​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.​

   Jane Austen included some unflattering portraits of clergymen in her novels. Mr. Collins manages to be both pompous and obsequious.  Emma learns that Mr. Elton is shallow and spiteful. Dr. Grant "will not stir a finger for the convenience of any one."
   Was it daring for Austen to portray clergymen in this light? Was it radical? More importantly, did she actually oppose the Church of England, as discussed in my previous post?
     Complaints about incompetent or corrupt clergy were quite prevalent in conversation and literature during the long 18th century. One of the first English novels, Tom Jones, featured a sadistic clergyman, Mr. Thwackum. 
    Austen deliberately included several explicit discussions about the clergy in Mansfield Park. Perhaps these might serve as a better guide to her opinions. 
​   Edmund Bertram, the second son of Sir Thomas Bertram, will not inherit the title and the mansion and the slave plantations in Antigua, but there are two "livings" set aside for him--that is, two parishes, and he is to become a clergyman.  Mary Crawford, a sophisticated young lady from London, is dismayed by this news. She thinks clergyman are lazy, selfish and, worst of all, unfashionable. "A clergyman is nothing."
    Edmund replies that her opinions are a "commonplace censure" of the typical clergyman.
   Commonplace, but I still was surprised to find, in the memoirs of Henry Hunt, a conversation between father, mother and son which makes exactly the same points.
   Henry Hunt was a radical activist and famous orator of Regency times, most famous for being the featured speaker (though he was arrested as soon as he started speaking) at the Peterloo Massacre. He was sent to prison by the authorities. And though Hunt was a radical, he was able to publish his memoirs from prison in 1820. There's no reason to suppose that Hunt cribbed from Mansfield Park, but the two books do show, indeed, how commonplace the censure of the clergymen was. 

  In his memoirs, Hunt recounted the time he told his father he'd rather become a farmer, like his father, than go to university. His father, perhaps to test his resolve, offered to pay for his university education and then buy him "a good living, and you will then have secured to you for life a thousand or perhaps twelve hundred pounds a year; and you will have nothing else to do, for six days out of the seven, but hunt, shoot, and fish by day, and play cards and win the money of the farmer's wives and children by night."
​   Hunt's father doesn't actually want his son to become a clergyman, as will become clear. But the father's description is similar to Mary Crawford's: "​​It is indolence, Mr. Bertram, indeed. Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish—read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work, and the business of his own life is to dine.”
    Edmund replies that she is painting with too broad a brush: "There are such clergymen, no doubt, but I think they are not so common as to justify Miss Crawford in esteeming it their general character."
    This is also how Henry Hunt's mother reacts. She says to her husband: "[R]eally, my dear, although there is too much truth in the picture you have drawn, yet you have been a little too severe upon the clergy, when speaking of them in the mass. There are many excellent and worthy men, who follow the precepts of their great master, who are an ornament to that society to which they belong, and are, therefore, most deserving members of, and do great credit to, the profession which you have so indiscriminately reprobated."

  Mary sticks to her guns: “I speak what appears to me the general opinion; and where an opinion is general, it is usually correct. Though I have not seen much of the domestic lives of clergymen, it is seen by too many to leave any deficiency of information.”
   And so does Henry Hunt's father: "Do not tell me about ornaments to society; the best of them are the drones of society, and, without contributing any thing to the common stock, they feed upon the choicest honey, collected by the labour of the industrious bees... they may be very necessary evils; but you are aware, my dear, that what I say is true as to most of them that we know...." (This part about feeding on honey is a reference to the fact that clergymen were supported by tithes, a percentage of all the produce of the farms in their parish, a tax which Hunt's father obviously resents.)
   Mary Crawford also suggests that lazy clergyman don't even write their own sermons: "How can two sermons a week, even supposing them worth hearing, supposing the preacher to have the sense to prefer Blair's to his own, [improve public morals?]"
   The 1836 version of Hunt's memoir adds the detail of Hunt's father saying, "by a visit to the metropolis, you can lay in a stock of manuscript sermons, which will last you for the whole of your life." ​

