In volume 2, chapter 1 of Northanger Abbey, the narrator states, “He [Captain Frederick Tilney] cannot be the instigator of the three villains in horsemen's greatcoats, by whom she [Catherine]will hereafter be forced into a travelling-chaise and four, which will drive off with incredible speed.”
This is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the vogue of the gothic novel, a highly popular literary genre during Jane Austen’s initial composition of Northanger Abbey in 1798, where forced abductions by would-be seducers are abundant.
But however Austen parodies the gothic, particularly when Henry Tilney mocks Catherine for her gothic tastes and sensibilities, she also vindicates many of its tropes and themes: for instance, see the tyrannical man who marries for money, maltreats his wife and/or forces his children into mercenary marriages. Such unfortunate characters and circumstances do, in fact, exist: for instance, the characters of John Thorpe and General Tilney. Thorpe (and...
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his sister, Isabella) are only interested in marrying for wealth and status, while Tilney is later discovered to have been a cold, negligent husband; he sends Catherine home with cold disregard for her safety when she is discovered (via Thorpe himself) to be far from rich.
Indeed, Austen validates some of Catherine’s seemingly absurd anxieties by noting the following in volume 2, chapter 10:
Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities. But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist. Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters. There, such as were not as spotless as an angel might have the dispositions of a fiend. But in England it was not so; among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad. Upon this conviction, she would not be surprised if even in Henry and Eleanor Tilney, some slight imperfection might hereafter appear; and upon this conviction she need not fear to acknowledge some actual specks in the character of their father, who, though cleared from the grossly injurious suspicions which she must ever blush to have entertained, she did believe, upon serious consideration, to be not perfectly amiable.
In other words, such evils can and do take place in England even if in less exaggerated form. Here, John Thorpe makes a clumsy effort to force Catherine to ride with him in his carriage: it is he who will also make attempts to separate her from Henry Tilney. General Tilney will then send Catherine home unprotected such that she will potentially be preyed upon by highwaymen prior to opposing marriage between his son, Henry, and Catherine in the manner of a tyrannical gothic patriarch. And not least, Captain Frederick Tilney does toy with Isabella Thorpe’s affections in ways that hark back to the tradition of the aristocratic libertine.