winds scattered the ships and they returned to France, but vulnerability to sea-borne threat had 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann



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been well remarked by the British.25 The first priority was, then, the navy, and it was, frighteningly, in the navy that the mutinies had flared up at Spithead and, even more ominously, at the Nore anchorage in the Thames estuary. These were feared to be the result of radical incitement; in historical perspective, they appear to be the simple outgrowths of the working conditions of the seamen as well as of the mix of men involved. There had been enormous losses in the first years of the war due both to enemy action and to disease—in light of Austen’s references to the West Indies both in the novels and in the letters, we might note that many of these losses took place in the West Indies. There was, then, a serious shortage of men for the ships. So severe was the shortage that in April 1795 an act was passed enabling magistrates to hand over to the navy any idle, disorderly, but able-bodied men. More laws in 1795 and 1796 were passed to fill the gaps and swell the ranks of both the regular and auxiliary forces. Initially this legislation was directed towards increasing the navy, which the government considered its main priority—so much so that seamen were invited to leave the militia for the navy and [it was] ordered that any seaman found enlisting in the army should forfeit his bounty money and be handed over to the navy. In February 1795 an Order in Council had put an embargo on recruiting for British merchant ships in home ports until the navy was up to strength, and the government followed this up with novel recruiting legislation. The first Quota Act was passed on 5 March; each county in England and Wales was given a specific number of men to raise, ranging from 23 for Rutland to 609 for the West Riding, and making a total of 9769 men in all. Eleven days later a second act demanded quotas from the different seaports of England, Wales and Scotland amounting to 19,867 men. A third act required that the counties and burghs of Scotland find 1814 men. (Emsley, 53)

This mixed and not exactly volunteer assemblage added to the standing crew produced a volatile group of men. Navy pay was low, prize money often long overdue. When the fleet at Spithead mutinied, the demands included “higher pay, security against embezzlement by pursers—especially with reference to



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provisions—an improved medical service [and later] the removal of unpopular officers” (53). These demands were met, but not immediately, leading to the mutinies. That at Spithead was relatively orderly, but the uprising at Nore was less so. The mutineers “blockaded the Thames; thousands of troops stood by on shore and London gentlemen volunteered to defend the capital” (59). The style of the revolts—and the device, indeed the language, of the petitions—seemed to many to be connected to the radical movement and direct instigation from the corresponding societies. In the end, the government investigators could find no direct link, but the suspicion was enough to alarm many.26 In addition to the fear of invasion from outside, the fear of subversion from within, and the actual mutinies in the navy that seemed to combine the two lines of threat, there were the more mundane but for most people more immediate problems of the war years; these were financial in nature. Taxes to support what became a progressively more expensive undertaking as the war dragged on hit at most levels of society. And the banks nearly failed. In 1797 Pitt introduced a bill to treble the assessed taxes; these taxes, on inhabited houses, windows, male servants, horses and carriages, were paid (and often evaded) principally by the well-to-do. . . . The City of London was furious. Tenant farmers . . . were concerned: as one land agent expressed it, ‘If the taxes upon Husbandry accumulate in this manner I am very much mistaken if the distresses of the Farmer will not disable him from paying his rent—for within the last 7 years iron is advanced 1/3, Labourage, Carpenters and poor rates in the same proportion.’ . . . [O]n 5 January the Commons passed the measure, and the Lords followed suit four days later. (Emsley, 70–71)

As the war continued yet more money was needed. In December 1798 Pitt outlined a proposal for replacing the assessed taxes with a new tax which no longer fell upon expenditure but upon incomes. . . . Pitt estimated that the total national income which he might tax was £102 million. He proposed a general tax of two shillings in the pound on all annual incomes of




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Emsley continues that “the propertied classes, especially those on low, fixed incomes, were feeling the pinch of war taxation.” One lady writes to her friend that “I cannot think this country in a prosperous way, for Bankruptcy stares us very full in the face; the present taxes are considered by most people and felt by many as a great grievance; and how is it possible for us to meet the future, for more heavy ones there must yet be.” She wants to get out from under the burden of the lease of her small, unsatisfactory house, but still has three years running on her lease, and “there are no hopes of parting with it, for you would be frightened to see the number of houses that are to be Lett in this Town. I believe if the war continues, and taxes increase, the grass will grow in London streets” (79). The taxes are heavy enough to have direct impact on people’s lives, like the Bedfordshire farmer who found that all the taxes made him a net loser financially for his work, or his sister, who had hoped to make a short journey, “but this Income Tax bears hard upon the pocket and absorbs a sum which might otherwise be devoted to travelling” (79). For the middle and upper classes the war brought such heavy taxation that for many years even the relatively well-off felt serious effects; for the lower classes, impressment, economic dislocation, the plight of military families (whose men had voluntarily or involuntarily been taken from them, some never to return) who were left to try to keep their households going without the major earner, all added to the unease in the country. In addition to these were the natural disasters of a series of bad harvests during this period which, although not the result of governmental decisions, were in the minds of many in the lower classes tied to these other causes of distress. This account of the causes of unrest would not be complete without a reference to what became known as Luddism, violent industrial protests beginning in 1811 and carrying over into 1812 (also the years of significant crop reversals). Workmen smashed stocking frames as a protest against working conditions. This violence took place in parallel with the food riots aimed at bringing



