Jane Austen and the Real Regency Society
Inspired by a comment I made to the blog of Sherwood Smith (sartorius).
He had written:
There is an entire subgenre, called Regency romance, that is largely built on Georgette Heyer's own alternate London.
and I replied:
Which is in turn largely built on Jane Austen's impression of Regency England. Here we have a different problem: Austen, who wrote fiction set in her own time, understood perfectly well how things worked and people thought, but
(1) did not always explain it in a way which someone from two centuries later -- why should she? She was a contemporary writer writing for a contemporary audience; and
(2) wrote from a particular point of view: that of a highly intelligent, in some ways idealistic and in some ways cynical unmarried gentlewoman, which is of course who she was; and
(3) advocated specific ideas, which were sometimes the ideals of her own particular class and generation, and sometimes her own personal obsessions, whether we tend to agree with them or not.
For instance, how many modern readers of Pride and Prejudice understand that the entail of an estate could only be set aside by the agreement of the entailed heir and at least in the case of some estates by Act of Parliament (which is the spur driving the plot: any Bennett sisters who don't marry well are going to be in trouble when Mr. Bennett dies)?
For that matter, how many modern readers grasp that the Regency economy was far smaller and less fluid than the modern one, which is why everyone's so obsessed with inheritences and wealthy marriages in the first place? Anyone not inheriting well or marrying into a good inheritance is facing a grim and possibly sterile future of very hard work which might only lead to a young grave. Jane Austen doesn't need to explain this to her readers (she avoided this herself only because her brothers loved her, and even then she had to suffer some of the humiliations of being a "poor relation."
Jane Austen's characters are obsessed by the simultaneous importance and difficulty of marrying for love, which Jane herself saw as essential because she had seen so many women marry purely for money and suffer miserable marriages in consequence. They did this because they (rightly) feared poverty: Jane herself had loved a man whom she could not marry because he lacked the means to support her well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Langlois_Lefroy
What must have made matters even more personally painful for Jane, he did become successful, and mainly through his own intelligence and skills -- meaning that she may have chosen wrongly, moved by her belief that he could not provide for her. But that's exactly the sort of thing that happened in an economy where the benefits of industrial capitalism had not yet spread widely through the population -- though Jane would never have seen it in those particular socioeconomic terms.
What modern readers most especially don't get about Jane Austen is that she was advocating a (mildly) radical position regarding love in marriage. At the time, the assumption was that one should marry for money, with "love" entering into it only in that one should at least avoid marrying someone one was likely to hate. Either love would blossom after marriage, or the couple would produce an heir or two and then settle into a routine of amicable cohabitation, perhaps seasoned by discreet adultery.
It was precisely the hypocrisy of the latter arrangement which Jane found reprehensible, which is why she insisted on marrying for love. Things could be worse: a wife with a truly hateful husband might find herself essentially beaten and raped at regular intervals, with little or no legal recourse (this is precisely the behavior that the modern concept of divorce for "cruelty" was invented to address). As long as he didn't literally kill or at least noticably maim her, no outsider was likely to intervene.
Even a genial but irresponsible husband might be bad for the woman. There was no fortune so vast that enough gambling might not run through it, and almost all of the wife's property save for that specifically defined as "dowry" became the husband's upon marriage. A woman might make a "good" marriage in ordinary social and financial terms and have it ruined by a fool of a husband.
A word on reputation and hypocrisy. The importance of reputation is frequently overlooked or belittled by modern writers who don't understand how it worked and why it was so important in the world of two centuries ago.
This is a world in which the economy as a whole is poor by modern standards, both criminal and civil law enforcement is minimal and extremely expensive to those attempting to make use of it, and consequently people are much more thrown onto their own resources, both personal and social, than is common today outside of the Third World. In fact, if you think of Regency England as being a lot like a more cheerful, dynamic and reasonable version of, say, Guatemala, you wouldn't be going so far wrong: economically, what you have is a tiny wealthy elite -- not so rich by modern American standards; a small middle class, and a huge mass of grindingly poor and uneducated people at the bottom.
The last thing you want in a world like that is to do something that causes people to think poorly of yourself or your family. Men do not want to be seen as cowards, because a lot of the protection they and their family enjoy from criminal and other violence comes from the knowledge that they are willing and able to fight at need. Women do not want to be seen as promiscious, because a lot of the social respect they and their family enjoy from other men and women comes from the supposition of virtue in both wives and daughters: this is why their heirs are assumed legitimate and their heiresses virginal and thus suitable for respectable marriages. And neither sex wants to be seen as bankrupt, because this will cut off their credit and possibly lead to incarceration for unpaid debts.
