Above Vulgar Economy: Jane Austen and Money

Abstract

Abstract: "Above Vulgar Economy": Jane Austen and Money By: Sheryl Bonar Craig Jane Austen's career as an author coincided with a series of economic recessions leading to a major economic depression, a banking crisis that resulted in government intervention, a number of controversial economic bills that were rejected or approved by Parliament in spite of public opinion, and the grudging public acceptance of paper money and debased coins. This discussion is an attempt to clarify some of the economic and political references that modern readers of Jane Austen's novels tend to overlook or to misunderstand and, in that process, to reveal Austen's interest in political economics and her familiarity with the ideas of the leading economists of her era, including Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, Frederic Eden and Patrick Colquhoun. Austen's informed and opinionated references to her nation's economy reveal an author engaged with the political/economic debates of her volatile, turbulent era, such as the Restriction Act, the Speenhamland System, the Poor Law Reform Bill and the Corn Law. As Mary Poovey notes in Genres of the Credit Economy, the economic instability during Jane Austen's adult life created a great deal of insecurity in the British public, and Austen uses "her fiction to manage the anxieties it caused" (370). Austen's books thus reveal themselves to be state-of-the-nation novels and a series of texts that respond to the ongoing deterioration of the late 18th and early 19th century British economy.