Georgian society in Jane Austen's novels Part II

The reign of George III—if one includes in it the Regency period that took place during his final illness — encompasses all of Jane Austen's life, and even beyond, as it started in 1760, just before her parents married in 1764, and ended up in 1820, after the death of Austen in 1817 and the posthumous publication of her two novels, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey in 1818.^[10]

French Revolution

It is through her cousin Eliza de Feuillide, married to a French aristocrat, that Jane Austen first heard of the French Revolution and of its violence. Eliza stayed in England in 1786 and 1787, and made several trips between France and England from 1788 to 1792. In January 1791, Eliza was in Margate, and was hoping that her husband, who had just joined a royalist group in Turin, could come back to her in June. After a brief stay in England during the winter of 1791, he then returned to France, as he wanted to come to the assistance of a friend, the Marquise de Marbeuf, accused of conspiring against the Republic. Unfortunately, he was unmasked while trying to suborn a witness, and duly arrested and guillotined.^[11]
The memory of Eliza de Feuillide can be seen in several of Austen's Juvenilia, such as Love and Freindship (sic)—dedicated, as it was, to "Madame la Comtesse de Feuillide"—or Henry and Eliza.
As the same time, the French Revolution led in England to the Revolution Controversy, involving such thinkers as Mary Wollstonecraft and her groundbreaking book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, William Godwin, Thomas Paine and Joseph Priestley. Austen, as the staunch Tory supporter she had always been, was herself in favour of the family as bringing stability in the midst of the turmoils of the times.^[11]

Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars are the series of wars that took place in Europe while Napoleon was France’s head of state. They are the continuation of the wars that arose as a result of the French Revolution in 1789, saw France briefly dominate most of Europe, and continued until the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. These were wars on a formerly unprecedented scale, largely as a result of mass conscription, and Britain remained at war with France throughout the period of 1803 to 1815, only two years before Austen died. Two Jane Austen’s brothers, Frank and Charles, made their careers in the Royal Navy.

This period of warfare accounts for the importance of the military in the novels, where some of the protagonists are officers, and the presence of officers at social functions is frequently a factor in the social life of a neighbourhood. Hence in Sense and Sensibility Marianne’s suitor is Colonel Brandon, the dastardly Wickham in Pride and Prejudice is an officer in the militia, and the youngest Bennet girls are obsessed with the officers at the nearby training camp in Meryton. In Mansfield Park, Fanny Price’s brother is a midshipman in the Royal Navy, and in Northanger Abbey, Frederick Tilney is an army officer and his father a retired general. Persuasion’s Frederick Wentworth is a naval officer whose career takes him from poverty to success and wealth.

Income spread

The income spread seen in Jane Austen’s novels allows us to better determine the social status of her different characters. Except in the case of heiresses, where we talk about the total fortune, these revenues are always annual.
In any case, it is easy to calculate the income corresponding to a given fortune, since money invested in government funds pays 5% a year (or only 4% in the case of a small investment). Thus Caroline Bingley’s fortune of 20 000 pounds (Pride and Prejudice) guarantees her an income of 1000 pounds a year, already a large sum which guarantees her a competence, that is, everything that can be considered necessary to lead a pleasant life, including a carriage.^[12]
Jane Austen’s novels depict a whole income hierarchy which implies very different lifestyles.
One hundred pounds a year: in Jane Austen’s novels, this is a very low income, that of a poor curate, for example, or of a civil servant working in a government office, or again of a small shopkeeper. However, it is rather satisfactory compared with that of a farm labourer which can be as little as twenty-five pounds a year^{[N 3]} including extra work at harvest time.^[13] With 100 pounds a year, the best one can expect is to have a maid of all work, as Mrs. Jennings points out to Edward Ferrars and Lucy Steele (Sense and Sensibility) when they seem to be about to get married with only this level of income.^[14]
Two hundred pounds: this is the income of Jane Austen’s parents four years after their marriage in 1764; even though it is double what they had at the beginning of their married life, it is barely adequate due to the birth of their children. Three hundred pounds would better meet their needs, even though that is the income of which Colonel Brandon says to Edward Ferrars that it is a nice sum for a single man, but “insufficient to permit him to marry”.^[14]
Four, or better, five hundred pounds: this is the level above which one can lead the life befitting a member of the gentry. It is the income enjoyed by Mrs. Dashwood, which permits her to give her daughters a decent existence, with two maids and a serving man, but neither carriage nor horses.
Seven hundred to a thousand pounds a year make a carriage possible: when George Austen, Jane’s father, reaches an income of 700 pounds he buys himself one, even though he realises that it is a pleasure that is slightly too expensive.^[15]
Two thousand pounds a year might seem a very comfortable sum, even for a gentleman. It is, for example, Colonel Brandon’s income in Sense and Sensibility. But it is also the income of Mr. Bennet, who, with a wife and five daughters, has difficulty living well on this sum. It is, however, true that his abilities in household management are very poor.^[15]
Four thousand pounds and above are the level above which even a gentleman ceases to need to do too much counting.^[15] It is the income enjoyed by Henry Crawford, Mr. Rushworth (Mansfield Park), Bingley, and Mr. Darcy (Pride and Prejudice) who actually has 10,000 pounds a year.^[15] At this level of income, one has a manor house or even a country estate, a carriage and everything that goes with it, and also no doubt a house in London in order to be able to make a comfortable stay in the capital.
But these incomes, large as they are, are exceeded by the real-life 100,000 pounds a year at the disposal of the owner of Chatsworth House, the Duke of Devonshire.^{[16][N 4]}
The fact remains, however, that Jane Austen’s universe is a privileged world which conceals the harshness of the living conditions of the vast majority of the rural population, a population which is impoverished, uneducated and brutal. wiki/Georgian_society_in_Jane_Austen's_novels