£200 or more. Incomes under £60 a year were exempt, and those between £60 and £200 were to pay on a graduated scale. (77–78)

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down the prices of staples such as bread and potatoes. It was a period of domestic violence, with 1812 also seeing the assassination of the prime minister. The war years were a period of intense unrest on all of these fronts, so much so that the war within the war, the War of 1812 with the United States, hardly roiled the surface. Finally, the battle of Waterloo, June 18, 1815, and the resulting abdication of Napoleon, ended the war. The war had lasted for a generation. From her writings, one would hardly know, however, that it was Austen’s generation.







Introduction 1. A significant collection of such documents, however, is available, especially in the first and third volumes, of the superb Narratives of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Alysa Levene. 5 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006). 2. Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher and Middle Classes of Society in Great Britain, Resulting from their Respective Stations, Professions, and Employments, The Sixth Edition, Corrected. 2 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, in the Strand, 1811), 1:1. There is also his An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797; repr. New York: Garland Publishing, 1974). But its one slim volume is in no way comparable to Gisborne’s earlier exploration of men’s social responsibilities.

Chapter 1 1. Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 3. 2. Derek Jarrett, England in the Age of Hogarth (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1974), 76. The following discussion about Elizabeth Ham and boarding schools draws on Jarrett. 3. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 5. Quotations will be cited by page number only when the page number itself is different from the number cited for the preceding quotation. All page references are to this edition. 4. Many critics of the novel talk about the failings of Sir Thomas, among them Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971); Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 50; and John Wiltshire, “Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 62. These commentators see “an ethical anxiety in the reader that is not entirely resolved” because we sympathize with Sir Thomas. I think that this “anxiety” is resolved if we accept Sir Thomas, as I think Austen expected us to accept him, as part of the moral measure in the novel. He is not perfect; were he so, he would not be an interesting character. But he is almost always quite close to the moral mark, and when he has erred, as in his early lack of enthusiasm for the idea of Fanny as a daughter-in-law, he recognizes and regrets his mistakes, and acts quite strongly on the other side of his own argument. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Notes

among the inconveniences of long straight avenues may very properly be reckoned that of their acting as wind-spouts to direct cold blasts with more violence upon the dwelling, as driven through a long tube. But I propose rather to consider the objections in point of beauty. If at the end of a long avenue be placed an obelisk, or temple, or any other eye-trap, ignorance or childhood alone will be caught or pleased by it: the eye of taste or experience hates compulsion, and turns away with disgust from every artificial means of attracting its notice. For this reason an avenue is most pleasing which . . . climbs up a hill, and, passing over its summit, leaves the fancy to conceive its termination. One great mischief of an avenue is that it divides a park and cuts it into separate parts, destroying that unity of lawn or wood which is necessary to please in every composition: this is so obvious that, where a long avenue runs through a park from east to west, it would be hardly possible to avoid distinguishing it into the north and south lawn, or north and south division of the park. But the greatest objection to an avenue is that (especially in uneven ground) it will often act as a curtain drawn across to exclude what is infinitely more interesting than any row of trees, however venerable or beautiful in themselves; and it is in undrawing this curtain at proper places that the utility of what is called breaking an avenue consists: for it is in vain we shall endeavour, by removing nine tenths of the trees in rows, to prevent its having the effect of an avenue when seen from either end.

6. The most prominent proponent of the symbolic nature of Austen’s use of “improvement” is Duckworth, beginning on p. 40. Duckworth has a long discussion about Repton and the other famous improver of the time, Capability Brown (Duckworth, 41–43). In the context of “improvements,” critics like Duckworth and others talk about Fanny standing for “stasis” while the Crawfords stand for “change” (Roberts, 51), but these are oversimplifications. As the novel goes on, it becomes ever clearer that the Crawfords, both Tom and Mary, are flawed human beings, and that what is wrong with them is a deeply imperfect moral perspective rather than simply a different viewpoint on tradition from Fanny and Edmund. 7. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (London: A. Strahan, Printers Street, for T. Cadell and W. Davies, Strand, 1799), 1:4–5 and 2:15. 8. Compare Edmund’s comments with Austen’s account to her sister Cassandra of their first cousin Edward Cooper’s acceptance of a living. Note



5. One of Repton’s particular hobbyhorses was the “avenue,” which he generally disliked. In his Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (London: W. Bulmer & Co., 1794), he says that

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especially Austen’s approval of Cooper’s decision to reside in the neighborhood of his work, just as Edmund insists he should do. And note also Austen’s clear interest in the economics of the position: £140 is a quite respectable amount. “Yesterday came a letter to my mother from Edward Cooper to announce, not the birth of a child, but of a living; for Mrs. Leigh has begged his acceptance of the Rectory of Hamstall-Ridware in Staffordshire, vacant by Mr. Johnson’s death. We collect from his letter that he means to reside there, in which he shows his wisdom. . . . The living is valued at 140£. a year, but perhaps it may be improvable.” Jane Austen (Jane Austen’s Letters, coll. and ed. Deirdre Le Faye [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 37).

