One more description of Jane Austen dates from about this time, though it was recollected, much later, by an acquaintance of the Austens’, Sir Egerton Brydges. He remembered Jane as “fair and handsome, slight and elegant, but with cheeks a little too full”. Her nephew enlarged on this in the Memoir. “In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face. If not so regularly handsome as her sister, yet her countenance had a peculiar charm of its own to the eyes of most beholders.” Her brother Henry, in the Biographical Notice he wrote for the posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, misquoted Donne significantly. “Her complexion was of the finest texture. It might with truth be said, that her eloquent blood spoke through her modest cheek.” What it spoke, is another question. No description can give the slightest hint of what lay behind her polite, enigmatic smile.
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The world of Steventon Rectory was a peaceful one, its variety no doubt provided by the coaches that stopped at Deane Gate or Popham Lane and set down an unexpected midshipman brother, or an equally welcome student. But what of the world outside the civilised enclave where Jane Austen was growing up? It was in a state of quite extraordinary social and political upheaval. Change of every kind was in the air. During her lifetime, Dr. Johnson died, and Darwin was born. Her brief forty-one years span the chasm between the eighteenth-century England of Dr. Johnson and Henry Fielding, and the comparatively modern one of the Regency.
Born in the year that “the shot heard round the world” heralded the War of American Independence, Jane Austen lived through the other, brief war with America of 1812-14 as well as the long, grim struggle with France that ended with Waterloo. War was a basic condition of her adult life, and it is not surprising that so many of the men who played a part in her story belong to the clergy. Her two sailor brothers fought for King and Country all over the high seas, and became admirals in the process, though not until after her death. She may not have talked about it much, but the long war must have been almost as steadily at the back of her thinking as the atomic bomb is at the back of ours.
At home, the war meant a steady rise in the cost of living, with prices when it ended eighty-seven per cent up on the pre-war level. Poverty, and the eighteenth-century enclosure of common land, were driving people into the towns; the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and the machine breakers were out. But this was mainly in the Midlands and the North, where the greatest industrial development was taking place. There were not many Jacobins in Hampshire.
As always, the rising cost of living, which harmed many, helped some. The poor grew poorer, and the rich richer. Between them, a fascinating new phenomenon was growing in size and complexity: the middle class that was to be Jane Austen’s special preserve. In the age of Dr. Johnson, there had been the aristocracy, the minor aristocracy, and the poor, with a few borderline cases (the clergy, for instance) in a kind of limbo between them. Younger sons of the aristocracy were provided for by “jobs” in the customs, the tax office, and above all in the exchequer. They could, without losing caste, be bought commissions in the army, or they could act as absentee parsons for a clutch of family livings. At a pinch, like Mr. Hancock, they could seek their fortunes abroad, often with the East India or the Hudson Bay Company. This kind of trade, if it was profitable enough, might pass. A rich nabob would be received in society much more easily than a man who had made money in trade at home. Similarly, medicine and the law might be profitable, but were not elegant.
The difficulty was that there were so many younger sons. By the end of the eighteenth century the supply both of “jobs” and of family livings was running low. Sprigs of the aristocracy were reduced to living in their parishes, like Henry Tilney and Edmund Bertram, and a whole new, literate society was beginning to develop round them. This was largely composed of “new” men, who had made fortunes of one kind or another, small or great, in the industrial expansion of the war years. George Austen’s Uncle Francis, who started out with a bundle of quill-pens and eight hundred pounds and made a fortune as an attorney, is a case in point. The Gardiners in Pride and Prejudice exactly reflect his position. Fortunes were being made in trade too. I like to think that Mr. Woodhouse’s money, which made Emma queen of Highbury, was based on some small, eighteenth-century, unmentionable object like the one in Henry James’s The Ambassadors. But of course Mr. Woodhouse would not have made it himself, or Emma could not have held the position she did.
