What Matters in Jane Austen?_Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved

by John Mullan

  The reader who supposes that Austen’s fictional servants form a class of devoted, silent attendants will miss many tricks. The fact that servants are also a problem is behind Mr Bennet’s remark to his just-engaged daughter Jane that she and Bingley are ‘so easy, that every servant will cheat you’ (III. xiii). Servants have their own interests. It would have been odd for Austen’s novels not to imagine difficulties with servants, for her own letters are full of them. Writing to her niece Anna in 1814, Aunt Jane pauses from detailed advice about her would-be novel to tell her important news. ‘Your Aunt Frank’s Housemaid has just given her warning, but whether she is worth your having, or wd take your place I know not . . . She leaves your Aunt, because she cannot agree with her fellow servants. She is in love with the Man—& her head seems rather turned’ (Letters, 108). She goes on to detail her relations and previous service. Her letters sometimes hint at the shifting balance of power between servants and their less affluent employers. ‘Mary’s promised maid has jilted her, & hired herself elsewhere’ (Letters, 24). Mary is her sister-in-law, evidently outbid for the services of a maid who knows her market value. The dismissal of servants is significant news. ‘Mrs Digweed parts with both Hannah & old Cook, the former will not give up her Lover, who is a Man of bad Character, the Latter is guilty only of being unequal to anything’ (Letters, 145).

  Fellowship with servants is a warning sign. In Sense and Sensibility, cheerful, vulgar Mrs Jennings, mother of a minor aristocrat, is happy enough to travel with ‘her maid’ and ‘take comfort’ in her ‘gossip’ rather than enjoy the company of the Dashwood sisters (III. x). In Mansfield Park, it is a nice touch that Tom Bertram, recently returned to England from a year in the West Indies, writes to the gamekeeper before he writes to his brother (I. xii). Back in the household, he crassly insists on talking to Fanny and others about one of the horses ‘and the opinion of the groom, from whom he had just parted’ (I. xii). His sisters recruit their servants to their own cruelties. When the ten-year-old Fanny arrives at the great house of her aunt and uncle, they are the supporting cast to Maria’s and Julia’s unkindness. ‘Her elder cousins mortified her by reflections on her size, and abashed her by noticing her shyness: Miss Lee wondered at her ignorance, and the maid-servants sneered at her clothes’ (I. ii).

  It is a nice piece of sociological realism on Austen’s part that the character who complains the most about servants in her novels is the impecunious ‘slattern’ Mrs Price in Mansfield Park (III. viii). Within minutes of Fanny arriving after an eight-year absence, her mother is moaning about the failings of Rebecca, complaints with which her daughter Susan readily falls in (III. vii). Soon Rebecca herself is squabbling with eleven-year-old Sam over carrying Fanny’s trunk. Fanny discovers that Rebecca is ‘the upper servant’, there also being ‘an attendant girl’ of ‘inferior appearance’ called Sally (III. vii). When Mrs Price does think to ask about the lives of her sisters at Mansfield Park, it is a route to her favourite topic of discontent. ‘How did her sister Bertram manage about her servants? Was she as much plagued as herself to get tolerable servants?’ (III. vii) Then she is away, into a disquisition: ‘the shocking character of all the Portsmouth servants, of whom she believed her own two were the very worst, engrossed her completely’. She has taught not only fourteen-year-old Susan but even five-year-old Betsey to complain endlessly about Rebecca. ‘I am sure the place is easy enough,’ observes Mrs Price, giving us an indication why the spatial and economic proximity of servants to their employers is a likely cause of mutual disgruntlement. Rebecca is ‘never where she ought to be’, which is not the narrator’s information but a report of the constant complaint. Even in these cramped lodgings, she cannot ever be in the right place. It is her ordeal rather than her fault. ‘Whatever was wanted, was halloo’d for, and the servants halloo’d out their excuses from the kitchen’ (III. viii).

