Bourgeois Deeds: How Capitalism Made Modernity 1700-1848

Peter Wardley has pioneered for the study of numeracy in England the use of probate inventories, statements of property at death available in practically limitless quantities from the 15^th century onward. He has discovered that as late as 1610 even in commercial Bristol the share of probates using Arabic as against Roman numerals was essential zero. By 1670, however, it was nearly 100%, a startlingly fast change. ³³³ Robert Loder's farm accounts, in Berkshire 1610-1620, uses Roman numerals almost exclusively before 1616, even for dates of the month. In 1616 he starts to mix in Arabic, as though he had just learned to reckon in them—he continued to use Arabic for years, probably because calendar years, like regnal years, Elizabeth II or Superbowl XVI, are not subjects of calculation.³³⁴

Fra Luca Pacioli of Venice popularized double-entry book-keeping at the end of the 15^th century, and such sophistications in accounting rapidly spread in bourgeois circles. The metaphor of a set of accounts was nothing new, of course, as in God’s accounting of our sins; or the three servants in Jesus’ parable (Matt. 25: 14-30) rendering their account [the Greek original uses logon, the word “word” being also the usual term for “commercial accounts”] of their uses of the talents, “my soul more bent / To serve therewith my Maker, and present / My true account, lest he returning chide.” Bourgeois and especially bourgeois Protestant boys actually carried it out, as in Franklin’s score-keeping of his sins.

We must not be misled by the absence in Olden Tymes of widespread arithmetical skills, though, into thinking that our ancestors were merely stupid. Shepherds had every incentive to develop tricks in reckoning, as in the old Welsh system of counting, perhaps from how many sheep the eye can grasp at a glance. The myth is that all primitive folk count “one, two, many.” Well, not when it matters, though some do because it doesn’t. Carpenters must of course have systems of reckoning to build a set of stairs. And Roman engineers did not build aqueducts with slopes of 3.4 units of fall per 10,000 units of length without serious calculation. The habit of counting and figuring is reflected in handbooks for craftsmen from the late Middle Ages on, the ancestors of the present-day ready reckoners for sale at the checkout counter at your Ace Hardware store. And you cannot build a great pyramid, or even probably a relatively little stone henge, without some way of multiplying and dividing, at least in effect, multiplying the materials and dividing the work. The first writing of any sort of course is counting, such as storage accounts in Mesopotamia or Crete and calendar dates in Meso-America and reckoning knots in Peru. In Greek and Latin the magicians of the East were called mathematici because calculation—as against the much more elegant method of proof invented by the Greeks—was characteristic of the Mesopotamian astrologers.

Large organizations counted perforce. Sheer counts had often a purpose of taxation—St. Luke’s story about a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed, for example; and in 1086 the better attested case of William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book. We owe our knowledge of medieval agriculture in Europe to the necessity in large estates to count, in order to discourage cheating by subordinates. The Bishop of Winchester’s N manors . . . .. cite Winchester Yields, and give example from it. We can see in such records the scribes making mistakes of calculation with their clumsy Roman numerals. We know less about agriculture a little later in Europe because the size of giant estates went down after the Black Death of 1348-50, and such accounting was therefore less worthwhile.

Sophisticated counting in modern times cuts through the Falstaffian fog of imprecision which any but a calculating genius starts with. Nearly universal before the common school outside the classes of specialized merchants or shepherds, the fog, I repeat, persists now in the non-numerate. Here is a strange recent example in which I have a personal interest. The standard estimate for the prevalence of male to female gender crossers in the United States is one in 30,000 born males. This is the figure in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4^th edition, 1994. Let us put aside the issue of whether it is a “mental disorder,” or what purpose of gender policing would be served by claiming that the disorder is so very rare. An emerita professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, Lynn Conway, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and one of the inventors of modern computer design (after IBM fired her for transitioning in 1968 from male to female), notes that the figure is impossibly low. It would imply by now in the United States a mere 800 completed gender crossers, such as Conway and me—when in fact all sorts of evidence suggests that there are at least 40,000.³³⁵

