Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  In Pride and Prejudice Jane employs a convention quite common in earlier eighteenth-century fiction but which she hadn’t used in her own writing since her youthful ‘novel’ The Beautifull Cassandra, that of coyly referring to her fictional earl as ‘Lord —’. This usually serves the dual purpose of steering well clear of any possible action for libel while at the same time encouraging your readers to wonder if you might not actually be referring to a real live earl. Here, however, we’re also told several times that the family name is Fitzwilliam. It’s Darcy’s Christian name, as well. And there was a real live Earl Fitzwilliam – Lord Fitzwilliam – at the time Pride and Prejudice was published. He was the nephew of one prime minister and grandson of another. He was a prominent politician in his own right. He’d also been the patron of Edmund Burke – Burke was occupying one of the parliamentary seats owned by Lord Fitzwilliam when he published Reflections on the Revolution.o

  So does this novel – with a title which seems to direct our attention towards Burke, and featuring characters with names which do likewise – look up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility? Not so much.

  Colonel The Honourable Fitzwilliam is a fairly inoffensive chap – ‘not handsome, but in person and address most truly the gentleman’. His greatest fault is a tendency to gossip; he’s the one who spills the beans about Darcy’s role in crushing the promising romance between Bingley and Elizabeth’s older sister. Now in Jane’s novels gossip isn’t always seen negatively. In Emma, as we’ll discover, Miss Bates’ relentless gossiping frequently exposes the truth, and the truth, for Jane, is necessary. Similar revelations arise from gossip in Persuasion. Here, though, it does look as if we’re meant to think a little less of Colonel Fitzwilliam. The affair is nothing at all to do with him and besides, he barely knows Elizabeth.

  But, in this first half of the novel at least, he’s the best representative of the nobility we get. Darcy, in his first proposal to Elizabeth, is justly accused of having behaved in a manner which is less than ‘gentleman-like’. And the behaviour of Lady Catherine isn’t remotely lady-like.

  Lady Catherine is a looming presence in the novel from early on, because Mr Collins, the distant cousin who is set to inherit the Bennet estate, owes his recent employment as a clergyman to her.p He’s very proud of the association, and drags her, and her many carriages and her ludicrously expensive chimney-pieces, into every possible conversation. We hear about her, as well, from Wickham, and from Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte Lucas, who suffers the fate worse than death – that of marriage to Mr Collins. Charlotte’s letters back home to her family and friends, once she’s married, ‘mentioned nothing which she could not praise’. She is determined to like her new home, the ‘furniture, neighbourhood, and roads’, determined too to find Lady Catherine’s behaviour ‘most friendly and obliging’. Charlotte has a gift for attempting to make silk purses out of sow’s ears.

  Elizabeth has begun to form her own view of Lady Catherine long before she travels to Kent and meets her in person. As she explains to Mr Wickham early on, though her cousin ‘speaks highly both of Lady Catherine and her daughter’, she has her own ideas: ‘from some particulars that he has related of her ladyship, I suspect his gratitude misleads him, and that in spite of her being his patroness, she is an arrogant, conceited woman.’

  The reader, too, at this point, is likely to have their own suspicions about Lady Catherine, based chiefly on her choice of parish priest. There’s rarely much Burkean ‘reverence’ in Jane’s attitude to the clergy; in Pride and Prejudice there’s none at all.

  The letter in which Mr Collins invites himself to stay with his cousins, and which precedes his appearance in the novel, is ‘a mixture of servility and self-importance’. When he does appear, he’s ‘absurd’. It’s impossible to take him seriously as a man, still less as a moral shepherd carefully guiding his flock. He hardly seems to think about religion. The closest we see him come to a sermon is when he reads to his cousins from ‘Fordyce’s Sermons’, which isn’t church sermons, but an old-fashioned book of lectures on how young ladies ought to behave. Tact, social grace, these are alien concepts to Mr Collins. He proposes to two young women within the space of 48 hours. He actually writes down ‘such little elegant compliments as may be adapted to ordinary occasions’. He can’t even dance well. That Lady Catherine can bear to be in his company, that she can think him fit to serve as a clergyman, says very little for her character, or for her sense.

