This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… Jane Austen Was Born on December 16, 1775Jane Austen wrote amid a peculiar peace: rents flowed, muskets hung idle, and reputations ruled, and in that context crafted Great Novels with each sentence a step in the moral education of the…
Jane Austen wrote amid a peculiar peace: rents flowed, muskets hung idle, and reputations ruled, and in that context crafted Great Novels with each sentence a step in the moral education of the leisured upper class…
And Henry Oliver has thoughts:
Plus there is:
I seem to have written a fair amount about Jane Austen here on this SubStack:
And there was still more over at Þe Olde Weblogge, Back in The Day… What do I think you should focus on as you read the Great Novels, in addition to simply absorbing them as Great Novels, doing what Great Novels do, and specifically these particular Great Novels? This: Start here: Register the oddity that the Bennets, the Bingleys, and the Darcys exist as they do—comfortably ensconced, with incomes large enough to allow idleness, conversation, and the occasional social humiliation—without either knights to enforce their will or factories to justify their rents? Two centuries earlier, their predecessors were and had armed men—warriors and magistrates with the power to deal out death and order. A century later, their successors would claim legitimacy through capital accumulation, organization, and skill. But in Austen’s England—call it 1795–1815—the landed gentry sits in a curious institutional interregnum: revenues flowing, status revered, power formalized mostly through habits and the yeomanry’s muskets, not through any visible contribution to production. And yet the world does not burn; there is no English August 4, 1789. Even though it is the era of the American, the French, and the Industrial Revolutions. This is a distinct oddity. A little less than a generation before in France, rumors of aristocratic conspiracy and tangible fiscal crisis fuse into what Lefebvre called the Great Fear: peasants arm themselves, châteaux burn, the records of feudal obligation go up in smoke, and the National Assembly preempts further conflagration by abolishing feudal dues. In England, the jacquerie does not arrive. Edmund Burke, admittedly, is terrified, writing of how “sophisters, economists, and calculators” will set in motion chaos that will destroy all socieal order but the English state’s fiscal capacity, legitimacy of taxation, and a less acute harvest-fiscal shock defuse any potential revolutionary moment. There is discomfort—enclosure riots, Luddite distress, food price spikes—but the social order that makes Austen’s drawing rooms possible remains intact. Austen’s fiction places its characters inside this remarkably bizarre historically peculiar equilibrium. Mr. Bennet of Longbourn—£2,000 yearly income—is not a technologist, not a warrior, not a manager of complex production. He did not make the land. He barely rouses himself to swat a fly. Yet something very real and quite hard to change binds 300 families to transfer roughly a third of their product in rent, tithe, and fees to the local proprietors. That “something” is an institutional package: property rights embedded in common law and custom; a state capable of taxation and public debt management without unraveling; parish poor relief as a pressure valve; and a social psychology that legitimates status via gentility, reputation, and the promise of paternal governance. Austen never lectures about this machinery. She shows it—by making it the water her characters swim in. Thus I at least find myself focusing on: First, the economic history lesson: Pure rents can persist when the fiscal state is strong enough to keep order, when the legal architecture makes land ownership the bedrock of claims, and when the opportunity set for the non-propertied is narrow enough that exit is costly. England’s Glorious Revolution settlement, the rise of the Bank of England, and the normalization of public borrowing make for a polity in which taxes can be levied, debts honored, grain imported when possible, and local violence minimized. A world safe for £2,000‑a‑year incomes—and for Elizabeth Bennet’s walks—rests on the boring triumph of administrators over zealots. No Necker, no immediate fiscal break, no August Night. But there is much more here:... Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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Jane Austen Was Born on December 16, 1775
Tuesday, 16 December 2025
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