Locke, Richardson, and Austen: or, how to become a gentleman.

Bour, Isabelle

THIS ESSAY BRINGS TOGETHER John Locke, Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen, in relation to the fashioning of the gentleman in the long eighteenth century. In a striking parallel, at a late point in the plots of both Samuel Richardson's Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740-41) and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice(1813), the two male protagonists look to their childhoods to find the roots of their shortcomings as gentlemen, seeming to confirm a major tenet and contention of John Locke's in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), namely that what makes a gentleman are the right habits and regular practice of sound principles, introduced from the earliest days of infancy.

The conjunction of these writers is not wholly new. There has been discussion of the link between John Locke and Samuel Richardson; there has been even more work on the influence of Richardson on Jane Austen. But nobody has studied Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice as a problematization of Locke's educational ideas as set out in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. (1) This essay will analyze the dramatization and partial challenging of Locke's ideas in Pamela and argue for the problematization of the ideas of both in Pride and Prejudice, moving among the three works rather than proceeding chronologically.

Civility will be seen as a defining feature of the gentleman--civility rather than politeness. The word "civility," up to the sixteenth century, could mean "citizenship"; it could also refer to the orderly state of a country; into the eighteenth century, it could mean "conformity to the principles of social order" (OED). The first meaning ill the fourth edition of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1770) has to do with this broader sociopolitical sense of the word. The next two entries cover a narrower range, where civility is akin to politeness. Both "civility" and "politeness" were seen as features of civil and civilized societies, but the former term emphasized "elegance of behaviour" (Johnson's phrase) as a requirement in man as a citizen, while "politeness" saw this elegance more as a characteristic of advanced civilization: the archaic senses of the latter word have to do with polish and smoothness of surface; the dominant semes (or units of meaning) in the word pertain to refinement. A further distinction between the two words has to be highlighted: "politeness" was associated with courtly culture, with the manners of the aristocracy in France and Italy, whereas "civility" came to be seen as a characteristic of the English gentleman--of the man of (some) rank living in a parliamentary monarchy rather than a divine-right one. (2)

An understanding of the denotation of the word "gentleman" is implicitly provided by this brief discussion of civility and politeness, but it is worth underlining that the meaning of the word "gentleman" is famously flexible, if not vague. To quote from the fourth edition of Johnson's Dictionary again, a gentleman is "a man of extraction, though not noble," or "a man raised above the vulgar by his character or post." Birth, worth, and rank can thus feature in various degrees in the ascription of gentlemanliness. The wide scope covered by the word "gentleman" is, for instance, illustrated by what Sir Walter" Elliot says in Jane Austen's Persuasion (1818) of a curate of excellent manners but little affluence: "'You misled me by the term gentleman. I thought you were speaking of some man of property'" (23; Nicolson 88). I will not aim at providing a comprehensive, historicized definition of the word but will concentrate on the image of the gentleman that emerges from Locke's Thoughts Concerning Education--a book specifically concerned with the gentleman, as Locke makes clear in his Dedication to Edward Clarke (8)--in order to study the dramatization and reshaping of this gentleman in the two novels under scrutiny.

The link between the Thoughts Concerning Education and Pamela is obvious, as Mrs. B. (nee Pamela Andrews) discusses the ideas of Locke in detail in the second part of the novel, published in 1741. But I believe that Richardson was already engaging with Locke's gentleman in the first part of the novel, published in 1740. The connection between Pamela and Pride and Prejudice is a close one: the plots of the two novels and the two male protagonists have much in common, over and above the above-mentioned parallel. There is little doubt (though no evidence) that Jane Austen had read Pamela: Richardson was her favorite novelist, and she was a great reader of novels.

