Jane Austen For Dummies (37 page)
Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
Victorian painter Richard Redgrave's painting,
The Governess,
done in 1845 and in the collection of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, touchingly depicts the governess's plight. In it, we see a young woman seated in a shadow at a piano where the music for “Home, Sweet Home,” sits on the music rack. Dressed in a heavy black dress with a modest white collar â it is clearly meant to suggest a nun's habits â she holds a letter in her hand and looks forlorn. But in the background, dressed in pastels and in the sunlight, are the young girls, not that much younger than she is, whom she teaches. The differences in the young ladies' situations and futures are clear in the painting as described. My first time seeing this painting was on a paperback edition of Charlotte Bronte's
Jane Eyre
(1847), the classic governess novel.
Being a Man in a Man's World
In This Chapter
Raising a gentleman
Discovering how property was kept in the family
Enjoying the privilege of being the eldest son
Keeping younger sons afloat
Witnessing social change
J
ane Austen lived in a patriarchal society: father knows best. So does husband. So does elder brother. So does younger brother. Although this was a man's world, it was a world that held specific expectations for gentlemen or men of the gentry, the class on which about Austen primarily focuses and the class that concerns us in this chapter. If a boy was the first son in a family, he was to the manor born! Only under the most unusual circumstances would a first son not inherit his father's property: Austen shows this in
Sense and Sensibility,
where the late Mr. Ferrars disregarded tradition and left his wealth to his widow (SS 1:3). More likely, he was raised and educated to succeed his father as the master of the family estate. This chapter escorts you through the expectations that his family had for him, explaining a young gentleman's upbringing, as well as the inheritance laws, limited professional choices, and changing nature of gentlemanly status. For men were beginning to attain the rank of gentleman in a new way: by working for it instead of inheriting it. Imagine that!
A gentleman was officially a member of the gentry or landowning, propertied class. (For more info on the gentry, see Chapter 2.) Granted, a man could
appear
genteel by being polite and dressing fashionably: think Wickham in
Pride and Prejudice.
But a true gentleman was a man of property. He owned a country house and estate. (For more on country house life, see Chapter 11.) And very likely, he inherited that country house and estate from his father, who inherited it from his father, and so on. Thus, being a gentleman in Austen's day required
only
inherited rank and wealth; a gentleman didn't have to be suave, smart, or sophisticated (what we, today, would expect in a gentleman) â though it was expected that he would be polite. Austen shows the irony of gentlemanly status in
Mansfield Park
through the character of James Rushworth. Sotherton, a country house and estate that dates back to Queen Elizabeth I (d. 1603), has been in the hands of the Rushworth family for generations, as the family portraits that line the walls attest. Does this make James Rushworth, Sotherton's present owner with an annual income of £12,000 â giving him £2,000 more per year than
Pride and Prejudice
's Darcy â an outstanding individual? No. For as the book's narrator tells us when she introduces the character, he has “not more than common sense” (MP 1:4). And as the novel proceeds, he actually shows little of that. But being a gentleman's only son, he's the new master of Sotherton and a gentleman in terms of class. And while his neighbor, Edmund Bertram, correctly observes that without the money and property Rushworth would be “a very stupid fellow” (MP 1:4), with inherited riches and rank, Rushworth, jerk that he is, is still a gentleman. In fact, because of his great wealth and status, Maria Bertram, though knowing he's stupid, agrees to marry him. After all, Rushworth is even richer than her father and also has a house in London! So Austen, shrewd observer that she was, saw that one didn't need smarts to inherit wealth and rank! But she didn't paint with a broad brush, either, and so she also shows us gentlemen who are rich, propertied,
and
clever: think Darcy.
In their infancy and early childhood, all the children were attended by nursery maids. From there, they went into the hands of the governess, who gave the boys in the family their preliminary education of reading and writing, as well as basic arithmetic. Special masters were brought to the home â sometimes from the nearest city or even from London â to teach the children music (the girls, especially) and dancing (the boys and girls). (The sisters could also learn drawing from a master.)
