at the Crown Inn, an inconsiderable house, though the principal one of the sort, where a couple of pair of post-horses were kept, more for the convenience of the neighbourhood than from any run on the road; and his companions had not expected to be detained by any interest excited there; but in passing it they gave the history of the large room visibly added. It had been built many years ago for a ball-room, and while the neighbourhood had been in a particularly populous, dancing state, had been occasionally used as such: but such brilliant days had long passed away; and now the highest purpose for which it was ever wanted was to accommodate a whist club established among the gentlemen and half gentlemen of the place (p. 179).
The village has more than one inn, but its principal stopping place is nothing to boast about. Although it is only sixteen miles from London, it seems not to be located on a road that is directly connected to the city or, for that matter, is much used. The post-horses are the Regency equivalent of the village taxi. At some time in the past, the place was livelier than it now appears to be. There has been a visible downward demographic shift. Population has been lost, along with the leading and more prosperous social luminaries. At present the most notable social activity at the Crown is card-playing among the mixed bag of gentlemen and half gentlemen. With that unique English genius for ever-finer distinctions of class and status, Jane Austen leaves it to the reader to define what a half gentleman might be.
Frank Churchill wants to dance and good-naturedly challenges Emma to “ ‘revive the good old days of the room.’ ” After all, she is the presiding and authorizing female center of social activity. Frank’s companions point out to him “the want of proper families in the place, and ... that none beyond the place and its immediate environs could be tempted to attend.” He remains unpersuaded and argues that the well-kept houses that he sees around him could surely
furnish numbers enough for such a meeting; and even when particulars were given and families described, he was still unwilling to admit that the inconvenience of such a mixture would be any thing, or that there would be the smallest difficulty in every body’s returning into their proper place the next morning (p. 180).
The ratio of genteel or respectable families per acre has gone downhill. We are not told anything about the causes or meanings of this change. But Emma observes to herself that Frank seems to have inherited the indiscriminate sociability of his father. And she silently huffs and puffs that Frank’s “indifference to a confusion of rank bordered too much on inelegance of mind. He could be no judge ... of the evil he was holding cheap” (p. 180). It is as if the relation between peerless Emma and the illegitimate, fatherless and motherless, and effectively anonymous Harriet Smith portends nothing confused or inelegant. The stilted awkwardness of Emma’s formulations suggests their anachronistic inappropriateness, as she will duly learn.
But there are also counter-indications to this apprehension of downwardness. When John Knightley comes down to Hartfield to leave his two oldest boys with their grandfather and aunt for a holiday visit of “some weeks” in the spring (p. 261), their arrival coincides with a welcoming dinner for the Eltons that Emma feels obliged to hold. John Knightley represents in some degree a departure in social sensibility. It is fair to say that he is in general unsociable, unlike his brother and even his father-in-law. He prefers the excluding and private domestic circle of his considerable and growing nuclear family. He is one of the extreme partisans of “home” in this novel and is never comfortable when separated from wife, children, and their dwelling in Brunswick Square. He can also be peevish and a considerable grouch; in particular, he has to control his irritable temper when he is confronted with the perseverated anxieties, phobias, and obsessions of Mr. Woodhouse, a duty at whose performance he is only moderately successful. Ironically, however, he resembles his father-in-law in his own easily disturbed equilibrium, his insecurity and anxiety when the restricted family circumstances that he has established for himself are broken into. At the dinner party, he charges Emma with the care of his boys and enjoins her to send them home if “ ‘you find them troublesome.’ ” He is of course needling their affectionate aunt in his annoyance at the supposed exponential intensification of her social life.
“Here am I come down for only one day, and you are engaged with a dinner-party! When did it happen before? or any thing like it? Your neighbourhood is increasing, and you mix more with it ... every letter to Isabella [has] brought an account of fresh gaieties” (p. 280).
