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Above Vulgar Economy: Jane Austen and Money

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Above Vulgar Economy: Jane Austen and Money “ABOVE VULGAR ECONOMY:” JANE AUSTEN AND MONEY By Sheryl Bonar Craig Submitted to the graduate degree program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. __________________________ Chairperson Dr. Dorice Elliot __________________________ Dr. Anna Neill __________________________ Dr. Philip Barnard __________________________ Dr. Ann Rowland __________________________ Dr. John T. Booker Date Defended: October 18, 2010 1ii The Thesis Committee for Sheryl Bonar Craig certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis: “ABOVE VULGAR ECONOMY:” JANE AUSTEN AND MONEY _____________________________ Chairperson Dr. Dorice Elliot Date approved: October 18, 2010 2 Table of Contents Introduction: “Above Vulgar Economy.” Chapter 1: Juvenilia: “Too Wise to be Extravagant.” Chapter 2: Sense and Sensibility: “Wealth Has Much to Do With It.” Chapter 3: Pride and Prejudice: “Where Does Discretion End, and Avarice Begin?” Chapter 4: Northanger Abbey: “Open to Every Greedy Speculation.” Chapter 5: The Watsons: “Poverty is a Great Evil.” Chapter 6: Mansfield Park: “Her Penny-Worth for Her Penny.” Chapter 7: Emma: “Valuable” Women and “Worthy People.” Chapter 8: Persuasion: “Growing Distressed for Money.” Conclusion: Sanditon: “When Rich People are Sordid.” 3 Introduction: “Above Vulgar Economy” At the Meryton ball in Pride and Prejudice, “Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien; and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a-year” (P&P 10). In 1813, the first readers of Pride and Prejudice knew exactly what that ten thousand a year meant, as Richard Altick maintains in The Presence of the Present: “If there was a single store of topical knowledge universally shared by author and reader, it was a practical awareness of what money would buy” (623). According to David Spring, in Jane Austen‟s novels “persons seem all to have their price” (45), but Austen‟s modern readers are strangers to the culture that Jane Austen and her contemporaries knew so intimately, and today we can be frustrated by the fact that we do not know quite what to make of her characters‟ various pounds per annum. We are likewise confused by Austen‟s statements about money for which we have no referent. For instance, what does Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey mean when he talks about “the Bank attacked” (NA 113)? Why should Robert Watson in The Watsons examine his coins, and why is his halfcrown “doubtful” (MW 349)? And then there are economic clues in the texts that have no obvious meaning to us, such as the financial significance of Fitzwilliam Darcy‟s being from Derbyshire in Pride and Prejudice, the political economics behind Sir Thomas Bertram‟s plantation in Antigua in Mansfield Park, and the financial implications of Persuasion‟s timing, “the summer of 1814” (P 8). 4 We tend to read over the references we do not understand, and while the novels remain sufficiently intelligible to us, we are missing clues that the author provided, information that Austen thought important enough to include and which her first readers would have appreciated. This discussion is an attempt to clarify some of the economic references that modern readers tend to overlook or misunderstand and, in that process, to reveal Jane Austen‟s interest in economics and her familiarity with the ideas of the leading economists of her era. Numerous critics have commented on Austen‟s specificity about money and her characters‟ annual incomes, but it is also worth noting that Jane Austen was well informed and opinionated about the political economics of her age, and she expressed this in her novels. To read Austen‟s novels only in the context of domestic economics, that is in terms of what kind of a lifestyle Fitzwilliam Darcy could afford on his income, we are not only missing Pride and Prejudice‟s more important economic point, but we are also perhaps unintentionally diminishing Jane Austen‟s achievement as a novelist. To limit the scope of Austen‟s novels to a counting of the pounds, shillings and pence in the characters‟ purses leads to a misreading of the novels and a subsequent harsh and unfair judgment of the books‟ author, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson‟s dismissal of Austen‟s novels as stories concerned only with “marriageableness”: “All that interests in any character introduced is still this one, Has he or [she] the money to marry with” (qtd. in Southam Critical Heritage Vol 1, 28). D. H. Lawrence drew a similar conclusion when he depicted the author as “the mean Jane Austen,” no more than a “thoroughly unpleasant,” penny-pinching “old maid” (qtd. Southam Critical Heritage Vol. 2, 107). 