JANE AUSTEN'S ENGLAND

In the late eighteenth century, England and Wales comprised fifty‐two counties, called shires until the time of William the Conqueror. Jane Austen's novels, as her life, took place in the counties north and south of London. She came from Hampshire, abbreviated as Hants., southwest of London. Industrial development centered in the north, with heavy manufacturing beginning to grow in Birmingham, cotton factories in Manchester, and coal mining in Newcastle. Bath, west of London, was the social center of fashionable England, and figures prominently in Austen's life and art. Portsmouth, a featured location in Mansfield Park and the place where Austen's naval brothers received their early training, was a naval base on the southern coast of England. And London, on the river Thames, was the metropolis.

Change was the predominant characteristic of England during Jane Austen's brief life. Austen was a paramount chronicler of that change in its social manifestations for a particular class: country landowners who were being displaced by the rising mercantile classes. While Austen was discreet about the difficult subject of money, in her life as in her novels, she was acutely aware of wealth: who had it, how it was earned, and what happened when there was not enough of it. The relationship between people whose wealth derived from land ownership and those whose wealth derived from commercial interests evolved in confusing ways during Austen's life, and she was fully aware of this evolution. As social historian Raymond Williams wrote in The Country and the City, Austen's world was set against the backdrop of a particularly unsettled time in English social and economic history.¹

Land—real property—dictated how this social world operated, and critic Tony Tanner usefully points out the etymological and thematic connections between property and Austen's other preoccupation, propriety. As Tanner shows, property rights were born as a sacred trust with John Locke's 1690 Second Treatise of Government. Sir William Blackstone's famous Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in four volumes between 1765 and 1769, discussed property rights as a law of nature. Tanner notes that laws about property offenses grew from fifty or so in 1688 to over 200 in 1820. Both economist Adam Smith and political thinker Edmund Burke also weighed in importantly on the relations between property ownership and the social order. Tanner points out that Austen's “proper” heroes all own land and, until Persuasion, her heroines all require a propertied man.² Similarly, Alistair Duckworth's important critical study of Austen's novels starts with the premise that the estate and its inheritance and improvement are central to Austen's imagined and real worlds.³

As the structure of the English economy changed during Austen's lifetime, so did English government and society. Coal and iron technologies and steam power supported new industrial developments and brought changes in agricultural and mechanical production. Material wealth increased and posed a challenge to the monopoly of aristocratic interests, and British power grew across the globe as a consequence. Railroads and free trade would come somewhat later, but the way was paved for these developments in the final decades of the eighteenth century.

When Jane Austen was born, the family was the central institution in English life. It bestowed rank or the lack of it on its members and dictated their place and expectations in the world. Eighteenth‐century philosophers built a moral perspective on the notion that order and orderliness could coexist with enlightened self‐interest, and that society should be utilitarian. The wealthy were expected to be benevolent and charitable, and the poor hardworking and grateful. Property owners came in ranks as well, with titled proprietors of large holdings at the top of the heap, those with smaller landed holdings beneath them, and the landed gentry, those whose land holdings provided their upkeep and social standing, anchoring this group. Austen's family belonged to this last group, the gentry, although her brother Edward became a substantial landowner through his adoptive parents the Knights, and Jane Austen, her sister Cassandra, and their mother eventually lived in a cottage he provided them on his estates.

At the same time, the new mercantile classes were gaining steadily in prestige and power. Trade allowed those who were not born into landed wealth to acquire it through commerce; trade provided for the rise of the “middling” or middle classes, those who could support themselves in comfort but without benefit of inherited wealth or land. Trade led to the birth of the British empire, particularly through the activities of the East India Company on the Indian subcontinent and sugar plantation owners in the West Indies. Below the merchant classes were yeoman farmers, artisans or skilled laborers, and country people who supported themselves directly from the land; and below these two groups were servants of the propertied and, increasingly, the moneyed classes.

For landed gentry families, there were two tiers in the passing of generations. Under the system of primogeniture, the eldest son inherited the whole of the estate. Daughters were provided a “portion” to facilitate their marriages, and younger sons sometimes also received a monetary settlement or annuity. But for the most part, younger sons, such as Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park, had to enter a profession, generally the military or the clergy. Jane Austen's novels depict many such men, from Admiral Crofts and Captain Wentworth in Persuasion to the plethora of churchmen in Austen's novels: John Dashwood and Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Norris, Dr. Grant, and Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park, and Mr. Elton in Emma. The Church of England was the country's largest and richest institution in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; its twenty‐six bishops each had a cathedral with deans, canon, and prebends, and there were about 26,000 parishes that encompassed all of England and formed part of the local government (parsons also often served as Justices of the Peace).

