Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. For some, recent interpretations of Austen appear to be part of a larger effort to jettison and disavow the past. Click here for the first in the series.  

 In my first post on land enclosure in Austen's time, I mostly talked about gypsies and whether the gypsies in Emma tell us anything about land enclosure. The second post looked at whether Mr. Knightley was a villain. In this final post on land enclosure, we'll look at two questions: Do we know how Austen felt about land enclosure? And, was it dangerous to oppose land enclosure?  That is, would a person living in Austen's time get in trouble with the authorities, or even socially, for speaking out against land enclosure?

    Next, Professor Easton looks at Mansfield Park. Mr. Rushworth plans to improve the landscaping at his estate. As well, Henry Crawford tells Edmund Bertram how he can fix up the parsonage at Thornton Lacey to look like a gentleman's house by clearing away the farmyard and planting trees. But in these cases, we're talking about ornamental landscaping. We know that some grand English lords had entire villages wiped out to improve the views from the windows of their mansions, to say nothing of the Highland clearances.
​However, I don't think there is any indication that Mr. Rushworth is planning to enclose more farmland; he intends to re-design his existing parkland. Henry Crawford's concerns about Thornton Lacey are strictly aesthetic as well. The farmyard Crawford wants to clear away appears to belong to the parsonage. It doesn't look like any villagers will be affected, which is the question at issue here.
    Austen shows affection for Mr. Knightley's old-fashioned home with its unimproved landscaping: "the Abbey, with all the old neglect of prospect, had scarcely a sight—and its abundance of timber in rows and avenues, which neither fashion nor extravagance had rooted up." In fact, comparing Mr. Knightley's home to General Tilney's pride in his modernized Northanger Abbey, we see that Austen is gently mocking about this new-fangled landscaping movement. Both John Dashwood and General Tilney have greenhouses -- and they are both bad guys in Austen. Dashwood and Rushworth have cut down or intend to cut down the old trees which line their avenues. The focus here is on showy landscaping, not enclosure. 
    (Interesting side note, some of those expansive Capability Brown-landscaped meadows were more than ornamental, they were profitable because sheep could safely graze serenely on them, and the landowner could make money selling wool and mutton. This is the part where people who know what a "ha-ha" is can nod knowingly. Ah yes, the ha-ha.)
   Many of Austen's characters enjoy walking outside and enjoying nature -- Fanny Price in particular -- so there is nothing reprehensible about enjoying a beautiful landscape. Perhaps it is all a question of moderation. As Fanny says of Mrs. Grant's shrubbery: "There is such a quiet simplicity in the plan of the walk! Not too much attempted!”
   In Persuasion, Anne Elliot joins in a very long ramble across fields divided by fences and hedges. Anne enjoys the melancholy beauty of autumn, and meditates on how the farmer and his plow attest to the promise of spring, but is there even a hint that the enclosed land she's walking through, the hedgerow she's resting beside, are symbols of the cruel disenfranchisement of the peasants?
    And what about Emma, the book that is Exhibit "A" in Dr. Helena Kelly's contention that Austen was anti-enclosure? In the JASNA article, Dr. Easton points out that Emma Woodhouse pays a charitable visit to a poor family, a family that could well have been affected by the loss of common grazing rights, but Easton does not single out any passages in Emma that refer to land enclosure.  She evidently does not see the "politicized references" that Dr. Helena Kelly sees.

    A very informative BBC podcast about land enclosure explains that enclosure was beneficial for the clergymen of the Church of England -- like Austen's father. Instead of collecting chickens and bushels of wheat from their parishioners as tithe payments, they were assigned their own land, or received a combination of land and money.
     Simon J. White writes in Romanticism and the Rural Community: “There is little evidence within [Austen's] novels that Jane Austen was radically opposed to enclosure in particular or agrarian reform in general. Indeed, as Robert Clark and Gerry Dutton have found, Austen’s father was ‘as engaged in capitalist agricultural activity as any farmer would be today’."     
    In Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney has his own "young plantations" (that is, areas that are newly planted or forested) and he concentrates on improving their value as he looks forward to his marriage. Edmund Bertram and Edward Ferrars are also shown as being interested in getting as much value as they can out of the lands (called "glebe lands") they control in the parish. Edmund is learning from Dr. Grant "how to turn a good income into a better" and Edward and Elinor would like "rather better pasturage for their cows." As well, they are intent on making their little parsonage look grander by adding shrubberies and a big curved driveway (a sweep). Professor Easton points out "The fact that clergymen have a particular interest in land enclosure is evident in Jane Austen’s fiction..."