Chapter 2 1. Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 97. Johnson in general misreads Mansfield Park, seeing this very realistic portrayal of eighteenth-century life as “no less a parody, though much less a comedy, than Northanger Abbey” (99). She demonizes Sir Thomas and excuses Mrs. Norris, claiming that much of the harm Mrs. Norris does is instigated by Sir Thomas: “Mrs. Norris, then, is less a villain in her own right than an adjutant. In her, we see his officiousness, his liberality, his family pride, and even his parsimoniousness—after all, his anxieties about money make him wish Mrs. Norris would take Fanny off his hands—with the drapery of decency” (114–15). Sir Thomas is not parsimonious—he supports Fanny for all those years— and the other qualities Johnson cites are positive ones in Austen’s portrayal of the man. His initial error in at first not wanting one of his sons to fall in love with the poor cousin is quite understandable, and once he knows Fanny’s worth he welcomes her match with Edmund without hesitation. Johnson twists the happy ending of the novel, with Fanny marrying Edmund, into a doubly questionable issue. First, it is apparently not a good thing after all for Fanny to marry into the Bertrams, for “Mansfield Park has no such luster [as Pemberly in Pride and Prejudice]. A conventionally happy ending which ensconces Fanny there, indispensable at last, and still adulating now enervated figures whose discernment has been radically impeached, sustains rather than settles the problems the foregoing material has uncovered” (116). But even more disturbing, according to Johnson, it all has a tinge of incest: “The marriage of Edmund and Fanny savors of incest” (116). And it is not only Fanny’s marriage that is suspicious; “a good deal of Mansfield Park is devoted to examining the intimacy of fraternal love” in which, as the novel tells us, “even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal” (117). By the way, “Nor is paternal affection exempt from an aura of erotic implication” (118), Johnson rather strangely decides. 2. Austen certainly was familiar with More: she mentions More’s Coelebs in Search of A Wife in her letters. See Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters to her