Some men were newer than others. The Eltons did not come up to Jane Austen’s rigorous social standards (still less to Emma’s), and Cobbett launched a fierce attack on new-rich farmers who lived in smart brick houses (often called “Waterloo Farm”), drove a gig and had a piano in the parlour for their daughters. The Martins, in Emma, leap at once to mind. I am sure that Mr. Martin bought a piano for his Harriet. On a higher level, “improving” farmers were making the most of the opportunities provided by the agricultural enclosure of the eighteenth century, and following Coke of Norfolk and his like in the intelligent use of their acres. The high price of wheat was no hardship to them. When he was not visiting the Woodhouses, Mr. Knightley was busy improving his land, with William Larkins as his prime minister, and no doubt making a great deal of money in the process. He could afford to be generous with his baking apples, and Emma, living on a fixed income, was lucky to get him.
The great landowners were improving too, but in a different way. It was the age of landscape gardening in the largest sense, of Capability Brown and of Repton, who charged five guineas a day, and whom Mr. Rushworth rather thought of employing at Sotherton. Mr. Rushworth, of course, was a mere Tory minnow compared to the great whales of the Whig aristocracy, who owned so much land, and so dominated society as practically to rule the country, whether they happened to be in or out of office. Most of them were not, in fact, of very ancient family, tending to date from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or, at the most, from the Tudor upheaval.
We do not need Caroline Austen’s information to be sure that Jane Austen, her family, and their friends were all country Tories of the deepest dye. As such, they would tend to look down on the comparatively nouveau riche Whigs, and might, often with some grounds, think them worse educated, and no better bred than themselves. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is probably Jane Austen’s caricature of a Whig aristocrat. It makes one wonder a little about the politics of the Darcy family. Similarly, when Lady Middleton says there is little chance of their meeting Willoughby in the country, since he “is in the opposition, you know”, she presumably means that she and her family are Whigs while his status as anti-hero makes him a country Tory like the Dashwoods.
Other changes were revolutionising social life. Canals and macadamised roads brought the first leap forward in transportation since the time of the Romans. Roads and regular mail services went together. The kind of steady correspondence kept up by Cassandra and Jane Austen had become a possibility for the first time in English history. Where Richardson’s Pamela had to hide her letters under a stone, Jane Austen’s Lady Susan could put them in the post bag.
Another drastic change was in dress. When Jane Austen was in short petticoats, men wore powder on their hair, knee-breeches, embroidered waistcoats and full-skirted coats, while their ladies were gorgeous in high “heads” and full-skirted gowns. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic War changed all this. Between the time that Jane Austen wrote her first three novels, and their revision for publication around 1809, fashions had changed dramatically, and were still changing. Trousers were coming in, even if the Duke of Wellington was turned away from Almack’s for wearing them, and Lady Caroline Lamb was damping her exiguous muslins to make them cling to her figure. Commenting dryly, in her letters, on the new extremes of fashion, Jane Austen also learned a very useful lesson from the changes she had seen. Whether she went through her early work, as she revised it, and struck out any
old-fashioned bits of costume, we shall never know, since the original versions do not survive, but certainly, in her books as they stand, there is the barest minimum of reference to dress. It is one of the many reasons why her novels remain so readable. One is not perpetually boggling over a fichu or neck-handkerchief. Only in Northanger Abbey, probably the least revised of all the books, do we get Henry Tilney’s imaginary diary entry with its “sprigged muslin robe with blue trimmings — plain black shoes — appeared to much advantage”. And here, significantly, Mrs. Allen reveals her stupidity by her preoccupation with dress.
Critics have accused Jane Austen of being impervious to the turbulence of the society she lived in, because she does not talk about it much. The answer, if one were needed, lies in the number of references to her novels in modern social histories of her times. She did not speak of these things, as Cobbett did, to praise or blame. They were simply incorporated in the fabric of her thinking, and therefore of her books. An acute reader can find hints of the contemporary scene everywhere. Where Lady Middleton gives the disagreeable Miss Steeles needlebooks made by an emigrant, a social historian would give us a whole chapter on the plight of the French refugees in England. Unluckily for her critics, Jane Austen was not vain enough to imagine being read by generations unaware of the conditions of her own age. Having, for once, set Persuasion definitely in 1814, she expected (not unreasonably) that her readers would know all about the brief peace with France that freed Captain Wentworth for his lovemaking. When she finished the book in 1816, she must have felt no need to underline the pathos of its ending. Describing Anne’s happiness, she tells us that, “The dread of a future war was all that could dim her sunshine.” Contemporary readers would have known how close that war was.
