The Story of Sergeants
Jane Austen as a History Source
One of my favorite books is Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), which heralded the advent of a new historical school: that of subaltern history—essentially the history of sergeants, not generals. Davis used court records and other documents to reconstruct a mid-16th-century narrative lost to history. Davis worked amid what historians had come to articulate as the cultural turn, a period when post-Vietnam War historians combined anthropology, sociology, and history to create ethnographic studies. Such treatises endeavored to offer a more informed context against which the rise of specific personalities and movements can be projected and better understood.
I do commend the book (not the film) to you. However, Davis’s treatment of assumed identity and its ultimate unmasking is not central to this essay. The conclusion of Professor Davis’ Preface sets the stage for my contemplation about how readers can use Austen as a historical source revealing nuances of English life several levels below the rarified atmosphere inhaled by the gentry.
I would figure out why Martin Guerre left his village and where he went, how
and why Arnaud du Tilh became an imposter…and why he failed to make it
stick. This would tell us new things about sixteenth-century rural society. …
And I would have the rare opportunity to show an event from peasant life
being reshaped into a story by men of letters.
&&&
Turning to the works of Jane Austen, we find many places where the author used her observations as a member of the gentry, albeit rising from modest roots as a clergyman’s daughter, to add context to her writing. Austen created a world, as I have noted before, that was utterly familiar to her audience. Her readers did not require explanations of her characters’ actions nor the tremendous social questions that roiled British society during the Napoleonic period (~1792-1815). War, slavery, the Industrial Revolution, social mobility (both upwards and downwards), and religion were the topics against which the good Lady cast the movements of the persons populating her created worlds.
I believe Austen can offer us insights into the world in which she lived. She neither lived in nor wrote in a vacuum. She was not alone in using fiction to consider great questions. Mary Shelley, whose The New Prometheus explored (nearly 70 years before Nietzsche wrote Parable of the Madman) the question of Man displacing God in the universal hierarchy through the Industrial Revolution.
Consider the question of the Church. Austen watched her father, a Church of England priest, interact with a panoply of characters who surely passed through or brushed against the Steventon parsonage. She stored those encounters to call them up later when her writing demanded it.
Likewise, Austen was undoubtedly aware of the echoes of The Great Awakening, a purification movement led by George Whitefield, an associate of the Wesley brothers, who, in a series of evangelical meetings (1740) in the American colonies, put a stick in the spokes of Church dominance in American colonial politics. Then there were the activities of the Wesleys, as mentioned earlier—John and Charles—who pointed to the inherent corruption of a state-run church. Today embodied in the Methodist conference, their Georgian movement and its followers were derisively referred to as Dissenters. They were barred from English political life and the gentry, itself dependent upon government goodwill. The Dissenters instead founded their own schools and went into the one avenue of advancement open to them: trade.
Might Charles Bingley’s father or grandfather have been a non-conformist?
However, back to religion.
There were second and third sons of gentle birth trapped by Britain’s hidebound grip on male primogeniture. If ODC had never gotten together, unentailed Pemberley would have ended up in the hands of Georgiana Darcy’s husband through coverture. Austenesque writers frequently give Darcy the “out” about never marrying, saying that Georgiana’s first son would inherit, except her husband would have grabbed the treasury first. Without an heiress, sons of the aristocracy (see Colonel Fitzwilliam) often availed themselves of the government employment service, the Army and the Church of England.
Like the aristocracy, the Church was not merit-based. And, while a man could advance in rank on his own merits, the Army sold all officer slots from coronet to colonel.
But, this is not the place to examine the process through which incompetents ended up commanding battalions.
Looking at the Church of England: I must, as Churchill said, If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons. This brings me to William Collins. We need to look beyond his shortcomings. How could an unconnected man like Collins, short on intellectual fortitude, find a pulpit after his ordination? Yet, work he must lest he gently starve while waiting for Mr. Bennet to meet his Maker.
A more accomplished man with higher status like Edmund Bertram, admittedly strained by the denial of his preferred living and being forced to accept £100 a year, could afford not to scramble if his father or brother was willing to feed and house him. Collins had no such avenues open to him. Who would grant him a living and why?
Desperation would have amplified Collins’ natural sycophancy, much as Austen did, to allow him to be appealing to Lady Catherine. Likewise, we must assume that Austen did not create the personality of Lady Catherine from the whole cloth. We can infer that both Collins and Lady Catherine were examples of personality archetypes. I would imagine that she heard her father wax poetic about this curate or that benefactor.