   And I also recommend a new novel by Elizabeth Grant, An Independent Heart. This beautifully-written story includes a debate over land enclosure and is set during the Regency period. "​It is February 1814. Claire Lammond is in London on a family visit. The British army has crossed the Nivelle. Justin Sumners is recalled to England. They meet on the ice of the frozen Thames: two strong, engaging characters whose relationship unfolds against a richly evocative historical background... At its core are family ties: between husband and wife, son and father, children and parents, siblings and cousins, all tested and strained by the demands of politics, love, and duty."  
   If I come across any other writings of Austen's time which protests against land enclosure, I'll share that information here.

Next post:

Some Jane Austen fans want to acquit her of being a woman of the long 18th century.  Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. Click here for the first in the series.  In last week's post, I looked at the suggestion that the gypsies in Emma were a veiled reference to the consequences of land enclosure. 

  Some modern readers of Emma don't care very much for its leading man. "[W]hat's so great about a mansplainer grooming the bride that (as he admits at one point) he's loved since she was thirteen?"  
   I don't object in the least if you don't like Mr. Knightley. To each his own. It's also understandable if you can't enjoy Emma because of its preoccupation with social class. If, after watching the 2020 movie version of Emma, you conclude that it's a story about selfish people who treat their servants like machines, I take your point. But, it's quite another thing to insist that Jane Austen intended for us to dislike Mr. Knightley. 
   George Knightley, the owner of Donwell Abbey, makes his money from his own farmland and from the rents of his tenants. Therefore Dr. Kelly, author of Jane Austen: The Secret Radical, wants to convince us that the leading man in a romantic comedy of manners is actually the villain of a tragedy about land enclosure.
   The enclosure movement involved a changeover from open farmland held and worked in common, to a system where fields and forests once used by everybody were fenced off so that poor people could not graze their cows, or gather berries, nuts, or firewood. 
   And how do we know that Knightley is a villain? Dr. Kelly says Emma is "crammed with references to agricultural improvement, parish boundaries, and hedges; loaded, inevitably politicized references, information that there’s absolutely no other reason to include.” 
    No reason, that is, unless you are writing a book set in a little English country village where the main male character is the leading landowner and farmer in the area? And what is "politicized," for example, about the the following:
     [When John Knightley, a lawyer from London, is visiting with his older brother George] "The brothers talked of their own concerns and pursuits…  As a magistrate, [George Knightley] had generally some point of law to consult John about, or, at least, some curious anecdote to give; and as a farmer, as keeping in hand the home-farm at Donwell, he had to tell what every field was to bear next year, and to give all such local information as could not fail of being interesting to a brother... The plan of a drain, the change of a fence, the felling of a tree,.. was entered into with as much equality of interest by John, as his cooler manners rendered possible…”

  ​    There is more attention given to Emma’s shoelace than to parish borders. ​More attention given to pianofortes, haircuts, shawls, balls and slices of cake. But perhaps this only proves how very heartless and indifferent Mr. Knightley and the others are to the plight of the poor people all around them.  
​     And, the word "enclosure" is not mentioned at all in Emma! As opposed to Sense & Sensibility, where enclosure is mentioned twice.  A scholarly article about "Jane Austen and the Enclosure Movement" in the journal of the Jane Austen Society of North America discusses references to enclosure in Sense & Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, but doesn't mention the hedges of Emma. ​
    According to Dr. Kelly, we aren't supposed to believe Mr. Knightley when he tells Emma that he loves her. He's marrying her for her land, whatever acreage the Hartfield estate sits on, so he can enclose it and make the poor villagers in the area still poorer. Further, he's a bad landlord who doesn't care about the welfare of his tenants because he "abandons" Donwell Abbey (as though he could not go there during the day--it's within walking distance), to move in with the Woodhouses.

     Dr. Kelly acknowledges that Mr. Knightley does not make a big deal about his wealth. He doesn't use his carriage very much, he wears thick gaiters because he is always tromping about in his fields. But nevertheless, he is avaricious. Dr. Kelly thinks the following passage is another hint about Knightley’s land enclosure schemes:
    “True, true,” cried Mr. Knightley, with most ready interposition—“very true. That's a consideration indeed.—But John, as to what I was telling you of my idea of moving the path to Langham, of turning it more to the right that it may not cut through the home meadows, I cannot conceive any difficulty. I should not attempt it, if it were to be the means of inconvenience to the Highbury people, but if you call to mind exactly the present line of the path.... The only way of proving it, however, will be to turn to our maps. I shall see you at the Abbey to-morrow morning I hope, and then we will look them over, and you shall give me your opinion.”
      The footpath is probably a right-of-way, a shortcut which has been used by local people since time out of mind. However, the meadows are being used for grazing animals or growing hay or something, and it would be both safer for the people and more efficient for the farm to move the path. Mr. Knightley would have to hire local labourers to  create a new clearly-marked path that skirts the meadows.
    In his annotated Mansfield Park, David M. Shapard points to this same passage as an example of Mr. Knightley’s thoughtfulness to the local people, thoughtfulness which sets him apart from other landowners of his class. He will not move the path until he can demonstrate that it won’t inconvenience anyone.
    Is there a secret message here? Not necessarily. Austen uses the footpath for comic reasons. It's part of a running joke in Chapter 12, where Emma and Knightley work together to distract John Knightley whenever he starts getting snappish with Mr. Woodhouse, by constantly changing the subject. And certainly Mr. Knightley emphasizes that he wouldn't do it if he believed it would be inconvenient for the Highbury people.

