Jane Austen by Valerie Grosvenor Myer Read Free Book Online

numbering nearly seven thousand families. Baronets are the highest rank of commoner, and their titles descend to their nearest male heirs. They are not ‘Mr’ but ‘Sir’ and their wives are not ‘Mrs’ but ‘Lady’. Knights and their wives are also ‘Sir’ and ‘Lady’, but their titles are not hereditary. Jane Austen’s fictional world straddles this class and the next class, to which her own immediate family belonged, the professional and business classes, estimated at some twelve thousand families.
    Like most country gentlefolk who educated their sons for the professions of the law, the Church, the army and navy, the Austens were Tory in politics. The great landowning families were more likely to be Whigs, some of them even republicans. Jane Austen believed in King and Country, and the established Church of England in which her father was employed. She was a loyal supporter of King Charles I of England and of Mary, Queen of Scots, both of whom had the misfortune to be beheaded. Although herself a convinced Anglican Protestant, she admired Catholic Mary for sticking to her religion. On the whole, she liked traditions without being hidebound or reactionary. She described an acquaintance as ‘as raffish in appearance as I would wish every disciple of Godwin to be’. William Godwin was author of
Political Justice,
 advocating Utopian communism, a book that influenced Karl Marx.
    There was tension between the Tory country gentry and the Whig aristocracy. Jane’s novels rarely deal with aristocrats, and the few who turn up in her pages are handled with hostility: Lady Catherine de Bourgh in
Pride and Prejudice
is rude and overbearing, while Viscountess Dalrymple and her daughter in
Persuasion
are vapid, cold and snobbish. Jane Austen’s viewpoint is very much that of the middle class of her day. Darcy in
Pride and Prejudice
is the son of Lady Anne Darcy, the daughter of an earl whose family name is Fitzwilliam. ('Fitz' as a prefix implies royal bastardy in an ancestor.) But the story shows Fitzwilliam Darcy, initially arrogant, being tamed and domesticated. In
Emma
we see the process by which Mr Weston and the rich Coles, originally in trade, infiltrate the landed society of Highbury.
    Despite the stigma of being ‘in trade’, rich manufacturers were buying estates, and even if they were not accepted as gentlemen themselves, their sons and grandsons would be. Incomes from estates came from rents and the sale of timber. There were many landowners who ran counties and parishes, served as magistrates and administered poor relief, in conjunction with the Anglican clergy. Some of them were ten times as rich as Mr Darcy, though Darcy’s £10,000 a year is the equivalent of millions today. To compare incomes with those at the end of the twentieth century, it is necessary to multiply by at least 200. Early in the nineteenth century even a modest landholding would bring in some £5,000 a year. To sustain the rank of gentleman, an income of at least £2,000 was necessary; £300 a year was genteel poverty. On that a family could barely afford two maids. A senior servant might earn £80 a year; a junior one, such as scullerymaid, as little as £5, plus food and lodging.
    With no electricity and no labour-saving gadgets, household work was heavy and servants a necessity for all but the poorest. Food preparation was time-consuming: chickens, for instance, had to be killed, plucked and drawn before they could be cooked. Jams, pickles and sauces all had to be made at home. Coal fires created dust, which had to be removed every day. Furniture had to be polished with beeswax. Labour was cheap.
    Although Mrs Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice
indignantly rejects Mr Collins’s suggestion that one of his cousins might have cooked the dinner, Jane and Cassandra at least supervised work in the kitchen. Their nephew James-Edward Austen-Leigh recorded in his
Memoir
that ladies in their day undertook more domestic responsibilities than