Georgian society in Jane Austen's novels. Part I.

Georgian society in Jane Austen's novels is the ever-present background of her work, the world in which all her characters are set. Entirely situated during the reign of George III, the novels of Jane Austen describe their everyday lives, their joys and sorrows, as well as their loves, and provide in the process an irreplaceable insight into the period.

Jane Austen's novels deal with such varied subjects as the historical context, the social hierarchies of the time, the role and status of the clergy, gender roles, marriage, or the pastimes of well-off families. Without even the reader noticing, many details are broached, whether of daily life, of forgotten legal aspects, or of surprising customs, thus bringing life and authenticity to the English society of this period.

wiki/George_III

Nevertheless, the point of view from which Jane Austen describes England is that of a woman of the English gentry (albeit from its lower fringes), belonging to a reasonably well-off family, well connected and remarkably well educated for the time, and living in a very small village of rural England around the late 1790s or early 19th century. Thus, some essential aspects of the Georgian era are virtually absent from her novels, such as the American Revolutionary War and the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, the French Revolution, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the birth of the British Empire. Indeed, rather than a depiction of the history of English society at large, Jane Austen's novels provide an understanding of everyday life in rural England at the turn of the 19th century. wiki/Georgian_society_in_Jane_Austen's_novels

All of Jane Austen's novels are set against the background of daily life in English Georgian society at the turn of the 19th century. As the name indicates, the Georgian period covers the successive reigns of kings George I, George II, George III, and George IV.^[1] That of William IV is also sometimes included. This was a period of considerable progress, and was the precursor to the Victorian era which followed. During Jane Austen’s own life, Britain suffered first the loss of its American colonies, then anxiety about the French Revolution, after which it confronted and finally overcame the Napoleonic Empire, and finally laid the foundations of the British Empire. From the social point of view, a new social order emerged at this time with the beginnings of industrialisation. This was followed in the early years of the 19th century by serious social unrest (such as the revolt of the Luddites) caused by the economic changes it gave rise to and the anxieties that accompanied it.^[2]
The Arts also flourished at this time, with tremendous output in all fields. In architecture Robert Adam, John Nash and James Wyatt were active, and the neo-gothic style emerged. In painting Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds were the great names, and new painters such as J. M. W. Turner and John Constable were gaining recognition. In literature too there were a host of famous writers such as Samuel Johnson and Samuel Richardson, and poets such as Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Lord Byron. It was a time of progress in education for women, leading to the proliferation of novels written and read by women, women writers who included Jane Austen herself, and also predecessors such as Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe and Maria Edgeworth.^[3] Finally, the Georgian period was a time of moral questioning and debate. The beginnings of feminism appeared at this time with Mary Wollstonecraft and her groundbreaking work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Growing concern about slavery was another major development, which soon led to the abolition of the slave trade (1807), and ultimately to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833.

Jane Austen's purpose never was to write historical or social novels, nor to provide a balanced and objective picture of late 18th century England. Her stories—considered as "comic", because of their happy endings—^[4] all take place in the society she knew, that of a small rural gentry family, rather well-off though without fortune, around the 19th century. As she wrote in one of her letters to niece Anna Austen: "three or four families in a Country Village [is] the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work".^[5] Consequently, some aspects of Georgian society, despite their importance, are ignored, or, at most, hinted at, in Austen's novels: thus, the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, as the Declaration of Independence took place when she was barely one year old, as well as the war with the former colonies itself and the ensuing Treaty of Paris in 1783, when she was eight, do not have any part in her novels.

