Capers and Frisks

In Jane Austen’s novels, little children are usually heard rather than seen. They are reflections of their parents: disruptive and very noisy when their parents are negligent; lively but well-behaved when their parents are diligent. And like all the characters in her fiction, children are portrayed with a sharp realism born of an unsentimental clarity.

In Pride and Prejudice, the little children are almost invisible because the children in the story have good parents: Mr and Mrs Gardiner, who are the beloved uncle and aunt of the Bennet girls. When the Gardiners take their niece Lizzie Bennet for a month-long coach trip, Lizzie anticipates a richly enjoyable time because her hosts are excellent people:

The Gardiners stayed only one night at Longbourn, and set off the next morning with Elizabeth in pursuit of novelty and amusement. One enjoyment was certain—that of suitableness of companions; a suitableness which comprehended health and temper to every inconvenience—cheerfulness to enhance every pleasure—and affection and intelligence, which might supply it among themselves if there were disappointments abroad.

The Gardiner children stay behind in the Bennet house, looked after by the gentle Jane Bennet. The Gardiners, consistent with their mature discernment, have committed their children to the very best of carers:

The children, two girls of six and eight years old, and two younger boys, were to be left under the particular care of their cousin Jane, who was the general favourite, and whose steady sense and sweetness of temper exactly adapted her for attending to them in every way—teaching them, playing with them, and loving them.

The coach tour is cut short because Lizzie and the Gardiners are urgently needed to help resolve the scandal of the disappearance together of Lydia Bennet and George Wickham. When Lizzie and the Gardiners arrive back at Longbourn, the Gardiner children gather to see who is in the unexpected carriage. The children are overjoyed to see their parents. Austen delights in picturing the children’s delight:

The little Gardiners, attracted by the sight of a chaise, were standing on the steps of the house as they entered the paddock; and, when the carriage drove up to the door, the joyful surprise that lighted up their faces, and displayed itself over their whole bodies, in a variety of capers and frisks, was the first pleasing earnest of their welcome.

In contrast to the careful oversight of the good Gardiner children by Jane Bennet is an altercation between the stubborn young master Lucas and the ineffectual adult Mrs Bennet. The boy visits the Bennets in the company of his older sisters; he listens as the women criticise the rich but proud Mr Darcy:

“If I were as rich as Mr Darcy,” cried a young Lucas, who came with his sisters, “I should not care how proud I was. I would keep a pack of foxhounds, and drink a bottle of wine a day.”

“Then you would drink a great deal more than you ought,” said Mrs Bennet; “and if I were to see you at it, I should take away your bottle directly.”

The boy protested that she should not; she continued to declare that she would, and the argument ended only with the visit.

Mrs Bennet’s inadequate authority and lack of sense are obvious as she engages, and continues—but does not win—an argument with a child over an imaginative fancy.

The children are more prominent in Persuasion because they are much noisier. They are noisy because their parents, the Musgroves, are indolent and self-indulgent. Mary Musgrove is constantly complaining of being ill and neglected; she is happy only when included in the social whirl, such as it is in a quiet English village. Her children do not provide much satisfaction for her when she is at home because they misbehave. Mary complains of the isolating neglect she suffers to her prudent, patient sister, Anne:

“You have had your little boys with you?”

“Yes, as long as I could bear their noise; but they are so unmanageable that they do me more harm than good. Little Charles does not mind a word I say, and Walter is growing quite as bad.”

Her husband, Charles Musgrove, is a better father than Mary is mother, but parenthood comes second to the pleasures of hunting and socialising. Moreover, his management of the boys is undermined by Mary’s meddling, a pattern that is plain to Anne:

As to the management of their children, his theory was much better than his wife’s, and his practice not so bad. “I could manage them very well, if it were not for Mary’s interference,” was what Anne often heard him say, and had a good deal of faith in it; but when listening in turn to Mary’s reproach of “Charles spoils the children so that I cannot get them into any order,” she never had the smallest temptation to say, “Very true.”

