In our modern world, there's an idea that fills our dreams and desires.
Something we've all searched for.
Romantic love.
Ooh!
# Love is the sweetest thing
# What else on earth could ever bring... #
What's fascinating is that
so much of romance isn't about spontaneous feeling.
All of love's rituals had to be invented.
# Love is the sweetest thing. #
Even the way that we feel can be traced back to specific
historical moments.
In this series, I'm going to tell the story of three centuries of romance.
Romance changed us from a society where courtship was controlled
to one where the romantic possibilities seemed endless.
It crossed barriers of class and sexuality
and transformed the way women and men relate to one another.
And none of this would have happened without
the invention of the romantic novel.
This was literature that
was as revolutionary as a political manifesto.
By focusing on love,
it drove readers to seek new forms of romance in their own lives.
No other artform has
so utterly transformed the way the British think and feel.
SHE SIGHS
In this first programme, I'm taking you back to the Georgian age,
when romance as we would recognise it first appeared.
People started reading romantic novels.
Fashionable love letters were full of tears and purple prose.
And with moonlit flits to Gretna Green,
romantic adventure started to enter the lives of ordinary people.
There were new ways of feeling and flirting and expressing your love.
Welcome to the first blossoming of British romance.
# I only hope that fate may bring
# Love's story to you. #
I confess.
I do love a good costume drama, but for me, the business of getting
together in real life in Georgian times is surprisingly unromantic.
Let's start with a true story. Just think to yourself -
what are the ingredients of a great 18th-century romance?
Well, probably a big house like this, a spirited heroine, like this,
and perhaps a handsome hero.
Unfortunately, for Mary Granville, an exceptionally beautiful Georgian
teenager, she wasn't to get the happy ever after that she'd hoped for.
In Mary's own account of her life, she remembers how naive she was
when she went in 1717 to stay at the house of her rich uncle,
little realising that she'd been invited
as potential wife material for his rich friends.
The house was busy, it was full of guests. Mary was out in society.
She was as happy as she could have imagined.
But then, an old friend of her uncle's arrived, Mr Pendarves.
According to Mary, Mr Pendarves was
"a person who was more disgusting than engaging".
Over three times her age, his face was crimson
and he was excessively fat.
His clothes were shabby and he was ridden with gout.
The days turned in to weeks and Mary came to the horrific
realisation that Mr Pendarves was staying for her.
She did her best to put him off. She was rude to him.
When he walked in to the room, she'd walk out again.
She even slammed the door on him.
But Mr Pendarves would not be deterred.
HE BURPS LOUDLY
Too late, Mary went to see her uncle,
who told her to stop being so childish
and commanded her to marry her geriatric Romeo.
Now, if this had been a Jane Austen novel,
things would have worked out for poor Mary.
A handsome young man with good prospects would have come along
and rescued her.
But Mr Pendarves' land and influence were valuable to Mary's uncle,
so the marriage went ahead.
Married life for Mrs Pendarves would be mercifully short.
Her husband's heavy drinking saw to that.
One morning, she woke up in their bed, had a look at him,
he was black in the face.
He had died in the night.
As Mary herself put it, being a widow was not unwelcome.
The predicament of Mary Pendarves, coerced into marrying for the
benefit of her family, was a common one at the start of the 18th century.
And not just among the aristocracy.
Out on the street, the newly-emerging commercial
and trading classes had started to reshape society.
Here, life was precarious, with bankruptcy
and debtors prison a constant threat.
Marriage offered a strategic way for families
and the community to pool resources and safeguard the future.
In the 18th century, your choice of who to marry wasn't
just your own business, nor even just your family's.
It was a matter for the whole community.
People's jobs and their businesses
and their status could all be affected.
And this meant that everybody wanted a say in your choice of spouse.
Recent historical research emphasises the high level of interference
that couples could expect from those around them.
A talented apprentice might be encouraged to
court his master's daughter. He got a step up,
while the long-term prospects of the business were protected.
Where a couple couldn't provide for future children, the community
might step in and collude with the vicar to stop the wedding.
Even if you thought that your choice was your own, it very often wasn't.
The families and the friends of young courting couples would help them out.
They'd deliver messages and arrange social occasions
and get-togethers for the young people to meet.
They'd be ever so helpful, but really,
they were keeping an eye on what was happening and, in some cases,
they were trying to bend the young lovers to their will.
We can see just how blatant this manipulation could be
when we look at a forgotten form of literature -
letter writing manuals, like this one from the 1740s.
Ostensibly, the book teaches you how to write a good letter,
but it does two other things as well.
Firstly, it provides entertainment, it's enjoyable,
and, secondly, it ends up being a guide to good behaviour.
It suggests the correct way to go about something like courtship
and more than half of the letters are devoted to that topic.