  Rebecca is a fright, as we know when Fanny sighs with relief that Mr Crawford has not sampled ‘Rebecca’s cookery and Rebecca’s waiting’ (III. x). Fanny has to survive on surreptitiously purchased biscuits and buns, for she is not equal to ‘Rebecca’s puddings, and Rebecca’s hashes’, served on ‘half-cleaned plates’ with ‘not half-cleaned knives and forks’ (III. xi). When Mrs Price is walking out with her family on a Sunday, her greatest possible torment is to see ‘Rebecca pass by with a flower in her hat’ (III. xi). This is the one day when she has not pretence of power over her and the thought that she has a better life is just too aggravating. When Mrs Price goes for her weekly walk on the ramparts she meets acquaintances for news and ‘talked over the badness of the Portsmouth servants’. It is almost the only topic on which she is able to fix her mind. When she is first told of her niece Maria’s presumed adultery, she barely has time to hope that it is not true, ‘it would be so very shocking!’, before she starts noticing that Rebecca has not cleaned the carpet and recruiting young Betsey in her laments (III. xv). Austen’s first readers, themselves reliant on servants, would have been able to relish the background drama of Mrs Price’s exasperation at her servants.

  For the more privileged, there is the pleasure of complaining about other people’s servants. In Emma Mrs Elton condemns ‘Donwell servants, who are all, I have often observed, extremely awkward and remiss.—I am sure I would not have such a creature as his Harry stand at our sideboard for any consideration. And as for Mrs. Hodges, Wright holds her very cheap indeed.—She promised Wright a receipt, and never sent it’ (III. xvi). In Persuasion, Mary Musgrove complains to Anne that her mother-in-law’s upper house-maid and laundry-maid ‘are gadding about the village, all day long. I meet them wherever I go’ (I. vi). Her own servant Jemima has told her that ‘they are always tempting her to take a walk with them’, but luckily, according to Mary, Jemima is ‘the trustiest, steadiest creature in the world’. The character who thinks that their own servant is wonderful belongs with the character who thinks that all their servants are useless. For of course Mrs Musgrove tells Anne that the aforementioned Jemima, Mary’s nursery-maid, ‘is always upon the gad’. ‘I can declare, she is such a fine-dressing lady, that she is enough to ruin any servants she comes near.’ She invites Anne to report ‘any thing amiss’ that she observes herself. By allowing these confident confidences to mirror each other so exactly, the novel invites us to imagine both employers beguiled by their own servants – critics who are really dupes.

  The reader is equally invited to recoil from the character who is unpleasant to servants. General Tilney in Northanger Abbey gets angry with his servant, William, for not opening a door for Catherine when she rushes in to their Bath apartment. If Catherine had not intervened, he might have lost ‘the favour of his master for ever, if not his place’ – even though he is entirely blameless (I. xiii). The General’s anger is always just under the surface in the novel, and here we are asked to suspect how he might regularly vent his fury on his servants. In Sense and Sensibility a whole political economy of employer–servant relations is satirically implied by Mrs John Dashwood’s recollection of her mother being ‘clogged’ by the requirement in her husband’s will to pay annuities to three ‘old superannuated servants’ (I. ii). ‘Twice every year, these annuities were to be paid; and then there was the trouble of getting it to them; and then one of them was said to have died, and afterwards it turned out to be no such thing.’ The detail mentioning how wearisome it was even to have to convey the funds is beautiful. Even better is the farce of wishfulness implied by the rumour of the death of one of these hapless ex-retainers, sparking the evident disappointment of the family when he or she was discovered to be living still. It was ‘unkind’ of her father to require the payment, judges a woman who has all the kindness of a Goneril. The utterly mean-spirited Mrs Ferrars is legally obliged to pay the annuities, and we are left in no doubt that she would otherwise have given the former servants nothing. In which case, the unfortunate ex-employees would almost certainly have had to eke out their final years on poor relief.2 Being considerate to ex-servants is
always virtuous, and in Sense and Sensibility the virtue is rather obviously rewarded. Colonel Brandon manages to find his sister-in-law Eliza, an impoverished fallen woman, because of his paternalistic care. ‘Regard for a former servant of my own, who had since fallen into misfortune, carried me to visit him in a spunging-house, where he was confined for debt; and there, in the same house, under a similar confinement, was my unfortunate sister’ (II. ix).

