Fundamental changes were taking place in the very appearance of the countryside, as hedges, walls and fences sprang up to mark the boundaries of newly enclosed fields, while new turnpike roads and canals carved fresh lines across the land. The open landscape that had existed since before medieval times was fast evolving into the chequered pattern of fields still seen in some places today, or else was being devoured by rapidly expanding industrial towns such as Birmingham and Manchester. As William Blake saw it, ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ was in grave danger from ‘dark Satanic mills’.17
This place of radical change is the real England of Jane Austen and the subject of this book. We wanted to show how the mass of ordinary people, our ancestors, lived and fitted into her England. It used to be fashionable to trace your ancestry back to royalty, even if on the wrong side of the sheets, but even the most humble or most nefarious ancestors are just as interesting. They all had a part to play in shaping events and influencing history. Without them, history is nothing.
We used a similar approach for Jack Tar: The Extraordinary Lives of Ordinary Seamen in Nelson’s Navy, in which we charted the everyday details of what it was like to be a seaman rather than a high-ranking officer. The period we chose for Jack Tar was roughly 1771 to 1815, from when Horatio Nelson first joined the navy as a captain’s servant to a decade after his death, when peace finally came. This coincided with Jane Austen’s lifetime, and so we hope that Eavesdropping on Jane Austen’s England will provide a fascinating contrast and give a flavour of life on land two centuries ago.
When encountering a remote era of history, such as Roman or medieval times, it is not surprising to find an alien world, but life in Georgian England was also very different to the world of the twenty-first century. The basic amenities that we take for granted, like electricity, a water supply and sewerage, were non-existent or just being introduced, so that simply keeping warm, clean and free from hunger entailed laborious, time-consuming and inefficient tasks. Steam engines were transforming some industries, but travel relied on horsepower, manpower or windpower. If someone went away for several years, perhaps serving in the Royal Navy, they might not be recognised on their return, because there were no photographs to refresh memories.
Even walking the streets in bad weather was a different experience, since few buildings had guttering. Instead, roofs overhung the walls so as to throw rainwater away from the foundations. Naturally, people kept close to the walls for shelter, under the overhang – the eaves – and caught snatches of conversation from within as they passed. In a similar way to this eavesdropping, we have caught snatches of the lives of Jane Austen’s contemporaries from the writings they left behind. Our book is a snapshot of her era, reflecting the variety of life at that time. It is not a narrative of events, but of people’s daily lives. We have opted for a loose chronological thread, running from marriage (the main theme of Jane Austen’s novels) to the birth of babies, progressing through childhood, domestic work, religion, occupations, entertainment, travel, illnesses and finally death and burial.
We have relied upon the words of people who lived at that time, recorded in documents such as letters, diaries, travelogues, accounts of criminal trials and newspapers. The spelling in these eyewitness accounts has occasionally been corrected and the punctuation and style sometimes modernised, particularly the tendency to use dashes instead of full-stops, ampersands (&) instead of ‘and’, and upper-case letters for the start of many words. Most quotations have been only slightly altered, if at all, and the words and meaning have not been changed.
Personal letters and diaries were rarely intended to be published, but were written for the information and enjoyment of one or two people, or at most a family and their descendants, as William Holland revealed in January 1801: ‘I began reading my diary to my family from its commencement and shall continue to do so as far as the last year goes.’18 His extensive diaries allow us to become acquainted not just with him and his family in the Somerset parish of Over Stowey and beyond, but also with his overworked servants and the local people including various paupers, labourers and tradesmen. Only an abridged selection of these diaries has ever been published,19 and so the full, original manuscript diaries provide a fresh window on English life, rather like the diaries of the Reverend James Woodforde. Six years younger than Holland, he was an unmarried clergyman from Ansford in Somerset who spent much of his working life on the other side of England, in his Norfolk parish of Weston Longville. Although classically educated, Woodforde turned his back on such learning after leaving Oxford university, and instead filled his diaries with extraordinary details about everyday life. We have made use of the complete text of his extensive diaries that have been so ably transcribed over the years by the Parson Woodforde Society, superseding the edited extracts published decades ago.
In northern England, from Wigan to Liverpool, through the Lake District and Yorkshire, Nelly Weeton provides another perspective on life at that time. She was clearly very intelligent, but her potential was stifled by poverty and her low-class status as a governess. Nelly’s letters and diaries are filled with comments that were often as satirical and perceptive as those of Jane Austen herself. Numerous other voices are heard in this book, including Sarah and William Wilkinson, whose mundane letters to each other (while he was at sea) convey valuable insights into daily life, while the writings of foreign visitors such as the American Benjamin Silliman and the German Carl Moritz provide an outsider’s viewpoint. Such documents take us right to the heart of Jane Austen’s England, allowing us to eavesdrop on what people thought and discussed among themselves – the very words of those who lived two centuries ago.