The church was thickly intertwined with politics and economics. Patronage was the key to clerical posts, and the clergy became an overcrowded profession in Austen's time. At the end of the eighteenth century, there were 11,600 benefices, or livings, which comprised a form of property that could be put up for sale or bestowed on those their owners patronized, and there was a fair amount of trafficking and speculation in church positions. Austen's clerical characters are rectors or vicars: the difference was that rectors received all their parish's tithes, whereas vicars were paid a salary. Both augmented their income by farming the property around the church and rectory. Both positions were forms of incumbency, but as they often paid little, many clergymen held more than one post, a circumstance that was called “pluralism” and provoked some controversy. In these cases, the vicar or rector often paid a stipend to a curate to perform the actual duties of the parish church, baptizing babies, performing weddings and funerals, and conducting Sunday services, while the incumbent served as an absentee. It was also difficult for clergymen to afford to retire, hence when livings were offered for sale, the life expectancy of their incumbents was frequently part of the advertisement. Those who had livings to bestow, such as Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility, could offer them for sale or as gifts.⁴

As the eighteenth century progressed, new institutions that were devoted to caring for the very poor arose: voluntary social organizations to care for foundlings, orphans, the elderly, and the ill. There also appeared some class mobility for the first time. When they had acquired enough money, merchants could buy land and the social status that came with estate ownership (Charles Bingley does this in Pride and Prejudice). So hard work and talent could buy one's way up the social ladder. This occurred in politics as well, because individuals could participate in local governance without benefit of aristocratic birth or title.

Industrial developments in the 1780s and 1790s—the Industrial Revolution—affected population and demographics, the growth of cities, trade expansion, and the enormous increase in production of goods such as cloth and copper. Edmund Cartwright set up the first power loom in 1786, which revolutionized cotton spinning and weaving, and cotton manufacturing became the most powerful industrial interest in England. The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce was founded in 1754, and the Manchester Committee for the Protection and Encouragement of Trade appeared in 1774. Coal and iron replaced wood, wind, and water as power sources. Beginning in 1775, James Watt and Matthew Boulton began to patent new types of steam engines. Factories and mines changed the natural landscape and brought new ways of thinking, new social groups, and new social problems as well as wealth and global power to England.

Two other areas experienced major advances: transportation, with an increase in roads and the use of rivers and canals, and banking, with increased circulation and availability of capital, credit, and cash. Houses began to be built of brick rather than timber; sewers were constructed and sanitation improved; and increased use of soap and pottery led, in different ways, to improvements in hygiene and personal cleanliness.

At Austen's birth, England was still largely rural, with its population spread across the countryside and in small villages. By the end of her life, towns and cities were becoming the centers of population. For example, the population of Birmingham doubled in the last 40 years of the eighteenth century. There were industrial towns (such as Manchester and Birmingham), market towns (such as Liverpool), ports (such as Portsmouth and Southampton), and specialized centers such as watering places and university towns (for example, Bath and Oxford). And, of course, London grew enormously during Austen's lifetime, with its population accounting for ten percent of the people in England.

All of these changes produced a larger divide than ever between rich and poor. Individuals could become enormously wealthy almost overnight, and the labor force that the new industries needed to sustain them also expanded at a great rate. This represented a major change from the country squire who looked after the rural poor in his neighborhood. Parish administrations could no longer handle the needs of their poor, and working conditions for laborers in the new factories were often dismal. Philanthropy did not provide enough resources to handle the problem, which required new forms of social organization.

Women and children worked in factories, especially in the cotton industry; in fact, children accounted for up to two‐thirds of the work force. Opposition to the new factory system was inspired by deplorable conditions and long hours for many workers; and social philosophers and politicians responded to the new regime of capital owners on the one hand and powerless laborers on the other with new laws. Along the way, traditional views of the social order were altered, in part because of the advent of the modern idea of class.⁵

In political terms, the England into which Jane Austen was born was a state run according to a Constitution written in 1688 and based on checks and balances as the guarantors of individual freedom, with the legislature (Parliament), the nobility, the executive (Prime Minister), and the King maintaining the civil order by regulating one another. The political order existed in tandem with the social order of property, the family, and professional rank and education. So inherited hierarchies and the attributes of merit coexisted in the way authority was conferred or denied. In Jane Austen's lifetime, the final decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, social and political interests began to differentiate, the monarchy grew somewhat in power, and what we would call “public opinion” became more politically organized.

George III's madness in the late 1780s inaugurated a prolonged period during which the King relinquished most of the reins of state business, with the exception that he managed to achieve his goal of Catholic emancipation. This lasted until George III's son took over in 1811. (George himself didn't die until 1820, but the country was run by the Prince Regent, to whom Emma was dedicated at his request, from 1811 on.) William Pitt became Prime Minister in 1783, partly as a result of the American War of Independence; the loss of the war created a crisis in England. Pitt's administration set the tone of this period. Following the French Revolution, war broke out between England and France and involved two of Austen's brothers. During this period of turmoil abroad, Pitt restored national finances by reducing the national debt and expanding taxes on everything from horses to bricks to candles; put into place administrative reforms by increasing the powers of the Prime Minister; reorganized the workings of the British empire; and increased England's standing in Europe by making controversial trade agreements with Ireland and France and consolidating British holdings in Asia while the American colonies were being lost.

