SOURCE: Reilly, Susan. “‘A Nobler Fall of Ground’: Nation and Narration in Pride and Prejudice.” Symbiosis 4.1 (April 2000): 19-34.

[In the following essay, Reilly stresses that, through her portrayal of the ideal and picturesque private estate at Pemberley, Austen reinforces English nationalism and decries the “dangerous enthusiasms of New World democratic ideals.”]

Elizabeth, as they drove along, watched for the first appearance of Pemberley Woods with some perturbation; and when at length they turned in at the lodge, her spirits were in a high flutter. The park was very large, and contained great variety of ground. They entered it at one of its lowest points, and drove for some time through a beautiful wood, stretching over a wide extent. Elizabeth's mind was too full for conversation, but she saw and admired every remarkable spot and point of view. They gradually ascended for half a mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable eminence, where the woods ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of a valley, into which the road with some abruptness wound. It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground.

—Pride and Prejudice, Volume III, Chapter I.¹

Pemberley Woods is a likely enough spot from which to explore Austen's views on English nationalism and domestic tourism. It stands perhaps as one of her most univocal representations of Englishness and gentrified taste. Yet it may seem a strange landing from which to launch a survey of the author's views on America. Austen's descriptions of the landscape on which Pemberley House is situated, and her narrative style in the novel in which it makes its appearance, however, take on new meaning when viewed in the light of the North American topographical narrative, a genre which during the last decades of the eighteenth century put forward enticing descriptions of a wilderness frontier and brave new world that lured or threatened to lure Southey and Coleridge, among thousands of others, to American shores. Austen's Burkean response to the rhetoric of these narratives, along with the ways that response highlights the relation between novel, empire, and nation, is the subject of this essay.² Austen's was a response crafted through the deployment of a fierce nationalism which is inscribed, using the principles of the picturesque, in the landscape, plot, and narrative style of Pride and Prejudice—a work whose very title, as we shall see, was taken from a piece of early anti-American satire.

A great deal of critical effort centring on the Age of Revolution has been directed towards theories of landscape and towards landscape's connection to textual narrative. Austen has been the subject of a number of such studies, or has been pointed to by-the-way as the exemplar of the Tory idealism of the landed gentry. John Barrell stands behind most views of Austen's heroines as displaying a ‘correct taste’ in landscape with an ‘almost ostentatious virtuosity’.³ Yet even earlier critics like Walton Litz had observed that only in Austen's later novels does she move from ‘man-made landscapes’ which rely on the theory and descriptions of Gilpin to the relatively more ‘natural landscapes’ of Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion.⁴ Indeed Austen's early landscapes are so much centered on the country residences of English society and so blind to the life of the less fortunate around them that Kenneth Clark goes so far as to characterize them as fantastical.⁵ But whatever claims they may make for the later works, few critics would disagree that Austen's early novels are steeped in rhetorical imitations of the picturesque aesthetic which define, reinscribe, and codify standards of gentrified taste and decorum.

In such works as Observations on the River Wye Gilpin privileged domestic tourism and elevated it as a conduit to taste and sublimity. Austen adopted Gilpin's prescriptions for grouping and for presenting figures and scenes in perspective and shadow and imported his emphasis on the beauties of domestic landscape.⁶ Editors are quick to gloss the references to his theories in Austen's early works. Mavis Batey in particular among Austen's commentators links notions of ‘Taste and Feeling’ to the picturesque in Austen, and to the ways they connect to matters of aesthetic appreciation in landscape and the cult of sensibility.⁷

But Austen's adoption of the ideals of ‘the picturesque decade’⁸ has itself come under critical scrutiny. Carole Fabricant, Raymond Williams, and Tim Fulford have argued that the picturesque ideals of tourism and the prospect view circulated in the works of aestheticians and poets were used by Thomson, Austen, and others to naturalize the suffering of the poor and keep the rhetoric of landscape exclusive to the English landed class. It is especially noteworthy, however, that fiction and theory begin to promote the domestic beauty of the English countryside over and against the primal and Edenic spectacles of North America represented in travel and topographical literature, or in response to accounts of antique and artistic glories on the Continent, at precisely the time such narratives were beginning to gain a toehold on the English imagination.

Marilyn Butler argues that during the ‘alarmist years'—1795-1817—when Austen wrote her six novels ‘about and addressed to the gentry', journals, newspapers, and sermons, along with pamphlets, novels, and satirical verse, were filled with Loyalist sentiment and preached the ‘old-fashioned values of piety and patriotism.’⁹ Authors like Austen, Gilpin and Burke threaded those values through the narrative tapestry of their works using landscape as their canvas. But the North American travelogue which proliferated during the same period put forward an ideology of human happiness and fellowship which valorized wildly beautiful American land and linked it to revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality. Many were written, in fact, prior to the American Revolution and helped sparked the drive to ‘wilderness’ embodied by America itself.

One influential practitioner in the genre was Gilbert Imlay, perhaps better known as the father of Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter Fanny and the recipient of a series of letters, written by Wollstonecraft, from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.¹⁰ Imlay's Topographical Description (first published 1794) was presented as a collection of unsigned ‘letters’ and included Filson's Boone narratives, The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon and The Discovery of Kentucky, works critical in establishing the farmer-hero of American myth.¹¹ Describing the ‘extent of fine land’ in the Ohio River Valley, Imlay incorporated picturesque prose to connect views of the American countryside to feelings of rapture and brotherhood, and to promote an ideal of a landscape over which even the lowliest creature could be ‘lord’:

While the setting sun gilds those extensive plains, the mild breezes of a summer's eve, playing upon the enraptured senses, softens the heart to love and friendship. Unperceived, upon some eminence, you may enjoy the sport of wild animals, which here rove unconcerned lords of the field. Heavens! what charms there are in liberty!¹²

Echoing Rousseau, the passage goes on to elevate North American geography, illuminated by the light of reason, as the ‘empire’ of freedom:

Man, born to enslave the subordinate animals, has long since enslaved himself. But reason at length, in radiant smiles, and with graceful pride, illuminates both hemispheres; and FREEDOM, in golden plumes, and in her triumphal car, must now resume her long-lost empire.

(36)

After offering up a list of American ‘civil liberties,’¹³ Letter VIII stresses the amazing fact that ‘foreigners […] may purchase and hold lands on the day of their arrival’ (220).

It was just this sort of ‘un-English’ and libertine view of emigration and parceled-out land in works written by English, American, and French authors that Burke and Austen reacted so strongly against. Travel, even in the pages of a book, which promoted the ‘vice’ of Pantisocratic ideals of accessible or communal land was a threat to Englishness, for by offering foreign landscapes of liberty it weakened an ideal of domestic stability bound to Tory notions of moral fitness and intimately linked to private and paternal control of land. In Pride and Prejudice, as in many of Austen's novels, no one ever stirs abroad. In an age when travel writings, especially those concerning North America, were criss-crossing the Atlantic, the Arcadian countryside of Hertfordshire, augmented by a ‘tour to the Lakes’ and ‘the celebrated beauties of Matlock, Chatsworth, Doverdale, and the Peak’ (Gray 153, 154) seems universe enough for the travelling delights of Austen's characters.

Yet, as Park Honan has shown, Austen had heard or read a good deal about America from her family and their friends.¹⁴ And she seems to have developed an aversion to foreigners and foreign travel which bordered on xenophobia. After reading Southey's Dom Espirella's Letters, a travelogue purporting to have been written from England by a young Spaniard offering a lively account of life and manners in that country, Austen characterized the work as ‘Horribly anti-English’ and as despicable as the ‘foreigner’ whose character Southey assumes.¹⁵ Still, Austen was an inveterate reader of travel writings, and hers was an age in which such narratives flourished.¹⁶ She read Carr's Travels in Spain, either Buchanan's Researches in Asia or his Christianity in India, (and possibly both) and one of Baretti's accounts of Italy, and owned a duodecimo copy of Bell's Travels from St. Petersburg.¹⁷ Though she deemed it faulty, one of her most frequently-mentioned travel narratives was Mrs. Grant's account of Catalina Schuyler, a Dutch emigrant to America, entitled Memoirs of an American Lady, published 1808.¹⁸ The work contains the usual litany of sites of natural American beauty. Though its author was at pains to position early Dutch settlers as ‘persecuted loyalists’ in their motherland and to recall and date the beauty of the American landscape to pre-revolutionary times, the work characterizes the Hudson River Valley as ‘fertile and beautiful', a land of ‘luxuriant harvest', and noted that the early Dutch settlement contained ‘boundless liberty of woods and pasturage’ (Grant 11, 13, 178). For Grant, as for so many other writers in the genre, America was a field of liberty, a bountiful Eden to which those who had been persecuted and dispossessed of their lands could flee for refuge while being assured of the promise of expansive and fertile ground.

For Austen, however, the ideal landowner embraces not the revolutionary ideals of equality and freedom, but the rural paternalism which assures the stability of the landed class. By acting as ‘landlord and master'—a ‘disinterested’ ‘guardian’ of his estate (Gray 158, 159)—Darcy insures against corruption from within the upper gentry. By his ‘attentive kindnesses’ as a governing steward who is ‘affable to the poor’ (Gray 158), he wards off the threat of ‘democratic opinions’ and peasant unrest.¹⁹ As Carole Fabricant has observed, the tour of Darcy's estate by Elizabeth and the Gardiners, like the country-house tourism it reflected, effectively advertises the values of the gentry. Yet while domestic tourism promoted nationalism and offered the poor controlled access to the estates of wealthy landowners, foreign tourism, and the literature that recorded it has been seen as serving very different ideological ends, of encouraging ‘the illusion of cultural diversity while permitting’ and even ‘reinforcing the continued ethnocentricity of English culture’. The ongoing wars with France and America rendered travel even more perilous than crude transportation methods already dictated. But foreign tourism represented other dangers as well—a profligate and wanton access to land which was tied to ideals of classless liberty, and which threatened English culture just as menacingly as did the taste for the bizarre and the primitive which critics have argued it satisfied.²⁰ The attention to the ‘perils of the free spirit’ which form the subject of the ‘persistent theme’ (Litz 220, in Spacks) of Austen's works manifests itself in an aversion to travel and to the freewheeling libertarianism it represented, both on the Continent and across the Atlantic. Austen may never have forgiven Southey his early Jacobin aspirations and she dismissed his early writing as the ravings of a turncoat and a radical; but she read his 1816 The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo with ‘much approbation',²¹ for after his early Pantisocratic fervour he depicted ‘the nature of foreign peoples’ in a manner ‘which helped define British imperialist ideology’.²²