In her novels Jane Austen brilliantly portrayed the lives of the middle and upper classes, but barely mentioned the cast of characters who constituted the bulk of the population. Mansfield Park was started in 1811 and published in 1814, and her account of how the Price family lived at Portsmouth is the closest she came to portraying the lower classes. It would be left to the genius of the next generation, Charles Dickens, to write novels about the poor, the workers and the lower middle classes. Born in Portsmouth in 1812, before most of Jane Austen’s books had even been published, Dickens was sent to work in a factory in London at the age of twelve and came to rely on writing to earn money. Looking back to the time of the French Revolution, his novel A Tale of Two Cities starts with the celebrated words: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.’ This is a succinct summary of Jane Austen’s England, on which we are about to eavesdrop.
A chronological overview of the main historical events is given on p. 347, including some key events of Jane Austen’s lifetime. For more about this book, see our website www.adkinshistory.com.
ONE
WEDDING BELLS
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
On a bitterly cold Norfolk morning in January 1787, Parson James Woodforde left the comfort of his rectory at Weston Longville and rode on horseback over a mile and a half along a muddy lane until he reached the imposing church of St Peter in the village of Ringland.1 Because its vicar was away, he had been asked by the parish officers to perform an urgent marriage ceremony – for the customary fee of 10 shillings and 6 pence. Inside this medieval church, the spectacular nave roof enhanced the impressive setting for the wedding, but it was not a day for joy and celebration, as Woodforde noted in his diary: ‘Rode to Ringland this morning and married one Robert Astick and Elizabeth Howlett by licence…the man being in custody, the woman being with child by him. The man was a long time before he could be prevailed on to marry her when in the church yard; and at the altar behaved very unbecoming.’2
Standing in the numbing cold before the altar, poor Elizabeth surely dreaded the prospect of being saddled with this man. Although his only alternative was to return to gaol, Robert proved highly reluctant to marry and almost needed to be dragged to the altar. His crime was not premarital sex, but causing a penniless woman and baby to be a burden on the parish, and as a result he was forced into marriage. Under the Bastardy Act of 1733, unmarried pregnant women were taken before the magistrate by the parish overseers of the poor and forced on oath to name the father – or alleged father. The named man then had the dubious choice of paying the parish for the upkeep of the child, marrying the woman (unless he was already married) or a spell in prison. If he ran away, a reward might be offered for his recapture. Nine days after Robert and Elizabeth’s forced marriage, John Hammonway in Northumberland escaped from prison, and the Newcastle Courant carried a detailed description of the offender:
COUNTY OF NORTHUMBERLAND
Made his Escape over a wall, in a yard joining to the House of Correction, at Morpeth, on the 3rd of Feb. instant [1787], JOHN HAMMONWAY, late of the town and county of Newcastle upon Tyne, nailer, was committed for bastardy.– The said John Hammonway is about 23 years of age, five feet five inches high, slender made, swarthy complexion, short black hair, dark-brown sully eyes; had on, when he escaped, a dark-blue coat, flowered cotton waistcoat, leather breeches, with metal buttons.
Whoever will secure the said John Hammonway, and give notice to John Doxford, Keeper of the said House of Correction, shall receive a reward of TWO GUINEAS, to be paid by JOHN DOXFORD.3
Forced marriages were commonplace, but the unmarried Parson Woodforde disliked them intensely: ‘It is a cruel thing that any person should be compelled by law to marry…It is very disagreeable to me to marry such persons.’4 He himself conducted several such weddings at his own church in Weston Longville. ‘I walked to church this morning between 10 and 11 o’clock,’ he recorded some years later, ‘and married by licence, one Daniel Tabble of Ling [Lyng] and Anne Dunnel of Weston, a forced match, she being very near her time, and he under custody of the parish officers ever since yesterday morning. I recd. of the officers for marrying them 0.10.6, being the usual fee for marrying by licence here.’5 Anne gave birth two months later.6 These weddings were a far cry from the romantic notion of courtship, love and marriage that form the essence of Jane Austen’s fiction.
Marriage based on love and on freedom of choice was becoming more common, and from the later eighteenth century romantic novels such as Evelina by Fanny Burney and Belinda by Maria Edgeworth confronted such issues, to be followed a few years later by the novels of Jane Austen. For many, though, particularly if accustomed to wealth, such an approach to marriage was totally impractical. A husband with a respectable income or a wife with a generous dowry was still extremely desirable, if not an absolute necessity, and the conflict between marrying for love and marrying for money and social advantage is a common element in Jane Austen’s writing. In Northanger Abbey she parodied novels such as Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic romance The Mysteries of Udolpho,7 and when Isabella’s impecunious brother John wants to marry her friend Catherine, she is pleased that Catherine is not interested, ‘for what were you both to live upon, supposing you came together? You have both of you something [some income] to be sure, but it is not a trifle that will support a family nowadays; and after all that romancers may say, there is no doing without money.’
A good number of parents arranged marriages to ensure that their children were securely established in life, and girls from wealthy families were provided with dowries, or ‘portions’, to make them attractive to male suitors. In Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility, Edward Ferrars is to marry the wealthy Miss Morton, and on learning that his older brother Robert is also contemplating her, Elinor Dashwood says: ‘The lady, I suppose, has no choice in the affair.’ Elinor’s own brother is puzzled by her reaction: ‘Choice! – how do you mean?’
