Jane Austen (1775-1817) is acknowledged to be one of
Britain’s finest novelists. The six books that she completed during her short
life revolutionised the form and tone of the English novel, while giving us
timeless insights into human psychology. Yet her novels were all set in the
small world that she herself had experience of: the country gentry of Georgian
England. In this article I do not aim to add to the millions of words of Austen
scholarship and literary criticism. Instead, I use her novels as sources for
social history and mine them for information about the lives and culture of the
land-owning gentry and their extended families during a period that Marc
Girouard has called “the golden age of the English country house”.
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| Jane Austen, a drawing likely made by her sister Cassandra, who wasn't a very good artist |
Jane Austen and
Country House Living
Although Austen was familiar with country houses and stayed
in them often, she never actually lived in one. She was brought up in the
rectory of the little village of Steventon, Hampshire. When her father, Rev. George Austen retired,
she moved with her parents and elder sister Cassandra to Bath, where the family
rented a succession of town houses. When her father died in 1805, his widow and
unmarried daughters lost most of their income and spent the rest of their lives
reliant on wealthier relatives, who supported them more or less generously
according to their own circumstances and sense of duty. For a time they moved
to Southampton, then settled in a cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, which was
owned by Jane’s brother Edward. He had been adopted by a rich landowning family
and was now the owner of a large estate. Jane died in Winchester in 1817 at the
age of 42.
The three female Austens therefore had a relatively
comfortable but rather hand-to-mouth existence. They belonged to what Lucy
Worsley has called the “pseudogentry”, well bred and steeped in the culture and
mores of the landed gentry while lacking the means to own land or property
themselves. They lived largely peripatetic lives, regularly staying in the larger
houses of better-off relatives or friends, or holidaying in genteel but fading
resorts. This agreeable, if somewhat purposeless life gave Jane the raw
material for her novels.
The Novels of Jane
Austen
In the rest of this article I will talk about English
country house and gentry living as depicted in Jane Austen’s novels. To save
space and time I will use abbreviations for each of her novels, as follows:
Sense and
Sensibility (published 1811): SS
Pride and
Prejudice (published 1813): PP
Mansfield
Park (published 1814): MP
Emma
(published 1815): EMM
Persuasion
(published posthumously 1818): PER
Northanger Abbey (first accepted
for publication 1803 but only published posthumously 1818): NA
Money
Georgian gentry were less coy about their wealth and income
than we are today. As we will see, money equated to status and marriageability
and so it was important that others knew what a family was worth. We learn
about the financial affairs of many of the characters in Austen’s novels and
money, or the lack of it, is a factor in many of their plots.
Money was needed by the wealthy gentry for an impressive and
up-to-date country house, with extensive grounds in the modern picturesque
style, at least one carriage, an army of servants and the means to entertain a
house full of guests. An additional house in London was also required. By such
means did a family display its status to its peers. But only one of Austen’s
heroines had wealth at this level: Emma Woodhouse (EMM), “the heiress of thirty
thousand pounds”. Her other heroines, we learn, were all worth around £1500,
more than Austen herself ever possessed in her lifetime and sufficient for a
comfortable life, but not really enough to entice a wealthy husband. Only one
of Austen’s heroines marries above her financial bracket, this is Lizzy Bennett
(PP), who attracts the rich Darcy through the force of her personality.
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| Godmersham Park, one of the country houses owned by Jane Austen's brother Edward. Its Palladian architecture echoed that of Mansfield Park |
Money came directly or indirectly from land. Land brought
income from farming, but more so from rents from tenant farmers. In the case of
Sir Thomas Bertram (MP), some of the family’s land was in the Caribbean, on an
estate worked by slave labour. The key questions for the gentry were how to
spend the income that came from owning land and how to pass it on to the next
generation. Some spent their money unwisely. The idle and spendthrift Sir
Walter Elliot (PER) overspends to such an extent that he and his family must
downsize from their country house, Kellynch Hall, to a town house in Bath,
while Kellynch Hall is rented out to a grounded Admiral.
The principal of primogeniture held that a landed estate and
all the income thereof should be passed on to the first-born son, regardless of
merit and that is what happens in MP, where the rather feckless Tom Bertram
will inherit Mansfield Park and all his father’s estates. It is accepted that
as his father’s heir, Tom needs no occupation, but is supported by an allowance
until he succeeds to his inheritance (and the baronetcy that goes with it). In
NA, on the other hand, General Tilney took the view that his eldest son Frederick,
despite being heir to the Northanger Abbey estates, should be occupied while
waiting for his inheritance and he consequently becomes an army officer.