Religious thought and feeling were changing with everything else. The eighteenth century had fancied itself the great age of reason. Pope, writing his Essay on Man in the first half of the century, had described the human situation as, “A mighty maze and quite without a plan”; had been persuaded by his friends that this might, just possibly, give offence; and had changed the line to read, “A mighty maze! But not without a plan.” His first version was probably the more characteristic of his time. When he was writing, the seventeenth-century religious crisis of Protestant versus Catholic was over; the Church was Established, taken for granted, and, much of the time, forgotten. It was the great age of pluralism and the hunting parson.
With the turn of the century came a turn of feeling. The age of reason had led to the horrors of the French Revolution. The inertia of the Established Church was challenged by the Dissenters, and, in particular, by the Evangelicals, whose Bible was Wilberforce’s Practical Christianity, published in 1797. Below the frivolous surface of Regency England, a great groundswell of serious thought was building up, showing itself; notably, in the Bill for the abolition of the slave trade, which was pushed through Parliament by Wilberforce and his friends in 1807. Writing, towards the end of her life, to her niece Fanny, Jane Austen spoke up for the Evangelicals, and there is certainly a contrast between the light-hearted use of the Church as a career in Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey and Jane Austen’s own declared intention of discussing the problem of ordination in Mansfield Park. But where she herself stood in the matter remains open to question. The one thing that is certain is that, as always, she was deeply aware of the change of feeling around her.
Dissent and education went together, and the reading public was already growing rapidly when Jane Austen was born. Circulating libraries existed as early as 1742, and by the end of the eighteenth century demand and supply of light reading were growing side by side. Public lending libraries were supplemented by private borrowing groups such as those Jane Austen speaks of in her letters. The mass market that made small fortunes for Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth, but not for Miss Austen, was already in existence. The libraries, in fact, were such a powerful element in the book market that they were able to insist on the maintenance of the expensive three-volume format that suited them because each of the volumes could be lent out separately.
It is hard, today, to imagine the amount of free time that the average member of the middle to upper classes had in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even middle-class poverty probably meant being reduced to two maid-servants and a man. Jane and Cassandra Austen may have acted as house-keepers for their ailing mother: it would have been unthinkable for them to act as cook. There was all the time in the world for satin stitch, and morning calls, and novel reading.
Jane Austen could always find time to write to Cassandra when they were separated, not with a fountain pen, or an easy ballpoint, but with a quill pen that constantly needed mending, and with the high cost of postage always in mind. Writing had to be kept small and legible, the lines close together, and sometimes even crossed. The importance of a good, clear hand was one of Tysoe Saul Hancock’s reiterated themes as he wrote home to his wife about the education of their daughter Eliza. Jane Austen wrote as beautifully as she sewed, and was glad, late in her life, to note an improvement in the handwriting of a nephew.
It is worth stopping for a moment to consider how different her world really was from ours. Her understanding of human nature was so profound, her cool, realistic outlook on life apparently so like our own, her characters so convincing, that one is in danger of assuming that her (and their) circumstances, too, were like ours. It is an advantage of her books that this mistake is possible, but it is a hazard to our understanding of their author.
When she described a country walk, like the one Anne Elliot took with the Musgroves and Captain Wentworth, what did Jane Austen expect her reader to imagine from the small amount of detail she allowed herself? There are “tawny leaves and withered hedges”, and, when the walkers near their destination, Winthrop Farm, where an improving farmer is at work, there are “large enclosures, where the ploughs at work, and the fresh-made path spoke the farmer, counteracting the sweets of poetical despondence, and meaning to have spring again.”
It was a quiet countryside, with birdsong and the farmer shouting at his horse where we would expect motor horns and the roar of the tractor. A horse-drawn mail coach might clatter by, but no jet plane would scream overhead. The hedgerows Jane Austen loved would be full of primroses and violets in spring, as they were of hazelnuts in autumn; and when silly Harriet Smith scrambled up the bank to get away from the gipsies, she may have been scratched by a bramble, or stung by a nettle, but she was certainly not impaled on barbed wire. One needs to remember, all the time, the untouched, quiet landscape that Jane Austen knew and loved.