Wealth was the key factor. Happiness was of secondary importance. For the upper classes, marriage was essential for the provision of legitimate heirs and for the survival of estates, fortunes and families, but for women of all classes marriage was crucial, because ways of supporting themselves were severely limited, resulting in the obsession with pairing off daughters with suitable men. For Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, ‘The business of her life was to get her daughters married.’
It was customary to marry within the same social class – because of hypocrisy and snobbery, marrying into a different class was problematic. It was frequently acceptable for a wealthy man to maintain a mistress of low rank, but he was despised and even shunned if he had the temerity to marry her. In 1810 Nelly Weeton was working as a governess at Dove Nest, a house near Ambleside in the Lake District. The previous year her wealthy employer, Edward Pedder, had married his dairymaid, as Nelly told her unmarried friend Bessy Winkley: ‘if you knew the sorrow that person must undergo who marries above herself, you would never be ambitious to marry out of your own rank; people call it doing well; they are most egregiously mistaken. Let the husband be ever so kind, it cannot compensate for the numberless mortifications a woman so raised must endure. Those married people have the greatest chance of being happy whose original rank was most nearly equal.’8
Originally from Lancashire, Nelly’s parents were both dead, and her younger brother Tom was a lawyer. She was forced to work because she had little money and at the age of thirty-three was still unmarried. A few months later, she elaborated on the former servant girl’s family:
Mrs. P. [Pedder] has a brother and sister…the sister keeps her father’s house, working in the fields, on the peat moss, or her father’s house, as occasion serves. What a difference in the situation of the two sisters! The one with her father wishes much to emerge from her present obscurity; but her father, an honest, warm-hearted, affectionate parent, sensibly says ‘there is more happiness in his humble situation, than where there is more bustle, show, and finery’; he thinks his eldest daughter might do just as well, or better, in marrying a farmer, as the youngest has done in marrying a gentleman. ‘People,’ he says, ‘do not always do well that marry so much above them, for they only get despised and abused by their fine new relations.’9
Finding a suitable marriage partner could prove stressful, since there were insufficient numbers of eligible men to go round, particularly with so many fatalities and injuries in the wars. Accurate figures are impossible to calculate, but throughout the Napoleonic Wars the combined casualties in the army and navy were on average about twenty thousand a year, and many thousands more were engaged in fighting overseas. Some eligible bachelors inevitably preferred the freedom of the single life, and countless young working men were prevented from marrying by restrictions such as apprenticeship contracts. Matchmaking and courtship therefore provided admirable material for Jane Austen’s fiction.
The most effective way for the middle and upper classes to meet prospective partners was at the various balls that were so frequently held in both public and private venues, but courting couples were expected to behave formally, even when greeting each other in public. In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor hears Willoughby using Marianne’s first name and so assumes they are to be married: ‘in his addressing her sister by her Christian name alone, she instantly saw an intimacy so decided, a meaning so direct, as marked a perfect agreement between them. From that moment she doubted not of their being engaged to each other.’
When a woman married she passed from the control of her father, who ‘gave her away’ at the wedding to the control of her husband. Her property became her husband’s, despite his promise in the marriage ceremony, ‘with all my worldly goods I thee endow’. As a wife, she could not legally own land or have a separate source of income, unless set out in a specific contract – the marriage settlement. Such a settlement might entitle her to receive the interest from her dowry in her lifetime and to bequeath the dowry to her children or use it as income if her husban
d died. Otherwise, she effectively had no legal status, and any children belonged to her husband.
The law governing marriage was Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753, which decreed that after 25 March 1754 marriages were valid in law only if they had been advertised by banns or sanctioned by a special licence and were conducted by an Anglican clergyman in a church. Marriages also had to be recorded in a register. A marriage conducted in any other way was not legal, and the person performing it was guilty of a felony and liable to transportation. The Act also advised that the ceremony should take place in the church of the parish where the bride or groom resided, but this was not essential for the marriage to be valid. The main intention of the Act was to prevent clandestine or irregular marriages and to prevent minors from marrying without parental consent – something that was of considerable consequence to the upper classes, who feared wealthy heiresses marrying impoverished husbands.
This Act was the first statutory law to require a formal marriage ceremony. Before 1753 all such matters were in the sole control of the Church of England, with the single requirement that the marriage should be conducted by an Anglican clergyman. Other requirements such as banns were not then essential, so all kinds of rapid and irregular marriages had been valid in law, and various places became notorious for the availability of pliable clergymen willing to perform clandestine marriages. Many churches in London conducted such weddings, mainly of Londoners, but some accepted outsiders as well. Weddings also took place at the Fleet prison, which claimed to be outside the jurisdiction of the Church. It was a prison for debtors whose inmates invariably included some clergy, and marriages performed there were called ‘Fleet marriages’. Most nonconformists, or dissenters, believed that marriage was not a religious ceremony, but for purposes of legality their marriages before and after the 1753 Act tended to be in parish churches, whereas Jews and Quakers, exempt from the Act, were allowed to marry according to their own customs. Not until 1837 could couples legally marry in register offices, or in their own chapels if a civil registrar was present.
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