Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  Jane herself, in one of those passages of her writing which it’s almost impossible to fix the tone of, called it ‘rather too light & bright & sparkling’.c It wanted, she said, ‘shade’ and ‘to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter – of sense if it could be had’. Failing long, sensible chapters, she suggests the book might benefit instead from adding in passages of ‘solemn specious nonsense – about something unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte’.

  It isn’t that unusual to find long sections in eighteenth-century novels which seem to have nothing to do with anything; theoretical discussions about writing appear too.d There was, for a long time, a pervasive view that the novel, as a genre, wasn’t good enough – wasn’t sufficiently serious, intellectual, improving. This is something we discussed briefly in the chapter on Northanger Abbey, and the ‘defence of the novel’ which appears there seems, in some respects, to chime with what Jane’s saying here. In Northanger Abbey, she sets the novel in opposition to other, traditionally better-respected, types of writing – essays, history – and she defends it against literary critics as well.

  But any ‘history of Buonaparte’ would, of its nature, be political, would, in spite of being called a ‘history’, be in effect current affairs.e Bonaparte, after all, was still very much a present threat in early 1813. And though Walter Scott’s poetry, like his later novels, was largely cod-medieval, though it had generally been reviewed very favourably, there had been one particular rather famous criticism – a ‘critique’. It had appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1808 and focused on Scott’s long poem about wicked knights, villainous nuns, and the Battle of Flodden: Marmion.

  Marmion ends with an address to ‘Statesmen grave’, wishing them ‘Sound head, clean hand, and piercing wit, | And patriotic heart – as Pitt!’ Pitt is William Pitt, the youngest prime minister Britain has ever had, who had died in 1806. It was Pitt who’d overseen the government crackdown on radicalism in the 1790s, the increase in state surveillance, the suspension of habeas corpus, the forced Union with Ireland after the Uprising, the expansion of the navy and the militia. The Edinburgh Review ‘critique’ of Marmion ended with a sneering reference to the ‘political creed of the author’. Reviews could be an even touchier subject in the early nineteenth century than they are now.

  What’s the reason that Jane starts to talk politics here, as she seems to be doing? Why does she follow up the references by asserting that her correspondent – Cassandra, as so often – would think differently (‘– I doubt your quite agreeing with me here – I know your starched notions’)? Are politics totally ‘unconnected with the story’?

  In another letter penned a few days earlier, Jane mentions some printer’s errors she’s noticed in the text of Pride and Prejudice: ‘There are a few Typical errors—& a “said he” or a “said she” would sometimes make the Dialogue more immediately clear—’. No matter, though, she continues, ‘I do not write for such dull Elves As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves’.

  This is, roughly, a quotation from the second to last stanza of Marmion. In the space of a few lines, the reader is encouraged to imagine how the hero, Wilton, and the heroine, Clara, are united, and how all the stray plot strands will be tied up:

  I do not rhyme to that dull elf,

  Who cannot image to himself,

  That all through Flodden’s dismal night,

  Wilton was foremost in the fight […]

  […] Nor sing I to that simple maid,

  To whom it must in terms be said,

  That King and kinsmen did agree,

  To bless fair Clara’s constancy;

  Who cannot, unless I relate,

  Paint to her mind the bridal’s state […]

  This stanza, the stanza which pops into Jane’s head when she’s thinking about how her newly-appeared novel will be read, deals with what an author can expect a reader to do. It’s about the author’s desire for readers who can join the dots, follow implications and allusions through to their natural conclusions, who can ‘image’ for themselves, ‘paint’ for themselves, who don’t necessarily have to see the words set down in order to understand the message.

  Jane wants readers who have a ‘great deal of ingenuity’. Isn’t it possible, then, that Pride and Prejudice isn’t quite so light and bright and sparkling as we’ve been led to believe? That there are darker, more serious layers to be uncovered?

