What Matters in Jane Austen?_Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved

by John Mullan

  Talk of money in Austen is always dramatic, never just informative. We listen to John Dashwood’s every inclination being warped by money. Yet he would not be able to have this conversation if marriage settlements were not broadcast. Sometimes the announcement of a marriage in a newspaper specified the amount of a dowry.10 It is likely that a woman like Mrs Bennet would be quick to tell any interested or uninterested party of the conditions of her marriage settlement. Equally, the system of taxation made the incomes of the landed gentry widely known. Land Tax was levied annually and was based on a valuation of a person’s estate. From 1799, income tax was assessed by local commissioners, often drawn from among the local landed gentry. Information about the income from estates like Henry Crawford’s was therefore readily available and quickly circulated. ‘Miss Julia and Mr. Crawford. Yes, indeed, a very pretty match,’ says Mrs Rushworth to Mrs Norris. ‘What is his property?’ ‘Four thousand a year’ (I. xii). Some characters talk themselves of how much they are worth. In Persuasion Charles Musgrove tells Anne and Mary that ‘from what he had once heard Captain Wentworth himself say, was very sure that he had not made less than twenty thousand pounds by the war. Here was a fortune at once; besides which, there would be the chance of what might be done in any future war’ (I. ix). Captain Wentworth would be ‘a capital match’ for either of his sisters. At the opening of the final chapter, the figure is made more exact. ‘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’ (II. xii). This too is information known by the characters as well as announced by the narrator: prize money won from capturing enemy ships was widely advertised.11

  Of course, there can be mistakes. Northanger Abbey turns on the misreporting of a person’s supposed wealth. It is because of John Thorpe that General Tilney believes Catherine to be rich. His treatment of our heroine is explained when Henry Tilney explains how John Thorpe had ‘misled him’ (II. xv). Consulted by the General, and imagining himself as Catherine’s future husband, ‘his vanity induced him to represent the family as yet more wealthy than his vanity and avarice had made him believe them’. Yet the very readiness with which the hard-hearted General Tilney believes this account suggests that he is used to reliable reports of other people’s wealth. This is a world in which everyone knows, or thinks they know, about everyone else’s money. Thorpe is a braggart whose own extravagance is bolstered by imagining everyone else to be immensely wealthy. The son of a widow, ‘and a not very rich one’, he has spent fifty guineas on a carriage (I. vii). He curses James Morland for not keeping a horse and gig, adding something in his ‘loud and incoherent way’ about ‘its being a d— thing to be miserly’, apparently believing, though Catherine hardly understands him, that the Morlands were ‘people who rolled in money’ (I. xi). He tends to believe that everyone is rich. He tells Catherine that General Tilney is ‘A very fine fellow; as rich as a Jew’ (I. xii). He has already said, ‘Old Allen is as rich as a Jew—is not he?’ (I. ix). And in a world where people rely on reports of each other’s wealth, he is a dangerous character.

  Not that the Morlands are poor. Having announced his engagement to Isabella Thorpe, James Morland is promised a living worth four hundred pounds per annum – plus the same again on his father’s death. James is grateful but Isabella, on being ‘heartily congratulated’ by Catherine, is ‘grave’ with disappointment – clear enough to the reader, if not to her ‘dear friend’ (II. i). Mrs Thorpe calls four hundred a ‘small income’, and looks ‘anxiously’ at her daughter. The sum seems devised by the author to test Isabella and find her out. James Austen, Jane Austen’s eldest brother, and his first wife, Anne Mathew, had married on £300 per annum.12 But this was close to the borderline of gentility. Edward Ferrars is offered a living by Colonel Brandon that will fetch him something over £200 per year. The Colonel thinks that this will make him ‘comfortable as a bachelor’ but ‘cannot enable him to marry’ (III. iii). In a final reckoning, we hear that Elinor and Edward are to have this living, plus the annual interest on £3,000. This makes a total of £350 per annum – which is inadequate: ‘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’ (III. xiii). Then Mrs Ferrars gives Edward £10,000 to match the amount that she gave his sister on marriage, and they are entirely comfortable. There is evidence that Fanny Price’s mother has an income of about £400 per annum. Her sister, now Lady Bertram, brought £7,000 to her marriage to Sir Thomas, and we might infer that Fanny’s mother would have been left the same amount. This would bring an income of £350 a year. Added to Mr Price’s half-pay of up to £50 a year, this would give them an income sufficient for slightly threadbare gentility. But Mrs Price has many children, a drunken husband and no way with a domestic budget. Her daughter explicitly recognises that her appalling Aunt Norris might well have made the income adequate. The reader truly attuned to the value of money should know that the Price family could live a more comfortable life than they do.

