Roy Adkins - Jane Austen’s England: Daily Life in the Georgian and Regency Periods

Detail from a 1797 map of London, with (from left to right) Blackfriars Bridge, Ludgate Hill, St Pauls cathedral, Bethlem Hospital and the Royal Exchange (the Bank of England is adjacent)

INTRODUCTION

One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.

Persuasion, by Jane Austen

The place is an austere, wartime England. In the north Hampshire village of Steventon, Jane Austen was born in December 1775, and just 12 miles away in the cathedral city of Winchester, she died in July 1817. Such a short distance separates her birth and death, yet during her lifetime of forty-one years she travelled more than most women of this era, westwards as far as Dawlish in Devon, eastwards to Ramsgate in Kent, southwards to Portsmouth and probably as far north as Hamstall Ridware in Staffordshire.

Yet wartime England makes only a low-key appearance in Jane Austens novels. George Wickham, the villain of Pride and Prejudice, is a lieutenant in the militia who is bought off with a commission in the regular army, while Fanny Price in Mansfield Park has a brother in the Royal Navy and a father who is a retired marine lieutenant. War forms a backdrop to the novels, but no fighting took place on English soil men sailed away to war at sea or in other lands. Even so, military men, preparations for war and foreign prisoners-of-war were encountered everywhere, and the threat of invasion by the French generated immense unease and, at times, panic. With a strong and efficient British navy, the danger of invasion was in fact small, but public perception was different. Invasion scares helped to make the population tolerate relentless rises in taxes, much of which went on the wars and on the extravagant royal family. This was a time of glaring disparity between the immensely rich minority and the poor majority, who suffered from steep rises in the price of food and from falling wages. It is hardly surprising that a good deal of support was shown for the French Revolution when it began in 1789.

The ruling class and the Church of England dreaded such an uprising in which they might be stripped of power and even put to death if the country became a truly democratic state. The Reverend William Holland, a Somerset clergyman whose background and status were similar to that of Jane Austens father, was forthright in his views about some of the lower classes: They expect to be kept in idleness or supported in extravagance and drunkenness. They do not trust to their own industry for support. They grow insolent, subordination is lost and [they] make their demands on other peoples purses as if they were their own.