Historical Fiction Notes: Sense and Sensibility

Title page from the original 1811 edition of Sense and Sensibility. Austen wrote the novel (her first completed work) around 1795, when she was only 19, but it was not published until years later.

Having detoured a bit into contemporary fiction, and having danced around the historical time frame of my inquiry, I decided it was time to right for the jugular and read a classic English novel that was both written and set in exactly in the years I was interested in, namely the early 1790s.

For this, I decided, there could be no better choice that Sense and Sensibility, the first novel by Jane Austen.

To my abject discredit, I had never read Jane Austen before. A couple years back I had begun to read Pride and Prejudice (her follow-up novel). This was partly because at the time I was single and I had joined an online dating site, having just arrived in Portland. I noticed how many women in their profiles mentioned this book, and specifically that they were looking for "Mr. Darcy." It was almost a trope.

So, brazen as I was, before I even read the novel, I put in my own profile that I was "the original Mr. Darcy." Later when I met Red, through that dating site, I told her about this and it made her laugh. She said she thought most of the women were looking for Colin Firth, who had played that character in a miniseries adaptation in the 1990s.

This time around, however, my attempt to read Jane Austen was grounded in the deep foundation of intellectual curiosity and research, so I found it easy going to continue through the book. And my efforts were well rewarded, for I soon discovered what so many others have throughout the last two centuries, namely that Jane Austen is an artistic genius of the highest caliber, with an unparalleled insight into certain aspects of human behavior, especially in regard to women, but extending to both sexes to a magnificent degree of excellence.

She seems to have an x-ray vision for the nuances of character motivation coupled with the artistic courage to actually set forth this nuances in words that bring sympathy to the character, even when it is not the most flattering insight to the personage in question. The social interactions of characters have extra dimensions that were especially refreshing after having plunged into contemporary fiction, where the female characters seem buttressed by a fear of showing anything but the "awesomest" front of sisterhood in regard to the thinking of women in stories. I couldn't help chuckle at thinking at how much printer ink has been spilled in recent years in college gender studies departments describing how Austen's female characters, despite being so well written, nevertheless demonstrate unending variations and examples of the "oppression" of women that time period.  I picture legions of young folks across the gender spectrum parsing texts with the same alacrity that lab assistants once analyzed the tracks of scattered sub-atomic particles in bubble chamber photographs. I expect all of this to go down in history as today's equivalent of the advances in quantum physics of the last century.

In regard to my own research interest---namely the particulars of life in England in that era---Sense and Sensibility was a bonanza that lived up to all my hopes and expectations of the insights it might furnish. Each chapter provided new interesting details about such things as the houses people lived in, the rooms they occupied, the daily routines they followed, and the horse-drawn conveyances by which they traveled about.

At one point, my attention to details gave way to a relaxed seamless appreciation for the context, to the point where I begin could to imagine movements of the characters of my own story within that context, all the while knowing that in regard these general settings, I could achieve a high degree of historical accuracy even if the minute particulars of a scene and dialogue were necessarily fictionalized as they applied to individuals within my story. This is the stage at which historical re-animation goes from hard labor to having a joyful aspect of creation (not that any creation by writing ever comes easy, of course).

Perhaps the most rewarding part of my research was that while reading Austen, I began to achieve a multi-dimensional sense of the way people of that time moved between the town (i.e. London) and the countryside, and how life among the middle and upper classes especially was often a seasonal balance between these two settings. The London part of the story I found particularly fascinating, and I dutifully looked up the location of each street and square that was mentioned, so as to furnish myself with a knowledge of where people of that class moved about in that era.

This balance between "town and country" is extremely important in the Harriman saga, I realized since William Harriman (who resided in the heart of the City of London), somehow winds up meeting and marrying Frances Holmes, the daughter of a family who resided out in the countryside of Hertfordshire.  How did this happen? Sense and Sensibility gave me a broad context of understanding how this might have occurred, even if I did know the particulars of how it actually came about.

Of course, this also goes directly to the theme of As You Like It, which creates a strong duality between civilization and the wilderness (although the English countryside of Hertforshire was certainly not a wilderness by any means).

I realized that if I could find out nothing further about the relationship of William and Frances, at least I was probably capable of creating a plausible fictional scenario of their meeting, thanks in great part to Jane Austen.

But of course I wanted more. Ironically, the rich details of Austen's novels made me want to know the true details of the Harriman story. Sure, I could make up a scenario, but I have learned that the real life version is always more interesting.  

Austen had given me a list of locales in Westminster, the residences of the people who formed the social circle of the Dashwood sisters. Portman Square, Upper Berkeley Street, Conduit Street, Harley Street, Saville Row, Bond Street, St. James Street---all of these formed a relatively tight cluster of locales in the West End area in which the middle and upper classes made their homes, both permanently and seasonally, during the Georgian Era.

I could almost begin to see the Holmes family, headed by Edward, walking about Portman Square right past the characters in Sense and Sensibility. It seemed obvious that if they had come to London from the country, and made their seasonal home there, that it would have been right in that district, one of those streets.

My imagination in this regard was further stoked by the marvelous coincidence that during my most recent trip to London, which was for a few days over Christmas in 2014, I had chosen a hotel smack in this district, on Nottingham Street (which by another coincidence turned out to be within a block of where Dickens had written A Christmas Carol).  During my visit I had spent many hours walking around in these very areas, without much of an agenda, except to visit Grosvenor Square, which turns out to be an important part of the Harriman story in the 1930s.

It was all becoming vivid in my mind---the characters in my story. I wanted to put them somewhere exactly. I wanted an actual street street. Of course it was not incumbent upon me to name this actual address in the story, if I didn't know it from historical record, but in my mind I wanted to put them somewhere (although for obvious reasons I would have avoided placing the Holmes residence on Baker Street, which runs through the district and nearly defines it).

Moreover there was another important historical clue in Sense and Sensibility for me to chew on. Austen had placed the London residence of Lucy Steele, the scheming rival of the heroine Elinor Dashwood, in  Barlett's Buildings, which are apartments not in Westminster, but in the City of London not far from the Harriman residence on Upper Thames Street.

According to one source I found on the web about Austen's London geography, Barlett's Buildings were largely professional residences for lawyers and merchants in the City, and placing Lucy there was part of Austen's genius in showing how Lucy was a social climber who desired a rich husband so she could move to more fashionable quarters in Westminster, where the other characters lived.

So here I had a wonderful example of someone who lived in the City of London, at least part time, but who wanted to move out (and upward). This dovetailed nicely with my impression of William Harriman. He lived in the thick of the commercial district of the City of London, right along the river. He definitely wanted to move upward, if not out.

The Holmes, his in-laws, probably had a part-time town residence in fashionable Westminster. Somehow they met, and William married into the family.

William was desirous of advancing his place in life. Did he aspire to live in Westminster as well, or to have a place out in the country? He never achieved those things in England, even though his marriage to a family which had those things. Instead he left that world behind and moved to America, right in the year that Austen wrote Sense and Sensibility. 

Why?

If only I could find out how they actually did meet, or at least get some further clues...