This is more than just melodrama. Gentlemen fought duels -- confrontations with lethal weapons -- over what seem to us extraordinarily-trivial points of honor. Yes, these usually proved non-fatal (deliberately shooting wide was not uncommon unless one actually hated the opponent), but sometimes someone shot straight instead of deliberately missing, smoothbore pistols were not exactly modern match firearms, and any wound to the torso was usually fatal. One of these points of honor was the reputations of their wives, sisters, daughters and even mistresses.
Imprisonment for debt was not only legal but quite common. If anyone with money cared sufficiently for the debtor, his debt might be paid by a friend or relative; if not, hey, it wasn't the creditor who was spending the rest of his life in prison. Did I mention that criminal and civil prosecutions were both largely personal during this era? The creditor was not necessarily doing this to be evil either: if enough of his debtors defaulted, he might be unable to pay his debts too. People lived much closer to the edge of ruin then than is common today. Yes, even than is common right now in the middle of a Depression.
If you were deemed a coward, you might be exposed to all sort of insult by bullies, and bullying was then not uncommon among adults. If you were deemed a slut, likewise, and to rape as well (good luck proving it if you were a woman of bad reputation!) Your children were likewise so exposed.
If you were thought of poorly, for any reason, good luck getting financial credit. There were no credit reporting agencies at the time, and being "creditable" meant that bankers personally thought that you both had the means and the morals to be a good lending risk. And they could and did take into account all sorts of personal sins or even eccentricities with which no modern banker would bother.
Thus hypocrisy. If you were a cowardly man, you swaggerd and boasted and lied about your bravery, so that no one would suspect your cowardice. If you were a light woman, you held your nose high and sniffed and fainted with the best of them, so that no one would suspect your lechery. And man or woman, you dressed and ate and lived as well as you could afford, or better than you could really afford, and delayed and juggled and sometimes resorted to the most absurd ploys to hold off your creditors, so that no one would suspect your bankruptcy.
Hypocrisy was then not so much a character trait as a survival strategy. The only alternative to it was to be really BE brave (like Jane Austen's brothers) or virtuous (like Jane Austen herself) -- and even then, if you didn't act the part, people might suspect that you weren't. Hypocrisy bred conformity, because honest non-conformists tended to have short and miserable lives in a world constantly on the edge of ruin.
This doesn't come naturally to us, because we aren't. No, really: compared to them, we're all rich and secure in our lives.
He had written:
There is an entire subgenre, called Regency romance, that is largely built on Georgette Heyer's own alternate London.
and I replied:
Which is in turn largely built on Jane Austen's impression of Regency England. Here we have a different problem: Austen, who wrote fiction set in her own time, understood perfectly well how things worked and people thought, but
(1) did not always explain it in a way which someone from two centuries later -- why should she? She was a contemporary writer writing for a contemporary audience; and
(2) wrote from a particular point of view: that of a highly intelligent, in some ways idealistic and in some ways cynical unmarried gentlewoman, which is of course who she was; and
(3) advocated specific ideas, which were sometimes the ideals of her own particular class and generation, and sometimes her own personal obsessions, whether we tend to agree with them or not.
For instance, how many modern readers of Pride and Prejudice understand that the entail of an estate could only be set aside by the agreement of the entailed heir and at least in the case of some estates by Act of Parliament (which is the spur driving the plot: any Bennett sisters who don't marry well are going to be in trouble when Mr. Bennett dies)?
For that matter, how many modern readers grasp that the Regency economy was far smaller and less fluid than the modern one, which is why everyone's so obsessed with inheritences and wealthy marriages in the first place? Anyone not inheriting well or marrying into a good inheritance is facing a grim and possibly sterile future of very hard work which might only lead to a young grave. Jane Austen doesn't need to explain this to her readers (she avoided this herself only because her brothers loved her, and even then she had to suffer some of the humiliations of being a "poor relation."
Jane Austen's characters are obsessed by the simultaneous importance and difficulty of marrying for love, which Jane herself saw as essential because she had seen so many women marry purely for money and suffer miserable marriages in consequence. They did this because they (rightly) feared poverty: Jane herself had loved a man whom she could not marry because he lacked the means to support her well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Langlois_Lefroy
What must have made matters even more personally painful for Jane, he did become successful, and mainly through his own intelligence and skills -- meaning that she may have chosen wrongly, moved by her belief that he could not provide for her. But that's exactly the sort of thing that happened in an economy where the benefits of industrial capitalism had not yet spread widely through the population -- though Jane would never have seen it in those particular socioeconomic terms.
