The Profligate Son
From Jane Austen's Wickham through Charles Dicken's array of extravagant cads to the latest Regency romance, the dissipated wastrel who throws away his family fortune, or at least his good name, is a familiar character to anyone who reads novels written (or set) in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. They drink, whore, gamble, lie, cheat, and steal. Some attempt to marry--or kidnap--heiresses. Some attempt to push the rightful heir out of the family fortune. A desperate few take to the High Toby.* When they fail, as they generally do, some flee to the Continent. Others are shipped off to the colonies, either by weary families or the legal system. A few reform.**
Fictional black sheep are fascinating, but they often left me wondering whether anyone ever really acted that way. According to historian Nicola Phillips, the answer is yes. In The Profligate Son or, A True Story of Family Conflict, Fashionable Vice, & Financial Ruin in Regency England, she tells the story of a real-life Regency wastrel, tracing his downfall in agonizing detail. His story is as gripping, and more tragic, as that of any of his fictional counterparts.The only thing missing is the highway robbery.
William Jackson, born in 1791 at the height of Georgian excess, was the son of a successful East India Company merchant. He had every advantage that a child of the merchant classes could ask for--and wasted them with an abandon that equalled that of any fictional ne'er-do-well. At the age of fifteen, he revolted against the increasingly spartan boarding schools in which his father placed him and set out on the path that would lead to his transportation to Australia at the age of twenty for forgery. Phillips leads her reader through the seedy world of London brothels, alehouses and debtors prison*** to the cramped hold of a convict transport and the slums of colonial Sydney. Jackson died in Australia at the age of thirty-seven, a penniless alcoholic survived by his mother, a widow, two young children,and his creditors. The effects of his profligacy lived on after his death in a Chancery Court suit over his inheritance that tied up his family's assets for years--a twist that will be familiar to readers of Bleak House.
The story is fascinating, though it is ultimately hard to feel much sympathy for Jackson, who repeatedly chooses to transgress. Be warned, once you've read The Profligate Son, Recency wastrels will never look dashing again.
* Highway robbery on horseback for those of you who don't hang out in Georgian England.
** Reform is more common in modern novels set in the period than in novels written in the period. Nineteenth century writers liked their sinners to suffer. Even Dickens' Sidney Carton reforms only on his way to the guillotine: "It's a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done…."
***With a side trip to a bookstore, where Jackson and a friend worked a shady scheme for getting erotic books on credit.
Jane Austen’s England
Even if you've never read Jane Austen's novels you probably have a clear image of what life was like for her characters thanks to excellent adaptations for film and television. Women wore white muslin dresses. Gentlemen wore precisely tied cravats and really tight pants. Red-coats wore, well, red-coats. People went to dances, visited great houses, walked astonishing distances, rode, and worried about status, money and marriage.
It's a pretty accurate image as far as it goes, but it's only a small part of the story.
In Jane Austen's England, Roy and Leslie Adkins present a detailed picture of the things Jane Austen didn't tell us about her characters' lives.
It was a tumultuous period, marked by almost constant war and the economic and social upheaval of the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. Like Austen herself, the Adkins do not focus on the larger events of the period--except to note their impact on daily life. (Mechanized textile mills, for instance, not only created a new class of urban poor, but transformed what people wore.)
The structure of the book 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 Adkins use 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 Adkins 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.
A version of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers
From The Ruins of Empire–Revisited
If you've been following along for a while, you've probably figured out that I like books that look at familiar history from another point of view. (For example, here, and here, and here.) Pankaj Mishra's From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, is an excellent example.*
Misra begins with the statement that the intellectual and political awakening of Asia was the central event of the twentieth century for a majority of the world's population. That event came about as a result of a new class of western-educated Asian elites. As a group, they typically rejected their traditional heritage in favor of western modes of thought, then later re-embraced their native traditions, transforming those traditions in the process.
Instead of concentrating on well-known Asian historical figures, Mishra centers his book on the intellectual journeys of three men who are important historical figures in their own cultures but largely unfamiliar to most Westerners. Journalist and political activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97) was a founder of Islamic modernism. Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao (1873-1929) inspired a generation of young Chinese activists with his calls for reform. Indian poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a leader of the Bengal Renaissance.
Over the course of the book, Misra shows how his characters are shaped by and respond to the familiar events of European imperialism in Asia, giving those events a new perspective for the Western reader. His stated goal is not to replace a Euro-centric view with an "equally problematic Asia-centric one", but to look at both the past and the present from multiple viewpoints. For the most part, he succeeds.
* I previously reviewed From The Ruins of Empire when it first came out in October, 2012. Now it's being released in paperback and I have a lovely new copy to share. If you'd like to have a chance to win, tell me your favorite non-Western thinker or historical figure in the comments on the blog. If you don't have a favorite,** tell me who you'd like to know more about.
**Really? Not even one?
This review appeared originally in Shelf Awareness for Readers