Her times: a brief background - Jane Austen in Perspective

Britain, in Jane Austen’s lifetime, was actually at the beginning of the most far-reaching social transformation in her history to date, as industrialisation began to take hold. This was not apparent on any large scale at the time, and it is not of course a feature of Jane Austen’s novels – except perhaps in an oblique nod to it in Northanger Abbey, in General Tilney’s passion for the latest in domestic gadgets. Although George III reigned for the whole of Jane Austen’s life, her novels have come to be associated with what is known as the Regency period in Britain. The term ‘Regency’ strictly speaking describes only the period from 1811 (when the Prince Regent assumed power because of the insanity of his father, George III) to 1820, when the old King died and the Regent became George IV. But George, Prince of Wales, the Regent, from quite early in his youth eclipsed his father in the public gaze, predominantly through the notoriety he created with his affairs and his mistresses and the complications of his marriages, his gourmandising and profligate spending, the unrestrained extravagance of his behaviour. George was a paradox, for he was also a man of intelligence, charm and taste, and a patron of the arts whose legacy to posterity was significant. His father’s immense book collection, for example, he donated as the foundation of the British Museum Library and his penchant for building projects inspired the elegant and distinctive Regency style of architecture, although the eclectic, eccentric – even garish – Brighton Pavilion is probably the monument most associated with his memory. The Duke of Wellington once described him as ‘the most extraordinary compound of talent, wit, buffoonery, obstinacy, and good feelings, in short, a medley of the most opposite qualities, with a great preponderance of good – that I ever saw in any character in my life.’¹⁸

For almost all of Jane Austen’s adult life, England – with only a couple of brief lulls – was at war with France: from 1793 when revolutionary France declared war on Britain, to Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. Although there are no direct references to these wars in her novels, they provide the occupation for the sailors who appear in them: Captain Wentworth and Admiral Croft in Persuasion, for example, or William Price in Mansfield Park (going off like Jane Austen’s own brothers to be a midshipman). And they directly affected her own family members. In May 1803, when Napoleon broke the brief Peace of Amiens, Jane Austen’s brother Henry and his wife Eliza were nearly trapped in France, while her brother Frank was sent to be stationed in Ramsgate, in charge of the ‘fencibles’ set up to defend the coast against possible French invasion, where he met his future wife, Mary Gibson. Earlier, in 1794, the French revolutionary upheaval had sent her cousin Eliza’s husband, the Comte de Feuillide, to the guillotine.

In 1775, the year of Jane Austen’s birth, the great landscape painter Turner was also born, the American revolution began, and James Watt perfected his invention of the steam engine, the machine which would transform the landscape, both literally and figuratively, in the Victorian era. The French revolution occurred in her lifetime, Britain lost the American colonies, and the First Fleet sailed to Botany Bay to establish the new colony of New South Wales. These are some of the events that have shaped the modern history of the west, but it is also interesting to realise that Jane Austen’s short span of life overlaps those of many of the figures regarded as the giants of western culture. She shares a birthday with Beethoven, born five years previously, in 1770. Haydn and Mozart were composing, and died (1809 and 1791 respectively), during her lifetime. They were living composers when she was playing their works. Reynolds, Gainsborough and Constable were painting and Gluck, Rossini and Paganini were composing in this period, and Schubert was born in 1796, the year she began writing the novel which became known as Pride and Prejudice. Voltaire’s long life (he was born in 1694) ended soon after Jane Austen was born, and so, in the same year, 1778, did Rousseau’s, while her ‘dear Dr Johnson’, a writer and thinker she admired greatly, died in 1784. Wordsworth and Coleridge were established poets, so were Goethe and Schiller, while Byron, Keats and Shelley were all her somewhat younger contemporaries. If genius were a virus one could make a case that there was an epidemic of it in Europe over this period. There are certainly others not included here, not to mention the scientists, explorers and inventors working at the time.