Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  The novel focusing on enclosure – what it had changed, what it had damaged, what it meant for the future – had to wait a little while. It had to wait till Jane started work on Emma.

  In spite of its rich, self-absorbed heroine, Emma is about need. Even Emma’s surname, ‘Woodhouse’, reminds readers of necessities – wood for a fire, a house to shelter you from the elements. The novel’s preoccupation with food fits in with this.

  And people aren’t just hungry in Emma; they’re desperate.

  The group of gipsies who attempt to rob Harriet Smith and her school friend are on the ‘greensward’ – the turf – at the side of the ‘Richmond road’, which means they’re committing highway robbery, a crime that carried the death penalty. It’s unlikely that any of the ‘half a dozen children’ in the group would be hanged, but the ‘stout woman’ and ‘great boy’ who lead them are running a serious risk.j If caught they are almost certain to be convicted, and even if they don’t end up dancing on the end of a rope, they’ll be transported to Australia. The series of thefts from hen-houses that closes the novel (and convinces the terminally conservative Mr Woodhouse to consent to Emma and Mr Knightley setting a date for their wedding) is a similarly risky enterprise.

  And since the gipsies take themselves off pretty quickly, the hen-house thief is probably not a gipsy, an outsider, but somebody in Highbury. Jane flags up two potential candidates. There may, we understand, be more. Jane also alludes to the direct cause of this financial hardship and desperation – enclosure. It’s unmistakable. Emma is crammed with references to agricultural improvement, parish boundaries, and hedges; loaded, inevitably politicised references, information that there’s absolutely no other reason to include.

  The novel is set in Surrey, a county that saw 30 enclosures in the first twenty years of the nineteenth century.11 No one has ever been able to determine whether Highbury is based on Leatherhead or Dorking or Epsom, or is a combination of all three. We’re told that Hartfield, Emma’s home, is sixteen miles from Brunswick Square, London, where her sister Isabella lives; Mr Weston, Frank Churchill’s father, talks of Richmond being nine miles distant, and Manchester Street, also in London, eighteen. Highbury itself is perhaps a little further from, or a little closer to the capital.

  Highbury is, not to put too fine a point on it, roughly in the same place as the village of Great Bookham, where Jane’s godfather, Samuel Cooke, was vicar. The Reverend Mr Cooke was married to Mrs Austen’s cousin, a writer who’d had a novel published in 1799, and they had three children, a little younger than Jane. From time to time Jane expresses something not far off loathing for her Cooke cousins. In 1799 she tells her sister that ‘I dread the idea of going to Bookham as much as you can do; but I am not without hopes that something may happen to prevent it’. In summer 1808 she complains that a journey planned by her brother Edward might result in being obliged to visit: ‘I shall be nearer to Bookham than I cd wish, in going from Dorking to Guilford.’12 Jane’s dislike seems to have softened, however – perhaps it stemmed originally from jealousy that Mrs Cooke was a published writer, and dissipated once her own books appeared in print. In the summer of 1814, when she was working on Emma, it appears that she did visit them – in the letter I use as inspiration for the scene that opens this chapter we find her preparing for a trip to Surrey.

  What this suggests is that, whether Highbury itself is real or imaginary, its enclosure may have been modelled on an actual one. Fetcham, the parish immediately neighbouring Great Bookham, was enclosed in 1813. So at the very time that Jane was working on Emma, she was being reminded of exactly what enclosure looked like, and what it did.

  The enclosure in Emma, too, is of recent date; indeed, it seems that it is still in progress. Mr Knightley talks at some length about his plans to move a right of way:

  ‘But John, as to what I was telling you of my idea of moving the path to Langham, of turning it more to the right that it may not cut through the home meadows, I cannot conceive any difficulty. I should not attempt it, if it were to be the means of inconvenience to the Highbury people, but if you call to mind exactly the present line of the path … The only way of proving it, however, will be to turn to our maps.’

  If moving the path is possible, where could ‘difficulty’ arise? Who does Mr Knightley have to ‘prove’ anything to? The officials sent to oversee the enclosure, surely.

  When Emma takes Harriet on a ‘charitable visit’ to a ‘poor sick family’, who live on ‘Vicarage-lane’, she fondly imagines the near future when she plans for Harriet to be married to Mr Elton and living in the vicarage: ‘I do not often walk this way now’, said Emma, as they proceeded, ‘but then there will be an inducement, and I shall gradually get intimately acquainted with all the hedges, gates, pools and pollards of this part of Highbury.’

