Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  For Jane, though, it’s only naivety or extreme youth which enable characters to persist in this kind of attitude. Mrs Bennet can ‘remember the time when I liked a red coat myself very well’, but, for all she is ‘a woman of mean understanding’, she can see past the uniforms. She doesn’t want her daughters marrying just any officer. Only ‘a smart young colonel, with five or six thousand a year’ will do.

  As I pointed out in both of the previous chapters, we can be certain of next to nothing about the genesis of the early novels. But whenever – and in whatever guise – Pride and Prejudice was begun, by the time Jane came to publish it, she had herself lived in what was, for all intents and purposes, a garrison town. The glamour, for her, had worn off.

  When the regiment removes to a summer camp at Brighton, Lydia Bennet is invited to go too, by her friend, the wife of the colonel. We’re told that she imagines:

  the streets of that gay bathing-place covered with officers. She saw herself the object of attention, to tens and to scores of them at present unknown. She saw all the glories of the camp—its tents stretched forth in beauteous uniformity of lines, crowded with the young and the gay, and dazzling with scarlet; and, to complete the view, she saw herself seated beneath a tent, tenderly flirting with at least six officers at once.

  Jane makes it absolutely clear that this is ‘the creative eye of fancy’ – and the fancy of a fifteen-year-old girl, at that. Jane knew that military camps were anything but ‘beauteous’, knew that a town full of soldiers was not a pleasant place for women – and she knew that her readers knew that too, or could guess at it.

  The camp at Brighton will be dirty and – if it rains – muddy. It will stink. There will be stalls selling alcohol; public drunkenness. There will be women (and girls, and perhaps a few boys) plying their wares as prostitutes. And these kind of problems aren’t confined to the large training camps. The militia, who supposedly exist to preserve order and to protect the local inhabitants, are in fact a disruptive force throughout Pride and Prejudice.

  When Elizabeth first hears of Lydia’s wish to go to Brighton, she’s appalled. ‘Good Heaven!’ she thinks to herself, ‘Brighton, and a whole campful of soldiers, to us, who have been overset already by one poor regiment of militia, and the monthly balls of Meryton!’ We’re told that Elizabeth ‘did not credit above half of what was said’ by the local gossips after Wickham elopes with Lydia but even if he isn’t ‘in debt to every tradesman in the place’, even if his amorous adventures – his ‘intrigues’ – didn’t in fact extend ‘into every tradesman’s family’, we’re left to conclude that Wickham really is economically and sexually dangerous, that he has done some damage in the town. And he’s only one officer. Are we meant to believe that all the others have been virtuously idle the whole winter through?

  Well, in fact, we know they haven’t. We see them promenading in the street, flirting, dancing, dining, drinking. We’re told that they’ve been dressing up as women – ‘We dressed up Chamberlayne in woman’s clothes on purpose to pass for a lady, only think what fun!’ – and this with the approval of the Colonel (‘Not a soul knew of it, but Colonel and Mrs Forster, and Kitty and me’).

  There’s a nasty underbelly to all this fun and games. Jane lifts the lid on it in one deeply, dizzyingly unsettling sentence, which goes from social niceties to bloody violence and back again: ‘several of the officers had dined lately with their uncle, a private had been flogged, and it had actually been hinted that Colonel Forster was going to be married.’ There must be plenty of privates somewhere in or near Meryton, but this is the only one we ever glimpse. As an ordinary member of the militia ranks, not an officer, he’s unlikely to have been a volunteer; he’ll have been selected by lottery and then conscripted. He didn’t, evidently, have the money to evade the ballot. He’s being flogged, subjected to discipline – the kind of discipline which, if wrongly judged or mistimed, could lead to bad feeling in the ranks; even, on occasion, to mutiny. Flogging took the skin off your back. It scarred you for life. What is this particular man being disciplined for? Laziness, insubordination, drunkenness, theft, handing out seditious leaflets, ‘bothering’ the local women? All of these options are plausible; none are soothing.

  The presence of the militia in the novel, then, introduces layer upon layer of anxiety. There’s the anxiety which always attaches to the sudden arrival of large numbers of strange men in a neighbourhood. Elizabeth really isn’t wise to walk alone, as she does early in the novel. It’s noticeable that she stops doing it. But there are also political anxieties – what if the strange men become radicalised? What, conversely, if a meeting gets a little out of hand, and they start shooting at ordinary people? Meryton isn’t so calm and untroubled after all.

  Invasions; the naval mutinies at Portsmouth and in the Thames Estuary in 1797; the food riots which periodically erupted throughout the war years – they’re there. They’re in the background, but they are there.

  As I mentioned in the previous chapter, we don’t actually know when Pride and Prejudice was begun or finished, nor whether it once had another title. It may be pretty much the same as First Impressions, the novel Jane mentions in letters in January and June of 1799. It may be the novel that Jane’s father thought was good enough to send off to a publisher at the end of 1797. We can’t be sure, though. Nor can we be sure when Pride and Prejudice is set. More than one eminent literary critic has devoted their time and effort to trying to make the dates Jane mentions match to a particular year or years. It can’t be done. Jane explains herself that the manuscript was ‘lop’t and crop’t’ before it was published – who knows what was taken out or altered.

