Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice celebrates the bicentennial of its publication today. Yes, January 28, 1813, is when its publication was first announced in a London newspaper. Pride and Prejudice is supposed to be the most read novel in the English language. The British philosopher Gilbert Ryle allegedly replied, when asked if he ever read novels, “Yes, I re-read all six each year,” in a reference to Jane Austen’s novels. In recent years, there has been a little industry of spin-off books and movies and many other things produced in her honor. But while I’ve read a few of the books that have been spun off and seen most of the movies, I flatly refuse to see the postmodern version of Mansfield Park that was produced in 1999. An English professor once told me that it was a legitimate interpretation of the novel, though if changing the main character, a creepmouse like Fanny Price, into a confident extrovert (which is what I’m told happens) is legitimate, then any change whatsoever is legitimate.
Anyway, my wife and I were caught up in the excitement back in the 1990s when the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice was released, and we subsequently, on trips to England, traveled to many places associated with Austen or her novels, like Chawton and Lyme Regis, that we would never have visited otherwise. We also began reading as much supplementary material as we could, to the point where I could pick out small factual errors in scholarly writings (no, she wasn’t the youngest child in the family; no, she had six brothers and not five; and no, the father in Mansfield Park is Sir Thomas Bertram and not Sir Walter Bertram).
Anyway, we learned a lot about this period in English history, such as the following:
• Housing was cheap back then, while food and clothing were relatively expensive, the exact opposite of the pattern today.
• Rectors for the Church of England were chosen not by the church itself but by wealthy landowners. It seems like a strange system.
• Commanders of naval vessels who captured a foreign naval vessel (generally French) were allowed to keep the booty and split it among their crews.
• Two of her brothers, Francis and Charles, were in the British navy, and both rose to the rank of admiral. That she had brothers in the navy allowed her to talk about it knowledgeably in Mansfield Park and Persuasion. One of them eventually became the top admiral (Admiral of the Fleet). I had originally thought this was due to his being thought better than the other admirals, but it seems that it had to do merely with his being the oldest living admiral of the top rank at the time.
• That brother, Francis Austen, was severely disappointed that he missed the Battle of Trafalgar because of the possibilities for booty that it represented. At the last minute, his ship was ordered to go to the Caribbean for some reason.
• Once a woman married, her husband had full control of any money she brought to the marriage, which is why it was so important for Mr. Darcy to prevent his sister from eloping with Mr. Wickham, for he would have squandered her £30,000 in no time.
• The period when the novel was published is called the Regency period, a name I had never heard of before. It’s the time when George III, our enemy in the Revolutionary War, went mad and his duties were taken over by his son as the Prince Regent.
• Although Mr. Darcy says that 50 miles of good road is nothing for a coach, the lanterns used weren’t good enough to light the way at night, so balls were usually held during the period of the full moon when its light would make safe night driving possible.
We also learned certain moral lessons – it had never occurred to either of us before that discretion is a virtue worth cultivating. And a lesson relating to our own time is that there are people in the world, like Mrs. Bennet, who think that rich people – and presumably rich nations like ours – can never exceed their income. Near the end of Pride and Prejudice when Jane Bennet gets engaged to rich Mr. Bingley, her father jokingly declares that the two of them are so generous they will always exceed their income, whereupon Mrs. Bennet chides him, saying, “Why, he has four or five thousand a-year, and very likely more.” In other words, Mr. Bingley and his wife can never exceed his income because he’s rich. Doesn’t this sound like many people, in fact an entire political party, that we know today?
One of the interesting things about Pride and Prejudice is the letter that Elizabeth Bennet receives from the hand of Mr. Darcy midway through the book. This letter provided her with new information about Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham, and the scene provides a fascinating study in evaluating new evidence in an open-minded way. There are lots of women who fancy themselves as Elizabeth Bennets, but how many women if handed a letter like that would have treated it the way she did? Lots of women, if handed such a letter, would rip it to shreds without reading it. Others would throw it in the fireplace when they arrived home, again without reading it. Still others would read it and instantly decide it was all false. Only a small number would actually be convinced, as Elizabeth was, that their former opinions were the result of prejudice.
I don’t want to pick on women here, because the idea of such a letter can be generalized to include any report of new evidence, and of course the recipient might be either a woman or a man.
A year and a half ago, for example, I saw a couple people (one man and one woman) fail what I think of as the Mr. Darcy’s Letter Test. Three people were vigorously claiming that a certain adjunct, being considered for another gig at a certain school, was a bad teacher. When the chair of the department requested the teaching evaluations from the adjunct’s previous teaching gig, they turned out to be no different from any other professor’s at the school, and maybe even better than some. Confronted with this new evidence, one of the three changed her mind, but the other two were adamant that the new evidence showed nothing.
It was a sorry spectacle.
Actually, each of us is confronted with new evidence and arguments every day. We are constantly being given new opinions about people we know or issues of the day, and how we deal with this new evidence shows whether we are open-minded and capable of evaluating evidence objectively.
Elizabeth Bennet had an advantage in that the letter she received referred to someone she trusted (Col. Fitwilliam) who would vouch for its claims. Most of us have no such advantage. Think of the way that the claim about anthropogenic global warming was advanced. It was reported in the media, and the people who were behind it were scientists, whom we all presumed were trustworthy. But we didn’t know them personally! It wasn’t until the Climategate emails were released that many people realized that maybe these people weren’t so trustworthy. But notice how many other people continued to believe, simply because they wanted to. It’s easy to look down on such people, though I’m sure all of us are guilty of failing to be objective at some point or another.
