Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  He would be unlikely to care much about the gipsies themselves; few people did. Specific anti-gipsy legislation had been repealed only in 1783. There remained an engrained cultural belief that gipsies would abduct non-gipsy children, given even half a chance.m Gipsies feature as kidnappers in numerous eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century novels, from Joseph Andrews (1743) to Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815). They can be reasonable foster parents to the children they steal. They can sometimes even repent and help to put matters right, as happens in Guy Mannering. But they’re consistently presented as a potential danger to the fabric of ordinary families. When not involved in kidnapping, they can be found telling false fortunes (as in The Vicar of Wakefield of 1766, enormously popular), stealing, or peddling ‘dream books’, ‘wicked songs’ and quack remedies, like ‘Tawny Rachel’ does in Hannah More’s story Giles the Poacher. The widely-read magazine, The Spectator, called gipsies ‘vermin’. William Wordsworth, in an 1807 poem, ‘Gypsies’, berates them for laziness, announcing in his concluding lines that ‘they are what their birth | And breeding suffer them to be; | Wild outcasts of society!’

  And William Cowper, so deeply moved by the plight of African slaves, so lyrical on the subject of their sufferings, writes of gipsies with open – and openly racist – contempt, in his long poem The Task. They are ‘a vagabond and useless tribe’, who eat ‘flesh obscene of dog | or vermin, or at best of cock | purloined from his accustomed perch’. They ‘pick their fuel out of ev’ry hedge’. The ‘flutt’ring rags’ they wear reveal their ‘tawny skin’. They prefer ‘squalid sloth’ to ‘honourable toil’. They beg, they steal; they disguise themselves and fake injuries to garner sympathy. They are strange, alien, ‘self-banished from society’.

  Against this background, Jane’s presentation of the gipsies in Emma has to count as relatively positive – nuanced, at least. Harriet and her friend are frightened, undoubtedly; but Jane indicates that there isn’t much – if any – real reason for them to be. A ‘child’ approaches them ‘to beg’; their immediate reaction is to ‘scream’ and flee. ‘How the trampers might have behaved, had the young ladies been more courageous, must’, we’re told, ‘be doubtful; but such an invitation for attack could not be resisted’. The ‘attack’, when it comes, comes in the form of ‘half a dozen children, headed by a stout woman and a great boy’, ‘clamorous, and impertinent in look’. Harriet’s reaction, which is to get out her purse, is not the wisest thing to do. The ‘whole gang’ surround her, demanding more. Harriet’s terror and her purse are both ‘too tempting’. We’re not quite at victim-blaming here, but both the novel and the other characters seem confident that the situation might quite easily have been avoided. Screen adaptations, without exception, exaggerate this scene, making it more threatening than it is in the book. The gipsies scare Harriet, but they never touch her.

  The arrival of Frank Churchill turns the tables immediately and completely: ‘The terror which the woman and boy had been creating in Harriet was then their own portion.’ Frank leaves them ‘completely frightened’. The details of the incident – the screaming, Harriet’s stitch, the ‘amused and delighted’ ‘sensibility’ with which Frank describes Harriet’s ‘naivete’ and ‘fervour’, Jane’s careful excision of any real physical danger, or any fear of sexual violence – ensure that this scene is a complicated one, especially given how short it is. Jane’s gipsies are not like other writers’ gipsies. For a start, nearly all of them are children, so there are no kidnappers here, no fortune tellers, or peddlers of suspect goods. They’re not even very good at begging; certainly they haven’t perfected the disguises or the professional beggar’s whine that Cowper is so ready to accuse them of.

  The Romani were frequent visitors to Steventon and to Chawton throughout Jane’s lifetime, but, aside from a fleeting reference in a childhood story, this is the only occasion on which they appear in her writing. They’re not even necessary to move the plot along; Jane could easily have come up with an alternative. They’re in the novel for a purpose.