The three works under consideration have several features in common: epistolarity, narrativity, the focus on morals and manners, didacticism, and the fact that each is "a kind of artificial experience," to use Richard Whately's felicitous phrase (319). The last three features offer a way of highlighting the thematic and epistemological bonds among the three works, bonds that constitute a sort of theoretical underpinning for the representation of the gentleman, which they partly inform and constrain. All three works under consideration focus on morals and manners. For Locke, breeding is one of the four "qualities" a gentleman must possess (together with virtue, wisdom, and learning), and he sees it as of an essentially moral nature--not as superadded polish. This enmeshing of manners and ethical standards also characterizes the two novels. The dialectical relationship is dramatized by the plot, but there are also unambiguous statements from characters. Both Pamela and Pride and Prejudice are, to a lesser or greater degree, didactic novels while Some Thoughts Concerning Education is, by definition, an expository didactic work. This is not to say that Pride and Prejudice is as overtly didactic as Pamela. While in Pamela the eponymous character repeatedly states the values conveyed by her story, Austen offers a moral vision but derides explicit didacticism through, for instance, the character of Mary Bennet and the fondness of the sanctimonious Mr. Collins for conduct-books. Austen clearly did not assume that fiction was exemplary in the sense that it was intended to, and could, have a direct effect on readers' behavior.

Most important, all three works offer "a kind of artificial experience." In his remarkable review-essay, written on the occasion of the posthumous publication of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 1818, Richard Whately spelled out what he meant: "a novel, which makes good its pretensions of giving a perfectly correct picture of common life, becomes a far more instructive work than one of equal or superior merit of the other class [pictures of romantic affection and sensibility]; it guides the judgment, and supplies a kind of artificial experience" (319). Whately states that represented experience has its own didactic impact, to some extent paralleling what Locke says when he recommends learning foreign languages, including Latin, through conversation and conveying moral and cognitive lessons through "cases." (3) Indeed, Locke's Thoughts Concerning Education has an unmistakable empirical foundation: his ideas on education and upbringing grew out of his epistemology. Parents should observe their children to learn about their propensities and abilities (see [section] 151 and 167), and children, in their turn, should start by learning about things that "fall under their senses" ([section] 181, 137), (4) characterized as "real knowledge" ([section] 169, 129), as opposed to the learning of Latin. For instance, a child will be made to observe the ecliptic when he is introduced to astronomy ([section] 180). In the second part of Richardson's eponymous novel, Pamela too takes a stance as an empiricist--indeed, as a better one than Locke because she has more first-hand experience of children:

   I will now ... begin ... to tell you, what are the little Matters,
   to which I am not quite so well reconciled in Mr Locke: and this I
   shall be better enabled to do, by my Observations upon the Temper
   and natural Bent of my dear Miss Goodwin, as well as by those,
   which my Visits to the bigger Children of my little school, and
   those at the Cottages adjacent, have enabled me to make. (4.330)

To bolster my main argument that Pride and Prejudice overlaps with the concerns of Locke in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, I will first show in some detail the kinship between Austen's second published novel and Pamela, focusing on the shaping of the gentleman. In the famous scene where Elizabeth Bennet rejects Darcy's first proposal, she accuses him of not behaving in a "'gentleman-like manner'" (192). Before that, in their sparring, Darcy has charged Elizabeth with making "'so little endeavour at civility,'" to which she responds: "'I might as well enquire ... why with so evident a design of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character? Was not this some excuse for incivility, if I was uncivil?'" (190). Later on, as we learn from the conversations of the two protagonists at the end of the book, Darcy will ponder this accusation of ungentlemanliness and will strive to be very civil to Elizabeth and her relatives when he meets them at Pemberley. His new civility is heavily emphasized by the repeated use of the word "civility" and its cognates (much more frequent than "polite" and its cognates) in the first chapter of volume III, in which the accidental encounter occurs (251 ff.).

