What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

by Daniel Pool

  It was, indeed.

  To judge from the great novels, debt was widespread, galling, and often catastrophic in its effects in the nineteenth century. In Dombey and Son and The Mayor of Casterbridge the main characters are bankrupted; in Middlemarch, Mr. Bulstrode. In Little Dorrit the protagonist’s father is imprisoned for years for debt; in Vanity Fair Mr. Sedley is ruined and Rawdon Crawley thrown into a “sponging house” for debt. And the pages of Trollope are replete with young men like the impecunious George Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her? who became the prey of bill brokers and moneylenders like the sinister Fledgeby of Our Mutual Friend and the persistent Mr. Clarkson, who hectors the eponymous hero of Phineas Finn. Then, of course, there is Mr. Micawber, whose travails and wanderings through the world of debtor’s prisons and low finance are a capsule education in the subject of nineteenth-century debt.

  The English of the nineteenth century looked on debt somewhat more harshly than we do now, which is, perhaps, one reason it was a subject of such interest to them. No doubt this is because personal savings rather than the use of credit cards were seen as the engine of economic growth. There is a good deal of not-so-subtle moralizing by Mr. Tulliver’s relatives when he goes under financially in The Mill on the Floss to the effect that he need not have gotten himself into such a mess and that it betrays some flaws of personal character, not to say downright immorality, on his part. Mr. Tulliver’s sister-in-law pointedly lectures her sister on “what disgrace your husband’s brought on your own family,” castigating family members who “have had the same chance as me, only they’ve been wicked and wasteful.” One could also go to prison for debt.

  It was also remarkably easy to get into debt or go bankrupt. Retailers, whether of beer or groceries, apparently encouraged their customers to go into debt by extending credit to them on a running basis—“there was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen,” notes Pip in Great Expectations, “with some alarmingly long chalk scores in it on the wall at the side of the door, which seemed to me to be never paid off.” Most such businesses, after all, were small, neighborhood enterprises, the customers local and generally known personally to the manager-owner. This made it sensible—and productive of client goodwill—to extend credit to regulars, especially when they knew they could be jailed for not paying their bills. Affluent households were encouraged to buy from their grocers and other suppliers on credit; one observer thought tradesmen saw it as a way to foster a sense of obligation on the part of their customers, and, of course, the novels are replete with wealthy young men like Pip running up huge debts at their tailors.

  Which raises another point: for most of the century, standards of desirable behavior were set by the upper class, and an aristocratic life-style could not be maintained without spending a good deal of money. This did not worry a tradesman who extended credit to a young lord, however. On the contrary, a wealthy family’s desire to keep the family name unsullied, to say nothing of the family wealth available to pay, meant the retailer would always receive his money in the end. It is, in fact, precisely this tendency on the part of tradesmen to deal liberally with “the quality” that makes the eminently practical and well-off Mrs. Greenow in Can You Forgive Her? regard the prospect of marrying a seedy ex-army captain with a certain degree of equanimity: “It is true Bellfield might have been a forger, or a thief, or a returned convict—but then his debts could not be large. Let him have done his best, he could not have obtained credit for a thousand pounds, whereas, no one could tell the liabilities of a gentleman of high standing.”

  Trollope’s account of his own misfortunes when young points up the final trap for the would-be debtor. Once you got into debt, there were bill brokers and moneylenders like Fledgeby waiting to help keep you there by advancing you money—or extending the date of your repayment—in return for your signature on more or less extortionate bills of exchange and promissory notes. Given the lack of controls over what a moneylender could charge, this could rapidly transform a trifling debt into a substantial financial burden.

  In novels like The Mayor of Casterbridge and Dombey and Son, however, there is a sense of misfortune greater than that we associate merely with getting into debt, and this is because personal economic difficulties have been joined to business reverses and, typically, they have simultaneously bankrupted a man’s business and left him personally penniless. Today, it is our experience that the owner of a failed business declares it bankrupt and walks away from it, psychologically scarred, perhaps, but with his home and personal belongings intact. But, until the mid-1800s, virtually every owner of a business in England was personally liable to the extent of every last thing he owned—home and furnishings included—for any debt incurred in his business life. Thus, if he went bankrupt, he lost not only his business but, typically, all his personal property as well. This accounts for the utter and complete nature of the personal financial devastation that men like Henchard and Dombey suffered, and it is why such business reverses are invariably portrayed in the nineteenth-century novel as being so utterly catastrophic. Moreover, the legal liability of the owner in such an instance was reinforced by a powerful prevailing ethos of personal responsibility for business debts. When they go bankrupt we find Henchard, unasked for, offering a watch to his creditors, and Mr. Dombey proudly refusing to bargain for any personal advantage in the sale of his goods. “Mrs. Tulliver carried the proud integrity of the Dodsons in her blood,” says Eliot in The Mill on the Floss, “and had been brought up to think that to wrong people of their money, which was another phrase for debt, was a sort of moral pillory: it would have been wickedness, to her mind, to have run counter to her husband’s desire to ‘do the right thing’ and retrieve his name.”