The same chasm yawns between her city experience and ours. Hans Place, where she liked to stay with her favourite brother Henry, was across the fields from London proper, and though Horace Walpole probably anticipated Jane Austen’s own views in calling Bath a detestable little city “all crammed together and surrounded with perpendicular hills”, it was still one where the Austens’ first house was on the edge of open country, and where the worst that could happen to Catherine Morland was to be nearly run down by a badly driven curricle. If Jane Austen disliked Bath in the 1800s, I wonder what she would think of it today.
And then there was the position of woman, into which Jane Austen was growing in the rambling freedom of Steventon. Mary Wollstonccraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in 1792, when Jane was seventeen. Some women and, even, men were beginning to talk and think about women’s rights, but the leaven of social change was only just starting to work. If there were few ways that a young man could respectably earn a living, there was only one for a young woman. She must marry. The only possible alternative was teaching, either in a school or as a governess. Miserably paid, either position meant that its holder was lost in an even lower limbo than that of the younger sons who became apothecaries or attorneys, and without their chance of redeeming themselves by making a fortune.
This was not all. Before she married, a young woman was imprisoned b
ehind an iron curtain of proprieties. She could not live alone, or travel alone, or, in the higher reaches of society, even walk alone. Lady Harriet Cavendish, walking on her family’s country estate, was invariably accompanied by a footman. It is no wonder that the Miss Bingleys were horrified at Elizabeth Bennet’s arrival, muddy and cheerful from having walked a few miles across the fields. And, naturally if she must not walk alone, still less must a young woman walk tête-à-tête with a man. If Jane Fairfax had agreed to walk back to Donwell Abbey with Frank Churchill, it would have been as good as announcing their engagement.
Since a woman’s only future was matrimony, education in the academic sense was comparatively unimportant. Accomplishments were what mattered. Young ladies must be able to display themselves to advantage. They learned to sing, to draw, to dance, to play the piano, or the harp, if they had good arms and rich fathers; to write a good hand and to listen to the gentlemen talk. Anything else was really supererogatory. When Jane Austen’s elder brother James suffered a small diminution in his income, he very naturally cut down on his daughter’s education. It is eternally to the credit of her brother, the author of the Memoir, that he instantly offered to give up his hunters rather than let her suffer.
But then, the Austens were an unusual family. Even so, young Jane must soon have been aware of the differences between Cassandra and herself and their brothers. While the boys were out in hunting pink risking their necks on cut-price ponies, the girls must graduate from garden and childhood pleasures to the more adult delights of housewifery, morning calls and, for exercise, shared walks and drives. Again, if they were rich, they could ride, with a groom in attendance, but this was well above the Austens’ touch. Jane Austen must have learned to ride at some point in her career, no doubt when staying with her brother Edward in Kent, or she would not have been able to manage those sad donkeys when she was ill, but she never speaks of riding in her letters, and her heroines do not indulge in it much. Mrs. Bennet made Jane ride to Netherfield in the (successful) hope that she would catch cold; Fanny Price rode for health, and Mary Crawford for pleasure, but we seldom see the Bertram girls riding, or the Musgroves. This may simply mean that Jane Austen was artist enough to realise that the kind of conversation at which she excelled is not very conveniently conducted on horseback, but I think it also reflects a condition of her level of society. Horses were for the gentlemen; ladies walked, or, best of all, danced for their exercise. Here, at least, was a socially accepted form of activity, and Jane Austen loved it. Luckily for her, she belonged to a family that almost certainly cared nothing for the elaborate rules of elegant society, by which a young lady could not appear in public until her older sisters were married and she was “out”. Mrs. Austen, like Mrs. Bennet, undoubtedly let her daughters join in those gay little balls of which Eliza de Feuillide wrote to her cousin Philadelphia, and when Jane Austen wrote of enough private balls to satisfy any but the insatiable appetite of fifteen, she wrote from experience.
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen Page 3