What modern readers most especially don't get about Jane Austen is that she was advocating a (mildly) radical position regarding love in marriage. At the time, the assumption was that one should marry for money, with "love" entering into it only in that one should at least avoid marrying someone one was likely to hate. Either love would blossom after marriage, or the couple would produce an heir or two and then settle into a routine of amicable cohabitation, perhaps seasoned by discreet adultery.
It was precisely the hypocrisy of the latter arrangement which Jane found reprehensible, which is why she insisted on marrying for love. Things could be worse: a wife with a truly hateful husband might find herself essentially beaten and raped at regular intervals, with little or no legal recourse (this is precisely the behavior that the modern concept of divorce for "cruelty" was invented to address). As long as he didn't literally kill or at least noticably maim her, no outsider was likely to intervene.
Even a genial but irresponsible husband might be bad for the woman. There was no fortune so vast that enough gambling might not run through it, and almost all of the wife's property save for that specifically defined as "dowry" became the husband's upon marriage. A woman might make a "good" marriage in ordinary social and financial terms and have it ruined by a fool of a husband.
A word on reputation and hypocrisy. The importance of reputation is frequently overlooked or belittled by modern writers who don't understand how it worked and why it was so important in the world of two centuries ago.
This is a world in which the economy as a whole is poor by modern standards, both criminal and civil law enforcement is minimal and extremely expensive to those attempting to make use of it, and consequently people are much more thrown onto their own resources, both personal and social, than is common today outside of the Third World. In fact, if you think of Regency England as being a lot like a more cheerful, dynamic and reasonable version of, say, Guatemala, you wouldn't be going so far wrong: economically, what you have is a tiny wealthy elite -- not so rich by modern American standards; a small middle class, and a huge mass of grindingly poor and uneducated people at the bottom.
The last thing you want in a world like that is to do something that causes people to think poorly of yourself or your family. Men do not want to be seen as cowards, because a lot of the protection they and their family enjoy from criminal and other violence comes from the knowledge that they are willing and able to fight at need. Women do not want to be seen as promiscious, because a lot of the social respect they and their family enjoy from other men and women comes from the supposition of virtue in both wives and daughters: this is why their heirs are assumed legitimate and their heiresses virginal and thus suitable for respectable marriages. And neither sex wants to be seen as bankrupt, because this will cut off their credit and possibly lead to incarceration for unpaid debts.
This is more than just melodrama. Gentlemen fought duels -- confrontations with lethal weapons -- over what seem to us extraordinarily-trivial points of honor. Yes, these usually proved non-fatal (deliberately shooting wide was not uncommon unless one actually hated the opponent), but sometimes someone shot straight instead of deliberately missing, smoothbore pistols were not exactly modern match firearms, and any wound to the torso was usually fatal. One of these points of honor was the reputations of their wives, sisters, daughters and even mistresses.
Imprisonment for debt was not only legal but quite common. If anyone with money cared sufficiently for the debtor, his debt might be paid by a friend or relative; if not, hey, it wasn't the creditor who was spending the rest of his life in prison. Did I mention that criminal and civil prosecutions were both largely personal during this era? The creditor was not necessarily doing this to be evil either: if enough of his debtors defaulted, he might be unable to pay his debts too. People lived much closer to the edge of ruin then than is common today. Yes, even than is common right now in the middle of a Depression.
If you were deemed a coward, you might be exposed to all sort of insult by bullies, and bullying was then not uncommon among adults. If you were deemed a slut, likewise, and to rape as well (good luck proving it if you were a woman of bad reputation!) Your children were likewise so exposed.
If you were thought of poorly, for any reason, good luck getting financial credit. There were no credit reporting agencies at the time, and being "creditable" meant that bankers personally thought that you both had the means and the morals to be a good lending risk. And they could and did take into account all sorts of personal sins or even eccentricities with which no modern banker would bother.
Thus hypocrisy. If you were a cowardly man, you swaggerd and boasted and lied about your bravery, so that no one would suspect your cowardice. If you were a light woman, you held your nose high and sniffed and fainted with the best of them, so that no one would suspect your lechery. And man or woman, you dressed and ate and lived as well as you could afford, or better than you could really afford, and delayed and juggled and sometimes resorted to the most absurd ploys to hold off your creditors, so that no one would suspect your bankruptcy.
Hypocrisy was then not so much a character trait as a survival strategy. The only alternative to it was to be really BE brave (like Jane Austen's brothers) or virtuous (like Jane Austen herself) -- and even then, if you didn't act the part, people might suspect that you weren't. Hypocrisy bred conformity, because honest non-conformists tended to have short and miserable lives in a world constantly on the edge of ruin.
This doesn't come naturally to us, because we aren't. No, really: compared to them, we're all rich and secure in our lives.