English society, French Revolution, and Jane Austen

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“Restraint, control and and propriety were vital if society was not to blow up in their face.”

—Roy Porter, England in the Eighteenth Century

It is important to stress that the society Jane Austen was writing about — and of which she was a loyal and critical member — was one which was essentially based on landed interests, the sacredness of property. At least since John Locke affirmed that “Government has no other end but the preservation of property” (in The Second Treatise of Government, 1690), the “rights of property” were continually stressed until they no longer appeared as the arbitrary and repressive ideology of the ruling propertied class but rather as a law of nature – “that law of property, which nature herself has written upon the hearts of mankind” (William Blackstone, 1793). Throughout the eighteenth century the general order and stability of society and the “rights of property” were not only inseparably linked: they became regarded as identical. […]

In an essay discussing “Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law” in the eighteenth century (in Albion’s Fatal Tree) Douglas Hay examines the various ways in which the populace was persuaded, or forced, to assent to the “rule of property”. […] Clearly terror was not the most important — or successful — way of maintaining the structure of authority which arose from property and protected its interests. The bonds of “obedience and deference” had to be maintained and perpetuated in other, subtler ways. What could never be exacted by legalised brutality might be won by a paternalistic mode of behaviour on the part of the landed class, by graciousness, justice, generosity, mercy. In this way, ideally at least, social control in the eighteenth century might appear as a “spontaneous, uncalculated and peaceful relationship of gratitude and gifts” and the whole system “a self-adjusting one of shared moral values, values which are not contrived but autonomous”. To maintain that this ideal was in fact how society worked and was bonded together necessarily involved a great deal of mystification, varying degrees of self-deception and inter-colluding habits of seeing — or not seeing — and selectively distorting and censoring aspects and conditions of society as they actually were. And of course the façade if harmonious relationships between the ruling propertied class and the populace was often a very thin and transparent one.

There was social order and stability, but it was always precarious and insecure. Just as there were regular hangings, there were frequent if often ineffectual riots. But above all of course there was the frightening example of the French Revolution. The Gordon riots of 1795 in London indicated the existence of plenty of easily-inflammable latent violence and discontent. (In a riot in October 1795, a window of the royal coach was broken, to the accompaniment of cries of “No King!”) The dream of an unshakeable, “natural” social order composed of benevolent propertied authority and loyal deferential populace came to seem increasingly threatened, increasingly unreal (to Jane Austen among other people). It was impossible complacently to assert that anything like the French Revolution couldn’t happen here. It all too obviously could.

This is why, for one thing, there was an increasing emphasis on the importance of property, in maintaining social peace and order in late eighteenth-cetury England. (An example of this intensification of emphasis is the way in which Burke reversed Adam Smith’s assertion that property was dependent on social order and made social order dependent on property — thus further “naturalising” and prioritising property.) To this extent Jane Austen is in agreement with the dominant ideology: her proper heroes all have landed property and her heroines need a propertied man (Persuasion as always the significant exception).

But in addition, and equally important, there was a new emphasis on the need for good manner and morals among the propertied class. Since they did not rule by police and force but rather by system of deference and obedience, they had to be exemplary — in every sense. […] Property was a necessary, but not sufficient, basis for a stable and orderly society. Decorum, morality and good manners — in a word, “propriety” — were equally indispensable. The one without the other could prove helpless to prevent a possible revolution in society. […] For Jane Austen, to secure the proper relationship between property and propriety in her novels was thus not the wish-fulfilment of a genteel spinster but a matter of vital social — and political — importance. That is why it is in many ways irrelevant to argue whether she was a relatively mindless reactionary or an incipient Marxist. She did believe in the values of her society; but she saw that those values had to be authentically embodied and enacted if that society was to survive — or deserve to survive. She indeed saw her society threatened, but mainly from the inside: by the failures and derelictions of those very figures who should be responsibly upholding, renewing and regenerating social order. 

Bad manners were not simply a local and occasional embarassment to be laughed at: they could be syptoms of a dangerous sickness in her society which could ruin it from within — through neglect, transgression and omission rather than by mobs and the guillotine. That there are so few of her characters who seem fully qualified to act as the necessary maintainers of the society of her novels is a measure of her concern and incipent pessimism, a pessimism actualised and visible in her last work.

— Tony Tanner, Jane Austen, Macmillan, 1986, pp. 16-18