  But from what remains, it seems that we can’t be going too far wrong in identifying the setting as the mid to late 1790s. This chimes with the mention of ‘peace’ at the end of the novel, with the prominence given to the militia, and with the reference to the large summer army camps at Brighton. The way in which Miss Bingley and her sister talk about Elizabeth’s muddy petticoat early in the novel (‘six inches deep in mud, I am absolutely certain; and the gown which had been let down to hide it not doing its office’) also indicates 1790s fashion rather than anything later.

  Elizabeth must be dressed in what was called by dressmakers a robe à l’anglaise, a dress which, by even the mid-1790s, was beginning to look dated, and countrified. It had a split overskirt, open at the front, which could be ruched up or let down at the back. The ‘petticoat’ is the underskirt, often in a contrasting material or colour. If the back of her ‘petticoat’ has been splashed with mud, Elizabeth may well have stopped outside Netherfield and done her best to hide the dirt by undoing the loops which hold her overskirt gathered up at the back. By 1813, this style was pretty much confined to the wardrobes of working women.

  Miss Bingley and her sister aren’t just criticising Elizabeth for walking alone through the muddy fields, they’re bitching about how unfashionably she’s dressed, a point the modern reader misses.

  If the 1790s setting is the right one, then we probably need to reassess the book’s title, because it would have been suggesting rather more to Jane’s first readers than it does to us.

  For the first nine-tenths of the eighteenth century, ‘pride and prejudice’ was a fairly standard, fairly innocuous phrase, like ‘love and friendship’, which Jane used as the title for one of her teenage pieces. It appears three times, all in capital letters, in the final chapter of Cecilia, a novel by the extremely popular author Fanny Burney, published in 1782.

  Jane certainly read and enjoyed Burney’s books and Pride and Prejudice echoes, faintly, some elements of both Cecilia and the earlier Evelina. Jane gives her readers a short lecture on pride early in the novel, using the only plain Bennet, Mary, as her mouthpiece.l But from 1790 onwards, the word ‘prejudice’ took on a very particular frisson, one which it simply didn’t have when Burney was writing Cecilia. And that frisson was intimately associated with the French Revolution and with radical politics.


  The initial reaction in Britain to the French Revolution of 1789 was for the most part mutedly positive. Before the revolution, the French had had an absolute monarchy – not one balanced by parliament, like Britain had. They’d had imprisonment without trial; England had habeas corpus, which insisted that detention had to be publicly justified. If France was becoming more like Britain, that was really the best thing they could do. It wasn’t until the Terror began, in 1792, and heads started to roll, that British public opinion recoiled. By the time the French royal family were guillotined, the revolutionaries inspired horror and disgust in almost every stout British heart. Some people, though, had seen nothing but danger in the French Revolution from almost the very beginning. One of the most prominent of these was Edmund Burke.

  We’ve encountered him already. It was Burke who led the prosecution of Warren Hastings – the godfather (and reputedly the biological father) of Jane’s cousin and sister-in-law Eliza. Hastings was tried in the House of Commons for extortion and corruption in his management of British affairs in India.

  Burke had been born in Ireland sometime around 1730. His mother was Catholic; so was his sister. But his father wasn’t, and Edmund and his brothers were raised outside the Catholic faith. This, at the time, was very normal in Ireland. There was a lot of legislation deliberately geared towards making life difficult for Catholics and easier for everyone else. Almost everything was made problematic – property ownership, inheritance, entry to the universities and to many of the professions, even owning a nice horse. For women, whose lives were anyway hugely circumscribed, the anti-Catholic laws made little real difference; for men they did, and so you ended up with generations of families in which religious loyalties were neatly divided by sex.

  After training as a lawyer, and turning his hand to writing philosophy and history, Burke had ended up in parliament, where he’d quickly found fame as an orator. Though not a Catholic, he chose to marry into a Catholic family. He had been prepared for university, conversely, at a Quaker school. It’s no surprise to find that, as well as being prominent in the hard-fought repeal of anti-Catholic legislation, he was sympathetic to religious dissenters of all kinds. During the anti-Catholic ‘Gordon Riots’ of 1780, a mob gathered in front of his house – not an occurrence to be taken lightly in a bout of civil disturbance which saw buildings set on fire, people killed, and the breaking open of Newgate Prison and the Bank of England.

  But for several years after this, his instincts remained reformist ones, not just in questions of religion, but in economic and constitutional matters as well, and in legal ones. Burke called some of his economic proposals ‘radical’. He disliked how much power remained in the hands of the Crown. Having been able to appreciate the arguments of both sides in the American revolutionary war, he was critical of how imperial expansion was being handled elsewhere. He pushed for the trial of Hastings. He spoke out against the prevalence of capital punishment. On one occasion he even involved himself in a case where a man convicted of sodomy had been killed in the stocks.

  Events in France, though, brought out a strongly reactionary streak in him.

