Why Mr. Knightley Only Has One Tenant (and another brief announcement)

Once more, my perennial apologia: Although I love the material specifics of history, I don't have much of a gift for it. Too many primary sources and I'm gobsmacked by the messiness, ditzed and dizzied by real life's overabundance of detail.

And though old documents are thrilling, there's all that handwriting to get through.

So I get most of my history from novelists, who have to employ some principles of selection. From good novelists -- when I can, from the great ones, the women of the nineteenth century, who so fully and so movingly comprehended a world of property -- landed and intellectual both -- in which they weren't full citizens.

Like Jane Austen's "acquisitive, high bourgeois society... interlocking with an agrarian capitalism... mediated by inherited titles and the making of family names." The literary historian Raymond Williams, in The Country and the City, continues that Austen's "eye for a house, for timber, for the details of improvement, is quick, accurate, monetary."

I love seeing through that quick, accurate eye.

And I trust it, even when I find myself a little surprised by what it sees.

As in Emma, a book it feels that I've been reading front to back and front to back again for at least the past three years -- ever since I realized that I needed to understand the material relationships between an English country village and the big estate adjoining it, in The Slightest Provocation. I used a lot of Highbury for Grefford, and some of Donwell Abbey for the Rowan estate (though -- now it can be told! -- I... shall we say... paid homage to Austen by naming the family estate in The Edge of Impropriety Wheldon Priory).

But one thing that always rather befuddled me was the fact that Mr. Knightley only has one tenant farmer, Robert Martin.

I mean, don't you think of "tenants" in the plural? As when Elizabeth Bennet tours Pemberley and Darcy's housekeeper tells her that, "there is not one of his tenants or servants but will give him a good name." Or think of Middlemarch's earnest Dorothea Brooke cherishing her plans for improving the tenant cottages on Sir James Chettam's estate.

Only one tenant at Donwell? And that tenant hardly lives in a cottage. In Harriet Smith's breathless reporting, Mr. Martin and his mother and sisters have "two parlours, two very good parlours... and an upper maid," not to speak of "a very handsome summer-house in their garden, where some day next year they were all to drink tea: -- a very handsome summer-house, large enough to hold a dozen people."

It's a pity to cut and paste Jane Austen, even (or especially) to dip in and out of the always consequential chatter of the "minor" characters in Emma -- which, though it's the only of Austen's novels to be named for its heroine, is (imo and the critic Lionel Trilling's as well) a book first and foremost about a community, and one that is delineated in exquisite precise detail.

But I hope you can see from what I kept that Austen is hardly slipshod or lacking in her delineation of Mr. Knightley's tenant farmer. And try as I might to uncover another tenant, I could not. Which leaves the question, as to why, if Donwell Abbey (in Emma's view and Austen's as well) is "just what it ought to be," a source of "honest pride and complacency," an ideal and very English estate -- why, when it comes to tenants, is Mr. Knightley different from all other knightly landowners (or at least noteworthy among them)?

(Because although in real life any instance of a general condition may be atypical, but in a novel, where every instance counts, there's got to be a reason for an atypical or noteworthy situation.)

And so there is a reason for Mr. Knightley's single tenant -- as I finally learned from a superb book of social/literary history, Superintending the Poor: Charitable Ladies and Paternal Landlords in British Fiction, 1770-1860 by Beth Fowkes Tobin.

The reason Mr. Knightley only has one tenant is because -- although his unpretentious, "rambling and irregular" estate was never "improved" by a Repton or a Capability Brown, never landscaped into artsy, inviting, artificially-engineered views or prospects -- Donwell Abbey, with its "abundance of timber in rows and avenues, which neither fashion nor extravagance had rooted up" is indeed atypical, in that it's a highly advanced instance of the most modernizing agricultural practices available during its time: enclosure and engrossment.

I already knew about the Enclosure Acts:

A series of laws passed in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries [...which...] led to the enclosure or fencing-off of farms. Where land had previously been shared in a community or divided into small lots, farms were now redistributed and enclosed. Those who had many land holdings could combine them into large farms, where the new production methods could be profitably implemented. These were more efficient and were also safe from scavenging, a previously accepted practice wherein the peasants had the right to take food left behind on landlords' fields.

(So that's why Mr. Knightley is so unfailingly fascinated by fences and drains. While for enclosures, click here for more detail)

But I hadn't thought about the other side of the process: engrossment, whereby fewer tenants, farming more efficiently, would be a better deal for the landlord as well.

We might call it downsizing. And we might, if we paid too much attention, not like every aspect of it any more than we do corporate downsizing in our day.

And why I'm grateful to have this safe space of hoydendom to consider the complexities of history and historical writing, the pleasures and perils of remembering that our escapist past was somebody's dynamic, challenging, vexing and inescapable present...

Once again, how do you readers and writers deal with this? Does it improve your understanding of a novel written in past times to see it in this sort of context? Is it possible (or even advisable) to create this level of context in a historical romance novel?

While as for the the brief announcement: because I'm not so selflessly engaged in these weighty considerations not to share that my most recent historical romance novel, The Edge of Impropriety, is a finalist for Romance Writers of America's RITA award in the Historical Romance Category.

Check out the killer list of finalists I'm part of. And bid me good luck in my own efforts at enclosure of the spread of my upper arms and engrossment, particularly of my triceps.
Come say hi if you're at the awards ceremony or the party afterwards -- I'll be the smallish lady of a certain age, wearing something shiny and sleeveless.