  What happened when you got so far into debt that you obviously couldn’t pay or creditors simply got tired of waiting? The answer depended on whether you owed money on a lease, a mortgage, a bill of sale, or on some kind of personal promise to pay like an IOU, a promissory note, or a bill of exchange. He is being watched over, writes Micawber to David Copperfield in a letter at one point, by a drunk “employed by a broker. That individual is in legal possession of these premises, under a distress for rent.” If you owed money on a lease, the landlord could come in and get his back rent simply by seizing all the furniture in your apartment and, after five days, selling it to recover his money, a process whereby he was said to “distress” or “distrain” the items. Specially licensed secondhand-furniture dealers called brokers would often sell the furniture for the landlord, who was supposed to hand over any excess profits to the tenant. Owing money on a bill of sale or a mortgage was somewhat different. In those instances, you were promising the creditor to repay his money by a certain date or the document permitted him to seize, respectively, your personal property or your land. Lydgate is forced to give a bill of sale on his household goods when he and his new bride run up overly high household bills in Middlemarch, and Earnshaw gives a mortgage on Wuthering Heights to Heathcliff. When Earnshaw dies without paying it off, the farm, of course, goes to his wily nemesis.

  When the debt you owed was for something other than rent or where it was not secured by a document like a bill of sale or a mortgage that expressly allowed the creditor to take your property you were declared to be either a “bankrupt” or a “debtor.” If you were declared a bankrupt, your name was published in the official biweekly London Gazette. The bailiff came and took possession of your house and goods, and an arrangement was worked out with your creditors to liquidate your possessions to satisfy as much of the debt as possible. In Dombey, the contents of the family’s house are auctioned off, “and herds of shabby vampires, Jew and Christian, over-run the house, sounding the plate-glass mirrors with their knuckles, striking discordant octaves on the Grand Piano, drawing wet forefingers over the pictures, breathing on the blades of the best dinner-knives, punching the squabs of chairs and sofas with their dirty fists, touzling the feather beds, opening and shutting all the drawers, balancing the silver spoons and forks, lo
oking into the very threads of the drapery and linen, and disparaging everything.” All is sold, the house is advertised for rent. “None of the invaders remain. The house is a ruin, and the rats fly from it.”

  However stark the consequences of bankruptcy might seem, neither Mr. Dombey nor his fellow bankrupts, Mr. Tulliver and Henchard, go to jail. They simply lost everything they owned.

  If, however, for largely technical reasons having to do with whether you were a “tradesman” or not, you were defined by the law as a “debtor” rather than a “bankrupt,” you were generally put in jail, and there was none of this business of working out an arrangement satisfactory to creditors.

  Indeed, a recalcitrant or impoverished debtor could often be imprisoned twice for the same debt. You were jailed initially because the courts had long before decided that it was faster and more effective to get someone to show up in court to participate in a debt case by arresting him rather than by simply sending him a piece of paper telling him he was about to be a defendant. So your creditor or creditors paid a shilling for an arrest warrant, gave it to a sheriff’s officer, and then he went off and arrested you and put you into a sponging house run by him and his wife. There you had a few days in which to make efforts to settle things or make up your mind to go to prison. “We’re three on us—it’s no use bolting,” says one of the bailiff’s men who nabs Rawdon Crawley in Vanity Fair in this manner one night. “It’s you, Moss, is it?” says the colonel. “How much is it?” “Only a small thing,” Moss whispers. “One hundred and sixty-six, six and eight-pence, at the suit of Mr. Nathan,” and proceeds to take Rawdon home to the Moss family sponging house, where, as Mr. Moss assures him, “I’ve got a Doctor of Divinity upstairs, five gents in the coffee-room, and Mrs. Moss has a tably-dy-hoty at half-past five, and a little cards or music afterwards, when we shall be most happy to see you.”

  Notice, however, that in most cases involving debtors all this was just, so to speak, a way of getting your attention. (Unless you had already been found liable to pay someone money often there would as yet have been no legal finding one way or the other as to whether or not you were actually a debtor.) The arrest was simply a procedural device to ensure that you showed up in court for the trial to determine if you were a deadbeat.

  If at trial you were found not to be a debtor or were found to be a debtor and paid up, you went home. If you were found to be a debtor and then didn’t pay, you were thrown in jail again, but—no doubt a comforting thought—on a different theory. Bankruptcy law, it will be recalled, permitted creditors to seize and sell the bankrupt’s belongings to satisfy the debt. The law regarding debtors, however, did not provide any such mechanism for a creditor to recover monies once the court had determined that he was owed them by a debtor. Therefore, if you refused to pay your creditor after a court found you to be a debtor, e.g., legally liable to do so, all the creditor could do was try to put the squeeze on you somehow so you would sell off your property or do something to pay him. Hence, the creditor typically got a writ to throw you back into prison until you paid. After three months in prison, you could get out by agreeing to give up your goods to your creditors, and then something called the Court of Insolvent Debtors in Lincoln’s Inn Fields—“a Temple dedicated to the Genius of Seediness,” Dickens calls it in Pickwick—could set you free.

  Such were the toils of debt and its attendant difficulties in the England of George and Victoria. One should bear in mind that all this was not confined merely to the first few decades of the 1800s. Imprisonment for debt was not abolished until 1869.