Early in Richardson's novel, Pamela diagnoses a similar hiatus between birth and behavior in Mr. B. After Mr. B. has embraced and kissed her in the summerhouse, she writes to her parents: "this very Gentleman (yes, I must call him Gentleman, tho' he has fallen from the Merit of that Title,) has degraded himself to otter Freedoms to his poor Servant!" (1.19-20). She does not shrink from repeatedly teaching him lessons about his ungentlemanly behavior, drawing attention to the social gap between them:

   [P]ermit me to say, that if you were not rich and great, and I poor
   and little, you would not insult me thus.--Let me ask you, Sir, if
   you think this becomes your fine Cloaths, and a Master's Station?
   ... I will tell you, if you was a King, and insulted me as you have
   done, that you have forgotten to act like a Gentleman; ... I'd have
   you know, Sir, that I can stoop to the ordinariest Work of your
   Scullions, for all these nasty soft Hands, sooner than bear such
   ungentlemanly Imputations. (1.106-07)

There are many further parallels. For instance, just as Charlotte Collins surmises that Darcy might be in love with Elizabeth (180), Mrs. Jervis, Mr. B.'s housekeeper, hypothesizes early on: "I believe he [Mr B.] loves my good Maiden, tho' his Servant, better than all the Ladies in the Land; he has try'd to overcome it, because you are so much his inferior; and 'tis my opinion he finds he can't; and that vexes his proud Heart, and makes him resolve you shan't stay ..." (1.53). (5)

More significantly, the childhoods of both men are pointed out as the root of their pride and disregard for the will and the feelings of the women they claim to love. Pamela, as often, makes a detailed diagnosis:

   [H]is poor dear mother spoil'd him at first. Nobody must speak to,
   or contradict him, as I have heard, when he was a Child; and so he
   has not been used to be controul'd, and cannot bear the least Thing
   to cross his violent Will. This is one of the Blessings attending
   Men of high Condition! Much good may do them with their Pride of
   Birth, and Pride of Fortune! (1.405-06)

Later on, Mr. B. will endorse this assessment:

   We People of Fortune, or such as are born to large Expectations, of
   both Sexes, are generally educated wrong. You have occasionally
   touch'd upon this, Pamela, several times in your Journal, so
   justly, that I need say the less to you. We are usually so
   headstrong, so violent in our Wills, that we very little bear
   Controul. (2.345)

Darcy says something very similar in one of his retrospective (and introspective) conversations with Elizabeth at the end of Pride and Prejudice:

   "Unfortunately an only son, (for many years an only child) I was
   spoilt by my parents, who though good themselves, (my father
   particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable,) allowed,
   encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing, to care
   for none beyond my own family circle, to think meanly of all the
   rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense
   and worth compared with my own." (369)

In both novels, the proud and well-born gentleman marries below his station after being chastised by the woman he loves and overcoming his pride. In both novels, the main female protagonist is the agent of this reformation. Again, in both cases, the education is mutual though for Pamela it comes after the marriage has taken place rather than before: she is introduced into good society and finds it all the easier to become a lady and to be accepted as one, as her many virtues are so conspicuous; she is also given books to read. In Pride and Prejudice we are told, at a point when Elizabeth thinks that she has lost Darcy forever, that she has become aware that as his wife she would greatly benefit "from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world" (312). Of course, she also undergoes a radical evolution before Darcy's second proposal. The education of the gentleman is thus also about the education of the gentlewoman. But, most important, it is women who make their suitors true gentlemen.

The link between manners and morals, dramatized in the two novels under study, is one of the tenets of Some Thoughts Concerning Education. "Breeding" is the third of Locke's "good qualities." He first defines it negatively, by characterizing ill breeding as, on the one hand, "sheepish bashfulness" and, on the other, "misbecoming negligence and disrespect" ([section]141, 106). With his binary typology, he explains that, to avoid these two habits, two others are requisite: "first, a disposition of the mind not to offend others; and, secondly, the most acceptable and agreeable way of expressing that disposition." He adds, "From the one, men are called civil; from the other well-fashioned" ([section]143, 107). Civility is a disposition of the mind, an internal quality, while politeness is, Locke says, "the language whereby that internal civility of the mind is expressed" ([section]143, 107). Locke is at pains to define civility precisely: it is "that general good will and regard for all people which makes anyone have a care not to show in his carriage any contempt, disrespect, or neglect of them"; it is "a disposition of the mind that shows itself in the carriage whereby a man avoids making anyone uneasy in conversation" ([section]143, 107). The very fact that he provides several glosses proves that he thinks that "civility" and its antagonist need to be defined, that the common understanding of the words is not enough. Further, civility, while "internal," can, it seems, be taught; it must "be made habitual to children and young people" ([section] 143, 109). (Well-fashionedness, being more superficial, can "be learned chiefly from observation and the carriage of those who are allowed to be exactly well-bred" [[section]143, 107].) For didactic purposes, Locke identifies the four components of incivility: roughness, "contempt or want of due respect discovered either in looks, words, or gesture," censoriousness, captiousness ([section] 143, 107-09).

Clearly, Darcy is guilty of the first three forms of incivility. Indeed, he exemplifies them at length in the first half of Pride and Prejudice. (6) He is not "well-fashioned" either; that is to say, he does not have "that decency and gracefulness of looks, voices, words, motions, gestures, and of all the whole outward demeanour which takes in company and makes those with whom we converse easy and well-pleased" ([section] 143, 107). One man has all these qualities, of course: that is Wickham. He is polite, polished--when he is first introduced into the novel, he is said to have "very pleasing address" (72)--but there is no goodness under this veneer. Darcy's superciliousness at the Meryton ball provokes an assessment that reflects Locke's definition:

   his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity;
   for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company; and
   above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire
   could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable
   countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.
   (10)

This problem might be summarized in a general formula provided by Locke: "Power and riches, nay virtue itself, are valued only as conducing to our happiness" ([section]143, 109); here Locke agrees with Chesterfield, for whom without polish, virtues and learning lack luster.

From the Meryton ball onward, Darcy's incivility is associated with his reluctance to dance:

   Mr. Darcy danced only once with Mrs. Hurst and once with Miss
   Bingley, declined being introduced to any other lady, and spent the
   rest of the evening in walking about the room, speaking
   occasionally to one of his own party. (11)

Locke thought dancing an important activity in the life of a gentleman: it is the first accomplishment he mentions after his discussion of the teaching of academic subjects. Dancing gives "manliness and a becoming confidence to young children" ([section]196, 150). In an earlier section, Locke indicates that dancing unites inner disposition and outward behavior, just as civility and politeness--the fact of being "well-fashioned"--are the inner and the outer aspects of good breeding. Dancing is more than a superficial accomplishment: "though this [dancing] consist only in outward gracefulness of motion, yet, I know not how, it gives children manly thoughts and carriage more than anything" ([section]67, 43, my italics). Dancing seems to contribute to the shaping of a boy's personality, indeed of his social identity. It might be said to be the social enacting of civility, to be a more direct expression of "inner civility," than politeness, promoting an easy behavior towards others while also making the individual more self-confident and thus more agreeable.

Nowhere in Pride and Prejudice is it suggested that Darcy is not a good dancer, but Bingley's gusto in engaging in the exercise manifests that the various required features of the gentleman are better integrated in him; he possesses the manly self-confidence Locke thinks so valuable: "Mr. Bingley was good-looking and gentlemanlike; he had a pleasant countenance, and easy, un affected manners" (10). That Darcy lacks this self-confidence and is not at ease in ritualized, social interaction is made clear by what he tells Bingley, who presses him to dance: "'You know how I detest it [dancing], unless I am particularly acquainted with my partner'" (11). His refusal to dance is a direct expression of the flaws in his upbringing and, consequently, his personality as well as serving as a metaphor for his inadequacies. Later in the novel, in a conversation with Colonel Fitzwilliam and Darcy, Elizabeth playfully asks the former: "'Shall we ask your cousin [Darcy] ... why a man of sense and education, and who has lived in the world, is ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers?'" (175). Elizabeth's own answer to this question is that mixing with strangers is like piano-playing: it takes practice (175). This judgment echoes what Locke says about the "general good will and regard" that, through continuous practice, must become habitual to children ([section]143, 107). (7) That Jane Austen had thought seriously about the pedagogical usefulness of dancing and its importance as a social activity is confirmed by Henry Tilney's lengthy declarations about dancing in Northanger Abbey: "'We have entered into a contract of mutual agreeableness. ... I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage'" (76). This formulation gives specificity to the "manliness" Locke thinks dancing teaches.