The showing of such a contradiction, like Prince Hal comments on Falstaff's boasting exaggeration, is the kind of point a numerate person makes. The sex doctors seem not to be modern in their quantitative habits of thought. A figure of 800 completed, Conway observes, would be accounted for (note the verb) by the flow of a mere two year’s worth of operations by one doctor. Conway reckons the incidence of the condition is in fact about one in every 500 born males—not one in 30,000. It is two orders of magnitude more common than believed by the psychiatrists and psychologists who in their innumeracy write the Manual. Conway suspects that among other sources of numerical fog the doctors are mixing up prevalence with incidence—stock with flow, as accountants and economists would put it. That is, they are mixing up the total number existing as a snapshot at a certain date with the number born per year. The wrong number justifies programs like that at the NNN at Johns Hopkins and the Clarke Institute in Toronto to Stop Them from changing gender—after all, the real ones are extremely rare, and the rest one supposes are vulgarly sex-driven.

Calculation is the skeleton of prudence. But precisely because it embodies ignoble prudence the aristocrat scorns calculation. Courage, his defining virtue, is non-calculating, or else it is not courage. Henry V prays to the god of battles: “steel my soldiers’ hearts;/ Possess them not with fear; take from them now the sense of reckoning, if the opposed numbers/ Pluck their hearts from them.” And indeed his “ruined band” before Agincourt, as he had noted to the French messenger, was “with sickness much enfeebled, / My numbers lessened, and those few I have / Almost no better than so many French.” Yet his numbers of five or six thousand did not prudently flee from an enemy of 25,000 on the Feast Day of Crispian.

One reason, Shakespeare avers, was faith, as Henry says to Gloucester: “We are in God’s hand, brother, not in theirs.” The other was courage: “’tis true that we are in great danger; / The greater therefore should our courage be.” Shakespeare of course emphasizes in 1599 these two Christian/aristocratic virtues, those of the Christian knight, and not for example the prudence of the warhorse-impaling stakes that on Henry’s orders the archers had been lugging through the French countryside for a week.³³⁶ Prudence is a calculative virtue, as are, note, justice and temperance. They are cool. The warm virtues, love and courage, faith and hope, the virtues praised most often by Shakespeare, and praised little by bourgeois Adam Smith two centuries on, are specifically and essentially non-calculative.

The play does not tell what the real King Henry V was doing in the weeks leading up to Sunday, October 25, 1415, of course. It tells what was expected to be mouthed by stage noblemen in the last years of Elizabeth’s England, a place in which only rank ennobled, and honor to the low-born came only through loyalty to the nobles. Before the taking of Harfleur (“Once more unto the breach, dear friends”), Henry declares “there’s none of you so mean and base, / That hath not noble luster in your eyes”; and before Agincourt, as I noted: “For he today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, / This day shall gentle his condition.”

Out of earshot of Henry, the king’s uncle grimly notes the disadvantage in numbers: “There’s five to one; besides they all are fresh”; at which the Earl of Salisbury exclaims, “God’s arm strike with us! ‘tis a fearful odds.” The King comes onto the scene, while the Earl of Westmoreland is continuing the calculative talk: “O that we now had here / But one ten thousand of those men in England / That do no work today!” To which Henry replies, scorning such bourgeois considerations, “If we are marked to die, we are enow [enough] / To do our country loss; and if to live, / The fewer men, the greater share of honor.”

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon St. Crispin’s Day.

This is not bourgeois, prudential rhetoric, and counts not the cost.

Public calculation is highly characteristic of the bourgeois world, such as the political arithmeticians of the 17^th century, first in Holland and then in England and then in France. The first person in Europe to suggest that accounting could be applied to the affairs of an entire nation, as though the nation were a business firm, appears to have been the inventor of the decimal point, the Dutch mathematician and statesman Simon Stevin(us) (1548-1620), who persuaded the City of Amsterdam and the King of Sweden to adopt double-entry bookkeeping.³³⁷ Find out more about Stevinus

