What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (27 page)

In
Sense and Sensibility
Elinor bumps into her half-brother John Dashwood in a Piccadilly jeweller’s shop and he gives her the outlines of a proposed marriage settlement between Edward Ferrars and the Hon. Miss Morton, ‘only daughter of the late Lord Morton’ (II. xi). The young lady has thirty thousand pounds; Edward’s ‘most excellent mother, Mrs. Ferrars, with the utmost liberality, will come forward, and settle on him a thousand a-year’. Social historians should hesitate before taking this as evidence of the openness with which settlements were discussed: John Dashwood is money-obsessed, and we can hear his love of lucre behind the empty doublings of ‘most excellent’ and ‘utmost liberality’. (What he calls Mrs Ferrars’s ‘noble spirit’ will later be aptly demonstrated when she disinherits her younger son for the sin of become engaged to a portionless young woman.) He surely should not be bandying such financial arrangements in a West End shop. Especially he should not be doing so when he knows that his sister was attached to the man whose proposed marriage he describes. His obtuseness and vulgarity are made worse by his announcement that Mrs Ferrars, his mother-in-law, has just given his wife ‘bank-notes . . . to the amount of two hundred pounds’ (almost half the annual income of Elinor, her mother, and her sisters). ‘And extremely acceptable it is, for we must live at a great expense while we are here.’ The stupidity of his avarice is all in that phrase ‘extremely acceptable’, used in talking to a sister who is so pushed for money that she has come to the shop to negotiate the sale of ‘a few old-fashioned jewels of her mother’.

Talk of money in Austen is always dramatic, never just informative. We listen to John Dashwood’s every inclination being warped by money. Yet he would not be able to have this conversation if marriage settlements were not broadcast. Sometimes the announcement of a marriage in a newspaper specified the amount of a dowry.
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It is likely that a woman like Mrs Bennet would be quick to tell any interested or uninterested party of the conditions of her marriage settlement. Equally, the system of taxation made the incomes of the landed gentry widely known. Land Tax was levied annually and was based on a valuation of a person’s estate. From 1799, income tax was assessed by local commissioners, often drawn from among the local landed gentry. Information about the income from estates like Henry Crawford’s was therefore readily available and quickly circulated. ‘Miss Julia and Mr. Crawford. Yes, indeed, a very pretty match,’ says Mrs Rushworth to Mrs Norris. ‘What is his property?’ ‘Four thousand a year’ (I. xii). Some characters talk themselves of how much they are worth. In
Persuasion
Charles Musgrove tells Anne and Mary that ‘from what he had once heard Captain Wentworth himself say, was very sure that he had not made less than twenty thousand pounds by the war. Here was a fortune at once; besides which, there would be the chance of what might be done in any future war’ (I. ix). Captain Wentworth would be ‘a capital match’ for either of his sisters. At the opening of the final chapter, the figure is made more exact. ‘Captain Wentworth, with five-and-twenty thousand pounds, and as high in his profession as merit and activity could place him, was no longer nobody’ (II. xii). This too is information known by the characters as well as announced by the narrator: prize money won from capturing enemy ships was widely advertised.
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Of course, there can be mistakes.
Northanger Abbey
turns on the misreporting of a person’s supposed wealth. It is because of John Thorpe that General Tilney believes Catherine to be rich. His treatment of our heroine is explained when Henry Tilney explains how John Thorpe had ‘misled him’ (II. xv). Consulted by the General, and imagining himself as Catherine’s future husband, ‘his vanity induced him to represent the family as yet more wealthy than his vanity and avarice had made him believe them’. Yet the very readiness with which the hard-hearted General Tilney believes this account suggests that he is used to reliable reports of other people’s wealth. This is a world in which everyone knows, or thinks they know, about everyone else’s money. Thorpe is a braggart whose own extravagance is bolstered by imagining everyone else to be immensely wealthy. The son of a widow, ‘and a not very rich one’, he has spent fifty guineas on a carriage (I. vii). He curses James Morland for not keeping a horse and gig, adding something in his ‘loud and incoherent way’ about ‘its being a d— thing to be miserly’, apparently believing, though Catherine hardly understands him, that the Morlands were ‘people who rolled in money’ (I. xi). He tends to believe that everyone is rich. He tells Catherine that General Tilney is ‘A very fine fellow; as rich as a Jew’ (I. xii). He has already said, ‘Old Allen is as rich as a Jew—is not he?’ (I. ix). And in a world where people rely on reports of each other’s wealth, he is a dangerous character.

