Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice: context, historical and temporal setting of the famous novel and the author’s life.
Pride and Prejudice: Historical and Environmental Context.
The famous writer Jane Austen , author of famous works such as Pride and Prejudice , Emma and Sense and Sensibility , lived between 1775 and 1817, in a period of great political and social changes in England , which only partially involved the writer, both because her life was very short and because she lived mainly in the provinces.
In 1702 , Anne Stuart, the youngest daughter of James II , ascended the throne . Since Anne had lost all her children, in 1701 Parliament, to prevent the return of the Catholic Stuarts, passed an act that entrusted the succession to the Protestant Hanoverians. Scotland, however, hesitated to approve the act, as it had done with the Declaration of Rights, in 1689. To overcome the crisis, the English decided to unite the two kingdoms and promulgated the Act of Union (1707) which created the Kingdom of Great Britain.
One of the aims of unification was to strengthen the country, which was engaged in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714). The reign of George I , who succeeded Queen Anne, had two important crises that marked it:
- The Jacobite rising of 1715 by followers of James Edward Stuart
- The financial collapse of the South Sea Company, in 1720.
The majority of citizens who did not enjoy the right to vote were able to petition, serve on juries in trials, and obtain guarantees against arbitrary arrest. Full political privileges were granted only to members of the Anglican Church.
The War of the Austrian Succession ended with the Treaty of Aachen (1748) which, as far as Great Britain was concerned, re-established the territorial status quo. The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) pitted Great Britain, allied with Prussia, against a coalition of France, Austria and Russia.
By the Treaty of Paris (1763) Britain gained all French possessions in Canada and east of the Mississippi River, as well as most of the French territories in India. Spain, which had entered the war on France’s side in 1762, had to cede Florida. The Treaty of Paris was a diplomatic triumph that marked the height of the British Empire in the 18th century. Edward Jenner ‘s discovery of a vaccine against smallpox in 1796 contributed to a progressive increase in the population of Britain. The transformation of the economy accelerated in the last decades of the 18th century, when James Watt perfected the steam engine and new inventions made it possible to mechanize the processing of cotton.
In the 18th century, the European population increased significantly, especially in England, and trade with the Americas became increasingly profitable, especially after the so-called triangular trade spread , a type of trade that allowed merchants to earn huge sums by exporting low-value goods, transporting black slaves to America and importing high-quality goods from there to resell on the European market.
The increase in population in Europe increased the demand for goods . For this reason, prices also increased and the need to produce more and more quickly arose.
This pushed men to develop new production techniques . In addition, rich merchants who had earned large sums with triangular trade had capital to invest in productive sectors.
The Industrial Revolution
The combination of these factors gave rise to the Industrial Revolution in England.
This began in the textile sector with the creation of spinning machines and looms that were more sophisticated than the ancient ones. But the real technical achievement that accelerated the industrial process was the steam engine, used first to operate the pumps that extracted water from the mines and then to run the factories. However, the driving sector of English industry was the iron and steel sector , especially after a coal was developed for use in blast furnaces, coke . The factory system radically changed the lives of men: workers, men and children, were forced to work in unhealthy environments for more than 14 hours a day for a very low wage.
Along with industry, agriculture also progressed in England : common lands were enclosed, large estates managed by the bourgeoisie were formed, new tools were invented, fields were fertilised more abundantly. Furthermore, new crops , such as corn and potatoes, arrived in Europe from America.
Between 1760 and 1830, the production of cotton cloth increased tenfold, becoming Britain’s main export; further inventions also led to significant increases in steel production and coal mining. By 1830, this industrial revolution had made Britain the “workshop of the world”. The population of London , estimated at 600,000 in 1701 , had grown to 950,000 by 1801 and to 2.5 million by 1851 , making it the largest city in the world. The total population of Britain had reached 10.7 million between 1751 and 1801, and doubled between 1801 and 1851.
Furthermore, Britain was now the first country in the world where the urban population exceeded the rural one.
After 1763, the French threat having been eliminated, the British colonies in North America , which had long enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy, could not tolerate political subordination to the government in London. American resistance led to the convocation of the First Continental Congress (1774) and to open conflict (1775), despite calls for conciliation addressed to the government in London by parliamentarians such as Edmund Burke .
British rule over the 13 colonies collapsed in 1775, at the start of the American War of Independence. After the defeat of General John Burgoyne at Saratoga (1777), the civil war within the British Empire became an international conflict. France (1778), Spain (1779), and the Netherlands (1780) aligned themselves against Great Britain, while the other powers formed a League of Armed Neutrality, causing the first diplomatic isolation of Great Britain in over a century.
After the surrender of General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown ( 1781), the resignation of Lord North (1782), and the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783), the 13 colonies were recognized as independent states and obtained all the territory south of the Great Lakes. Florida and Minorca were ceded to Spain, while France obtained some islands in the West Indies and some African ports.