Anyway, my wife and I were caught up in the excitement back in the 1990s when the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice was released, and we subsequently, on trips to England, traveled to many places associated with Austen or her novels, like Chawton and Lyme Regis, that we would never have visited otherwise. We also began reading as much supplementary material as we could, to the point where I could pick out small factual errors in scholarly writings (no, she wasn’t the youngest child in the family; no, she had six brothers and not five; and no, the father in Mansfield Park is Sir Thomas Bertram and not Sir Walter Bertram).
Anyway, we learned a lot about this period in English history, such as the following:
• Housing was cheap back then, while food and clothing were relatively expensive, the exact opposite of the pattern today.
• Rectors for the Church of England were chosen not by the church itself but by wealthy landowners. It seems like a strange system.
• Commanders of naval vessels who captured a foreign naval vessel (generally French) were allowed to keep the booty and split it among their crews.
• Two of her brothers, Francis and Charles, were in the British navy, and both rose to the rank of admiral. That she had brothers in the navy allowed her to talk about it knowledgeably in Mansfield Park and Persuasion. One of them eventually became the top admiral (Admiral of the Fleet). I had originally thought this was due to his being thought better than the other admirals, but it seems that it had to do merely with his being the oldest living admiral of the top rank at the time.
• That brother, Francis Austen, was severely disappointed that he missed the Battle of Trafalgar because of the possibilities for booty that it represented. At the last minute, his ship was ordered to go to the Caribbean for some reason.
• Once a woman married, her husband had full control of any money she brought to the marriage, which is why it was so important for Mr. Darcy to prevent his sister from eloping with Mr. Wickham, for he would have squandered her £30,000 in no time.
• The period when the novel was published is called the Regency period, a name I had never heard of before. It’s the time when George III, our enemy in the Revolutionary War, went mad and his duties were taken over by his son as the Prince Regent.
• Although Mr. Darcy says that 50 miles of good road is nothing for a coach, the lanterns used weren’t good enough to light the way at night, so balls were usually held during the period of the full moon when its light would make safe night driving possible.
We also learned certain moral lessons – it had never occurred to either of us before that discretion is a virtue worth cultivating. And a lesson relating to our own time is that there are people in the world, like Mrs. Bennet, who think that rich people – and presumably rich nations like ours – can never exceed their income. Near the end of Pride and Prejudice when Jane Bennet gets engaged to rich Mr. Bingley, her father jokingly declares that the two of them are so generous they will always exceed their income, whereupon Mrs. Bennet chides him, saying, “Why, he has four or five thousand a-year, and very likely more.” In other words, Mr. Bingley and his wife can never exceed his income because he’s rich. Doesn’t this sound like many people, in fact an entire political party, that we know today?
One of the interesting things about Pride and Prejudice is the letter that Elizabeth Bennet receives from the hand of Mr. Darcy midway through the book. This letter provided her with new information about Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham, and the scene provides a fascinating study in evaluating new evidence in an open-minded way. There are lots of women who fancy themselves as Elizabeth Bennets, but how many women if handed a letter like that would have treated it the way she did? Lots of women, if handed such a letter, would rip it to shreds without reading it. Others would throw it in the fireplace when they arrived home, again without reading it. Still others would read it and instantly decide it was all false. Only a small number would actually be convinced, as Elizabeth was, that their former opinions were the result of prejudice.
I don’t want to pick on women here, because the idea of such a letter can be generalized to include any report of new evidence, and of course the recipient might be either a woman or a man.
A year and a half ago, for example, I saw a couple people (one man and one woman) fail what I think of as the Mr. Darcy’s Letter Test. Three people were vigorously claiming that a certain adjunct, being considered for another gig at a certain school, was a bad teacher. When the chair of the department requested the teaching evaluations from the adjunct’s previous teaching gig, they turned out to be no different from any other professor’s at the school, and maybe even better than some. Confronted with this new evidence, one of the three changed her mind, but the other two were adamant that the new evidence showed nothing.
It was a sorry spectacle.
Actually, each of us is confronted with new evidence and arguments every day. We are constantly being given new opinions about people we know or issues of the day, and how we deal with this new evidence shows whether we are open-minded and capable of evaluating evidence objectively.
Elizabeth Bennet had an advantage in that the letter she received referred to someone she trusted (Col. Fitwilliam) who would vouch for its claims. Most of us have no such advantage. Think of the way that the claim about anthropogenic global warming was advanced. It was reported in the media, and the people who were behind it were scientists, whom we all presumed were trustworthy. But we didn’t know them personally! It wasn’t until the Climategate emails were released that many people realized that maybe these people weren’t so trustworthy. But notice how many other people continued to believe, simply because they wanted to. It’s easy to look down on such people, though I’m sure all of us are guilty of failing to be objective at some point or another.
Your reference to reversing the personality of the main character of a novel led me to consider other reformations of famous novels, like "Captain Ahab, Environmentalist Whaler". You can probably think of many other literary transformations.
Posted by: Mark Spahn | 01/29/2013 at 02:34 PM
Yes, indeed. The Wikipedia article on the film mentions a large number of ways in which the film changed the book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansfield_Park_%28film%29
As far as I know, it was a flop, and given the huge interest in everything to do with Jane Austen, it was a bad mistake, because a film that was even halfway decent, like the Pride and Prejudice film of 2005, would have made loads of money.
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