Younger sons needed to support themselves by having a
profession. The range of options was limited to the Church, the army, the navy
or the law. “Trade” was beneath the status of a gentleman and other modern
professions had not yet been invented. Going into the Church was essentially a
less lucrative way of living off the land and was often inherited. Younger sons of the gentry could be provided with a “living” that was in the gift of their family or a
sympathetic friend, the income from which was provided by tithes paid by tenants
for the support of the parish. The pastoral duties (or the intellectual
abilities required) were not generally onerous. Austen’s novels contain many
clergymen, as befits a rector’s daughter. In SS, Colonel Brandon gives Edward
Ferrars the living of Delaford, enabling him to marry Elinor Dashwood and in
MP, Edmund Bertram succeeds to the living of Mansfield on the fortuitously
timely death of the incumbent, Dr Grant.
Other professions are scattered among the books. In PP,
Wickham is denied a living by Darcy, who is well aware that he does not deserve
one and ends up in the regular army. The only significant character in the law
is the stolid Mr John Knightley in EMM. Colonel Brandon in SS does not appear
to have too many military duties to perform. The nearest to a self-made man is
the dashing Captain Wentworth in PER, who does well for himself despite having
limited connections to the gentry. He
contains echoes of Jane Austen’s brothers Frank and Charles, who both ended up
as Admirals from elatively modest beginnings.
Daughters of the gentry were expected to marry and those who
did not (like Jane herself) could feel a financial burden on their family. Anne
Elliott (PER), unmarried at the advanced age of 27, “was nobody with either
father or sister; her word had no weight, her convenience was always to give
way – she was only Anne”. Jane Austen, as an unmarried woman among the
‘pseudogentry’ was conscious of her financial status and a powerful
motivation behind her seeking to become a published author was to bring in
money and even to become financially independent of her relatives’ charity.
In some of the novels, as in real life, the inheritance of
money creates life-changing issues. Georgian gentry families often found
themselves playing what Lucy Worsley has called “inheritance bingo”. If there
was not a clear male line to leave wealth and property to, messy situations
could ensue. SS begins with the difficulties that followed from Mr Henry
Dashwood’s uncle’s will and his own untimely death soon after his uncle (too
complex to relate here – read the book!). The upshot was that Norland, the
large house and estate where Mr Dashwood’s widow and daughters Elinor and
Marianne lived, was bequeathed to the girls’ half-brother John and his ghastly
wife, who turn them out, leaving them to downsize to a modest cottage with a
very small allowance – a situation not too far removed from Jane Austen and her
mother and sister following Rev Austen’s death.
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| Chawton Cottage, where Jane Austen and her mother and sister settled in 1809. It is a "cottage" in name only, having six bedrooms and more space to accomodate servants. As such, it was larger than the Dashwoods' country cottage in SS |
Another complexity of inheritance underpins PP. In this
case, the estate where the Bennett family lives is subject to an ‘entail’,
established by an ancestor, whereby, on Mr Bennett’s death, it must go to his
nearest male relative. As Mr and Mrs Bennett have five daughters and no sons, the
heritor will be a cousin, the idiotic Rev Collins, who would be perfectly
entitled should he so desire (and he probably would) to eject Mrs Bennett and
her daughters and take possession of the house himself.
Status
Georgian society was stratified by class and so were Jane
Austen’s novels. However, she was no respecter of status and much of the humour
in her books comes from her gently mocking the class-consciousness, or outright
snobbishness of some of her less worthy characters and from the mismatch between
their status and their personal abilities. Lucy Worsley observes that a theme
of the novels is criticism of the principal of primogeniture and notes that
“homes are given to the virtuous rather than the first-born”.
We noted above that among the gentry, money equated to
status, but this was not the whole story. The gentry was also divided by
“breeding”, with the various ranks of the aristocracy and baronetcy holding
themselves higher than those with land but no titles. This is most apparent in
PER, where Sir Walter Elliott “never took up any book but the Baronetage” and
insists on the intrinsic worth of his ancient family, despite squandering its wealth
and losing his country seat. In Bath he is ridiculously proud of having the
acquaintance of the Dowager Viscountess Dalrymple and her daughter, despite
neither having any social prowess or accomplishments to commend them.
Elsewhere, snobbishness is given short shrift. The rich and
class-obsessed Lady Catherine de Bourgh (PP) is depicted as a monster and Mr
Collins’s fawning respect for her underlines his wallyish character. Also in
PP, the Gardiners, whose money comes from “trade”, are looked on askance by
snobbish Miss Bingley, despite the fact that her own wealth, a generation
before, had come from the same source and the Gardiners are much pleasanter
characters than she is.
The gentry could also be snobbish towards those further down
the social scale. The next rung down was the ‘yeomanry’, farmers who owned
their own farms but did not themselves have tenants. Rich Emma Woodhouse has
little time for them:
“The yeomanry are precisely the
order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do…a farmer can need
none of my help, and is, therefore, in one sense, as much above my notice as in
every other he is below it”.
She did her best at the outset of the novel to prevent the
marriage of her young illegitimate protégée Harriet Smith to the yeoman farmer
Robert Martin, but sees the light in the end. And lo and behold, Harriet turns
out to be the daughter of a “respectable” tradesman, just the right class for a
farmer’s wife.
Marriage and Morals
All Jane Austen’s books end with the wedding of the heroine.
In this, they were conventional for their time, but the social compatibility of
the couples in question was somewhat revolutionary in contemporary fiction.
Popular novels of the Georgian period were full of servant girls who captivate
gentleman’s sons or farm hands who turn out to be the long-lost sons of Lords.
In contrast, the husbands that Austen’s heroines marry are strictly
conventional. The only one who marries above her wealth level in Lizzy Bennett
in PP, by softening the heart of the proud and aloof landowner, Mr Darcy. The
wealthy Emma Woodhouse marries the equally wealthy Mr Knightley and the well-bred
but relatively impoverished Anne Elliott is reunited with the dashing naval
captain Frederick Wentworth. The remaining three all marry clergymen: Elinor
Dashwood = Edward Ferrars; Fanny Price = Edmund Bertram and Catherine Norland =
Henry Tilney. Needless to say, all are of impeccable character; in Austen’s
novels everyone gets what they deserve.
A hundred years before Austen was writing, many marriages
among the gentry and aristocracy were arranged by the couple’s parents. By
Georgian times, parents had to be more subtle if they wanted to influence their
children’s choice of partner, but could still use the weapons of refusal of
consent or withdrawal of allowances. In NA, General Tilney does his best to
prevent the marriage of his son Henry to Catherine Moreland, but of course,
love prevails in the end.
While Austen’s heroines are basically sensible and gain
sensible husbands, her other characters are often less so. Ultimately, however,
her morality is conventional. The caddish Willoughby entrances Marianne
Dashwood (SS), but gets his just desserts and she ends up with the dull but
upright Colonel Brandon. Maria Bertram (MP) marries the oafish Mr Rushworth for
his money but then has an affair with sexy Henry Crawford. This cannot end well
and following their break-up and her divorce she is exiled to a country cottage
with her unspeakable Aunt, Mrs Norris (J.K. Rowling clearly knew her Austen when naming Hogwarts caretaker's cat)..
The story of Lydia Bennett in PP is perhaps more likely to
raise modern eyebrows. Aged sixteen, she elopes with the charming but feckless
Wickham. The response of her family is to do all they can to ensure that the
couple marries and are profoundly grateful when Darcy effectively pays Wickham
to wed her. Today, the last thing that parents would want for a sixteen year
old daughter is marriage to such an unsuitable husband, but things were
different then. In the first place, sixteen was not an especially young age for
a girl to marry – Catherine Moreland is just seventeen when she marries Henry
Tilney and of Austen’s other heroines, only twenty-seven year old Anne Elliott
is approaching old maid status. Secondly, in terms of her future among her own
class, marriage even to someone inappropriate was a better outcome for Lydia
than public scandal; knowledge that she had had an affair (and even worse if
she had an illegitimate child) would mean social death for her and dishonour for
her family. Austen kindly makes the Wickhams’ marriage tolerable, though one
wonders how it panned out after the novel ended.
However conventional her novels in moral terms, it is clear
that the Rector’s daughter (who turned down at least one firm offer of
marriage) knew about sex and alternative varieties of sexuality. MP includes
two splendid double entendres. In one
scene, Maria Bertram decides to climb over an iron gate to spend some time alone
with Henry Crawford while out on a walk. Sensible Fanny Price warns her not to:
“You will certainly hurt yourself against those spikes, you will tear your
gown”. How right, as it turned out, she was. Elsewhere, Mary Crawford talked of
her knowledge of naval officers in general and admirals in particular:
“Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of
admirals. Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be
suspecting me of a pun, I entreat”. The trainee parson Edmund Bertram looked
grave.