Notes

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

Notes

sister Cassandra and others, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1932), 1:259. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Education (London: A. Strahan, Printers Street, for T. Cadell and W. Dabvies, Strand, 1799), 2:4–5, 1:15. Elizabeth Inchbald, Lovers’ Vows, trans. of Kotzebue’s Das Kind der Liebe reprint. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), 329. The “Preface” runs from 329–32; the play from 333–75. Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (New York: Viking, 1955), 208. Trilling goes on to say that “Mansfield Park is for this reason held by many to be the novel that is least representative of Jane Austen’s peculiar attractiveness. For those who admire her it is likely to make an occasion for embarrassment. By the same token, it is the novel which the depreciators of Jane Austen may cite most tellingly in justification of their antagonism.” For discussion of Fitzwilliam’s conversation with Elizabeth and how it characterizes the place of the younger son of an aristocratic family, see Mona Scheuermann, Her Bread to Earn (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 209–10. Gary Kelly, “Religion and Politics” in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 152–53, does a good job of summing up much of Austen’s awareness of the movements of her time, including those of religion: “She would have known and understood both the interconnection of religion and politics and the way other writers used the novel to disseminate their religious and political views during the period when she herself was writing novels. She left little direct comment, however, in her novels or her letters, on these matters. According to her family she practiced an unostentatious yet consistent and mainstream Anglican faith. Scattered remarks on religion in her letters indicate that she placed great importance on taking holy communion, regarded religiosity unfavourably, and sometime between 1809 and 1814 came to view the Evangelicals with less disapproval than before. . . . She also left three highly penitential manuscript prayers. . . . She left even fewer comments on politics, though her letters show that she followed current events and especially naval affairs, as they involved two of her brothers [who eventually became Admirals].” “Paucity of direct comment” does not necessarily mean indifference to issues of religion and politics and their representation in the novel, and it is likely that she saw these issues and representations as a woman of her religion and class. Her father and two of her brothers were Church of England clergymen, so she had both a familial and a personal commitment to the established Church. She also had an interest in the social hierarchy that supported and was supported by the Church. Her brother Edward was adopted as heir by a gentry family and thereby joined the historically dominant social class. . . . Yet Austen could sympathize with reformers’ claims for merit over inherited rank and status. Two of her brothers, Francis and Charles, went into the navy, a profession open to merit, and did well. In addition, Austen would know that writers from Mary Wollstonecraft to 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Hannah More called for women of merit to reform the domestic and local sphere and thus, indirectly, the public and political sphere. It seems likely, then, that a woman like Austen would support the historic hierarchical social structure and constitution of church and state, yet could recognize that they should be open to merit . . . if they were to avoid the closedness and rigidity that many blamed for causing the social and political upheavals of the Revolution and its aftermath. 8. Austen’s letters make repeated references to the role of patronage in the naval careers of her brothers Frank and Charles. Tucked into a letter to Cassandra between a discussion of the uses of different kinds of feathers to dress up an outfit and news about visits from some of the neighbors is this reference to Charles, whom she hopes will have the same luck with their father’s intercession as Frank had had: “I am sorry that our dear Charles begins to feel the Dignity of Ill-usage.—My father will write to Admiral Gambier.—He must already have received so much satisfaction from his acquaintance with & Patronage of Frank, that he will be delighted I dare say to have another of the family introduced to him.” That was December 18, 1798. On Monday, December 24, Austen is writing to Cassandra: “I have got some pleasant news for you, which I am eager to communicate. . . . Admiral Gambier in reply to my father’s application writes as follows.—‘As it is usual to keep young officers in small vessels, it being most proper on account of their inexperience, & it being also a situation where they are more in the way of learning their Duty, Your Son has been continued in the Scorpion; but I have mentioned to the Board of Admiralty his wish to be in a Frigate, and when a proper opportunity offers & it is judged that he has taken his Turn in a small Ship, I hope he will be removed.—With regard to your Son now in the London, I am glad I can give you the assurance that his promotion is likely to take place very soon, as Lord Spencer has been so good as to say he would include him in an arrangement that he proposes making in a short time relative to some promotions in that quarter.’” Austen’s next letter to Cassandra on the subject of promotions and placements sounds very much like the letter Henry Crawford brings to Fanny announcing her brother’s success. At the end of December 1798 Austen tells Cassandra that this letter shall consist only of good news: “Frank is made.—He was yesterday raised to the Rank of Commander, & appointed to the Petterel Sloop, now at Gibraltar.—A Letter from Daysh has just announced this, & as it is confirmed by a very friendly one from Mr. Mathew to the same effect transcribing one from Admiral Gambier to the General, we have no reason to suspect the truth of it.— As soon as you have cried a little for Joy, you may go on, & learn farther that the India House have taken Captn Austen’s Petition into Consideration . . . & likewise that Lieut. Charles John Austen is removed to the Tamer Frigate—this comes from the Admiral” (Jane Austen. Jane Austen’s Letters, coll. and ed. by Deirdre Le Faye [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997], 26, 28, 32).



Notes

Notes

Further references to the two brothers’ careers come frequently: see for example pages 38, 39, 57, 63, 67, 75, 80. These letters are full of very specific references to ships and duties, and these letters show that Austen was very much aware of current events, at least as they relate to the navy. See for example her letter to Cassandra of November 1,1800: “We have at last heard from Frank; a letter from him to You came yesterday. . . . You must rest satisfied with knowing that on the 8th of July the Petterell with the rest of the Egyptian Squadron was off the Isle of Cyprus, whither they went from Jaffa for Provisions &c., & whence they were to sail in a day or two for Alexandria, there to wait the result of the English proposals for the Evacuation of Egypt” (52).

Chapter 3 1. Hannah More, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More by William Roberts, Esq. (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1834), 2:210–11. 2. Martha More, Mendip Annals: or, A Narrative of the Charitable Labours of Hannah and Martha More in their Neighbourhood. ed. Arthur Roberts (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1859), 66–67. 3. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia Johnson (New York: Norton, 1998), 250. All further references to the novel are to this edition. 4. For discussion of these works see Mona Scheuermann, In Praise of Poverty: Hannah More Counters Thomas Paine and the Radical Threat (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002), passim. 5. Naomi Tadmor’s Family & Friends in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) is an elegant study of the relationships among not only family members but friends and acquaintances of the family who could be called upon, indeed were expected to act, in support of those in their family and social circles. Her analysis of the terminology of kinship shows that the responsibilities accepted in these relationships were much wider than we might assume, and that the socially accepted expectation was that any help coming from these sources was legitimate as well as welcome.