The American War of Independence was underway when Jane Austen was born, and the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the Peninsular War, and the War of 1812 that followed in its wake marked European politics from the late 1780s until 1815, just three years before Austen's death. English political ideas were strongly influenced by the events in France that brought an end to feudalism and the monarchy, with heated debates between the Jacobins (radicals) and the anti‐Jacobins (conservatives). As the French situation turned from revolution to repression and France turned its attention to wider European activities and became aggressive on military fronts, declaring war on Austria in 1792 and on England and Holland in 1793, the British became more Francophobic in public opinion as well as in governmental attitudes. When the French defeated the Austrians and Antwerp fell in 1792, new trade openings changed European diplomacy because France defied long‐standing commercial treaties. By 1793 the national mood in England was ready for war. The British navy, the strongest of England's armed forces and the one to which Austen's brothers Francis and Charles belonged, was the decisive military force in England.⁶

Starting in 1792, the English government became more repressive against those seen as agitators or as treasonous, and in 1794, the law of habeas corpus was suspended. Two acts passed in 1795, one making some kinds of speech and writing treasonous (the Treasonous Practices Act) and another that required a special permit for large public gatherings (the Seditious Meetings Act). In 1796, stamp taxes were raised for newspapers, and printing presses had to be registered. In 1799, two more acts made it difficult to organize workers' groups.

At the same time, the English government was dealing with other kinds of pressing questions: Catholic emancipation, the Irish question (there had been armed rebellion in Ireland in 1798), and the price of corn (the Corn Law Act of 1815 barred foreign corn from Britain until a price goal was met). Once the wars ended, the influx of former military personnel into the working ranks and a decrease in urban employment meant difficult times.

JANE AUSTEN'S TIME IN HISTORY

Jane Austen was born into the end of the relatively stable world of the neoclassical Enlightenment, but almost immediately, revolutionary wars and often violent and vehement renegotiations of social, political, economic, and philosophical ideas interrupted that stability. Revolutionary claims battled anti‐Jacobin resistance to reform, so the massive industrial and social changes of the period occurred against a backdrop of strife that fed into growing discrepancies between rich and poor. Aristocrats and landowners continued to enjoy their comforts while towns grew without benefit of sanitation systems, urban planning, or decent working conditions. When the writer and civil servant Daniel Defoe observed his country during Queen Anne's reign, he noted the orderliness of the social and economic systems. A hundred years later, the social activist William Cobbett noted that the poor had been disinherited and that rival social and economic interests dominated England.⁷

England was at war during most of Jane Austen's life. English soldiers fought against colonists in the American War of Independence, which ended with the defeat of the British at Yorktown in 1781 when Austen was six years old, although the official end did not come until the Treaty of Paris in 1783. From 1789 to 1799, the French Revolution captured the imaginations of the English, who were bitterly divided over which side to support. Beginning in 1793, England fought against France and Napoleon's bid for empire, a fight that did not end until the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. And during that same period, from 1812 to 1814, England fought again with America in the War of 1812. There was periodic concern that England's coast would be invaded, and southern ports were filled with military personnel.

The birth of the middle classes introduced a relatively new distinction between the public and the private spheres. Such a distinction always existed between, for example, the state and its laws on the one hand and what went on in people's homes on the other. But something new occurred toward the end of the eighteenth century: a demarcation between the outside world of capitalist markets and rational economic and political forces and the internal world of emotion, religion, and morality. Individuals, predominantly men, began to amass power through their wealth and material activities, while behind them stood a network of family support influenced largely by women. So a sexual division of labor derived from the structure of the family itself and provided the foundation for capitalist values and enterprise outside the home.⁸ These private, family activities served not only as a backdrop to public life, but dictated what happened to many social institutions and ideologies.

The new middle classes had much in common with the aristocracy and the gentry in terms of their desires for comfort. At the same time, they acquired their status through individual work, so they also had affinities with the work ethic of the poor and with a desire for independence from the established orders of the past. The revolutionary fervor of the period spoke to those desires, and nonconformist writers and thinkers as disparate as William Cowper, Austen's favorite poet, and the political theorists Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, spoke out against the corruption of those in power and the need for liberatory reforms. Not surprisingly, there was also a backlash of reaction against such calls for reform. Not until the Reform Act of 1832 (the backdrop for George Eliot's 1872 novel, Middlemarch) did middle class households get some political clout, although, ironically, that act explicitly excluded women from political enfranchisement. And through it all, land remained the particular form of property ownership that conferred an authority unavailable from other forms of wealth.

A religious revival in England accompanied these social changes, as people became interested in the idea of individual salvation and turned to Evangelism.⁹ The notion of a shared moral code united people from different walks of life—farmers and landowners, manufacturers and factory workers, Whigs and Tories, Anglicans and Puritans. This Evangelism coupled Protestant individualism with humanitarian ideas, public piety and strict morality, and unbending standards of personal conduct. Opponents of the French Revolution made much of the revolutionaries' supposed atheism; to be a supporter of the Constitution meant to be a good Christian, and to be a Jacobin was to be unpatriotic. Beginning as an anti‐Jacobin reaction, the new religiosity persisted into the Victorian era. The Church of England, of which Austen was a member, continued to control the majority of England's religious activity, but dissenting groups such as the Evangelicals and the Wesleyan Methodists, not to mention the Roman Catholics, raised issues about everything from spirituality to clerical absenteeism (an issue for Austen in Mansfield Park) to political scandals. There was a staunch moral earnestness that made manners and morals into social and philosophical issues.

