In Jane Austen's England, Roy and Leslie Adkins present a detailed picture of the early 19th-century world in which Austen wrote her novels.
It was a tumultuous period, marked by almost constant war and the economic and social upheaval of the earlier Industrial Revolution. Like Austen herself, the Adkinses do not focus on the larger events of the period, except to note their impact on daily life. (Mechanized textile mills, for instance, transformed people's wardrobes, but also created a new class of urban poor.)
The structure of Jane Austen's England loosely follows the course of life from birth to death, stopping along the way to consider education, fashion, filth, illness and belief. In addition to Austen's novels and letters, the authors use sources such as newspapers, diaries, letters from more ordinary folk, reports by foreign visitors and accounts of criminal trials to create an intimate picture of daily life. They consider not only the middle and upper classes that Austen portrayed so brilliantly, but the full range of a highly stratified society: from clergymen and governesses to farmers, mid-wives, barbers and chimney sweeps.
Fans of Austen, Georgette Heyer or Regency romance novels will find explanations of familiar tropes, including a detailed account of the marriage laws that led eloping couples to head for Gretna Green, the first town over the Scottish border. At the same time, the world the Adkinses portray is darker, dirtier and colder than it appears in the novels or their movie adaptations. Keeping those white muslin dresses white was hard work. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins