What Jane Austen Read
by Patrick Farrell

INTRODUCTION

This presentation — What Jane Austen Read — is a pretty courageous undertaking for me. I only have the required twelve semester hours of English for my BA. So I come to you, self-taught — an autodidact.

Even if I was appropriately credentialed to comment upon literature if I was smart I should feel very tentative in my presentation. Because the full title of my undertaking should be — What Jane Austen read — and what I think about it.

Now, I’m enough of a product of the 19th and 20th centuries to find the role of autodidact rather romantic. You know the idea, kick aside the musty old academics and their musty old books and ideas and take a fresh look at the world.

But having lived long enough to have had my own ox gored a few times I have developed empathy in the ox goring department. And indeed as one reads the authors that Austen read or commentary upon them ones reads caution about being too sure of either the originality or the correctness of one’s thoughts.

Samuel Johnson in writing of Milton says, “Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should doubt their conclusions.” Macauley, the 19th century man of letters was even more specific in his caution. In reviewing a 1843 biography of the essayist Addison he wrote about the book’s author; “The truth is, that she is not well acquainted with the subject. No person who is not familiar with the political and literary history of England during the reigns of William III, of Anne, and of George I, can possibly write a good life of Addison.”

In a way I think of today’s effort as sort of my senior thesis in an English major I never pursued. I plan to continue reading what Jane Austen read and with your indulgence I would propose to come back here a year from now and present my masters thesis and at that time you can conduct my masters orals. And I promise at that time I’II be more familiar with William, Anne, and the Georges.

Having issued my disclaimer I do want to tell you that I have been diligent and virtuous in my application to my task. Over the past two years I’ve read almost 12000 pages related to this paper.

Now I know some of you are familiar with the fiction of the period and I know you are saying to yourself “Big deal! So he read three novels by Fanny Burney and one by Richardson.” Not true! Those novels only seem that long. And I want to reassure you that I read material from multiple genres. The one thing I avoided to this point was reading much secondary sources or rather 20th century criticism of the literature of the period preceding Austen. So how did I proceed?

Well, the first step was easy and already done for me and for you. R. W. Chapman, the editor of the Oxford Press edition of Austen’s work has done our preliminary work for us. In Volume V one finds an appendix entitled: “General Index of Literary Allusions”. In this appendix one finds every reference to a printed work (including plays) made by Austen in either her novels or letters. And in Volume VI, covering her juvenilia there is also an appendix entitled “Authors and Books”.

Some of what she read we would know in general from the novels. Certainly she read the fiction of the times as she parodied the Gothics in Northanger Abbey, a passion for theater figures in Mansfield Park, and a passionate regard for poetry or poetry as an affirmation of a passionate sharing of interest with another is seen in Sense and Sensibility and in Persuasion.

But there are some other genres that she was exposed to that we don’t think of immediately — remember my title is not something like the influence of 18th century novelists on Jane Austen’s fiction, but rather what Jane Austen read. Let me cover those other genres first.

THE BODY OF MY TALK

In the 18th century accounts of travels were popular with obvious good reason as travel was not common. Travel narratives of the times were not our modern ones influenced by 2Oth century anthropology, sociology and liberal thought in general. They were not ruminations about what we can learn from these people we encounter about what it means to be human. Rather the dominant theme was strange customs and behaviors of other Europeans and the truly horrific and ungodly behavior of non-Europeans.

Social Science was not value free!

History was read by both sexes. Here I’ll remind you of Catherine Morland’ s opinion of what she termed, “…history, real solemn history.” In talking to Henry and Miss Tilney, she says, “I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing; and hardly any women at all-it is very tiresome.”

Certainly Jane Austen was exposed to her share of history. She probably read parts of Hume’s multi-volume History of England as a child. And it seems reasonable to me to assume by the time Northanger Abbey was published she had read some of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Holy Roman Empire. (Vol. 1, l776; Vol. 2 & 3, 178l; Vol. 4,5,6; 1788). Gibbon is an author famous for scandalously ironic statements about the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church and its clergy. And I think that we find Catherine Morland echoing some of Gibbons thought in what I’ve quoted.

In Vol. 1 of Decline and Fall referring to the rule of a second century emperor Gibbons writes; “His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

And let me give another example of his sardonic and ironic style. In speaking of a theoretical dispute concerning the nature of punishment in the afterlife he writes

“…both parties were agreed in the belief of an intermediate state of purgation for the venial sins of the faithful and whether their souls were purified by elemental fire was a doubtful point, which in a few years might be conveniently settled on the spot by the disputants.”

Austen by age thirteen for fourteen begins to develop her own ironic style in writing her own History of England (see juvenilia). It was entitled The History of England from the reign of Henry IV to the death of Charles I. And it was inscribed, “By a partial, prejudiced and ignorant Historian”.

