“Jane Austen’s England”, by Roy & Lesley Adkins

448 pages, Viking, ISBN-13: 978-0670785841

Jane Austen’s England by the husband and wife team of Roy and Lesley Adkins seeks to bring to life the world in which Jane Austen lived and worked – that would be the late Georgian and early Regency Era, between about 1775 and 1817, or Jane’s lifespan. The book’s chapters are sorted by topic and takes the natural beginning of birth and follows that through to the last chapter on death. Even though this is non-fiction, there were protagonists of a sort, for the authors chose a handful of people who existed at the time in various walks of life – a governess, a clergyman, an impoverished gentleman, a couple foreign travelers, a gentle lady, among others – and used their letters and journals to share their experiences of the topic that was being discussed. Furthermore, instead of just tackling a topic and spitting out lots of research, there is a conversational quality to the book that makes it that much more readable. The Adkin’s go to great lengths to not romanticize life in those times; for example, the chapter on childbirth and marriage doesn’t hold back from the grave situations in which people who had a child out of wedlock found themselves, and how the law came down like a hammer upon them. I cringed through the discussions of the conditions of the inns, primitive plumbing, medical and mental issues, crime and punishment, the effects of war and famine and, well, pretty much most of the topics, because these could be hard times for common people.

Jane Austen’s England focused on the average person’s life and not so much that of the privilege few at the top, which I found to be a problem. You see, Jane wrote about her class, for her class; that is, the Gentry, which was the growing middle class which also included the lower nobility and the “bourgeoisie”, the growing middle class. This English Gentry class was a broad one with people of differing fortunes within in which some had vast wealth and others…not so much. Jane Austen’s England was not an elegant, dainty fairyland in which gentlemen in shiny Hessian boots and frockcoats courted delicate ladies in diaphanous gowns and cute bonnets while the lower orders worked and sang and knew their place; it was, of course, a caste-ridden society, and this book won’t let you forget it. Hearing for the umpteenth time about poverty and dirt and the lack of equality gives one a fuller visions of what this era was like, but I also wanted to know more about the world in which Austen moved – and not just to learn how, for all their dapper looks and sterling manners, everyone stunk to high heaven. All-in-all an interesting and informative book, but unequal in its treatment of the haves and have-nots – at the expense of the haves, ironically enough.