Reading all of these readymade letters, I'm surprised at how
acceptable it was to poke your nose into somebody else's love life.
So, here's a model letter to a gentleman of fortune who has
children, dissuading him from a second marriage with a lady
much younger than himself.
If you know someone in that situation,
this is the letter that you should write.
Then we have a letter from a father to his daughter,
recommending that she should accept an offer of marriage from a man
who is a bit older than her.
She writes back saying - I don't want to, do I have to?
But then we get his reply,
"urgently enforcing her compliance with his desire."
Poor girl.
And then there's my favourite letter of all, which is
from a father again to his daughter against a frothy French lover.
"His frothy behaviour,"
this letter goes, "may divert well enough as an acquaintance,
"but is very unanswerable, I think, to the character of a husband."
In other words, don't marry him, he's just too French.
All of these letters and the characters in them
were created by a single writer,
who in this case was also the printer of the book
and one of these letters, number 138, from a father to
a daughter in service, would change literature for ever.
Here is the germ of an idea that would become Pamela,
the first classic romantic novel.
The writer of both the letters and Pamela was Samuel Richardson.
I find it almost impossible to exaggerate
the importance of this tubby middle-aged man.
Samuel Richardson was the fairy godfather of British romance.
The son of a wood worker, by 1740s,
Richardson was one of the most successful printers in London.
He was well aware that there was a market for what were termed Romances.
Imported from France, this fledgling genre of fiction knew its audience.
Targeted at the 40% of women who could now read,
the stories were rambling, but punctuated with racy incidents,
involving aristocratic heroines in far off lands.
Pamela, though, was to be a new species of writing.
It followed a single event, a courtship,
and was gripping, realistic, and believable.
Samuel Richardson set his Romance in the grubby world of the present day.
His readers felt that the characters in Pamela were perhaps people
they'd seen on the street, or even people that they knew.
And if you look at the title page of the novel, you'll notice that
there's no mention even of Samuel Richardson as the author.
He was that keen to maintain the illusion that this really was,
as it says, a collection of "letters from a beautiful young damsel
"to her parents".
The letters of Pamela Andrews take us
into the world of the invisible serving class.
Pamela is vulnerable, she's living away from her family, and she's
flattered but wary of the attentions of Mr B - her rich, young employer.
"Don't be frightened," she reassures her parents, "I am honest,
"but if my head and my heart will let me, you shall hear all."
I think it's completely extraordinary that a corpulent
man of business in his 50s was able to get
convincingly inside the mind of a 15-year-old girl.
It helped that Richardson clearly liked and understood women
and he wasn't afraid to ask their opinion.
Samuel Richardson used what we'd call a focus group to check
that his story really was riveting.
It consisted of his wife and a young lady who was staying with them
and, every night, their heads would appear around the door
of his study and they'd say, "Mr R, we've come for a little more Pamela.
"How is Pamela getting on?"
Pamela was the first modern romance novel and the first best seller.
Many people also think it marks the moment
when the novel itself was born.
It was also a multimedia event.
I've met up with Lynn Shepherd, novelist and Samuel Richardson
obsessive, to look at images created by the artist Joseph Highmore.
So, Lynn, this is very clever.
It's the whole story of Pamela, half a million words,
condensed into 12 pictures.
- Absolutely. It's the graphic novel of Pamela. - Ha-ha!
Visitors would come to Highmore's studio,
peruse their favourite scenes, and order a set of prints.
To follow the story of Pamela, being left at the mercy of Mr B,
who loses no time in attempting to take advantage of her.
Pamela retains a soft spot for Mr B,
although today, his behaviour would result in an exclusion order.
What's happening in this incredibly salacious scene down here?
Yes, this is what Richardson referred to as a warm scene.
- A warm scene. A sexy scene. - Basically, yes.
As you say, extremely dramatic.
Mr B attempting to have his way with Pamela and she's fainting
- and this is what happens again and again in the novel... - She faints.
She faints. Every time he gets anywhere near her, she faints,
and he is sort of put off by this and withdraws.
What do you think people's boyfriends felt about Pamela?
Because presumably their girlfriends, as soon as they came up to them,
they would go, "Oh, I've fainted away!"
Well, it would be interesting to know
whether she started a fad for fainting.
A fad for fainting.
And then we go to this one, which is again very interesting,
- which is Pamela in the carriage. - What's happened here?
He's taking her away.
Well, she thinks she's going back to her parents,
but actually what's happened is that he's put her in his carriage...
- He's kidnapped her! - Basically, yes.
He's having her carted off to his estate in Lincolnshire and what's
interesting about this is it's another thing
about the 18th-century novel, which comes out very strongly here,
which is that men have physical freedom, men can travel,
men can decide where they want to go and when they want to go.