Servants
Servants perform all the roles in Austen’s books that they
did in real life. They passed on messages, announced guests, drove their
employers on visits, cooked, cleaned, washed, tended the gardens and grounds
and generally oiled the wheels of their betters’ comfortable existences. They
appear frequently in the books, though they very rarely have speaking parts and
few are known by name. The number of servants employed is, of course,
proportional to the size of a house and the solvency of its occupants. In SS,
Mrs Dashwood and her daughters take with them “two maids and a man” when they
downsize from Norland to their country cottage in Devonshire, while at the
other end of the wealth spectrum, when arriving at Northanger Abbey, “The
number of servants continually appearing did not strike [Catherine Moreland] less
than the number of their offices”.
There is nothing of “Upstairs Downstairs” about the novels.
Servants know their place and maintain their discretion. Rarely do we learn about
their own lives, or their views of their masters. But in PP, it is a warm testimonial
from his housekeeper Mrs Reynolds that persuades Lizzy Bennett that Darcy is
more than the cold and arrogant figure he comes across as. “What praise is more
valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant?” she muses. And in MP, Sir
Thomas Bertram sends his butler, Baddeley, to summon Fanny Price to meet with
him and Henry Crawford, who is proposing marriage. Bumptious Mrs Norris cannot
believe that Sir Thomas wishes to speak to Fanny about anything and assumes
that Baddeley meant to call for her. But Baddeley, replies, “’No, ma’am, it is
Miss Price, I am certain of its being Miss Price’. And there was a half-smile
with the words, which meant, ‘I do not think you would answer the purpose at
all’”.
In general, there is appropriate distance maintained in the
books between masters and servants; as we observed above, there are no
fanciful marriages between deserving housemaids and handsome young squires. However,
there is evidence that relationships could be warm and reciprocal. In PER, the
invalid Mrs Smith’s best friend in Bath is her servant Nurse Rooke and even the
unsympathetic Mrs Norris takes the trouble in MP to nurse a sick maid.
Parents and Children
Parents do not come out well from Jane Austen’s novels.
Considering the parents of her heroines: Mr Dashwood (SS) dies inconveniently
young and his wife is a stay-at-home cypher. Mr Bennett (PP) is indolent and
cynical and his wife is an airhead. Fanny Price’s birth parents in MP are
feckless and of her adopted guardians, Sir Thomas Bertram is cold and distant
and his wife appears (to modern eyes) to be on drugs. Emma Woodhouse (EMM) and
Anne Elliott (PER) have both lost their mothers and their fathers are ineffectual.
Finally, Mr and Mrs Moreland (NA) are solid citizens, but play little part in
the story.
While this trail of dysfunctional parenting exists to help
the novels’ plots, it has some echoes in Jane Austen’s own family situation.
Jane was not emotionally close to her mother, who sounds like…well, like a
mother in a Jane Austen novel. Jane spent much of her early childhood away from
home, initially being looked after by a local family and then attending
boarding schools. While this was not uncommon for girls of her class at the
time, it did not make for an intimate family life. While Jane was fond of her
father she also felt some resentment that he did not consult her about leaving
Steventon Rectory and beginning their nomadic and somewhat freeloading
existence.
Children have walk-on parts only in Austen’s books, as they
tended to do in the lives of the gentry in Georgian times. According to Lucy
Worsley, Jane liked babies but could seem ambivalent towards children. This
comes out in the novels, in which children are not always darling little
angels. In SS,
“Lady Middleton seemed to be
roused to enjoyment only by the entrance of her four noisy children after
dinner, who pulled her about, tore her clothes, and put an end to every kind of
discourse except what related to themselves”.
None of the novels take their stories beyond the main
characters’ weddings, so we don’t know what kind of parents they turned out to
be. However, we have noted above the practice of babies and toddlers being
brought up outside the family and older children being sent to boarding school
and perhaps that was the lot of their offspring.
