Jane Austen and the enclosure movement: the sense and sensibility of land reform

Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, Annual, 2002 by Celia Easton

"'NOT so LARGE, I DARE SAY, as many people suppose,'" John Dashwood tells his half-sister, Elinor, in Sense and Sensibility, when she comments that although it is expensive for him to maintain households both in town and in the country, his income is "a large one." He hopes to increase his wealth by making improvements in his country estate--her former home--but his investment has required considerable capital outlay:

"The inclosure of Norland Common, now carrying on," he notes, "is a most serious drain. And then I have made a little purchase within this half year; East Kingham Farm, you must remember the place, where old Gibson used to live. The land was so very desirable for me in every respect, so immediately adjoining my own property, that I felt it my duty to buy it. I could not have answered it to my conscience to let it fall into any other hands. A man must pay for his convenience; and it has cost me a vast deal of money." (SS 225)

Readers who know little about the enclosure movement in Georgian England will nevertheless distrust John Dashwood's motives in land improvement and acquisition. This conversation occurs more than halfway through the novel; John Dashwood's self-centeredness and ungenerous nature have already been scoured by Austen many times over. Rather than explicitly criticize their selfish moral choices, Austen lets characters like John Dashwood reveal the darkness of their own souls through their compulsion to relate self-serving ideas and indifference to their listeners' reactions. Enclosure and land expansion, actions that require considerable legal operations as well as financial investment, are admittedly somewhat abstract. In case we miss their point, however, John Dashwood's vulgar attitude toward "the land" is expressed concretely through his rejection of romantic sensibility when he explains that he and his wife have had all the old walnut trees behind the house taken down to make room for a greenhouse. Elinor is silently grateful that her sensitive sister Marianne has not heard this conversation. Her brother is replacing Marianne's beloved, old, gnarly trees with a cold and modern building.

John Dashwood's news about the construction of Fanny's greenhouse is directly related to his motivations for enclosing Norland Common and acquiring an adjacent farm. Plants, trees, and flowers enhance the aesthetic presentation of one's home, but nature is unreliable. Tree roots creep into pathways; shade blocks tidily planted annuals; perennials return to each year's garden on their own schedule in scraggly disarray. The artificial climate of a greenhouse, in contrast to the land's natural environment, promises an efficient production of plants at a time and place most convenient for the gardener. A greenhouse is more valuable than the land it occupies because it makes the land more productive. Throughout England during the Georgian era, especially in the midlands during the reign of George III, many landowners like John Dashwood sought ways to make their land more productive. As in the building of greenhouses, the purpose of enclosing agricultural fields and former commons and wastes was to enhance the value of the land by increasing its efficiency and profitability. The moral and social effects of enclosure were, during this period, decidedly secondary.

The question a reader of Sense and Sensibility must ask is, "Were they also secondary for Jane Austen?" Nearly all acts of enclosure in England from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth can be justified economically. They were a significant part of agrarian reform movements dedicated to improving land use. Even from a position of "sensibility" like Marianne's, we can commend many acts of enclosure for restoring exhausted soil and preserving land that had been over-farmed. Irene Collins, in Jane Austen and the Clergy, has called land enclosure "the outstanding economic development" of Jane Austen's day, asserting that Austen views enclosure as a "symbol of hope" when Persuasion's Anne Elliot thinks wistfully of her youth as she walks through an enclosed farm field (175). Maggie Lane, in Jane Austen's England, points out that enclosure transformed the landscape of England during Jane Austen's lifetime, tidying up fields with handsome frames of hedges (19-20).

Yet hand-in-hand in every generation that petitioned to change the way land is used came objections that enclosure ignored the rights of the poor, favored the individual over the community, and destroyed the employment of large segments of the working class. During the Georgian period, several significant changes in the history of enclosure took place. The first was a formal change: after 1760, almost all petitions for enclosure were requests for a private Act of Parliament. The second, financial change is related to the first: petitions to Parliament objecting to proposed enclosures had to be made through lawyers, whose fees were too great for small landholders, to say nothing of tenants and cottagers who merely leased their fields and garden plots. The third change is in the nature of the propaganda regarding enclosure and the response to enclosure made by lawyers, landholders, and members of the clergy. Throughout the seventeenth century, pro-enclosure pamphlets claimed that enclosing land served the greater good of the national economy, but care had to be taken to compensate those displaced from farms and villages. In the late-eighteenth century, propagandists asserted instead that enclosure was actually good for the poor. Additionally, Georgian clergy were easily won to the side of enclosure by small legal insertions in the Parliamentary Act guaranteeing them their tithes or corn rent, or a portion of land in lieu of the tithes they had received under open-field agriculture. Land-owning clergy, moreover, eagerly petitioned for their own enclosures when they had an opportunity to enhance their property's profitability.