The character of Darcy, the only son in a genteel family, would've learned his dance steps at an early age so that he could participate in formal dances as he became older. In fact, in the 2005 film version of
Pride and Prejudice,
Darcy is shown at a dance looking around hesitatingly at the other dancers and painfully counting his steps. But neither his mother, Lady Anne, nor his father would've let him out of Pemberley without mastering the dances that gentlemen were expected to perform. (And in Volume 1, Chapter 6 of the novel, Sir William Lucas compliments Darcy's dancing.)
Among the gentry, male children especially knew their heritage and sense of family continuity from boyhood, and the eldest son knew that he would eventually inherit his father's estate, thus assuming the roles and responsibilities of his father when the father died. The practice of male inheritance occurred by tradition, not law, and almost every family adopted the tradition. Thus, Mr. Ferrars's decision in
Sense and Sensibility
to leave his wealth to his wife and give her control of what his sons receive is quite an exception to the tradition.
The gentry frequently sent their sons to boarding schools to start their Latin lessons and begin a more formal education. Jane Austen's father ran a private boarding school that accommodated a few boys at the Steventon Rectory, where Jane grew up. Here the boys studied algebra, geometry, some Greek, some English literature (Shakespeare and Milton, especially), ancient history (Greco-Roman), and geography. The last item was important because England was at war, on and off, in varied places around the globe during Austen's lifetime. They also learned French and became more proficient in their writing. Dancing lessons that started at home continued. Because dancing at balls and assemblies was the major way to meet and sustain a relationship with suitable young women for potential wives, the importance of dance lessons should not be minimized. In Austen's novels, Henry and Catherine (NA), Darcy and Elizabeth, and Bingley and Jane (PP) all meet at dances and end up marrying. (See Chapter 5 for more on dancing, and Chapter 6 for information on courtship.)
In
Sense and Sensibility,
the snobbish Robert Ferrars argues that his brother Edward is socially awkward because he attended a small private school (SS 2:14). Through this character, Austen voices the then prevalent debate of whether educating a boy at a small private school was better or worse than sending him to a “public school.” But if Robert Ferrars is any example of what a public school produces, Austen must have favored private schools: Robert, who attended Westminster, an elite “public school,” is affected, mean-spirited, impolite, selfish, and dumb â he's even outwitted by Lucy Steele. So much for his attending Westminster!
If a family preferred, they sent their sons to “public school.” Public school is a particularly English phenomenon and has a long history. These schools are actually private schools, and among the more famous are Eton, Harrow, and Rugby. They were founded by wealthy donors as “independent schools” so that ordinary boys (that is, the public) could learn Latin and Greek. But as time went on, these public schools started to take boys from wealthy and frequently aristocratic, even royal, families, and thus became what we think of as private schools. (Keep in mind that public education as we know it â government supported â only began in the 19th century in both England and America.) Austen had nephews who went to an elite Hampshire public school, Winchester College, which is the original English public school, founded in 1394. Her father attended the Tonbridge School in Kent as a boy.
From a school like Mr. Austen's, a boy could go to a public school or even the university. (Students could enter the university as young as 14.) Or he might even go directly from home tutoring to a public school, sometimes as early as age 7 or 8. It really depended on the family's preferences and boy's maturity.
Boys faced a tough regimen at public school and were expected to keep the proverbial stiff upper lip â even if that lip was on a 7-year-old. While at school, boys studied the following subjects:
Mathematics
History
Latin and Greek
English literature
Modern languages
Public speaking
Writing
Fencing
Networking
The last mentioned item was probably the most important part of the public school student's education: Boys met other boys of their own social class or higher, including sons of noblemen. Today we call this
networking.
The eldest son of a gentleman could possibly even meet the brother of the girl who would become his wife many years later. Boys made connections at public school that served them throughout their lives. Many boys attended the schools of their fathers, thus giving the student body generations of connections among families.
Because the eldest son was the son in line to inherit the family's property and title, a father might send his younger sons to boarding schools designed to prepare officers for the army and navy. Being an army or a navy officer meant having a gentlemanly profession. Two of Austen's brothers, Frank and Charles, went to the Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth. While Mr. Austen did not have a large estate to pass on, he did have the clerical living of Steventon and the parsonage that went with it: He gave them to James, his eldest son. (See Chapter 3.)