  A sure sign that Lady Denham in Sanditon is (as the heroine thinks) ‘very, very mean’ is her pride in not paying her servants more (Ch. 7). Other Austen characters like to be above the economic system that binds their servants to them. Lady Bertram is amazed and relieved to find that, in her husband’s absence, Edmund is capable of ‘settling with the servants’ (I. iv). We are left to imagine how irksome such everyday negotiations would be for her. In contrast, her sister Mrs Norris loves to talk about talking to servants. Her excuse for sending Fanny on endless errands in the heat of the day is that she has been doing just this. ‘I was talking to Mr. Green at that very time about your mother’s dairymaid, by her desire, and had promised John Groom to write to Mrs. Jefferies about his son, and the poor fellow was waiting for me half an hour’ (I. vii) She is too busy bossing the servants to get a servant to do the errands. This is officiousness and the mere exercise of power, of course. When Sir Thomas returns unexpectedly from Antigua, she pesters him to eat something, for if he asked for food ‘she might have gone to the house-keeper with troublesome directions, and insulted the footmen with injunctions of despatch’ (II. i).

  Austen’s monsters are invariably attentive to the lower orders, for thus they exercise their self-importance.

  There are plenty of servants in Mansfield Park and, hardly noticed by the other characters but noticed by the attentive reader, Mrs Norris is invariably in among them. The very fact that she is keen to call servants by name is a sign of her interfering bent. When bustling over the arrival of tea she suggests that Lady Bertram ‘hurry Baddeley a little, he seems behind hand to-night’ (I. i). She refers to the inferior coachmen as Stephen and Charles (II. ii). She has a special interest in servants. On the visit to Sotherton we find that she has ‘fallen in with the housekeeper’ (I. ix) and on the return journey she talks of how ‘good old Mrs. Whitaker’ has well nigh forced a cream cheese upon her (I. x). She later calls her ‘a treasure’, apparently on the grounds that she never allows wine at the servants’ table and has sacked two housemaids ‘for wearing white gowns’. (White was the most fashionably elegant colour for a woman’s dress, and therefore presumptuous in a mere servant.3) A woman after her own heart. In her company she meets the benighted Sotherton gardener, and has soon ‘set him right as to his grandson’s illness, convinced him it was an ague, and presented him a charm for it’ (I. x). She has never, of course, seen the ailing grandson. That ‘convinced him’ is the perfect touch, letting you imagine the force of Mrs Norris’s assertion and the helpless need of the elderly retainer to concur. And what about the charm? Does Mrs Norris carry a supply of these? Naturally she gets a plant out of him, for he must see the kind of person that she is. Although this man never speaks and is never named, you glimpse how his life must be spent falling in with the inclinations of his betters.

  Mrs Norris’s professed solicitousness for the servants should encourage a contrary reading. Back at Mansfield, where she is ‘cross because the house-keeper would have her own way with the supper’, she is, in reality, in a war for power with the senior servants (II. ix).Vaunting herself to her brother-in-law for her encouragement of the connection with the Rushworths, she narrates the sufferings of the ‘poor old coachman’, who has been afflicted with ‘the rheumatism which I had been doctoring him for, ever since Michaelmas’ (II. ii). And then, decisively, ‘I cured him at last.’ Leaving the dinner at the Parsonage, she chivvies Fanny, ‘Quick, quick. I cannot bear to keep good old Wilcox waiting. You should always remember the coachman and horses’ (II. vii). In fact she is only interested in bullying her niece. All the small examples of her talk about servants are there to let you imagine the quotidian meddling and bullying that these servants must endure. They are not her servants, of course. Mansfield Park has a large retinue of retainers who dine in their own Hall. They are not paid by Mrs Norris, they are just her potential victims. Christopher Jackson is favoured by Sir Thomas, so it is no suprise when Mrs Norris tells us that ‘the Jacksons are very encroaching, I have always said so’ (I. xv). She is boasting of having intercepted the hapless ten-year-old Dick Jackson on his way to the Servants’ Hall with a couple of pieces of wood for his father. She calls the Jackson parents ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’, with a kind of officious familiarity that is her special tone. By her own account, she speaks sharply to their ten-year-old son, ‘a great lubberly fellow’, and sends him off, perhaps in tears (he ‘looked very silly’ in response to her harshness).