As late as 1673 Sir William Temple was observing, astonished, of the Dutch that “the order in casting up [i.e. accounting for] their expenses, is so great and general, that no man offers at [i.e. attempts] any undertaking which he is not prepared for, and [is not] master of his design before he begins; so as I have neither observed nor heard of any building public or private that has not been finished in the time designed for it.”³³⁸ The English were then not slow to adopt such rationality, or at least to claim it. Pepys again, and naval accounts. Sir William Petty announced in 1690: “The method I take to do this is not yet very usual. For instead of using only comparative and superlative words and intellectual arguments I have taken the course (as a specimen of the political arithmetic I have long aimed at) to express myself in terms of number, weight, or measure; to use only arguments of sense.”³³⁹ It is a manifesto of a bourgeois age.

In an economics course recently I assigned my undergraduate students, whom I try to teach to think prudently like the Dutch of the Golden Age, the task of calculating the costs and benefits of the automobiles that three-quarters of them operated. I suspected that American college students work many hours in non-studying jobs, skimping their learning, to pay for cars and pizzas—though come to think of it, so do their parents. My suspicion was confirmed. Shame on them.

But it seemed only fair for the professor herself to take the test. It turned out that the indignant professor was the most irrational owner of an automobile in the class. My beloved seven-year old Toyota Avalon was costing me $4000 a year more than the same services would cost to get in other ways where I live in downtown Chicago. Taxis stream by my front door on South Dearborn Street day and night. On the other side of the accounts a parking place off-street was $160 a month and the city’s meter maids on-street were cruelly efficient and parking the car free on a side street resulted in three break-ins. So I sold the car. And likewise, probably, should you. I suggest you do the calculation, and certainly do it for that third car that sits outside your house to be used, if that, once a week.

But a rhetoric of calculation since the 17^th century does not mean that Europeans actually were rational. Many social scientists following Max Weber have mistakenly supposed they were, that a new skill with numbers and with accounts meant that Europeans had discovered true rationality. No. They discovered how to talk rationality, which they then applied with enthusiasm to counting the number of bird seeds you could fit into a Negroid skull and the number of Jews and Gypsies you could murder in an afternoon. The numbers and calculation and accounts appeal to a rhetoric of rationality—terms of number, weight, or measure; only arguments of sense. But they do not guarantee its substance.

The numbers, for one thing, have to be correct. So does the accounting framework in which they are calculated. So does the evaluative job they are supposed to do. So does the ethical purpose of the whole. These are heavy, heavy requirements, and any quantitative scientist knows that most people, even other scientists, commonly get them wrong.

For example, the technique of "statistical significance" used in certain quantitative fields such as medicine and economics—though not much at all in physics or chemistry, say—turns out to be on inspection comically mistaken. Tens of thousands of earnest researchers into medicines and minimum wages persuade themselves that they are doing a properly bourgeois calculation when in fact the calculation is very largely irrelevant to what they want to know. Like businesspeople priding themselves on economically erroneous allocating of fixed costs to various branches of their business, the medical and social scientists who use so-called t or p or R “tests” are doing more than fooling themselves. They are killing people and ruining economies. The suspicion that "you can prove anything with statistics" is primitive. But in field after field of the intellect, from politicized census-taking up to double blind experiments sponsored by Merck the primitive gibe seems approximately true, at the 5% level of significance.³⁴⁰

In 1713, as the economic historian John Nye explains in his recent history of British-French commercial relations, the British makers of drink had long benefited from the prohibition of imports of French wine into Britain. Britain and France had just concluded their long and bloody quarrel over the Spanish succession, and a bill in Parliament proposed therefore to drop the wartime preferences for Spanish and Portuguese wines, to which unsurprisingly the existing importers of Spanish and Portuguese wines—there were of course no legal importers of French ones to speak up for the profits pro tempore of that trade—objected strenuously. A frantic river of pamphlets spilled out a rhetoric of accounting and quantities. It was the first time, Nye notes, following G. N. Clark, “that the newly collected statistics on British trade entered the political debate in a substantial way,” serving “as a basis for the mercantilists’ published statements of economic doctrine.” Note the date: in now Dutch-imitating England, 1713 was the first time that policy depended on numbers, this a century after the first such debate in Holland. True?

