What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (16 page)

Some of her characters acknowledge poverty. It is the arch-snob Emma Woodhouse who pays ‘a charitable visit’ to ‘a poor sick family’ in
Emma
(I. x). The account of the visit seems suspended between endorsement and satire: Emma is ‘very compassionate’ and has ‘no romantic expectations of extraordinary virtue’ – even if she does afterwards embark on some sermonising to Harriet. Yet there is no doubt of the ‘wretchedness’ of what she has seen. She has given money as well as counsel, and soon a child comes from the cottage with a pitcher to get broth from Hartfield. Later, when walking with Harriet and trying to divert her protégée’s mind from thoughts of Mr Elton, she talks of ‘what the poor must suffer in winter’ (II. i). The rich are expected to relieve the poor. In
Persuasion
, Anne Elliot is ashamed to know that, with the Crofts installed in Kellynch Hall instead of her father and sister, ‘the poor’ are sure of ‘the best attention and relief’ (II. i). Having returned to Kellynch from Uppercross to stay with Lady Russell, Anne herself engages in more than one ‘visit of charity in the village’ (I. ii).

What is poverty? There is Mrs Smith in
Persuasion
: ‘She was a widow, and poor’ (II. v). She rents two rooms in a cheap part of Bath. Unable to walk, she relies on a servant (Mary) whom she shares with all the other occupants of her lodgings. She has to be rung for. Mrs Smith’s very poverty seems to put her on a conversational level with those to whom Austen’s characters do not usually talk. When Anne visits her after the concert, she already knows much about the gathering ‘through the short cut of a laundress and a waiter’ (II. ix). Suddenly you catch a world of chat and information passing beneath the hearing of genteel characters. ‘Did you observe the woman who opened the door to you, when you called yesterday?’ she asks Anne (II. ix). Anne of course noticed ‘no one in particular’ – when in fact it was Nurse Rooke, who observed her closely, knowing much that was said about Mr Elliot’s relationship with her. Yet Mrs Smith’s status, which has made her the conversational companion of members of the lower classes, is temporary. Her circumstances have been reduced by her husband’s improvidence and Mr Elliot’s nefariousness, and like some character from Victorian fiction, she is restored to deserving affluence at the end of the novel.

Another character reduced from gentility is Miss Bates in
Emma
. Mr Knightley explicitly says ‘She is poor’ (III. vii), but she and her ageing mother, living in a couple of upstairs rooms, themselves employ one maid-of-all-work, Patty, who cooks and cleans.
Emma
is a novel which lets you feel the embarrassment – or Hobbesian carelessness – of those who are luckily rich and are living close to those who are unluckily poor. Austen inserts some entirely unnecessary evidence of poverty in Highbury into one of Miss Bates’s rambling monologues. She is trying to remember when she first heard that her niece had accepted Mrs Elton’s arrangement of a governess’s post, and recollects Mr Elton being called out of the room by ‘old John Abdy’s son’ (III. viii). We find out from Miss Bates, ever particular, that the old man is a bedridden former clerk to the vicar (her father), and that she visits him. His son, an ostler at the Crown, is after parish relief for him, and must persuade Mr Elton into dispensing it.

The crucial distinction is between those who employ servants, and those who do not. Almost all the named characters who belong to the latter category in Austen’s novels are themselves servants; to her first readers, as habituated to the presence of servants as the novelist, they would not have been invisible at all. Indeed, her novels rely on the readers ‘seeing’ these servants in a way that we have forgotten to do. Her characters are wise not to forget that they are often observed by servants. Colonel Brandon recalls how his planned elopement with Eliza, the woman he loved who was promised in marriage to his brother, was scotched by a servant. ‘The treachery, or the folly, of my cousin’s maid betrayed us’ (II. ix). It is a foolish person who does not shape conversation to take account of the presence of servants. In
Pride and Prejudice
, Elizabeth and the Gardiners are relieved when Mrs Bennet withdraws to her room in the wake of Lydia’s elopement, ‘for they knew that she had not prudence enough to hold her tongue before the servants, while they waited at table’ (III. v). Hearing the account of her mother’s reactions when the news about Lydia was first broken, Elizabeth cries out that every servant must have known ‘the whole story before the end of the day’. And when the servants know, so does the world. They are self-interested monitors, who will not necessarily protect those whom they watch. Lady Catherine de Bourgh boasts of having sent two servants with her niece to Ramsgate (‘I am excessively attentive to all these things’), but they do not manage to prevent the planned elopment (I. xiv). In fact, the scheme is facilitated by a diabolical servant, Mrs Younge, the former governess to Miss Darcy