  A division in the House of Commons: members passing the tellers.

  POWER AND THE ESTABLISHMENT

  The Government

  With respect to Mr. Gladstone,” wrote Queen Victoria querulously in 1885, “the Queen does feel that she is always kept in the dark. In Lord Melbourne’s time she knew everything that passed in the cabinet and the different views that were entertained by the different Ministries, and there was no concealment.”

  Her complaint was a measure of how much the cozy, clubby, nature of English parliamentary government had changed since the early 1800s. In Jane Austen’s era, Parliament was a sleepy collection of worthy peers in the House of Lords and landed gentlemen in the Commons who sometimes fought off intermittently mad George III’s efforts to be another royal strongman but in general spent their time haggling over minute questions of local government such as whether or not a particular road should have a turnpike and whose fields should be enclosed in tiny villages in the Midlands. There were no hard and fast party lines, no mass party organizations, no clear rules on when a government could stay in power (or when it should resign), no truly popular elections. And there was very little pressing business—other than to vote the army budget. George Eliot could have been describing the entire country when she wrote of Middlemarch during this period, “before Reform had done its notable part in developing the political consciousness, there was a clearer distinction of ranks and a dimmer distinction of parties.”

  The House of Lords consisted of the peerage together with the archbishops and bishops of the Church of England, who held their seats, so to speak, ex officio rather than by election. Members of the House of Commons had to get elected in their boroughs or counties, not usually a difficult task since they were generally men of considerable standing in their home areas and probably the landlords of many of the electors, as the voters were called. (There was no secret ballot until 1872.) The candidate—if for some reason he actually had to make a real speech—spoke from a platform called the husting after the alehouses had been opened for some hours to get everyone in a receptive frame of mind. There was then a public vote to determine who had won. The bias in favor of the wealthy and influential was reinforced by the fact that until 1838 M.P.’s were required by law to have a £600 a year annual income in the case of a county member and £300 a year in the case of a borough member. Property qualifications were not completely abolished until 1858, and members received no salary until the 1880s. Plus, Catholics could not sit in Parliament until 1829, nor Jews until the 1860s.

  By law Parliament had to meet at least every three years, but in practice it met annually because the historic English antipathy to a standing army forbade Parliament to authorize any army budget that provided for more than a year’s expenditure. Also, as the century wore on, there was simply too much business to be dealt with without an annual “session,” as the period between January or February and August, when Parliament met, was called. Originally, Parliament was an assembly of notables collected by the monarch to advise him and perhaps to do his bidding, and its origins as an instrument of the monarch continued to be reflected in various practices long after the realities of the situation had changed dramatically. Thus, genial deference continued to be paid to the fiction of royal leadership by having the monarch open each session of the two houses with a speech explaining why they had been summoned. (This eventually became a summary of the government’s legislative proposals.) Similarly, the members of the cabinet and other officials were formally “His Majesty’s” ministers, and the foremost, or “prime,” minister among them took office by visiting the monarch to “kiss hands” in a feudal gesture of fealty.

  In fact, the monarch had long since ceased to play anything but an advisory role in the government, although Queen Victoria tried, once, to intervene early in her reign. Thus, though in theory the queen sent on her own initiative for a new prime minister to form a government when the old one fell, in practice, “the Queen will send for any one that the House of Commons may direct her to call upon,” Mr. Bott points out in Can You Forgive Her? Trollope was writing in the mid-1860s, and his reference to the power of the House of Commons should be noted, for by then not only the monarch but the House of Lords as well was becoming irrelevant to the real exercise of power within the government. The growing tide of democratic sentiment in the nation meant that the nonelected House of Lords could not credibly interfere with legislation pr
oposed by a popularly elected body like the Commons. After the king threatened to pack the Lords by vastly enlarging the peerage when they refused assent to the Reform Act of 1832, the Lords backed off and became something of a rubber stamp to the Commons thereafter.

  The House of Commons was divided between two main parties, which were known as the Whigs and Tories until the 1830s and, thereafter, respectively, as the Liberals and Conservatives. (There were also a small number of extreme democrats known as the Radicals.) The house organ for the Whigs was the Edinburgh Review, while the Tories had the Quarterly Review, which, we are told in Mansfield Park, was used to pass the time at Sotherton. New governments were formed when a cabinet in power resigned and was either replaced by a new one or dissolved Parliament so that new elections had to be held. In either event, the majority then quickly selected their leader who became the new prime minister. The prime minister formed a cabinet consisting of some fifteen or so members, which always included the lord chancellor, the secretaries of state, respectively, for home and foreign affairs (also known as the home secretary and the foreign secretary), the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the first lord of the admiralty, plus, usually, the president of the Board of Trade, the lord privy seal, the postmaster general and the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Ordinary members of Parliament were styled “the Honourable”; members of the Privy Council, which also included all cabinet ministers, were “Right Honourables.” The cabinet together with twenty-five or thirty-five other figures in the executive branch—such as the junior lords of the treasury and admiralty, the secretaries to the treasury, and the like—made up the “ministry.”