Society through the novels of Jane Austen.

   Wordsworth, goaded by the high poetic standing accorded to Crabbe by the critics of the great early nineteenth century journals, consistently denigrated his rival´s work.  In one of his sharper asides he even ventured to compare Crabbe´s poetry to Jane Austen´s fiction.  Though he admitted that her novels were "an admirable copy of life", he nevertheless insisted that the could not be interested in "productions of that kind" and, he protested, "unless the truth of nature were presented to him clarified, as it were, by the pervading light of imagination, it had scarce any attraction in his eyes".  Wordswoth´s comment suggests something of the breadth of the gulf which seemed to separate the new poetry from the staid, older fashion of a literature which aspired merely to represent nature by copying it.  The idea of the transforming power of the imagination, which was to become so much a commonplace of subsequent criticism, cannot uniformly be applied to the literature of the English "Romantic" period, nor can the absence of visionary gleams or pervading lights be now seen as crucially detrimental to a substantial portion of the poetry and the fiction of the period.  Jane Austen was, according to her first biographer, an admirer of Johnson in prose, Crabbe in verse, and Cowper in both.

    J.E.Austen-Leigh´s memoir of his unmarried aunt assumes that she shared the feeling of "moderate Toryism which prevailed in her family".  Austen´s novels ostensibly suggest little active political commitment or deep involvement in national and international affairs.  The class to which she belonged and which her fiction almost exclusively describes, had largely remained unruffled and unthreatened by the ructions across the Channel, but the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, the long-drawn-out conflict between Britain and France and the active risk of a French invasion, left few families untouched by the Napoleonic Empire and the domestic and foreign policies of the succession of repressive Tory Governments.  Although a well connected cousin of the Austens had died on the scaffold in France, and although the novelist's two younger brothers served as officers in the navy in the great campaign against Napoleon, any discussion of revolutionary politics is eschewed and the war remains a relatively marginal concern even in novels such as Mansfield Park and Persuasion which introduce naval officers as characters.  The desperate domestic measures introduced by British governments to counter political dissent, notably the frequent suspensions of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the emergency legislation aimed against all kinds of "sedition" are passed over silently.  The agricultural depression which left many farm laborers  destitute and the widespread evidence of rural pauperism is glanced at only as  the occasion of genteel charity or, as in the case of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, as an occasion for scolding the poor "into harmony and plenty".  The vast advances in industrialization and imperial expansion, and the social earthquake consequent upon both, elicit mere allusions.  The uppermiddle-class world of Austen´s fiction is seen as secure in its values, its privileges, and its snobberies.  It is a society which defines itself very precisely in terms of land, money, and class and it accepts that rank is an essential guinea stamp.  Its awareness of geographical space is generally revealed only with reference to far-flung estates and to the incomes derived from them, and to forays into the fashionable society of London or Bath.  Its attachment to nature and to natural scenery is expressed in transitory enthusiasms for picnics at Box-Hill and trips to the seaside or for parkland disciplined and tidied up by landscape gardeners.

    Jane Austen is far too subtle, challenging, and inventive a novelist to be usefully defined by negatives.  Her work may seem to set and apart from the preoccupations of many of her literary contemporaries, but it remains very much of its time.
    It is, in many significant ways, defined in Christianity conservative, but not necessarily reactionary, terms against current radical enthusiasms.  It should also be  seen as standing in, and presenting variations on, an established fictional tradition.  Where new writers who had espoused Jacobin, libertarianism spoke of rights, Austen refers to duties; where they look for steady human improvement, she remains esceptical about the nature of the fallen human condition.  The late eighteenth century cultivation of sensibility and sentiment, and the new "Romantic" insistence on the propriety of passion, are consistently countered in her novels by an ironic exposure of affectation and by a steady affirmation of the virtues of restraint.  Austen chose her own literary limitations, not simply because she held that "three or four families in a country village" were an ideal subject for the novel, but because her omissions were considered and deliberate.  Her moral message is infused with an ideological insistence on the merits of good conduct, good manners, sound reason, and marriage as an admirable social institution.  She never scorns love, but she balances its often disconcerting and disruptive nature with a firm advocacy of self-knowledge, self-discipline, and practicality.  Her heroines can be as vivaciously intelligent as Elizabeth Bennet and as witty, egotistic and independent as Emma Woodhouse, but both, like the essentially introspective Elinor Dashwood or the passive and self-effacing Fanny Price, are finally brought to mature judgment and, by proper extension, emotional fulfillment.  The narrative line of Sense and Sensibility (1811), which balances maturity against impulsiveness, also systematically undermines the attractions of superficial glamour and contrasts conflicting value systems and ways of seeing.  In the two other novels which were probably begun in the 1790s and later revised, Northanger Abbey(1818) and Pride and Prejudice(1813), first impressions, illusions, and subjective opinions or prejudices give way to detachment.  Mere cleverness, wit, or spontaneity, though admirable in themselves, are never allowed to triumph without being linked to some steadier moral assurance.
    The scrupulous pattern of education that Austen requires of her major characters (both male and female) is also required of her readers.  Those who merely seek to escape into a delicately placid and undemanding fictional world willfully misread her novels.  Throughout her work, but especially in her three later novels, Mansfield Park(1814), Emma (1816),and Persuasion (1818), she obliges readers to participate in the moral processes of disciplined learning, weighing, and judging, and in the gradual establishment of the principle that judgment is contingent upon understanding.  This is not imply that Austen is either priggish or stridently polemic, but to suggest that her readers have to be constantly alert to her tone and to her supple narrative method.  The relatively restricted world of her novels, and the social and physical confines of her settings, define the limits in which opinions are formed and within which her fools and snobs, her bores and gossips, her prudes and poseurs, must be both endured and accepted.  The illusion of actuality which she so succinctly suggests also enforces a response to a society confident of its own codes and values.  In Emma, we follow the heroine in her often wayward exploration of manipulations, misapprehensions, niceties, complacences, and lapses in judgment, but we also see her finding a personal liberation within the enclosure of the society whose rules she learns to respect and use.  Austen´s often astringent anti-romanticism is nowhere more evident than in Mansfield Park, a novel centred on a heroine suffering from what she admits are "faults of ignorance and timidity", but also one who embodies, like the man she finally marries, a Christian forbearance which can be seen as informing her grasp of tact and decorum.  If the values of the novel, most clearly expressed in the embarrassments surrounding the play-acting which so offend Sir Thomas Bertram, often seem to be at odds with twentieth century preconceptions of character and social action, for Austen such values are projected as essential to the happy development of human affairs.  The relatively somber tone of Persuasion also emphasizes the importance of the process of judging through which all her heroines pass.  The freedom which all Austen´s lovers attain is a freedom of action and moral decision worked out, not in a deceptively "gracious society", but in a post-lapsarian world often unaware that it is in constant need of grace.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