The work opens with the following description of the reign of Henry IV. “Henry IV ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399, after having prevailed on his cousin & predecessor Richard II, to resign it to him & to retire for the rest of his life to Pomfret Castle, where he happened to be murdered. It is to be supposed that Henry was married, since he had certainly four sons, but it is not in my power to inform the Reader who was his Wife.”

Certainly the historical writing of the time does not follow our contemporary rules of objectivity. It was unabashedly partisan, the story was important and history had a moral. There were definite good guys and bad guys.

[Here an aside. I have 16 years of Catholic education that I am grateful for and perhaps may even be eternally grateful. Throughout school I was exposed to Catholic martyr stories. The brave Jesuit priest was grabbed by the evil Protestant soldiery of Elizabeth, dipped in molten oil, broken on the rack, etc. and still he did not, recant. In my current reading I was exposed to Foxe’s The English Martyrs. Same gory stories, different heroes and villains. Brave and upright parson Jones preaches the gospel until the evil troops of the Catholic bishop grab him from his home, parade him through the streets, torture him and still he did not, ….].

I think works like Foxe’s point to something that we all know; Austen must have read far more than we find recorded in her fiction and letters. But all genres are represented to some degree in Chapman’s lists. And one such genre is the sermon.

Remember in Pride and Prejudice Mr. Collins the minister comes to visit his relatives the Bennets and as part of a normal evening he is asked to furnish part of the entertainment by reading to the company:

“Mr. Bennet was glad to take his guest into the drawing room again and when tea was over, glad to invite him to read aloud to the ladies. Mr. Collins readily assented, and a book was produced; but on beholding it, (for every thing announced it to be from a circulating library) he started back, and begging pardon, protested that he never read novels. Kitty stared at him, and Lydia exclaimed. Other books were produced, and after some deliberation he chose Fordyce’s Sermons. Lydia gaped as he opened the volume, and before he had, with very monotonous solemnity, read three pages, she interrupted him…”

The reading of sermons and devotional material was certainly popular with some, if not with Lydia and Kitty. In his appendix on Literary Allusions Chapman lists a number of religious writers that Austen mentions. And in one letter of her collected Correspondence she writes “I am very fond of Sherlock’s Sermons and prefer them to almost any.” Chapman notes that Sherlock’s collected sermons ran to 5 volumes.

And I’d want to point out something here that is pretty obvious when we think about it, but may escape our attention if we do not focus on it. When we talk about reading sermons we are not talking about reading theology. We are not even talking about reading bible commentary. A sermon of whatever length deals with our relation to a personal deity, our duty to him and our duty to others because of our and their relation to Him. Certainly these were the themes of popular works such as Fordyce.

The titles of Fordyce’s books were Sermons to Young Women and The Character and Conduct of the Female Sex. Apparently Fordyce in writing his advice to young women had a direct line to the deity and God had a lot of ideas about how women should behave that were a lot like those of Fordyce’s buddies down at the club.

Here as in other places in her work I think Austen is clear that perhaps men’s understanding of women might be influenced by men’s wants and desires to uphold the status quo. You may remember a section in Persuasion; Anne Elliot and Captain Harville are talking about men and women, love and constancy, time passing and physical separations. Harville says: “…I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”

Ann answers, “Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything” (234).

Perhaps Lydia was right in ignoring or being put off by Mr. Collins and Fordyce’s advice. Perhaps she was a proto-feminist and not just a rebellious misguided teenager. This view would gain some support from Mary Wollstonecraft. In her 1792, Vindication of the Rights of Women she devotes six pages to Fordyce. In a chapter entitled, “On some of the Writers who have Rendered Women Objects of Pity Bordering on Contempt” she writes: “Dr. Fordyce’s sermons have long made a part of a young woman’s library; nay, girls at school are allowed to read them; but I should instantly dismiss them from my pupil’s if I wished to strengthen her understanding, by leading her to form sound principles on a broad basis; or were I only anxious to cultivate her taste… These discourses are written in such an affected style, that were it only on that account… I should not allow girls to peruse them.”

THE ESSAY

Another genre that we don’t immediately think of when thinking of leisure reading is the essay. But it appears to me that the 18th century reader would immediately think of the essay. I remember in my twelve hours of undergraduate literature or perhaps even earlier in high school I was taught a typology of the essay: instructional, familiar and persuasive. The first was a straight forward description of a process or event; the second might be a light humorous rendering of something and the last exhorted or argued a position.

