While still quite young, children are forced into dangerous labor as chimney sweeps or sent to work in coal mines. It becomes clear very quickly that life is grim for those without money. The book is organized according to the life cycle, starting with marriage, then birth, childhood, illness and death, with chapters on work, travel and crime, among other topics. The observations of visitors to England are supplied primarily by Benjamin Silliman from America and Carl Philipp Moritz from Germany.
Quotations from the journals of Nelly Weeton, a governess, offer a female point of view. The authors rely more on the diaries of two English clergymen, William Holland and James Woodforde, who provide not only details of daily life, but also their attitudes toward the behavior of the people they observe. This meticulously documented social history by Roy and Lesley Adkins has much more to say about the struggle for survival of the poor than the mating dance of the gentry.Īlthough the authors open each chapter with a quotation from one of Austen’s novels and include comments from her letters, Austen is not the major source of information about the England of her lifetime (1775–1817). Most of Jane Austen’s England is about a country you do not encounter in Jane Austen’s novels.
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