  What should be enough is not enough for Austen’s extravagant characters. Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility has six or seven hundred a year, but ‘lived at an expence to which that income could hardly be equal’ (I. xiv). We are to realise that this income should be perfectly adequate for a genteel single man. When he hears that Edmund Bertram is due to get seven hundred a year from his living at Thornton Lacey, Henry Crawford thinks this is a decent amount, and is duly mocked by his sister, who wonders how he would feel if he were limited to seven hundred a year (II. v). Equally evident to the Regency reader would have been the wastefulness of Mr Bennet, a character always blamed less by us than by Austen’s own heroine. His estate brings an income of £2,000 a year, which should be enough for a surplus to be put aside for dowries for all his daughters. He himself wished that ‘instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum for the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived him’ (III. viii).

  The obscurity to present-day readers of monetary value in Austen means that some hints are likely to be lost. When Edmund Bertram objects to the probable expense of making a theatre in Mansfield Park, his brother Tom replies sarcastically, ‘Yes, the expense of such an undertaking would be prodigious! . . . a whole twenty pounds.’ (In fact it costs a good deal more.) This would have been the annual wage of a labouring man with a family, or perhaps of one of those servants recruited to erect the stage. Then there is the vulgarity of Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice telling Mrs Philips that Lady Catherine’s ‘chimney-piece alone had cost eight hundred pounds’ (I. xvi). This would have been the annual income of an affluent country gentleman. Later on in the novel, as Mr Collins walks across the park to Rosings with Elizabeth, Sir William Lucas and his daughter Maria, his companions are forced to listen to ‘his enumeration of the windows in front of the house, and his relation of what the glazing altogether had originally cost Sir Lewis de Bourgh’ (II. vi). Of course his knowledge must have come from Lady Catherine, and her money-obsessed boasts to her toadying auditor.

  Certain markers of affluence might pass us by. No wonder, for instance, that so many characters talk and think about the ownership of carriages. The Austens themselves owned a carriage for a year or two in the late 1790s but then had to give it up.13 Mrs Dashwood is persuaded by Elinor to sell their carriage: ‘had she consulted only her own wishes, she would have kept it’ (I. v). Edward Copeland quotes John Trusler’s estimate in The Economist in the 1770s that an annual income of £800 would allow for the keeping of a carriage.14 The inflation of the last decades of the eighteenth century would have taken this figure to about £1,000 a year, so we can see how foolish Mrs Dashwood was tempted to be. The plot of Emma turns on Mr Perry’s planned purchase of a carriage; any genteel reader would have known just how affluent this must have declared him. And when Mrs Elton parades her provision of her carriage to ferry the Bates party to the ball at the Crown, she advertises her o
wn membership of this economic elite.