  Wickham assures Elizabeth that her suspicions chime with his own experiences. He has, he says, not seen Lady Catherine ‘for many years, but I very well remember that I never liked her, and that her manners were dictatorial and insolent’.

  It’s worth just dwelling on this for a moment. Wickham and Elizabeth bond over their shared dislike of Darcy. Wickham’s dislike of Lady Catherine is, really, just an extension of his feelings about Darcy (he suggests that her ‘reputation of being remarkably sensible and clever’ is the creation, in part, of ‘the pride of her nephew’). But Elizabeth’s impression of Lady Catherine is, so far as we can tell, completely unconnected to Darcy; she’s only just discovered that the two are related. What Jane is offering her readers here is a potent and, for some, terrifying cocktail – a dash of personal and class resentment, a measure of clear-eyed judgement. A young, unmarried woman with connections in trade, and a lieutenant of militia, the son of a steward, an estate manager, sit and shred the character of a much older woman, a lady, a member of the nobility, who has the power to pick a clergyman to serve her local parish and who we’re meant to imagine might be related to prime ministers.

  This, right here, is a revolutionary moment.

  And by the same token Pride and Prejudice is a revolutionary novel. A conservative novel would show its readers how wrong Elizabeth was, or at the very least introduce a truly positive aristocratic character by way of counterweight. Darcy could have been made into this counterweight, but, as we’ll see, he isn’t, or not in any straightforward way. Instead, Elizabeth’s suspicions (and ours) turn out not to have gone far enough. In spite of her title and her lineage, Lady Catherine isn’t just conceited, she’s shockingly ill-bred, far worse than the vulgar Mrs Jennings in Sense and Sensibility who, if she sometimes blunders tactlessly, has a kind heart.

  On the very first occasion that Lady Catherine meets Elizabeth, she interrogates her, without, seemingly, any awareness of how impolite she’s being: ‘She asked her, at different times, how many sisters she had, whether they were older or younger than herself, whether any of them were likely to be married, whether they were handsome, where they had been educated, what carriage her father kept, and what had been her mother’s maiden name?’ She demands to know Elizabeth’s age. She criticises the way she’s been brought up.

  And she’s like this with everybody. When she condescends to visit Mrs Collins and Elizabeth at the vicarage, we’re told that she ‘looked at their work’ – their needlework – and ‘advised them to do it differently’. The furniture is wrongly arranged, the housemaid has neglected some part of her duties. She even criticises the food she’s given to eat and, with it, Charlotte’s housekeeping.

  Lady Catherine was born into luxury, remaining in it all her life. A self-anointed expert on almost every subject, she never exerts herself to acquire new knowledge. She claims at one point that there are ‘few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt’, she declares, laughably, ‘I should have been a great proficient’. Her total lack of experience doesn’t stop her offering advice on Elizabeth’s piano-playing. Nor, Jane tells us, does Lady Catherine’s lack of experience of poverty prevent her from sallying forth ‘into the village’ ‘whenever any of the cottagers were disposed to be quarrelsome, discontented, or too poor’, confident in her ability ‘to settle their differences, silence their complaints, and scold them into harmony
and plenty’.

  Jane’s not exactly showing her readers a perfectly functioning system here, is she, any more than she is with the militia? Not only are the cottagers ‘poor’ and ‘discontented’; Lady Catherine doesn’t do anything for them, apart from scolding them. She’s not a Lady Bountiful. There is, for her, no sense of noblesse oblige, no feeling that noble rank entails any sort of responsibility. From the corner of our eyes we can see the shadow of the guillotine.

  There’s no unthinking respect for the nobility in Pride and Prejudice, any more than there’s reverence for Mr Collins.