Austen's novels illustrate, perhaps better than anything else from the period, the crucial ways in which private behavior toward others stood in for broader questions of merit, social standing, and authority. Humanitarian ideals fostered by increased religiosity brought many religious sects into anti‐slavery activities, as public opinion became more independent. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807, despite powerful opposition from vested economic interests, demonstrated this free thinking, and in 1834 all slaves in the British empire were freed.¹⁰ There is evidence in Austen's novels that Jane Austen held abolitionist sympathies. In Emma, Mrs. Elton and Jane Fairfax have a conversation concerning Mrs. Elton's offer of help in finding a situation for Jane as a governess.

“When I am quite determined as to the time, I am not at all afraid of being long unemployed. There are places in town, offices, where inquiry would soon produce something—Offices for the sale—not quite of human flesh—but of human intellect.”

“Oh! My dear, human flesh! You quite shock me: if you mean a fling at the slave-trade, I assure you Mr. Suckling was always rather a friend to the abolition.”

“I did not mean, I was not thinking of the slave-trade,” replied Jane; “governess-trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely differnt certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies.”¹¹

In Mansfield Park, where the Bertram fortune derives from Sir Thomas's plantation holdings in Antigua and the slave‐driven economy of the West Indies, a conversation between Fanny Price and her cousin Edmund turns to Sir Thomas's new esteem for his young niece after his return from Antigua. Edmund suggests that Fanny should talk to her uncle more:

“But I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do. Did not you hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?”

“I did—and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.”

“And I longed to do it—but there was such a dead silence! And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like—I thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel.”¹²

Claire Tomalin argues that Fanny's abolitionist views are made clear by this exchange.¹³

Jane Austen's favorite poet was William Cowper, known as a vehement abolitionist. The Austens themselves had family connections to the slave trade; Austen's father, George Austen, was a trustee of a plantation in Antigua that belonged to one of his Oxford friends, James Nibbs. Claudia Johnson has made the persuasive point that Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park represents the ideal of the benevolent slave‐owner, and that his kindness to Fanny stems from the same impulse of caring paternalism that assumes that dependents are better off being looked after than being granted autonomy.¹⁴ In this way, Jane Austen may have made connections between the plight of enslaved Africans and the situation of dependent women.

Home, or cottage, industries, became fewer because home manufacture could no longer compete with the new machinery, particularly in the textile industry. This development impoverished many rural households and put many women, especially single women, out of work. Many women joined men in fieldwork, and others went to work in factories or as servants in the homes of people better off than they were. Women thus had access to fewer roles and occupations, and they were beset by more expectations about what a “proper lady” should be.

Other than dancing and occasional equestrian exercise or walking, middle‐ and upper‐class women got little physical exercise. So in Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennet decides to visit her ailing sister at Netherfield, her mother objects that there is too much dirt and that she will not be fit to be seen when she arrives.

Elizabeth continued her walk alone, crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity, and finding herself at last within view of the house, with weary ankles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of excerise.¹⁵

She is received with polite surprise by the Bingleys: “That she should have walked three miles so early in the day, in such dirty weather, and by herself, was almost incredible to Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley; and Elizabeth was convinced that they held her in contempt for it.”¹⁶

Home and family dictated the world of women in Jane Austen's time. When capital became liquid and the middle classes redefined notions of property, women could leave production and be supported by their husbands (or fathers or brothers, as was the case for the Austen women after George Austen's death in 1805). At the same time, as marriage became based on the idea of a contract, the position of married women with respect to property became more encumbered by patriarchal ideologies of inheritance. Married women were unable to hold property until the landmark Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882.¹⁷ Property was the key determinant of wealth and status in Austen's lifetime, because ownership of land continued to dominate the economic structure at the end of the eighteenth century. Commerce and credit were coming into play, but “real property” still meant land.

LIFESTYLE AND CULTURE

Jane Austen's family was orthodox in its views: Church of England religious ideas and conservative Tory politics. The Austen family belonged to what we would call the upper middle class; they were members of the gentry class that produced landowners, clergymen, military officers, and women with domestic accomplishments and a basic literary education. Austen's novels are justly famous for their highly detailed and meticulously observed portrait of daily life among the English country gentry. Austen depicted a wide range of character types, from the haughty, aristocratic, overbearing Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice to the misguided commonsensical Lady Russell in Persuasion, and from the caddishly charming Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility to the moralistic but ambivalently motivated Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park and the self‐deludedly intelligent title character of Emma. Austen had a brilliant ear for realistic dialogue and an amazing intuition about human drama.

A woman of Austen's class was best situated to document the private world of human interaction: the subtle ways that families were built or destroyed; the casual interactions between the sexes and the formal relations that ensued and dictated family power, wealth, and lineage; and how people negotiated between moral strictures and human desires.

Education was a major component of domestic change. Upper‐class men had had access to an elite, formal education in Europe since the Middle Ages. In the eighteenth century, forms of education also became available to women and to the poor. Women were given greater access to book learning at home and sometimes were sent off to schools, as the Austen girls were, for several years. The poor had charity schools, though many still argued that these institutions would engender insubordination. One of the major proponents of broad schooling was the reformist philanthropist Hannah More, who opened a school for the poor that local farmers thought would incite children to be disaffected from their families and their lot in life.