  In December 1943, on a visit to Tunis, the British wartime leader Winston Churchill fell seriously ill with pneumonia. Later he recalled that, confined to bed, banned from work, he ‘decided to read a novel’ or, rather, to have his daughter Sarah read one to him. Having ‘long ago’ read ‘Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility’, he thought that he

  would have Pride and Prejudice. Sarah read it to me beautifully from the foot of the bed. I had always thought it would be better than its rival. What calm lives they had, those people! No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.f

  This wasn’t an original idea. Rudyard Kipling, the great writer of empire, had drawn a very similar direct contrast in The Janeites, a short story centring on one character’s experiences in the trenches of the Great War. In it, Jane’s novels are absurd, almost meaningless and, paradoxically, a representation of civilisation, salvation and Britishness, a balm to wounded minds. The names and passages that the main character, the Cockney hairdresser Humberstall, learns to recite – and which get him out of more than one sticky situation – are to begin with all Greek to him. After the war, when he reads the books, he finds ‘nothing in ’em’ – except the solace of seeing ordinary, everyday peacetime life reflected back to him.

  In a novel of 1975 by Paul Scott – A Division of the Spoils, the last of the ‘quartet’ on which the 1980s television series The Jewel in the Crown was based – a returned prisoner-of-war recalls discussing with one of his former captors what the experience of coming home might involve. The home in question is in colonial India but the imagined return is both distinctly British and soothing, hypnotic even – ‘a comfortable chair in a cosy room’, ‘reading Pride and Prejudice, sipping a glass of special malt whisky, and fondling the ears’ of a ‘faithful black labrador’. Dog, whisky, Pride and Prejudice – all are equally alien to India, and, it’s implied, equally unimaginable in war, in its twentieth-century incarnation at least.

  The idea that Jane’s novels offer a blissful, almost drugged-up, break from harsh reality doesn’t hold water, though. Remember that Britain was at war with France from 1793 to 1815, with only two short periods of peace. It’s this background that we have to place the books against. The ‘emigrant’ mentioned in passing in Sense and Sensibility is a refugee from the French Revolution. Easy enough to miss the reference out, if you wanted to try to make the war and revolutionary unrest disappear; Jane doesn’t.

  War is a constant presence in the novels, a buzz of background static which, at times, rises to ear-splitting screeches and whines. Later on, we’ll see just how closely the plot of Persuasion is built around the ‘crashing struggle’ of the Napoleonic wars. In that novel, the heroine’s family don’t object to her marrying a naval officer just because they’re snobs, but because there is a very real risk that he will be killed or injured, leaving her without any money. He returns years later with a fortune acquired by seizing enemy ships; hardly a blameless or a bloodless pursuit. While Anne has sat at home, ‘quiet, confined’ and anxiously poring over the newspapers, Captain Wentworth has been braving sabres, musket fire, and cannon. Persuasion ends with ‘the dread of a future war’.

  Possibly Winston Churchill was familiar with the 1940 Hollywood film of Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson, which transfers the action to the Victorian era and softens almost all of Jane’s jagged edges, even succeeding in th
e difficult task of making Darcy’s aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh lovable. Churchill seems to have known what he was going to find in the novel before he ever opened it (he had ‘always thought it would be better’) – I’d suggest he’s very far from being the only reader to approach the book through a haze of preconceptions. Either way, we have to wonder how much of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice he actually heard, and how much he tuned out, as he dozed.

  Because what he doesn’t seem to have registered is that, for a novel which is supposedly far removed from any concerns about war, it’s crammed with references to soldiers. Its pages are peppered with the words ‘regiment’, ‘militia’, ‘officers’. Sense and Sensibility has one colonel – Colonel Brandon, who seems to have retired from military life.g Pride and Prejudice features two, both of whom – so far as we know – are still active. One major character and quite a number of minor ones are pursuing military careers, though, naturally, as officers. The ranks of the militia were supposed to be filled by lot but you could pay to be taken out, so that in practice the landowning, and even middling classes were exempt.h

  Both Persuasion and Mansfield Park have been called naval novels; if Jane ever wrote an army novel, then it’s this one.