  A famous piece of Marxist literary criticism compares Jane Austen unfavourably to the pioneering journalist and social campaigner, William Cobbett. The two were roughly of an age; both were born in Hampshire and spent much of their lives there. Cobbett, who though a passionate and outspoken critic of the French Revolution, was a lifelong reformer, was mostly out of favour with the British establishment – so much out of favour at times that he served two years in prison and twice had to remove himself to America until passions had cooled. The government feared his influence. Once he set out to make his long-running periodical, The Political Register, widely affordable, its circulation went through the roof (rising to more than 40,000 a month). In the 1820s and 1830s, his interest turned to the dire state of the English rural economy; his Rural Rides describes what happened in the generation after the rash of enclosures spread across the face of the countryside.

  For the Marxist critic Raymond Williams, Cobbett offers a necessary corrective to Jane’s genteel comedy of manners:

  [W]hat Cobbett names, riding past on the road, are classes. Jane Austen, from inside the houses, can never see that, for all the intricacy of her social description. All her discrimination is, understandably, internal and exclusive. She is concerned with the conduct of people who … are repeatedly trying to make themselves into a class. But where only one class is seen, no classes are seen.13

  The interlude with the gipsies gives the lie to this claim. For a start, it takes place on the road. Lots of the pivotal scenes in Jane’s novels take place outdoors, and even when indoors, we’re not invariably ‘inside the houses’. Sometimes we’re in inns, assembly buildings, hotels, cramped rented rooms. Frank Churchill, gentleman of leisure, is in no way in the same social class as the gipsies. Nor is he in the same social class as the illegitimate Harriet Smith. There may be no difference for a Marxist between Frank and Harriet, but for Jane and her first readers there was. Her willingness to force the landed gentry together with other classes without making broad comedy of it is, as we saw when we looked at Pride and Prejudice, enormously innovative. So is her willingness to include in her novels marriages that cross class barriers.

  But even accepting the much blunter class distinctions of Marxism, there are actually plenty of characters in Jane’s novels who can’t sit back and wait for money to appear – who need to earn their living, to make their own way. The clergymen don’t quite come under this heading, but the sailors certainly do. Captain Wentworth, in Persuasion, hasn’t joined the navy to have fun and see the world. When he first proposes to Anne, he’s penniless apart from his salary. Fanny Price’s brother William is earning his keep before he hits puberty. The attorneys, the estate managers: they work. So do the servants.

  In fact over the course of her career, Jane becomes increasingly interested in working people, particularly – and perhaps unsurprisingly – in working women.

  In Northanger Abbey servants are almost entirely anonymous (‘a pattened maidservant’, a ‘footman’). Eleanor Tilney’s companion in Bath has a name, but very little more. In Sense and Sensibility one or two servants are individualised – the Dashwoods’ manservant is called Thomas, Mrs Jennings has a ‘Betty’; Thomas even speaks a few lines. But the outline of personalities doesn’t appear until Pride and Prejudice, where what might be called ‘half-servants’ – housekeepers, governesses, companions – begin to take on greater significance. Jane differentiates. There is, she tells us, ‘nothing remarkable’ in the appearance of Anne de Bourgh’s companion, Miss Jenkinson, while Georgiana Darcy’s governess-companion Miss Annesley is described as ‘a genteel, agreeable-looking woman’, sensitive to the awkward undercurrents in the drawing room at Pemberley and ‘proved to be … truly well-bred’ by her attempts to defuse them. Georgiana’s previous companion, Mrs Younge, is, of course, a crony of Wickham’s. She facilitated his intimacy with Georgiana and, for the right price, reveals his whereabouts – and Lydia’s – to Darcy. Mrs Reynol
ds, Darcy’s fond housekeeper, has known him from his childhood upwards. She’s closer to a stock character, but we’re meant to agree with Lizzy’s assessment of her – after all, ‘What praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant?’

  In Mansfield Park the servants have skills, rheumatism, children, grandchildren. We never encounter Miss Lee, the governess at Mansfield, but she’s clearly well-qualified. Christopher Jackson, the estate carpenter, does a ‘neat job’ on the theatre – it’s the only positive thing Sir Thomas finds to say about the entire acting scheme. Jackson has a son, Dick, ‘a great lubberly fellow of ten years old’. At Sotherton we glimpse from the corner of our eye a gardener, with a sick grandson, who grows ‘a very curious specimen of heath’. The Mansfield coachman is afflicted with ‘rheumatism’; menaced by the ‘doctoring’ of Mrs Norris, he recovers. These characters are vivid, individual – the Prices’ maid Rebecca is stroppy, wilfully incompetent; even Baddeley, the perfect butler, permits himself a solitary, smug ‘half-smile’ to see Mrs Norris discomfited.