Jane Austen received some formal training, but mostly she had the advantage of her father's extensive library. Here is her brother Henry's account of her intellectual accomplishments:

Her reading was very extensive in history and belles letters; and her memory extremely tenacious. Her favourite moral writers were Johnson in prose, and Cowper in verse. It is difficult to say at what age she was not intimately acquainted with the merits and defects of the best essays and novels in the English language. Richardson's power of creating, and preserving the consistency of his characters, as particularly exemplified in “Sir Charles Grandison,” gratified the natural discrimination of her mind, whilst her taste secured her from the errors of his prolix style and tedious narrative. She did not rank any work of Fielding quite so high.¹⁸

So Austen had something a woman of her class and place might not have had even fifty years earlier: books and the ability to read.

Education in history, philosophy, and poetry was especially important for women because conversation was one of the arts an elegant, well‐bred woman needed for social success. The Bertram sisters study at home in Mansfield Park and know how to read maps, and in Emma, Harriet Smith receives her training at a boarding school for girls. Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and Emma Woodhouse in Emma demonstrate most powerfully the scope and importance of a woman's ability to be articulate.

In addition to religious training and an education in letters, Jane Austen participated in the range of activities that were considered to be “feminine accomplishments” in the late eighteenth century. She was competent with a needle and made clothing and household textiles; she could draw and paint; she sang and played the pianoforte; and she was a prolific letter‐writer. Darcy's sister plays the harp in Pride and Prejudice, as does Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park. Art and music rounded out the most central of women's expected accomplishments, which was needlework.

Much emphasis was placed on a woman's talent at embroidery and the neatness of her handwriting, and Austen excelled in both of these areas—she made shirts for her brothers, stitched a shawl for Cassandra in muslin with satin embroidery, and embroidered handkerchiefs. In 1811 Jane, Cassandra, and their mother created a patchwork quilt. Sometimes young women worked a sampler to complete their education in household skills. In Sense and Sensibility, Charlotte Palmer demonstrates the fruits of her education by displaying a landscape in colored silk. Lady Bertram spends her days doing needlework in Mansfield Park, and Mrs. Jennings makes a rug in Sense and Sensibility. Other artistic hobbies in the home included cutting paper, making designs with shells, and painting with watercolors. These skills fell into the sphere of women's activities; each of them could be undertaken in one's own home or in the homes of others. And certainly one of the goals of perfecting these accomplishments, like the goal of conversational decorum, was to draw the admiration of a suitable young man.

Austen's early anti‐heroine, Lady Susan, sends an account to her confidante that satirizes prevailing ideas about women's accomplishments. After writing about her daughter Frederica's education, she remarks that she herself lacks the usual feminine skills.

Not that I am an advocate for the prevailing fashion of acquiring a perfect knowledge in all the Languages Arts & Sciences; it is throwing time away; to be Mistress of French, Italian, German, Music, Singing, Drawing &c. will gain a Woman some applause, but will not add one Lover to her list. Grace & Manner after all are of the greatest importance. I do not mean therefore that Frederica's acquirements should be more than superficial, & I flatter myself that she will not remain long enough at school to understand anything thoroughly.¹⁹

While ridiculing the conflation of surface talents with the pitched battle to win a socially and economically appropriate husband, a battle fought feverishly in the novel, Lady Susan's speech nevertheless suggests the stakes involved in preparing women for society. Compare it with the more sophisticated addition Darcy makes to the usual list of “music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages” as well as “a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions” in Pride and Prejudice. “All this she must possess,” he says, “and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”²⁰

Like Lady Susan, but utterly without her manipulative motives, Catherine Morland's mother in Northanger Abbey “did not insist on her daughters being accomplished in spite of incapacity or distaste.” Catherine's happiest day is when her music‐master is dismissed, and she is described as equally mediocre at drawing, French, and accounts. On the other hand, Catherine's ignorance comes in for some satire when the narrator suggests that her shame about her lack of accomplishments is misplaced, as ignorance is a virtue in a woman who wants to attract a man. “To come with a well‐informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid,” the narrator writes. “A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.”²¹ Yet both Lady Susan and Northanger Abbey present, in very different ways, the necessity that a young woman seek an acceptable husband. An unmarried woman risks poverty and humiliation and, as Elizabeth Watson points out in The Watsons, “my Father cannot provide for us, & it is very bad to grow old & be poor & laughed at.”²² This fear pervades Austen's writings.

Austen was also a competent dancer, card player, and dramatic reader, social endeavors that occupied leisure time in country villages. Country dances and balls featured prominently in Austen's life, as they do in her novels. Such dance assemblies had been around for several centuries, but they became especially ritualized events in Austen's time, when dancing was the most popular and most important recreational activity. For a local country dance, someone who could play the piano and wasn't dancing, often an older married woman, provided musical accompaniment, and the music consisted of dance tunes that we would now label as baroque or classical. Several couples (at least three) “stood up” with one another to dance, and they formed separate lines, with the men and women facing one another. Then they proceeded through a sequence of movements or figures in which they would advance and retreat, lock arms and swing one another around, or weave their way through the other couples. Sometimes everyone danced at once, and other times each couple did their set of figures in turn, following the lead couple, in groups that were called “sets.”