The reader who supposes that Austen’s fictional servants form a class of devoted, silent attendants will miss many tricks. The fact that servants are also a problem is behind Mr Bennet’s remark to his just-engaged daughter Jane that she and Bingley are ‘so easy, that every servant will cheat you’ (III. xiii). Servants have their own interests. It would have been odd for Austen’s novels not to imagine difficulties with servants, for her own letters are full of them. Writing to her niece Anna in 1814, Aunt Jane pauses from detailed advice about her would-be novel to tell her important news. ‘Your Aunt Frank’s Housemaid has just given her warning, but whether she is worth your having, or wd take your place I know not . . . She leaves your Aunt, because she cannot agree with her fellow servants. She is in love with the Man—& her head seems rather turned’ (
Letters
, 108). She goes on to detail her relations and previous service. Her letters sometimes hint at the shifting balance of power between servants and their less affluent employers. ‘Mary’s promised maid has jilted her, & hired herself elsewhere’ (
Letters
, 24). Mary is her sister-in-law, evidently outbid for the services of a maid who knows her market value. The dismissal of servants is significant news. ‘Mrs Digweed parts with both Hannah & old Cook, the former will not give up her Lover, who is a Man of bad Character, the Latter is guilty only of being unequal to anything’ (
Letters
, 145).

Fellowship with servants is a warning sign. In
Sense and Sensibility
, cheerful, vulgar Mrs Jennings, mother of a minor aristocrat, is happy enough to travel with ‘her maid’ and ‘take comfort’ in her ‘gossip’ rather than enjoy the company of the Dashwood sisters (III. x). In
Mansfield Park
, it is a nice touch that Tom Bertram, recently returned to England from a year in the West Indies, writes to the gamekeeper before he writes to his brother (I. xii). Back in the household, he crassly insists on talking to Fanny and others about one of the horses ‘and the opinion of the groom, from whom he had just parted’ (I. xii). His sisters recruit their servants to their own cruelties. When the ten-year-old Fanny arrives at the great house of her aunt and uncle, they are the supporting cast to Maria’s and Julia’s unkindness. ‘Her elder cousins mortified her by reflections on her size, and abashed her by noticing her shyness: Miss Lee wondered at her ignorance, and the maid-servants sneered at her clothes’ (I. ii).

It is a nice piece of sociological realism on Austen’s part that the character who complains the most about servants in her novels is the impecunious ‘slattern’ Mrs Price in
Mansfield Park
(III. viii). Within minutes of Fanny arriving after an eight-year absence, her mother is moaning about the failings of Rebecca, complaints with which her daughter Susan readily falls in (III. vii). Soon Rebecca herself is squabbling with eleven-year-old Sam over carrying Fanny’s trunk. Fanny discovers that Rebecca is ‘the upper servant’, there also being ‘an attendant girl’ of ‘inferior appearance’ called Sally (III. vii). When Mrs Price does think to ask about the lives of her sisters at Mansfield Park, it is a route to her favourite topic of discontent. ‘How did her sister Bertram manage about her servants? Was she as much plagued as herself to get tolerable servants?’ (III. vii) Then she is away, into a disquisition: ‘the shocking character of all the Portsmouth servants, of whom she believed her own two were the very worst, engrossed her completely’. She has taught not only fourteen-year-old Susan but even five-year-old Betsey to complain endlessly about Rebecca. ‘I am sure the place is easy enough,’ observes Mrs Price, giving us an indication why the spatial and economic proximity of servants to their employers is a likely cause of mutual disgruntlement. Rebecca is ‘never where she ought to be’, which is not the narrator’s information but a report of the constant complaint. Even in these cramped lodgings, she cannot ever be in the right place. It is her ordeal rather than her fault. ‘Whatever was wanted, was halloo’d for, and the servants halloo’d out their excuses from the kitchen’ (III. viii).

