Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

by Helena Kelly

  Population growth had been seen as a positive thing through most of the early modern period, but no longer. Britain struggled to feed herself during the wars with France, really struggled. The prospect of feeding more and more mouths was a sobering one. It wasn’t necessary to agree with all the theories of the Reverend Thomas Malthus to be haunted by the spectres he conjured up in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population: death, doom, and disaster, ‘sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague’, ‘gigantic inevitable famine’.

  Official census-taking began in 1801, but even without the official data, it was clear that the traditional way of using the land wouldn’t work for much longer. Where twenty families had gathered firewood, 40 would shiver through the winter, or else strip the woods entirely, leaving nothing for the next year or the year after. Thirty cows could graze peacefully; 60 would destroy the turf before moving on to crops. And in the age of revolutions, what could be relied on to stand in the way of a starving mob?

  The half-trained militia whose ranks were drawn from the poor? A local clergyman? Not if he collected tithes: he was the one taking food out of people’s mouths.

  Something fundamental had to change.

  An increasing number of landowners began to enclose, to shut off access to land. Parliament passed laws to make the process easier and quicker. An Enclosure Act would begin by naming the lord of the manor, rectors and vicars, and other local landowners who claimed common rights or tithe and describing exactly what rights they claimed. It then outlined exactly how the enclosure would benefit them:

  [T]he Lands of the respective Proprietors in the said Open Fields … Meadows, and Pastures, lie dispersed and inconveniently situated … the other said Commonable Lands and Waste Grounds, are capable of great Improvement by an Inclosure, and it would be very beneficial to the said Owners and Proprietors in general if all the said Fields … Meadows, Pastures, Commonable Lands, and Waste Grounds, were divided and inclosed, drained, warped, and embanked, and specific Parts allotted to the several Persons interested therein, in Proportion …d

  The first step, once the enclosure was agreed, was to draw up a map, almost entirely blank, except for the parish boundary, the village, the church, houses. Everything else was, potentially, subject to alteration – rivers and woods, meadows, roads and footpaths. The rest of the land was parcelled out; the land for the tithe holders, to replace their tithe entitlement, then the land for everyone else, in proportion.

  There would have been digging, ditching, staking, planting; trees and perhaps old hedgerow boundaries might be grubbed up and new boundaries laid out, rights of way moved or blocked altogether. If you had a legally enforceable right, then you would be provided for. If you didn’t, from now onwards the fences and the hedges would bar your way.

  For a while there would be want, that was inevitable, but not once more intensive, large-scale farming methods had been established; and once the commons were taken out of the equation, then the market would do much to control population growth.e Landowners – and their tenant farmers – could specialise, in sheep, perhaps, or in whatever the land was particularly good for. Tenant farmers could afford to pay more rent. Labour would still be needed.

  The whole economy of the countryside would be on a more secure footing, and a more civilised one too – since if you couldn’t send your children to forage on the commons you might as well send them to school instead. While the land was being reorganised, it made sense to sort out the unpopular tithe system too, and then people might stop resenting their clergyman and start listening to him. Modernity was what enclosure offered – order, safety; for how could a country run on lines like this ever descend into the revolutionary anarchy that had engulfed France?

  That was the hope. Alongside it, though, was real anxiety about the repercussions of enclosure, not simply among those who suffered from it, and from radicals, but from some quite unexpected quarters. Enclosure Acts didn’t require universal agreement and they didn’t always get even enough agreement to pass through parliament; 23 per cent of enclosure bills failed between 1760 and 1800.5 Enclosure could effectively halve the income of labouring families, so that in addition to paying for the enclosure, many landowners would find themselves paying much higher poor rates. Even pro-enclosure writers like Sir Frederick Morton Eden or Nathaniel Kent admitted that, badly managed, enclosure could produce serious harm, increasing poor rates and reducing employment.f

  Unspoken was the fear that rather than defeating revolutionary impulses, enclosure would exacerbate them. The poet John Clare, himself a labourer, and briefly a celebrity in the 1820s, explains the alienation that enclosure could produce, the ‘men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease’. He also writes of the slow-burning resentment, the sense that the poor had been cheated: ‘Inclosure came and trampled on the grave | Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave.’

  But for the head of the pro-enclosure Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement, Sir John Sinclair, enclosure was a patriotic obligation, another way of waging war against the French: ‘Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt, or the subjugation of Malta, but let us subdue Finchley common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath, let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement.’

  The war with France, the fear of demographic catastrophe, the desire to control – and also to feed – the country, all of these helped to add to a sense of urgency. Enclosure occurred from the Tudor period into the twentieth century, in a desultory, piecemeal fashion. It grew in popularity throughout the eighteenth century. But it exploded in the twenty years between 1795 and 1815. Of all the Enclosure Acts passed over a 160-year period, around half were passed in these two decades. More than 3 million acres of British wastes, commons and heaths were enclosed during this time – 5,000 square miles.6 To give you some idea of scale, that’s roughly a tenth of the area of England. The ecological historian Professor Oliver Rackham suggested that as much as 200,000 miles of hedgerow may have been planted between 1750 and 1850. It’s been calculated that parliament must have been passing Enclosure Acts at ‘the rate of one a week’.7

  These twenty years of intensive enclosure – and intense debate – coincide, almost exactly, with Jane’s writing career.

  Sinclair wasn’t wrong in using the language of warfare: enclosure was an aggressive declaration of power, and it stamped a new system on the countryside, as visible as Roman roads or Norman castles.

  In 1807 the poet Robert Southey published a book entitled Letters from England. He didn’t put his own name to it, but instead that of an imaginary foreigner, a Spanish traveller called Don Espriella. Southey was Poet Laureate from 1813 to his death in 1843 but nowadays he’s best known as William Wordsworth’s neighbour, as brother-in-law to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and as Charlotte Brontë’s earliest literary critic. In 1808 he also became the nephew by marriage of Jane’s old friend Catherine Bigg. He was a prolific and indefatigable writer, and his work ranged widely, from youthful radical poetry to a Life of Nelson, via a ‘historical’ epic about Welsh Native Americans. Letters from England is one of his more peculiar efforts. It’s never entirely clear whether we’re meant to sneer at ‘Espriella’ as a foolish and misguided foreigner, or be unnerved by his insights into the oddities of English culture.

  Espriella has plenty to say about fashions and food. But he also refers, repeatedly, to enclosure. ‘The beauty of the country is much injured by enclosures’, he writes in one letter. In another he gloomily explains that ‘I had been disposed to think that the English enclosures rather deformed than beautified the landscape, but I now perceived how cheerless and naked the cultivated country appears without them’. Whether on Salisbury Plain or the outskirts of London; in the Midlands or Basingstoke – the town closest to Steventon, where Jane grew up – Espriella makes sure to mention whether or not the land is enclosed. An enclosed landscape was unmistakable – it was formed of straight lines, and squares. ‘Lines of enclosure lay below us like a map’, writes Es
priella, describing elsewhere ‘an open country of broken ground with hills at a little distance enclosed in square patches and newly as it appeared brought into cultivation’.

  We know that Jane read Southey’s book. ‘We have got the second volume of Espriella’s Letters’, she explains to Cassandra in October 1808, ‘and I read it aloud by candlelight. The man describes well, but he is horribly anti-English. He deserves to be the foreigner he assumes.’8

  Jane recognised the descriptions, then; she doesn’t argue with their accuracy. The country she lived in really was what ‘Espriella’ described: a land stripped raw, marked by the lines of enclosure, by new fences and sparse, low, struggling hedges; square shapes and locked gates; a world remade.

  Five of her six novels include either explicit reference to enclosure or discussion of its results. The exception is Pride and Prejudice, which, as we’ve seen, is about the dream of escaping society entirely. Even there, we find fences. In Pride and Prejudice, though, barriers exist to be overcome; early in the novel we’re shown Elizabeth, ‘crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity’, walking into the breakfast-parlour at Netherfield, and straight into Darcy’s heart. Stiles are necessary only where a public right of way cuts across enclosed space; they exist as a reminder of previously free access, a ghost of commoning.

