The Gentry and Farming in Jane Austen’s Fiction

Abstract

By the time he had completed The Excursion, Wordsworth’s poetics had moved on from one rooted in the representation of heroic individuals to one that acknowledged the importance of connections between people. His response to the idealisation of rural life in 1790s political polemic meant that he came late to a realisation that social and civic structures were central to the survival of rural communities. The Excursion tells us he had come to understand that to represent the social nature of rural life did not necessarily involve idealising it. But even in The Excursion there is no sense of either the importance nor the function of connections between different social groups in the countryside. This is primarily because his poetry focuses almost exclusively on smallholders and semi-independent labouring people. In particular, he does not acknowledge the role of the gentry in setting the moral tone within small rural communities. But the way in which the gentry performed this function, and the manner in which it fed into all aspects of rural life, increasingly dominated Jane Austen’s fiction. In particular, she was sensitive to the impact of new money and to the ways in which the changing attitudes of the gentry affected the farming classes. Contemporary commentators such as William Cobbett often criticised farmers for turning away from their core function within rural working communities, but Austen’s fiction suggests that they were only following the lead of the gentry.