Austen made important narrative use of the time a couple stood and watched the others, as these moments provided sanctioned time for an unmarried man and woman to be alone and to converse in private in an acceptable way. These moments also provided useful narrative opportunities for eavesdropping. In Austen's time, a country dance remained a highly social, even intimate, community gathering.

A ball differed from a country dance in that it was much larger, public, and entailed much stricter rules of etiquette. A young girl might participate casually in a country dance at the home of friends or relations, but to attend a ball required that she had officially “come out.” Coming out entailed a formal entry into womanhood and into matrimonial availability. In Mansfield Park, for example, Mary Crawford asks whether Fanny Price is out, because this is crucial information among young women looking for husbands.²³

An orchestra provided the music at balls and the décor was often elaborate. Invitations went out weeks in advance and replies were expected almost immediately. A supper room was set up in a space separated from the dance floor, and a cloakroom was provided for attendees' wraps. At a very public gathering, a master of ceremonies made sure that decorum was maintained and introduced gentlemen to ladies they did not know. For example, Mr. King, the actual Master of Ceremonies of the Upper Rooms at Bath during the period the novel takes place, introduces Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey. Introductions are also stressed at the assembly that opens Austen's unfinished fragment The Watsons, where readers can find detailed information about such events and the way they worked. Events where dancing took place were carefully chaperoned and regulated, and the highly codified rules of dancing informed Austen's plots.

A woman could not dance with a man to whom she had not been properly introduced, and it was considered improper for a woman to dance more than two dances with the same partner unless they were engaged or married. The hostess or her eldest daughter would begin the dancing with a gentleman of appropriate rank. Emma is annoyed, for example, when Mrs. Elton's status as a new bride mandates that she be asked to begin the ball in Emma. Once engaged to dance with a gentleman, a woman could not accept further offers to dance with others. Dancers took time out for supper, and a standard refreshment was a hot spiked wine punch or soup called negus, mentioned as the refreshment in The Watsons.²⁴

A highly charged discussion of dancing as a social metaphor occurs in Northanger Abbey, when Henry Tilney proposes that dancing serves as an analogue for marriage. He offers the theory that an engagement to dance represents a contract between the parties. “I consider a country‐dance as an emblem of marriage,” Henry says to Catherine Morland. “Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both; and those men who do not chuse to dance or marry themselves, have no business with the partners or wives of their neighbours.” Catherine remonstrates that the two things are very different, in that “People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together” whereas “People that dance, only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour.” Henry extends his metaphor in response, arguing that in both dancing and marriage, the man has the advantage of choosing while the woman can only accept or refuse, that both contracts are exclusive and involve duty and fidelity, and that the chief difference lies in a turnabout in the obligations. In marriage, the man must support while the woman please, whereas in dancing, the man is expected to please “while she furnishes the fan and the lavender water.”²⁵

Those who did not dance often played cards, and card games took place in the evenings after dinner parties as well. Popular card games in Austen's day consisted of, among others, whist, speculation, loo, casino, and quadrille. Whist, like bridge, required a set number of players. Loo and speculation were “round” games, which meant that any number could play. A set of games was called a “rubber.” The Watsons contains some detailed discussions of card‐playing both at the opening ball, where the game of choice is casino, and at a later social visit, where there is a sharp competition between the games speculation and vingt‐un (twenty‐one) for social superiority. Casino is the game of choice for Lady Middleton in Sense and Sensibility. This game entailed trying to match your cards until they were all used up. Mrs. Bates in Emma favors quadrille, which was played by four people using a deck from which the 8s, 9s, and 10s had been removed; it was a variant of ombre, an older game that was disappearing by Austen's time. Quadrille resembled whist and had a trump suit. A game of speculation figures in Mansfield Park. This is a round game with a trump suit: Players sought to get a card higher than the one displayed as trump; and they could sell the card if they chose. The player with the highest card won. Whist was played by two couples with the partners sitting opposite one another and is the ancestor of bridge; the partners tried to match each other's suits. Round games seem to have been played by younger people and entailed a rowdier, less serious demeanor. In Mansfield Park, the speculation players are portrayed as enjoying themselves more than the older, stodgier whist players, who conducted their game in silence.

More intimate social gatherings such as visits to neighbors and dinner parties occupied Jane Austen's time as well. As with dances, there were more elaborate rules of etiquette required by these social rituals than exist today. For example, visitors to one another's homes left a calling card, a small card bearing the visitor's name. The use of cards presupposed a servant to answer the door and take the card to the master or mistress or (if they were “not in”) to place it in the card tray for their later inspection. People often displayed these cards in a dish in the hallway or on the mantel as signs of their social status, as they provided a way to show off one's connections in society. And visits needed to be returned in kind in order not to risk impoliteness and social censure. These visits occurred in the morning. The time category “morning” referred to daylight hours and could last until dinner.

Later in the day, the social gathering of choice was the dinner party. In addition to serving one's guests food and drink, these gatherings served as ways to increase one's social acquaintance. Dinner was prepared and brought to the table by servants, but they were not addressed or spoken about during the meal. After dessert, the women adjourned to the drawing (or “withdrawing”) room for tea while the men drank port and sometimes smoked (neither of these activities was acceptable behavior in front of women). Later, the men joined the women for tea and conversation. In London during the social “season,” dinner guests often proceeded to a ball or assembly at this point.