SOCIETY DURING THE XIX CENTURY.

   We need to study the SOCIETY DURING THE XIX -especially the aristocracy-century to undertand better the novels of Jane Austen.......
The ties of social deference were further weakened by the aristocratic preference for town life, which kept them away from their estates for all but two or three months of the summer.
   In the early nineteenth century, the Dukes of Devonshire, for instance, were seldom in Derbyshire for above three months of the year.  This was probably not untypical, particularly for aristocrats with a variety of scattered estates, even if a conscientious administrator such as the second marquess of Bute could move slowly around the country visiting each of his properties in turn.
   Although town life was generally reckoned to be detrimental to relations between aristocrats and their tenants and workforce in the countryside, apologists could be found, naturally enough.  In 1756 Joseph Massie wrote against the prevailing notion that London residence impoverished the countryside.  he suggested that the purchasing power utilized in the capital was challenged back into the countryside throughout the acquisition of goods: consequently London life "hath been a great advantage to the country in particular, and to the nation in general".  Later, London life came to be seen as having beneficial social effects.  According to William Howitt, writing in the 1830s:

   The attraction of London was reflected in the number of newspapers which appeared on its streets from the 1960s, the building of new theatres and the rebuilding of older establishments, and the growth of opera and concert facilities.  Around the beginning of the eighteenth century the Duke of Chandos used his London base for a series of financial transactions, but also for a varied and busy social round.  He passed many hours in the company of the Royal Society, visited the theatre, went to concerts, played cards, collected books, and visited the numerous coffee houses, taverns, chocolate houses, and other places of amusement.  However, it was wives who were the most anxious to attend.  For them the round of theatres, balls and receptions, and the opportunities for buying jewels and fashionable clothes, provided welcome relief from the tedium of countryside.  They pressed upon their husbands the significance of London in providing an education for daughters, and interests for sons, although these were probably no more than excuses for their own desire to join the social whirl.  Even daughters complained that their marriage prospects would be adversely affected if for one reason or another the family could not make the Season.
   Over time the Season became a formal social round, which by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, had been infused with an elaborate etiquette.  It became private and exclusive, with the most important protocol surrounding the court.

   English aristocrats were no fools.  They recognized that time spent being both seen and active in the country was not wasted, however much the pull of London threatened to divert them off course.  Appearance strengthened ties of deference, and helped to shore up the existing social order, for which patronage provided the adhesive.  But deference had its limits.  Paternalism was often limited to places in which landowners had the sole interest, or a strong political hold, and even the latter could not necessarily be turned into votes.  many landowners were neither active nor responsible enough to try to influence the rural community in a systematic fashion.  In wages, rents and housing they often expressed more interest in the cash nexus than in the duties of landed property, while the monopoly of shooting game was always a social sore point.  the most ruthless nineteenth-century aristocrats even sought a profit from letting allotments to laborers, while many failed to promote schools, were overzealous in prosecutions under the game laws and in general, were insufficiently active in relieving the lot of the rural poor.

   The failure to uphold the Anglican Church had serious implications.  Lack of new building permitted dissent to flourish, so that by 1851 only 20 per cent of the population attended an Anglican Church, and a significant proportion of them were doing so because they resided in closed villages.  The lack of aristocratic support for the Anglican Church may even have allowed religion to act as something of a catalyst in undermining traditional rural social relations.  The influence of the established church fell away with the rise of the of Methodism and the remoteness of the clergy.  Consequently, in the long run the church abandoned its aim of promoting the temporal as well as the spiritual welfare of its parishioners.  In predominantly rural south Lindsey during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, the state of religious practices and beliefs was an important means of bringing about a transformation in social relation, and it provides an explanation for the breakdown of the traditional village order and the emergence of a class society with a distinctive outlook and religious style.
 
 

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