Pride-and-Prejudice

action, except for the occasional ironic reference, as when Lydia Bennet,
living out the absurd logic of England’s relatively new consumer culture, buys
a hat she knows is ugly simply for the sake of spending money.
What Austen foregrounds throughout the novel is a culture of leisure. In an
age when the values of the gentry and aristocracy still prevailed, leisure was
understood not only as a respite from labor, as it would have been for those
who had to work for a living, but as a way of life that had its own virtues and
failings. As in the worlds of classical Greece and Rome so admired by the
eighteenth-century society into which Austen was born, a life of leisure at
one’s country seat—construed as “retirement” from the daily concerns of
commerce and petty political and financial intrigue in London—was
considered essential for any gentleman who would take on the responsibilities
of disinterested participation in politics and the administration of empire.
Especially in the early eighteenth-century of Austen’s grandparents, known in
poetry as the Augustan Age for its neoclassical values, those who depended
on income from sources other than land—that is, commercial or professional
interests—would have seemed compromised in their ability to rise above the
concern for personal gain to serve the public good. The country gentry,
however, whose values were articulated by Lord Bolingbroke and Augustan
poets such as Alexander Pope, regarded themselves as being at leisure for
virtuous study and reflection, and as having the power to rise above the
corruption, favoritism, and factional-ism that dominated London politics.
In Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy provides the model for the virtuous
country gentleman, even though he keeps a house and has acquaintances in
London. While we never see Mr. Darcy in his role as keeper of the public
interest, or managing his estate, we feel assured that he is the kind of man
who inhabits his country estate responsibly. When Darcy negotiates the
Lydia-Wickham elopement crisis with authority and competence, we sense
that he manages all his life’s affairs with similar capability. That he husbands
his estate well becomes clear when the touring party of Elizabeth Bennet and
the Gardiners arrives at Pemberley to find grounds that, in accordance with
the standards for eighteenth-century British taste in landscape design, seem
natural and unpretentious. Such simple elegance was understood to reflect the
values and temperament of the owner, as Pope had made clear in his poem on
house and grounds aesthetics, the “Epistle to Richard Boyle, Earl of
Burlington,” in which he argued against frivolous and impractical estates but
applauded the taste in design and architecture of men of sense. It is also
quickly apparent that Darcy is a good estate manager because he commands
the allegiance and respect of his servants, as Elizabeth and the Gardiners soon