  ‘— what Spectators and what actors!’ wrote Burke in a letter of August 1789, a few weeks after the revolution had begun; ‘England gazing in astonishment at a French struggle for Liberty and not knowing whether to blame or to applaud’. Burke decided soon enough. Within months, he was openly criticising developments across the Channel in parliament. In 1790, he published Reflections on the Revolution in France, the book which was to become the touchstone of British conservatism – and a target for criticism by radicals – for the next decade, if not longer.m

  Reflections on the Revolution purports to be a letter to a young man who has been caught up in revolutionary fervour. It’s one long, anguished cry for the past, for certainty, for the way things have always been done.

  ‘We know that we have made no discoveries’, writes Burke. (The ‘we’ here, it soon emerges, is the English, an odd identity, you might think, for this particular author to adopt.) There are, he continues, ‘no discoveries […] to be made in morality’. The ‘great principles of government’ and the ‘ideas of liberty’ were ‘understood long before we were born’. It is, Burke suggests, almost a racial characteristic of the English to ‘cherish and cultivate’ their ‘inbred sentiments’. They ‘preserve the whole’ of their ‘feelings still native and entire’. And what does that lead the English to do? ‘We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility.’ Burke insists that this is as it should be – ‘natural’ – and that ‘all other feelings are false and spurious’.

  ‘You see’, he goes on, a few lines later:

  I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings, that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, […] we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.

  ‘Prejudice’ then, in the 1790s, isn’t simply bias or judging without all the facts – it’s tradition, ‘inbred sentiments’, unquestioned cultural assumptions. It’s the entire edifice of society. The monarchy, the government, the judicial system, organised religion, the class system: all are to be upheld simply because they’ve been around for a long time. ‘Awe’, ‘duty’, ‘reverence’, ‘respect’ – these are the ‘old prejudices’. They are to be clung to, a raft swirling in the maelstrom of revolution.

  So far as Burke was concerned, any criticism of the way things had always been done would lead inevitably to the chaos and madness which, according to him, was already engulfing revolutionary France. It bordered on treason to question any element of the status quo. The poet William Wordsworth, who travelled to France to observe the revolution at first hand, later came to agree with Burke, writing in The Prelude – the epic poem in which he describes his youth and how he became a poet – that, having dragged ‘all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds, like culprits to the bar’, all that was left to him was confusion and darkness.

  But that’s what radicalism was, and still is, about – questioning unexplored assumptions, getting, quite literally, down to the root, the ‘radix’. It’s about reassessing the way society works on a fundamental level, about challenging, in the process, every single one of Burke’s ‘prejudices’.

  If Jane wasn’t familiar with Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution she would have been in a minority among the educated, literate Englishmen and women of her time. We know she read at least some of the other influential political writers of the period – we saw that she probably borrowed the set-up for Sense and Sensibility directly from Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and there are indications in Northanger Abbey that she was also familiar with some of the writing of the anarchist philosopher William Godwin. If Pride and Prejudice had been published with that same title in the 1790s, it could scarcely have avoided being seen as consciously political, as deliberately attaching itself into radical discourse.

  And even though it didn’t appear until 1813, there are clear links to Burke’s wholly impassioned, irrational defence of prejudice, and to the revolution.

  For a start, the names of the hero (Darcy) and of his aunt (De Bourgh) sound and look French. The first is occasionally printed as ‘D’Arcy’ in nineteenth-century editions of the novel. ‘De Bourgh’ isn’t even vaguely anglicised. Why make characters with French names aristocrats and the owners of large land holdings if you don’t want to bring up what had happened in France – the abandoning of titles, the confiscation of estates, the guillotining?

  Jane’s novels are unusual for their period in tha
t they seldom feature members of the ‘nobility’, the titled aristocracy. Her near-contemporaries – Maria Edgeworth, Fanny Burney – love a lord or a lady. Jane doesn’t, an aspect of her work which was remarked on by more than one early critic. ‘Her characters’, suggests an essay of 1830, ‘are for the most part commonplace people […] of secondary station, and hardly ever exhibited through that halo of rank and wealth which makes many an ill-drawn sketch pass … with a credulous public’.4

  It’s rare that Jane ventures higher than a baronet. This is the rank held by Sir John Middleton in Sense and Sensibility, by Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park, and by Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion. Baronets are the lowest hereditary title; they’re technically still ‘commoners’ rather than ‘nobles’. There is a noblewoman, a viscountess, in Persuasion, but she is in no way a prominent character, not least because we hardly ever hear her speak.

  Pride and Prejudice is the exception – something which, again, was picked up early on. One review of Jane’s next-but-one novel, Emma, laments that it lacks the ‘highly-drawn characters in superior life which are so interesting in Pride and Prejudice’.5 Sir William Lucas, the Bennets’ officious though friendly neighbour, may only have risen to ‘the honour of a knighthood’ (not a hereditary title). Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s late husband may only have been a baronet, perhaps no more than a knight. But – as is indicated by the use of her Christian name – Lady Catherine herself is the daughter of a high-ranking nobleman; as it turns out, an earl.n The hero, Fitzwilliam Darcy, is that same earl’s grandson. His cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam, a minor character, is the younger son of the current earl. Earls are the third-highest rank of nobility. There are no more than a handful of them in England; a few more in Scotland and Ireland.