  Caring about love rather than money is admirable. When Catherine Morland declares, ‘to marry for money I think the wickedest thing in existence’, her hyperbole is naive but not foolish (Northanger Abbey, I. xv). Her delusion is the belief that others are above caring about money. Catherine is readily convinced that General Tilney does not care about money, except ‘as it allowed him to promote the happiness of his children’ (II. x). She knows nothing, but we know better from the next short sentence: ‘The brother and sister looked at each other.’ Having heard his ‘disinterested sentiments on the subject of money . . . more than once’ (II. xi), she thinks that he is ‘misunderstood by his children’. But anyone who professes not to care must be a hypocrite. ‘I hate money,’ announces Isabella Thorpe (II. i). It will not be long before she tells Catherine, as if in implied justification of her carrying on with Frederick Tilney, ‘after all that romancers may say, there is no doing without money’ (II. iii). Another mercenary young woman, Lucy Steele, tells Elinor Dashwood, ‘I have always been used to a very small income, and could struggle with any poverty for him’ (II. ii). This is cant. Lucy is ruthless about money – a fact nicely illustrated by her final theft from her sister of all her cash (III. xiii). We should not forget that Marianne Dashwood shares this supposed scorn of wealth with these two calculating girls. When Marianne is burbling about the ‘remarkably pretty’ upstairs sitting room at Allenham (just right, she is thinking, for a lucky wife), she regrets its ‘forlorn’ furniture. All it needs is to be ‘newly fitted up—a couple of hundred pounds, Willoughby says, would make it one of the pleasantest summer-rooms in England’ (I. xiii). The casual extravagance of this – all the worse as it is the imagining of wealth that will only come when Willoughby’s aunt dies – should stop us short. The two lovers have been thinking of spending twice Miss and Mrs Bates’s annual income on furnishing one small private room. One of Austen’s attentive first readers would surely have come close to despising Marianne when he or she heard her saying this, a woman possessed by her suitor’s extravagant spirit. It is further proof that those who declare themselves above caring about money are those who are most governed by it.

  FOURTEEN

  Why Do Her Plots Rely on Blunders?

  ‘Wretched, wretched mistake!’

  Pride and Prejudice, III. iv

  Near the end of Persuasion, slowly, happily pacing the gravel walk in Bath, Anne Elliot listens to Captain Wentworth tell her of his feelings for her and explain his recent conduct. After Louisa Musgrove’s fall in Lyme, he says, he went to stay with his brother in Shropshire, hoping to loosen ‘by any fair means’ Louisa’s supposed attachment to him (II. xi). Edward Wentworth had asked after Anne, ‘asked even if you were personally altered, little suspecting that to my eye you could never alter’. The earnest hyperbole of a lover is more resonant than he knows. ‘Anne smiled, and let it pass. It was too pleasing a blunder for a reproach.’ It is a ‘blunder’ because it reminds Anne and us of what he said just a few months earlier, when he met her again after eight years apart. Her sister Mary told her that he thought ‘You were so altered he should not have known you again’ (I. vii). Anne smiles now because he so blithely contradicts what he has said before. She says nothing to show him that she knows this. The comparison with his ‘former words’ delights her, for his opinion must be ‘the result, not the cause of a revival of his warm attachment’. His love convinces him of her charms, not the other way round.

  Pleasing blunder: it is a kind of oxymoron. A foolish mistake, an instance of clumsiness, opens up his feelings to her and gives her more pleasure than any successful compliment. Having misunderstood him for much of the book, Anne for a moment understands him better than he understands himself. A blunder is a way into truly knowing a person. It is the first time that the word is used in the novel, but it is used for a second time in the very next paragraph, which reports Captain Wentworth recalling his time at his brother’s home in Shropshire, spent ‘lamenting the blindness of his own pride, and the blunders of his own calculations’. It is as if he has caught the word from Anne, even though it was a word only in her thoughts. He is thinking of his attempt, out of ‘angry pride’, to attach himself to Louisa Musgrove, which could have led him into a wholly unwanted engagement. When he thought he was being manipulative he was, in fact, making the clumsiest of mistakes. For a blunder is not just an error, it is an error that another person has noticed. So it serves an oddly powerful double purpose in Austen’s fiction: it can embarrass or mortify, but it also reveals a person’s true feelings.