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| A group portrait of a wealthy family by Thomas Gainsborough. Family life in Jane Austen's novels was not always idyllic and children were rarely seen and never heard |
Daily Life
Jane Austen’s characters passed their time in the manner of
the gentry of the day. Work rarely seemed to bother them (except when their
absence “on business” helped the plot) and they had ample time for conversation,
flirting and other forms of enjoyment. Of the landowners, Mr Knightley (EMM) is
a Justice of the Peace and takes an active interest in farming, while Sir
Thomas Bertram has to journey to the Caribbean to attend to his estates. The
others, Mr Bennett (PP) and Mr Woodhouse (EMM) don’t do anything very much and
nor does Sir Walter Elliott (PER), who relies on his long-suffering agent, Mr
Shepherd, to manage his affairs – not very successfully, as it turns out.
None of her female characters have paid occupations.
Ironically, about the only paid profession that a woman of the gentry could consider
was Jane Austen’s own, that of novelist, but Austen does not follow the modern
trend of making her main characters writers. Instead, they spend their time in
the drawing room engaged in “busywork”, sewing and embroidery, or practicing
music or painting. The menfolk spend most of their time shooting - gamekeepers
were kept busy in Austenland.
Other recreations included paying calls, walking in the
shrubbery and playing cards. A bewildering number of different card games are
mentioned in the novels. Amateur theatricals have a central role in the plot of
MP and there are numerous balls, as exciting in the build-up and aftermath as
in the partaking. Trips and holidays are frequent; the action of NA takes place
largely during a visit paid by Catherine Moreland to Bath and the holiday by
the sea that Anne Elliott and her friends took in PER made Lyme Regis famous.
Finally, the tourist visit that Lizzy Bennett and her party paid to Darcy’s grand
house at Pemberley and her unexpected meeting with him, paved the way for their
ultimate marriage (though I suspect Darcy kept his shirt on).
What Jane Austen
didn’t write about
Two important aspects of early 19th century life
bear little mention in Jane Austen’s novels. The first was religion. Despite
the profusion of clerics among her characters, God is never discussed and
little if any of the action takes place in Church. If one didn’t know that
Edward Ferrars, Edmund Bertram, Henry Tilney and the rest were parsons, it
would be hard to recognise that fact from their deeds and conversations.
Anglicanism was a given among Jane Austen’s class; she was herself a regular
church-goer and would take it as read that her characters were as well. Being
given a “living” by a wealthy relative was as natural to the younger sons of
the gentry as gaining a good job in the city through the Old Boys network is today.
Anglicanism was at the time a religion of privilege and complacency, which was
why non-conformism was gaining strength among the “lower orders”.
The other major omission from Austen’s novels is politics.
They all have contemporary settings, meaning that they took place during the
Napoleonic wars (though the plot of PER was helped by being set in 1814, during
a brief period of peace, meaning that Captain Wentworth could return to dry
land). However the wars barely feature, the French revolution is not mentioned
and the industrial revolution could be happening on a different planet. There
are a few references to the then current rural issue of inclosure of land and
Fanny Price (MP) is keen to ask Sir Thomas Bertram about slavery –
Wilberforce’s bill abolishing the slave trade was passed a few years before the
action took place. But no character expresses a firm political view on any
matter. To an extent, this reflected the reality of the situation of the gentry
at the time. The wars were only an inconvenience if a family member had to go
and serve. The books were written from a female perspective and women were not
expected to join in the political discussions that the men enjoyed after dinner over
their port and cigars once the ladies had departed for the
drawing room. Despite modern attempts to paint her as a radical, Jane Austen
was probably not a very political person herself. Lucy Worsley says she was
likely to be a Tory in views, as were the vast majority of her class. Her books
focused on the personal, with the political as a faint background hum.
Conclusion
We can learn much about the lives of the gentry and
“pseudogentry” in Georgian England from Jane Austen’s novels. Her genius was to
make the humdrum lives of the better-off interesting and to glean from her
characters universal insights into the human condition. After her death,
Austen’s family destroyed many of her letters, and worked hard to whitewash
her image, leaving us today with an almost blank slate that succeeding
generations have sought to write on. In recent years she has been called a
radical, a proto-feminist and even a sexual liberal. All such views seem to me
to be wishful thinking – she was a writer of empathic genius but she was a
woman of her class and time and her novels are firmly anchored in Georgian
England.
Sources Used:
This article was compiled from the six novels by Jane Austen
listed in the text, with help from:
Girouard M (1978) Life in the English Country House: A
Social and Architectural History. New
York: Yale University Press
Worsley L (2017) Jane
Austen at Home: A Biography. London: Hodder & Soughton
