Moreover, and this is the second point, the business of social and moral discrimination does not take place in a vacuum. Jane Austen may have nothing to say about the victories of Napoleon or the execution of Louis XVI, but this does not mean that they had no impact on her work. Given that two of her brothers were on active service in the navy and the husband of a much loved cousin was guillotined during the Terror, it would be absurd to imagine her living and writing in seclusion from the great events of the time. Her concern with manners, with propriety, with social convention was intimately related to what was going on in this wider world. If the Romantic movement and the cult of Sensibility reflect a positive response to the radical political ideas that were sweeping through Europe, Jane Austen’s social conservatism, imbued with the sort of ideas that had been expressed by Edmund Burke, reflects an equally clear negative response. She was, as Marilyn Butler has convincingly shown, one of the combatants in a war of ideas.
The overwhelming emphasis in Mansfield Park on stability and order have a significance that we can only understand if we set the novel against its contemporary background of war and revolution in Europe. The contrast between Fanny’s passivity and the Crawfords’ restlessness gains a new dimension from this context. That Henry Crawford should be hostile “to anything like a permanence of abode, or limitation of society” sets him clearly, and damningly, on the side of change and commotion. By the same token, when Fanny goes back to her family’s home in Portsmouth and finds it “the abode of noise, disorder, and impropriety”, her revulsion is not mere priggishness; the three nouns define it as an image of everything the values of the novel stand against.
The tensions reflected in Mansfield Park are not only the ideological conflicts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they are the social tensions of a country that was on the verge of tremendous change. The world of Mansfield Park over which Sir Thomas has presided is essentially an eighteenth-century world. The Crawfords who come from London to threaten it with their city ways and their passion for movement and variety are harbingers of a century of change. Mansfield Park itself resists them successfully, but they are a sign of things to come. England had just begun to see the emphasis of national life shifting decisively from the country to the city, and the nineteenth century was to usher in, thanks to the railways, an age of relentless movement.
In this, as in other respects, Mansfield Park is poised between the two centuries. The novel’s social allegiance is to the old order of the eighteenth-century landed gentry, to the values of rural tradition and stability which stand in opposition both to the radical ideas that have been hatched on the Continent and to the stirrings of social change in England. But at the same time the book’s moral perspective looks forward to that strand of Victorianism which tends to oppose style to substance, to be suspicious of social charm, to respect depths rather than surfaces, to value earnestness above all. The novel’s heroine, too, though she has antecedents in the eighteenth century, has more in common with the physically frail but morally righteous heroines of many Victorian novels.
Mansfield Park is in several ways a towering achievement. Its uncompromising moral vision, the clarity of its social observation, the command of tone that can keep figures as diverse as Lady Bertram, Mrs. Norris and Mr. Yates within the range of the author’s humor and yet prevent them from escaping into a separate comic world—all this is brilliantly managed. But has anyone ever been quite satisfied with the brisk resolution of Fanny and Edmund’s love story? Reading Mansfield Park in 1836, the actor William Macready complained that it “hurried with a very inartificial and disagreeable rapidity to its conclusion.” It’s easy to see what he means. “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery,” says Jane Austen at the start of the final chapter, confessing herself “impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.” In pursuit of this aim, she consigns Fanny and Edmund to felicity with remarkably little ceremony. The brief paragraph that announces their prospective marriage is almost dismissive.