  For Mrs Norris life is one continual battle against ‘encroaching’ from the servant class. Any concern she demonstrates for them is specious, aimed at showing herself in the best light. But Mr Woodhouse, for all his ‘habits of gentle selfishness’, shows a real, if mild, affection for his staff and their families. We’ve come a long way from the nameless servants in Northanger Abbey – in Emma only a character like Mrs Elton pretends to forget the names of the people who work for her. Mr Woodhouse recommends Hannah, the daughter of his coachman James, for a position as housemaid at Randalls:

  ‘I am very glad I did think of her. 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: she is a civil, pretty-spoken girl; I have a great opinion of her. Whenever I see her, she always curtseys and asks me how I do, in a very pretty manner; and when you have had her here to do needlework, I observe she always turns the lock of the door the right way and never bangs it. I am sure she will be an excellent servant.’

  But in Emma even excellent servants have their disagreements – we learn of a falling-out between Mrs Elton’s housekeeper Mrs Wright and Mr Knightley’s Mrs Hodges, over a promised ‘receipt’ (a recipe). Elsewhere we learn, at third- or fourth-hand, that Mrs Hodges is ‘quite displeased’ about her master sending apples to the Bateses, learn too that she is not a perfectly good-tempered woman (‘Mrs Hodges would be cross sometimes’). Then there’s Emma’s governess, Miss Taylor, who begins the novel by retiring, and becoming Mrs Weston. There’s Jane Fairfax, who has been ‘brought up for educating others’, and only narrowly avoids being employed by one of Mrs Elton’s friends. These two characters are (or have been) part of the servant class but they’re fully fleshed-out; they make the novel. What would happen to the plot, after all, if Miss Taylor hadn’t married, or if Jane Fairfax didn’t exist?

  Emma is also full of people who work but aren’t servants. There’s the lawyer Mr Cox, involved in Mr Knightley’s attempt to enclose Highbury. There’s Mr Knightley’s estate manager, William Larkin. There’s the apothecary Mr Perry, so busy that the reader is continually just missing him as he races off to see his next patient. The impoverished John Abdy was, we’re told, a parish clerk for ‘twenty-seven years’. We have the shopkeepers – Mr and Mrs Ford, who own a ‘woollen-draper, linen-draper, and haberdasher’s shop united’; Mrs Wallis, the baker’s wife, thought by some to be ‘uncivil’ and to ‘give a rude answer’. We have Mrs Goddard, ‘mistress of a school’ who, we’re told, ‘had worked hard in her youth and now thought herself entitled to the occasional holiday of a tea-visit’, and ‘the three teachers, Miss Nash, and Miss Prince, and Miss Richardson’.

  There’s nothing like this in any of Jane’s earlier novels. Even Persuasion, which takes us from a baronet to a monthly nurse, doesn’t feature this sheer number and variety of characters. In part, of course, this is because, unlike any of the other novels, Emma stays in one place. Jane has only one canvas to fill. The preoccupation with enclosure necessitates precision – just consider how much more we know about the geography of Highbury than we do about Meryton, in Pride and Prejudice – but the range and the detail, the care with which class distinctions are traced out, the touching almost every character with shades and tints of personality, these are also Jane’s artistic, deliberate choice.

  Many of the characters define themselves by their relationship to others, by their status relative to neighbours and acquaintances. The words ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ appear three times more often in Emma than in the other novels. But social definitions are seldom, if ever, stable in Highbury; nor are they universally agreed on.

  Emma thinks that Mr Elton would do very nicely for Harriet: ‘Mr Elton’s situation was most suitable, quite the gentleman himself, and without low connexions; at the same time, not of any family that could fairly object to the doubtful birth of Harriet.’ Mr Elton, who rates his claims rather differently, is ‘affronted’ at the idea:

  ‘I think seriously of Miss Smith!—Miss Smith is a very good sort of girl; and I should be happy to see her respectably settled. I wish her extremely well: and, no doubt, there are men who might not object to—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!’

