The Bourgeois Interior

2 Fanny’s Room

40 qWWe u U Q฀w฀wE 2 Fanny’s Room Beginnings and Endings Many writers who lived before Jane Austen, Defoe among them, register the rise of the spirit of capitalist enterprise in England, but Austen was the greatest novelist to have lived during the first stage of the Industrial Revolution. The England of her childhood was not wholly preindustrial, and the England of the last years of her life was not wholly industrialized , but contrasting the social contexts into which she was born and died may help us to understand some of the concrete particulars of the transition from agrarian to industrial society . With this transition came a new relation to the bourgeois home and its objects, one Austen witnessed at close hand and that she reinvents in her fiction with a less droll, more intellectual and pointed irony than that of Defoe. As we shall see, the domestic myth of Robinson Crusoe itself becomes a target of her irony in Persuasion. Austen was born in 1775 in Steventon, a village of thirtythree families. Her father was a clergyman in a parish most of whose worshippers were tenant farmers, while her mother supervised her own poultry yard and cows. In this minuscule, homogenous, and unified society, the largest gathering Austen would have been likely to witness would number fifty or sixty at the small medieval church in Steventon on Sundays. Economy was home-centered, whether in the form of a cottage industry or farming. All depended on the seasons, such that the activity of everyone—high and low alike—was affected by Fanny’s Room 41 seasonal changes. The servant who rose to light the fire early in the morning did so for himself as well as the Austens, and he would join in prayer each day with the family and the three or four boys who had come to live with the family for tutoring. The village of Steventon was not on the beaten path to London but equidistant from two roads running there. The outer world was remote: news from the colonies reached Steventon several months after the event through rumors from naval ports, and travel was so slow in the 1770s that, like many other English towns, Steventon had its own time-system, four or five minutes behind the neighboring town.1 The Austens were lower gentry in this isolated rural society. A neighboring squire, who might have served as the original for Fielding ’s Squire Western, once asked the educated Mr. Austen: “You know all about these sort of things. Do tell us. Is Paris in France, or France in Paris?”2 Years later Austen would memorialize the small world of Steventon in Emma, whose heroine has never been to London or the seaside. The arrival of a new person from outside the village, like Frank Churchill, or an excursion beyond the community, like the expedition to Box Hill, is a momentous event in this novel. In the words of the historian Peter Laslett, preindustrial society was one in which “everyone belonged to a group, a family group.” Everything material was on a human scale, and “everything temporal was tied to the human life span too.”3 The death of a father could mean the end of a household business; marriage meant the creation of a new household. Work of all kinds depended on the weather, that troublesome secondary character in Emma; industry and agriculture lived in tandem. Austen died in 1817 in Winchester, a city of thousands, where she had access to a weekly newspaper. To make way for commerce and the rising population, three old historic churches had been taken down; a hospital, debtor’s prison, and new retail businesses related to the burgeoning tourist trade lined the streets.4 The economy was dependent on the trade cycle rather than the seasons. The change in the scale of life 42 The Bourgeois Interior from the world of her childhood, the increase in an anonymous population, the wider access to public affairs, the increasingly diversified economy, the decline in commonly held religious beliefs and habits—all had for at least a decade occupied Austen ’s attention. From 1801 to 1806 Austen had lived in Bath and subsequently made the contrast between the rural and the urban home central to the plot of Mansfield Park. Austen never married, and this gave her an unusual vantage point from which to witness the shift...