Rules of etiquette were stringent and strictly defined by gender. Men were introduced to women and not the other way around, and a man waited for a woman to acknowledge or speak to him before he approached or nodded to her. Introductions in general were formal, ritualized, and based on hierarchies. For example, Elizabeth Bennet is highly distressed in Pride and Prejudice when the obsequious Mr. Collins insists on introducing himself to his social better, Mr. Darcy. A man also looked after women in various ways: walking or riding along the street side, taking the backward‐facing seat in a carriage, entering a public place first to find a seat for his female companion, removing his hat when women were present, and so on. An unmarried woman under thirty would not usually be in a man's company without a chaperone, and she did not often walk alone other than in a park or to church in the morning. Outdoors, a man and woman could converse only while walking; they would not simply stand in the street to talk, hence the occasional invitation in an Austen novel to “take a turn” round the gardens or wherever the couple happened to be.

Throughout Austen's private correspondence and often in her novels, there is discussion of visiting the homes of relations and friends for what appear to modern readers as extended periods of time. Explanations for these lengthy visits involve the practical details of travel at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the days before the railroad made long‐distance travel more feasible, roads were poor and travel took place by horse‐drawn carriage or coach. So there was little point, and no practicality, to making a visit that lasted only a few days when the getting there and returning was so arduous and uncomfortable (for example, springs were not invented until the 1790s, and prior to the ability to suspend the coach, a coach ride was stiff and quite grim). During these visits, men spent their days hunting and fishing, while the women went for walks, wrote letters, or went on brief excursions to town; the day's big event was a formal dinner followed by cards or other games.

Mail or stage coaches (so called because they proceeded in stages with fresh horses) took ordinary people long distances. Private carriages of different sorts—such as barouches and landaus, gigs and curricles—had greater social status. These would be additional vehicles (on the order of a second or sports car today), as a family of wealth required a coach‐and‐four for general transportation. In some cases, as with Mrs. Long and the Hearst family in Pride and Prejudice, the family owned the coach but hired the horses. Most of Austen's characters drive in gigs, which were one‐horse carriages that could carry two people. In Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland favors the curricle, essentially a gig that accommodates two horses so costs more and has more prestige value, over the chaise and four, a sturdier and more sedate means of transportation. The coachman for the Bertrams in Mansfield Park worries about the scratches on his carriage as he is in charge of maintaining the equipage. In general, these vehicles carried the kind of status symbolism that characterizes today's cars. They are toys and prized possessions as well as the means of transportation.

As Austen's novels amply demonstrate, the point of the social life young women led was to yield an appropriate marriage partner. Professional employment for women was out of the question. Jane Austen herself earned money from her writing—enough to increase her comfort and that of her sister and mother—but still an inadequate amount to offer them any real independence. Fanny Price considers with a shudder the dire prospects of returning to life in an impoverished port city with a dissolute father and ill‐mannered mother and siblings in Mansfield Park.

The continuation of families and the consolidation and maintenance of real property depended upon the orderly and socially acceptable marriages of a family's children, and it was especially crucial that daughters find suitable men to take them off the hands of their fathers and brothers. A woman could not marry without her parents' permission until 1823, a detail made stark in Pride and Prejudice when it is pointedly underscored that Lydia and Wickham are in London and have not gone to Gretna Green, just across the border in Scotland, to marry. (After 1823, girls and boys could marry without consent at the startlingly young ages of twelve and fourteen, respectively.)

The institution of marriage underwent some change during the course of the eighteenth century, with the 1753 passage of Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act the key event. After the Marriage Act took effect in 1754, only a church wedding legally bound a couple to one another. Prior to 1754, marriage involving a propertied family consisted of five parts: a written legal contract between the couple's parents, stipulating financial arrangements; a formal exchange of oral vows, termed “spousals,” usually before witnesses; three public proclamations of the banns in church to permit claims of pre‐contract to be heard; a church wedding; and, finally, the sexual consummation of the marriage. However, the spousals or oral contract were legally binding in and of themselves: any sort of exchange before witnesses followed by cohabitation constituted a legally valid marriage. In Scotland, Wales, and parts of the southwest of England, the “handfast” was considered an adequate sign of marriage, and unscrupulous clergymen conducted a thriving trade in marriages performed with no questions asked about age or parental consent. The Marriage Act changed that.²⁶

After 1754, the only recourse for eloping couples was flight to Scotland, where the new Marriage Act did not apply and a new trade in commercial marriage arose. Marriage was by and large indissoluble except by death; divorce that permitted remarriage was not available within the Church of England, so an unhappy couple could separate with a financial settlement, but neither of them was free to remarry. But by Scottish law, any unchaperoned meeting or an elopement that crossed the border constituted a marriage—and was therefore valid in England. Hence the feverish quality with which the Bennets and Gardiners speculate about whether Lydia and Wickham are “gone to Scotland” (282 and 290) and their palpable relief when they learn that the lovers are in London.²⁷

As the frantic search for the eloped Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice illustrates, courtship is a solemn matter of enormous consequence for all parties, and families often intervened. Once the principals and the parents of the bride‐to‐be agreed upon an engagement, serious economic negotiations ensued and produced detailed, legal marriage settlements. One's place in the larger society depended upon these family connections. The financial health of the whole family often depended on one good marriage among its children. Elizabeth Bennet's marriage to the generous and wealthy Fitzwilliam Darcy sets up the whole clan in comfort in Pride and Prejudice. General Tilney opposes the connection between his son Henry and Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey when he discovers that he was mistaken in thinking Catherine an heiress. In Emma, Mr. Knightley supports Harriet Smith's connection with the farmer Robert Martin; he recognizes that Emma's ambitions for Harriet will be frustrated by the fact that Harriet's lack of family prevents her from aspiring higher in social rank. And, perhaps most poignantly, Charlotte Lucas is willing to settle for Mr. Collins in preference to a life of dependence in Pride and Prejudice.

