As we all know, Emma Woodhouse is handsome, clever, and rich.
But not all rich people are rich in the same way!
Mr Knightley, for example, is rich in the oldest way that humans have ever been rich, a manner of being rich that stretches all the way back to the beginnings of settled human society. Mr Knightley controls agricultural land, which tenants farm for him, and he collects rents from those tenants.
Not only is this the oldest way to be rich, for much of human history it was essentially the only way: either control agricultural land directly, or have some sort of overlordship over someone else who controls agricultural land, or collect tithes or taxes from those who control agricultural land, etc. Artisanal production and cottage industries might have produced some amount of wealth, but in most societies if you wanted to be unequivocally no-two-ways-about-it rich (not merely ‘well, at least I’m not a peasant!’), you had to have land.1 Agriculture was just that big a deal.
This is no longer the case. And famously, the shift began in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, exactly when Emma is set. Without wanting to get extremely New Historicist on you, I think this matters a little bit for the expectations of Austen’s various characters.
The Woodhouses are rich. We see clearly in the novel that Emma enjoys all the benefits of wealth: the carriages, the servants, the lot of it. (And also all the drawbacks of wealth, above all being coddled and spoiled.) It is extremely obvious that she and Mr Knightley are, for all intents and purposes, on the same level of wealth; and they act like it, treating each other as equals in terms of the British class structure.2 To put it another way, there is no indication that anybody thought Isabella Woodhouse’s marriage to George Knightley was a matter of Isabella moving up in the world: it was clearly a match between approximate equals in terms of class.
But the Woodhouses’ wealth is of a different sort to the Knightleys’:
The landed property of Hartfield [the Woodhouse estate] certainly was inconsiderable, being but a sort of notch in [Mr Knightley’s] Donwell Abbey estate, to which all the rest of Highbury belonged.
Hartfield produces a bit of pork (and probably other agricultural products—pork’s just the one that’s mentioned); but mostly this is for at-home consumption, and the Woodhouses don’t control agricultural surplus.
Seen in terms that made sense of the vast majority of settled human history, then, the Woodhouses’ wealth ought to pale into insignificance next to that of the Knightleys, owners of Donwell Abbey. Yet it doesn’t. The above-quoted passage continues:
their fortune, from other sources, was such as to make them scarcely secondary to Donwell Abbey itself, in every other kind of consequence.
Emma is set just as various forms of wealth that are less obviously tangible than control over land—shares in colonial adventures, stock in the East India Company, government bonds, investment in factories, etc.—began to pay off. And not merely enough to make some small number of merchants rich, but enough to change the fundamental structure of British society.3
Why does this matter for the novel? Well, let’s focus just on volume 1. Mr Elton is decidedly middle-class, a salaried professional with ‘inconsiderable’ landed property, just his house. If Emma had been set a century before, or even half a century before, Emma and Mr Elton would probably have been on roughly the same rung in terms of the British class system, because Emma would not have had access to her new forms of wealth.4 And Mr Elton is still stuck in that past.
He can’t see that, in pursuing Emma, he is reaching. Not that ‘reaching’ is inherently wrong or anything like that—Jane Bennet was ‘reaching’, and we all applaud her for it—but it requires a certain level of self-awareness. This is still true today: an underemployed starving artist who wants to pursue a relationship with a high-powered professional totally can do it, but they need to be aware of the asymmetry of the relationship and understand how their financial instability will affect the other person. Mr Elton has no such awareness or understanding, because he’s stuck in a past where anyone who doesn’t have agricultural wealth can’t be truly wealthy. His error was that he, ‘so well understanding the gradations of rank below him, [was] so blind to what rose above, as to fancy himself shewing no presumption in addressing her!’
Obviously Emma brings it on herself, too. She makes the inverse error, failing to understand the gradations of rank below her, and convinces herself that Mr Elton is a perfectly reasonable match for Harriet (a penniless bastard who doesn’t even know her father’s identity), and that indeed Harriet would be humiliated and degraded if she married anybody ‘lower’ down the social scale than him, like a farmer. Arguably the error is partly that Emma, whose wealth comes from sources that are far less tangible than control over land, correspondingly overindexes on intangibles: she plays up the vague possibility that Harriet’s father is an aristocrat, knowing that aristocrats’ bastards can often be found in high society; not realising that the bastards found in high society are generally those who are acknowledged and supported, not those who are cast out like Harriet. Financial and intangible assets, like a claim on a firm’s profits or a family connection, only matter if they actually issue in material prosperity—as Emma’s assets do but Harriet’s don’t. Emma has been brought up in a historically-unparalleled era of financial assets paying out, and she is wealthy as a result; but her judgment is overfitted to this particular set of circumstances and assets.5
I don’t want to lean too heavily on this. Emma is mostly not about wealth, but about why you shouldn’t play matchmaker, and about the often difficult-to-perceive difference between helping your friends and meddling in their lives, and about spoiled kids growing up. If you really lean too hard on this kind of context without paying attention to the actual characters and their actual motivations and relationships, you can end up making the kind of crazy argument that says (e.g.) that Emma is actually a work of conservative propaganda, intended to convince deracinated and alienated ‘new money’ to submit themselves to historical landed gentry, or (on the flipside) that Emma is actually a radical critique of the landed class, who the novel portrays as extractive enclosers of common wealth.6
But still, I’ve been rereading Emma, and I have noticed that paying attention to these shifts in the patterns of wealth is super productive. Austen clearly believes that there is an objective—or at least, intersubjective, grounded in real patterns in mutual expectations—fact of the matter about people’s place in the class hierarchy, even during periods of massive upheaval. (Indeed, I think that one of Mr Knightley’s virtues is supposed to be that he is perceptive and can grasp the fact of the matter, unlike many others who are bamboozled by the changes.) It is interesting thinking about the degree to which she was right about this.
