Were Jane Austen’s sometimes comical and often less than flattering observations about the clergy merely a plot device to amuse us, or was there an undercurrent that revealed the impact of “the living” on the parishioners? What was the price of prayer?
In December 2023, I examined the topic, “The Enigma of Jane Austen’s Clergy”, which posed that question. Were her portrayals a reflection of pithy humor, contemporary opinions, and her own life experiences even though her own family members were immersed in the living? I decided to revisit that question after I read Jane Austen, The Secret Radical by Oxford scholar and acclaimed author, Helena Kelly. Her revelations provided a new perspective about the relationship of the clergy and landowners on the local population and new lenses through which to view the topic.
Here and now, I will eat the final words of my original posting …” she had an opportunity to observe and be amused by the foibles and vanities of that society. Perhaps she overheard the type of diatribe espoused by Mary Crawford amongst those social elite and rather than be offended by it, she chose parody to lampoon it. I believe she had high regard and respect for her father, brothers, extended family, and friends who were all clergymen, but she wrote for her own amusement.”
I stand corrected. Jane Austen was doing something much more serious than parody; she was outing the social disparities between the privileged and the poor; the impact of the parasitic relationship that large landowners and the clergy had on those less fortunate.
To start, let’s hop in the way-back machine to medieval times when The Crown and Christendom were tightly bound together by wealth, power, and shared religious doctrine. The Church’s mission that included caring for the poor, the needy, and travelers in want of a resting place, who could visit local monasteries and abbeys for assistance, was centuries old.
In England, a clash occurred when Henry VIII’s wandering eye and need for a male heir caused a breach with the Pope so that he could divorce his first wife, Catherine, and marry another, Anne Boleyn. While Henry may have abandoned the Pope, he did not abandon the wealth and property under papal control, claiming all for himself and forming the new Church of England. While Henry claimed the wealth, vast amounts of property transferred to his favorite nobles; the newly established Anglican church came under his jurisdiction and relied on the noblesse oblige of the landholders to care for the needy local inhabitants through appointed clergymen.
The formerly Catholic populace was forced to switch allegiance to the new head of the Anglican church, the king, and continue to pay their tithes to the new local landholders, a system that fused the church and secular landlords in an exclusive relationship mutually beneficial to both. The church, under the auspices of a local clergyman, exacted a tithe (10% tax) on everything produced in the parish which was shared with the landowners who paid no taxes at all.
“The living” bestowed by a large landowner had little to do with a clergyman’s religious calling or ability as a moral shepherd to his flock, and more to do with benefiting a family member or choosing a compliant partner in what could be a quite advantageous relationship since more than one parish could be managed by a clergyman with the help of clerics. The downside of the bargain for the clergyman was that he did not own the property he oversaw.
Jane’s family was deeply entrenched in “the living”; her father was a fellow at Oxford College when he met her mother, Cassandra Leigh, who was the daughter of a clergyman employed by one of the colleges, as well as the niece of the Master of Balliol College. The living when George Austen took over Steventon Rectory in 1768, was purchased for him by a relative, as was the parish at Deane. He supplemented tithes paid by parishioners with income from “glebe lands” that were farmed and a boarding school for boys at the rectory. The living was later settled on her brother, who inherited it when Jane’s father retired.
Jane’s lineup of clergy in her novels reflects this process. Mr. Collins, Mr. Elton, and Edward Ferrars were beneficiaries of the landowner, while the living was passed on as an inheritance to Edmund Bertram and Henry Tilney. Charles Hayter, a cleric in Persuasion, was hopeful of having a living bestowed on him after the retirement of an elderly clergyman. Since tithes were levied on everything produced by the parish, clergymen collected and sold the tithes be they crops, eggs, bricks, or pigs, and shared the income with the title holder of the land. It was likely Lady Catherine selected Mr. Collins for the living because he accommodated her by not claiming the full tithe rights due him.
Parish relief was still required to be distributed to those born in the parish and this was determined by the landholder based on land values. Since the major landholders such as Mr. Knightly were also local employers who rented out cottages and farmlands, they along with the appointed clergy decided who qualified for assistance in the parish. In Jane’s time, the cost of housing and feeding the militias during war time created additional tax burdens.
The poor and working poor bore the brunt of the “price of prayer”. Young men who did not volunteer were likely to be conscripted for military service leaving poor women behind while their male wage earners were carried off or died. When we consider Emma and Harriet bringing relief to a local family living in poverty, we must realize how urgently that relief was needed. Even her gifts of pork and apples to Mrs. and Miss Bates was essential to their well-being since they had no male relative on whom to rely. The local parish was the only resource for the needy, but the symbiotic relationship with the wealthy landowner and their appointed clergy happened at the expense of the poor.
Jane lifts the veil on this view of poverty in Emma, but she also experienced it in her own life. She was blindsided by the decision of her father to retire and pass on the living of Steventon to his son. She was forced to leave behind the precious books she valued, her instrument, and the country life she loved with little or no warning. What was done to benefit the son was at the expense of the sisters, and one wonders if she felt resentment. To be sure her parents aimed to present their two daughters to Bath society in hopes of finding them eligible matches despite the lack of dowries. No one could have predicted the early death of Mr. Austen or the women’s descent into poverty, forced to rely on the charity of the men in their lives and dealing with housing insecurity for eight years.
Was Jane a religious person? The evidence says yes, right down to prayers she wrote and her last words to Cassandra to pray for her. Was she also a keen observer of the plight of women and the awareness of hunger and deprivation that society foisted on the most vulnerable, especially women? Yes. Beneath the lampooning of the life of a clergyman by Mary Crawford, (“A clergyman has nothing to do but to be slovenly and selfish – read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work, and the business of his own life is to dine.”), and the comical conceits of Mr. Collins, or the vaunted aspirations of Mr. Elton, we find an eyewitness to both the wealth and deprivation resulting from the political and social practices of the time brought to our attention two centuries later. Sometimes it seems that not much has changed and women still pay a price based on the whims and directives of men. The “thoughts and prayers” of politicians when something catastrophic happens usually comes at a price for the less fortunate. Whenever I read the novels of Jane Austen and learn from the authors who dissect her writings, there are always deeper layers to be examined. This is not to say that Jane Austen did not have a high regard and respect for the clergy including beloved family members; merely that she was a realist.
You can view my original blog post on this topic here.
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