Austen was inclined to see the worst in foreigners, and even her treatment of the landowning immigrant Lady Catherine de Bourgh is tinged with disdain.²³ In this essay I would like to examine another direction in which Austen's distrust of foreigners and foreign ideals was directed: towards the American continent. Her earliest-published novel, Pride and Prejudice, first drafted in the aftermath of the American War and in the shadow of the specter of the French Revolution, uses rising ground not only to figure the moral, cultural, and ethnic elevation of its principal model of Englishness—Fitzwilliam Darcy—but also the ways in which English soil was to be kept safe from the corruption and physical invasion threatened by democratic ideals. As Tim Fulford has persuasively argued, landscapes often reinscribed the ideals of conservative gentry through the use of the prospect view,²⁴ to which Austen frequently alludes throughout Pride and Prejudice. Because they were gained from a commanding position, such views afforded a means for the propertied classes to represent their political dominance as confirmed by the natural scene. Bishop Berkeley had argued in 1712 that the prospect view offered the observer a panorama in which all ‘parts’ of the landscape were viewed in equal proportion.²⁵ An overhead vista offered the capacity ‘to take a distant, extensive and detached view of the scene, to be above self-interest’ (Fulford 3) and thus was a trope of the landowner's disinterestedness, a concept Austen uses over and over in her novels. Disinterestedness, the sine qua non for ‘wise government’ (Fulford 8), is consistently linked, like the prospect view, with moral probity and applied as the crowing virtue in Pride and Prejudice.²⁶

Mr. Darcy, as he was aptly portrayed in an early anonymous piece in the Critical Review, is ‘a man of high birth and great fortune.’²⁷ The very paragon of English virtues, the ‘model landlord and master’ (Fabricant 254) is heir to Pemberley House, which itself sits on an ‘eminence’ commanding a prospect of Pemberley Woods, whose every vista provides the viewer at each step with a ‘nobler fall of ground.’ The ‘rising’ language of the Pemberley Woods scene is impossible to miss. The purview Pemberley House affords from its windows establishes the classic verbal prospect view—a vista from the sublime summit of the ‘vertical empire’ attained via ‘paths of glory’ retold in English art, poetry, and expedition.²⁸ From the dining room window Elizabeth sees that

Every disposition of the ground was good; and she looked on the whole scene, the river, the trees scattered on its banks, and the winding valley, as far as she could trace it with delight.

Immediately after taking the view from Pemberley, Elizabeth's thoughts proceed to its governance—to ruling the estate via a match with Darcy: ‘And of this place,’ thought she, ‘I might have been mistress!’²⁹

Darcy's character is inextricably bound to the type of heritable land he both controls by ownership and admires and prefers. He suffers, for example, from a ‘great curiosity’ to view the prospect from Oakham Mount (241). Elizabeth's eventual entrée to the ‘noble’ estate (52) of Pemberley, accomplished by the marriage which permits unlimited access to those grounds, ‘strengthens and affirms', as Fabricant observes, the elevated social class into which the heroine ascends (Fabricant 255). She rises, like the ground at Pemberley, in a ‘much-naturalized version’ of what Butler has called the ‘anti-jacobin fable’ (Butler 100) into the elevated realm of Darcy and his ancestors, ironically poised to eradicate the polluting French influence of Lady Catherine and restore true English taste and gentility to the land.

The prospect view is inscribed even in the narration of the novel itself. Richard Whately, early Austen critic and supporter, remarked that Austen had ‘not been forgetful of the important maxim, so long ago illustrated by Homer, and afterwards enforced by Aristotle, of saying as little as possible in her own person.’³⁰ Character is revealed with a crafted ‘disinterest’ as though impartially from above and outside. There are no diegetic intrusions of the author's voice until the end, and the plot is unfolded partially through letter and dialogue. The Pemberley scene itself rises like a peak to the centre of the novel.