Rebecca is a fright, as we know when Fanny sighs with relief that Mr Crawford has not sampled ‘Rebecca’s cookery and Rebecca’s waiting’ (III. x). Fanny has to survive on surreptitiously purchased biscuits and buns, for she is not equal to ‘Rebecca’s puddings, and Rebecca’s hashes’, served on ‘half-cleaned plates’ with ‘not half-cleaned knives and forks’ (III. xi). When Mrs Price is walking out with her family on a Sunday, her greatest possible torment is to see ‘Rebecca pass by with a flower in her hat’ (III. xi). This is the one day when she has not pretence of power over her and the thought that she has a better life is just too aggravating. When Mrs Price goes for her weekly walk on the ramparts she meets acquaintances for news and ‘talked over the badness of the Portsmouth servants’. It is almost the only topic on which she is able to fix her mind. When she is first told of her niece Maria’s presumed adultery, she barely has time to hope that it is not true, ‘it would be so very shocking!’, before she starts noticing that Rebecca has not cleaned the carpet and recruiting young Betsey in her laments (III. xv). Austen’s first readers, themselves reliant on servants, would have been able to relish the background drama of Mrs Price’s exasperation at her servants.

For the more privileged, there is the pleasure of complaining about other people’s servants. In
Emma
Mrs Elton condemns ‘Donwell servants, who are all, I have often observed, extremely awkward and remiss.—I am sure I would not have such a creature as his Harry stand at our sideboard for any consideration. And as for Mrs. Hodges, Wright holds her very cheap indeed.—She promised Wright a receipt, and never sent it’ (III. xvi). In
Persuasion
, Mary Musgrove complains to Anne that her mother-in-law’s upper house-maid and laundry-maid ‘are gadding about the village, all day long. I meet them wherever I go’ (I. vi). Her own servant Jemima has told her that ‘they are always tempting her to take a walk with them’, but luckily, according to Mary, Jemima is ‘the trustiest, steadiest creature in the world’. The character who thinks that their own servant is wonderful belongs with the character who thinks that all their servants are useless. For of course Mrs Musgrove tells Anne that the aforementioned Jemima, Mary’s nursery-maid, ‘is always upon the gad’. ‘I can declare, she is such a fine-dressing lady, that she is enough to ruin any servants she comes near.’ She invites Anne to report ‘any thing amiss’ that she observes herself. By allowing these confident confidences to mirror each other so exactly, the novel invites us to imagine both employers beguiled by their own servants – critics who are really dupes.

The reader is equally invited to recoil from the character who is unpleasant to servants. General Tilney in
Northanger Abbey
gets angry with his servant, William, for not opening a door for Catherine when she rushes in to their Bath apartment. If Catherine had not intervened, he might have lost ‘the favour of his master for ever, if not his place’ – even though he is entirely blameless (I. xiii). The General’s anger is always just under the surface in the novel, and here we are asked to suspect how he might regularly vent his fury on his servants. In
Sense and Sensibility
a whole political economy of employer–servant relations is satirically implied by Mrs John Dashwood’s recollection of her mother being ‘clogged’ by the requirement in her husband’s will to pay annuities to three ‘old superannuated servants’ (I. ii). ‘Twice every year, these annuities were to be paid; and then there was the trouble of getting it to them; and then one of them was said to have died, and afterwards it turned out to be no such thing.’ The detail mentioning how wearisome it was even to have to convey the funds is beautiful. Even better is the farce of wishfulness implied by the rumour of the death of one of these hapless ex-retainers, sparking the evident disappointment of the family when he or she was discovered to be living still. It was ‘unkind’ of her father to require the payment, judges a woman who has all the kindness of a Goneril. The utterly mean-spirited Mrs Ferrars is legally obliged to pay the annuities, and we are left in no doubt that she would otherwise have given the former servants nothing. In which case, the unfortunate ex-employees would almost certainly have had to eke out their final years on poor relief.
²
Being considerate to ex-servants is always virtuous, and in
Sense and Sensibility
the virtue is rather obviously rewarded. Colonel Brandon manages to find his sister-in-law Eliza, an impoverished fallen woman, because of his paternalistic care. ‘Regard for a former servant of my own, who had since fallen into misfortune, carried me to visit him in a spunging-house, where he was confined for debt; and there, in the same house, under a similar confinement, was my unfortunate sister’ (II. ix).