Women are moved about, literally as if they were objects.
And she is here literally being moved, against her will,
as she finds out,
because she's not actually going where she thinks she's going.
And we have Mr B here watching from the window.
There's a lot of subterfuge
and spying going on in some of these pictures and that's a great example.
At one point, she actually says, "I can't even leave the house
"in these fine clothes because people will think that I've stolen them."
- Yes. - "They'll come after me." - Or that she's his mistress.
- Or that she's a trollop. - Yes, quite. - So, the poor woman is trapped really.
- Yes. Absolutely. - But it all ends up happily...
- Here they are at the altar. - It does, yes.
And the interesting thing about that is that one of the reasons
he falls in love with her and decides to marry her...
- As opposed to just raping her. - Absolutely.
..is by reading her letters.
So the letters are not just the form of the novel, they are really
important, in terms of what's actually going on in the book.
He reads her letters
and is converted by her letters into virtue.
So, exactly what Richardson wants to happen with his reader as well.
By reading her letters, we are converted to virtue.
- It makes us a better person... - Absolutely.
- ..to read Pamela's letters. - Mm-hm.
The tale of the servant girl who won the lord was popular with all
levels in society.
And news of this remarkable novel travelled along the turnpikes
and highways of Britain.
The story of Pamela was so massively popular that, pretty soon,
merchandising appeared. You could waft yourself with a Pamela fan.
Or drink your tea from a Pamela cup.
And the story was enjoyed at all levels of society.
In one hamlet, the villagers were reading extracts of the novel,
as it was published in the newspapers.
When they got to the chapter with Pamela's wedding, they went wild.
They got the keys to the church,
they flew a flag from the steeple, and they set the bells ringing.
I imagine people going past and saying, "What's happening?"
And the villagers all yelling, "Pamela's getting married!"
CHURCH BELL RINGS
Our girl is married at last!
Mr B has done the right thing. Yes, Pamela!
After Pamela, the idea of a marriage across a class divide could
appear in any young lady's fantasy.
There's a rather telling incident in the early life of Jane Austen,
who vandalised the marriage register here in her father's church.
In the front of the book, she defaced blank forms for marriage banns
with the names of imaginary future husbands.
It's a fascinating insight into the daydreams of a Georgian teenage girl.
First of all, she imagines herself, Jane Austen, getting married
to the very grand sounding Henry Frederick Fitzwilliam of London.
That's almost Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Then she has a go imagining herself
the wife of Edmond Arthur William Mortimer of Liverpool.
He sounds a bit less posh, doesn't he?
And finally, she envisages her future as plain Jane Smith,
the wife of Jack Smith.
Fantasies about vastly unequal marriages should come as no surprise.
One of young Austen's favourite writers was Samuel Richardson.
Marriage was the perfect subject for early novelists.
Getting your choice wrong was unthinkable.
Not only was there no going back, under English law,
when a woman married, she ceased to exist.
If you got married as an 18th-century woman,
you would lose everything - your land, your possessions,
even your children, all become the property of your husband.
Even if your husband was nice, then, after his death,
the property would go to his heirs.
That's just the way it was, legally.
But a good Georgian husband, with access to good lawyers, might take
the trouble to arrange some form of financial independence for his wife.
A quarterly allowance, known as pin money perhaps,
and something for her to live on should he die.
In the story of Pamela, the whole of the last quarter of the novel
is devoted to working this all out legally.
It's only when we know that Pamela has financial independence and
security that we really believe that she will live happily ever after.
With Pamela's move from subordinate to equal via a marriage
based on mutual respect, Richardson gave his readers
a model for domestic happiness that for us feels rather modern.
In his own life, he had borne his share of personal tragedy,
including the death of his first wife and their six children.
He believed that his health had been worn down by grief.
This threw him into the arms of a physician
with some rather bonkers ideas,
including indoor equestrianism.
Samuel Richardson's physician was Dr Cheyne, a famous nerve doctor,
who thought that Richardson made his health worse
by his habit of worrying.
Cheyne also thought that Richardson should get more exercise,
using one of these - a chamber horse.
Giddy-up!
You get all the benefits of being on horseback,
without having to leave your own room,
and Cheyne said that, if Richardson was worried about losing
the writing time, well, then he could dictate to somebody.
Whoa!
This may all sound a bit like quackery,
but Dr Cheyne was a hugely important figure in 18th-century medicine.
In his book, The English Malady,
he set out his ideas about the diseases of the nervous system.
It would make having weak nerves fashionable.
Dr Cheyne himself suffered from nervous distempers, which is
perhaps why he gives the impression that all the best people do.
It seems that members of high society were particularly susceptible.
Their sedentary lifestyle gave them extra sensitive nerves,
a condition called sensibility.
Over the next few decades,
this idea of sensibility would redefine Romance.
