Baronets, Retrenching, and How to Pronounce Somersetshire

What’s important about the year 1814? Why is it so ironic that Sir Walter is obsessed with rank? Learn the answers to these questions and more in the inaugural episode of My Cousin Jane.

Hey everybody, welcome to the inaugural episode of My Cousin Jane. I’m excited to have this chance to talk about Jane Austen and her works. Whether you’re already a huge Jane Austen fan, just starting out with Jane Austen, or maybe you stumbled across this podcast by accident and thought it was some new age punk band, I hope you learn something and come away with a more enriched and deepened understanding of Jane Austen’s writing.

A little bit about me. I started listening to Jane Austen in audiobook format about 10 years ago when I was in graduate school, and I since then have listened to and read multiple times all of her completed works. I haven’t read her fragment works, but I love British history. I’m by no means an expert, but I do enjoy reading about it and learning about it and sharing it with people, especially my own family.

The goal of the podcast is not so much to do a literary analysis of the deeper ethos of Jane Austen, but it’s like a fun deleted scenes, bonus features sort of vibe. We’re going to go book by book, chapter by chapter, and look at a brief overview of what’s going on, as a refresher, and then talk about some of the interesting side notes that will bring a little more color, a little more depth to the story.

When I was thinking about which order to go in, I thought maybe I could go chronologically as to when the books were published or when she wrote them. Then I decided I would start with Persuasion because that’s my favorite. Then we’ll go from there.

My Cousin Jane

The podcast is called My Cousin Jane because Jane Austen is actually my cousin. I was doing some family history work a little while ago, and I discovered that I’m actually related directly to Jane Austen on her mother’s side.

When I say “directly”, take that with a bit of a grain of salt, because as you might suspect, if you know anything about genealogy, the further back you go, the easier it is to say you’re related to anybody. In fact, Jane Austen is my eighth cousin, six times removed on her mother’s side.

I could have easily called the podcast Our Cousin Jane, because frankly she is probably everybody’s cousin at some point. The more I thought about it, the more I thought she wouldn’t have said Our Cousin Jane, she would have said My Cousin Jane, because that’s how she wrote. That’s what I call the podcast.

Let’s go ahead and jump right into Persuasion Chapter One.

Chapter Summary

We’re going to talk about that. Our first segment here, we’re going to talk about the time and place of Persuasion. Then we’re going to talk a little bit for our second segment about Sir Walter’s rank in British society. Then our third segment, we’re going to talk about his financial situation.

Time and Place

The time period: this takes place in the summer of 1814. The time period is important because this is the tail end of the Napoleonic Wars. While Jane Austen doesn’t talk a lot about war and politics in her books, she does paint this picture of how these external events affected especially the common country family life, especially the women. We’re going to see that in Persuasion.

Jane had two brothers who were in the Navy, and one of which became an Admiral of the Fleet in the Royal Navy when he retired, which we’ll talk more about in a future episode. She was very familiar with the battles, the naval battles at least, of the Napoleonic era.

This takes place right about at the end of the Napoleonic war. Napoleon’s in exile, his fleet has been wiped out at the Battle of Trafalgar. He’s in exile, and this is right before the Hundred Days War when he comes back. This is a time period of relative peace for the British.

The location: it takes place in Somersetshire. If you go on a map and look for Somersetshire, you won’t find it, because in our day the county is called Somerset. Many of the southwestern and southeastern counties of England dropped the -shire suffix in later times.

Our family lived in Cambridge for a couple of years, and it was in the city of Cambridge, in the county of Cambridgeshire. Depending on where you are from, people would either say Cambridge-shire, some people would say Cambridge-sure, some people would say Cambridge-shear, depending on if you are from the north of England, the south of England, or around the London area.

We’re going to say Somersetshire, because that’s the pronunciation of the suffix that I’d always been introduced to at the beginning. All of those suffixes, however you say it, mean county, which is an area overseen by an earl.

Sir Walter’s Rank

The second thing I want to talk about is Sir Walter Elliot. What’s interesting about him is that he’s vain and proud. His oldest daughter, Elizabeth, is the female version of Sir Walter.