Representation of landscape in Pride and Prejudice is rooted, too, in the work of another author beloved of Austen—Edmund Burke—and the novel is permeated by Burkean anti-revolutionary rhetoric which expresses itself, as it does in Burke's Reflections, through land-linked representations of England and Englishness. Austen may have known and capitalized on the connection between Burke and his aristocratic patron, Lord Fitzwilliam, when she applied the name to her hero. The ‘decay and corruption’ which for Burke threatens the ‘treasure of [English] liberty’ is the same imminent corruption which threatens the Bennets and the ‘decent regulated pre-eminence […] given to birth', the ‘principle of hereditary property and hereditary distinction’.³¹ Both Burke and Austen seek to exorcise foreign and libertine ideals through a discourse of English nationalism which both authors linked to the soil itself and to a class of Englishmen who controlled it. As these representations strengthened nationalism, they pointed at the same time to the imagined horrors of a world in which landscape was out-of-control—due partly to the moral laxity of its aristocratic owners—and in the hands of rebels and revolutionaries abroad. The principles of political democracy which Burke critiqued come under attack in his Reflections,³² especially as they were applied to the confiscation ‘to the last acre’ of aristocratic land in France. Burke compared the hordes of democratic ‘money-jobbers’ who implemented seizure of property to the ‘barbarous’ Roman ‘confiscators’ and their ‘auctions of rapine’ (Burke, 215, 216-17). The ‘Barbarism’ which would succeed a revolution in England was to be guarded against by avoiding waste and indiscretion, through a ‘consecration’ of the land which Burke is careful to link in part to the stewardship of the clergy. ‘Wild'ness in Austen is unfavorably linked to uncontrolled behavior, and by extension to the wilderness of North America. Darcy's housekeeper Mrs. Reynolds warns Lizzy and the Gardiners that the profligate and parasitical Wickham has turned out ‘very wild.’ Lydia and Kitty Bennet are characterized as ‘wild.’ The Bingley sisters consider it a serious malign to remark to their brother that Elizabeth ‘looked almost wild.’ For the Bingleys, the wild state is connected not with Edenic harmony and plenty, but with an uncultivated lack of taste which threatens to divide landowners from their estates.

The wild, fertile, and unsettled North American landscape was itself a trope for the democratic liberty which in England threatened to spell the end of estate life. Indeed, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution of France (published 1790) was provoked by the sermons and pamphlets of the radical preacher Richard Price—himself, like the young Burke, a supporter of the American Revolution. By 1790 Burke was arguing that revolutionary ‘grasshoppers’ like Price ‘made the field ring’ from under a fern with their ‘importunate chink’³³ while the proper masses of Englishmen, whom Burke portrays as ‘thousands of great cattle', are content to repose ‘beneath the shadow of the British oak', and silently ‘chew the cud’ (Andrews 74-75). For Austen, as for Burke, patriotic Englishmen wanted nothing more than to stay at home, touring and grazing on English countryside.

In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner wrote the classic academic statement of the myth of the American frontier. European immigrants, he argued, moving onto the wild lands of North America, were seen as gaining the liberty and creativity that were the sources of American democracy. That myth depended on free and available land—on wilderness.³⁴ In the England of Austen's time, topographical narratives spread the craze for North American exploration. American geographical and travel narratives were highly politicized, and offered relief from the general oppression generated by the class system in Europe. Though in 1784 Benjamin Franklin had tried to correct the widespread assumption that emigrants from Europe would be given ‘land gratis’³⁵ in America, the belief that land was to be had almost for the asking was promulgated through works by Imlay, Williams, Cooper, Morse, Crèvecoeur and Brissot. In 1795, the year the Pantisocracy scheme was hatched, Southey had been reading Williams's Farther Observations on the Discovery of North America, a work which would provide him with the eponymous hero of his 1805 poem Madoc.³⁶ Thomas Poole echoed the sentiments of Coleridge and Southey when he wrote that the America of the 1790's offered ‘the only asylum of peace and liberty.’³⁷ Coleridge had read Thomas Cooper's, Gilbert Imlay's, and Jean-Pierre Brissot's accounts of travel in America in 1794. Cooper was the son of a wealthy Manchester industrialist who emerged in 1787 at the age of twenty eight as a friend of liberal causes with the publication of his Letters on the Slave Trade in The Manchester Chronicle. He has been characterized as ‘the land agent of liberty', for he ‘crossed the Atlantic to reconnoiter a suitable refuge for what Joseph Priestley called ‘the friends of liberty” (Andrews 94). The works of Cooper, Imlay, and Brissot, as Coleridge wrote to Southey, commended the eastern shores of the continent as sites of ‘excessive beauty.’³⁸

