Abstract
By the time he had completed The Excursion, Wordsworth’s poetics had moved on from one rooted in the representation of heroic individuals to one that acknowledged the importance of connections between people. His response to the idealisation of rural life in 1790s political polemic meant that he came late to a realisation that social and civic structures were central to the survival of rural communities. The Excursion tells us he had come to understand that to represent the social nature of rural life did not necessarily involve idealising it. But even in The Excursion there is no sense of either the importance nor the function of connections between different social groups in the countryside. This is primarily because his poetry focuses almost exclusively on smallholders and semi-independent labouring people. In particular, he does not acknowledge the role of the gentry in setting the moral tone within small rural communities. But the way in which the gentry performed this function, and the manner in which it fed into all aspects of rural life, increasingly dominated Jane Austen’s fiction. In particular, she was sensitive to the impact of new money and to the ways in which the changing attitudes of the gentry affected the farming classes. Contemporary commentators such as William Cobbett often criticised farmers for turning away from their core function within rural working communities, but Austen’s fiction suggests that they were only following the lead of the gentry.
Keywords
- Rural Community
- Polite Society
- Agrarian Reform
- Rural Life
- Tenant Farmer
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Notes
See Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study in Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 36–55.
See also Stephen Daniels, Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 52–3 and 127–8.
See Fraser Easton, ‘The Political Economy of Mansfield Park: Fanny Price and the Atlantic Working-Class’, Textual Practice, 12:3 (1998), 459–88 (466–9).
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 147. Presumably, Robinson is Tilney’s land steward.
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Ros Ballaster (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 190.
Chris Jones, ‘Landownership’, in Jane Austen in Context, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 275.
See J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Rights, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 24–5.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 189.
Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study in Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 123.
See Tom Williamson, ‘“At Pleasure’s Lordly Call”: The Archaeology of Emparked Settlements’, in Deserted Villages Revisited, ed. Christopher Dyer and Richard Jones (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010), pp. 178–9.
See Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley and Jane Stabler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 42–5. All future references will be to this edition, and will appear within parentheses in the text.
See E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 118, n. 3.
Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 202.
Jane Austen, Emma: Case Studies in Criticism, ed. Alistair M. Duckworth (Boston, MA: Bedford, 2002), p. 194. All future references will be to this edition, and will appear within parentheses in the text.
John Wiltshire, ‘Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 67.
Paul H. Fry, ‘Georgic Comedy: Fictive Territory of Emma’, in Emma: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. David Monaghan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 166.
Jonathan H. Grossman, ‘The Labor of the Leisured Class in Emma: Class, Manners and Austen’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 54:2 (1999), 143–64 (144).
David Spring, ‘Interpreters of Jane Austen’s Social World: Literary Critics and Historians’, in Jane Austen: New Perspectives, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), p. 60.
See also Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 160.
See Mark Schorer, ‘The Humiliation of Emma Woodhouse’, in Emma: A Selec tion of Critical Essays, ed. David Lodge (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 170.
Michael E. Adelstein, ‘Duality of Theme in The Vicar of Wakefield’, College English, 22:5 (1961), 315–21 (321).
Nigel Everett, The Tory View of Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 197.
See Robert Miles, ‘“A Fall in Bread”: Speculation and the Real in Emma’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 37:1 (2003), 66–85 (82).
Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 141.
Rosemarie Bodenheimer, ‘Looking at the Landscape in Jane Austen’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 21:4 (1981), 605–23 (612).
Jane Austen, Persuasion: An Annotated Edition, ed. Robert Morrison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 35. All future references will be to this edition, and will appear within parentheses in the text.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 253.
Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 209.
The representation of Sir Walter Elliot has political implications too. As Roger Sales observes, the fact that Sir Walter is a self-indulgent dandy can be read as a criticism of the Prince Regent, who was also a self-indulgent dandy. See Roger Sales, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 171.
See C. Michael Hall and Stephen J. Page, The Geography of Tourism and Recreation: Environment, Space and Place, 3rd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999), p. 286.
The Works of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 4, ed. Claire Connolly and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), p. 49.
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© 2013 Simon J. White
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White, S.J. (2013). The Gentry and Farming in Jane Austen’s Fiction. In: Romanticism and the Rural Community. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137281791_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137281791_4
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