  In fact Jane makes it clear that titles and blood count for very little. In this novel, being ‘gentleman-like’ has almost nothing to do with your social position. Colonel Fitzwilliam is; Darcy, for much of the novel, isn’t. Mr Bingley is, and his money ‘had been acquired by trade’. Elizabeth’s uncle Mr Gardiner, too, is ‘a sensible, gentlemanlike man […] well-bred and agreeable’, though he lives ‘by trade’. It isn’t always a reliable measure of true moral worth – Wickham, after all, is also described as ‘gentlemanlike’ – but it’s open to almost everyone. In this self-consciously politicised text, ‘breeding’ isn’t about your lineage, it’s about what you think and how you behave. Lady Catherine de Bourgh exhibits ‘ill-breeding’, while the social efforts of Georgiana Darcy’s lowly companion, Mrs Annesley, ‘proved her to be […] truly well-bred’. Elizabeth is eventually persuaded to respect not Darcy’s ‘noble’ pedigree, but his actions in saving her sister Lydia’s reputation and his ‘feelings’, which were ‘always noble and just’.

  Elizabeth, in common with most of Jane’s heroines, has inadequate parents. They have made no financial provision for her, nor can she apply to them for moral guidance or advice. But there are characters who perform this second function – her uncle and aunt, Mr and Mrs Gardiner. Mr Gardiner is a considerate man, far more so than Mr Bennet. Mr Bennet barely bothers to write to his wife and daughters during his attempts to discover Lydia in London; Mr Gardiner, by contrast, makes a point of keeping them informed. He does all the things that Lydia’s own father ought to be doing. His wife, too, is as close to an exemplary character as Jane allows us to come in Pride and Prejudice. Mrs Gardiner is ‘an amiable, intelligent, elegant woman’. She’s kind; she takes the oldest Miss Bennet back to London with them to help her get over her romantic disappointment. She’s tactful; we see that she will turn a conversation ‘out of compassion’, and she cautions Elizabeth against developing feelings for Wickham ‘punctually and kindly’. What’s more, she does so in such a way that Elizabeth not only agrees, but thanks her for her intervention, ‘a wonderful instance’, remarks Jane, ‘of advice being given on such a point, without being resented’.

  It’s a significant departure, this, to make the characters who live by trade not only so much the most agreeable of the older generation, but also the novel’s moral arbiters. Jane makes no effort to soften the realities of their social position. The Gardiners live in London, but it’s a very different London to the fashionable western end of the city, which is where Jane took us in Sense and Sensibility. Their house is in Cheapside, ‘in view of their own warehouses’, at what is still, nowadays, the heart of the financial district, the ‘City’. Mr Gardiner is the son of a country attorney; his wife has no relatives that we know of, though we’re told that before she married she lived for a time in Derbyshire, near Pemberley, that she has seen the place (from outside, it seems), and has many acquaintances in common with Wickham. That, we gather, was her original social position – she belonged with the stewards and attorneys. She, at least, did not quit the sphere in which she had been brought up when she married. Mr Gardiner can afford to travel for pleasure – he and his wife propose taking Elizabeth on holiday with them to the Lake District – but his priority is his work, and business requires him to substitute a shorter journey to Derbyshire instead, with life-altering consequences for Elizabeth and Darcy.

  More importantly, Mr Gardiner’s still very active interest in whatever trade he carries on distinguishes him from, for example, the Bingleys – Miss Bingley and her sister manage most of the time to forget ‘that their brother’s fortune and their own had been acquired by trade’. The social hierarchy during this period fetishised the ownership of land, as we’ve seen, but it was just about willing to overlook the fact that money had come from trade provided that there was enough of it, and that the source was decently concealed. In Pride and Prejudice, by contrast, we’re encouraged to think far more positively of Mr Gardiner than we are of Sir William Lucas, whose knighthood ‘had given him a disgust to his business’ and led him to abandon it, although he is by no means rich (he can afford to give Charlotte ‘little fortune’ when she marries, and he appears to have at least five children).

  In the other novels Jane’s readers would have known, city characters – characters involved in trade – are included for broad comedy or to create embarrassment for heroines. In one novel we know Jane liked – Emmeline, by Charlotte Smith – the character who started his career as ‘a clerk to an attorney in the city’ is ‘cunning’, interested in only ‘place or profit’. The heroine has suitors who are engaged in business – and are, clearly, meant to be repellent. The only men she seriously considers are noblemen. In Burney’s Evelina, our beautiful young protagonist fairly writhes under the humiliation of having relations in trade. She’s constantly ‘chagrined’, filled with ‘mortification’, apprehensive that an acquaintance might hear one of these people ‘call me cousin’. She sets down on paper that she is ‘ashamed’ of her ‘near relationship’ with her own grandmother. And Burney’s novel never questions Evelina’s snobbery. Her city cousins are uniformly quarrelsome and unappealing, their speech filled with grammatical solecisms. Her grandmother is appalling. Evelina is better than them and after her splendid marriage to Lord Orville, she abandons them without a backward glance.

