The Manners of Tragedy

Jane Austen and Winston Churchill find common ground // In my headphones: Cowboy Junkies—Sweet Jane (1988)

Jane Austen’s House in Chawton.

What caught my eye most at Jane Austen’s house in Chawton, Hampshire was not her topaz cross or even her rickety writing-table. Rather, it was a statement by Winston Churchill written during World War II.

By 1943, Churchill had contracted pneumonia. Upon the advice of his doctors to relax, he read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the first time.

“What calm lives they had those people,” he wrote. “No worries about the French Revolution or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars.” 

The characters in Austen’s novels appear remarkably unbothered by the chaos across the sea. Granted, the war was across the sea in 1813 and not directly overhead, but compared to what Britain underwent during 1940, combat zones during the Napoleonic Wars were rather strictly delineated; no successful attacks encroached on the British mainland.

But that is not to say that the Napoleonic Wars and French Revolution would not have impacted the characters in Austen’s novels. The conflicts loomed large over Regency-era Britain; they even impacted Jane Austen herself. Two of Austen’s brothers served in the Royal Navy, and her cousin’s husband (a captain in Marie Antoinette’s Regiment of Dragoons) was executed during the French Revolution. And since career options for the landed gentry were rather narrow—members of Austen’s class mostly held positions within the military, clergy or law—it would have been abnormal for families like hers not to have a brother, husband or cousin somehow involved in the war effort.

In Pride and Prejudice alone, the motivating conflict in the story is initiated when the Bennet sisters encounter Wickham, the son of the elder Mr. Darcy’s steward, who serves as a militia officer. There is much talk about the regiment being in town, which, although it provides romantic prospects for the sisters, also serves as a reminder of the ever-present thrum of war. Indeed, the officers’ deployment to Meryton disrupts daily social life in the Bennets’s circles. Wickham’s regiment is invited to such society events as balls and receptions. But despite such distorting forces, and ever-fearing an invasion from France, the community in Meryton continues to be merry.

Churchill, in his own darkest hour, wondered about Austen’s characters’ capacity for unworried quietude in stormy times. He concluded that these social courtesies were the very key to their relative sanctuary: “Only [in] manners controlling natural passion as far as they could” could their respite be found, “together with cultured explanations of any mischances.”

Pride and Prejudice transported Churchill to a more tranquil reality. The story, for him and many other English people, was a liferaft of certitudes in a sea of unease. After all, it is an oft-told anecdote that shell-shocked British soldiers were given Jane Austen novels to read after the First World War. This is hardly surprising. Systems of control like etiquette and social protocol provide relief to adherents in exchange for their fealty. Jane Austen commissioned this fulcrum to better effect than anyone.

As Churchill writes, Regency manners and cultured explanations served as the antidotes to the chaos and confusion lurking just beyond the English shore. Even if Wickham’s militia wasn’t deployed, every member of Meryton society, civilian and military alike, would have known at least one person fighting in the war. But Jane Austen hardly references it. In chapter 50, Mr. Gardiner writes that Wickham will enter the regulars, which Colonel Fitzwilliam (Darcy’s cousin) is already part of, making Elizabeth Bennet’s own brother-in-law an active participant in the war. Still, the silencing of war in Jane Austen’s Britain is blatant. Whether a subtle critique of inefficiency in England’s military is implicit in such a choice is up for debate, but the fact of the matter is that her characters, and her peers, were unbothered by the war or at least chose not to show it. Polite society dictated that women attend balls and select ribbons for their bonnets, while men looked after their affairs, managed their lands and courted ladies, instead. This reality starkly differs from the industrial Britain of the mid-twentieth century, when all of society was mobilized in the war effort. Austen offers an alternative to the existential and national anxiety that accompanies war through the strictures of etiquette.

Austen’s novels do not provide a balm for war as much as they remind readers of a universal truth: Manners and rules, when stripped to their bones, make chaos, destruction and death easier for those who must bear them.

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When a loved one dies, one hardly knows how to hold their head. But two minutes after the world ends, so the world begins again. There is still a funeral to plan, with all the trappings of societal protocol that any large gathering might afford.

Where will the funeral take place? Who will be invited? What kind of sandwiches will be served at the reception? And how are you supposed to hold your hands in the pew during the service, for God’s sake?

Propriety toward others is a ceaseless ordeal. It does not end, not even for the dead.

For all of its stiff formalities and the extensive planning involved, a funeral is rather like a wedding. Weddings, or the supposition of them, feature quite prominently in Jane Austen’s stories. For life goes on, no matter the entropic state of the world. Some young readers find the manners in Austen’s world absurd. But Churchill intuits good manners are perhaps the most reasonable behavioral responses to societal upheaval. We need social courtesies in order to live, to make peace with uncertainty and to move on from the unreasonable phenomena out of our control. Etiquette makes the world go ’round.

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📍Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, Hampshire, England

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