  And it’s one which, unlike Sense and Sensibility, is definitively set during wartime. At the end of the book, when Jane details the various fates of the different characters, she mentions, explicitly, ‘the restoration of peace’. The whole action of the novel, then, takes place during hostilities. But to Jane’s first readers this would have been apparent from early on. The ‘regiment of militia’ which in Chapter 7 takes up its winter quarters in the town of Meryton and, halfway through the book, moves to a larger camp at Brighton, on the south coast, would have been shifted around the country like this only during a time of war. The summer army camps strung along the south coast weren’t there just to train recruits in the bracing sea breezes; they were there to defend against invasion.

  I grew up near Chatham in Kent, which was for centuries a major naval base. It’s ringed with hilltop fortifications built or extensively remodelled during the Napoleonic wars. Throughout Jane’s adulthood, people were terrified of being invaded by the French. There was a degree of scaremongering involved. It was far from unusual for newspapers to carry alarmist reports in which invasion was made to seem imminent. But scaremongering wasn’t the only reason people were afraid. Fourteen hundred French troops landed at Fishguard in Wales in 1797.i They quickly surrendered, but they landed.

  And one of the alarmist reports at least was pretty accurate. It appeared in 1796, and detailed how an escaped prisoner-of-war had seen, with his own eyes, French volunteers massing near Dunkirk, consumed with revolutionary bloodlust, warning that the French had collected ‘a number of flat-bottomed boats all along the coast, which are constructed with great convenience for the landing of cavalry from them. Each boat has two field pieces [i.e. artillery guns] belonging to it. The French talk of the Expedition being ready towards the end of November.’j

  It was. The French didn’t invade the well-fortified south coast; they tried instead to land troops at Bantry Bay, on the sparsely-populated south-west coast of Ireland. They were prevented by a combination of bad weather and the British navy. Among the ships which sailed out from Cork to mop up the last remains of the French fleet was the Unicorn, captained by the man who’d married Jane’s first cousin Jane Cooper and having, among its officers, Jane’s younger brother Charles.

  Ireland, in some ways, was less distant from England then than it is now. Jane never ventures there in her fiction – aware, perhaps, that her scenes would be unlikely to stand comparison with the more famous novelist Maria Edgeworth, who had lived in Ireland for much of her life. She sends characters there quite often, though, more often than she sends them anywhere else. Jane Fairfax’s foster sister, in Emma, marries a Mr Dixon and goes to live with him at his Irish ‘country seat, Baly-craig’. In Persuasion, Admiral and Mrs Croft are stationed for a time at Cork and the heroine, Anne, has family who live in Ireland, the aristocratic but uninspiring Dalrymples. In the unfinished fragment usually called The Watsons, the heroine returns home to her birth family because the aunt who brought her up has married again to a man called ‘O’brien’, and ‘is gone to settle in Ireland’.

  We don’t have to cling to those mysteriously vanished letters, and the idea that Jane was in love with the Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy to explain this. Jane knew a number of people who had spent time in Ireland; Tom Lefroy, yes, but also, as we saw above, her cousin and her younger brother. In 1799 her brother Henry, too, spent the better part of a year in Ireland with the Oxfordshires, the regiment of militia which he had joined in 1793, and for which he became Acting-Paymaster.

  Ireland wasn’t so distant to Jane, and – though both her brothers had managed to avoid them – the horrors which took place there in the narrow gap between Charles’s visit and Henry’s must have seemed uncomfortably close to home.

  In 1798 French soldiers invaded Ireland, in support of what used to be called the ‘Irish rebellion’ and is now more often called the United Irish Uprising.

  For us Irish nationalism is strongly associated with Roman Catholicism but in the 1790s the Catholic Church was opposed to any suggestion of rebellion in Ireland. Not many of the United Irishmen were Catholic. They were political radicals; most had been directly influenced by the literature and ideas of the French Revolution. Prominent among the United Irish leaders was a man called Lord Edward Fitzgerald, one of the 22 children born to the Duchess of Leinster. Despite being related to half the aristocratic families in the British Isles and serving for a time in the army and as a member of parliament, Lord Edward embraced revolution wholeheartedly. He visited Paris, where he stayed with Thomas Paine, the author whose writings could fairly be said to have inspired both the American and French Revolutions. He repudiated his title and married a woman who was in all probability an illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Orléans, the only member of the French royal family to support – and indeed help to promote – revolutionary change.