The figure of the modern prime minister was defined by William Pitt the Younger, who became the youngest prime minister in British history in 1783 and served a long term (1783–1801 and 1804–1806). In the aftermath of the American War of Independence, Pitt worked to restore the national debt and consolidated the annual budget. Although he favored political reform, the repeal of restrictions on non-Anglican Protestants, and the abolition of the slave trade, he did not obtain a parliamentary majority to implement these measures. Some reformers, such as Charles James Fox and Thomas Paine, were inspired by the revolution that had broken out in France in 1789; but when the French revolutionary army invaded the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) and declared war on Britain in 1793, a decade of moderate reform gave way to 22 years of conflict.
In the 1790s, Napoleon I came to power in France. Pitt’s First Coalition against the French (with Prussia, Austria and Russia) broke up in 1796, and in 1797 Britain suffered a naval defeat and French invasion attempts, which led to the Act of Union with Ireland (1801) and the formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Dublin Legislative Assembly was abolished and the 100 Irish representatives became members of the Parliament in London; Dublin remained with only an Irish viceroy and an English-appointed administration. Horatio Nelson’s naval victory at Trafalgar (1805) averted Napoleon’s invasion of Britain.
George III, who suffered from mental illness, was succeeded in 1820 by his son George IV. The British Empire gained some former Dutch possessions, such as the Cape Colony and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In 1816, economic depression led to revolts. Government policies became more moderate with the recovery in the early 1820s. Foreign Secretary George Canning expressed British support for the independence of Spain’s colonies in South America and for the Greek rebellion against Turkish rule, a cause also supported by the Romantic poet George Gordon Byron.
The Enlightenment
The bourgeoisie, despite being the protagonist of economic progress, still had no power at a political level. Therefore, it developed a new type of thought, the Enlightenment (which wanted to free men from superstition and ignorance with the light of reason and science), to undermine the existing political order supported by the clergy and the nobility. To spread their new ideas, the Enlightenment thinkers used books as a means. The most representative book of the new thought was the Encyclopedia , a work in 35 volumes written by a hundred intellectuals and directed by Diderot and d’Alembert . The most famous intellectuals of this movement, which initially developed in France, are Montesquieu , Voltaire and Rousseau who influenced ordinary citizens and sovereigns with their theories. The latter even started reforms in their states aimed at establishing the equality of subjects before the law, the freedom of individuals and the freedom of trade.
Thus enlightened despotism came into being , which also spread to the Italian states, especially to Milan, Naples and Tuscany, where some reforms were started: the state became more modern, the privileges of the clergy and nobles were limited, agriculture was modernized and the laws were reworked in the light of the new theories of the Enlightenment . The industrial revolution began in England in the second half of the 18th century due to a series of favorable conditions: the participation of the bourgeoisie in the government which allowed its members to invest capital with greater profit; a subsoil rich in mineral resources (iron and coal); numerous technical innovations which technologically transformed production and improved communications; the expulsion of peasants from the countryside thanks to the enclosure of the fields and their consequent transfer to the cities, where they became workers in the nascent industries; a flourishing international trade.
As for the social context, the author lived in a period of profound change in English society , which was now beginning to enjoy a greater openness of thought due precisely to the Enlightenment that somehow managed to go beyond the old social conventions, which however still had a dominant role in English society. The bourgeoisie was beginning to threaten the primacy of the nobility, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the spread of Enlightenment ideas.
Jane Austen, however, remained on the fringes of this great change and these historical events influenced her minimally. The nascent Romanticism did not involve Jane Austen, who lived only 15 years in the 28th century , when this cultural movement had not yet reached its maximum extension and the Enlightenment was still strong.
The role of money
The historical context of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice coincides with that of the author, who, in fact, takes inspiration from her anonymous provincial life to write a work in which she skilfully describes and ridicules both the members of the middle class and those of the upper middle class, managing to create comical situations .
In that period there was a strong contrast between the middle and upper middle classes . The nobility was beginning to lose its privileges and its power, overwhelmed by the bourgeoisie that thanks to the industrial revolution conquered political and economic power. Many women were forced to an anonymous life in the city or in the province, only partly cheered up by balls and receptions, where girls of marriageable age tried to get a good match. Few of them were actually happy under the conjugal roof and marriages of convenience were the rule.
Jane Austen highlights this interest in money by adding to the physical/moral description of many characters also the annual income, their properties, defining them as rich or poor. The economic motive was at the basis of sentimental relationships, which were also regulated by social origin, given that many marriages did not happen because the bride had lower-class relatives compared to the groom, or vice versa. The historical events of that period do not influence the events of the novel in the least, closed as it is in the microcosm of the bourgeoisie and the provincial nobility , interspersed with the events of the novel that take place in London.
