So exclaims Mrs. Bennet in Pride & Prejudice. A bleak future awaits the Bennet girls because Longbourn is entailed on the heirs male, and Mrs. Bennet frets about it frequently. Her two oldest daughters, however, appear to accept that this is just the way things are. Austen goes on to write:
"Jane and Elizabeth tried to explain to her the nature of an entail. They had often attempted to do it before, but it was a subject on which Mrs. Bennet was beyond the reach of reason, and she continued to rail bitterly against the cruelty of settling an estate away from a family of five daughters, in favour of a man [Mr. Collins] whom nobody cared anything about." |
In this blog series, I've been discussing the values which I think are implicit in Jane Austen-- values such as pride in being English, pride in being an Englishwoman, a belief in the idea of human progress, the maintenance of class distinctions, and decorum in religion. Now I'll turn back to the themes identified in Jane Austen: the Secret Radical by Dr. Helena Kelly. I have previously discussed (and disagreed with) what she has to say about hidden themes in Austen's novels, except for Sense & Sensibility. So here we go.
Dr. Kelly asserts that Sense & Sensibility is a subversive attack on primogeniture, the practice of leaving the family estate to the oldest son, or closest male heir. (An "entail" was an additional restriction put on the estate which controlled who could inherit and what they could do with the property.) Certainly inheritance is the event that kicks off the plot of Sense & Sensibility, but is there a hidden message of protest as well?
Because in fact, advocating against primogeniture was radical in Austen's time.

However, Adam Smith, a Scottish philosopher we call the father of modern economics, was opposed to primogeniture. Smith decided it encouraged “a certain class of people to live beyond their means and not contribute to progress through investment and improvement.”

Revolutionary France put an end to monarchy, the aristocracy, and primogeniture. Some people in England thought that all sounded like a great idea. Then the revolutionaries in France really went to town and abolished the Catholic church, renamed days of the week and the days of the month, and reset the calendar to year zero. In between chopping off a lot of heads and drowning thousands of people in the river at Nantes.
The Reign of Terror caused a huge backlash in England. Those who had initially been favourable to -- or at least interested in -- the French Revolution, found themselves in big trouble. Thus anyone advocating the abolishment of primogeniture at that time would be associated in the public mind with those crazies over there in Revolutionary France. As historian Rory Muir, author of a new book about the effect of primogeniture on younger sons, states: "Inequality of various kinds was universal [in Austen's time] and taken for granted, challenged only by the most radical and impractical of political philosophers and French Republicans in the most extreme phase of their disastrous revolution."
There are several towering names in this debate. Edmund Burke is considered the father of conservatism because of his book Reflections on the Revolution in France, which correctly predicted that the revolution would take a violent turn. Mary Wollstonecraft disagreed so vehemently with Burke that she published her response, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, just a few weeks after his book. She later followed up with her iconic A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

Thomas Paine, the passionate radical polemicist, made strong economic arguments against primogeniture. He thought large estates should be heavily taxed and the wealth distributed. Also, he pointed out that the younger sons of the aristocracy were parasites on the economy, because the Crown gave them ceremonial and salaried “posts, places and offices,” like Master of the Rolls, etc, all of which was paid for by the general revenue.

The French Revolution, as we've seen, made primogeniture a hot-button topic at the time when Austen wrote Sense & Sensibility. Therefore, if Austen opposed primogeniture, it was a radical thing at that time.
Let’s look next at Sense & Sensibility and Austen’s other novels to see if she was sympathetic to actually abolishing primogeniture, like the English radicals.