Chapter 4 1. Alistair Duckworth’s commentary in The Improvement of the Estate (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971) is central to an understanding of Bingley’s responsibilities. Even if Pride and Prejudice might not have been Austen’s own favorite among her novels (she worried that it was perhaps too light in its outlook), critics find the book a compelling subject. Among the countless studies of the novel, as is true of Austen’s work as a whole, there are the Chicago, the Marxist, the Freudian, the feminist, the historical criticisms; a good starting point for surveying the territory is Duckworth’s thoughtful essay “Jane Austen and the Conflict of Interpretations” in Jane Austen: New Perspectives, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Holmes 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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and Meier, 1983). Claudia L. Johnson’s Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988) and Mary Poovey’s The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984) remain major studies, and Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) is still indispensable. 2. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Donald Grey (New York: Norton, 2001), Quotations will be cited by page number only when the page number itself is different from the number cited for the preceding quotation. All page references are to this edition. 3. The Yearsley controversy has received a good deal of discussion. A sampling of recent work includes Moira Ferguson, “Resistance and Power in the Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley,” The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation 27 (1986); Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen (London: Routledge, 1994); Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 4. In Mansfield Park Austen alludes to these same responsibilities when Mr. Crawford recounts to Fanny the events of his recent trip into Norfolk; his willingness himself to take the trouble to investigate the case of a deserving tenant is meant to find Fanny’s “approbation.” Of course, the fact that in Pride and Prejudice it is Darcy’s servant in her own voice who lauds her employer makes the testimony as to Darcy’s character all the more effective.

Chapter 5 1. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Stephen Parrish (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 3. Quotations will be cited by page number only when the page number itself is different from the number cited for the preceding quotation. All page references are to this edition. 2. Hannah More, “The History of Tom White the Postboy. In Two Parts,” in The Works of Hannah More. A New Edition, with additions and corrections in Eleven Volumes (London: T. Cadell, 1830), 3: 28–29. 3. Critical discussions of Jane Austen’s novels often talk about her as a conservative writer whose novels are based on a conservative literary tradition or as a revolutionary writer whose “feminism” shapes her books; as my study has shown, however, Austen’s canon grows from a much more organic reflection of the upper-class assumptions and concerns that defined her times. Recently (roughly the mid-1980s to late-1990s) a generation of critics presented us with a feminist Austen who, sadly, was deficient in that she did not know how to end her own novels—all those happy marriages at the end of her books! Contemporary criticism has repositioned Austen in her own times, but the emphasis often still is on the literary milieu that shaped her writing. Thus the conservative Austen is shaped not by events but by literature; it is Burke and Adam Smith to whom we need look for help in contextualizing Austen. Peter Knox-Shaw in Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) presents this view, most explicitly in his chapter on Emma. 10.1057/9780230100831 - Reading Jane Austen, Mona Scheuermann


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Notes

1. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Linda Bree (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press Ltd., 1998), 45. Quotations will be cited by page number only when the page number itself is different from the number cited for the preceding quotation. All page references are to this edition. 2. As Bree explains, “Senior naval officers, in particular, could gain large fortunes through prize money. When an enemy ship was captured, an inventory was made of its contents and a ‘price’ arrived at. The captain of the victorious ship was entitled to a substantial proportion of its value, which could amount to several thousands of pounds; the captain’s own commanding officer (usually an admiral some distance away) and the officers and men of the ship also benefited financially” (57). 3. Compare Austen’s description here with her comment to Cassandra on a young woman of their acquaintance who “has been for many years a distinguished beauty.—She is now seven or eight & twenty, & tho’ still handsome less handsome than she has been.—This promises better, than the bloom of seventeen.” Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters, coll. and ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 65. 4. Austen does see something to envy in the adventure of such a life. In a letter to Cassandra, she talks about her own upcoming move to Bath and remarks “there is something interesting in the bustle of going away, & the prospect of spending future summers by the Sea or in Wales is very delightful.—For a time we shall now possess many of the advantages which I have often thought of with Envy in the wives of Sailors or Soldiers.” Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters, collected and ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 68. 5. Hannah More, The Works of Hannah More. A New Edition, with additions and corrections in Eleven Volumes (London: T. Cadell, 1830), 3: 410. 6. The letter appears in Memoirs of The Life and Correspondence of Hannah More by William Roberts (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1834) 2:237–247.

Chapter 7 1. H. T. Dickinson, British Radicalism and the French Revolution 1789–1815 (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 1. 2. For fuller discussion of these issues see Mona Scheuermann, Social Protest in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), chap. 3, passim. 3. The best discussion I have found of the Dissenters and their role both in the industrialization of Britain and the radicalization of her politics is Isaac Kramnick’s Republicanism & Bourgeois Radicalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).