The upside was that you were more alive,
you experienced things more intensely.
The downside was that it opened you up to other maladies,
such as long grief or dark melancholy,
or even hopeless love,
that would wear out your nervous system.
When Richardson published his 1748 novel Clarissa,
he transmitted Cheyne's ideas to his vast number of readers.
The heroine, Clarissa Harlow, is sensibility made flesh.
Her ability to feel things deeply is a sign of her goodness.
SHE SIGHS
When her ambitious family try to marry Clarissa off to
a man that she doesn't love,
she escapes with the help of a charming rake, Robert Lovelace.
But Lovelace is danger, male sexuality at its most destructive.
He installs Clarissa in lodgings which turn out, really,
to be a brothel.
It's just the start of an obsession which dooms them both.
And it's a slowly unfolding tragedy from which there's no escape.
This novel is like a tool or a machine for drawing out
emotion from the readers.
Richardson was arousing their dormant sensibility
and, for some of them, it was a very intense and distressing experience.
One lady wrote him a letter, saying, "I've cried a pint of tears.
"In agonies, I would lay down the book, take it up again,
"walk around the room, wipe my eyes, read again,
"and then I would have to throw away the book, crying out.
"Excuse me, Good Mr Richardson, I cannot go on!"
But Richardson's readers persevered, identifying
so closely with a fictional character with a new experience,
and for a million words, they endured Clarissa's extreme traumas
and lingering death alongside her.
The emotional impact of the book rippled out through
society for decades.
And by inventing Clarissa, a heroine of sensibility,
Richardson helped to change the way the British felt.
In Britain, the second half of the 18th century was
dominated by what's been called the Cult of Sensibility.
And its early acolytes could be found in fashionable Bath,
where couples wanted to show themselves in a more emotional way.
The painter Thomas Gainsborough set up shop here in 1759.
He'd come from rural Suffolk, where he created a celebrated
depiction of a traditional marriage, Mr and Mrs Andrews.
Not much sign of affection between these two.
But now, Gainsborough would have to adapt to the new vogue.
Once he was in Bath, Gainsborough painted Mr and Mrs Byam.
Now, he had made a stack of money out of owning slaves.
Not the sort of person you'd necessarily expect to
go for this touchy-feely self presentation.
But it was beginning to be the Age of Sensibility.
He wanted to be shown as a man of feeling.
He and his wife are going for a country walk.
They're saying - we are part of nature and they're a partnership.
They're exactly the same height, they're walking along, arm in arm.
The message is - we're in love.
Feelings were being flaunted.
Romantic relationships were something to show off about.
Now, obviously,
there had been loving relationships before this,
but in the 18th century, thanks to sensibility,
Romance became fashionable, it became glamorised.
The perfect showcase for your romantic feelings was
the love letter, which became more and more emotional,
as this fashion for sensibility took hold.
I'm at the Library of Birmingham to meet historian Sally Holloway.
We're going to look at a typical set of love letters
written by the future social reformer Joseph Strutt.
This son of a wheelwright made good clearly had
something of a soppy side.
These letters are kind of written at the apex of sensibility
in 1770s and '80s. And he's writing
- a love poem. - A poem. Very fancy. - To his sweetheart to impress her.
So this is his big moment as the suitor. So, he says to her...
She's got Isabella Douglas... He said - Douglas is the theme.
"Oh, the powers divine inspire her soul with sentiments like mine."
- It's very flowery and... - Gushing, more like! - Gushing, yeah.
- It's dramatic. - Thoughts that can never change when she appears.
I wish the hours were days and the days were years.
So he's saying, swoon, ladies. Joseph is here.
And also, he's using these kind of set kind of stock romantic tropes
that he would invoke to show he's the ideal lover.
So, saying - when we're apart, time drags, you know,
an hour feels like a day, but when we're together, time flies by.
Right.
So, he's kind of drawing upon these accepted romantic customs to
show himself kind of as the ideal lover.
And how did the relationship progress?
Yes, so, it's not uncommon for couples to have kind of an emotional
crisis, so at one point,
he accused her of hanging out with kind of base flattering men.
So, he's giving her a telling off.
What's he going to feel when her next letter arrives?
Well, so, he tells us here.
He says, "When Mr Fox showed me your letter on Friday, my dear,
"Isabella, a chilling coldness seized my whole frame.
"My hands trembled as I received it.
"I felt as I think I should feel if I had committed an atrocious crime."
An atrocious crime.
So, Joseph is trying to portray himself as a man of sensibility
and so all of his emotions are portrayed in bodily form.
So, it's blushing, weeping, trembling,
he's kind of got chills, and these are all physical manifestations
of feeling to show his kind of innate
sensitivity to the world around him, so, by the 1780s, it wasn't
enough to just say you were sensitive, emotional...
