Students of Austen's life are not very pleased with her first two biographers--her brother Henry and her nephew James Austen-Leigh. Along with Austen's sister Cassandra, they stand accused of obscuring the real Jane Austen. Cassandra destroyed most of Austen's letters, and Henry and Austen-Leigh portrayed her as a retiring spinster who did not live a "life of event."  Her gravestone proclaims "the sweetness of her temper." Really?  Jane Austen, who wrote with a quill dipped in vinegar?
   The family biographers and the gravestone also emphasize her Christian faith.  Henry, who became a clergyman himself, wrote that “her opinions accorded strictly with those of our Established Church." 
   Dr. Helena Kelly, however, knows better. In Jane Austen: The Secret Radical, she writes: "What we can say, with confidence, is that [Austen]'s opinion didn't really accord anything like as strictly 'with those of our Established Church,' as Henry claims." For one thing, Austen is "scornful" of the clergy. She wrote satirical and critical portraits of clergymen. (Kelly includes Edward Ferrars and Edmund Bertram along with Mr. Collins and Mr. Elton in her list of bad clergymen.)
  As it happens, Edmund Bertram and Mary Crawford actually discuss whether clergyman are good people in Mansfield Park. I explore that discussion in the next post. For now, consider the fact that showing unquestioning reverence to clergymen is not required in the Church of England. The 39 Articles, a list of official church doctrines, includes article 26, which acknowledges that some clergymen are unworthy of their calling, but this does not affect the truth of the sacraments.   
     If Henry Austen is correct, if his sister's beliefs accorded "strictly with those of our Established Church," then she subscribed to the 39 articles. For example, article 19 states that "the Church of England is the one true Church, and its teachings are necessary for salvation," which has implications when we come to talk about savages and heathens down the line. 
      I think Paula Byrne's biography Jane Austen, a Life in Small Things, makes a convincing case that Austen was a devout Anglican because it draws on examples from her private correspondence. For example, Byrne mentions a letter Austen wrote to her sister, concerning a local woman who had run away with a lover. Austen comments that the Sunday before the woman eloped, she "staid the Sacrament," that is, she took Holy Communion at church.
   This looks like a reference to Article 29: "The Wicked who Partake of the Last Supper Do Not Eat the Body of Christ." Mrs. Powlett was unfaithful to her husband and was planning to leave him when she took her wafer and wine.
   Austen distinguishes between actually calling upon one's Creator ("Oh God, her father and mother!")  and profane cursing. When Fanny Price's father says, "by God," Austen spells it "by G—!"    Article 39 of the 39 Articles specifies no "rash swearing." 

    Austen's favourite moral essayist was Dr. Samuel Johnson, a figure so well known in English literature that he is referred to as "the Doctor." Johnson was a devout Anglican who took a rational approach to religion. That is, he believed there was abundant evidence for the truth of the Gospels and that Christianity appealed to logic as well as emotion.
   Scholar Lance Wilcox says of Johnson: "He presents the Church of England as a bulwark against 'infidelity, superstition, and enthusiasm': eighteenth-century code words for deism, Catholicism, and dissenting Protestantism, respectively."   
    So Austen's favourite moral author was opposed to dissenters, those who worshipped independently of the official state church. He was not alone. In The Club, a joint biography of Dr. Johnson, Boswell, and other men in their circle in 18th century London, historian Leo Damrosch explains, "Throughout the seventeenth century it was taken for granted that religious commitment depended upon faith, an interior conviction of divinely revealed truth. But in the eighteenth century that premise seemed increasingly suspect to many people, because it smacked of the 'enthusiasm' --from a Greek word meaning 'possessed by a god' -- that had energized the Puritan revolution and turned Britain upside down.'

   A new evangelical movement arose in Austen's lifetime, one which appeared to threaten the absolute authority of the Church of England. Some famous evangelicals include William Wilberforce, the abolitionist, and Hannah More, a very successful writer, (although Wilberforce and More were Anglicans, not dissenters).
   Then there were the dissenting ministers, such as the raving Methodist minister and the non-conformist minister in the "Clerical Alphabet." [Click on the picture to see the entire alphabet which makes fun of Anglican clergymen of all ranks as well.] 
(To the left: detail of "A Clerical Alphabet" (1795)  with a Methodist Parson "stark mad!" and a Non-conformist Minister, "nearly as bad")

  However, Dr. Kelly argues that Austen was a dissenter. She thinks the words "humble Christian" in Austen's obituary are "problematic" and revealing. She points out that the "words 'humble Christian' had been strongly associated with writers who questioned Church of England orthodoxy," such as Methodists and Evangelicals.  Dr. Kelly thinks that Jane Austen arranged to be buried in Winchester Cathedral as a final act of defiance, not piety.
​   Kelly believes that Mansfield Park is so anti- Church of England that mentioning Mansfield Park on her gravestone would have been Austen's way of thumbing her nose at the Anglican church for so long as her gravestone and the Cathedral exists. 
​   In other words, she wanted to be buried there out of spite, as a private joke. But it was "a joke that failed" because her relatives did not mention her radical novels on her gravestone inscription. 
   Frankly, I cannot roll my eyes hard enough at this assertion, which has to do with Kelly's contention that Mansfield Park has symbolic references to the sugar plantations in the West Indies owned by the Church of England.  These are references which I think Kelly has projected into the book.
  It is interesting, and possibly significant, that Austen's gravestone does not mention her novels, but an obituary sent to the newspapers reveals her authorship. 