Not that the Morlands are poor. Having announced his engagement to Isabella Thorpe, James Morland is promised a living worth four hundred pounds per annum – plus the same again on his father’s death. James is grateful but Isabella, on being ‘heartily congratulated’ by Catherine, is ‘grave’ with disappointment – clear enough to the reader, if not to her ‘dear friend’ (II. i). Mrs Thorpe calls four hundred a ‘small income’, and looks ‘anxiously’ at her daughter. The sum seems devised by the author to test Isabella and find her out. James Austen, Jane Austen’s eldest brother, and his first wife, Anne Mathew, had married on £300 per annum.
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But this was close to the borderline of gentility. Edward Ferrars is offered a living by Colonel Brandon that will fetch him something over £200 per year. The Colonel thinks that this will make him ‘comfortable as a bachelor’ but ‘cannot enable him to marry’ (III. iii). In a final reckoning, we hear that Elinor and Edward are to have this living, plus the annual interest on £3,000. This makes a total of £350 per annum – which is inadequate: ‘they were neither of them quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty pounds a-year would supply them with the comforts of life’ (III. xiii). Then Mrs Ferrars gives Edward £10,000 to match the amount that she gave his sister on marriage, and they are entirely comfortable. There is evidence that Fanny Price’s mother has an income of about £400 per annum. Her sister, now Lady Bertram, brought £7,000 to her marriage to Sir Thomas, and we might infer that Fanny’s mother would have been left the same amount. This would bring an income of £350 a year. Added to Mr Price’s half-pay of up to £50 a year, this would give them an income sufficient for slightly threadbare gentility. But Mrs Price has many children, a drunken husband and no way with a domestic budget. Her daughter explicitly recognises that her appalling Aunt Norris might well have made the income adequate. The reader truly attuned to the value of money should know that the Price family could live a more comfortable life than they do.

What should be enough is not enough for Austen’s extravagant characters. Willoughby in
Sense and Sensibility
has six or seven hundred a year, but ‘lived at an expence to which that income could hardly be equal’ (I. xiv). We are to realise that this income should be perfectly adequate for a genteel single man. When he hears that Edmund Bertram is due to get seven hundred a year from his living at Thornton Lacey, Henry Crawford thinks this is a decent amount, and is duly mocked by his sister, who wonders how he would feel if he were limited to seven hundred a year (II. v). Equally evident to the Regency reader would have been the wastefulness of Mr Bennet, a character always blamed less by us than by Austen’s own heroine. His estate brings an income of £2,000 a year, which should be enough for a surplus to be put aside for dowries for all his daughters. He himself wished that ‘instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum for the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived him’ (III. viii).

The obscurity to present-day readers of monetary value in Austen means that some hints are likely to be lost. When Edmund Bertram objects to the probable expense of making a theatre in Mansfield Park, his brother Tom replies sarcastically, ‘Yes, the expense of such an undertaking would be prodigious! . . . a whole twenty pounds.’ (In fact it costs a good deal more.) This would have been the annual wage of a labouring man with a family, or perhaps of one of those servants recruited to erect the stage. Then there is the vulgarity of Mr Collins in
Pride and Prejudice
telling Mrs Philips that Lady Catherine’s ‘chimney-piece alone had cost eight hundred pounds’ (I. xvi). This would have been the annual income of an affluent country gentleman. Later on in the novel, as Mr Collins walks across the park to Rosings with Elizabeth, Sir William Lucas and his daughter Maria, his companions are forced to listen to ‘his enumeration of the windows in front of the house, and his relation of what the glazing altogether had originally cost Sir Lewis de Bourgh’ (II. vi). Of course his knowledge must have come from Lady Catherine, and her money-obsessed boasts to her toadying auditor.

