Jane Austen's England Read online

  Also by Roy and Lesley Adkins

  THE KEYS OF EGYPT

  EMPIRES OF THE PLAIN

  TRAFALGAR

  THE WAR FOR ALL THE OCEANS

  JACK TAR

  Jane Austen’s

  England

  ROY and LESLEY ADKINS

  VIKING

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Copyright © Roy Adkins and Lesley Adkins, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  First published in Great Britain as Eavesdropping on Jane Austen’s England by Little, Brown, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group

  Published by arrangement with Little, Brown Book Group

  Map illustrations on pages viii, ix, x and xi by John Gilkes

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Adkins, Roy (Roy A.)

  Jane Austen’s England / Roy and Lesley Adkins.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-101-62286-5

  1. England–Social life and customs–19th century. 2. England–Social life and customs–18th century. 3. Austen, Jane, 1775-1817. 4. England–In literature. I. Adkins, Lesley. II. Title.

  DA533.A35 2013

  942.07–dc23

  2013016959

  To Anne and David Barclay

  For their friendship, support and encouragement

  CONTENTS

  Also by Roy and Lesley Adkins

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  Introduction: Know Your Place

  1 Wedding Bells

  2 Breeding

  3 Toddler to Teenager

  4 Home and Hearth

  5 Fashions and Filth

  6 Sermons and Superstitions

  7 Wealth and Work

  8 Leisure and Pleasure

  9 On the Move

  10 Dark Deeds

  11 Medicine Men

  12 Last Words

  Inserts

  Weights and Measures

  Chronological Overview

  Notes

  Bibliography

  List of Maps

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  England with the main place–names mentioned

  Map showing the main places in Hampshire, where Jane Austen lived

  Map showing the main places around Over Stowey in Somerset, where William Holland lived

  Map showing the main places around Weston Longville in Norfolk, where James Woodforde lived for many years. The parish boundary is shown as a dashed line

  The counties of England and Wales in 1809, with major place-names and mail coach routes. The English counties (as spelled on the map) are: 1. Northumberland; 2. Cumberland; 3. Durham; 4. Yorkshire; 5. Westmoreland; 6. Lancashire; 7. Cheshire; 8. Shropshire; 9. Herefordshire; 10. Monmouthshire; 11. Nottinghamshire; 12. Derbyshire; 13. Staffordshire; 14. Leicestershire; 15. Rutlandshire; 16. Northamptonshire; 17. Warwickshire; 18. Worcestershire; 19 Glocestershire; 20. Oxfordshire; 21. Buckinghamshire; 22. Bedfordshire; 23. Lincolnshire; 24. Huntingdonshire; 25. Cambridgeshire; 26. Norfolk; 27. Suffolk; 28. Essex; 29. Hertfordshire; 30. Middlesex; 31. Surrey; 32. Kent; 33. Sussex; 34. Berkshire; 35. Wiltshire; 36. Hampshire; 37. Dorsetshire; 38. Somersetshire; 39. Devonshire; 40. Cornwall

  A 1797 map of London showing Covent Garden, the British Museum and the Foundling Hospital on the west side, extending to Whitechapel Road and Mile End on the east. Southwark lies to the south of the River Thames

  Detail from a 1797 map of London, with Holborn running from east to west, St Giles on the left and Fleet Street, Strand and Covent Garden at the bottom

  Detail from a 1797 map of London, with (from left to right) Blackfriars Bridge, Ludgate Hill, St Paul’s cathedral, Bethlem Hospital and the Royal Exchange (the Bank of England is adjacent)

  INTRODUCTION

  KNOW YOUR PLACE

  One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.

  Persuasion, by Jane Austen

  The place is an austere, wartime England. In the north Hampshire village of Steventon, Jane Austen was born in December 1775, and just 12 miles away in the cathedral city of Winchester, she died in July 1817. Such a short distance separates her birth and death, yet during her lifetime of forty-one years she travelled more than most women of this era, westwards as far as Dawlish in Devon, eastwards to Ramsgate in Kent, southwards to Portsmouth and probably as far north as Hamstall Ridware in Staffordshire.1 England was the only country she knew, and for most of her adult life, that country was at war. In fact, England was at peace for only twelve years and eight months of her entire life – a decade of peace was enjoyed from the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783, with another brief interlude of peace between the ending of the Revolutionary Wars with France in 1801 and the start of the Napoleonic Wars from 1803, and then more permanent peace when the wars with France and America ended in 1815.2

  Yet wartime England makes only a low-key appearance in Jane Austen’s novels. George Wickham, the villain of Pride and Prejudice, is a lieutenant in the militia who is bought off with a commission in the regular army, while Fanny Price in Mansfield Park has a brother in the Royal Navy and a father who is a retired marine lieutenant. War forms a backdrop to the novels, but no fighting took place on English soil – men sailed away to war at sea or in other lands. Even so, military men, preparations for war and foreign prisoners-of-war were encountered everywhere, and the threat of invasion by the French generated immense unease and, at times, panic. With a strong and efficient British navy, the danger of invasion was in fact small, but public perception was different. Invasion scares helped to make the population tolerate relentless rises in taxes, much of which went on the wars and on the extravagant royal family. This was a time of glaring disparity between the immensely rich minority and the poor majority, who suffered from steep rises in the price of food and from falling wages. It is hardly surprising that a good deal of support was shown for the French Revolution when it began in 1789.

