Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. When I say "my take," I very much doubt that I could find anything new or different to say about Austen, not after her admirers have written so much. But I am not trying to be new, rather I am pushing back at post-modern portrayals of Austen as a radical feminist. Click here for the first in the series.

   People who write about Austen 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. (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.   
    Mr. Bennet scoffs at Mr. Collins when he writes to advise him to never let Lydia darken his door again: He reads a portion of Collins letter: ""You ought certainly to forgive them, as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight, or allow their names to be mentioned in your hearing.'" Then adds, "That is his notion of Christian forgiveness!"​
   Mr. Collins' take does not shake Mr. Bennet's understanding of what Christian forgiveness is.
      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. 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.'

      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 might return to that later. 

     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.

​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.

      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.”   ​
​   On this particular errand, however, we learn that Emma is glad that another motive for her charity arises -- the chance to show Harriet off to Mr. Elton in a good light.

   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.

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.

   One reason for Austen's enduring popularity is the timelessness of her novels. She creates characters and situations that are familiar to us. We talk about her characters as though they were real people. We even argue about them. But in this post I want to talk about how Austen's world was different from ours.

   In a previous post, I talked about the economic realities of Austen’s time. All her novels are placed before the great explosion in national income which occurred with the Industrial Revolution.  When we look at the world 200 years ago, it was not a world where everybody had adequate shelter, food, clothing and medical care. There was no police force to investigate crime. Many people agreed with Thomas Malthus that starvation was effectively the only way growing populations would be curbed. 
    At the conclusion of Persuasion, Austen writes: "When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other's ultimate comfort. This may be bad morality to conclude with, but I believe it to be truth." 
     Notice that even before compatibility, Austen lists poverty as a serious barrier to marriage, and she considers this to be a moral question.

   In Emma, Robert Martin, a yeoman farmer, comes to consult with Mr. Knightley before he proposes to Harriet Smith. Knightley tells Emma, "I had no hesitation in advising him to marry. He proved to me that he could afford it; and that being the case, I was convinced he could not do better."
   In Sense & Sensibility, the usually cheerful Mrs. Jennings  soberly predicts that Edward Ferrars and Lucy Steele "will set down upon a curacy of fifty pounds a-year, with the interest of his two thousand pounds, and what little matter Mr. Steele and Mr. Pratt can give her.—Then they will have a child every year! and Lord help 'em! how poor they will be!"
     Mrs. Croft, a sensible and likeable woman, declares in Persuasion, "To begin without knowing that at such a time there will be the means of marrying, I hold to be very unsafe and unwise, and what I think all parents should prevent as far as they can." 
   Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park “is an advocate for early marriages,  where there are means in proportion." Early marriage helps a young man avoid temptation, of course. Sir Thomas “would have every young man, with a sufficient income, settle as soon after four-and-twenty as he can.” Note how he repeats himself on the matter of income. And while Austen presents Sir Thomas as a man with faults, she does not portray him as malicious or wrong-headed in his basic principles.
     Parents had strong views about who their children would marry, because the right marriage could increase the security and prosperity of the entire family but an imprudent marriage could lead to disaster, as is illustrated by the contrast between the fates of the three Ward sisters in Mansfield Park. ​    

   The fierce moral codes of Austen's day arose from an economic imperative as well as a religious one. In the long 18th century, in a world where a single mother is dependent upon meagre parish relief, society had a vested interest in discouraging the proliferation of single mothers.
​   The result of this social and legal clampdown, obviously, is that there were a lot of unhappy marriages and just general hypocrisy. 
  If women were not in a position to get married, they were expected to remain chaste. However, the middle and lower classes of Austen's time were well aware of the prevalence of infidelity and illegitimacy in the upper classes. What was preached for the lower classes was flouted by the privileged few. King George III's three sons had over 50 illegitimate children. He had only one legitimate grandchild, Princess Charlotte.
​   But all choices are a matter of trade-offs, even today. One of the downsides of modern sexual license is that fewer children today know the stability of growing with the same two parents. Today half the children in England are born out of wedlock and the percentages are even higher in other countries.   

   Since the 18th century, therefore, we have   seen a relaxing of strict moral codes, and more honesty in general about sexual activity. But first, there came a great rise in prosperity. Only a prosperous society can afford to subsidize hundreds of thousands of households that cannot support themselves. Remember the chart.​   As we have seen, the message is repeated throughout Austen -- don't get married if you are not in a position to support your wife and any children that come along. Before Edward and Elinor get their happy ever after in Sense & Sensibility, Austen spells out, in detail, how much money they will have. Colonel Brandon gives Edward a living in Delaford which he reckons would enable a bachelor to live comfortably but "it cannot enable him to marry." The lovebirds also have three thousand pounds between them, which, invested at four or five percent, brings them another 160 and 200 pounds a year, "and they were neither of them quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty pounds a-year would supply them with the comforts of life." Fortunately, Edward's mother provides another ten thousand pounds which will give them another 400 a year.
   Austen is at pains to prove to her reader that Elinor and Edward are not doing anything rash. Perhaps she was thinking of her own family--her father married her mother on the narrow income of a clergyman, had eight children, and when he died, Mrs. Austen, Jane and Cassandra were not only homeless but thrown into dependence on Jane's brothers.
​   Strict moral codes were not just a tool of the Patriarchy to oppress and control women for the fun of it. They were intended to prevent the creation of too many mouths to feed.

