The Uses and Abuses of Austen's "Absolute Historical Pictures"

Abstract

IN 1833, in response to the reissue of Austen’s fictions in Richard Bentley’s series The Standard Novels, the Literary Gazette recommended Austen’s fictions to the “rising generation.” Noting that “one” particular “merit . . . of these delightful works is every hour increasing,” the Gazette continues somewhat ruefully that Austen’s novels are fast “becoming absolute historical pictures.” Were it not for these works, in other words, younger readers “would have no idea of the animation of going down a country dance, or the delights of a tea-table.” The Gazette’s view of history is both quaint and condescending. Implying that Austen’s writings are a repository not just of information but of values that are fast diminishing, the Gazette projects a new readership, whose ignorance of ephemera bespeaks other deficiencies that reading Austen will not remedy so much as underscore. Reading Austen is not simply educative on this view; it is, in its new capacity as popular history, a steady reminder of how far the “rising generation” has already fallen. The Gazette, it turns out, was not very far off base in its assessment. In fact, it is characteristic of the popular pedagogy in which Austen’s fictions were enlisted throughout much of the nineteenth century (and of her fictions’ ability to enshrine an historical moment or heritage) that their most succinct manifestation may be found among a group of readers who, suffice it to say, are as removed from that historical world as one could possibly be. I’m referring, then, to “the Janeites” memorialized by Rudyard Kipling in his fictional vignette bearing that same title. 1 To those for whom the term “Janeite” is a shorthand for the amateur (and sometimes professional) enthusiast who knows Austen’s novels (and their cinematic adaptations) seemingly by heart, not to mention the various sequels to works such as Pride and Prejudice that have been essayed over the years, the “Janeite” enthusiasm that Kipling explores may prove something of a puzzle. For unlike the members of the Jane Austen Society, who are nothing if not blessed with a fair measure of cultural capital, the visibly traumatized veterans of the World War I artillery unit, to whom the sobriquet was first applied, would seem to be the last readers—if indeed they are readers at all—in whom Austen might strike a responsive chord. This is most evident perhaps in the Janeites’ mode of speaking, where cockneyisms and colloquialisms abound to a degree that is not only at odds with the otherwise normative discourse that we associate with Austen’s writing, but at odds to a