  The ruling class and the Church of England dreaded such an uprising in which they might be stripped of power and even put to death if the country became a truly democratic state. The Reverend William Holland, a Somerset clergyman whose background and status were similar to that of Jane Austen’s father, was forthright in his views about some of the lower classes: ‘They expect to be kept in idleness or supported in extravagance and drunkenness. They do not trust to their own industry for support. They grow insolent, subordination is lost and [they] make their demands on other people’s purses as if they were their own.’3 Even so, he was broadly sympathetic towards the plight of the poor: ‘I wish I could prevail on the farmers to sell their wheat to the parish at the rate of ten shillings per bushel and then keep the poor to their usual standard of allowance.’4

  This was a period of drastic, sweeping changes that affected almost everyone and everything in England. The upper classes became fearful that the class structure was
under threat, while the oppressed lower classes had to endure constant hardships. Although the poor were increasingly assisted by charities, such as the provision of free education and hospitals, they continued to be treated as an inferior part of society and were expected to know their place and show absolute deference towards their betters.

  Despite some political protests and anti-royalist affrays, a French-style revolution never materialised. Instead, England experienced a revolution within industry and agriculture, with more efficient, often more scientific, production of food and manufactured goods. The people who did the hard work were at best regarded as just another factor in the economy, alongside raw materials, capital and land – those who had the least often lost the most, while the wealthy literally capitalised on the improvements. In both wartime and peacetime, Jane Austen’s England was not a tranquil place. Hundreds of disturbances and riots were ignited by protests against industrial change, the enclosure of common land and, above all else, high food prices. One desperate mob at Brandon in Suffolk in 1816 gathered under the banner ‘Bread or Blood’ and threatened to march on London.5

  Throughout Jane Austen’s lifetime, King George III was on the throne. Only her last few years fall within the Regency period, when Prince George ruled as regent on behalf of his father, who was declared insane in 1811. When he died in 1820, the prince became King George IV, but immediately after his own death a decade later, historians, satirists and political commentators began to write about the evils of his regency and his reign as king. By the mid-nineteenth century the Regency period was recognised as an episode that had impoverished the nation at a time of war and damaged the influence of royalty through the lazy, self-indulgent and profligate life led by the Prince Regent. One saving grace was his patronage of art and architecture, creating a climate where all kinds of art, writing and music flourished. It was a world inhabited by poets such as John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, painters including John Constable, J.M.W. Turner and David Wilkie, and novelists like Jane Austen, Fanny Burney and Walter Scott.

  Novels were in fact a fairly new art form in England that were able to develop from around 1700 once government controls over publishing had been relaxed. Being part of a family of avid readers, Jane Austen was well acquainted with the books being published, and for the first half of her life she had access to her father’s extensive library.6 One trend was for Gothic novels of horror, suspense and the supernatural, which flourished after the publication in 1764 of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Subsequent successful writers of this genre included Ann Radcliffe, William Beckford and Matthew Lewis, while other novelists were drawn towards the dilemma of young women finding suitable marriage partners, as in Fanny Burney’s first novel Evelina, published in 1778, which she followed by Cecilia (1782) and Camilla (1796). Maria Edgeworth also wrote popular novels about English society, manners and marriage, most famously Belinda in 1801. Such novels were treated with suspicion by many, an attitude that Jane Austen described with amusement in her own works. In Northanger Abbey the narrator criticises those who are embarrassed by novels: “‘I am no novel-reader – I seldom look into novels – Do not imagine that I often read novels – It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss – ?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”.’

  Having moved to Ireland with her father in 1782, Maria Edgeworth was better known for her four Irish novels, in particular Castle Rackrent (1800). Other writers also ignored England and chose the more romantic backdrops of Ireland, Wales, Scotland or the Continent, such as the Spanish setting of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and the French location for Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), while her Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) took place in sixteenth-century southern France and Italy. It was Sir Walter Scott who raised the status of historical fiction with his immensely popular Scottish tales, the first of which was Waverley, dealing with the Jacobite uprising of 1745, an event still remembered by many when Jane Austen was born. As she remarked to her niece Anna a few weeks after its publication in 1814, ‘Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths. I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it, but I fear I must…I have made up my mind to like no novels really but Miss Edgeworth’s, yours, and my own.’7 Anna was currently immersed in writing a novel, some of which she had recently shown to her aunt.