The boys’ grandparents would like to see more of little Charles and Walter, but not while they are so troublesome. Mary complains that grandmama spoils the boys “and gives them so much trash and sweet things, that they are sure to come back sick and cross for the rest of the day”. Grandmama complains that their mother doesn’t know how to control them and wishes her daughter-in-law had more of Anne’s method with the children. Grandmama explains to Anne:

“I believe Mrs Charles is not quite pleased with my not inviting them oftener; but you know it is very bad to have children with one that one is obligated to be checking every moment—‘don’t do this,’ and ‘don’t do that,’ or that one can only keep in tolerable order by more cake than is good for them.”

The adults blame each other, but take little responsibility to change the children’s behaviour and habits. This is no surprise, because the parents and grandparents take little responsibility to change their own selfish behaviour and habits.

At Christmas time, the terrorising tots are brought to grandmama’s house to play with the children of visiting friends and the boys’ cousins. The result is predictable: a “domestic hurricane” that doesn’t seem to shake any of the adults—who add to the rumpus—other than Anne, whose life and emotions are always well governed. The hurricane of noise and disorder tests her forbearance; she watches with amazement:

Immediately surrounding Mrs Musgrove were the little Harvilles, whom she was sedulously guarding from the tyranny of the two children from the Cottage, expressly arrived to amuse them. On one side was a table occupied by some chattering girls, cutting up silk and gold paper; and on the other were tressels and trays, bending under the weight of brawn and cold pies, where riotous boys were holding high revel; the whole completed by a roaring Christmas fire, which seemed determined to be heard, in spite of all the noise of the others. Charles and Mary also came in, of course, during their visit, and Mr Musgrove made a point of paying his respects to Lady Russell, and sat down close to her for ten minutes, talking with a very raised voice, but from the clamour of the children on his knees, generally in vain. It was a fine family piece.

Gabbling girls playing with pretty things, and riotous boys stuffing their faces: an intense program of vigorous social engineering will have to be enacted before the predilections of girls and boys are amended. One hopes the engineering fails and the healthy natural instincts of each sex prevail.

It is natural, too, that parental examples are key—but not determinative—to a child’s development. In Emma, the shrewd observer of humanity Mr George Knightley tells Emma Woodhouse the reasons for the hedonistic temperament of Frank Churchill, the “chattering coxcomb”—insults from Jane Austen’s good characters are rare but memorable:

“I am not supposing him at all an unnatural creature in suspecting that he may have learnt to be above his connexions, and to care very little for anything but his own pleasure from living with those who have always set him the example of it. It is a great deal more natural than one could wish, that a young man brought up by those who are proud, luxurious, and selfish should be proud, luxurious, and selfish too.”

However, instincts and the example of parents are not all that is at play in building character. They alone do not decide the morals and temperament of a person. In all her novels, Jane Austen has at least one, and sometimes several prominent characters who defy uninspiring backgrounds and an indifferent upbringing to achieve a large measure of good sense, care, patience and discernment. Fanny and Susan Price and Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park; Elizabeth and Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice; Eleanor in Sense and Sensibility; Emma and Isabel Woodhouse and the yeoman Mr Martin in Emma; Anne Elliot and Mrs Smith in Persuasion: these are all examples of young people who have taken the raw material of their lives and fashioned it so that by their early to mid-twenties they have gained for themselves a richer, kinder, more reasonable and authentic personhood.

Austen often identifies indolence and complacency as destructive of a person’s life; just as often she identifies reflection, edifying reading and recollection in solitude as the means to maturity. Her young women characters in particular—at least those who struggle for wisdom—are always seeking solitude after some good or difficult episode to think, to recall, to steady and to compose themselves before deciding on their response.

In Emma, another aspect of little children is on display: their taste for adventure. When the timid Harriet Smith is harassed by “a loud and insolent” group of gypsies and has to be rescued by Frank Churchill, the whole neighbourhood is alarmed by the sensational event, including the young boys John and Henry Knightley. They get their aunt Emma to regale them with the tale again and again, and they relish each retelling:

The gipsies did not wait for the operations of justice; they took themselves off in a hurry. The young ladies of Highbury might have walked again in safety before their panic began, and the whole history dwindled soon into a matter of little importance but to Emma and her nephews; in her imagination it maintained its ground; and John and Henry were still asking every day for the story of Harriet and the gipsies, and still tenaciously setting her right if she varied in the slightest particular from the original recital.