  The Uprising was more than an expression of Hibernian nationalism – it was a clash of fundamental ideologies, played out over the course of a wet summer across the Irish hills and through the streets of towns like Carlow and Ballynahinch and Enniscorthy. Bullets flew. Buildings were burned. There were brutal atrocities on both sides; the aftermath was no gentler. Fitzgerald was betrayed and shot, dying in prison of untreated septicaemia. His co-conspirator, Wolfe Tone, who held the rank of general in the French army, committed suicide. Jane could have read in the Hampshire Chronicle of the fate of another Irish rebel, Henry Munro, hanged opposite his front door. ‘After hanging a considerable time’, the newspaper reports, ‘his heart was taken out and his head being severed from his body was stuck on top of a pike and affixed on the market house.’1

  What the Uprising revealed was that the British government was willing to turn its troops – including its foreign mercenaries and its militia – against its own people. In 1797, in Haddington in Scotland, a disagreement over call-ups to the militia had resulted in public unrest in which a number of civilians were killed.2 In the wake of the Uprising, this looked less like an unfortunate incident and more like the unspoken reason for having a militia in the first place. When proposals for expanding the militia were being debated in parliament, a member of the opposition claimed that ‘the real object […] was to […] extend the influence of Ministers’.3 The government wanted, he suggested, a large armed force with which to menace the populace; their true intention was to introduce, by stealth, the apparatus of ‘an absolute Monarchy’ – a tyranny, a dictatorship.

  Serving in the militia was rather like being in the Territorial Army – in peacetime you occasionally had to do some training but it wasn’t a major disruption to your life. During wartime or national crisis it was different. Militia were purposely stationed away from their homes, in areas where they had no loyalties, no networks of friends and
family. Traditionally they had been billeted in towns; the officers in rented lodgings, the men at inns, though this was starting to change. In Pride and Prejudice it seems likely that the men, at least, are in barracks, since in one scene the Bennet sisters dine together at the local inn, the George. The officers, however, are in ‘lodgings’ – and, with their red coats, are a visible presence in the town, a constant reminder of government observation and control. Meryton is, we know, close to the Great North Road – the main arterial route northwards from the capital. When it’s thought that Lydia and Wickham have eloped via London to Scotland, a character laments that ‘they must have passed within ten miles of us’. From Meryton to London is, Jane tells us, ‘a journey of only twenty-four miles’, one that can be achieved in a morning. The War Office hasn’t quartered the regiment at random; they’ve put it there so that it can easily march to the north or be used to help suppress metropolitan unrest.

  The militia aren’t in the novel to provide young men for the Bennet girls to dance with; they bring with them an atmosphere which is highly politically charged, they trail clouds of danger – images of a rebellious populace, of government repression and, more distant but insistent nevertheless, the fear of what might happen if the men in the militia, the troops, mutiny. The militia embody one of the central questions of the age – who should you be afraid of? In evading one danger, do you run straight into the arms of another?

  Jane freely admits that men in uniform are glamorous. Even the intelligent, cynical heroine Elizabeth Bennet isn’t immune, though she is discerning. When she and her sisters first meet the caddish Wickham, they’re delighted to find that he’s planning to join the militia – ‘the young man wanted only regimentals [i.e. uniform] to make him completely charming’.k Wickham has, in addition, ‘all the best part of beauty, a fine countenance, a good figure, and very pleasing address’. He’s also – crucially – happy to pull Darcy’s character apart. But Kitty and Lydia, the youngest and silliest of the Bennet girls, are entranced even by the ‘regimentals of an ensign’ – the most junior officer rank, not infrequently held by teenaged boys.