1802: Jane Austen and Her World 200 Years Ago

WHEN, AT THE BANQUET in Quebec in 1998, Clifford Collier asked me whether I might give the keynote speech the 2002 JASNA conference in Toronto, it darted into my head with the speed of an arrow--not that Clifford must marry nobody but myself--but that it would be fun to take the year 1802 and describe what was happening in Jane Austen's life and in the wider world, as a kind of prelude to the more detailed investigations into different aspects of this world by subsequent speakers. My thinking was that by focusing on one year out of Jane Austen's forty-one, I would set myself interesting, and of course necessary, parameters. 1802 is a pivotal year in more ways than one. Historically, it means the Peace of Amiens, that one-year lull in the fighting between Britain and France that otherwise lasted through almost the whole of Jane Austen's adult life. Though hardly anyone even the time thought it heralded a lasting peace, still, the novelty of ceasefire gave the year a flavour of its own that I see as a kind of standing on the brink, a kind of collective holding of breath before plunging in to fight to the death--or regime change, as we would say today. Then, the year comes roughly the midway point in Jane Austen's conscious years. It was twelve years since she had attained adulthood, and she had twelve years of life left. So it is a useful year to do a spot-check on social developments as her world evolved around her: the more so, as it so neatly happens, because of the date itself. There are some aspects of what we refer to as Jane Austen's world which we recognise as late eighteenth century in character, others that belong to the early nineteenth century, anticipating developments to come: here we stand on the cusp. And finally, on a personal level for Jane Austen, I shall argue, the events of 1802 conspired to set her path for life. It is certainly not easy for us to recapture Jane Austen's life in 1802, putting out of our minds that was to follow, but this is what I want us to try to do--to share her own ignorance of the future. How did she experience that year in her life, not knowing what the future held? It was famously one of her fallow years as far as writing was concerned as well as a year of emotional upheaval. In 1802 she was in her 27th year, with her 27th birthday falling just before the year's close. We know that 27 was for her a momentous age, after which a woman might feel, in that horrible phrase, left on the shelf. In two books already written--I should say drafted, for we cannot of course know what was added in revision--she had remarked upon that age. Charlotte Lucas, at the age of twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome feels all the good luck of attracting a proposal of marriage, albeit from a wearisome man whose attachment to herself she knows must be imaginary (PP 123). The very much younger Marianne Dashwood has no doubt that 'A woman of seven and twenty ... can never hope to feel or inspire affection again, and if her home be uncomfortable, or her fortune small, I can suppose that she might bring herself to submit to the offices of a nurse, for the sake of the provision and security of a wife' (SS 38). And in Persuasion, written long after its author had passed that watershed and might be expected to consider, as we almost do here today, that 27 is enviably youthful, the heroine of 27 has lost her bloom, her marriageableness in the eyes of her community, and the habit of dancing that is the public expression of that marriageableness. As 1802 opened, Jane Austen was embarking on her first full year as a permanent resident of Bath, after the many disruptions of the move from Steventon, the long stay with the Leigh Perrots while they were homeless, the house-hunting and the extended visit to Devon while the house they eventually settled on was redecorated. Only in the late autumn of 1801 had they moved into 4 Sydney Place, on which Mr Austen had taken a three-year lease. …

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