From Mansfield Park to Gosford Park: the English country house from Austen to Altman

Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal, Annual, 2002 by Peter W. Graham

DURING THE TWO CENTURIES bracketed by Jane Austen's country house novels (Mansfield Park among them) and Robert Altman's recent country house film Gosford Park, a sort of Darwinian evolution in architecture, landscape, and social structure has played out. (1) The late eighteenth through twentieth centuries have witnessed the heyday and subsidence of that stone or brick, emparked or embowered phenomenon Henry James memorably called "the great good place," a cultural icon signifying grace, tradition, hospitality, closeness to nature, and harmonious relations between the social classes. Before making a progress from Mansfield Park (and other Austen houses) to Gosford Park, it is worth appraising origins of the literary trope and its connection with socioeconomic realities in earlier periods of English history. The country house theme, a commonplace of Latin poetry, enters English literature in 1616 with the publication of Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst." This tribute to the seat of the Sidneys in Kent is one of the best bread-and-butter missives a grateful guest ever penned to his host and hostess. It brings into English many conventions from Virgil's georgics and eclogues, and Horace's odes--and it sets nearly all the standards by which subsequent literary country houses will be measured. (2)

Jonson's lines begin backhandedly, defining Penshurst Place in light of what it is not:

   Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show
     Of touch, or marble, nor canst boast a row
   Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;
     Thou hast no lantern, whereof tales are told,
   Or stair, or courts; but stand'st an ancient pile,
     And these grudged at, art reverenc'd the while.
   Thou joy'st in better marks, of soil, of air,
     Of wood, of water; therein art thou fair

(Jonson 282, 11. 1-8)

As Malcolm Kelsall has argued, these introductory lines set forth an important opposition noticeable throughout English country house literature: the essential contrast between the House of Pride, a monument to wealth, power, family prestige, and personal taste, and the House of Virtue, a place of simplicity and culture that seems to rise naturally, almost inevitably, from the fertile earth surrounding it (35). The wild and cultivated grounds of Penshurst serve the needs of recreation and sport, but also self-sufficiency. Its copses offer "season'd deer." Its pastures feed livestock; its woods and fields yield gamebirds; and its waters provide fish, all characterized as the elegant extravagance called sponte sua, the freely given gifts of nature in a Golden Age:

   The painted partridge lies in every field,
     And for thy mess is willing to be killed.
   And if the high-swoll'n Medway fail thy dish,
     Thou hast thy ponds that pay thee tribute fish:
   Fat, aged carps, that run into thy net;
     And pikes, now weary their own kind to eat ...
   Bright eels, that emulate them, and leap on land
     Before the fisher, or into his hand.

(Jonson 283, 11. 29-34, 37-38)

Equal bounty comes from the orchards and the gardens, where walls are seen as protecting and nurturing fruit rather than as excluding the peasants.

   The early cherry, with the later plum
     Fig, grape and quince, each in his time doth come;
   The blushing apricot and wooly peach
     Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.

(Jonson 283, 11. 39-42)

Penshurst's fruit-sheltering walls, presented as indigenous materials shaped by human art to assist benevolent nature, serve uses far from their defensive castle origins. Furthermore, as Jonson depicts it the hierarchical social structure that erected these walls and maintains them is cooperative rather than exploitative:

   And though thy walls be of the country stone,
     They're reared with no man's ruin, no man's groan,
   There's none that dwell about them wish them down,
     But all come in....

(Jonson 283, 11. 43-46)

The happy; freely welcomed rustics who "dwell about" Penshurst are prosperous enough to "come in" bearing gifts of their own rich produce--or to send such tribute "By their ripe daughters, whom they would commend/This way to husbands" (Jonson 283, 11. 54-55): a country-house strategy Mrs. Bennet and her ilk would follow some two hundred years later!

If the locals are treated generously at Penshurst, so are guests. There is none of the niggling class-consciousness that makes each visitor keenly aware of his or her precise place above or below the salt. No stinting of hospitality here, where the less important guests are not obliged to envy their highborn hosts. Nor need servants grudge the full plates or replenished cups of the guests:

   Here no man tells my cups, nor, standing by,
     A waiter, doth my gluttony envy,
   But gives me what I call, and lets me eat;
     He knows below he shall find plenty of meat,
   Thy tables hoard not up for the next day,
     Nor when I take my lodging, need I pray
   For fire or lights or livery: all is there,
     As if thou then wert mine, or I reigned here.

(Jonson 284, 11. 67-74)

At Penshurst, as at Mansfield and many of the other literary houses Austen and her successors portray, the availability or unavailability of a horse or a bedroom fire for guests signals the deeper virtues or failings of the lord--or yet more particularly of his lady. Jonson's poem ends with the highest compliments for Lady Barbara Sidney, born Gamage, whose Penshurst huswifery was apparently of a truly impeccable standard. Jonson's poem reports a time when King James and his son, hunting in the Kentish countryside, saw smoke from the chimneys of Penshurst and proposed themselves as guests. Although the Sidneys were away, their royal visitors received a worthy welcome because that resourceful lady was able "To have her linen, plate, and all things nigh/When she was far; and not a room but dressed/As if it had expected such a guest!" (Jonson 284, 11. 86-88). This, however, is but Jonson's secondary praise of Lady Barbara. In a country house world where primogeniture and entailment prevail, there are female attributes more important than hospitality. What are they? Fidelity, fertility, and commitment to the nurture of children: