The political economy of Mansfield Park: Fanny price and the Atlantic working class

Textual Practice

Volumn 12, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 459-488

  Easton, Fraser ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Common right economy; Custom; Maria Edgeworth; Plebian resistance; Raymond Williams; Royal dockyards at Portsmouth

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249259413     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502369808582319     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. For a reading of Fanny as a genteel rebel, see Peter Smith,'Mansfield Park and the world stage', The Cambridge Quarterly, 23 (1994), pp. 203-29.
2. Bridget Hill on the benefits of the common right economy for women in Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (1989) (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994).
3. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 178.
4. Subsequent references to this work will appear paren- thetically. For evidence of Austen's opposition to slavery, see Michael Steffes, 'Slavery and Mansfield Park: the historical and biographical context', English Language Notes, 34, 2 (December 1996), pp. 23-41.
5. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 21.
6. The first phrase is from Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (London, 1808), Vol. 2, p. 583
7. The second, slightly modified, is from Jane Austen, Emma, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 271.
8. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (2nd edn) (1963) (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 392.
9. See also Linebaugh, 'Atlantic mountains', p. 108.
10. Wedderburn participated in London radical circles in the 1810s and 1820s and drew explicit parallels between African slaves and British labourers; see Iain McCalman (ed.), The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert Wedderburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), p. 114.
11. Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 3-35.
12. Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)
13. Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (New York: St Martin's Press, 1979)
14. Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism, and Fiction (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1983)
15. Exceptions to this consensus include David E. Musselwhite, Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 16-42
16. Roger Sales, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (London: Routledge, 1994).
17. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 603 and passim, on the interpenetration of these two languages in the Spithead mutiny (normally viewed as a Jacobin outbreak),
18. see Joseph P. Moore, ' "The greatest enormity that prevails": direct democracy and workers' self-management in the British naval mutinies of 1797', in Colin Howell and Richard J. Twomey (eds) Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour (Fredericton, NB: Acadiensis Press, 1991), pp. 80-5.
19. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 96. Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically.
20. David Aers, 'Community and morality: towards reading Jane Austen', in David Aers, Jonathan Cook and David Punter (eds) Romanticism and Ideology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 126-7
21. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 238.
22. Rule, The Vital Century, p. 79 (Defoe is cited on the same page).
23. William Cobbett, Rural Rides, ed. G. D. H. Cole and M. Cole (London: Peter Davies, 1930), p. 34; first published in Cobbett's Political Register in December 1821.
24. Edward W. Said is persuasive when, in his comments on Sir Thomas' return to Mansfield, he argues that Austen 'synchronizes domestic with international authority', linking both to 'actual rule over and possession of territory' ('Jane Austen and empire', in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 87). One implication is that Sir Thomas' 'Mansfield life' is no less centred on 'business' (p. 171) than his Antigua one.
25. J. M. Neeson, 'The opponents of enclosure in eighteenth-century Northamptonshire', Past and Present, 105 (1984), p. 116.
26. Deidre Le Faye (ed.) Jane Austen's Letters, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 202.
27. Neeson, 'The opponents of enclosure', pp. 123, 124.
28. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 196.
29. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon, ed. John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 86-7.
30. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 'The boundaries of Mansfield Park', Representations, 7 (1984), pp. 138, 135.
31. The new emphasis by tenant farmers on the class division between themselves and labourers was angrily remarked upon by Cobbett, Clare and other observers of agrarian improvement in the early nineteenth century. See Cobbett, Rural Rides, p. 65
32. Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics, pp. 51-2.
33. On the recent affordability of white cotton, which allowed housemaids to dress 'above' their station, see Christopher Kent,' "Real Solemn History" and Social History', in Monaghan (ed.) Jane Austen in a Social Context, p. 96.
34. Thus in 1773 recourse to the commons was seen as an incentive for 'idleness' and the refusal of 'work'; cutting off access to such land would serve as a 'com- pulsion' to 'honest industry' (cited in Rule, The Vital Century, p. 89); while in 1794 another writer claimed that 'use of common land by labourers operates upon the mind as a sort of independence' (cited in Neeson, 'The opponents of enclosure', p. 134). For a fictional defence of low wages, see Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent and Ennui, pp. 190-1.
35. The employment figures are from Rule, The Vital Century, p. 126.
36. Cited in Linebaugh, The London Hanged p. 381.
37. Austen, Northanger Abbey, p. 147.
38. Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, ed. W. J. McCormack and Kim Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 130.
39. Trilling, 'Mansfield Park', p. 213;
40. Kingsley Amis, cited in B. C. Southam, Jane Austen: 'Sense and Sensibility,' 'Pride and Prejudice,' and 'Mansfield Park,' a Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 246;
41. Tanner, Jane Austen, p. 156.
42. Betty Rizzo, Companions Without Vows: Relationships Among Eighteenth- Century British Women (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994).
43. Describing 'the domestic service hierarchy', Bridget Hill puts 'waiting women, ladies' maids, and companions' at the top (above even 'housekeepers and cooks'); all were 'upper servants' {Women, Work, and Sexual Politics, p. 132). What Rizzo shows, however, is that both the experience and the literary treat- ment of companionship underline its disadvantages, especially in terms of an unsheltered exposure to arbitrary power. This is briefly acknowledged in Mansfield Park when 'the house-keeper' is able to 'avoid' Mrs Norris' complaints about 'supper' - while Fanny cannot (p. 242).
44. Rizzo, Companions Without Vows, p. 6.
45. According to Clarkson, Burke made a similar point in support of the abolition of the slave-trade in 1789: 'Nothing made a happy slave but a degraded man' (Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, Vol. 2, p. 81).
46. The first phrase is from Jane Collier, An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (London, 1753).