This semi-facetious account is in large measure hyperbole, and Emma fires back a sensible and convincing confutation. John Knightley has also, however, atypically expressed himself with some ambiguity when he remarks that “your neighbourhood is increasing.” He may simply imply that Emma’s rate of socializing has grown; but he may also mean that Highbury is also growing, or even that the range of those admitted into the precincts of the upper social circles has been enlarged. In any case, it is useful to recall Emma’s remark that “there was no denying that those brothers had penetration” (p. 121), meaning that their observations as a rule have some non-incidental point. Here the point suggests that the representation of Highbury’s situation as far as demographic circumstances and socio-economic changes are concerned is a mixed and uncertain picture, with indications and pointers going in more than one direction.
Such complexities and equivocalities are borne out in the life histories of most of the narrative’s significant characters. Mr. Weston is one of the sources for such impacted significations. A native of Highbury, he comes from a respectable family that for several generations “had been rising into gentility and property.” Well-educated, he was at the same time disinclined as a young man to enter into the “more homely pursuits” of profession or trade that engaged his brothers. He took advantage of the urgencies brought on by England’s response to the French Revolution and joined the county militia, which had been activated. The “chances of ... military life” had led Captain Weston to meeting Miss Churchill, “of a great Yorkshire family.” She fell in love with him, and they married. Her brother and his wife, however, were offended, indeed mortified, by the lowness of her choice, and “they threw her off with due decorum.” Though the young couple were in love, the marriage proved to be “an unsuitable connection, and did not produce much happiness.” Mrs. Weston, willful, resolute, and independent enough to defy her family’s interdictions, could not “refrain from unreasonable regrets at... [their] unreasonable anger.” She missed the opulence of the family estate, and although she never “ceased to love her husband ... she wanted to be at once the wife of Captain Weston and Miss Churchill of Enscombe.” After three years of living “beyond their income,” she died, leaving Mr. Weston a rather poorer man than before along with a young son. Her death from “a lingering illness” and the little boy’s half-deserted existence had led the forbidding brother and sister-in-law to soften. Childless themselves, they offered to take over entirely the rearing of the boy. Mr. Weston, having given up his son to these resources of wealth and opportunity, now “had only his own comfort to seek and his own situation to improve as he could.”
He resigned from the militia and went into trade with his brothers in London. He did not work with exceptional ardor at his business and divided his time between employment in the city and “a small house in Highbury” where he enjoyed his leisure hours. After eighteen or twenty years of this not very strenuous existence, he discovered that he had “realized an easy competence”—he was a beneficiary, like many others in the middling ranks at the time, of an economy that prospered in wartime, and that was simultaneously expanding at an unheard-of rate. He had achieved independence. He could now purchase “a little estate adjoining Highbury, which he had always longed for.” He was free to marry without hindrance or second thoughts a woman “as portionless even as Miss Taylor,” a gentlewoman whose resources were so reduced that she had had to hire herself out as a governess. And he was now able “to live according to the wishes of his own friendly and social disposition” (p. 13).
For Weston the phases of the life cycle and the social cycle have happily coincided. In his mid-forties, he “had made his fortune, bought his house, and obtained his wife”—in that order. He was “beginning a new period of existence with every probability of greater happiness” (p. 13). On this occasion he was aware that “he had only himself to please in his choice.” Even more, in the person of Miss Taylor he had “the pleasantest proof of its being a great deal better to choose than to be chosen, to excite gratitude than to feel it” (p. 14). His trajectory in life is clearly meant to be paradigmatic of major tendencies of social change in the densely contextualized world of this novel. It is characterized by moderate but genuine mobility upward, and to a lesser degree by obstacles and detours along that route. Weston has augmented his freedom by means of the working of a growing commercial and market economy. In terms of social class he has achieved freedom from trade through his successful application to trade.
Nevertheless, this depiction of open possibilities is modified by the shadow cast by prohibitions and restrictions. On the whole, it is a representation of progress, but this progress includes deep inequalities. It is defined by broadly increasing life-chances, which means increasing freedom of choice. Still this progression toward increased latitude and amplitude of individual freedom of choice is not simply a one-way street. It is better to be active than passive, independent than dependent, choosing rather than being chosen. This asymmetry applies not only to money and rank or social status; it applies to differences in gender as well. One of Emma’s objections to marriage is that she has no inclination to be dependent, or to be anything other, or less, than “first.”