- You had to show it. - You had to show it.
It had to be shown through the body.
These love letters survived
because they were treasured as objects in themselves.
They were love tokens that could be touched or held to trigger emotions
and to feel close to your lover.
Love tokens could take all sorts of forms.
They could be cheaply produced, or they could be luxury artefacts.
In the late 18th century, there was a craze for eye miniatures.
These tiny little portraits are tantalising,
because they're anonymous.
You can't tell who it is, unless you've spent an awfully long time
looking into their eyes and can recognise them.
So, people used them to tease their friends.
You might wear one of these and say, "You'll never guess who my lover is."
Sadly, that means that we will never know which Georgian lovers
these eyes belonged to.
During the Georgian period,
it became progressively easier to meet people,
as places to flirt, like concert halls, pleasure gardens
and, above all, assembly rooms were being built.
And the wealthy could now fish in a bigger pond,
a national marriage market.
During the summer season, they would congregate in Bath.
Here, the gouty took the water, while their young companions
ventured to the Upper Assembly Rooms, in search of romance.
Ladies arrived at the Assembly Rooms by sedan chair.
They were better in Bath than carriages because of all the hills.
In fact, that Colonnade out there was like a taxi rank for the chairs
and the chairmen.
Next, the guests checked their cloaks, they could go on into the
card room for gambling, but the main event was the ballroom through here.
Now, the rooms today seem all calm and elegant,
when in fact they would have been packed with people.
Jane Austen used to come here and she has one of her young heroines rather
disappointed by the experience of a ball at the Assembly Rooms
because of all the crush and the crowd.
It was only by a continual exertion of strength and ingenuity that the
young lady was able to get to a spot where she could see any dancing.
In addition to the marble fireplaces
and the candles lining the walls, there were five crystal chandeliers
illuminating the room with an explosion of light.
Add beating hearts to the scene and it must have seemed magical.
This fantastic little thing is my Georgian jealousy glass.
Now, it wasn't uncommon for people to carry spyglasses or miniature
telescopes to say hello to their friends across the ballroom. Yoo-hoo!
I'm over here!
But this one has a secret mirror hidden inside it,
which means that I can see over here.
I can see the tip of my finger
and all this area of the ballroom behind me.
Which means that, if my boyfriend was talking to another young
lady behind my back, I could catch him at it.
Now, obviously, these weren't totally secret.
Lots of people knew how they worked,
but they provided an extra frisson of fun to the flirtation.
Some people actively enjoyed being spied on through a jealousy glass.
But assembly rooms were policed by a master of ceremonies who would
make introductions and vet new arrivals,
sometimes even barring the likes of shopkeepers and other working people.
So patrons were unlikely to run into anybody of whom their parents
would disapprove.
For all the sense of freedom,
flirting here was quite strictly controlled.
To play the game of romance, it helped first to know the rules.
In 1778, a novel appeared, Evelina, that told the story of a young
girl's journey through the pitfalls of this emerging marriage market.
Evelina is beautiful. She's a girl of great sensibility.
But she's an outsider.
She survives a series of social embarrassments...
..and preposterous escapades, finally to win the hand
of the handsome Lord Orville.
Crucially, the book takes us into the private lives of young women
and it details the industry that went into becoming
an eligible catch.
When Evelina is about to go to a ball,
we follow her around the London shops, as she chooses
ribbons and accessories.
And then, there's the hair!
Ooh!
- Another feather? - Yes. Let's have another feather.
1778, the year that Evelina was published,
coincided with Georgian peak hair.
Ladies went for these immensely-tall hairstyles - three or four feet -
and decorated with crazy things,
like ships or burrs
or jewels, like mine.
Evelina herself goes to the hairdressers
to get one of the new do's.
"How oddly my head feels," she says. "Full of powder and black pins
"and a great cushion on top. I cannot tell when I will be able
"to make use of a comb again, my hair is so entangled.
" 'Frizzled', they call it."
The novel had been published anonymously...
..which made Evelina even more intriguing.
Evelina gave the philosopher Edmund Burke a sleepless night,
while the painter Joshua Reynolds missed meals to be with her.
Everyone wanted to know who Evelina's creator was.
Few guessed that it was
this shy 24-year-old, Fanny Burney.
Richardson's heroines, a generation earlier, had been trapped
in domestic spaces...
..but Burney shared, with Evelina, her own experience
of a society that was loosening up.
'I'm hitting the town with Claire Harman - Fanny's biographer -
'for a night out in the London that Burney so memorably described.'
Here we go. I have brought you a bottle of mineral water.
- Yes! Soho-style. - Soho-style, yes.
Here we go. Yay! Are we ready to pop?
- Yes. - Whoo! Oh, slope it up,
slope it up!