    Emma ends with not one but three happy couples, but according to Dr. Kelly, it "ends on a particularly ominous note."  This is because the event which makes it possible for Emma to set her wedding day to (the heartless, hypocritical) Mr. Knightley is the theft of poultry from Mrs. Weston. The theft frightens her father and so he welcomes the idea of Mr. Knightley moving to Hartfield to superintend and protect the household. As Dr. Kelly puts it: "Readers already have reason to mistrust the purity of Mr. Knightley’s motives in wanting to marry Emma. That the marriage itself is made possible only by criminal acts and an elderly man’s terror doesn’t do anything to dispel that lingering sense of unease."
  Kelly reckons this theft must have been carried out by a hungry local villager, because the gypsies are gone by this point in the novel. (On the other hand, it might have been a professional gang of roaming poachers, who caught black-market game for London’s dining tables. Maybe they also stole domesticated fowl. “Other poultry-yards in the neighborhood also suffered,” Austen writes. This sounds like a criminal gang working methodically. If a poor villager suddenly had a yard full of turkeys and a full stew pot, the neighbours would have noticed.) Or, perhaps the turkey thieves were​ desperate. Perhaps enclosure is happening in Highbury during the period of the novel; it probably is or already has. We can speculate all we want about who purloined the poultry. Were we supposed to feel the theft was "ominous," when the only person who was frightened was Mr. Woodhouse, and (in case the reader was not yet aware) Mr. Woodhouse is an extremely neurotic man?
    Or are we supposed to laugh at Austen's ironic twist -- in the end, Mr. Woodhouse's habits of selfish nervousness actually made the marriage possible?  The fact is that in terms of her plot, Austen had written herself into a corner. Emma's best trait is her patience and love for her father. Her feelings of duty made it impossible for her to leave his roof: "With respect to her father, it was a question soon answered... a very short parley with her own heart produced the most solemn resolution of never quitting her father — She even wept over the idea of it, as a sin of thought. While he lived, it must be only an engagement."
     Austen had to resolve this issue before writing her happy ending, and she did. We should look first at the narrative structure and logic of the novel before delving around for hidden meanings.

    The most significant thing about Mr. Knightley is not that he wants to move a footpath that is cutting across his meadows, it is not that he throws a “Marie Antoinette"-style strawberry picnic for his privileged social circle, it’s that he is the moral arbiter of Emma.
​    Throughout the novel, Mr. Knightley is making judgements. Emma thinks Robert Martin is unworthy of Harriet. Mr. Knightley disagrees. Emma is wrong and Mr. Knightley is right. He's worried about the consequences of Harriet's friendship with Emma. His premonitions are correct. He has a clearer understanding of Mr. Elton's character than Emma. He’s suspicious of Frank Churchill. He's right to be.  He realizes Jane Fairfax is hiding a secret. He scolds Emma for making fun of Miss Bates in front of everyone at the Box Hill picnic. Everything Mr. Knightley says about Emma’s faults is correct, and she comes to realize this. His approval means everything to her. If he is a villain, then what is she?
    As Professor John Mullan pointed out, there's a problem with insisting that Knightley is not a hero, but actually a villain. Dr. Kelly is ignoring the narrative logic of the story. Where is the payoff for the reader in a story about a man who worries about the heroine, who does kind and thoughtful things for Miss Bates and her mother, who steps up and dances with a humiliated young woman at a public ball, who protects his housekeeper from the interference of Mrs. Elton, who speaks of a yeoman farmer with praise -- but marries Emma just so he can get his hands on her father’s lands?
   To make Mr. Knightley into the villain of the tale is to turn it upside down; in fact, to remove any inducement for reading such a strangely constructed book.​ I am not denying that land enclosure created significant problems for poor people in England through the 18th century, I am just saying that Emma is not about land enclosure and Knightley is not intended to be a villain.
    Dr. Kelly also claims that Austen merely hints at radical themes because of the restrictive times in which she lived, when criticizing the authorities could get you in trouble, even sent to prison. That's why we have to read Austen carefully, to divine the hints given within, which Kelly believes Austen's contemporary readers would have understood.
      If Austen had been opposed to land enclosure, was it dangerous for her to say so?

Next post: How did Austen feel about land enclosure?