Brissot, born near Chartres in 1754, abandoned the legal profession for a career in journalism. Later a revolutionary politician who was present at the storming of the Bastille, he was guillotined in 1793 along with twenty other Girondists. Brissot's 1791 New Travels in America sparked tremendous interest in Europe and abroad. A translation was completed in Paris by the American Joel Barlow and was published in London in 1792. It was immediately republished in pirated editions in New York and Dublin in the same year, and in Boston in 1797. Five publications of the work appeared in German between 1792 and 1795, one was published in Dutch in Amsterdam (1794), and one in Swedish appeared in Stockholm in 1797.³⁹ Though there had been numerous land scams in New England (especially in Rhode Island) about which he was aware,⁴⁰ and although the price of land in New England was rising, Brissot still talked of ‘free Americans’ (‘Amèricains libres’) and of the purchase of land as the project by which a public could be organized ‘according to the lessons taught by experience, […] common sense and reason, and comformable to the principles of fraternity and equality which ought to unite all men.’⁴¹

American soil was portrayed as especially fertile:

It would seem logical that all the large land areas of the world are equally fertile. It is, however, possible that the soil of America may be much more productive and contain proportionately many more natural resources.

(Brissot 34)

Connecticut is described as the Paradise of the United States, the Ohio River Valley and Louisiana as rich, fertile, and beautiful. Brissot pointed out in his preface that at the time of his writing, France had already ‘won’ its liberty, but that the French needed to learn from Americans how to preserve that ‘blessing.’

Yet while these narratives were enormously popular and influential, their rhetoric was refuted in works like Burke's Reflections, which proposed that Englishmen ought to be as docile and content to graze on English countryside as a herd of cattle.⁴² Though born in Dublin, Burke used English landscape as the ground upon which sublimity was reaped and sown. His Tory representations of the English nation ‘as a landed estate which needed to be protected’ so that it could ‘handed down to the next generation’ (Sales 88) was one which Austen handled in miniature through the central conflict surrounding the entailment of the Bennet estate in Pride and Prejudice. An early friend and ally of Charles Fox against the folly of the British government's American policy, Burke's later horror of the revolutionary confiscation of property in France caused him to aver in 1790 that property must be ‘predominant in the representation’ and ‘represented in great masses of accumulation, or it is not rightly protected’ or ‘safe’ from ‘invasion.’ Breaking up the ownership of the land, allowing it to be ‘divided among many', meant weakening its defensive power and rendering it subject to foreign attack (Burke 140). Burke, an ‘erstwhile friend of liberty’⁴³ but by now a large estate owner himself, wrote that ‘the power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it’ (Burke 140). ‘Liberty’ for Burke was a ‘social’ and ‘practical’ liberty to maintain private property and to be free of ‘trespass’ against his estate of Gregories, at Beaconsfield, in Buckinghamshire, a ‘costly establishment’ purchased in 1768.⁴⁴

Austen grew up in the wake of the separation of American land from England. The United States were declared independent in the first year of her life. She was weaned on Anti-American rhetoric that spewed forth from the pulpit and was heard even in the words of her father, vicar of the parish of Steventon, who beginning three days before his daughter's birth held extra services, and read out prayers against the American rebels.⁴⁵ Austen's brother Francis, while at naval school in the 1780's, kept careful notes on American geography.⁴⁶ It should not be surprising, therefore, that ‘the “American War'”, as Park Honan observes, ‘was one household topic at the rectory as Jane Austen first learned to talk, to read, and to interpret adult opinions;’ (Honan 185) yet the influence of America and the American Revolution on Austen has been curiously understudied.

Anti-American sentiment was long-lived. Americans were thought to lack taste, the essential quality for the ‘wise government’ of the Tory gentry. Honan offers a general statement that they were ‘known to be indelicate or tasteless’ (Honan 187); on the home front, at least one anti-American contribution in the Austen brothers' production The Loiterer implied as much and even provided Austen with her final title. In November 1789, five months after the fall of the Bastille, James Austen printed a story by a St. John's College friend which ‘satirizes the American ideal of a classless democracy by investing two moral abstractions, pride and prejudice, with Tory values.’⁴⁷ The hero is ruined by Washington's American Revolution.

Washington himself had by this time been crafted into a powerful revolutionary symbol—one which was tied to representations of ‘free’ available, and ‘natural’ land in the works of Imlay, Brissot, and others. The French-born Crèvecoeur, who after having traveled through Canada, the Great Lakes Region, and Pennsylvania settled on a farm in the colony of New York, dedicated his Voyages to the American general, who would be portrayed by Byron and others as a wild child of the mountains and cataracts in narratives of the period. Thomas Poole kept a lock of his hair which was given to him by American friends. Coleridge, during one of his famous walking tours, proposed ‘an American toast to General Washington’ at Bala in 1794.⁴⁸ Washington was also the subject of a prospect poem in the style of Thomson and Cowper, published during Austen's teenage years: William Crowe's 1788 topographical poem Lewesdon Hill had made Washington's Mt. Vernon a landscape of liberty, upon which its owner ‘rests after having delivered his country from British imperialism.’⁴⁹