Thus, while civility is not reserved for men in Pride and Prejudice, it is seen as a quality indispensable in males because, to some extent, it is a "civic" quality. Therefore, I cannot but disagree with Patricia Howell Michaelson's opposition between civility and sincerity, taken from William Godwin's essay in The Enquirer on "The Reciprocal Claims of Politeness and Sincerity." She writes: "By the end of the eighteenth century, civility came to be associated with aristocratic and French artificiality or with female dissimulation; the discourse on bourgeois speech championed manly sincerity" (57). It rather seems to me that civility remained an essential aspect of the fashioning of the English gentleman, men's involvement in social life (Darcy is "a brother, a landlord, a master" [250]) giving their civility all the semantic--and experiential--depth it has for Locke.

The strong moral component of civility made clear in Pride and Prejudice had already been brought out by Richardson in the mid-eighteenth century. (8) For instance, shortly after their wedding, Mr. B. tells Pamela, "I would wish, by degrees, by a Conformity of my Manners to your Virtue, to shew everyone the Force of your Example" (2.325). As in Pride and Prejudice, the word "civil" and its cognates are used much more often than the word "polite" and related terms. The force of virtue can shape a man's manners because what Locke calls internal civility is essentially of a moral nature. (9) Mr. B. receives, belatedly, a Lockean upbringing from an absolute outsider, a servant who is also a woman. His parents having brought him up to arrogance, it takes a strong sexual attraction, which turns to an even stronger emotional bond, to refashion him. This pattern can be seen in Darcy too--though, of course, Elizabeth is not as much of an outsider as Pamela. The first part of Pamela dramatizes ideas that the second considers from a theoretical viewpoint. Part I shows Richardson in broad agreement with Locke's major tenets; Part II establishes some distance in points of detail--the use of toys, diet, clothing, the disadvantages of sheepish bashfulness. Jane Austen focuses on the broader question of the centrality of civility in the gentleman's education.

Finally, the question of civility may be briefly related to that of pride in Locke and Austen. Locke, being concerned with the child, has no reason to dwell on the pride of the well-born male adult. Nonetheless, in a section entitled "Recreation," he does mention "the vanity and pride of greatness and riches" ([section]207, 155-56); earlier, he had deprecated parents who "invert the order of their [children's] education, and teach them luxury, pride ..." ([section]52, 35). We saw above that this problem of pride is thematized at length by Pamela and Pride and Prejudice, which have adult male protagonists. Like Austen, Locke considers that pride "is both good and bad" (Knox-Shaw 72). To him, pride leads a child to want to be treated as a reasonable creature: "'Tis a pride should be cherished in them and, as much as can be, made the great instrument to turn them by" ([section]81, 58).

The dialogue among three works that span the long eighteenth century shows the blossoming of potentialities contained in Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Though Locke addresses a man and speaks of the father and the male tutor as the educators, he does not rule out the intervention of women (as is clear from the Two Treatises of Government). While Janet E. Aikins may be overstating the matter when she says that "[u]sing Locke's words, Pamela defines her voice as a woman and claims matriarchal domination within the B. Family" (93), it is true that Richardson's Pamela fills the place left for women in Locke's educational scheme; Pamela takes over from Locke in the upbringing of children and even undertakes the remedial education of a grown man. Austen's "educator," while unconventional, is less of a nonce case than Pamela, redefining the gentleman without challenging either its broader socio-economic contours or its legitimacy. Both Pamela Andrews and Elizabeth Bennet, by pronouncing on what a gentleman is, strengthen their claims to becoming, or to being, gentlewomen.