At the beginning of the novel, at the opening, Elizabeth is 29. The obsession with age and physical appearance reveals a little bit about her concerns, because to be an unmarried 29-year-old woman in that time period was pretty alarming. Especially since the estate was going to be inherited by someone else, someone she had tried to court indirectly through her father’s influence. That didn’t work out. We’re going to talk more about that in the future.

What’s also interesting is Sir Walter’s obsession with rank and position in society. Jane Austen always writes with this satirical slant. She wants to point out hypocrisy and satire, especially social satire.

The peerage ranks in the United Kingdom: you have the upper class aristocracy, you’ve got the monarchy, which are their own thing, and then you’ve got the peerage. The peerage consists of dukes, and the marquis, and the earl, and the viscount, the baron, in that order. Then below that is a whole different social class, which is what we would call the gentlemen, or the landed gentry.

If you owned land and did not have to work for a living, then you were part of this middle class aristocracy, so to speak. They would typically earn their money through tenant farmers who would be renting their land and paying them rents for that.

Sir Walter did have a title, a title that was what we call a heritable title. It can be passed on to his son or to the next heir of the estate. Sir Walter’s title was baronet rather than baron. A baronet is just one step above knight. If you think about Sir William Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, he was a knight. Sir Walter was just one rank in society above that.

In fact, most of the aristocracy looked down on the class of baronet in general. It had been created specifically by King James to raise money. There weren’t any great honors with being a baronet. If you were part of the peerage, there were certain legal rights you had regarding trial and precedents and things like that, but baronets didn’t come with any of that.

It was just a title that you could pass on to your children, and technically you ranked above knights, but nobody really cared. It’s ironic that Sir Walter is so obsessed with rank while possessing what is essentially the lower middle class rank of the aristocracy.

Sir Walter’s Debt

When the story opens, we have Sir Walter, as we said, deeply in debt, and he’s trying to figure out what to do. He goes to his daughter, Elizabeth, and this is interesting.

We’re going to listen to a clip from an audiobook version done by Karen Savage for LibriVox. If you’re not familiar with LibriVox, LibriVox.org, it’s a great website. They take books that are in the public domain, and volunteer narrators create audiobook versions of those books and release those into the public domain.

For any given book that has its copyright expired, you can find several different versions done by different narrators, sometimes by themselves, sometimes with a cast doing a dramatized version. This version that we’re going to listen to is done by Karen Savage, who’s actually a professional audiobook narrator, but who did quite a bit of volunteer work for LibriVox. We’re going to use that version of Persuasion whenever we need to listen to a clip.

Here is Elizabeth trying to decide what she should do to help her father save money and get out of debt:

It had not been possible for him to spend less; he had done nothing but what Sir Walter Elliot was imperiously called on to do; but blameless as he was, he was not only growing dreadfully in debt, but was hearing of it so often, that it became vain to attempt concealing it longer, even partially, from his daughter. He had given her some hints of it the last spring in town; he had gone so far even as to say, “Can we retrench? Does it occur to you that there is any one article in which we can retrench?” and Elizabeth, to do her justice, had, in the first ardour of female alarm, set seriously to think what could be done, and had finally proposed these two branches of economy, to cut off some unnecessary charities, and to refrain from new furnishing the drawing-room; to which expedients she afterwards added the happy thought of their taking no present down to Anne, as had been the usual yearly custom. Persuasion, Chapter 1

Elizabeth’s three great ideas for saving money:

1. Let’s stop giving money to charity.

2. Maybe we should not refurnish the drawing room.

3. Why waste all the money giving a Christmas present to Anne?

Side Characters

That just about wraps up everything we want to talk about. I’ll point out there are a couple more side characters who are in this chapter who are introduced here.

Mr. Shepherd, who is the land agent, who plays a minor role, but his daughter becomes important. We’ll talk about her in the next chapter, along with Mr. Elliot, who is the heir presumptive, meaning that he is presumably going to inherit if nothing else happens. That becomes an important point in the novel. We’ll talk about that next week.

Conclusion

That wraps up this episode of My Cousin Jane. As always, if you enjoy the show and would like to help support us, please consider clicking the little donate button or subscribing to our newsletter. Either way, thanks so much for listening.