  Austen’s monsters are invariably attentive to the lower orders, for thus they exercise their self-importance. The Collinses’ housemaids have to suffer the admonishments of Lady Catherine de Bourgh whenever she calls (II. vii). The local cottagers have to suffer her attentions when she arrives to ‘scold them into harmony and plenty’. Mrs Elton brandishes her servants in conversation, unnecessarily telling Emma how Wright (presumably her housekeeper) will always dish up enough to allow Jane Fairfax a portion. Later she offers to have Jane Fairfax’s letters fetched from the post office for her by ‘the man who fetches our letters every morning (one of our men, I forget his name)’ (II. xvi). Her amnesia is itself a boast. Talking of her servants is her way of showing off: ‘it is a kindness to employ our men’. Clearly any intelligent servant would do well to avoid unnecessary encounters with either of these two, but we are expected to notice that even employers who think of themselves as considerate can be oppressive. In the background of Emma is the little drama of Mr Woodhouse’s relations with his servants, all the more resonant because this rich and sedentary man imagines himself the kindest of masters. His is an ordinary kind of hypocrisy. He provides his carriage and his coachman James to carry Mrs and Miss Bates and Mrs Goddard back and forth frequently from their homes to Hartfield, though if the trips had been ‘only once a year’, the narrator tells us, he would have worried about his servant and his horses (I. iii). He is serving his own pleasures, naturally, as Miss Bates and Mrs Goddard are his powerless, recruited companions. At the Coles’ party, we find out from Emma that she would like to have the Woodhouse coach used sometimes by friends like the Bateses, but she cannot think of it because of Mr Woodhouse’s concerns for James. Mr Knightley concurs (II. viii). As soon as Mr Woodhouse’s own gentle selfishness is not being indulged, he starts worrying about his servant. He is always mentioning James – ‘James will take you very safely’ – as if being coachman in the lanes of Surrey were a dangerous posting (II. vii). He worries away about James, though when it snows it is Mr Knightley who goes out to talk to both coachmen to find out their opinions of the ease of a return journey (I. xv).

  Austen slyly lets you glimpse the irksomeness of life as one of Mr Woodhouse’s servants in his very praise of their virtues. Discovering that Emma has sent the Bateses a hind-quarter of pork, Mr Woodhouse discourses on the dangers of eating this meat, unless ‘very thoroughly boiled, just as Serle boils our’s’ (II. iii). Serle, the invisible Hartfield cook, features in Mr Woodhouse’s conversation as a prodigy of culinary skill. ‘Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body. I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else’ (I. iii). This fragment of dialogue is a little miracle of absurdity, suggesting something of Serle’s skills at managing her employer’s expectations (Serle’s gender is never specified, but only peculiarly grand or fashionable households usually employed expensive male cooks). We know that life in the Hartfield kitchen must be determined by Mr Woodhouse’s endless fussiness, but perhaps that Serle has simply become skilled at pretending to pander to her master’s nervous demands. The subtext of all Mr Woodhouse’s kind remarks about his serv
ants is that they have to put up with all his fussing. We have to infer this from his own comments, as when he delivers his ‘great opinion’ of James’s daughter Hannah, recently appointed as a maid to the Westons (I. i). ‘Whenever I see her, she always curtseys and asks me how I do, in a very pretty manner; and when you have had her here to do needlework, I observe she always turns the lock of the door the right way and never bangs it. I am sure she will be an excellent servant.’ His praise manages to be both weak-minded and imperious. In his implied dealings with servants we can imagine what Austen calls his ‘gentle selfishness’ – a choice oxymoron for his self-pleasing exhibition of consideration for others. His ordinary expectations are probably high. Austen allows us the little detail of his ordering Emma’s maid, the cook and the butler to wait up for her when she goes out to the Coles’.