Austen's sentiments tended towards anti-Americanism and persisted even beyond the publication of Pride and Prejudice in 1813. On 2 September 1814, when England was again at war with America, she wrote to her sister-in-law Martha Lloyd that in the continuing British-American conflict (‘War of 1812’) her country was entitled to ‘the protection of Heaven', and she placed her hopes on England ‘as a Religious Nation, a Nation in spite of much Evil improving in Religion, which I cannot believe the Americans to possess’ [emphases mine].⁵⁰ For Austen, the belief that God was on the English side in the ‘just war’ against America only confirmed and supported her notion of the propriety of class-controlled English land as a defense against further trouble from the upstart, classless and rebellious American child with its well-advertised and alluringly open wilderness. ‘Nobility’ for Austen is literally inscribed on English land: Darcy's ‘nobler fall of ground', bestowed on ‘disinterested’ and deserving gentlefolk, displays its lordly ‘eminence’ in a nature Providentially arranged, its taste, and the moral fitness to govern enjoyed by its owners. And it keeps the English nation a nation by displaying the class-determined and land-linked solidarity of the country of which it is a part.

Pemberley House for Austen is the pinnacle of English taste and landed power. Commanding a view of the valley below, Pemberley Woods is not only figured as lofty but as situated in a position from which to survey and enjoy the many ‘charms’ of the territory below. After entering the woods and ‘bidding adieu to the river for a while', Lizzy and the Gardiners

ascended some of the higher grounds, whence, in spots where the opening of the trees gave the eye power to wander, were many charming views of the valley, the opposite hills, and the long range of woods overspreading many, and occasionally part of the stream.

(161)

Prospects like these offered a way to ‘tour’ without movement. Such views brought the country, as it were, to the viewer's feet. Austen's blending of landscape and nation in the Hertfordshire countryside literally lies at the foot of Pemberley, whose eventual governance by Darcy and Elizabeth will pool, as it does in Burke, resource with virtue.

For Burke, ‘the outrage on all the rights of property', ‘the act of seizure of property', was the most noxious of the poisoned effluvia which flowed from the fountainhead of democracy, which itself was in his eyes ‘the most shameless thing in the world’ (Burke 207, 206 191). ‘The very idea of the fabrication of a new government', he wrote, ‘is enough to fill us disgust and horror’ (117). The National Assembly was portrayed as ‘mixed mob of ferocious men, and of women lost to shame', who had ‘inverted order in all things’ (161).

Austen adopts a set of remedies strikingly similar to Burke's in Pride and Prejudice's denouement. Darcy's fortune is certain to be protected by the modesty and prudence of the heroine, one who amidst a luxury-loving circle is so frugally represented that she trims her own hats and travels on her two feet. To allow waste and indiscretion to creep into the landed class, to countenance the ‘wild’ and savage behavior associated both with American landscape and its native inhabitants is to risk both losing the riches gained in Austen by inheritiance and maintained by moral rectitude, and, as in Burke, the dangerous spread of mob-generated ‘wild’ revolutionary ideals.

Fears of domestic insurrection among the English poor (fuelled by the examples of the French and American Revolutions) threatened to overturn the stable world of Austen's Hertfordshire gentry.⁵¹ Travel narratives created and inflamed the passion for liberty-through-land which was so attractive for Englishmen with democratic sympathies, and which offered them a prospect, however flawed, for freedom and prosperity. But Austen, as Raymond Williams argues, sees land as linked to issues of class-bound moral worth, cultivation, and taste, which is figured by an inherited code and the country estate—and not to democratic ideals of individual and political liberty displayed in land's easy availability and accessibility in America.⁵² Austen's English stay in England; Austen's countryside, like the landscape paintings of her British contemporaries, in some sense ‘stands for the nation’⁵³—a nation attempting to maintain an uneasy balance between private property, opening of controlled domestic sites for touring, and the discontent of the growing numbers of poor and opposers of the class system. Austen's ‘omnipotent’ narrator sees all, says all, and hears all in the ‘disinterested’ mode which is in reality the mode of the English gentry. By settling her heroine, through the long-established and inherited land of the hero Mr. Darcy, in a private estate, situated on a prospect, Austen positions her stationary, domestic novel against the perambulatory and peripatetic travel narrative from North America. She limits the spread, by limiting the mobility, of her characters' exposure to the dangerous enthusiasms of New World democratic ideals. ‘Liberty’ for Austen is Bingley's ‘liberty of a manor’ at Netherfield—Burke's ‘social’ liberty applied to the Hertfordshire estate provided by ‘inherited property’ (Gray 11).

Notes

1. All Quotations from Pride and Prejudice are taken from the Norton Critical edition prepared by Donald Gray, (hereinafter cited as Gray) the 1993 edition.

2. For a discussion of the connection between the sentimental novel in England and America, and their use of the captivity narrative, see introduction to Deidre Lynch and William B. Warner, eds., Cultural Institutions of the Novel (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996) and Michelle Burnham, ‘Between England and America: Captivity, Sympathy, and the Sentimental Novel’ in Cultural Institutions, 47-72.

