Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  p ‘Miss Bertram’s engagement made him in equity the property of Julia, of which Julia was fully aware’; ‘Sir Thomas Bertram’s son is somebody; and now he is in their own line. Their father is a clergyman, and their brother is a clergyman, and they are all clergymen together. He is their lawful property; he fairly belongs to them.’

  q Both Norrises – Robert and Henry Handley – seem to have had links to shipping and to the financial district of London, so there may have been some distant family connection between the two. There is, however, a degree of uncertainty about the identity of Robert Norris’ parents.

  r Fanny Austen mentions her father going to the meeting in her journal, though she makes no reference to her grandmother and aunts attending.

  s A ‘J. Plumtree, Esq. of Fredville, Kent’ – either Fanny’s ‘Mr Plumptre’ or perhaps his father – gave an annual donation of 5 guineas to the Bible Society in 1815. The younger Plumptre was a lifelong member of the Bible Society, later serving as treasurer of the Canterbury branch. (See Summary Account of the Proceedings of the British and Foreign Bible Society.) Ben Lefroy, who had become engaged to Anna Austen in the summer of 1813, was active in the Hampshire branch of the Bible Society, as were other members of his immediate family (Hampshire Chronicle).

  CHAPTER 6

  Gruel

  Emma

  Chawton, June 1814.a

  The day is hot and airless, the sky like pewter. It strikes her that no author – and no authoress either – would ever have written weather like this for the summer of 1814. In a novel, rain and storm would never threaten these first days and weeks of summertime and peacetime together. And, that being so, it seems strange to her that real life should take a different course. An absurd fancy, but there it is.

  But real life is absurd enough. Mrs Browning has a daughter who will make an admirable maid, Miss Benn’s poor hand is going on as well as possible, and it seems almost certain that Alexander, Emperor of All Russia, will pass by this road on his way to attend the peace celebrations in London.b

  Peace, after all these years. She cannot accustom herself to the idea.

  Jane stops under the shade of an elm tree to dab a handkerchief over her damp forehead, but she can do nothing about the prickling under her arms, or the beads of sweat that gather and trickle down her back. She will look sadly inelegant, she fears, but she is only going to meet Fanny and Edward. And if her brother expects her to traipse up to the great house and write down memoranda for him of everything that needs to be done in order to shut the house up for the summer, then he must take her as he finds her. Item one, the holland covers. Item two, the trunks to be corded. Item three, the carrier to be written to. Item four …

  She would have resented her task, once upon a time. She understands her brother better now. She has come to love him better. And besides, with Mansfield Park launched upon the world, she has at present nothing in hand and nothing much to do.

  She tramps along the lane, the dust rising, the heat shimmering ahead. Under a hedge is a young woman, a gipsy, picking the wild strawberries that grow by the side of the road. The bright dark gaze that turns on her is astonishingly like her own. This girl is of an age with her niece Fanny, or thereabouts. But what a life she must lead! Jane bids her good day, and before the gipsy girl can reply, turns in at the gates, walks slowly up the long straight drive towards the great house. To the right, across the lawn, is the wilderness, where she imagined that Lizzy and Lady Catherine de Bourgh stood and argued over Darcy.

  And here is Edward, with a pencil and a sheaf of papers. Jane takes them from him, and he begins to complain about how much is still to be done.

  Well then, says Jane, we had better make a beginning.

  Edward frowns in the direction of his kitchen garden. The nurseryman comes tomorrow from Alton, he says, and I must speak to the gardener about it.

  The nurseryman? echoes Jane, writing it down.

  Yes, to value the crops. He is impatient, as if she ought to have thought of it for herself.

  What, she asks, are you selling all the garden stuff?

  Of course, he replies. There is nobody here who wants it. The children and I will spend the summer in Kent. It will only go to waste.

  But perhaps, says Jane, greatly daring, our mother might wish for some of it. (Or Miss Benn, or Mrs Browning. Mrs Browning’s daughter, her other children. We are not all emperors, brother.)