Similarly, the French Revolution does not find its way into her work, except as regards her cousin Eliza and her French husband, guillotined in 1794. Even the birth of the British Empire is largely absent from her world. However, the owners of Mansfield Park have a plantation in the Caribbean, and the Austens had a connection with India, since that is where Eliza and her mother, Philadelphia Hancock, had arrived from around 1786. Indeed, the Austens were warm supporters of Warren Hastings, Philadelphia's long time friend (and possibly Eliza's father),^{[N 1]} when he was sued for serious misdemeanour in India^[6] before being cleared in April 1795. Though the Industrial Revolution had started in England as early as the 1750s, it is not apparent in the way she lived as well as in her novels.^{[N 2]} Life in the small rural village of Steventon, Hampshire, where the family rectory was, kept her quite far from this new world. Besides, she belonged to the local gentry, in a reasonably well-off family whose head was the village parson, nurtured by the reading of Samuel Johnson's works;^[7] as such, a Tory at heart, she lived in unison with her position in society.^[8] But her point of view was that of a woman of her times: clever and perceptive, very well read, she lived however in a society organized by men for men; this meant for a woman considerable difficulties to become financially independent through her own trade, and the fact that social status as well as economic security had to be expected from marriage;^[9] these themes are consequently

Photograph: The 12th century Steventon church, which was that of George Austen, Jane Austen's father.

But the truth is ......

Sense and Sensibility's Marianne Dashwood develops a fever after a stroll through wet grass and Pride and Prejudice's Jane Bennet gets ill after going riding in a downpour.

Professor Michael Warboys said the scenes reflected medical understanding in the 19th-century in which a person's constitution was believed to be linked to a variety of factors including the weather.

He said women were considered to be of a weaker constitution and thus more susceptible to environmentally "exciting causes" of disease such as extremes of weather, damp, shock and bad air. "The exciting cause in Pride and Prejudice was Jane going out in the rain," he added.

Vivienne Parry, the science broadcaster also speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival event, said: "We may laugh at Jane Austen and her heroine's susceptibility to damp, but the truth is we still cling to the idea that going out with wet hair or not wearing shoes will ensure we catch our death of cold."
Read all: Telegraph.co.uk 

But the thing that really pricked the interest of the bibliophilic gathering was the pins in the manuscript.

It’s almost two years since the Bodleian celebrated its hard-fought acquisition (nail biting auction) of Jane Austen’s manuscript draft of her abandoned novel, The Watsons.

Once a manuscript has been fetched into the bosom of the Bodleian, repaired, shelf-marked, and safely housed, it needs to be studied. So it was that at a seminar with Professor Kathryn Sutherland, an authority on Austen here in Oxford and Andrew Honey, a senior Bodleian conservator, we set about the task of looking not just at the intellectual, textual intrigues of the manuscript – the deletions, corrections, false starts – but the essential, material qualities of the thing.

But the thing that really pricked the interest of the bibliophilic gathering was the pins in the manuscript. Before the invention of the paperclip in the mid-nineteenth century, pins were routinely used to gather together groups of paper, or to affix patches of paper to other bits of paper in order to add text or make corrections (these days we reach for the dreaded post-it note).
Read more: jane-austens-pinny

Jane Austen-postzegels

 

De Britse The Royal Mail heeft, ter ere van het 200-jarig jubileum van Jane Austens wereldberoemde tweede roman Pride and Prejudice (1813), speciale Jane Austen-postzegels geïntroduceerd. Op de zes nieuwe postzegels staan scènes en titels van alle romans van de Engelse schrijfster weergegeven.
in-de-voetsporen-van-jane-austen

Nine walks through both the London Jane Austen knew and the London of her novels

From prize-winning historical novelist Louise Allen, this book presents nine walks through both the London Jane Austen knew and the London of her novels! Follow in Jane's footsteps to her publisher's doorstep and the Prince Regent's vanished palace, see where she stayed when she was correcting proofs of Sense and Sensibility and accompany her on a shopping expedition - and afterwards to the theatre. In modern London the walker can still visit the church where Lydia Bennett married Wickham, stroll with Elinor Dashwood in Kensington Palace Gardens or imagine they follow Jane's naval officer brothers as they stride down Whitehall to the Admiralty. From well-known landmarks to hidden corners, these walks reveal a lost London that can still come alive in vivid detail for the curious visitor, who will discover eighteenth-century chop houses, elegant squares, sinister prisons, bustling city streets and exclusive gentlemen's clubs amongst innumerable other Austen-esque delights.

Mr Darcy through the ages

The sight of Colin Firth in his white shirt, breeches and enviable sideburns, emerging from Pemberley's lake certainly stirred the heart of Elizabeth Bennet, not to mention the pulses of countless female viewers across the globe. But while his Mr Darcy remains one of the most iconic in TV history, his portrayal was not the first and is certainly not the last, with the recent announcement that Matthew Rhys will become the latest actor to step into the brooding bachelor's shoes in new BBC serial, Death Comes to Pemberley.
So to celebrate the upcoming three-part adaptation of PD James's Austen spin-off, we thought we'd indulge in a run-through of the finest Mr Darcy's in TV and film history. From Laurence Olivier's 1940s incarnation to Martin Henderson's Bollywood inspired Bride and Prejudice turn, not to mention Matthew Macfadyen's starring role opposite Keira Knightley, here is an essential reminiscence of the very best Mr Darcys. Read more and see You Tube films: mr-darcy-through-the-ages