  Emma, in her turn, is entirely taken aback when Mr Elton proposes to her, astonished that he ‘should suppose himself her equal’, should ‘fancy himself shewing no presumption in addressing her’.

  Does Mr Elton succeed in making an equal marriage? His wife brings ‘no name, no blood, no alliance’, only a modest fortune from trade, but she isn’t shy about asserting her place in the social hierarchy. Though herself from mercantile, slave-trading Bristol – and defensive about the connection (her brother-in-law, she asserts, ‘was always rather a friend to the abolition’) – Mrs Elton sneers at northern manufacturing towns: ‘One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.’ She sees herself as Mrs Weston’s superior (‘I was rather astonished to find her so very ladylike!’), and as equal to ‘Knightley’ and to Emma – ‘You and I must establish a musical club!’

  But then, Mr Knightley keeps ‘no horses’ for his carriage and seldom hires them. He goes about on foot; he has ‘little spare money’; he dresses like a farmer – how is Mrs Elton meant to know that he’s her social superior? Emma has as her intimate friend not only Harriet Smith – ‘the natural daughter of nobody knows whom, with probably no settled provision at all, and certainly no respectable relations’ – but her former governess. Where is Mrs Weston from? What is her family background? Has she any relations, respectable or otherwise? We never discover. It’s best, we gather, to draw a veil over such questions; the answers might not be what we would like. If it comes to that, what social class was Emma’s mother born into? Emma has £30,000, so too, we have to presume, does her older sister; that kind of liquidity, when combined with marriage to the untitled, uninspiring Mr Woodhouse, suggests her mother came from trade – successful trade, to be sure, but trade. North of England industry? The West Indies? The East? Emma’s sister is married to a London lawyer. The Woodhouses may be the ‘younger branch of a very ancient family’, but is Emma really in any position to cavil at Mrs Elton’s antecedents?n

  Critics like to call Emma a snob – and she does spend a lot of time deciding precisely where in the social order people ought to belong. But if she is a snob then she’s a very inclusive, persuadable one, willing to embrace a number of her social inferiors, and to change her mind about others. Harriet Smith, Mrs Weston, Mr Weston – who has spent the past ‘eighteen or twenty years’ ‘engaged in trade’ – all are her intimates, her associates. She tells herself that the Coles – ‘of low origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel’ – ‘ought to be taught that it was not for them to arrange the terms on which
the superior families would visit them’; but she easily allows herself to be convinced that, after all, she will accept their invitation. She asserts that Harriet’s suitor Robert Martin belongs to the ‘yeomanry’, and ‘must be coarse and unrefined’, but the letter in which he proposes to Harriet forces her to re-examine her own ideas:

  She read, and was surprized. The style of the letter was much above her expectation. There were not merely no grammatical errors, but as a composition it would not have disgraced a gentleman; the language, though plain, was strong and unaffected, and the sentiments it conveyed very much to the credit of the writer. It was short, but expressed good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling. She paused over it.

  Jane indicates that her readers should be pausing, too; should refrain from jumping to conclusions. They won’t be the right ones. In Highbury the old rules and conventions don’t work. It’s a restless, unsettled sort of place. The landscape is new and unfamiliar – in all sorts of ways. Paths have moved; barriers have sprung up; maps have to be redrawn. Characters are constantly on the move, walking, getting in and out of carriages, travelling to and from London. Mr Weston, we’re told, essentially commuted for years – working in London but keeping a house in Highbury ‘where almost all of his leisure days were spent’. Frank pops into the capital to have a haircut and order a piano (his real object). Social class creaks and shifts. The Westons, the Martins and the Coles are moving up, the Eltons too. But the movement isn’t all upwards. One local family, the Abdys, have gone in one generation from parish clerk to ostler – from a literate quasi-professional to someone who looks after horses at a staging inn. The Bates women have moved down too, the daughter further than the mother. (‘She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more.’) Characters shore up their sense of their social position by distributing charity to those they see as less fortunate. Shifting social class is so central a concern that at least three of the characters in the novel embody it within themselves.