  Elsewhere the references are less nebulous. In Sense and Sensibility, ‘inclosing land’ is a topic of general conversation at dinner, together with ‘politics’ and ‘breaking horses’. In Persuasion a walk from Uppercross to Winthrop leads ‘through large enclosures’ and the heroine finds herself an inadvertent eavesdropper on a conversation taking place on the other side of a hedge. Meanwhile the hero’s brother is, we learn in a throwaway comment, sympathetic to the anger and confusion that enclosure produces. Jane tends to associate approval of enclosure or active involvement in it with her less attractive characters. The monumentally selfish John Dashwood complains about the expense of the ‘inclosure of Norland Common … a most serious drain’. When Catherine Morland is being shown around Northanger Abbey by General Tilney, the word ‘enclosure’ is repeated again and again: ‘the whole building enclosed a large court’; ‘the new building … intended only for offices, and enclosed behind by stable yards’; ‘the walls seemed countless in number, endless in length … a whole parish [was] at work within the inclosure’. We’re surely meant to understand that General Tilney is an encloser, and not just at Northanger. He’s also been busy at Woodston, where Henry Tilney is vicar. As the General tells Catherine, ‘it is a family living […] and the property in the place being chiefly my own, you may believe I take care that it shall not be a bad one’.

  It also seems clear that at one point Jane envisaged Mansfield Park as a book about enclosure.

  We’ve already spent some time looking at one of Jane’s letters to Cassandra, written in January 1813. The first half of the letter is devoted to Pride and Prejudice, which was about to be published, and following on from this are a few odd comments that seem to refer to the novel that would become Mansfield Park: ‘Now I will try to write of something else; — it shall be a complete change of subject — Ordination. I am glad to find your enquiries have ended so well. — If you cd discover whether Northamptonshire is a Country of Hedgerows, I shd be glad again.’9 Mansfield Park is set, for the most part, in Northamptonshire and among its cast of characters are three clergymen – Mr Norris, Dr Grant, and the ‘hero’, Edmund Bertram. It’s generally agreed, though, that there are no hedgerows in Mansfield Park.

  Several readers assume that Jane left the hedgerows out because she wanted the novel to be factually accurate. Jane’s early twentieth-century editor, R.W. Chapman, suggested that she’d planned an eavesdropping scene like the one in Persuasion, but ‘scrupulously gave it up on hearing that Northamptonshire was not a country of hedgerows’. The writer Virginia Woolf also approved of what she saw as Jane’s fastidiousness; ‘when she found out that hedges do not grow in Northamptonshire she eliminated her hedge rather than run the risk of inventing one which could not exist’.10

  There’s just one small problem with this suggestion – it’s nonsense. Northamptonshire was a ‘country of hedgerows’, or, rather, a country of hedges – very much so. It was one of the counties most affected by enclosure, and by Enclosure Acts, which stipulated the planting of hedges. It’s where John Clare, the poet whose verses mourn the coming of enclosure, lived.

  And there are hedges in Mansfield Park. There’s the ‘rough hedgerow along the upper side of the field’ that has been turned into the parsonage shrubbery, and there’s another hedge, unmistakably an enclosure boundary, in Thornton Lacey, Edmund’s future living.

  During a lull in a card game, Henry Crawford tells how, after his horse ‘flung a shoe’ while out hunting, obliging him to turn for home, he ‘found himself … in Thornton Lacey’. Jane has him describe the place in some detail:

  I was suddenly, upon turning the corner of a steepish downy field, in the midst of a retired little village between gently rising hills; a small stream before me to be forded, a church standing on a sort of knoll to my right—which church was strikingly large and handsome for the place, and not a gentleman or half a gentleman’s house to be seen excepting one—to be presumed the Parsonage—within a stone’s throw of the said knoll and church.