Chapter 6

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4. Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars 1793–1815 (London: Macmillan Press, 1979), 169. 5. At the end of a very long letter to Cassandra on the third of January, 1801 Austen says, with no context at all, “The threatened Act of Parliament does not seem to give any alarm.” This offhand comment suggests both that Austen and her sister indeed followed the news and that Cassandra as well as Jane would have known what the “threatened Act” was and how to consider it in terms of its effect on their own lives. Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters, coll. and ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 69. Le Faye suggests that the reference is to “one of the measures proposed to meet the distress of the winter of 1800–1” (374). 6. Both remarks are quoted by E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 56. 7. Mendip Annals: or, A Narrative of the Charitable Labours of Hannah and Martha More in their Neighbourhood. Being the Journal of Martha More, ed., with additional matter, by Arthur Roberts (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1859), 66–67. 8. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 65. 9. Henry Thompson, The Life of Hannah More: with Notices of Her Sisters (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey & A. Hart, 1838), 1:101. For a more detailed discussion of these attitudes see Mona Scheuermann, In Praise of Poverty: Hannah More Counters Thomas Paine and the Radical Threat (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2002), chaps. 6 and 7. 10. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 57. 11. Lord Cockburn, on his youth in Scotland, quoted by E. P. Thompson, 57. 12. Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 19. The following discussion is largely based on Roberts’ account. 13. Hannah More, “Tom White the Postilian, part two” and “A Cure for Melancholy: Showing the Way to Do Much With Little Money, Written During the Scarcity of 1794” in The Works of Hannah More. A New Edition, with Additions and Corrections, in Eleven Volumes, vols. 3 and 4 (London: T. Cadell, 1830). The “Cure for Melancholy” in some printings is titled “The Cottage Cook, or, Mrs. Jones’s Cheap Dishes; Shewing the Way to do much good with little money.” 14. Clive Emsley, British Society and the French Wars 1793–1815 (London: Macmillan Press, 1979), 2–4. 15. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), 175–76. 16. John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (Boston and New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 305. 17. David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York and London: Norton, 1974), 223.



Notes

Notes

18. Details of these episodes are from Keane, p. 307–8, 310, and 324–27. 19. E. P. Thompson’s analysis of the response to the second part of Rights of Man is important. “The estimate (in a pamphlet of 1793) that sales totaled 200,000 by that year has been widely accepted: this in a population of ten millions. The Second Part went immediately into a 6d. edition, sponsored by the Constitutional Society and by local societies. At Newcastle (Staffs.) Paine’s publications were said to be ‘in almost every hand,’ and in particular those of the journeymen potters: ‘more than Two Thirds of this populous Neighborhood are ripe for a Revolt, especially the lower class of Inhabitants’” (107–8). Paine’s book was found in Cornish tinmines, in Mendip villages, in the Scottish Highlands, and, a little later, in most parts of Ireland. “The Northern parts of Wales,” a correspondent complained, “are infested by itinerant Methodist preachers who descant on the Rights of Man and attack Kingly Government.” “The book,” wrote another Englishman, “is now made as much a Standard book in this Country as Robinson Crusoe & the Pilgrim’s Progress.” (108) 20. Dickinson, 6–7 21. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Hannah More, Lady Browne . . . , ed. W. S. Lewis, Robert A. Smith, and Charles H. Bennett (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961). All references to Walpole’s letters are to this edition. 22. For more detailed accounts of English upper-class responses to the horrors in France see Women’s Travel Writing in Revolutionary France, part l. ed. Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave, vol. 1–3 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007). The series reprints the first and second volumes of Helen Maria Williams’ A Tour in Switzerland, Williams’ Letters Containing a Sketch of the Scenes which Passed in Various Departments of France during the Tyranny of Robespierre; and of the Events which Took Place in Paris on the 28th of July, 1794, and Charlotte West’s A Ten Years’ Residence in France. 23. John Adams, one of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence, expressed views similar to Burke’s about the violence in France. “I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists,” and, later, “Danton, Robespierre, Marat and company are furies. . . . Dragon’s teeth have been sown in France and come up monsters,” he wrote. Thomas Jefferson for years embraced the French Revolution, seeing in it a parallel to the American Revolution, many years later to confess to Adams that he, too, had come to Adams’ view. See David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 418, 436, 443. 24. This and the following quotations come from Emsley, 17–18. 25. Edward Royle and James Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers 1760– 1848 (Columbus: The University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 81. 26. For further discussion of these incidents, see Royle and Walvin, pp. 82–83, Dickinson, pp. 55–56, and Emsley, pp. 59–60. The leaders of the naval mutinies were severely punished; the most prominent, Richard Parker, was hanged, soon to be followed by thirty other men. Lesser but still severe punishments were meted out to hundreds of other mutineers. Derek Jarrett, Britain 1688–1815 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965) also deals with these and related issues.