So, here we are on our big night out in the year 1778.
In the novel Evelina, would you say we get a girl's-eye view
of Georgian London?
We certainly do. It's completely a fresh, lovely, girlie view
of the city. Nobody had written
a novel of that period that had so much of a finger on the pulse
of the time. And what Burney was able to do in her novel was show
all the different strata of society. She showed the aristocrats,
she showed the middle classes, which she was very much a member
of herself, and she also showed the lower classes,
so it is a, kind of, melding of the classes, which is, of course,
what Jane Austen did later, too, with Pride and Prejudice.
But Fanny Burney did it first.
There is a Mr Darcy in this story, isn't there? Lord Orville.
Yes, Lord Orville. Very much.
He is the, kind of, godfather of Mr Darcy.
He is posh and he is rich and he is gracious.
He has got sensibility, though, too. He is a new young man.
But initially, there is a misunderstanding, isn't there?
Initially, they don't hit it off.
Yes. They don't hit it off, although he is the very first person
she ever dances with out of school. She says she has only danced with
schoolgirls before. The very first bloke she ever dances with is...
- BOTH: ..Lord Orville! - So, that is, kind of, ker-ching.
But because she is so tongue-tied, she is so incapable
- of knowing how to behave... - Yes. - ..in society, she doesn't know
what to do or what to say to Lord Orville.
So, she says nothing and she feels like an idiot.
Burney's genius is being able to express
how a girl would feel, like that.
And it really gives the novel a, sort of, freshness.
- Evelina, surely, IS Bridget Jones? - She is Bridget Jones.
I think if you did a DNA test of Bridget Jones and Evelina,
you would find that they were related, because Bridget Jones was,
as Helen Fielding said, based on Pride and Prejudice.
And Pride and Prejudice, lo and behold, was based on Evelina -
- or, at least, it owes a huge debt to Evelina. - So, you have got
a young girl enjoying London, getting herself into all sorts of
- embarrassing situations? - Yes. I mean, the unattainable man,
the one you feel, every time you are in this company...
- You make a fool of yourself. - Exactly. You do something absolutely stupid.
How could it ever work out all right? But, hey, he has just got
that ability to see through your blundering and your stupidity.
And it has a happy ending, for Lord Orville and everything.
Of course. It's wedding bells.
You can, sort of, hear them distantly, right at the beginning
of the novel, but, yes, of course, they get married.
They have many, many a slip betwixt cup and lip, as it were.
- Cheers to them. - Cheers.
THEY GIGGLE
Toward the end of the 18th century,
the number of women writers exploded
and Evelina's success had placed Fanny Burney in the vanguard.
But nearly all of her profits were going to her publishers,
so she took matters into her own hands.
This is Fanny Burney's third novel, Camilla, and, by this time,
she decided that she wanted to earn a bit of money from her writing.
So, rather daringly, she published it by subscription.
And if you look at the list of people
who have contributed financially,
it is lovely, because it is like Fanny's being supported here
by a sisterhood of female Georgian novelists.
We have got here Mrs Ann Radcliffe
and Maria Edgeworth and, perhaps nicest of all, a young lady
who was only 20 at the time, "Miss J Austen", of Steventon.
The romance novel made people think about the importance
of romantic love and, by shaping stories around courtship,
its writers were changing what people expected in their own lives.
Some anecdotes from the time suggest a growing understanding
of matters of the heart by the public at large.
There's the curious case
of a certain Richard Bignall, a bright boy of humble origin,
who was working for a well-to-do Oxfordshire lawyer.
He fell in love
with the boss's daughter.
And when Bignall himself qualified as a lawyer, in 1770,
he asked her to marry him.
But her father said, "No way!"
The young couple got married in secret and, when this was revealed,
her father chucked her out of his house.
Now, you might think, that is perfectly reasonable behaviour
for any responsible Georgian paterfamilias,
but in this case, something rather curious happened.
All the people thereabouts took the part of the young lovers
and, gradually, they withdrew their legal business from the father
and they gave it, instead, to the newly-qualified,
newly-married Mr Bignall.
I think that probably all the people in that part
of Oxfordshire must have been reading romantic novels.
They may also have been reading the newspapers,
which were filled with eloping couples defying parental authority.
One of the most famous was the elopement of the under-age heiress,
Sarah Anne Child and her lover, the 10th Earl of Westmoreland,
in 1782.
After drugging her chaperone, Sarah Anne escaped from her parents' house
and headed north with the Earl, in his carriage.
The couple travelled 300 miles from London,
with her father and all of his servants
chasing along behind.
At one point, one of the servants
very nearly caught up with the carriage,
so the Earl stuck his gun out of the window.
But then, he hesitated. It was Sarah Anne who said,
"Shoot him, my Lord! Shoot him!"