Robert Martin seems, on first inspection, a less elaborate case. He is a comfortably situated and hopeful young farmer (the principal tenant of Knightley) who works the Abbey-Mill Farm. He is literate and alert, and his sisters have been to school with Harriet at Mrs. Goddard’s. He is doing very well with his sheep, selling their wool at a premium in a market whose processing and manufacture of woolens was in the first stages of industrialization and was to expand massively. He is ambitious, sensible, and without affectation; he reads “the Agricultural Reports,” keeps up on both improvements in farming technology and the states of the various markets. He owns a copy of
Elegant Extracts,
the anthology of miscellaneous pieces that both Emma and her father are familiar with, and from which Emma claims she has copied out the riddle “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid.” He has read
The Vicar of Wakefield
but is unacquainted with the popular Gothic romances that Harriet recommends. He travels on horseback to do business in a nearby town, although he also makes his way about the neighborhood on foot. His “appearance” is “very neat,” and he is by all reports a solid and stable young man of twenty-four-seven years older than Harriet. He writes a straightforward and coherent letter and maintains an attractive and comfortable home.
None of this cuts any ice with Emma. She waves him out of consideration and declares that the “ ‘yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do ’ ” (p. 25). Although yeomen was one of the terms used for the local militias raised for defense against possible invasion during the wars of the French Revolution, the term itself was commonly, if loosely, applied to free-holding farmers. In her put-down of Martin, Emma seems unwittingly, through an almost anachronistic usage, also to have raised him up—at least formally—since he rents his farm (which has very little to do with his relative prosperity).
ix
And, she goes on to say to Harriet, when Robert Martin is Mr. Weston’s age, he “ ‘will be a completely gross, vulgar farmer, ’ ” unattractive, slovenly, obsessed with money. He may become rich, but he will remain “ ‘Clownish,‘” a local mechanic and yokel, “ ‘illiterate and coarse’ ” (p. 28).
Leaving to one side Emma’s personal motives for behaving in this crude and nasty way, we understand that she has done a number on both Harriet and Robert Martin. She has reproduced by analogy (and in parody again) the situation of the young Captain Weston and Miss Churchill, grotesquely inflating Harriet to a great Yorkshire heiress far beyond the social possibilities of the lowly Captain of Yeomanry (or Militia, or Volunteers). Emma herself occupies the place of the Churchill brother and sister-in-law; and she threatens Harriet with the fate Miss Churchill incurred when she insisted on choosing Weston (p. 54). Harriet sends Martin a letter of rejection—largely composed by Emma (p. 47). The next morning Knightley promptly appears to tell Emma the good news that Martin has consulted him before writing his letter of proposal to Harriet. Knightley is a great champion of Martin, and Martin “ ‘considers me as one of his best friends’ ” (p. 52). Knightley recommends him highly in terms we are already familiar with, and adds that Martin can afford to marry and that he, Knightley, has happily encouraged him to go ahead. Emma, smiling to herself that she is far ahead of Knightley, informs him of what he doesn’t know. Knightley cannot believe his ears, and Emma has to repeat herself. He goes red, stands up, and hits the ceiling. He sees at once that Emma has schemed this whole thing through. He is furious at her for her failure of intelligence, for her narcissism, for her self-referential and mistaken interfering, for her irresponsibility. Emma, as yet unshaken, saucily replies that it is inconceivable that Martin could be “ ‘a good match for my intimate friend! ... It would be a degradation’ ” At this, Knightley more or less jumps out of his skin. “ ‘degradation to illegitimacy and ignorance, to be married to a respectable, intelligent gentleman-farmer’ ” (p. 54). And he proceeds to commend Martin’s manners for their “ ‘sense, sincerity and good-humour’ ” and concludes with the more salient “ ‘and his mind has more true gentility than Harriet Smith could understand’ ” (p. 57).