Austen's gentleman in Pride and Prejudice is still very much Locke's, a landowner with onerous social responsibilities whose civility validates his social position. This picture of the gentleman may be seen as a confirmation of Jane Austen's conservatism, for which Marilyn Butler argues convincingly in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975). Pride and Prejudice, however, admirably dramatizes the dialectics of civility and politeness and the social importance of civility while registering the growing role played by women in the education of children and in the socialization of males. The empiricism of Locke's educational method is enacted in the "kind of artificial experience" offered by Jane Austen, who moves beyond Richardson's Pamela by creating a heroine who, once she has made a gentleman of the man who loves her, is not subservient to him but goes on challenging him to remain a perfect gentleman.

WORKS CITED

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Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: OUP, 1975.

Chaber, Lois A. "From Moral Man to Godly Man: 'Mr. Locke' and Mr. B. in Part 2 of Pamela." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 18 (1988): 213-61.

Cohen, Michele. Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1996.

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Emsley, Sarah. Jane Austen's Philosophy of the Virtues. London: Palgrave, 2005.

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Moler, Kenneth L. "Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen's 'Patrician Hero.'" SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 7 (1967): 491-508.

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Ten Harmsel, Henrietta. "The villain-hero in Pamela and Pride and Prejudice." College English 23 (1961-62): 104-08.

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NOTES

(1.) For studies focusing on John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Samuel Richardson's Pamela, see Ezell, Chaber, Aikins, and Briggs. On the intertext between Richardson and Pride and Prejudice, see Duncan-Jones, Ten Harmsel, Moler, Fergus, and Harris. Devlin discusses the influence of Locke's educational ideas on Austen's fiction but only makes a few passing references to Pride and Prejudice; he focuses on other works, in particular Mansfield Park, and mentions Richardson once, with reference to Sir Charles Grandison.

(2.) Therefore, I will not use the two words as synonyms, unlike, for instance, Michele Cohen or Patricia Howell Michaelson, who has studied civility as the art of polite conversation; but, more importantly, like Locke, Richardson, and Jane Austen.

(3.) See Some Thoughts Concerning Education, sections 168 and 98, for instance. Further references will provide the number of the relevant section, followed by the page number.

(4.) Locke makes the same point, almost in the same words, in section 166.

(5.) See also 1.176.

(6.) As for Mr. Collins, he embodies "another fault in good manners": "excess of ceremony" or "mistaken civility" ([section] 144).

(7.) Therefore, I can only disagree with Sarah Emsley's definition of civility as separate from amiability in Jane Austen's novels. See her fourth chapter, entitled "Pride and Prejudice and the Beauty of Justice."

(8.) To be found earlier, for instance, in Richard Brathwaite's English Gentleman and English Gentlewoman (1630). See Harold Nicolson (190-91).

(9.) This identity is suggested by what Pamela says of the ideal husband chosen by Prudentia, the exemplary heroine of one of her didactic tales: he has the "true Politeness, which is but another word for Virtue and Honour" (4.490). The same inextricable meshing of the moral and the social is suggested by what a Mr. Martin tells Mr. B. at the end of the first part of Pamela, just after the first visit of the married couple to the local church: "I think your Lady's Example has made you more polite and handsome too, than I ever knew you before, tho' we never thought you unpolite neither" (2.424).

Isabelle Bout teaches English at the Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her three chapters on the reception of Jane Austen's novels in France and Switzerland appear in The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe, edited by Brian Southam and Anthony Mandal (Continuum, 2007).