The wine trades with Portugal, wrote one defender of the status quo, “have as constantly increased every year as we have increased the demand for their wines, by which means the navigation and seamen of this kingdom have been greatly encouraged.” If French wines are allowed back into Britain the navigation and seamen will be ruined, because “small ships and an easy charge of men can fetch wines from France.” And so “the greatest part of those ships must lie and rot, or come home dead freighted,” resulting in a rise in freight rates on British exports, to the detriment of the country’s treasure by foreign trade. Another British pamphleteer reckoned that “the advantage to the French nation by having such a vent for their wines” was very great. “The French king . . . would give a million of money to procure” it.³⁴¹ Another that

formerly the king of Portugal prohibited the importation of cloth into his kingdom. . . . [The] prohibition was taken off on consideration that Portugal wine should pay [in Britain] one third less duty than French. . . . Should the duty on French wines be lowered . . . . we very much fear that the French king will take the opportunity of introducing his subjects’ cloth into Portugal, which being of a thinner manufacture than the cloth of this nation, may be fitter for that country and their Brazils. . . . We may forever lose the cloth trade in that kingdom³⁴²

In June of 1713 the bill to relax the duties on French wine was rejected, though the quantitative arguments were all specious. The social accounting was mistaken, sometimes positively wacko. But anyway a rhetoric of quantitative prudence ruled.³⁴³ Such bourgeois, quantitative reasoning was in Britain rare a century before, though among the Dutch it was already commonplace in 1613. "Constantly increased." "The greatest part of those ships." "A million of money." "One third less duty."

But I said there can be a sort of madness in the counting, and counting is no guarantee of actual rationality. As a calculating modern person, even an economist, before I sold my Toyota I first went on a big shopping expedition, as my mother prudently advised, and stocked up with $1500-worth of Barilla Thin Spaghetti and Manischewitz Thin Tea Matzos and other non-perishable necessities. As an aid to such prudence I worked out little tables of equivalences, like the builder’s ready reference book: If you use ½ a package of Quaker Instant Oats a week, and want two-years’ worth, that’s . . . let’s see, ½ x 52 x 2 = 52 boxes. Calculation embodies a modern sort of prudence, even when it is slightly mad, as here. I still had by actual count, three years now after the shopping spree, 11 cans of Pillar Rock Pink Salmon, but couldn't find the sell-by date on them. Auden writes in 1940: "The measurable taking charge/ Of him who measures, set at large/ By his own actions, useful facts/ Become the user of his acts.”³⁴⁴

What the modern fascination with charts, graphs, figures, and calculations shows is that moderns admire prudence. It does not show that they practice it. Body counts in Vietnam did not show that American policy there was in fact prudent. What changed from Shakespeare's time to Dickens' time was the rhetoric of quantification, and the social prestige of people like merchants and engineers and economists who specialized in it. Now the world claims to be ruled by little else. Dickens was arguing about and against the spirit of the age in Chapter XV of Hard Times, her father trying to persuade Louisa to marry Mr. Bounderby by the batty citation of facts, only facts:

You are, we will say in round numbers, twenty years of age; Mr. Bounderby is, we will say in round numbers, fifty. There is some disparity in your respective years, but in your means and positions there is none; on the contrary, there is a great suitability. Then the question arises, Is this one disparity sufficient to operate as a bar to such a marriage? In considering this question, it is not unimportant to take into account the statistics of marriage, so far as they have yet been obtained, in England and Wales. I find, on reference to the figures, that a large proportion of these marriages are contracted between parties of very unequal ages, and that the elder of these contracting parties is, in rather more than three-fourths of these instances, the bridegroom. It is remarkable as showing the wide prevalence of this law, that among the natives of the British possessions in India, also in a considerable part of China, and among the Calmucks of Tartary, the best means of computation yet furnished us by travelers, yield similar results.


