income.
In one area of course Jane could enter the marketplace: through her writing, though not easily without male sup port. Henry advocated his sister’s work, made connections with publishers and saw her novels through the press. With his help she speculated in publication by not selling most of her copyrights outright, the unfortunate exception being Pride and Prejudice, which would have brought her most money. She loved the ‘pewter’ she earned: ‘I have written myself into £250 which only makes me long for more,’ she wrote. Just after she penned the last words of Sanditon, she received nearly £20 for the second edition of Sense and Sensibility. It gave her a ‘fine flow of Literary Ardour’.
But her earnings were always modest. Especially unfortunate was the decision not to sell copyrights of her later novels to her final publisher John Murray: as a result, she earned little from Emma, since the losses on Mansfield Park’s second edition were set against its profits. It had not been a successful speculation.
In 1815 the battle of Waterloo ended the Napoleonic Wars and England was at peace for the first time in twenty-two years. After initial rejoicing and jollity came inevitable disappointment. The effect of peace on the economy was huge: financial and social adjustment, even depression, wracked the country. Through Henry, Jane now had firsthand experience of market volatility: his wartime prosperity was over. In 1815 the Alton bank was already struggling: it collapsed in March 1816. The rest of Henry’s businesses failed in a welter of debts. He lost his home and possessions and was declared bankrupt.
Henry Austen as Rector
With her other siblings, Jane showed no distaste at Henry’s murkier dealings, for patronage, nepotism and dependence on the great were part of the family background. Little blame seems to have been cast on the always charming brother, though he took his family down with him. Especially hit were Edward and uncle James Leigh-Perrot, the first owing £20,000 and the second £ 10,000. Jane herself lost £26. 2s, part of the profits from her writing. After their father’s death, the Austen brothers had clubbed together to provide a small income for their sisters and mother. After the crash, little of this could be paid.
Despite such huge losses, Henry’s optimism and vitality were undimmed. He returned to his original life-plan and took Holy Orders. Jane Austen was impressed by his resilience, a quality she gave in spades to her speculator Mr Parker.
Can speculative capitalism be good?
Jane Austen wrote Sanditon in the winter and spring following the famous dark summer of 1816. Away in Switzerland under the gloom, Mary Shelley invented her monster and Byron his vampire. The pall over Europe was caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora more than 7000 miles away. The volcano spewed out gas and particles that hid the sun; temperatures dropped, crops were blighted. Hunger was widespread.
In England landowners who had flourished under wartime protectionism made the situation worse by banding together to pass corn laws against cheap imports, ignoring the principle of free trade and the needs of a hungry population. No accident that the poor who come to the attention of Tom and Diana Parker required subscriptions from the better-off to keep afloat.
Jane Austen’s characters are all in various ways defined by money. Indeed, her novels’ tendency to dwell on the economic side of life startled the poet W.H. Auden, who described them in his poem as revealing
so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.
‘Letter to Lord Byron’
In her fiction we learn that the dowager has her jointure, the widow her allowance, the heir his expectations, the rich girls their dowries, the poor their scrambling needs, the warriors their prizes and the peacetime officers their half pay. We know who is landed and who funded by means of investments in government stock, and whose fortune comes from trade or an ancestor’s clever speculation. In short, we know what most characters are worth.
There is much to spend on. Emma displays a traditional economy whose basic commodities are produced locally and circulated: apples and the hind-quarter of a pig travel from the wealthy to the poor, and gifts of meat, fruit and craft are exchanged among equals. Yet there are also particulars of fashionable and leisure items brought in from outside the region. These come to the fore in Sanditon; added to which, even the most necessary foodstuff is here bought and sold for money. Once self-sufficient from his own estate, Mr Parker now pays for much of the produce and meat he needs in this new commercial economy.
Regency England was afloat with consumer goods through ‘the demand for everything’, as Mr Parker puts it. Fictional Sanditon, like the real seaside resorts, was full not only of new and unfinished buildings but of all manner of expensive things that marked status and answered whims: dresses, lace, straw hats, shoes, fancy boots, bonnets, gloves, books, camp stools, harps and carriages. The whole town is for sale and to let, and visitors are consumers who must make it flourish – Charlotte feels obliged to buy something when she enters the local subscription library and trinket shop which sells ‘all the useless things in the world that could not be done without’.
Etching by Thomas Rowlandson from Poetical Sketches of Scarborough, 1813
Even people may become saleable items: Sidney Parker, the most dashing of the Parker siblings, is a useful attraction for displaying girls and their scheming mothers. The rich ‘half mulatto’ Miss Lambe, an heiress from the West Indies, is desirable as both a paying visitor and as prey for one of the town’s needy bachelors – such as Sir Edward.
Glorious British victories of the Napoleonic Wars were speedily commercialised – war tourism to Waterloo was established almost before the dead were cold; their bones were collected and sold as souvenirs. The names of battles dwindled from being patriotic achievements to become adornments, embellishing new houses, terraces and squares of peaceful England. By 1817, the naval battle of Trafalgar, which had meant so much to Jane Austen through her sailor brothers, had lost cultural, even decorative, caché through relentless exploitation. It had been replaced by the more recent Waterloo, the bubble of whose fame would likely be popped long before Mr Parker was dead. As it is, he regrets that, just a year before Waterloo, he had named his new property Trafalgar House and saw it become almost instantly out-of-date.
Although four of the complete novels – viz Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Persuasion – have financial mismanagement at their core, uniquely in Sanditon the topic of national economy is widely discussed, as it was throughout England in these years. Debates raged in pamphlets and books, in taverns and private homes, concerning profit and loss, capital and property, wealth and paper credit.
In his pioneering work of capitalist theory, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith stressed the idea that the pursuit of self-interest can benefit society generally. Yet many doubted that the greed and extravagance of the rich would benefit those below them, that wealth inevitably trickled down and that capitalist activity and consumption were good for all. Satires noted that the extravagant and dissolute lifestyle of the Prince Regent in his elaborate pavilion in Brighton failed to improve the lot of the town’s deprived inhabitants.
James