It is the same masters John and Henry who play vigorous games with their uncle. These games alarm their cautious grandpapa Mr Woodhouse, who seems to think that everybody’s health is fragile and jeopardised by the slightest bump or inclemency. Emma placates her worried father by explaining the reasons why John and Henry’s father allows such rough play.

“He appears rough to you,” said Emma, “because you are so gentle yourself; but if you could compare him with other papas, you would not think him rough. He wishes his boys to be active and hardy, and if they misbehave, can give them a sharp word now and then; but he is an affectionate father—certainly Mr John Knightley is an affectionate father.”

“And then their uncle comes in and tosses them up to the ceiling in a very frightful way!”

“But they like it, Papa; there is nothing they like so much. It is such enjoyment to them that if their uncle did not lay down the rule of their taking turns, whichever began would never give way to the other.”

“Well, I cannot understand it.”

“That is the case with us all, Papa. One-half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”

One of the sweetest characters in all Austen’s fiction is John and Henry’s mother Isabel Knightley, who is Emma’s older sister. She is a cheerful and loyal woman who has found great happiness in her role as wife and mother. She remains very close to her father and sister, and visits are frequent. Isabel is described as:

a pretty, elegant little woman of gentle, quiet manners and a disposition remarkably amiable and affectionate; wrapped up in her family; a devoted wife, a doting mother, and so tenderly attached to her father and sister that, but for these higher ties, a warmer love might have seemed impossible.

However, she was “not a woman of strong understanding or any quickness” and her happiness is sometimes clouded because she shares, although to a lesser extent, the anxious carefulness of her father, Mr Woodhouse. He, to whom all change contains the likelihood of regret, imagines that Isabel wishes she was back with himself and Emma at Hartfield, and he struggles to comprehend that Isabel loves having her own home and family. This is at the end of one family holiday with Emma and Mr Woodhouse:

Mr and Mrs John Knightley were not detained long at Hartfield. The weather soon improved enough for those to move that must move; and Mr Woodhouse, having, as usual, tried to persuade his daughter to stay behind with all her children, was obliged to see the whole party set off, and return to his lamentations over the destiny of poor Isabella—which poor Isabella, passing her life with those she doted on, full of their merits, blind to their faults, and always innocently busy, might have been the model of right feminine happiness.

There is none of Austen’s famous satire here, except for the fun with Mr Woodhouse and his misplaced lamentations. Isabel—a model of right feminine happiness—reflects the experience of tens of millions of women across every culture and religion and throughout history. There have been untold numbers of eupathic women who have found lasting joy in the gift of themselves to the family they have done so much to create, nurture and sustain. Moreover, the stability, amity and rich good sense they contribute to their society and culture through their properly trained and loved children is immense, although it seems to have escaped the notice of more than a few politicians and too many social commentators.

Isabel’s youngest is the six-month-old baby, Emma. Emma is cradling her little namesake at a family gathering when the baby’s uncle, George Knightley—he who tosses boys to the ceiling—comes to Emma and gently takes the infant from her so he can cradle it himself. The grace-filled freedom between Emma and George, evident in this ready exchange of their newest niece, is indicative of the tender regard they have for each other that later leads to their betrothal.

When considering this aspect of her work, it is well to remember that Jane Austen was a single, celibate woman. Her family was loving despite the occasional irritations common among siblings, and its values were infused with the Anglicanism of her father, a rector. Never impious, Jane grew more devout as she grew older.

She was a dear sister and a fond aunt, whose advice was sought by her nieces. Graced with a high intelligence and rare wit, she was also gifted with a precocious level of sagacity. This wasn’t a result of either wide experience or rich old age, because her life was circumscribed and she died aged only forty-one from, it is suspected, Addison’s disease. Rather, her wisdom was perhaps a benefaction, augmented by a sharp understanding and a mind improved by reading and deliberation: a bestowment which through her superb novels she passed on to legions of readers, if they have ears to hear.

One facet of Jane Austen’s wisdom—it shines in every novel—is to see that temporal human happiness is to be found, not in politics, not in luxurious living, not in a tumult of envy and imagined desert, and not in selfish ambition, but in loving relationships with those among whom we are intimately placed. The children of the women and men who have this wisdom are blest because their parents—and their extended family if they share this sapience—know how to attend to them in every way: teaching them, playing with them, and loving them.