     I think Austen's strongest expression of religiosity comes from Marianne in Sense & Sensibility, when she apologizes to Elinor for over-indulging in grief when Willoughby abandoned her, which led to her illness and nearly her death. 
​   "I wonder at my recovery,—wonder that the very eagerness of my desire to live, to have time for atonement to my God, and to you all, did not kill me at once."
   Here, "wonder" means she is surprised that her passionate desire to live didn't kill her. She wants to atone, a more serious and profound word than mere apology. Marianne's love for Willoughby can never be overcome but vows it will be "regulated, it shall be checked by religion, by reason, by constant employment."  Religion goes hand-in-hand with reason, as it did for Dr. Johnson.

 Next post:  The clergy.

      Poverty was a fact of life in Georgian and Regency England. The standard of living for most people was at a subsistence level. Apart from a roof over their head, the average family had very few possessions. Austen and her family did not think of themselves as wealthy, but they bought books and were able to travel, and this alone put them in a different class from about 90% of their fellow Britons. It is estimated that one in seven people in Britain turned to public welfare at one time or another for food and money to survive, and yet, England was regarded as more prosperous than other nations -- that is, you had a better chance of not living in abject misery if you were British, as opposed to being French or Italian.
    In Jane Austen's day, there were strict distinctions made between the “deserving poor” and those who brought misfortune upon themselves through laziness and idleness.  When catastrophe befell a family, if the mother died in childbirth or the father was injured at work, stricken families relied upon their local parish authorities for relief. 
   Charity was given out at the parish level, not as part of a national welfare plan. That’s because everybody in your village knew you, and knew your habits, and they knew if you were hardworking and therefore deserving, or if you were improvident, shiftless and dissolute. (And yes, as today, rich people could live recklessly without facing the consequences that poor people face.) It also meant that the parish was not obliged to look after strangers. Too many poor people would drive up the poor rates.
   In The Two Cousins, (1794) the virtuous Mrs. Leyster finds a woman and her baby unconscious in the snow. She summons her servants to carry them to her home and when the women recovers, Mrs. Leyster learns that she is the widow of a carpenter who broke his arm and then succumbed to consumption (tuberculosis). The widow left her parish to take up a promised job, which fell through. Destitute and starving, she and her child would have died but for their rescue. Mrs.  Leyster sets her up in a small cottage business -- but only after first confirming the truth of her story and the respectability of her character. 
  It was feared that over-generous, over-abundant charity would invite more idleness and vice.

   "It is not my way to find fault with People because they are poor, for I always think that they are more to be despised and pitied than blamed for it, especially if they cannot help it," says a titled lady in one of Austen's lively sketches written in her youth.
   It's true enough, though. Back then, nobody would describe an alcoholic living on the street with the non-judgmental term "experiencing homelessness." They might reach out to help such a person, as an act of Christian charity, but they would also warn against the vice of drunkenness. 
    Georgian and Regency attitudes toward the poor can be summed up in Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ants. Below is a poem from 1809, in which Sir Brooke Boothby uses the dialect word “emmet” for ant.  The grasshopper is thoughtless for not preparing for the winter, but the ant is also criticized for not helping the grasshopper.    
   ("Niggardly” has a completely separate etymological derivation from that other word you are thinking of. “Niggardly” is from Old Norse, presumably from the Vikings. )

   It was the moral duty of rich families to dispense charity in their respective parishes, as we see Emma and Harriet doing in Emma, and Lady Catherine deBourgh doing in Pride & Prejudice. We know that they dispense advice along with the alms. 
   When Austen breaks the fourth wall and directly editorializes to her readers, we must assume that the topic she is talking about, the point she is making, is important to her, otherwise she would not break the fourth wall.
   So she bestows some rare praise on Emma and while doing so, shares her opinions about poor people. She says approvingly that Emma “was very compassionate; and the distresses of the poor were as sure of relief from her personal attention and kindness, her counsel and her patience, as from her purse. She understood their ways, could allow for their ignorance and their temptations, had no romantic expectations of extraordinary virtue from those for whom education had done so little; entered into their troubles with ready sympathy, and always gave her assistance with as much intelligence as good-will.”   

   These charitable impulses, however, were not extended to Gypsies. In Austen's England, they were regarded as a race of parasites,  people who followed a vagabond lifestyle and survived by begging and stealing. Rumours persisted that the gypsies stole little children. They were permanent outsiders from society. 
    They are exotic and unexpected in the quiet village of Highbury,  "Nothing of the sort had ever occurred before to any young ladies in the place," and they are not welcome.
   Harriet was soon assailed by half a dozen children, headed by a stout woman and a great boy, all clamorous, and impertinent in look, though not absolutely in word.—More and more frightened, she immediately promised them money, and taking out her purse, gave them a shilling, and begged them not to want more, or to use her ill.—She was then able to walk, though but slowly, and was moving away—but her terror and her purse were too tempting, and she was followed, or rather surrounded, by the whole gang, demanding more.
   In this state Frank Churchill had found her, she trembling and conditioning, they loud and insolent. 
      Harriet is shown here as acting like a silly goose, but there is also nothing sympathetic in Austen's portrayal of the gypsies. They are described as impertinent and insolent, and they respond to Harriet's "terror" by surrounding her and demanding more money.
     Austen says the gypsies "did not wait for the operations of justice; they took themselves off in a hurry," that is, before Knightley or anyone can get up a posse to drive them out. (Recall that bylaw officers and police do not exist at this period in history.)  Austen does not explain or justify the response of the village. She would not have expected her readers to disagree with the response. In a later post, when we get to the topic of Emma and land enclosure, we'll see how this scene is interpreted to make the gypsies into the victims.