  Why doesn’t she know them already? She’s lived in Highbury all her life and she’s familiar with the vicarage – she’s surprised to find that Harriet has ‘never in her life been inside’ it. Well, clearly, while the vicarage (‘an old and not very good house’) hasn’t changed, the landscape has, out of all recognition.

  A ‘pollard’ is a tree that has been cut back; a sign of closely-managed woodland, woodland that doesn’t offer much, if anything, by way of sticks for firewood. Enclosers wanted to break commoning traditions as quickly as possible. Enclosure Acts insisted that physical barriers should be put up – ditches dug, fences erected, hedges planted. Gates are necessary only where the land is divided and emphatically private.

  It seems likely that these changes to the vicinity are very recent ones. The Romani – the people Jane calls gipsies – have been in England since the 1500s, if not even longer. Genetic studies indicate they left India around a millennium ago, but when they first appeared in the British Isles, they were thought to be from Egypt, hence the old name ‘gypsy’ or ‘gipsy’. Over the last 200 years there’s been an increasing amount of intermarrying and assimilation, both with Irish traveller and circus communities, and with the general population – but quite a number still live a traditional lifestyle. They travel the same routes year after year, setting up camp in the same places. But it’s clear that the gipsies in Emma are not in their usual campsite.

  They’re camped on the side of the road, somewhere ‘retired’, but not somewhere Harriet or her school friend have ever been warned about walking. So far as we can gather, in fact, it’s unheard of to encounter gipsies anywhere ‘young ladies’ are likely to go. ‘It was a very extraordinary thing!’ thinks Emma to herself. ‘Nothing of the sort had ever occurred before to any young ladies in the place, within her memory; no rencontre, no alarm of the kind.’ Given the speed with which the news spreads (‘Within half an hour it was known all over Highbury’), we can be confident that Emma would have known if such a thing had happened at all recently.

  So what might Jane have intended an early reader to gather from this scene? That the gipsies, arriving in the neighbourhood of Highbury, found that they couldn’t access their usual campsite – presumably somewhere away from the village, somewhere on the common land adjoining the road. And they couldn’t access it because, during the period since they last visited, someone had put barriers up. Jane even particularises the exact nature of the barriers: they’re enclosure hedges. Harriet’s friend, Miss Bickerton, alarmed by the gipsies, gives ‘a great scream, and calling on Harriet to follow her, ran up a steep bank, cleared a slight hedge at the top, and made the best of her way by a short cut back to Highbury’.

  The ‘bank’ may be there to prevent vehicles or heavily laden horses gaining access to the land on the other side, or simply to remove the space from sight of the road. The hedge at the top is ‘slight’ because it’s not very long since it was planted. Miss Bickerton, who as a ‘parlour boarder’ at the local boarding school can’t be much older than about twenty, knows about the ‘short cut’ because, we gather, it’s hardly any time at all since it was a publicly accessible footpath. More athletic than Harriet, who�
��s suffering from a stitch in her side after dancing too much the evening before, Miss Bickerton is able to escape the barriers that the enclosers have tried to place in her way. Harriet isn’t. The gipsies aren’t really so threatening – they’re ‘clamorous and impertinent’, ‘insolent’, not violent. They disperse as soon as Frank Churchill appears on the scene. It’s enclosure that has made the road dangerous; enclosure that’s turning the landscape into a hostile one. And once the hedges have grown higher, will even a strong and fit young man be so happy to wander alone along the Richmond road?

  This may be the first encounter between gipsies and townspeople in Highbury; it’s unlikely to be the last. Memories linger; they linger longest in groups that make a point of adhering to tradition. I’ve passed Romani encampments myself, driving through the Hampshire lanes – brightly painted caravans drawn up on the grass by the side of the road, open fires – stubbornly sited by rights of way, the only access that remains to what was once common land.

  Who’s been driving the enclosure? George Knightley, obviously.