Austen's lifetime represents the period when, some historians have argued, it became the norm for people to marry for love—or at least to expect that they could find appropriate partners for whom they could feel esteem and affection. This view has been hotly contested by social historians, and probably applies more to the upper bourgeoisie and the aristocracy than to the poor or even the gentry.²⁸ Nevertheless, Austen's novels are a study in the development and care of the companionate marriage, and historical evidence supports the idea that finding a mate with whom one could share conjugal love became a greater priority and subject of discussion in the eighteenth century than it had been in earlier periods in England.²⁹ A young woman's life could be influenced in complex and fraught ways by the marital options at her disposal. All of Austen's novels attest to the rich narrative possibilities represented by the courtship plot.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England and throughout the European continent produced an art and culture that has attracted scholars as well as appreciators of the visual arts, music, architecture, and literature. In England, Franz Joseph Haydn composed music, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable painted, and Georgian architecture lent itself to some of the finest domestic buildings in English history, landscaped with the aesthetic ideas of garden designers such as Humphrey Repton and Lancelot “Capability” Brown. Classical order still reigned when Austen was born, but was soon challenged by the Romantic idealism engendered by revolutionary politics and social change. Austen's literary contemporaries included William Blake and William Wordsworth among poets, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Maria Edgeworth among novelists, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft among social theorists who also wrote novels, and Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine among economic and political thinkers. It was a time of cultural richness and diversity, and of artistic ferment.

Notes

1. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

2. Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 16‐17. Neither Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility nor Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park are themselves inheritors of estates, but they both come from established landowning families, and they both achieve clerical livings adequate for the support of a family. For a broader discussion of land ownership and its social ramifications, see F. M. L. Thompson, Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963).

3. Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).

4. For a discussion of the complexities of church positions, see Irene Collins, Jane Austen and the Clergy (London: Hambledon Press, 1993).

5. The terms “common people” and “lower orders” referred to the working poor through most of the eighteenth century; class terminology came into use during the 1790s.

6. For a detailed account of England's role in the Napoleonic wars, see Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1783‐1867 (London: Longman, 1959), pp. 129‐83.

7. For a discussion, see G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria (London: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1944), pp. 463‐66.

8. A fine book about the role of gender in the development of modern capitalism is Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780‐1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

9. Over 100 religious periodicals began publication between 1790 and 1820, and for many people these would have been the main reading material in the home. See A. D. Gilbert and T. W. Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture 1780‐1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).

10. After May 1807 ships could not legally sail with slaves from any port in the British empire. The slave trade continued illegally, however, and remained divisive and controversial.

11. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. IV, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 300‐01.

12. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. III, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 198. Brian Southam has argued that Mansfield Park takes place in the years 1810‐1813, after the abolition of the slave trade (that is, after it became illegal to transport slaves by ship; slavery itself continued). Hence, the Bertram silence when Fanny raises the subject. See Brian Southam, “The Silence of the Bertrams,” Times Literary Supplement (17 February 1995), pp. 13‐14.

13. Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 230.

14. Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 107. Johnson discusses the passages in Mansfield Park and in Emma.

15. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. II, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 32.

16. The Novels of Jane Austen, 3rd ed., Vol. II, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 32‐33. This passage is a fine example of Austen's use of free, indirect style to represent the thoughts of people without quoting them directly.

17. For a comprehensive history of married women and property law, see Susan Staves, Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660‐1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

18. Henry Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,” published in 1818 as the front matter to the posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion and reprinted in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, Vol. V of The Novels of Jane Austen, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 7.

19. The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI: Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 253.

20. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. II, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 39.

21. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. V, 3rd ed., ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 14; 110‐111.

22. Ibid., p. 317.

23. There are useful discussions of many of these issues in Susan Watkins, Jane Austen: In Style (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990).

24. For a useful discussion of dancing and other social activities as Jane Austen depicted them, see David Selwyn, Jane Austen and Leisure (London: The Hambledon Press, 1999).

25. Op. cit., pp. 76‐77.

26. For a discussion of marriage practices, see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500‐1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).

27. See the article on “Marriage” in The New Companion to Scottish Culture (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1993), pp. 208‐10.

28. The theory of the development of “affective individualism” is connected largely with Lawrence Stone's influential and controversial book, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500‐1800 (New York, Harper & Row, 1977); the phrase is Stone's. See also Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975), Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth‐Century England (New York: Academic Press, 1978), and John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). The book that inaugurated the modern study of family social history is Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Knopf, 1962).

29. For other discussions, see Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).