  No, no, says Edward, she has her own. And then, you know, Cassandra is in London with Henry, and you are for Bookham, are you not? To stay with our cousins?

  Yes, murmurs Jane, yes, I had thought of it. For a week or two. They are very kind, very pressing.

  So you see, there is no call for it here, smiles Edward. It had much better go to market.

  ‘There is no story in it’, declared one perplexed early reader of Emma, ‘except that Miss Emma found that the man whom she designed for Harriet’s lover was an admirer of her own – & he was affronted at being refused by Emma … And smooth, thin water-gruel is according to Emma’s father a very good thing.’

  These are the words of Maria Edgeworth, who despite living most of her life on an isolated family estate in Ireland and helping to educate her numerous younger siblings, was the best-selling author of the day. Jane made a point of sending her a copy of Emma when it was published in December 1815 – then, as now, it was quite a common way of drumming up publicity. If Jane had hoped that Edgeworth would help to promote her, she was in for a disappointment. Edgeworth hated Emma and doesn’t seem to have got past the first volume. But even on her cursory examination, she registered the novel’s interest in food. In Emma Jane devotes an extraordinary amount of time and attention to what people eat – far more than in any of her other novels.

  Wedding cake, chicken, oysters, eggs, apple tarts, roast pork and roast mutton, Stilton cheese, pigeon pies and cold lamb, baked apples, rice pudding, walnuts, gingerbread, strawberries, cold meat, turnips, carrots, parsnips, beetroot, celery, bread and butter, apple-dumplings – Emma covers food for every appetite and every budget, from ‘nice smooth gruel’ for rich hypochondriacs to broth handed out to the poor.

  Unlike Jane’s other heroines, Emma Woodhouse is ‘handsome, clever, and rich’ – we learn these things about her in the first line of the first chapter of the novel that bears her name. At the age of nearly 21, Emma has had, her creator tells us, ‘very little to distress or vex her’. Her personal fortune is enormous: £30,000, a sum that, cautiously invested in government funds, would bring in around £1,500 a year. Even if she didn’t stand to inherit Hartfield along with her sister, Emma could very well afford her own home, and still live comfortably. In an era of war and uncertainty, Emma is secure, unassailable. But, as we’ve seen, Jane isn’t really writing books about the romantic lives of the upper classes. Emma may be named for its rich heroine, but she’s no more than a focal point.

  Emma is rich enough that the only anxieties about food that ever intrude into her ‘comfortable home’ come courtesy of her elderly, querulous father, who worries that there might be too much of it. When it comes to food, we’re told, ‘poor Mr Woodhouse’s feelings were in sad warfare’. He likes to ‘have the cloth laid’ – the tablecloth, that is – but is ‘rather sorry to see any thing put on it’.

  Few, during the war years, would have shared his sorrow. Not many were in a position to.

  With a rapidly increasing population, and years of poor harvests, the cost of putting meals on the table kept rising and rising. Wages couldn’t keep pace. The price of bread more than doubled between 1793 and 1800. Militia camps, concentrated in the south and east of England, were full of soldiers who needed to be fed, which drove prices up even further in those areas. Companies of militia threatened to interfere not just with the free expression of political opinions and the hearts of the local maidens but with people’s pockets and stomachs as well. The government, obliged to raise money wherever it could to fund the war, increased tax on almost everything: some
peculiar items, like bricks, hair-powder and dogs, and some more everyday ones – coffee, salt, tea and sugar. Contemporary writers complain bitterly about the poor ‘wasting’ their money on items like this, but in a period before refrigeration and without reliably clean, safe drinking water, tea and salt were less luxuries and more necessities.