  The name George means ‘farmer’; it comes from a Greek root word connected to soil. Jane makes it explicit that Mr Knightley is a modernising, improving landowner. He wears ‘thick leather gaiters’ to protect his shoes and clothing when walking through muddy fields. He consults weekly with William Larkin, his estate manager. We’re told that many of his conversations with his brother centre around ‘the place of a drain, the change of a fence, the felling of a tree, and the destination of every acre for wheat, turnips, or spring corn’. Towards the end of the novel Emma teases him about his fascination with ‘new drills’ – seed drills, that is. He can frequently be found discussing ‘modes of agriculture, etc.’, once with Harriet Smith, more often, we gather, with his tenant Robert Martin – Harriet’s first (and final) suitor. It’s possible that Robert Martin gets his preferred reading, the ‘Agricultural Reports’, from Mr Knightley. Mr Knightley’s interests are, according to Emma, ‘his farm, and his sheep, and his library, and all the parish’.

  Actually, Mr Knightley is involved in the business of two parishes – Donwell and Highbury. Jane devotes quite a lot of time to describing who lives in which parish. We’re informed as early as the third chapter that there’s ‘Highbury, including Randalls’ (where the Westons live) in one parish ‘and Donwell Abbey in the parish adjoining, the seat of Mr Knightley’. On our first introduction to Robert Martin, readers learn that he rents ‘a large farm of Mr Knightley’ and lives ‘in the parish of Donwell’. We know from Frank Churchill that Frank’s father, Mr Weston, discusses ‘parish business’ after dinner with Mr Cox (‘the lawyer of Highbury’), Mr Cole, rich from ‘trade’ in town, upwardly mobile, and with Mr Knightley. The parishes of Donwell and Highbury may be nominally separate, but, with the exception of Emma’s home, Hartfield, ‘all the rest of Highbury’ is part of ‘the Donwell Abbey estate’. What ‘parish business’ are these men – three of them landowners, one a lawyer, discussing? A rise in poor rates, resulting from the local enclosures? Or further enclosure?

  Mr Knightley has to be the lord of the local manor. There are no other great houses about. And given that his estate is called Donwell Abbey, we must be meant to understand that he’s also the tithe holder for the parish of Donwell, and probably for Highbury parish as well. There’s not much room for doubt, I think, that Mr Knightley has obtained an Enclosure Act for the parish of Donwell, and that it’s in the process of being completed; between his freehold land and his tithe rights, it’s likely that he could push the Act through without reference to anyone else who owns land or holds rights of common there. But, though the town of Highbury is largely estate land, matters there aren’t so simple. There are presumably a number of townspeople who hold rights of common as well as other reasonably sizeable landowners in the parish – Mr Cole, Mr Weston at Randalls, and, at Hartfield, Mr Woodhouse.

  Mr Knightley has, it seems, enclosed as much as he can without obtaining an Act of Parliament (remember those pollards and hedges and fences round Vicarage-lane), but the parish isn’t fully enclosed yet. Amid all the descriptions of enclosed land in the novel, Jane mentions one area that is still explicitly unenclosed – the ‘common field’ that lies between Hartfield and Randalls. Common field can be just another way of saying common land, or it can be another feature of pre-enclosure land use – open fields, farmed in strips, that would often be distributed by an annual lottery. There’s really only one conclusion to be arrived at, from all the information Jane gives us – Mr Knightley is trying to get a majority of the other landowners in Highbury to agree to another Enclosure Act. Of course he is, if he’s the tithe holder for the parish as well as owning most of the land the town is built on. He’ll gain even more land for his modern farming methods at no expense to himself.

  As so often in Jane’s novels, uncomfortable possibilities start to open up. There’s a notable omission from the little group of landowners planning the reshaping of the local landscape over the port – Mr Woodhouse, innately conservative, who hates any and all change. His reluctance to leave the confines of his own property (he ‘never’ goes ‘beyond the shrubbery’) may be due to hypochondria or it may be due to real feelings of anxiety and stress caused by the shifting, alien landscape outside. However ‘useful’ Mr Knightley makes himself to Mr Woodhouse, however ‘ready to write his letters’, however ‘glad to assist him’, it’s difficult to imagine that the older man could easily be convinced to sign up to an enclosure. But Mr Knightley’s younger brother John is married to Emma’s sister Isabella. Isabella and Emma will inherit Hartfield jointly, as co-heiresses.k

