Literature in Context

My only, very slight, complaint about Jane Austen’s England is its somewhat misleading title. Roy and Lesley Adkins mention Austen regularly throughout the book, using her letters and novels as sources for sketching the social life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. But their main aim is to describe Austen’s world rather than to show how that world impacts the novels. The title looks like a marketing decision, an effort to latch onto the Austenmania that shows few signs of abating.

If you’re looking for a thick description of the world Austen wrote in and the world of her novels, you could hardly do better.

Drawing from an impressive range of sources, the Adkinses describe how the English lived – from married through childhood to the grave. You’ll learn how babies were diapered (mostly, they weren’t), how people traveled, what kind of medical care was available, how English people disposed of sewage, where they shopped and what they could buy, the availability of books, their attitudes toward the church, work and leisure and games.

Neil MacGregor’s Shakespeare’s Restless World: A Portrait of an Era in Twenty Objects looks like a similar book, but actually pays much closer attention to the interaction of literature and world. By examining twenty different objects from Shakespeare time in depth (globe, chalice, fork, the battle gear of Henry V, the plague, Ireland, John Dee’s “magic mirror”), MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, illuminates much about the plays, how they were put on, what the groundlings and the nobility did during performances.

A fork is an occasion to examine eating customs and table manners, a chalice leads into a discussion of Protestant-Catholic conflicts and how they are reflected in Hamlet, London’s triumphal arches open into a treatment of the Elizabethan imagination of ancient Rome. The combination of archaeology, social history, and literary criticism is compelling, and the book is thoroughly and beautifully illustrated.