5 Even Jane Austen‟s Victorian and Edwardian admirers had the tendency to underestimate her. Edward Fitzgerald damned Austen with faint praise: “She is capital as far as she goes: but she never goes out of the Parlour” (qtd. in Southam Critical Heritage Vol. 2, 300). Henry James pictured Jane Austen as a day-dreamer and a homebody whose novels took shape as she sat knitting by the hearth, when she “fell a- musing… into wool-gathering, and her dropped stitches” (qtd in Southam Critical Heritage Vol 2, 231). No doubt, the male authors who found Austen‟s novels so limited were influenced by their own culture‟s attitudes towards female novelists and women in general, as it is impossible to imagine the same critics passing similar judgments on Henry Fielding or Charles Dickens or Anthony Trollope because their novels ended with prosperous marriages. But the Victorians and Edwardians were also sufficiently distanced from Georgian England so that they did not read Austen‟s texts with the same economic assumptions as her contemporaries. To consider Austen‟s novels in context with the Georgian economy and to the political economics of the time is to read them as Austen‟s first readers did and to find in them much larger economic themes than the characters‟ incomes. Indeed, Austen‟s novels are not isolated and sterile little love stories, as many readers and scholars assume, but are actively engaged with Georgian economic and political realities. To consider Austen‟s texts as products of the Georgian economy is to read them as state-of-the-nation novels and as a series of books that progress and alter in response to the deterioration of the British economy. By limiting the main characters‟ income, Sense and Sensibility breaks new ground for the novel, as Austen‟s first readers noted. Sense and Sensibility also marks Austen‟s first tentative foray into the 6 public arena of political economics. As a state-of-the-nation novel, Pride and Prejudice opposes the assumptions of the most popular political economists of the 1790s, and Northanger Abbey continues to engage with political economics by taking a side in the controversial Restriction Act, Prime Minister William Pitt‟s political maneuver to protect the Bank of England from collapse. The fragment The Watsons is the beginning of a novel apparently abandoned because the characters were too poor to fulfill their destinies in the plot. Mansfield Park shifts the financial focus from the economists to politicians and broadens the economic scope from the nation to the British Empire. In Emma, the emphasis changes yet again from the macroeconomics of the empire to the microeconomics of an English village and offers an economic ideal in the model community of Highbury. Austen‟s last completed novel, Persuasion was written during the economic depression following the Battle of Waterloo, but the novel is set just before the Battle of Waterloo and the subsequent financial collapse. Thus, Persuasion‟s characters and their financial problems function as a comment on the causes of the Regency‟s own Great Depression. Austen‟s final attempt to write a novel resulted in the fragment Sanditon, clearly a text about economics and one that reveals, as Oliver MacDonagh has observed, economic insight far ahead of its time. How Austen might have developed Sanditon is open to speculation, but the domestic economics of the novel‟s heroine, Charlotte Heywood, is not even a consideration in the surviving manuscript, suggesting that Austen‟s novels were always, from their inceptions, about more than the individual characters‟ poverty or wealth. Nevertheless, Jane Austen‟s modern readers often succumb to the same limited thinking as Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, unable to 7 imagine any more than Mr. Darcy‟s £10,000 and the “pin-money… jewels… carriages” such an income would provide (P&P 378). In The Financial System in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Mary Poovey notes “the single most frequently asked question about money in this period: How can we translate nineteenth-century money amounts into modern equivalents?” (7). As Poovey acknowledges, the answer is that we cannot, but that fact has not deterred people from trying. After nearly two hundred years, the exchange rate between a British pound and an American dollar has experienced innumerable changes due to inflation and deflation, recession and depression, gold standard, silver standard, economic booms and financial busts, national debts and budget surpluses, war and peace, creating constantly fluctuating exchange rates. As if the question were not already vexed enough, in the 1960s, the British monetary system went decimal. This helps to explain why numerous economic multipliers have been offered as conversion rates from Regency pounds to modern pounds, or dollars, but none are particularly reliable. As Daniel Pool notes in What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, estimates in the 1990s “put the pound‟s worth in the neighborhood of $20, $50 or $200” (21).
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