Chapter 17:

The New Values Were Triumphant

by 1848, or 1776, or Even as Early as 1710
Use Kenneth Boulding’s The Image

My friend the economist Mark Blaug once said to me, in effect, "Isn't it remarkable that much of moral conduct doesn't need explicit ideology, because much of the socialization of people is tacit. Isn't it the tacit socialization at your mother's knees—and perhaps even the biological imperative in your father's genes—that must be explained?" Blaug's objection is similar to that of the late Clifford Geertz, though Blaug is resisting the textual study that Geertz and I like to do. "Do we need to drone on and on about theories of ethics and their historical change?" His remarks are anti-verbal: look for interest, he says, and instinct. Set aside the mere words.

And I answer to Blaug: I understand your scientific impatience, and agree that some of the socialization is tacit, and some even is perhaps hardwired in humans. It seems to be hardwired at any rate in the broad method of, say, social shaming, if not in the detailed rules about what exactly is shameful. We are hardwired, for example, as another economist friend of mine, Alexander Field, argues in a recent book, not to kill each other on meeting Field **date).

But of course even in this case we can rather easily be socialized by words, even at our mothers' knees, to kill the enemies of Rome on meeting, or at any rate at a convenient distance. The particular enemies are highly specific to a culture and time, demonized in an ideology, often explicit. An ideology of German superiority socialized Germans to kill Poles. An ideology of British imperialism socialized Englishmen to kill Zulus. An ideology of American manifest destiny socialized Americans to kill Sauk and Sioux. I repeat: of course. Humans are both hard-wired and soft-wared. We can read at least part of the software's code, because it is expressed in the lines and especially between the lines in Molière's plays and Jane Austen's novels, in Paine's Common Sense and in Johnson's colloquies, in Candide and in The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Articulated ideology and subliminal ideology, too, as Blaug implies, rides perhaps as a little wave of talk upon deeper currents of biology or interest or the means of production. But the little wave, too, has its own logic and its own consequences. I think—this is no astonishing discovery, but it is what this book is arguing—that in northwestern Europe and especially in England the ruling ideology changed a great deal from 1600 to 1710 and then from 1710 to 1848, from Shakespeare's time to Addison's time, and then further to Macaulay's, with a very significant mile mark at Adam Smith and 1776. The characteristic European site moved from an French aristocrat's estate to an English bourgeois' town. And, I claim, the change had big consequences.
Contrary to Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1952, "Prosperity was not, according to the Puritan creed, a primary proof or fruit of virtue. 'When men do not see and own God,' declared Urian Oakes (1631), 'but attribute success to the sufficiency of instruments it is time for God to maintain his own right and to show that He gives and denies success according to His own good pleasure'."³⁴⁵ But Niebuhr sees "the descent from Puritanism to Yankee in America . . . [as] a fairly rapid one. Prosperity which had been sought in the service of God was now sought for its own sake. The Yankees were very appreciative of the promise in Deuteronomy: 'And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the Lord: that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest go in and possess the good land which the lord swear unto thy fathers'" (6: 18). (Chap 3, sec. 1) "According to the Jeffersonians," Niebuhr continues, "prosperity and well-being should be sought as the basis of virtue. They believed that if each citizen found contentment in a justly and richly rewarded toil he would not be disposed to take advantage of his neighbor. The Puritans regarded virtue as the basis of prosperity, rather than prosperity as the basis of virtue. But in any case the fusion of these two forces created a preoccupation with the material circumstances of life which expressed a more consistent bourgeois ethos than that of even the most advanced nations of Europe." Niebuhr 1952, Chap. 3, Sec. 1)

Jane Austen’s characters in her six mature and finished novels, published between 1811 and 1817, are of course smallish landholders and their pastors, the lesser gentry, with the Army and the Navy off stage. She never portrays, or even mentions, the real heights of England’s tiny aristocracy, and her dedication of Emma to the Prince Regent was famously forced. "3 or 4 families in a country village," she writes to her niece Anna in 1814, "are the very thing to work on."³⁴⁶ We hear little or nothing of dukes and duchesses. Her people bring along with their rise into the lesser gentry an attitude of disapproval for the gaming tables and dueling grounds of the real aristocracy. Part of the embourgeoisfication of England 1600 to 1848 consisted of tempering the aristocracy with bourgeois values, until dukes took to walking about in sober business suits and serving as honorary board chairmen for gas works.