  Henry, who gaily admits that he ‘can never bear to ask’, declares that ‘I told a man mending a hedge that it was Thornton Lacey, and he agreed to it’. For a modern reader, this seems to be a completely irrelevant detail. The man might just as well be herding some cows or walking along the road. But for a reader of 1814, living in a country scored and marked by enclosure, a hedge in need of mending was in all probability a hedge that had been deliberately damaged. The recognised way of objecting to an enclosure had always been to damage the enclosure boundary, if possible, to open up the access again. This is exactly what we’re told happens to Mr Wentworth, the clergyman brother of the hero of Persuasion. As recalled by the local lawyer: ‘he came to consult me once, I remember, about a trespass of one of his neighbours; farmer’s man breaking into his orchard; wall torn down; apples stolen; caught in the fact; and afterwards, contrary to my judgement, submitted to an amicable compromise.’

  The next likeliest explanation, after a formalised protest, is that the locals have been stripping the hedge for fuel. It is, after all, winter at this point in the novel. It was very usual for this to happen, especially where an enclosure had taken place relatively recently; frequent enough for enclosure literature to specify which hedgerow plants wouldn’t burn well. Similarly, enclosers were warned specifically not to plant anything that bore edible fruit. It was ‘bad policy’, an encouragement to ‘theft’ and ‘depredation’.g

  What we ought to be seeing in this scene from Mansfield Park, I think, is a compressed version of William Wordsworth’s poem Goody Blake and Harry Gill, a dramatisation of what enclosure meant to the poor; not simply a bewildered unfamiliarity with the surroundings that had been theirs since childhood, but real suffering, real want (‘But when the ice our streams did fetter, | Oh then how her old bones would shake!’).

  Critics are, of course, perfectly happy to accept that a man like William Wordsworth, what Emma Woodhouse would call ‘a man of information’ – well-read, well-educated, well-travelled – might choose to confront an issue as politically loaded as enclosure. But if you refuse to believe that Jane ever deals with politically sensitive subjects, then you end up tying yourself in knots to get away from the fact that she actually writes about it.

  Some critics dodge the issue entirely. Alistair Duckworth’s hugely influential The Improvement of the Estate, a book all about landscape in Jane’s novels, doesn’t once mention enclosure.h Some stubbornly insist that despite Jane using the word enclosure, she doesn’t really mean it.i Because we know (don’t we?) that Jane’s view of the English countryside is just like Emma Woodhouse’s and tha
t everything in the garden is rosy. Looking out across the surrounding fields from Donwell Abbey, Emma famously sees ‘a sweet view—sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive’.

  Emma may be ‘spoiled by being the cleverest of her family’, but given that neither her father nor her sister Isabella offer any competition, that’s not really saying a lot. Emma’s wrong about pretty much everything. Towards the end of the novel she admits it: ‘How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living under!—The blunders, the blindness of her own head and heart! … She was proved to have been universally mistaken.’ Why, then, assume she’s right about the landscape? We would do well to be cautious of the much-quoted claim that Jane described Emma as a ‘heroine whom nobody but myself will much like’ – it appears only in the Victorian biography written by Jane’s nephew. And there’s really no reason for us to assume that Jane’s own views chime with those of her heroine.

  If, at the beginning of 1813, Jane intended the novel she was then about to begin, Mansfield Park, to centre on enclosure and the Church, then she got distracted. The Church was a major beneficiary of enclosure – tithe owners automatically got a fifth of any enclosure award, they had the right to choose one of the officials who would carry the enclosure out, and they didn’t have to pay any of the expenses. It was an active mover in enclosure, not a disinterested onlooker. But the Church’s involvement in enclosing, and in the immediate impoverishment of people who were already close to the breadline, is only one of a raft of accusations that Jane brings against it in Mansfield Park. That the Church encloses is all of a piece with its acceptance of pluralism (holding multiple parish livings at once); it neglects the physical well-being of its parishioners in the same way that it neglects their spiritual well-being. It owns slaves, and lends Christian respectability to every other slave-owner by doing so; it is morally bankrupt and in urgent need of reform. The evangelicals are right.