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: Second, the psychology lesson: Austen draws a moral economy of the upper class that polices itself not through brute force but through reputation, self-command, and ritual—balls, visits, proposals, letters, and, crucially, shame. The sanction mechanism is not the dungeon; it is the cold shoulder at the assembly rooms. Her heroines learn to see from another’s point of view—Lizzie reads and rereads Darcy’s letter; Emma finally perceives what she has done to Miss Bates; Elinor survives by feeling deeply but acting prudently. This is Enlightenment psychology filtered through drawing-room empiricism: sympathetic identification as moral education. The virtuous are those who can look about with prudence. The rakes—the Wickhams, Willoughbys—are the high‑T merchants of immediate gratification (but Austen does not give them any full comeuppance!). The colonels—Brandon, sober, wounded, reliable—are low‑variance, high‑responsibility equilibria. It is comedy, yes, but comedy with a spine: preference formation under social constraint. Third, the marriage market as an allocation mechanism in a constrained gender-economy. Austen’s plots are portfolio optimization under legal and informational frictions. Women possess human capital—wit, judgment, beauty, network position—but face primogeniture, entail, and limited labor-market access, and so they have to actively woo beneath the pose of bashful maidenly modesty. Men’s wealth is sticky—land, commissions, trade profits—but reputation can be fragile. The equilibrium outcomes—Lizzie with Darcy, Jane with Bingley, Marianne with Brandon—are not random. They are achieved through signal extraction in repeated interactions. Letters are the costly signals; elopements are negative shocks; public dances are noisy marketplaces where type and temperament are inferred. Good outcomes require moral education: learn to see others’ utility functions, correct for your own biased priors, and then choose. Fourth, the absence of English jacquerie is telling. England’s inequality is visible—Longbourn’s park versus the Lucas’s scrap, Lady Catherine’s condescension about west-facing windows—but there are some compensating institutions: parish relief, evangelical movements, the yeomanry, and a national mythos of liberty that convinces the poor that change will be gradual and ordered. From this angle, Austen is evidence for a broader thesis: legitimacy and capacity can stabilize an unjust distribution long enough for technological change—the steam and factory age—to reassign both rents and moral narratives. By the time capital justifies wealth, rentier gentility has already enjoyed a century of grace. Fifth and last, Austen’s contribution to the “modern novel” is itself part of the Enlightenment’s institutional-psychological learning. She perfects free indirect discourse—the technique that moves between narrator and character seamlessly—and thereby teaches readers to inhabit other minds without forgetting the social frame. That is more than literature. To understand choice you must understand belief formation, emotion, and status anxiety, all under constraint. Austen’s achievement is to make you feel Marianne’s blaze and yet endorse Elinor’s calm; to register Lizzie’s anger and then to accept Darcy’s accounting; to notice Emma’s meddling and finally to choose kindness. There is, of course, a darker coda. The rents that sustain Longbourn are part of a global portfolio—naval power, colonial extraction, sugar, and cotton soon to come—fully entangled with lash and cash. The genteel surface depends on distant violence and poverty. But Austen does not dwell there. However, we must. But step back: These are Great Novels. A great novel transforms perception, widens empathy, and rewards rereading. Criteria ossify into checklists, but we can note:
The test is emotional and cognitive: do we feel seen, think harder, and keep turning pages without manipulation. And I see one thing as key to Austen’s innovativeness and her greatness: it is her absolute mastery of the subtle merging of narrator and character consciousness. When done well (Austen is canonical), it lets us inhabit other minds while maintaining the social frame, producing empathy and irony in the same breath. That widening of perspective is both a literary achievement and a moral education. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel <https://archive.org/details/riseofnovel0000ianw_i1p5>, I think, puts it best here:
A Great Novel is not a formula. It’s a durable machine for seeing—built from language, structure, and point of view—that changes how we apportion attention and judge motives, and that keeps yielding new returns as our own context shifts. If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail… #jane-austen-was-born-december-16-1775 |
| ||||||||||
No comments:
Post a Comment