GUNSHOT
The Earl fired, but with a great piece of good luck,
the bullet went through the horse and left the rider unharmed.
They were aiming for Scotland and were successfully married
just over the Border, in a tiny village called Gretna Green.
Because she was under 21, it would have been virtually impossible
for Sarah to marry in England without her parents' consent,
but Scotland had different marriage laws....
..and many couples from the north of England would cross the River Esk
to get to Gretna Green and reap the benefits of a Scottish marriage.
Here, you could get married by declaration.
It simply meant exchanging vows in front of witnesses.
So, marriage in Scotland was quick, it was cheap
and it was secret! By the time your disapproving relatives worked out
what was going on,
it was too late!
This cross-Border traffic was busiest at the time
of the annual hiring fairs,
when agricultural workers, with a few days between jobs,
would flock into Gretna Green and other Border towns,
in order to get married.
Here, they could engage the services of a self-styled priest.
Now, these weren't proper priests.
They were just cobblers or fishermen, or sometimes smugglers,
who wanted to make a bit of extra money.
For a fee, they would offer you a one-stop service for all your
wedding needs. They would preside over the ceremony
and sort out your accommodation. "Maybe a barn for your party, sir?"
Or a bed chamber for your wedding night.
Since the 1770s,
a Scottish marriage had been accessible to everyone,
thanks to the expanding network of turnpike roads.
Even London was now only three days away.
And just next to the road, the first place eloping couples arrived at
would have been the Blacksmith's Forge.
As stories about Gretna Green circulated,
the idea that it was the blacksmith who performed the wedding ceremony
took hold... and in plays, prints and novels,
the blacksmith forged lovers together just as easily
as he did two pieces of metal.
It was a story that had it all.
There was romance - the triumph of love,
the defiance of parental authority.
Then, there was adventure - the dash through the night.
But then, in this crazy modern world of high-speed travel
and coaching inns and turnpike roads,
there was the comforting traditional figure of the friendly blacksmith.
What could possibly go wrong, if there was a blacksmith involved?
The public were well aware of Gretna's Green's dark side.
There were well-publicised abductions, along with many
unhappy marriages, once desires had cooled.
Writers like Fanny Burney used "the Gretna plot" as a warning.
A question was being asked over and over again -
could all this romance actually be harmful?
In 1799, a letter appeared in a magazine, purporting to be
from the mother of a teenage daughter.
This mother was complaining that the daughter did
nothing in the world but read novels, from morning to night.
Two or three times a day,
the daughter would send the maid to the library to get new books
and during the course of the week, she'd read novels with titles
like Excessive Sensibility,
Refined Delicacy
and Sentimental Beauty.
The mother's point was that sensibility may originally
have been a genuine, heartfelt outpouring of emotion,
but it had become nothing but an artificial self-indulgence.
"We've had enough sensibility," she was saying, "let's get over it."
At the end of the 18th century, sensibility was coming to be seen
as a distraction from the real dilemmas that women faced.
The philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft claimed that an overstretched
sensibility prevented women from being rational and useful.
But a more nuanced critique occurred in the debut novel
of a spinster from Hampshire -
Jane Austen.
Two centuries ago, you could have encountered Jane here -
Chawton House Library is in a home originally owned
by her brother Edward.
This little book is an early edition of Jane Austen's first
published novel from 1811, Sense And Sensibility.
It's a tiny little thing, isn't it?
It's gentile, it's petite,
and there's no indication of the dynamite that lies within.
The novel follows the courtship trials of two sisters.
Elinor is Sense, the voice of pragmatism,
while Marianne is a disciple of romantic Sensibility.
We encounter them at a moment of crisis - their father has died
and they've been left £10,000.
They, their mother and their younger sister will all have to live on it.
The whole plot hinges on what this inheritance was going to mean
to the four female Dashwoods.
Jane Austen's readers would have known at once exactly
what standard of living £10,000 represented.
Invested in government bonds at 5% a year, it would have meant
an annual income of £500 -
not a particularly lavish lifestyle.
The Dashwoods' nasty sister-in-law took malicious pleasure
in imagining their reduced circumstances.
"They will live so cheap,"
she says, "their housekeeping will be nothing at all.
"They will have no carriage, no horses and hardly any servants.
"They will keep no company and have no expenses of any kind.
"Only conceive how comfortable they will be."
Sense And Sensibility subtly shows how the sisters' feelings
are shaped by their precarious situation.
They do find love, but only when it's balanced with financial sense.
Elinor falls in love with sensible Edward Ferrars.
At the start of the novel, he is the heir to a large estate,
but then he gets disinherited.
When he and Elinor declare their feelings for each other,
they decide that they're not quite enough in love to get married
on £350 a year - their combined income.