In the other direction, Jane’s servants and children are entirely silent—barely mentioned. Her country villages seem bare of agricultural workers—contrast Hardy fifty years on. We hear of Mrs. Charles nursery-maid, but we do not hear her speak, or hear of the children who thronged these households. Remember that Jane's mother had eight children, six sons and two daughters. You wouldn't know that England was an astonishingly stratified society from Austen's novels—except that even within the tiny class she examines a snobbery reigns, at least among the minor characters, or among the misled major characters. This needn't matter much to a modern reader. The narrow spectrum of the English class system which Austen examines can be refracted into whatever class arrangement we want for our own purposes, or, still better, de-historicized entirely and left as Literature about Humanity.

Yet none of Austen's characters are conventionally bourgeois. It is notable that not a single merchant or manufacturer is so much as mentioned, though this is a bit less surprising when one realizes that Austen Country, like Dickens country later on, was the south and southwest, the least industrial parts of England. The most ordinarily bourgeois figure is Robert Martin, the farmer-suitor of Harriet Smith. Emma persuades Harriet not to accept his offer, until the very end of the novel. Marilyn Butler argued that Austen was a right-wing figure, an anti-Jacobin: “the crucial action of her novels is in itself expressive of the conservative side in an active war of ideas.”³⁴⁷

So Austen wrote in a bourgeois genre, but did not bother with tradesmen. She was not a radical bourgeois writer, not at all No celebration can be found of entrepreneurship or the thrusting enterprise of new men. Not at all.

And yet I would say—there again is nothing terribly new or shocking about this—that our Jane is highly economistic, and in this way bourgeois. It is a feature of the English novel from Robinson Crusoe forward that the characters consider, plan, agonize before they venture. It is no accident that the novel and the science of economics, called then "political economy," grew up at the same time and share the same atmosphere of calculation. Alessandro Manzoni, the Italian Tolstoy, devoted an entire chapter of his masterpiece The Betrothed (1825-26, 1840; Chapter 12) to explaining the dire consequences of interfering with the grain market. You could reprint it for a lecture in Economics 101. But Austen advocates both sense and sensibility, that is, both prudence and love among the traditional principal virtues. In this I would say she is strikingly bourgeois. The bourgeoisie above all calculates. But the good bourgeois has sensibility, too, and loves.

Notice how impossible a carelessly aristocratic sentiment is in an Austen novel. Responsibility, honor in the bourgeois sense of keeping your word, and above all “amiability,” her most honored quality, play their part. Edgy heroism of a boy's sort does not. Doubtless Austen’s brothers Frank and Charles were gloriously heroic, and urged their men once more unto the breach. You didn’t rise in His Majesty's navy of Lord Nelson and Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey to the rank of admiral, as did at last both of her sailor brothers, without physical courage. But in Austen's world, as in the Navy, the most necessary virtue was the bourgeois virtue of prudence. Naval officers were of course expected to do their utmost, and were hanged if they didn’t. But they were expected to be prudent, too, as well as courageous. No wild charges for the guns, no throwing away an expensively trained life on gestures.

In Austen the admiration of prudence is undercut, of course, when it shows as prudence only. The minor characters are often insanely prudent, mothers pushing their daughters up the marital tree, for example, with a single-mindedness that would delight a modern economist. Lucy in Pride and Prejudice, of whom the author {who is she channeling here?} Get it. remarks:

The whole of Lucy's behavior in the affair, and the prosperity which crowned it, therefore, may be held forth as a most encouraging instance of what an earnest, an unceasing attention to self-interest, however its progress may be apparently obstructed, will do in securing every advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than of time and conscience.³⁴⁸

Or more famously, consider Mr. Collin's proposal to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, an anticipation of Mr. Gradgrind’s argument to Louisa in Hard Times:

My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish. Secondly, that I am very convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness; and thirdly—which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice of the very noble lady whom I have the honor of calling patroness.³⁴⁹

But the major characters never talk in this prudence-only way. Their behavior, and their talk about their behavior, are always mixes of prudence with love and justice and temperance and moral courage. Or at least they achieve such ethical balance by the past pages of the novel.