  In Emma, the word ‘blunder’, used fifteen times in the novel, is like a guide to the plot. In a famous episode of coded revelation (understood by the reader, glimpsed by Mr Knightley, missed by Emma), it is made the word at the heart of the game that is itself at the heart of the novel. Having made his mistake of showing the other characters that he knows about Mr Perry’s planned purchase of a carriage, and therefore showing the reader that he has been in secret communication with Jane Fairfax, Frank Churchill uses the silly diversion of anagram making with children’s spelling letters around the table at Hartfield to signal to his lover. Foolish Harriet seizes on the letters that he has put in front of Jane Fairfax and, with Mr Knightley’s help, finds the answer. ‘The word was blunder; and as Harriet exultingly proclaimed it, there was a blush on Jane’s cheek which gave it a meaning not otherwise ostensible’ (III. v). We see all this through Mr Knightley’s eyes; he knows that the word means something hidden, but does not know what. ‘These letters were but the vehicle for gallantry and trick.’ ‘Blunder’ signifies Frank Churchill’s covert communication with Jane Fairfax. ‘Blunder’ is the word for the stupid mistake made by the clever person, a mistake that might have allowed a really ingenious interpreter to understand just what has been going on.

  Frank Churchill, the cleverest character in Emma, seems to have alighted on a word that has been on others’ lips and in the heroine’s thoughts. In the work of a less skilful writer, the novel’s insistence on the word might seem an authorial insertion, an advertisement of her consciously contrived theme. Not in Emma. Here the coincidence of its use tells us of the conditions of life in this little world, where polite social exchanges have to cover unspoken desires, and where characters are made to guess, often wrongly, at each other’s true feelings. Sometimes you can hear Austen pursuing a word like this through one of her novels, as Shakespeare does, testing its powers. And as in Shakespeare, the word will often turn up in the speech or thoughts of different characters, as they all come across the same knot in the language. Though blunder is most often used when recounting Emma’s thoughts, its first appearance in the novel is in a remark made by Mrs Weston, out of Emma’s hearing, in a conversation she has with Mr Knightley. She is vindicating Emma from Mr Knightley’s premonition that she will do ‘harm’ through her friendship with Harriet Smith. ‘No, no; she has qualities which may be trusted; she will never lead any one really wrong; she will make no lasting blunder; where Emma errs once, she is in the right a hundred times’ (I. v). Her attempted exoneration is more like a warning. What Mrs Weston says about Emma’s mistakes is itself mistaken: we know that Emma is already leading Harriet Smith very ‘wrong’. Yet more than this, her use of that peculiar phrase ‘no lasting blunder’ sensitises us to the mix of comedy and potential disaster in the errors that follow. For what is to prevent a blunder being ‘lasting’? Why might not Emma’s misperception about Mr Elton’s intentions lead to the ruin of Harriet’s and Robert Martin’s chance of happiness together? We recall Elinor Dashwood’s thought about Mr Palmer’s marrying foolish Charlotte Jennings: ‘his kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it’ (I. xx). Common – and irreparable. The results of some blunders last for the rest of a person’s life.

  Emma, the great blunderer, fancies herself alive to the blunders of others. When Mr John Knightley suggests to her that Mr Elton might be courting her, and that she mi
ght seem to him to be ‘encouraging’, she confidently contradicts him: ‘she walked on, amusing herself in the consideration of the blunders which often arise from a partial knowledge of circumstances, of the mistakes which people of high pretensions to judgment are for ever falling into’ (I. xiii). We are fully inhabiting Emma’s thoughts and therefore her delusions, and we can hear how the word blunder is like a little trap for her. The person who lives by cleverly intuiting the motives of others, of knowing a blunder when she encounters it, is doomed to blunder herself. She almost recognises this as she sits down ‘to think and be miserable’ after the embarrassing disaster of Mr Elton’s proposal, and that word inserts itself into her thoughts. ‘She would gladly have submitted to feel yet more mistaken—more in error—more disgraced by mis-judgment, than she actually was, could the effects of her blunders have been confined to herself’ (I. xvi). The narrative subtlety of this is that we can hear her capacity for self-delusion beginning to reassert itself even in the train of apparent self-condemnation: ‘gladly have submitted’ is her turn of phrase or turn of thought, as she tells herself that she would be happy to be ‘disgraced’ if only Harriet were to escape the consequences of her errors. She acknowledges to herself that she has ‘blundered most dreadfully’, yet she does so in a passage where most of her delusions remain intact (I. xvi). She sleeps well and awakes the next day with her ‘spirits’ restored.