Beneath the genteel surface of decorous society, unrest simmered in the world – and works – of Jane Austen
While the novels of Jane Austen might suggest an endless schedule of middle- and upper-class gaiety, disgruntlement was rumbling beneath the surface across the country – and, during this tail end of the Georgian era, it often erupted in violent, sometimes lethal protest. Not that Austen herself completely ignored what was happening in the country beyond Barton Cottage and Netherfield Park.
For instance, her fifth novel, Northanger Abbey, refers to the unrest erupting in England’s larger cities. Although she writes about a riot as imagined by one of the characters, the rather visceral description depicts: “a mob of three thousand men assembling in St George’s Fields, the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood”. Whether real or imagined, Austen’s inspiration for this tableau does seem to have come from real-life events. The episode appears to
be a conflation of at least two separate disturbances that occurred prior to Northanger Abbey’s publication.
In 1808, perhaps 6,000 weavers from the local – and rapidly growing – textile industry in Manchester gathered in St George’s Fields to protest about the lack of a minimum wage in their trade. Eight years later, not long before Austen’s novel was published, another riot broke out in London at the end of a hitherto peaceful protest. During the violence, the rioters even planned to attack the Tower of London – so it was surely not mere coincidence that Austen’s imagined account of the unrest included the Tower being “threatened”.
Fighting for fair pay
The weavers’ protest in Manchester may have been violent but it did achieve a modicum of success. Though dragoons
were called in to restore peace (and one protester died during this response), the rioting was replicated in surrounding towns in Lancashire, and the weavers won a small concession in the form of a modest rise in their wages.
Some scholars of Jane Austen believe that the Gordon Riots of 1780 also contributed to her description in Northanger Abbey, though those events took place when the author was only four years old. In particular, these scholars cite her reference to a deadly disturbance during which “the streets of London [were] flowing with blood”, as well as an attack on the Bank of England.
The Gordon Riots were certainly bloody, a violent response to the Papists Act 1778, which aimed to reduce discrimination faced by Catholics. Anti-Catholic protests, led by the head of the Protestant Association, Lord George Gordon, exploded into chaos, with a week of rioting, burning and looting following in the capital, resulting in several hundred deaths.
Religion was also the cause of the 1791 Priestley Riots in Birmingham, in which non-Anglicans who supported the French Revolution were attacked and their property damaged or destroyed. Local taxation was the reason for the Bristol Bridge Riot two years later; the militia were called to quell this disturbance, and 11 people died.
Headstrong heroines
As well as including occasional references to events playing out across the country, Austen didn’t confine her social
commentary to the romantic politics of the gentry. Although by no means a polemical feminist, she put the disparity between men and women in the late Georgian period at the heart of her novels. They focus heavily on marriage, the ways women are defined by their husband, and what society’s expectations of women.
Women seldom owned property; they couldn’t vote; they were barred from higher education; and they were rarely able to access prestigious professions. Certainly, a middle-class woman who had to work was looked down upon. Despite the absence of women’s rights, Austen’s headstrong heroines are by no means shrinking violets in their marriages or in their pursuit of suitable husbands. Although she can’t give her female characters the rights that society has denied them, Austen does empower them with purpose and intent.
Women lower down the social strata simply had to work if their husband’s income wasn’t sufficient – those who were married, that is. Women were also required to maintain a functioning household, even when conditions beyond their control intervened. Such conditions arose in 1795, when a savagely cold winter brought the average temperature in the English Midlands down below –3°C. When the rivers thawed, great floods raged, so that crops didn’t grow, and animals couldn’t graze.
Angry women tackled the resulting food scarcity head-on in what was later dubbed the ‘Revolt of the Housewives’ or the ‘Food Riots’. Unscrupulous merchants took full advantage of the fact that demand far outstripped supply, pushing up the prices of items such as flour and meat – but the rioters weren’t having high prices dictated to them. They seized merchants’ goods and sold them at what they believed were true market prices, giving the proceeds to the merchants.
Such direct action was one way that women, with no electoral power, could effect change. But other people were also denied the vote in Austen’s time. Indeed, only 200,000 individuals – all of them property-owning men – had the vote. So a wave of vociferous reformers fiercely pushed for a large-scale extension of electoral suffrage – in the face of equally implacable opposition.
Did you know?
Initial goverment responses to the Gordon Riots were weak and badly planned. But when the army was called out to protect the Bank of England on 7 June 1780, the result was mass bloodshed – around 285 protesters were shot dead.
Boasting nearly 30 MPs among its ranks, the Society of the Friends of the People filed a petition in the House of Commons in 1793, demanding electoral reform. This was heavily quashed in a parliamentary vote by MPs concerned about the redistribution of power to the masses after the French Revolution four years earlier. And while that Society was trying to put the subject of reform on the political agenda, organisations such as the Hampden Clubs and the London Corresponding Society, whose more radical proposals included extending the vote to all adults, met with even greater opposition.
It wasn’t until the Reform Act of 1832 that the growing metropolis of Manchester gained any representation in the Commons. Unsurprisingly, then, the protection of entrenched interests in Parliament, and the means by which this was legitimised by a very limited notion of democracy, poured extra fuel on the bonfire of disquiet that flared among large swathes of the population.
Problems at the pinnacle
While the fabric of wider society was being unpicked, unease also proliferated right at the pinnacle of the British elite. While George III bounced between bouts of madness and lucidity, the threat of a constitutional crisis always hung heavy in the air. In 1788, a bill was passed in the Commons that would see the king’s eldest son, another George, become regent. The king emerged intact from that episode of mental ill health, and the bill was withdrawn before it had progressed through the House of Lords.
By 1811, though, his insanity had become permanent, and another regency bill successfully negotiated its way through Parliament. With the Care of King During His Illness etc Act 1811, George III was replaced as head of state by his son, who eventually became King George IV on his father’s death in 1820.
By then, Jane Austen had also died, passing away three years earlier, in 1817, at the age of just 41. Her great success and renown arrived only posthumously. Yet her legacy proved to be not only her artfully plotted novels, populated by enduring characters, but also her ability to depict – albeit subtly – the late Georgian period as it approached the crossroads of change.
The industrial age cometh
Austen’s writing did little to reflect the vast changes taking place in Britain’s cities
Jane Austen’s novels might be set on rolling country estates and in well-heeled towns and cities, but the Industrial Revolution was well underway during her lifetime.
Although more commonly associated with the early Victorian age, industrial development was progressing at lightning speed during Austen’s lifetime, and the largely rural economy that had dominated the countryside was being undermined.
Towns and cities grew rapidly, their skylines soaring and their populations booming. The nature and pace of everyday life was irrevocably changed within a generation, and the world became driven by steam, not horse.
Who knows what themes Austen’s novels might have touched on had she been born 50 years later, or if she’d grown up in the dirty heart of a city dominated by factories and chimneys. As it is, her works remain lasting memorials to a fading, possibly more innocent era.
Explore more content from week three of our Regency course:
War and Conflict, with Dr Lizzie Rogers – watching time 11 mins
Uncertainty and unrest: the madness of the Regency period – reading time 8 mins
Peterloo: the story of a massacre – listening time 37 mins
1816: the year without summer – reading time 9 mins
Regency Britain: An age of war and revolution – reading time 6 mins
The Napoleonic Wars: everything you wanted to know – listening time 1 hour, 3 mins
The Peterloo Massacre: what did it achieve? – reading time 6 mins
