Juvenilia: A Liberal Conservative

Abstract

National politics and political economics play a prominent role in Jane Austen’s Catharine: or the Bower, dated August 1792 and written when Jane Austen was 16 years old. The protagonist, Catharine or Kitty, lives with her aunt and guardian, Mrs. Percival, a radical Whig, who maintains that “the welfare of every Nation depends upon the virtue of it’s [sic] individuals” (MW 232), a common evangelical, radical Whig refrain at the time. Mrs. Percival’s the-sky-is-falling scenario is similar to the predictions of radical, evangelical Whigs, like Jeremy Bentham and Patrick Colquhoun, who blamed the immorality of the poor for Britain’s supposed impending economic collapse (Wilson, Making of 91–2). Moderate Whigs expressed less evangelical zeal and were considerably more hopeful of Britain’s economic survival, but to radical Mrs. Percival, the personal is definitely political, and she is appalled to think that her niece “who offends in so gross a manner against decorum & propriety is certainly hastening [the Nation’s] ruin.”