All universal generalisations are false, there are obviously exceptions to this rule, there have been people in every era who have become stinking rich through e.g. becoming merchants or bankers. But many of them ended up having to invest much of the wealth they’d gained in the form of agricultural land anyway!
Even as Mr Knightley decisively does not treat Emma as an equal in virtue or judgment, at least until the end.
Janet Browne’s biography of Darwin actually uses Emma as a point of comparison of what Darwin’s upbringing was like: the historical Shrewsbury of Darwin’s childhood strongly resembles the fictional Highbury of the novel, which is set at the time of Darwin’s early life. And the comparison gives a great example of the change in wealth structures at the time. The Darwins had no land or inherited wealth to speak of; yet Charles’ father was a brilliant financier who helped connect new industrialists with potential investors, while his maternal grandfather was one of those new industrialists; and in the end, the Darwins became substantially richer than many of the landed families of the local gentry. Thanks to this, Charles was able to basically fuck around for a long time, e.g., going on overseas expeditions, because his father paid for it all! This obviously had world-historical consequences.
Emma perhaps would have been slightly higher, thanks to extremely distant family ties (her nth cousins are wealthy gentry) and the length of time her family has been ‘established’ in Highbury. But, as we know from Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, such advantages can be outweighed in the eyes of the class system by material deprivation, and women with family connections but without material prosperity would often have considered themselves lucky to marry a salaried professional like Mr Elton.
Another way her judgment is overfitted to her circumstances can be seen early on in volume 2, when she gets snooty about the Coles—another newly-wealthy family, but who (unlike the Woodhouses) don’t have distant family connections to the gentry or the aristocracy. Emma fails to perceive that the Coles are in very much the same situation as her own family, and that the Woodhouses’ family connections aren’t really all that causally relevant to their wealth and status. Luckily, though, none of her friends have any desire to be snooty about the Coles at all, and FOMO leads Emma to put snobbery aside and attend the Coles’ party.
In many of these cases, the error seems to be something like trying to infer causation from limited correlational data when we actually have causal data in front of us.
For example, to take Tobin’s thesis that Emma is a defence of the supremacy of the gentry, her argument largely boils down to inferring causal structure from co-occurrence: Emma isn’t landed and has various vices, Mr Knightley is landed and has various virtues, the happy ending comes when Emma brings her judgment in line with Mr Knightley’s; ergo probably Emma has various vices because she isn’t landed, Mr Knightley has various virtues because he is landed, and the novel wants the non-landed class generally to submit their judgment to the landed class. Apart from the problem that the correlational structure in the novel is not as clear as all this (lawyer John Knightley’s vices seem extremely minor to me, and the landed Churchills’ seem major!), there is a bigger problem: we are actually told why Emma has her vices. Emma’s vices have come about because she was spoiled by her father and Miss Taylor. And ‘being spoiled’ is something that equally afflicts the children of the gentry (again, the Churchills!). If the novel was really trying to convey the idea that Emma’s class has special vices unique to it, it would not explicitly say that Emma’s vices were caused by an affliction that equally affects other classes.
If we throw out much of the causal data the novel actually provides us with, then yes, the remaining correlations might seem to be consistent with some nice historicist causal story, like ‘Emma has vices because she is a member of the deracinated financier class’. But we actually have the causal data! Again, I think this problem plagues a lot of historicist readings of all sorts of novels: they focus a lot on the correlations between the evaluative structure of the work and the various socio-economic variables they’re interested in; but generally, in a novel, that evaluative structure will actually have structure, characters and relationships and plot, which carries information that too often gets thrown out.
I’d put off reading Emma (the only Austen I haven’t read?); I think because I felt like I knew what it was about. Thank you for this excellent nudge to read it and pay attention to this fascinating angle (but not go crazy about it)!