  An article in the Edinburgh Magazine in January 1799 examined why novels were so popular:

  we fly for relief from the sameness of real life to the composition called Novels. In them we find common things related in an uncommon way, which is precisely the remedy we have been seeking to vary our amusements…It is this art of making much out of little that reconciles us to a course of novel-reading. We find how tame and insipid real life is; we awake in the morning, dress ourselves, go out shopping or visiting, and return in perfect safety to the same employment or amusements this day that we returned to yesterday, and which will probably engage our time to-morrow. It is not remarkable, therefore, if young and active spirits become tired of a routine so dull and unvarying, and are desirous of adventures which may distinguish them from the common herd of neighbours…Such are to be found in novels.8

  In short, novels were considered as cheap escapism, the pulp fiction of their time, and not to be regarded as in any way realistic.

  Jane Austen took a different direction, writing about what she observed of contemporary English society. She advocated authenticity and so advised Anna to steer clear of Ireland in writing her own novel: ‘you had better not leave England. Let the Portmans go to Ireland; but as you know nothing of the manners there, you had better not go with them. You will be in danger of giving false representations. Stick to Bath and the Foresters. There you will be quite at home.’9 Her meticulous attention to detail is highlighted by another comment to her niece: ‘Lyme will not do. Lyme is towards forty miles’ distance from Dawlish and would not be talked of there. I have put Starcross indeed. If you prefer Exeter that must be always safe. I have also scratched out the introduction between Lord Portman and his brother, and Mr. Griffin. A country surgeon…would not be introduced to men of their rank.’10 Other errors in Anna’s novel were also pointed out, such as the amount of time consumed by travelling: ‘They must be two days going from Dawlish to Bath. They are nearly 100 miles apart.’11

  The novels and letters of Jane Austen provide realistic glimpses into the way of life in England, even if the world she depicts is largely the privileged end of society. But in order to understand the context of her novels, the rest of the nation needs to be considered. England was highly stratified, and everyone knew their place or ‘rank’. In 1709 Daniel Defoe roughly summarised the social strata as ‘The great, who live profusely; the rich, who live plentifully; the middle sort, who live well; the working trades, who labour hard, but feel no want; the country people, farmers, etc. who fare indifferently; the poor that fare hard; the miserable, that really pinch and suffer want.’12

  In the ensuing decades little had changed to alter his sketch of society. The bulk of the population comprised skilled and unskilled labourers, craftsmen, servants, apprentices, the unemployed, vagrants and criminals. Even these lower ranks had subtle gradations, and social mobility was rare. Anyone’s hopes of bettering themselves might well be frowned upon by the ranks above, and William Holland certainly took a sceptical view of his servant’s aspirations: ‘Robert borrowed my horse to go to his brother’s wedding. He is [to be] married to a farmer’s daughter which has turned poor Robert’s head and he begins to think that both he and his family in a short time must rank with the principal men in the kingdom.’13

  Apart from this strict social ranking, a person’s place
in society was frequently influenced by their wealth. An increase in wealth could improve status, but would not erase memories of humble beginnings, as Holland revealed in a comment about a local man, Andrew Guy, ‘alias squire Guy, a rich old widower…the son of a grazier [who reared cattle] lifted up to the rank of gentleman, but ignorant and illiterate’.14 Nor could money alone bridge the gap between the elite and the working majority, as many newly prosperous merchants and manufacturers discovered. They would never be fully accepted, and the best hope was for their children to marry ‘above their station’, something that nevertheless carried a stigma. In the novels of Jane Austen, wealth and income often form part of a character’s description, and in Persuasion a rich bride is described as a ‘very low woman’ because, despite her wealth, ‘her father was a grazier, her grandfather a butcher’.

  England itself measures roughly 360 miles north to south and 330 miles east to west at its widest extent. Jane Austen’s England was not an overcrowded country – in 1801 the entire population was approximately that of London today. Even though London was the largest city in Europe, most people at that time still lived and worked on the land. To the residents of London, the city seemed vast, prompting the politician George Canning to lament that it was possible to lose close acquaintances for days on end.15

  There were pronounced regional differences and much variety in the way people lived – more so for the poorer classes who relied on local resources than for wealthier people who could afford to do or buy whatever they wanted. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, the insurance businessman Sir Frederick Morton Eden carried out a remarkable survey, which was published as The State of the Poor. In it he included a wide range of prices for common items across the country, such as potatoes selling at 1 shilling the bushel in Petersfield, Hampshire, 2 shillings and 8 pence in Winslow, Buckinghamshire, and 3 shillings in Brixworth, Northamptonshire.16