After my recent visit to Basildon Park and seeing the exhibition for the "Pride and Prejudice" filmshoot, I reflected on my trip to Jane Austen's home in Chawton last year. Chawton is a picture postcard village and the Austen connection will doubtless ensure that it stays unaltered for a very long time to come.
But of course the outward shell of the buildings does not reflect the multiple social revolutions within the walls. As I toured the upper floor of the Austin house, I heard horses' hooves outside. Sure enough, there was a pair of well groomed animals, with their equally well groomed riders, walking at a relaxed pace down the one street of Chawton. No need to rush; after all, this was Sunday and these were animals kept as an expensive hobby.
In Jane's time, there would have been plenty of horses around, but as essential working beasts, supporting everything from farm work to deliveries of essential products to transporting people locally or nationally. The only horsepower used by most Chawton people today is the 200 bhp under the hoods of their BMWs as they set off for well paid jobs in the Thames Valley or up the M3 motorway to London.
As I came out of the Austin house, I heard the unmistakeable and very rare sound of a steam locomotive. The last steam locomotive ran on British Rail in 1968. Of course - it was the preserved railway which runs behind the row of trees near the house. Again, a form of transport which was the backbone of the Industrial Revolution for over a hundred years is now a tourist curiosity. The famous "Watercress Line" starts at Alton, less than two miles north-east of Chawton. Alton is a little gem of a historic English town, as much as Chawton is a little gem of a village. Appropriately, Alton station is both the terminus of the Watercress Line and the terminus of the real present day trains which carry commuters to London.
Jane Austen's life finished shortly before the railway revolution started in the 1820s in England. No wonder such a famous person traveled only short distances in her lifetime, as I noted in a previous blog entry. Before the railways, any long distance travel was laborious, expensive, time consuming, uncomfortable and often downright dangerous. Period films hardly convey the problems; the immaculately polished carriages and impeccably presented horses are covered by present day Health And Safety laws and legislation forbidding cruelty to animals.
The Railway Revolution was only one of multiple revolutions which separate us from Jane. The Industrial Revolution of which it was an integral part is obviously another. The social and sexual revolutions within Chawton are less visible than the flat screen TVs and the broadband internet links within the historic houses or the BMWs in the driveways. But they are longer lasting and more deeply felt than the ephemeral technologies around us.
Watching the glossy, but unsatisfying 2005 version of "Pride and Prejudice", some of the aspects of the social revolution are far more startling than the beautiful houses and costumes. The interesting, but inadequate "additional material" on the DVD outlined some of the aspects of social attitudes underpinning British high society of the time. Obviously the kind of potential husband with an income of five or ten thousand pounds a year was part of a very, very tiny minority of the British population. Yet a procession of such desirable beaus was paraded across the screen.
Most telling was the position of clergymen. It is almost unimaginable now, but in Jane's time a clergyman held one of the most lucrative and desirable professions in the land - comparable to a very high powered lawyer or City trader today. This is evident in the reference to one character getting eyewatering compensation for losing out on preferment for a parish. The power and wealth of the ordinary clergy was a direct reflection of the national power and wealth of the established Church.
Almost as revealing are the courtesies and behaviors between the sexes - with the young ladies bowing automatically before any gentleman and the care taken over the reputations of the ladies. It was not merely bad being "damaged goods", as Elizabeth's youngest sister threatens to become as she elopes to London. Being related to the damaged goods would be social disaster and spell the end to any hopes of a respectable marriage.
The discretion exercised between a potential "couple" rang a distinct bell. Of course - all that old Catholic teaching about "avoiding the occasions of sin". You should not just avoid sin, but any circumstances likely to lead you to sin. No doubt Jane Austen and all her characters would have been horrified at any insinuation of Popery, but here they were, taking traditional Christian precautions, ensuring that a young man and woman should not even have a private conversation by themselves and that they behaved with the utmost decorum.
Even the present day actors portraying these characters could see some of the advantages of such rules; people knew where they stood, how they should behave and how to interpret the almost invisible signals given by the opposite sex. Not much scope for the present day excuses of "I though she meant Yes, Your Honour".
So here we are after 200 years of English revolutions far more radical than either the French or Russian variety. As Dr Johnson so truly remarked, no sensible man would pay a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. Jane could hardly have comprehended our present day technologies, beyond anything imagined by the most visionary science fiction writers of her time. But she might have written an even more devastating satire on present day sexual behavior - "Nonsense and Insensibility" perhaps?
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