The two virtues of the classical and Christian seven that are missing from Austen are the same ones missing also from Adam Smith (whom it seems she got the gist of by way of NNN)—transcendent hope and faith and love of God. That is, Jane is not a Romantic novelist, even though she concerned herself exclusively with romance in its very recent sense of “affairs of the heart.” She does not take art as a model for life, and does not elevate the artist to a lonely pinnacle of heroism, or worship the Middle Ages, or have any of the other obsessions of Sir Walter Scott and later Romantics. Her Northanger Abbey, written it appears in the same year as Coleridge and Wordworth’s Lyrical Ballads, was a spoof on the proto-Romantic gothic novel.

In this connection what is especially odd is that she is not, either, a Christian novelist, and her characters, whether major or minor, make little of their Christianity. Hope and faith and love of God are Christian virtues, or so the Christians had claimed from the earliest times. Romanticism revives hope and faith and a love for Art or Nature or the Revolution as a necessary transcendent in people's lives. But Austen never deals in the transcendent. She was a daughter of a clergyman, courted by clergymen, and a sister to a clergyman, and the aunt or-great-aunt-in-law to clergymen. As a friend put it to me, “In an Austen novel you can’t spit without hitting an Anglican clergyman.” But she never once mentions God. We know from other sources than her a-religious novels that she was an 18^th-century, conservative, broad-church Anglican. Austen was clearly no Enthusiast. She writes to her niece Fanny Knight, advising her on a suitor: “and as to there being any objection from his Goodness, from the danger of his becoming even Evangelical, I cannot admit that. I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals, and am at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason and Feeling, must be happiest and safest.”³⁵⁰ Note the mix of Reason and Feeling, sense and sensibility, an entire lack of understanding of the Evangelical temper.

It has often been remarked, further, that Austen is bourgeois in the precise concern she has for money. Two recent handbooks for the study of Austen both feature a chapter entitled simply “Money,” though by the same scholar.³⁵¹ Oliver McDonagh observes that she “was accustomed from childhood to hear money matters discussed in informed and detailed fashion; and the lessons she learned were driven home by her own comparative poverty.”³⁵² My undergraduate students who come from small businesses have the same informed grasp of the value of money. In the same letter just quoted Jane tells the heiress Fanny that Mansfield Park has sold out its first edition. "I am very greedy and want to make the most of it; but,” adds Aunt Jane to the young heiress with a sharp turn,” you are much above caring about money. I shall not plague you with any particulars."³⁵³

Samuel Johnson said that no one but a blockhead wrote except for money, and Jane was no exception. She writes to Cassandra and Martha expressing her pleasure in making so much as £400 from writing, twenty times the average annual income of a working family at the time, Think in modern terms of royalties accumulating to $600,000. As Marilyn Butler explains, she felt in her last six years that she was an Author, because she was making money at it.³⁵⁴ It was her independence, and bespoke a competence similar to that of her sailor brothers.

Economics is the science of prudence, and prudence is the chief virtue of the bourgeoisie. So Jane was an economist before the name. Prudence is not the only virtue, say Jane and I. A successful capitalism, I would argue, must have the virtues that Jane praises on the other accounts.

For Austen is above all an ethical writer. Remove ethical evaluation, education, experience from her novels and you have nothing at all. Nothing much happens, of course. The happenings are internal. If Austen is bourgeois—and I think she is—she is a model for good bourgeoisness. Not sense alone, but combined with sensibility. Not amiability alone, but also a prudent marriage. It seems impossible. As I say, she doesn't so much as mention stockbrokers or mill owners. But so long after her death she has assumed a special place in the ethical education of the English-speaking world. I am thinking of her apotheosis at the hands of the English critic F. R. Leavis in the 1930s. It would alarm many of her readers then and now to say so, but her kind of people are the kind we want in our capitalist society—her major people, that is, who do not follow the modern economists, as her minor people often do, in relying on prudence only.