206

Adams, John, 206n23 adoption, 14; Austen, Edward, 14; Churchill, Frank, 115; Ham, Elizabeth, 14; Price, Fanny, 15, 17–20, 45 agriculture, economic expansion of, 170 Alien Act, 190 American War of Independence, 182 Anglicans, liberal, 187 arbitrary power, 180 army, 180; mutinies, 188; standing, 180 Association for Preserving Liberty and Property Against Republicans and Levellers, 188 Austen, Cassandra, 198n8 Austen, Charles, 201n8 Austen, Frank, 201n8 Austen, Jane: ethics, 1–2; fortunes, 60; horror of lower-class life, 66; meals as measure of order, 69, 73, 76, 106; morality, 2, 10, 13; prayers written by, 59; wealth, 15 Bage, Robert, 94 banking system, near failure of, 193 Bath, 139, 143, 159, 161 benevolence, 125–27 Bermuda, 150 Birmingham, 170 Biron, Marechal de, 182 Bonaparte, Napoleon, abdication, 139, 169, 171, 181, 195 Bree, Linda, 204n2 Bristol, 170 British fleet, threatened defection of, 171

Burke, Edmund, 172; Reflections on the French Revolution, 13 Burney, Fanny, 170, 187 Cadell, Thomas, 173 Cambridge, 176 Chapman, Thomas, 185 Chapone, Hester, 101 charity, 123–24 chastity, 40 Child of Love [Das Kinde der Liebe], 41–47 Christianity, 30–31 civility, 2, 110 class, 2, 3; barriers, 122; social dynamics of, 170 clergy, duties of, 9, 29, 32–35, 58–59, 153; salaries, 55 clerical livings, 22 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 109 commerce, economic expansion of, 170 conduct books, 2, 4, 13, 21, 30, 37 Cooper, Edward, 198n8 core beliefs, 2 Cork, 150 Corn Law of 1791, 176 courtesy, 2 crop failures, 177, 179 Das Kinde der Liebe [Child of Love], 41–47 debtor’s prison, 176 decency, 1, 2 deserving poor, 75 Dickinson, H. T., 170 diffidence, 1



Index

208

dissenters, dissenting academies, 187; Test and Corporation Acts, 170, 187 Divine Right, 183 domestic unrest, 175 East Indies, 17, 140, 150 economics of labor, 170 Edinburgh, 170 education, female, 18, 20, 21, 22, 117–18, 121; male, 21, 23; poor, 125; social, 3 “Eleanore and Marianne,” 172 Emma, 1, 15, 66, 78, 87, 113–34, 154–55, 166; Box Hill picnic, 1–2, 117, 127–29; work, 115, 116, 118, 119 Emsley, Clive, 176, 181, 194 enclosures, 169, 176 English Corresponding Societies, 190 equality of situation, male and female, 127–29, 131–33 ethics and society, 1 famine conditions, 169 Feuillide, Compte de, 174 Feuillide, Eliza de, 174–75 financial security, fragility of in upper classes, 23 “First Impressions,” 173 food riots, 171, 176, 177, 179 food shortages, 171, 194 fortune, financial standing, 20–25, 89–91 Frances, Lady Shelley, 172 French National Convention, 186 French Revolution, 10, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 181, 191; execution of king and queen, 188; fall of the Bastille, 189; the Terror, 172 French wars, 180–88 Garrick, David, 10 gentle classes, 2 Gibraltar, 150

Gisborne, Thomas: An Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher and Middle Classes of Society in Great Britain, Resulting from their Respective Stations, Professions, and Employments, 4–9, 10, 30; An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, 197n2 Glasgow, 170 Glorious Revolution, 169 Godwin, William, 10 habeus corpus, 169, 188, 190 Hardy, Thomas, 182, 190 Holcroft, Thomas, 10; Hugh Trevor, 16 illegitimacy, 131 impressment, 180, 194 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 10, 41–45, 94, 100 industrialization, 169–70, 187 Industrial Revolution, 176, 181, 187 influence, 60–62 interest, 118, 141 Jemappes, French victory at, 186 Johnson, Claudia L., 199n1 Johnson, Joseph, 185 Johnson, Samuel, 10, 13 Jordan, J. S., 185 Kelly, Gary, 200n7 Knight, Catherine, 14 Knight, Thomas, 14 Kotzebue, August Friedrich Ferdinand von, 41–42 landowner responsibilities, 58 Lascelles, Mary, 14 Leeds, 170 Lisbon, 150 Liverpool, 170 London, 170 London Corresponding Society, 182, 186, 188, 190 Louis XVIII, restoration of, 181



