Illuminating darkest of times

What is also astonishing, however, is how tightly she ring-fenced her fictional territory. The "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory" she described as her canvas was deliberately constrained. To read her novels without knowing a thing about the period they were written in is to imagine a world dominated by the middle and upper classes, a group obsessed with status who had little to occupy their time but social manoeuvring, much of it through the medium of marriage. As this lively, well-informed history shows, one could hardly be more wrong.

As is often noted, there is barely a nod in Austen's oeuvre to the wars that were tearing the continent apart and emptying Britain's coffers while her heroines were dancing cotillions. Whenever a military figure does appear, he is off-duty or retired, and tight-lipped about the bloody battlefields and warships he has encountered. Yet as the authors Roy and Lesley Adkins point out, in towns where Austen lived, such as Southampton, prisoners of war would have been a common sight, some of them socialising with locals, and even marrying them.

Using a handful of the most vivid diarists of the time, and quoting from an extensive array of other first-hand sources, the Adkinses recreate Georgian England with relish. This is not an academic book, despite the research that has gone into it, but a lively and impressionistic guide to the age, enjoyable for those entirely new to the subject, but also for the better informed, who will not only discover new facts in its wealth of material, but appreciate the immediacy and flavour of its eye-witness accounts. 

Covering the main elements of life in this turbulent, often terrifying period, this husband and wife pair depict an often murky landscape in which Austen's novels stand like beacons, their precision and perfection, wit and charm, at odds with the political turmoil and drama of her day. 

Had Austen's interest lain not in social satire, she had all the material at her disposal to have been an early Dickens. This was an age of child labour, abject poverty, and high rates of crime. As the authors relate, following wars, industrialisation and the enclosure of common lands, it was a period of dreadful hardship for many. These ills, they write, "were approaching their worst by the end of Jane Austen's lifetime, with people literally starving in the streets". As Parson James Woodforde from Norfolk records in his diary in 1795, riots and violent demonstrations were common. Indeed, on a visit to London he witnessed an assassination attempt on George III, and was lucky  to escape unhurt. 

Outraged at the high cost of bread, the hungry and out of work revolted in their droves, as did a small group of  skilled workers – Luddites – angry at the introduction of labour-saving machinery which produced inferior products and lowered the price of their goods. Kindlier magistrates overlooked protesters' misdemeanours, and even their lesser crimes, if committed because of dire want. Harsher judges, however, summarily sentenced wrongdoers to deportation and death. Such was the list of capital crimes, this was one of the most savage periods in British legal history. 

For the most part it was the lower orders who faced the consequences of their crimes, the rich being able to bribe their way out of trouble. Not so, however, for one gentrified lady, a Mrs Leigh-Perrot, who was kept on bail in the prison-keeper's house after being charged with shoplifting. She refused a kind offer from her brother of sending his daughters to keep her company "in that vile place", saying she did not wish the girls to endure the privations of such quarters. These nieces were Jane and Cassandra Austen, and their aunt, although acquitted, a source of family shame thereafter. Reluctantly, Jane continued to visit her: "I thought it was of the first consequence to avoid anything that might seem a slight to them. I shall be glad when it is over."

Covering subjects such as childhood, marriage, fashion, housing, medicine, travel and death, this history paints a teeming and colourful picture of Austen's generation. Much of its wit comes from the judicious  selection of diarists. One such is the aristocratic traveller John Byng, who was appalled at the bovine responses of rural Midlanders. "When I stop to ask the plainest question as the name of our road to any village, they begin with, 'Why as to that' 'Let me consider' 'You seem to be out of your way' 'And so I was saying'. Here I ride off, for life were not long enough to hear them out."

Highwaymen were another menace, many discharged soldiers taking to this lucrative way of life, and their horsemanship helping them evade the hangman's rope. Even worse were footpads who, being unable to flee the scene of their deeds, were more likely than their mounted colleagues to murder their victims as well as rob them.

Woodforde is one of the most endearing diarists of any age, and it is a pleasure to encounter him again in these pages. Unmarried but well looked after by his niece, he enjoyed a good dinner but would also send a servant to disburse money to the poor when the weather turned cold. While the modern reader cannot share his glee in having finally shot a woodpecker that had been destroying his thatched roof, when one considers how cold and damp houses could be, it is perhaps a forgivable lapse of charity. One can also forgive his well-meaning treatment of an ailing servant: "My boy Jack had another touch of the ague about noon. I gave him a dram of gin at the beginning of the fit and pushed him headlong into one of my ponds and ordered him to bed immediately and he was better after it..." 

The state of medical knowledge at this time was rudimentary, as much the product of superstition as science, and there was little difference in efficacy between homegrown cures like Woodforde's and that of so-called professionals. This alarming fact was widely acknowledged. Another clergyman diarist who graces this book, Rev William Holland from Somerset, laconically recorded an encounter with a physician in 1800: "Met Mr Forbes on foot going to kill a few patients." 

Jane Austen would have been all too aware of the hazards of ill health and medical intervention. Accompanying her nieces to the dentist, where Marianne needed two teeth removed, she wrote:  "When her doom was fixed, Fanny, Lizzy and I walked into the next room, where we heard each of the two sharp hasty screams." She added: "I would not have had him look at mine for a shilling a tooth and double it."

Courtship and the question of love play a large role in the works of Austen, but to describe or dismiss them as romances, as many mistakenly do, is to miss the point entirely. Marriage was a contractual arrangement, the only security available to a woman without independent means. As Eavesdropping on Jane Austen's England reminds us, who and how one married was crucial at every level of society. It could also be a life sentence. Death, natural or provoked, was generally the only means by which an unhappy bond could be dissolved. There was one other way, though, to which the lower orders sometimes resorted. It was widely, if wrongly, believed that if a man sold his wife, this was as good as a divorce, so long as he put a halter around her neck when doing so. Sadly, unlike Thomas Hardy, this was a subject Austen never addressed.