    Fanny Price loves Edmund, and so it follows that tithing must be just and reasonable to her. That is, if Edmund thinks tithing is reasonable, then it's reasonable to Fanny.
    Tithes and farming (in addition to tutoring) was how Austen's own father supported his family. Recall, as well, that Austen made a merry joke out of the idea that she include the abolition of tithes as a theme in one of her novels, and this was after she'd written Mansfield Park, her supposedly anti-Church novel.
​    I should note that according to Dr. Kelly, Edmund Bertram is not a good guy. It is not just that she​ dislikes him, she thinks Austen intends for us to dislike him. It's not just that he's boring or preachy, it's that he's complicit in the slave trade and she thinks he doesn't really love Fanny. But that's another debate.

   These last two posts have addressed the question of whether putting Mr. Elton and Mr. Collins in her novels was a daring act for the times she lived in. But I did not revisit Dr. Kelly's assertion that Mansfield Park is a protest against the sugar plantations owned by the Church of England. Since Austen doesn't mention these plantations in the novel--for that matter she doesn't even mention sugar--Kelly's assertion rests on the symbolism and allusion she claims to find. I did touch on this briefly in the past, and will write more about Mansfield Park in the future.

  The unstated assumption behind Shannon Chamberlain’s Atlantic essay is that we shouldn’t enjoy novels with Happy Ever After endings (“What Jane Austen Thought Marriage Couldn’t Do,” October 3, 2019).
   Her opening sentence is: "Spend any amount of time searching for the villainous mastermind behind the marriage plot in Anglophone literature and inevitably Jane Austen’s name comes up."
   Even if the intent is to be tongue-in-cheek, Chamberlain is assuming that a) romantic novels are pernicious and b) her readers will agree with her on this point.
   Admittedly, some avid readers of romance novels make jokes along the same lines: "Mr Darcy," reads the sweatshirt, "giving women unrealistic expectations since 1813."
  Austen, Chamberlain goes on to say, "leaves herself open to several justifiable criticisms... [she focuses] too much on younger women at the expense of making older ones either irrelevant or ridiculous." Also, Austen doesn't illustrate what happens after the wedding.
   These two criticisms remind me of Caroline Bingley’s remark that balls would be more rational if they featured “conversation instead of dancing." "Much more rational,” her brother agrees, “but it would not be near so much like a ball."
   Surely anyone who wants conversation instead of dancing is free to pick up the book of their choice and let the rest of us enjoy some time alone with our favourite Austen heroes?

  One justification, I suppose, for taking Austen to task is that she is so ubiquitous and influential. Austen’s tone is ironic rather than sentimental and her concluding love scenes are notoriously restrained and brief, yet she is associated with palpitating romance today.
   Chamberlain provides some context for Austen's novels. Austen wrote at a time when marriages were no longer arranged by parents and started being love matches. People began to expect more happiness and fulfillment from marriage. (Let me mention in passing that it is nice to see an acknowledgement in a mainstream magazine that capitalism is responsible for freeing women from being chattel.) So therefore Austen can be criticized because she didn't “leave [her] readers much idea about how to conduct themselves once the rice is swept up and the bill for the reception comes in.“ 

     The idea that novels gave young women unrealistic notions of life was a common criticism in Austen’s day as well. To cite just one example, Sir Edgerton Brydges wrote in 1820 that novels “often do much mischief… they cherish… false views of life, which it is the proper business of books to correct and cure.”
   So we find that a 19th century baronet is in perfect accord with a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. 
     I will close with the following quote from Sense & Sensibility, as evidence that Austen perfectly well understood that the intense felicity of courtship settles down into something else after marriage--and she paid her readers the compliment of supposing they understood it as well:

  "[Edmund Ferrars] could do nothing till he were assured of his fate with Miss Dashwood; and by his rapidity in seeking THAT fate, it is to be supposed... in spite of the modesty with which he rated his own deserts, and the politeness with which he talked of his doubts, he did not, upon the whole, expect a very cruel reception. It was his business, however, to say that he DID, and he said it very prettily. What he might say on the subject a twelvemonth after, must be referred to the imagination of husbands and wives."