  Jane’s letters speak to a constant low-level anxiety about the cost of food – ‘the exorbitant price of fish’, ‘a rise in tea’, questions about the price of ‘Butcher’s meat’ and bread. Guests added considerably to the household expenses at Chawton; it was often a relief when they left. ‘You will miss them’, wrote Jane to her sister Cassandra, when their youngest brother Charles departed after a rare visit with his family, ‘but the comfort of getting back into your own room will be great! — & then, the Tea & Sugar! —’1

  The dash here speaks volumes. We glimpse the wistful totting up of expense as the teapot is emptied yet again, Cassandra chipping shards off the sugar loaf and pounding them to powder in the kitchen, glowing with secret resentment. And at Chawton, the Austens had a kitchen garden. Their firewood was supplied for free from the Chawton estate. Jane’s rich relatives and neighbours shot for sport and sent occasional gifts of meat.

  For the poor, matters were far worse.

  It was the poor who, spending a higher proportion of their income on food, bore the brunt of inflation. It was the poor who satisfied the inexhaustible appetite of the army and the navy, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes because they were forced to it – kidnapped from the street or the fields by press gangs or unscrupulous recruiting officers, leaving women and children to struggle on without an adult male wage.

  And it was the poor, especially the rural poor, who, as the price of living increased and many male wage-earners vanished, were cut off from the resources they had relied on for generations.

  England is still overwhelmingly a rural country; only just over 10 per cent of it counts as urban.2 From the air it’s green and pleasant, a patchwork-quilt of fields divided by hedges; tranquil, undisturbed. Go back a few generations, though – say six or seven, to take us to the end of the eighteenth century – and the land would have looked very different.

  From the middle ages onwards the country was divided up in two ways: by the parish system, and by manors. These overlapped, so that you might find several parishes in one manor, or a parish that was divided between different manors. Not only did the Church and secular systems sit on top of each other, but by the eighteenth century they were fused together. It was the norm for lay landowners to select the clergymen who were to serve on their properties – as Lady Catherine de Bourgh selects Mr Collins, as Jane’s own father was selected by a distant cousin. There were also plenty of lay landowners who had obtained the right to cream off some of the tithes.

  Tithes (literally, ‘tenths’) were essentially a tax levied by the Church on everything produced in a parish, a system that began before the Norman Conquest. It was a widespread practice in medieval and early-modern Europe. Everything really does mean everything – corn, apples, pigs, eggs, bricks. Collecting and selling all of these different types of tithes could take up a lot of a clergyman’s time. No one was immune, except the tithe holder. In fact, we learn that Lady Catherine de Bourgh has picked Mr Collins to be the clergyman for Hunsford in part because he’s willing not to claim his full tithe rights, but instead to reach an ‘agreement’ that is ‘not offensive to his patron’.

  The tithe system had been designed to support the Church, both at an individual level and on an institutional one, with a certain proportion going to the local priest and the rest being spirited away into the nearest monastery or bishop’s palace. The idea was that the Church was then in a position to support the poor; in practice the Church’s charitable exertions were, at best, uneven. When Henry VIII broke with Rome and confiscated the Church’s property, much of it was sold, and the right to take tithes was often sold along with it. Local priests still got their portion, but a good deal of the money that had previously ended up in the coffers of the Church ended up in private hands – in the hands of families like the Tilneys and the Knightleys.

  Jane surely intended her readers to understand that the wealth of the Northanger Abbey estate, and of the Donwell Abbey estate in Emma, was, in part, based on two centuries of collecting tithes – or, rather, of diverting them away from the Church. That’s half the point of giving the estates those ‘Abbey’ names.

  Tithes were hated, particularly once war taxation began to bite. And by the end of the eighteenth century they were no longer remotely fit for purpose. Not only did a large proportion of tithes vanish into the pockets of private individuals, but yet another local tax system – poor rates, or parish relief – was required in order to actually provide support to the impoverished inhabitants of a parish. In theory, everyone was entitled to be supported by the parish of their birth, or, in the case of married women, the parish their husband had been born into. In practice, parish officials often tried to evade or minimise their responsibilities. The stories about women in labour being shoved across parish boundaries are probably largely apocryphal, but being reliant on the parish wasn’t designed to be an attractive option and people tried very hard to avoid it.