I think it was the last, the persuasive essay, arguing moral or political action that was the specialty of the great English essayists of the 1700’s and their periodicals: The Rambler, The Idler, The Spectator, The Tattler. The history of these publications is interesting (again I promise you more next year). The Spectator appeared (if that is the word) five days a week, Johnson’s Rambler appeared twice weekly. I assume it had something to do with the number of writers involved. Almost as soon as they were published they were bound together into sets. And both initially and as sets they served a function of moral instruction in manners, appropriate behavior, cautionary tales, etc.

Remember when our heroine in training Catherine Morland returns home having been thrown out of Northanger Abbey by General Tilney — separated from her beloved Henry Tilney she mopes around the house. Her mother wrongly diagnosing her malady says: “I hope, my Catherine, you are not getting out of humor with home because it is not so grand as Northanger. I did not quite like, at breakfast, to hear you talk so much about the French bread at Northanger.” And Catherine replies: “I am sure I do not care about the bread. It is all the same to me what I eat.” Bringing the conversation to an end her mother tells her: “There is a very clever Essay in one of the books upstairs upon much such a subject, about young girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance-“The Mirror,” I think. I will look it out for you some day or other, because I am sure it will do you good.”

In talking of the essayists of the 1700s Johnson is the only one I’d recommend as reading for entertainment. I don’t think he is an acquired taste — anyone who loves language will respond to the good Doctor, but there are some dangers in how one approaches him. And just like Shakespeare has been ruined for many by a boring introduction in high school, Johnson usually suffers by his introduction in a college literature survey course.

Johnson’s Rambler’s publication schedule of a 1700 to 2000 word essay arriving twice a week is, I think, the ideal way of approaching him. Johnson’s style is dense and is such that it commands at least passive involvement. Its not a good idea to read several of his essays at one time. Addison and Steele’s Spectator came out more frequently and was lighter in its content. They did share a structural similarity. Each one of the essays in the Spectator is preceded by an untranslated aphoristic quote in Greek or Latin. Johnson also begins with an aphorism from Latin.

Perhaps for literary purposes we should call the 1700s the Age of Aphorism. Boswell’s life of Johnson is so readable because of the aphorisms. And its a funny thing here, you read these people, get really involved and you start coining your own aphorisms.

Let me give you a few examples from Johnson:

1. In speaking of the progress of civilization he say, “As manners grow more polished, with the knowledge of good, men attain likewise dexterity in evil. Open rapine becomes less frequent, and violence gives way to cunning.

2. In a letter to Boswell on the death of his father and his consequent inheritance he says, “begin your new course of life with the least show and the least expense possible; you may at pleasure increase both, but you cannot easily diminish them.

3. Here’ s one pertinent to our very meeting, “We must not estimate a man’ s powers by his being able or not able to deliver his sentiments in public.

Anyone thinking of a famous Austen aphorism yet? How about, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Let me say a little more about Johnson. The way that the essays enlighten and entertain is Johnson’s appreciation of individual psychology and the articulation of the individual with society. In some ways Johnson is always the same. That is, his approach to any particular problem that he poses involves the application of the same moral principles. As a psychologist he writes about the factors which allow our reason and our better selves to be overwhelmed, ignored or out argued by impulses and appetites. He writes about the way in which universal human failings get in the way of our discharging our obligations to ourselves, to others, and apparently more important in the 18th century than now, to God. Remember he is writing for an audience for whom original sin is not a metaphor, but a concept of considerable explanatory power.

The modern reader, you, I, will find ourselves agreeing and disagreeing with Johnson’s sociology. Johnson cautions the Rambler’s readers and his friend Boswell to live within their means so that they do not become impoverished. Poverty is an evil because it dramatically reduces the ability of an individual to do good and increases the temptation through want of yielding to evil or acquiescing in it.

This sociology we find insightful and agree with, but what appears to be Johnson’s unquestioning assumption of the inherent superiority of the gentry and nobility rankles. And I don’t know if we can cut or how much slack we can cut him here. He was a man of his times, but even Boswell criticized him for excessive regard for the titled.

And of course his big sin-his ideas on the place of woman and the psychology of women. Here he is probably with the prevailing attitudes of his times. But it still seems like cheap shots and as you read him you get the feeling that probably even for his time he was not comfortable with seeing women in any but the most traditional categories and roles. His sociological analysis doesn’t address all power relationships, some remain invisible to him.

THE NOVEL

I started out talking about the genres of Travel Narrative, History, Sermons and Essays because they are not the first things we think of when we think of leisure reading. So now, lets move on to the novel.

And here I would assert that there is nothing to make you appreciate Jane Austen more than reading her predecessors and her contemporaries. Sir Walter Scott is a partial exception and I’ll address him in a while.

Our received wisdom is that Samuel Richardson was her favorite author and his Sir Charles Grandison her favorite work of fiction (apparently she wrote a dramatization or play of it).