Index

Index

Manchester, 170 Mansfield Park, 2, 9, 13–36, 37–63, 65–83, 87, 100, 133; child moved from parental household, 115; clerical careers, 7, 9, 22, 31–35, 58–59, 148; emotional abuse, 52–55, 67; expectations in the marriage market, 20; honesty, 1; female education, 18, 20–22, 80; finances, 19, 23–25; improvement of estates, 19, 26–29, 59, 100; landowners, duties of, 74; lower-class life, 66, 70–71; Lovers’ Vows, 37, 38–47, 50–51, 55; manners, 73–76; morality, 3, 13, 22; parenting, 68–69, 70–71, 137, 145; patronage, 16, 61–62, 141; private theatricals, 48–52; as problem novel, 13; wealth as positive, 15, 60; younger sons, 22–23, 57 marriage, market, 20; for monetary gain, 24 money, 144; crossroad between money and morality, 23; morality, 15; moral life, 3, 4 Montagu, Elizabeth, 101 morality, 1 moral substance, 20 More, Hannah, 10, 21, 30–31, 37, 41–42, 65, 70, 73, 76, 100, 101, 172; Cheap Repository Tracts, 10, 75, 124, 126, 156, 172; Cheddar poor, 65–66, 173, 174; Coelebs in Search of a Wife, 199n2; “A Cure for Melancholy: Showing the Way to Do Much With Little Money, Written During the Scarcity of 1794,” 177, 179; Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 4, 38; “Tom White the Postilian, part two,” 177–79; Village Politics, 10, 172

More, Patti, 173; Mendip Annals, 65–66 Morning Chronicle, 190 Napoleonic wars, 172 naval mutinies, 171, 180, 188; blockade of Thames, 193; at Spithead, 193 Northanger Abbey, 173 nouveau riche, 170 Paine, Thomas, 16, 30, 172, 174, 180, 190–91; Age of Reason, 13; Catholic Church, 184; hereditary government, 183; Rights of Man, 13, 16, 172, 174, 175, 183–86, 188 patronage, 16, 60–62, 83 Peace of Amiens, 170, 181 Persuasion, 1, 87, 118, 129, 133, 135–66, 180; Croft marriage, 159–60; debt, 138; filial ties, 143, 145–46; finances, 136; hereditary rank, 140; instability of society, 135; interest, 148; money, 141, 143; naval prize money, 148–49, 150–53, 165; navy lists, 142, 148; navy as profession, 139–40, 148; parenting, 137, 145; property, 153; sailor’s life, 139, 148–49, 180, 188; social rank, 136; Sundaytravelling, 158; talent, rise in social class by, 140; women on board ship, 149–50 Pitt, William, 188, 191, 193 political ferment, 10, 13 Pope, Alexander: Essay on Man, 5–6 population growth, 170 Porteus, Bishop of London, 10, 30 poverty, 183 press gangs, 171, 180 Pride and Prejudice, 3, 14, 74, 78, 87–112, 166; class interplay, 113; Darcy’s library, 92–93; Darcy’s modesty, 1; Darcy’s morality, 96, 98, 99–100; entail, 23, 91, 94; family relationships, 87, 88, 90, 91, 95, 102, 104, 108, 11–12,



Lovers’ Vows, 37, 41–48, 50–51, 55 Luddites, 171, 194 Lyme, 161 Lyrical Ballads, 109

209

210

Index

religion, 29, 94 Reports of Committees of Secrecy, 191 Repton, Humphrey, 26–27, 198n5 Rodney, Sir George, 182 Romilly, Sir Samuel, 174 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 38–39 Rowberrow Parish, 173 Royle, Edward, 182 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von: Tragedy of the Robbers, 39 Scottish Corresponding Society, 190 Sense and Sensibility, 172 Seven Years War, 182 Sheffield Constitutional Society, 182 Sheffield Register, 181 Shipham Parish, 173 social rank, 2, 20, 130 Southwark, 170 spies, government, 169, 182 Sterne, Laurence, 182 Steventon, 175

Stranger, The, 40–41 “Susan,” 173 Tadmor, Naomi, 202n5 taxes, 171, 183, 193–94; income tax, 194 Thellwell, John, 190 Thompson, E. P., 174, 176, 180, 182, 191 Thompson, Henry, 174 Tooke, John Horne, 190 Townsend, Joseph: A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, 75 Trafalgar, Battle of, 140 transportation, sentences of, 190 Trilling, Lionel, 48, 200n5 universal manhood suffrage, 187 urban expansion, 170 Valmy, French victory at, 186 Victorian middle class, 174 Voltaire, 40 Walpole, Horace, 101, 188 Walvin, James, 182 War of 1812, 195 Waterloo, Battle of, 171, 195 wealth, hoarding, 18 West Indies, 17, 24, 58, 150–51, 164, 166 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 10, 21; Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct in the More Important Duties of Life, 4 Wordsworth, William, 132; “The Old Cumberland Beggar,” 132 World War I, 171 Yearsley, Anne, 101–2



Pride and Prejudice (continued ) 143, 165; manners and ethics, 93; marriage, Bennet’s, 95–96, Charlotte’s, 94–96; Pemberly’s, 100–101; rank in society, 136; servants, 74, 93, 101–2, 116, 119; soldiers, 139, 179, 181; truths universally acknowledged, 7; wealth, 15, 57, 88–91, 114, 132, 137, 154, 163 Priestly, Joseph, 189 Private Gentlemen, 7 professions, 115, 116, 118, 119, 139– 40. See also Emma, Mansfield Park, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice

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