  In Pride and Prejudice, though, Darcy’s mindless snobbery isn’t allowed to stand. It can’t be justified. For the first half of the novel he is certain both of his own place in the social hierarchy and of everyone else’s, viewing status less as opinion than fact. For him, it’s immutable, self-evident. It’s an idea which is so obviously right that it has never occurred to him to question it. It’s a prejudice, in Burkean terms – something that has to be correct because everyone’s thought it for ages. When Miss Bingley and her sister take the opportunity to laugh over the ‘vulgar relations’ the Bennet girls are saddled with, ones who actually work for a living, the good-natured Bingley objects (as well he might, given the origin of his own fortune). And he tries to defend them as individuals – ‘“If they had uncles enough to fill all Cheapside,” cried Bingley, “it would not make them one jot less agreeable.”’ Darcy disagrees; that’s not how it works. He doesn’t dispute that the eldest Miss Bennets are ‘agreeable’, but having those family connections ‘must very materially lessen their chance of marrying men of any consideration in the world’. ‘Must’, note, rather than ‘will’ or ‘is likely to’ – this isn’t about likelihood, it’s about the rules which govern ‘the world’, the world that Darcy knows.

  Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth continues down the same – prejudiced – path. Jane withholds most of the proposal itself. ‘You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you’, Jane has him declare, before promptly shifting into summary, and stopping him telling the reader much at all. Now it’s rather a feature of her novels that successful proposals aren’t written down in full, to the frustration of generations of scriptwriters. The exception is Persuasion, Jane’s last (more or less) complete novel, and that’s rather a unique proposal anyway, since the heroine indirectly declares her love first. We know that it involved some fairly major editing, as well as clever stage-managing to make it work. What we are given, much more fully, is unsuccessful proposals – Mr Elton’s offer to Emma Woodhouse, for example, or Mr Collins’ cringe-making one to Elizabeth.

  Here we’re told onl
y that Darcy ‘spoke well’. There are, though, ‘feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed and he was not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride’. Jane informs us that he speaks about Elizabeth’s ‘inferiority—of its being a degradation—of the family obstacles’ which had stood in the way of his ‘inclination’, and this with ‘a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit’. Exactly what he said, though, to rouse Elizabeth first to ‘resentment’ and then to ‘anger’, isn’t clear. After Elizabeth has, to his astonishment, turned him down, Darcy insists that there is no reason for him to be ‘ashamed of the feelings I related’. On the contrary they were ‘natural and just’. The insistence on naturalness might, again, recall Burke to mind. The reader, though, is unable to agree or disagree, because we don’t know what the feelings were. Who is he objecting to? On what basis? Their birth, or their behaviour?

  Now, it may be that this is one of the scenes that was ‘lop’t and crop’t’, edited out. Artistically, it makes a certain amount of sense, because the whole of the next chapter is taken up by Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth, and the less he says here the greater our interest, as readers, in what he goes on to reveal there. But later it appears that Darcy has talked specifically, disparagingly, about Mr and Mrs Gardiner. Two-thirds of the way through the novel Elizabeth, holidaying with her aunt and uncle in Derbyshire, ends up visiting Pemberley. She can’t really get out of it without making an embarrassing admission and she’s been assured that Darcy is away from home. He turns up, of course, a day early, while Elizabeth and the Gardiners are being shown around the estate.

  Tourism within Britain, to places with interesting historical associations or particularly picturesque scenery, became increasingly common during the period of the Napoleonic wars, for obvious practical reasons. Big houses – the kind of places that are now run by the National Trust – were also a draw for tourists. But it wasn’t the case that just anyone could turn up and be granted access. You didn’t buy a ticket – it wasn’t a financial transaction. You paid, in effect, with social capital; you had to be confident that you would be allowed in by, usually, the upper servants. It was a question of ‘passing’, socially. And the Gardiners do.