Pride-and-Prejudice

11 (p. 239) On applying to see the place: Domestic tourism, which included
visits to stately country manor houses listed in guide-books as well as the
picturesque countryside, had come into vogue in England during the
eighteenth century. A touring party of the gentry class might be admitted to
one of England’s great homes at certain stipulated times, often for a fee. The
craze for visiting great privately owned estates coincided with the increasing
tendency of the upper gentry and aristocracy to “enclose” for exclusive,
private use what had previously been common lands, on which the lower
classes had been able to farm and hunt for food.
12 (p. 265) gone off to Scotland: After Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of
1753, which sought to give consistency to the laws governing marriage and to
protect young heiresses and heirs against predatory suitors and upstart brides,
couples under the age of twenty-one wishing to marry quickly and without the
consent of their parents had to elope to Scotland, where the Marriage Act did
not apply. Lydia believes, we soon hear, that she and Wickham will make the
long journey to Gretna Green, which is the closest Scottish village to the
English border and where speedy weddings had become something of an
industry.
13 (p. 286) the death of your daughter would have been a blessing: Mr.
Collins’s pompous moralizing complements Mary Bennet’s pedantic
observation several pages earlier that “loss of virtue in a female is
irretrievable, that one false step involves her in endless ruin.” Relationships
out of wedlock were, indeed, fodder for scandal, and a young woman of good
family could expect serious consequences to ensue from an extramarital
affair, but Austen is also drawing on a formidable literary tradition of
melodramatic accounts of the “fallen” or “ruined” heroine, whose fate was
usually destitution, illness, and death.
14 (p. 298) Five daughters successively entered the world: One might wonder
why the Bennets persisted in having a large family when their financial
resources seemed limited and when it was possible to limit the number of
children (through, for example, breast-feeding, which had become popular
among the middle and upper classes under the reign of Queen Charlotte and
which helps to inhibit the rate of conception). This passage suggests that part
of the motivation was to have a son who would be able to preserve the estate
for the immediate family. Mr. Collins’s legal claim would then no longer be
valid.
Austen herself came from a family of eight children, the size of which
created some financial difficulties for her father, an Anglican minister. Two of