It's only when Edward's mother gives him £10,000
that it's all back on and we hear the ringing of wedding bells.
Elinor's sister Marianne is a woman of sensibility,
which is why she falls for the dashing John Willoughby.
He is awfully handsome and he thinks he's going to be rich too.
He and Marianne enjoy a torrid romance,
but then Willoughby unexpectedly loses his prospects.
He dumps her and he runs off instead with a rich heiress.
Willoughby, you're a heartless cad.
Which leaves Marianne with this gentleman, Colonel Brandon.
Now, there's a problem here - he's more than 35 years old,
positively ancient. But he loves Marianne like a faithful hound.
And his property's not bad either,
although it's a bit boring for a flighty young thing.
The best entertainment is watching the carriages go past
on the nearby turnpike road.
But he is a decent chap with £2,000 a year.
The lesson for Marianne, as it must have been for many
women like Austen, is that Sense - wealth and security - come first.
Sensibility and feelings and romance will hopefully follow on afterwards.
All of this could make Jane Austen seem mercenary and unromantic.
But, when faced in real life with a similar choice to Marianne's,
what did she do?
Reader, she didn't.
Details of Austen's own emotional life are scarce,
but we do know about an intriguing episode that happened late in 1802.
While staying with his family,
Jane caught the attention of the amusingly-named Harris Bigg-Wither.
He was a bit awkward, he had greasy hair and he was six years younger,
but he was the heir to a large house and estate.
One evening, Harris proposed to Jane and she accepted him.
There must have been celebrations.
The two families were very friendly
and perhaps Jane's relations felt a bit of relief.
After all, she was now 27 - getting on -
and this was a very good match,
the best that she could have hoped for.
But the next morning, presumably after a sleepless night,
Jane sent for Harris and she broke it off.
She'd realised that she just couldn't love him,
despite the fact it meant turning down a life like that.
But as Jane herself put it,
"Nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without love."
Even though she portrayed a world in which sense seemed to win out
over sensibility, Austen would not consider a marriage for herself
that was not based on romantic love.
Jane returned to Bath, where she'd ended up living.
Jane paid a heavy price for her choice because now she was embarking
upon middle age still financially dependent upon her own family.
Austen's own situation is echoed in her last complete novel,
which is largely set in Bath - Persuasion.
In Persuasion, we meet somebody who has lost the game.
The heroine, Anne Elliot, is a casualty of the marriage market.
She has squandered her chance of romance
and now she bitterly regrets it.
Years before, Anne Elliot had been persuaded to
break off the engagement to a young naval officer.
Now she's almost an old maid.
To make matters worse, the captain she'd spurned is back on the scene,
now with a lot of money, and Anne is still in love with him.
Austen gives us aching, broken-hearted love through
the experience of a woman who thinks she's lost her chance.
Anne Elliot would often find herself trapped behind the piano at parties.
She'd have to provide the music while everybody else danced.
This was the fate of the old maid.
People would give her patronising little put-downs.
"Oh, well done, Miss Anne.
"Lord bless me, how those little fingers of yours do fly about."
But Persuasion's greatness isn't just this comedy of manners.
It goes beyond anything that romantic fiction had achieved before.
It's not a novel about the thrill of courtship,
it channels the quiet desperation of a woman who has known love,
and is deeply in love, but has to persuade herself that she's not.
As readers, we're taken right inside these complex emotions.
The book is Austen's most romantic and, wonderfully,
she does allow Anne to get her naval officer in the end.
A consolation, perhaps, for women like Jane herself -
it's never too late for a second chance.
Austen's own fate was to be the unmarried spinster.
The burden, shared around by her married relatives.
Persuasion was written while Jane Austen was living here,
in a cottage owned by her brother.
This is where she found the stability to write her novels
and create her universe.
It was at this insignificant-looking little desk that Jane Austen
created the imaginary world in which she had all the choice
and control that she lacked in the real world.
But I think that the desk is more significant than that,
more than just empowering Jane,
because I believe that Jane Austen and Fanny Burney
and Samuel Richardson
and the other novelists of this first great Georgian flowering
of British romance were changing the world in which they lived.
They'd nurtured a new literary form - the romantic novel -
that revealed women's uncertain situations and their interior lives.
They wrote about new ways of feeling and having fun and, in the case
of Austen, found a way to articulate sincere romantic love.
By putting this out there, they encouraged people to seek
these things in their own lives and they still do.
Ever so many people, even today, have got their own ideas about love
and romance from the books written at that desk.
And if you were to ask me who was the most influential Georgian,
I wouldn't say Nelson or Wellington, I would say Aunt Jane.
Spinster.
Next time, the Victorians go back to the future as chivalry brings
romance into the middle-class home.
But can the romantic ideal survive industrialisation,
changing desires and women's growing self-confidence?