In Jane Austen's time, a gentleman's reputation was so important that he sometimes risked his life for the sake of honour -- with pistols at dawn. Or, as in the case of Colonel Brandon, they dueled to punish someone else's dishonourable conduct.
   However, the plot of Pride & Prejudice turns on another characteristic habit of English gentlemen: Darcy does not deign to explain his past dealings with Wickham. His reticence has consequences: too late, Darcy realizes that Wickham has prejudiced the mind of the woman he loves against him. Stung, he writes Elizabeth a long letter. After realizing she misjudged Darcy and Wickham, Elizabeth tells her sister Jane. They both decide to keep the whole matter to themselves, as Darcy would wish, and to preserve Wickham's character -- after all, he's leaving town anyway. But that has unforeseen consequences...

 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?

   We should understand that by Austen's time, enclosure was basically a fait accompli. Much of England's farmland was enclosed before Austen was born, including her home village of Steventon. If Highbury and Northanger Abbey and Uppercross were all real places, they likely would be places where the farmland had already been enclosed. According to the National Archives website, because enclosure happened here and there and gradually over centuries, this "piecemeal" conversion "ensured that opposition to the loss of rights was fragmented although there were various enclosure riots at places such as Charnwood Forest (1748-51), West Haddon (1765), Sheffield (1791), and Burton on Trent (1771-72)."  
​     So what did Jane Austen think? .....​​

  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? ....