3. John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) 5.

4. A Walton Litz, ‘New Landscapes,’ from Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development (New York Oxford University Press, 1965) 150-60; hereinafter cited as Litz. Excerpted and reprinted in Patricia Meyer Spacks, ed. Persuasion (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1995) 217-23.

5. See Litz, in Spacks, 217. The Clark phrase which Litz quotes is ‘landscapes of fantasy.’ Spacks fails to note the source.

6. On Gilpin's influence in Austen's work see Christopher Gillie, A Preface to Jane Austen (London: Longman, 1974), 87-88, passim.

7. Mavis Batey, Austen and the English Landscape (London: Barn Elms, 1996) 8.

8. From the title of chapter two, Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

9. See Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) 96, 97, and 100.

10. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was first published by Johnson in 1796. See also The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay (Norwood, PA: Norwood editions, 1978), a reprint of the 1908 edition; and Mary Wollstonecraft: Letters to Gilbert Imlay (London: C. Kegan Paul, 1938), reprinted from 1879 edition.

11. For a discussion of the evolution of the American hero, see Richard Slotkin, ‘Evolution of the National Hero,’ in Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 313-68.

12. Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, facsimile copy of the third edition (London: J. Debrett, 1797), ed. Joseph J. Kwiat (Duluth: University of Minnesota Press, 1968) 35-36.

13. Among these are trial by jury and the freedom to practice trades and employment without molestation.

14. See Park Honan, ‘Jane Austen and the American Revolution,’ University of Leeds Review 28 (1985-86) 181-95.

15. See David Nokes, Jane Austen: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997) 335. The letter, in which Austen offers her remarks, was written from Southampton to Cassandra at Godmersham Park on 1 October, 1808, and is printed in Jane Austen's Letters, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) 209-14.

16. Burke himself penned a clear-eyed contribution to the genre which was relatively free from grand claims and rhetorical flourishes many years before his Reflections,—An Account of the European Settlements in America. In Six Parts (London: Dodsley, 1757), possibly the joint work of Edmund and William Burke. My copy text is the second edition, (London: Dodsley, 1758).

17. See Chapman, Letters, vol. II, 292 (letter to Cassandra, 24 January 1813). In 1807 Austen was reading either Baretti's 1768 Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy or his Journey from London to Genoa (Chapman I, 185, letter to Cassandra, 20 February, 1807). On Buchanan see Chapman II, 292 (letter to Cassandra, 24 January, 1813). For an description of Austen's copy of Bell, see Gilson, ‘Jane Austen's Books,’ The Book Collector 23, (1974), 27-39, 31.

18. Anne Macvicar Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady: With Sketched of Manners and scenery in America, as They existed Previous to the Revolution. (London: Longman, Hurst, Ress and Orme, 1808). Austen had read the work by 1809, see letter to Cassandra 10 Jan. 1809, Chapman I 248.

19. Uvedale Price, Essay on the Picturesque As Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (1794), quoted in Bermingham 67, 68. Price, like Richard Payne Knight, sought to craft a theory of the picturesque based on Gilpin's practical ideas.

20. See Carole Fabricant, ‘The Literature of Domestic Tourism and the Public Consumption of Private Property’ in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, eds. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York:: Methuen, 1987) 254-75. The quote is from page 257.

21. Letters, Chapman II 476 (letter to Alethea Bigg, 24 January, 1817).

22. Timothy Fulford, ‘Heroic Voyagers and Superstitious Natives: Southey's Imperialist Ideology', Studies in Travel Writing 2 (Spring 1998) 46-94, The quote is from page 46.

23. The matter of Lady Catherine's origins is unsettled in the novel. I am grateful to Richard Gravil for pointing out the nuances and implications of French and Norman ancestry, and for suggesting the possibility that Austen's critique of the ‘Norman yoke,’ if it were in play, would have been allied with Jacobin as much as Tory principle.

24. See Timothy Fulford, Landscape, Liberty, and Authority: Poetry, Criticism, and Politics From Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 1996); Introduction and passim. Subsequent references are provided in parentheses in the text.

25. Berkeley, Passive Obedience, in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed. T. E. Jessop, 9 vols. (London: 1948-57) vol. VI, 32-33, cited in Fulford 3-4.

26. See, for one example among many in the novels, Elizabeth Bennett to her sister, Jane: ‘Your sweetness and disinterestedness are really angelic’ (Vol. II Chapter I).

27. Review: (unsigned), Critical Review March 1813. 4th series, iii, 18-24. Reprinted in B.C. Southam, vol I, page 45.

28. See Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995) 463-78, on the importance of ‘mountainous Britain’ to the ideology of empire in the eighteenth century. Quotations are from chapter heading, 463, and 464. For a discussion of the prospect poem, see Fulford, Landscape, Liberty, and Authority, introduction and passim, and William Richey, ‘The Politicized Landscape of Tintern Abbey,’ Studies in Philology 95:2 (Spring 1998) 197-213.