I read his Pamela and his Clarissa and I just couldn’t finish the seven volumes of Sir Charles Grandison. Imagine my glee when I came across Johnson’s opinion of Richardson as a story teller.

In replying to a comment from a dinner partner to the effect that Richardson was “tedious” Johnson replied, “Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.” Sentiment here meaning the moral message.

What Johnson said about Richardson was my reaction to all the fiction that preceded Austen: the novels were incredibly long ( evidently editors are a 20th century innovation); many of the famous ones, e.g. Gulliver’s Travels are political tracts disguised as novels.

But most damning for the modern reader is the technique. In Pamela there is a 40 to 50 page section in which Pamela offers her protector and future husband a critique of John Locke’s theory of early childhood education. Radcliff in her novels has the habit of sticking in poetry here and there and unlike songs in the Broadway musicals they don’t forward the action. And some, despite repeated reading, don’t seem to comment upon the action. The epistolary novel of course has its limits as to point of view, particularly the difficulty of the omniscient narrator to comment in any fashion. I have used here two terms the contemporary college educated reader is familiar with; omniscient narrator and point of view. In reading the fiction of the 1700 one realizes that the authors are truly developing a new form and that they are concretely, right before our eyes wrestling with the problems of telling an arresting and vivid story

But the worst were the Gothics. Oh, those poor girls. Endless attacks on their chastity by hooded strangers. For the first time in my life I began to appreciate the impulse behind the contemporary discipline of Cultural Studies.

Oh, those poor girls in The Monk, in The Italian; in Clarissa, and in Pamela. They are just objects, they have no power. All conspire against them, even those who by family or class ought to be their allies.

How could young women continue to read this stuff. Then the ah-ha, duhh experience — because that is the way they experienced their world and their options.

To continue graduate studies in English without attentions to gender and class was to be complicit in their oppression by society and by those 18th century authors, male and female.

Fifteen years ago when I first began to read secondary sources on Jane Austen one of the first books of criticism I read was Susan Morgan’s In the Meantime. Morgan points out that in Austen for the first time the moral, indeed, the complex moral center of the novel resides in the women. That’s obvious enough when you read Austen. But an appreciation of the monumental nature of that achievement or leap forward only comes with reading what came before. But in good conscience I can not recommend to you the journey of discovery I took.

THE ENDING

We’re drawing to end here. Let me refer back to my conceit of this as my senior honors thesis. Right now in saying how Jane Austen got to write the way she did I’ll take refuge in that old explanatory concept — The ZEITGEIST, the spirit of the times. Something was in the air that Austen and Sir Walter Scott were breathing. Listen to these quotes from Scott’s 1814 novel Waverly. I think they are reminiscent of Jane Austen. And trust me they don’t sound like anything I read which was published prior to Austen and Scott.

(1) “There is no better antidote against entertaining too high as opinion of others, than having an excellent one of ourselves at the same time” (62).

(2) “But to Waverly [the hero of the novel], Rose Bradwardine possessed an attraction which few men can resist, from the marked interest which she took in everything that affected him. She was too young and too inexperienced to estimate the full force of the constant attention which she paid to him” (368).

(3) “Rose tripped off demurely enough till she turned the first corner, and then ran with the speed of a fairy, that she might gain leisure, after discharging her father’s commission, to put her own dress in order, and produce all her little finery — an occupation for which the approaching dinner hour left but limited time.

The Very End Ending

The only unequivocal thing I can say about what Jane Austen read was that almost all of it was informed by a very clear morality. This morality was a traditional Christian Biblical morality. Cultural relativism, situational ethics, etc. were not dreamed of, or at least not addressed. Potentially every behavior could be conceptualized in moral terms and stories as Johnson said of Richardson had a clear moral message. And fiction like the essay, the travel narrative, sermons and history was good for moral instruction.

In a sense it sounds like the motion picture Hayes code of the 1930. Bad people can not be shown in an attractive light and they must come to a bad end. We all have heard of the ill repute of the theater around Austen’s time and I have always assumed it was because of the actors themselves. But if you think about it good theater in some way has to humanize the bad people or else its melodrama. And as I reflect upon a lot of what I read of the fiction that was the problemr; it depicts good and bad in conflict with good predestined to win.

Copyright © 2001 by Patrick Farrell

Dr. Farrell received his Ph.D. in clinical developmental psychology from Washington University of St. Louis in 1974. His dissertation deal with age related changes in moral reasoning. For Christmas in 1978 he received a paperback set of Jane Austen and finished all six novels by Ground Hog Day. Being no fool he acknowledged Jane’s genius in depicting moral reasoning and behavior; and recognizing a good thing when he saw it he has presented papers at various psychologocal conventions calling Jane’s achievement to his peers attention.