Austen does offer us a different portrait of churchmen once we gain some distance from the oleaginous Collins. I always find much to admire in the upright nature of Edward Ferrars. His honorable character, exemplified by his seeking to fulfill his promise to Lucy Steele and to sacrifice his happiness, allows us to see the decent sort of man who most likely inhabited many livings across the Isles.
Ferrars was Austen’s first published portrait of a Man of God.
And, we must recall that Austen returned to type with Bertram in Mansfield Park after she swung her ink-dripping blade in Pride and Prejudice. I could imagine either man spending all night at the bedside of a failing parishioner with none of the self-righteous pretensions that Collins would have expressed to inflate his weak ego. None of these men are Bishops, Canons, or Archbishops. That was left to Trollope in Barchester Towers.
I took the Ferrars/Bertram model to heart when developing the character of Edward Benton (Bennet) in The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey, the first book in the Bennet Wardrobe series. While I was not reconstructing a hidden discourse, I sought to apply the same techniques Austen employed as she shaped her characters. I cast Benton in the reformist as opposed to Dissenter mode, assuming that he would conduct his ministry in whatever parish he could win, never seeking to advance himself to the detriment of his congregants and community.
&&&&
Before you enjoy an excerpt from The Keeper, the Always Austen collective is conducting its semi-annual giveaway. Please visit the blog and enter before March 12, 2023. There are all sorts of books (print, e, and audible) and gift cards available!
Click here to visit:
https://alwaysausten.com/2023/02/12/welcome-to-the-very-first-always-loving-austen-giveaway/
Now, please enjoy the excerpt from The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey.
&&&&
This excerpt is © 2017 by Don Jacobson. Any reproduction in any manner, either electronic or print, without the author’s written consent is prohibited. Published in the United States of America.
This excerpt is an extract from a letter from Benton to Mary Bennet dated July 23, 1812. In it, he describes an encounter in Boston with the 77-year-old John Adams, lately the second President of the United States, at a reception for Harvard students at the Boylston house. Here we see Benton expounding the ideals of a young man deep in faith and social consciousness.
&&&&
“We were seated together by chance near a beautiful bay window overlooking the back garden when Mr. Adams spoke to me.
He turned his gaze upon me and asked, “So, Mr. Benton, you are attending Harvard College. But, you are a stranger in a strange land, trapped here by the circumstances of war. Why are you here? Are you a spy? Are you some agent provocateur for your masters at St. James? Explain yourself.”
I recalled that Mr. Adams had been the most accomplished lawyer in Massachusetts during colonial days. One only has to read his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law or his defense of the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre to understand that he has a mind like a steel trap, ready to snap shut and extinguish anyone who prevaricates. Thus, my answer was frank.
“Sir, my family is of gentle circumstances but without significant resources. A distant relation prevailed upon Bishop Hobart to sponsor my studies at the College. I hope to take Holy Orders upon graduation and then return to Great Britain once the war has ended. My ministry will be amongst those in the middle of a social upheaval we call ‘The Industrial Revolution.
“I am no radical. I believe that the government in Westminster is held firmly in the grip of landowners who have no concept of how the world is changing around them. Great Britain will always grow things, to be sure. But new and prodigious wealth will be found in the mines, looms, and forges springing up across the Midlands.
“Land powered the Agricultural Revolution. But, Mr. Adams, people will power the industrial one. And those souls will need spiritual support and advocates to take their part.”
The Old President leaned back in his chair. Dropping his chin onto his chest and planting his stick on the floor like a monarch would the scepter of state, he stared at me as if he would bore a hole into my soul.
“You sound like my son John Quincy. He is always going on about how the world will move on the legs of millions and be powered by steam. You also remind me of my revolutionary brother Mr. Jefferson. Always the bright-eyed idealist.
“The world has made much of the break between us. That was politics. He and his family have always been dear to Mrs. Adams and me. We have begun exchanging letters again these past several months thanks to the machinations of Dr. Rush and my wife.”
Links to books mentioned in this column:
The Return of Martin Guerre
https://www.amazon.com/Return-Martin-Guerre-Natalie-Zemon-ebook/dp/B01GX4QD1G
The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey
Thanks for the opportunity to win some amazing prizes!