  Can we be certain that there’s no hope of gain (all those extra acres, fenced and ditched for free, and the £30,000 besides) mixed in with Mr Knightley’s feelings for Emma? Does he move to Hartfield because he loves Emma and wants to be with her, or because he’s keen to pursue every opportunity of convincing her father to agree with him? He tells Emma that he has been in love with her ‘ever since you were thirteen at least’; a shocking moment for modern readers and not an altogether untroubling one for a reader in 1816. At this point, twelve was deemed marriageable for a girl, and fourteen for a boy, but it was vanishingly rare for either sex to be married so young.l In Persuasion, Jane has Captain Wentworth joke about being willing to accept any woman ‘between fifteen and thirty’, but he ends by marrying a woman of 27. For Jane, a bride below the age of about eighteen is considered very young to be married, and the men who have a taste for excessively youthful women – Willoughby, Wickham – are generally revealed to be cads. Mr Knightley isn’t in the best of company. Leaving that aside, however, we know that John Knightley and Isabella Woodhouse married when Emma was twelve. Is it coincidence that George Knightley began to think (even if not entirely consciously) of Emma as a possible marriage partner so soon afterwards? Married to Emma, and with his brother married to Emma’s sister, Mr Knightley can be certain of pushing the enclosure through – eventually. It won’t, after all, really be the sisters who inherit Hartfield, and its votes in any petition for enclosure, but their husbands.

  Mr Knightley’s suggestion of moving into Hartfield would be pleasing, if it weren’t that his willingness to abandon his own house – his own servants, his parish – recalls his more wide-ranging carelessness, his lack of concern for the poor, for the people he has made poorer. Given his zeal for enclosure, and for improving his land, he’s a terrible landlord. We have to assume that the cottage which Emma takes Harriet to visit early in the novel belongs to him. Small cottages were generally rented; Highbury is part of the Donwell Abbey estate, and Jane never tells us that the cottage is owned by anybody else. In the cottage Emma finds ‘sickness and poverty together’ – poverty worsened by Mr Knightley’s enthusiasm for enclosure, sickness exacerbated by his unwillingness to spend money on his buildings rather than his land. Jane describes the garden outside the cottage, ‘the low hedge, and tottering footstep’ and the ‘narrow, slippery path’; she has Emma paus
e ‘to look once more at all the outward wretchedness of the place’. The implication is that the building too is dilapidated, ill-maintained.

  Emma is the most selfish heroine that Jane ever produces, but, still, she visits the ‘wretched’ cottage at least once, and she ensures that the cottagers have warm, nourishing food. Does Mr Knightley? He’s happy to send apples to the beautiful and accomplished Jane Fairfax, and even to Miss Fairfax’s unbeautiful, unaccomplished relatives, the exhaustingly loquacious Miss Bates and her elderly mother – but they, of course, have the merit of being impoverished gentlewomen. Emma supplements the diet of the Bates women constantly, and it’s worth noting that she supplements it with more costly, and more nourishing foodstuffs, with meat, and eggs, and pastry-tarts.

  The only other occasion on which Mr Knightley provides food is an occasion that Marie Antoinette would have been proud of. It’s the ‘sort of gipsy party’ to pick strawberries at Donwell. The episode comes almost immediately after Harriet’s run-in with the gipsies on the Richmond road – only two chapters intervene. It reads like a deliberate parody of traditional commoning practices. The party – well-fed, for the most part, with every advantage money can buy them – ‘collect round the strawberry-beds’ and, for half an hour, pick fruit, playing at foraging their food. But it’s all pretence, it’s all for fun. They can stop when they get tired, and wander around the grounds before going into Donwell Abbey to be ‘seated and busy’ round a dining-table. The servants have produced a ‘cold repast’, suitable to the hot weather; they will clear it away again. It’s true that the dreadful Mrs Elton has somewhat forced Mr Knightley’s hand over the party; but it’s also true that he lets her. Mrs Elton has grown up in Bristol. She’s the daughter of an indifferently successful ‘merchant’. There’s some excuse for her. But is Mr Knightley really so blind, really so inconsiderate? Even if he believes that enclosure is a patriotic necessity, the only protection against a ticking demographic time-bomb, against want and revolution, does he really care so little about the immediate repercussions of what he’s doing? Does he have no concern at all for the poor cottagers, for Harriet’s unpleasant experience with the gipsies?