29. Citations from Volume II chapter I, 156-157 in Gray.

30. See Richard Whately, unsigned review in Quarterly Review (January 1821), xxiv, 352-76; excerpted and reprinted in Patricia Meyer Spacks, ed., Persuasion, 197-205, and in B.C. Southam, Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 87-105. Quote is from Southam, 97.

31. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and the Proceedings in certain Societies relative to that Event (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) 143, 141.

32. The problem of whether Burke's critique of the French Revolution is inconsistent with his former support of the revolution by the American colonies is a vexed and complex one. I am grateful for suggestions on this matter from Timothy Fulford and Richard Gravil. For a discussion of the matter of how far Burke's critique of the French was taken up by Cooper see also Gravil, ‘James Fenimore Cooper and the Spectre of Edmund Burke,’ Romanticism on the Net 14 (May 1999).

33. Stuart Andrews, The Rediscovery of America: Transatlantic Crosscurrents in an Age of Revolution (New York: St. Martin's; Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) 74.

34. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, from an address delivered at the forty-first annual meeting of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893. On American landscape painting and its connection to national mythmaking see Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), chapters 5 and 6, 146-99.

35. Benjamin Franklin, Information to Those Who Would Remove to America, in Two tracts: Information to Those Who would remove to America, and Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America, third edition, (London: Stockdale, 1784), 5.

36. Williams's work attempts to prove that America was discovered by Prince Madoc, about the year 1170.

37. See Vol. I, 98, Thomas Poole and his Friends, by Margaret Poole Sandford, 2 vols (London and New York: Macmillan, 1888).

38. It is Andrews who characterized Cooper as ‘and agent of liberty', 94. Coleridge quotation is from a letter his letter to Southey, cited in Andrews, 185, and taken from Griggs, Collected Letters I 99.

39. Brissot de Warville, Jacques Pierre, Nouveau Voyages dans les Etats-Unis (Paris: Buisson, 1791). Translated from the French as New Travels in the United States of America. Performed in 1788. By Joel Barlow London: J. S. Jordan, 1792. On the publication and translation history, see the Harvard edition, ed. Echeverria, (1964), xxvi-xxviii.

40. See, for example Brissot's chapter on Rhode Island, 129-33 in 1964 translation. Fraudulent land-agents like ‘The Atherton Company’ would not only bilk Indians, with the help of the colonial government, out of thousands of acres of land, but sell the title to these lands to more than one group of settlers, for example the Huguenots and veterans of King Philip War.

41. Quoted from Brissot, New Travels in the United States, 29 and 41. For a fuller discussion of Brissot's representations of America see Andrews, chapter 9, 109-20.

42. Burke, Reflections, cited in Stuart Andrews, The Rediscovery of America: Transatlantic Crosscurrents in an Age of Revolution (New York: St. Martin's; Basingstoke Macmillan: 1998).

43. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, (New York: Knopf, 1995), 248.

44. Quotations from Burke are from letter of ‘Oct 1789’ referred to in prefatory title, reprinted in Correspondences VI, 39-50, and from Conor Cruise O'Brien, ed., Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, 19. Cobban and Smith, however, established that it was written in November, and probably not forwarded before the end of that year. See Conor Cruise O'Brien, notes to Penguin edition of Reflections, 15.

45. Tomalin, 19. Such sermons were apparently not uncommon, and anti-American pamphlets were published under the guise of the sermon. Coleridge's father John privately printed his own political statement, A Fast Sermon, which deplored the outbreak of American War of Independence, in 1776. Exactly one year after Revd George Austen's sermon, The Reverend John Coleridge preached another of his anti-American sermons in support of divine right at Ottery St. Mary, Devon. It was printed for the author the next year as ‘Government Not Originally Proceeding from Human Agency but Divine Institution’ in London, and sold by Rivington, Buckland, Richardson, and Urquhart at two bookseller's shops in the city.

46. See page 188 in Park Honan, ‘Jane Austen and the American Revolution,’ University of Leeds Review 28 (1985-86): 181-95.

47. Quotation is from Honan, 189. The story appeared in The Loiterer, no 41, 7 November 1789.

48. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Penguin, 1989) 63.

49. Quote is from Fulford, Landscape, Liberty, and Authority, 226. For representations of Washington see, e.g., Byron (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto IV, stanza 96, ll. 856-64), and William Crowe, Lewesdon Hill.

50. R. W. Chapman, ed., Jane Austen's Letters, page 508. Jane Austen to Martha Lloyd, 2 September, 1814.

51. For a discussion of the relation of landowners to the rural poor, see Bermingham, ‘The Picturesque Decade’ in Landscape and Ideology.

52. See Raymond Williams, ‘Three Around Farnham,’ 108-19 in the Country and the City (London: Hogarth, 1973).

53. Michael Rosenthal, Christiana Payne, and Scott Wilcox, eds., Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750-1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 15.

This paper was delivered on 12 December 1999 at the Twenty-Third Annual Conference of the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire, USA.