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 my previous post, I looked at (and rejected) the theory that Pride & Prejudice takes an anti-aristocracy approach.  After all, Elizabeth and Jane marry wealthy men. Mr. Bingley's father acquired his wealth in trade but Mr. Bingley is going to settle down on an estate and be a gentleman.  John Green of the YouTube video series Crash Course points out that "Wickham, the upstart who comes from the servant class, is the villain" in the novel.
   Austen is taking a revolutionary approach in Pride & Prejudice, but we are looking in the wrong place if we are looking at the French Revolution. The revolution is a more personal one. Elizabeth turns down two offers of marriage, one of them extremely eligible, because she does not like and respect the men who make them (although of course she changes her mind about one of them). As Green points out, Austen was writing "at a time when individual happiness was not privileged over family status and security."     When Elizabeth turns down Mr. Collins it appears she has condemned her family to a life of poverty when their father dies. She has a chance to keep Longbourn in the family and she's thrown it away. This could be an extremely dramatic moment in any other novel but Austen treats the subsequent discussion with her mother and father with humour.   Elizabeth is true to herself. She is even prepared to pay a very high price for refusing to marry someone she can't respect. She is rewarded in the end.
   Austen balances out Elizabeth's actions with the pragmatic approach of her friend Charlotte Lucas. Charlotte is neither a villain or a fool, and Elizabeth eventually comes to respect the choice that she's made. (Author Mark Brownlow compensates Charlotte with a series of mysteries to solve in his Charlotte Collins series. Being a part-time sleuth is a nice distraction from being married to Mr. Collins.)
   This stress on the rights and liberty of the individual arises from Enlightenment values. Consider Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." As Elizabeth defiantly tells Lady Catherine de Bourgh, "I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.”

    Notice how Thomas Jefferson used the word "created" instead of "born?"  All men are created equal. And this same verb was used when the King of England created a new duke or a new baronet. When Sir Walter Eliot, who boasted an old family line, looked through the Baronetage he felt "pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century." By declaring "all men are created equal," Jefferson was not saying that every man could expect an equal outcome in life. He is saying that in nature, no man is born a king, or a viscount, or a baronet. But that was for Americans, not for Austen.
   Rank and social class are integral to Austen's novels. Persuasion and Pride & Prejudice both mention "rank" 12 times. On the one hand, Austen is critical of Mary Musgrove for tenaciously insisting that her rank as a baronet's daughter be recognized, that she walk into the dining room ahead of her own mother-in-law.

   And Austen is being very sarcastic when she says, "Captain Wentworth, with five-and-twenty thousand pounds, and as high in his profession as merit and activity could place him, was no longer nobody. He was now esteemed quite worthy to address the daughter of a foolish, spendthrift baronet."   There are limits to the egalitarianism, however: Anne Elliot may be "easy and indifferent" about rank, but she doesn't want Mrs. Clay to marry her father. How dare Mrs. Clay act in that manner which will constitute her happiness, without reference to Anne, or to any person so wholly unconnected with her? 
   In Sense & Sensibility, Lady Middleton, Mrs. Jenning's daughter, regrets that her mother hasn't dropped her old city friends (the wives of vulgar merchants or bankers). Well, she's a snob, but the heroines Elinor and Marianne are also made uncomfortable by the acquaintance. "[E]xcepting a few old city friends... [Mrs. Jennings] visited no one to whom an introduction could at all discompose the feelings of her young companions."
   Lucy Steele, Mrs. Elton and Isabella Thorpe are objectionable characters in part because they are underbred.  Emma is a snob, yet I do not think we are asked to disagree with Mr. Knightley's opinion that Harriet Smith is of a lower social class and not an appropriate confidante for Emma. Fortunately Harriet ends up "happy and respectable in the line of life to which she ought to belong."
  It's not as though differences in social class have disappeared today. High-ranking politicians don't marry chambermaids, except in the movies, and when they do the chambermaid swiftly becomes an entrepreneur.

   After surveying what Austen and her characters have to say about rank, I see nothing to support the idea that she wants to abolish class distinctions.  The upper classes have duties as well as privileges, and the lower classes may aspire to rise, but she is not a great leveller.
   In Mansfield Park, her most serious novel, Austen's heroine Fanny Price hopes her uncle will forgive her for rejecting Henry Crawford's proposal of marriage, and come to feel, "as a good man must feel, how wretched, and how unpardonable, how hopeless, and how wicked it was to marry without affection."
   And there is that rare, fleeting, tender moment in Pride & Prejudice when Mr. Bennet speaks seriously to Lizzie:  "My child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life."
   Marrying without affection or respect is actually wicked, or in other words, sinful. 
​   And marrying without being able to support yourself and your family is also wrong. 

Next post:​​  If you can't afford to marry.

I take a slightly more sympathetic view of Mrs. Clay in my short story, "The Art of Pleasing," which appears in the Quill Ink anthology Rational Creatures. Click here for info about my Mansfield Trilogy.