  Nevertheless, poor rates were often a considerable expense. They were based, for the most part, on the value of land owned; it was the only real disadvantage to being a landowner. The ownership of land determined the right to vote in elections, to sit on a jury, to hunt. Landowners – men like Mr Darcy or John Dashwood, and, on a smaller scale, Colonel Brandon and Mr Knightley – were incredibly powerful. Minor crime and local judicial matters like licensing were dealt with by magistrates, justices of the peace; men of standing in the community and, crucially, men of property. They were untrained, and often entirely ignorant of the law, but they were in a position to ruin people’s lives. Landowners were the major local employers. They usually owned the cottages that workers rented. They were the people who decided who qualified for parish relief.

  Indeed, so much of the income of an average cottager, or an average tenant farmer, went straight back into the pockets of the larger landowners, or into their control, that the labouring poor would never have survived if it hadn’t been for the existence of a rough and ready safety-net, a primitive form of social security.

  This was common land.

  Originally all the land in a manor belonged to the lord of that manor, held from the Crown – the manor house, the parkland immediately around it, the woods, the arable land, often still farmed in small strips, and pasture. Then, too, there were the areas that weren’t really suitable for farming, that were too boggy, or too steep; scrubby, littered with stones. These were known by all sorts of names: heath, forest, waste.

  It was fairly usual for tenants to enjoy ‘rights of common’. Some of these rights have strange, beautiful names, drawn from legal Latin and medieval French. There’s piscary, which is a right to fish, and pannage, which permits you to take your pigs to forage for acorns. Turbary is the right to cut turf for fuel. Estovers is the right to take wood. There was also the right to pasture for animals. These rights still exist in some places – there are commoners in the New Forest in Hampshire, and on Port Meadow in Oxford.

  ‘Common land’, technically speaking, is land that is subject to these legally-enforceable common rights. In practice, though, lords of the manor weren’t, for a long time, all that concerned with legalities. Use of common land, and of the ‘waste’, the agriculturally unprofitable areas of the manor, was rarely policed. Only the cruellest landowner would have objected to an old woman picking sticks for her fire in the depths of winter; only the silliest, too, given that the alternative to sacrificing a little firewood was paying higher poor rates.

  So people were allowed to wander freely over a vast amount of the countryside, perhaps 8 or 9 million acres at the beginning of the eighteenth century according to some estimates: 25–30 per cent of England.3

  If you neede
d firewood, you could send a child to collect some. In season there might be berries and mushrooms. You might set snares for rabbits, if the local landowner was willing to turn a blind eye. And you could keep animals – chickens and geese, pigs, cows and sheep. You could have wool or eggs and butter and cheese to sell at market, meat to exchange with your neighbours, something to vary an unappealing diet of soup and gruel and bread. The historian Ruth Perry suggests that the commons and wastes, efficiently exploited, could effectively double the income of a rural labouring family.c You might build on the common if you needed to, always provided you threw up your dwelling overnight and there was smoke rising in the morning. Even outsiders like gipsies were tolerated as long as they kept to the common or the waste, and didn’t stay for too many days together.

  For left-wing historians, this is paradise, the garden of Eden – land shared according to need. And, as in every paradise, there was a fall. In the case of common land, it was enclosure.

  Enclosure wasn’t stealing common land from the people, in spite of what a large number of historians still assert. The commons and wastes weren’t public land; they were private land that landowners were either legally obliged or simply happy to permit access to. If they weren’t happy it was possible to buy all the land back and shut everyone out that way. More complicated, but still achievable, was arranging some financial inducement that would convince commoners to give up their legal rights, or, instead of paying, portioning out small plots of the land. Most of the time it wasn’t worth the trouble, or the expense.

  Sometimes, though, it was. And as agricultural engineering and technology improved, and new methods of farming and new breeds were introduced, the sums began to add up differently. Then, too, the population of England began to get larger. In 1750 it was less than 6 million. By 1811, it had reached the 10 million mark. By 1821, it stood at 12 million.4