Certain markers of affluence might pass us by. No wonder, for instance, that so many characters talk and think about the ownership of carriages. The Austens themselves owned a carriage for a year or two in the late 1790s but then had to give it up.
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Mrs Dashwood is persuaded by Elinor to sell their carriage: ‘had she consulted only her own wishes, she would have kept it’ (I. v). Edward Copeland quotes John Trusler’s estimate in
The Economist
in the 1770s that an annual income of £800 would allow for the keeping of a carriage.
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The inflation of the last decades of the eighteenth century would have taken this figure to about £1,000 a year, so we can see how foolish Mrs Dashwood was tempted to be. The plot of
Emma
turns on Mr Perry’s planned purchase of a carriage; any genteel reader would have known just how affluent this must have declared him. And when Mrs Elton parades her provision of her carriage to ferry the Bates party to the ball at the Crown, she advertises her own membership of this economic elite.

Caring about love rather than money is admirable. When Catherine Morland declares, ‘to marry for money I think the wickedest thing in existence’, her hyperbole is naive but not foolish (
Northanger Abbey
, I. xv). Her delusion is the belief that others are above caring about money. Catherine is readily convinced that General Tilney does not care about money, except ‘as it allowed him to promote the happiness of his children’ (II. x). She knows nothing, but we know better from the next short sentence: ‘The brother and sister looked at each other.’ Having heard his ‘disinterested sentiments on the subject of money . . . more than once’ (II. xi), she thinks that he is ‘misunderstood by his children’. But anyone who professes not to care must be a hypocrite. ‘I hate money,’ announces Isabella Thorpe (II. i). It will not be long before she tells Catherine, as if in implied justification of her carrying on with Frederick Tilney, ‘after all that romancers may say, there is no doing without money’ (II. iii). Another mercenary young woman, Lucy Steele, tells Elinor Dashwood, ‘I have always been used to a very small income, and could struggle with any poverty for him’ (II. ii). This is cant. Lucy is ruthless about money – a fact nicely illustrated by her final theft from her sister of all her cash (III. xiii). We should not forget that Marianne Dashwood shares this supposed scorn of wealth with these two calculating girls. When Marianne is burbling about the ‘remarkably pretty’ upstairs sitting room at Allenham (just right, she is thinking, for a lucky wife), she regrets its ‘forlorn’ furniture. All it needs is to be ‘newly fitted up—a couple of hundred pounds, Willoughby says, would make it one of the pleasantest summer-rooms in England’ (I. xiii). The casual extravagance of this – all the worse as it is the imagining of wealth that will only come when Willoughby’s aunt dies – should stop us short. The two lovers have been thinking of spending twice Miss and Mrs Bates’s annual income on furnishing one small private room. One of Austen’s attentive first readers would surely have come close to despising Marianne when he or she heard her saying this, a woman possessed by her suitor’s extravagant spirit. It is further proof that those who declare themselves above caring about money are those who are most governed by it.

FOURTEEN

Why Do Her Plots Rely on Blunders?

‘Wretched, wretched mistake!’

Pride and Prejudice
, III. iv

Near the end of
Persuasion
, slowly, happily pacing the gravel walk in Bath, Anne Elliot listens to Captain Wentworth tell her of his feelings for her and explain his recent conduct. After Louisa Musgrove’s fall in Lyme, he says, he went to stay with his brother in Shropshire, hoping to loosen ‘by any fair means’ Louisa’s supposed attachment to him (II. xi). Edward Wentworth had asked after Anne, ‘asked even if you were personally altered, little suspecting that to my eye you could never alter’. The earnest hyperbole of a lover is more resonant than he knows. ‘Anne smiled, and let it pass. It was too pleasing a blunder for a reproach.’ It is a ‘blunder’ because it reminds Anne and us of what he said just a few months earlier, when he met her again after eight years apart. Her sister Mary told her that he thought ‘You were so altered he should not have known you again’ (I. vii). Anne smiles now because he so blithely contradicts what he has said before. She says nothing to show him that she knows this. The comparison with his ‘former words’ delights her, for his opinion must be ‘the result, not the cause of a revival of his warm attachment’. His love convinces him of her charms, not the other way round.