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Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770-1820: Dangerous Occupations 1st Edition
Joseph Morrissey
(Auth.)
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Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881) 1st Edition Friedrich Nietzsche
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For Majella, Tony, Claire
and Mike
Acknowledgments
The support of Jacqueline Labbe, first as a PhD supervisor and now as a colleague and mentor, has been vital for the completion of this book. Whether by providing critical commentary, career advice or simple enthusiasm, she has been part of this project throughout. I must also thank the staff and students at the University of Warwick who made it such a vibrant place to undertake doctoral research. I am particularly grateful for the financial and professional support received through grants and an early career fellowship, which helped with the completion of my PhD and sharpened my sense of academia as an industry in ways that few institutions do.
Special thanks are due to Jennie Batchelor and Christina Lupton, examiners of my thesis, whose astute readings of my work and continued support have been invaluable. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer at Palgrave who evidently read my manuscript with care and interest—the book is no doubt a stronger piece of scholarship for it. My editor, Ben Doyle, and editorial assistant, Camille Davies, are also due thanks for the encouraging, timely and efficient manner in which they have engaged with this project. I am indebted to Chawton House library and the University of Southampton for providing a visiting fellowship through which I made significant research progress. My colleagues at Coventry University deserve thanks for all their encouragement and willingness to lend support—close friends who have been behind me all the way.
The most important people in ensuring this project came to completion are my family. I want to thank my parents, Majella Morrissey and Tony Chambers, and stepdad, Mike Newton, for their unwavering confidence in
me and willingness to listen in challenging times. Emily Morrissey and Andrew Chambers also deserve special recognition for their unconditional support. Lastly, I should like to thank my partner, Claire Quinn, who has made life a joy and whose rock-solid encouragement and patience have been essential in the writing of this book.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Despite the wealth of criticism on literature by women and about women and their roles in the domestic sphere in the early Romantic period (1770–1820), spearheaded of course by two centuries of commentary on the relatively modest output of Jane Austen, there remains little attention to women’s domestic activity as a subjective, personal experience. That is, what were the cognitive and affective processes which underwrote the stitching of a cushion cover, the playing of the harp, the reading of a novel or the sharing of self with others in company? Moreover, how did these intimately personal experiences branch outwards and structure the thoughts, feelings and actions of others within a woman’s immediate social vicinity?
Previous scholarship on Romantic-period women’s domestic activity has tended to take one of three broad perspectives, which, while valuable in their particular emphases, have left the above questions largely unanswered. First, research has formulated women’s work and leisure pursuits within a repressive mode of production, showing how they operated in perpetuating class and gender inequality. Such approaches have tended to be superseded, or at least significantly complicated, by more recent revisions, but they nevertheless remain the touchstone in key areas.
For example, Richard Leppert’s seminal analysis of long eighteenthcentur y musical accomplishment Music and Image (Leppert 1988), as well as his later The Sight of Sound: Music Representation, and the History
J. Morrissey, Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770–1820, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70356-5_1
of the Body (Leppert 1993), continues to offer the most thorough examination we have available of women’s domestic engagement with music in the period. Leppert approaches the musical act primarily as an ideologically informed practice, and he is mainly interested in exposing the social inequality which determines music in ways beneficial to the status quo.
Second, feminist literary critics and historians have emphasised women’s agency and have shown that ideological discourses did not in fact determine subjects and practice to the degree suggested by conduct books, periodicals and novels (among other things). For example, Jennie Bachelor’s (2010) Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830 places the stress on the ways in which women’s engagement with work shaped their lives as autonomous subjects and writers, highlighting resistance to apparently entrenched gendered conventions rather than conformity. Similarly, Amanda Vickery’s (1998) The Gentleman’s Daughter has forced an ongoing revaluation of the assumption that women’s sphere of activity was almost entirely determined by gender and class formations, which shut women off from public endeavours, as well as enclosed them rigidly within the confines of their class.
In many ways, this book departs from both the broad perspectives outlined above because it is ultimately less concerned with how women’s activities intersected with the productive relations which partly constituted them (although this does play a subordinate role), and rather more interested in day-to-day pursuits on an intimate personal and interpersonal level. That is, there is rather less emphasis in the following chapters on whether women’s actions were the consequence of subjection or rather resistant to it, and a greater emphasis on how domestic activity informed and was informed by experiences of self, how it felt and how it moulded friendships and romantic relationships.
A third approach to the topic has been to emphasise how women’s tasks in the home, sometimes regarded as frivolous or at least only of marginal social value, actually contributed to broader socioeconomic structures in important ways, such as seen in Davidoff’s and Hall’s (1987) detailed history of domesticity in the period, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850. This type of analysis is mostly concerned with the products of women’s endeavours, whether material, cultural or even political. Because of this, such scholarship is typically less interested in what motivates women to act, how their actions related to and consolidated their sense of self, and how these actions had profound and often unanticipated consequences in interpersonal relationships and the wider
domestic sphere. The chapters that follow, conversely, aim to offer some suggestions along these lines.
It might seem that my approach converges in some respects with Nancy Armstrong’s (1989) Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, a book which locates the domestic sphere, female activity and female subjectivity as key mechanisms in forging the later Victorian ‘Angel of the House’, and the increased consolidation of male- and femaledefined spheres of activity. I think, however, that the analyses I offer differ quite markedly from those of Armstrong. My localised studies of select novels focus less on attempting to understand the female self in relation to a broad metanarrative of historical change as they do, through a close focus on domestic action as it unfolds moment by moment, instead offer ways of understanding women’s day-to-day pursuits at the personal and interpersonal level. For example, my analysis of needlework in Chap. 1 functions not so much to articulate the practice within an emerging historical experience of subjectivity as to illustrate how the activity might inform and be informed by the worker’s momentary thoughts and feelings, as well as how it might impact the cognitive-affective processes and behaviours of immediate observers.
It is this focus on domestic activity as a function of fluctuating psychological processes and interpersonal relationships from which the book derives its subtitle, Dangerous Occupations. I consider women’s occupations as, first and foremost, types of human action. That is, I emphasise the human messiness and unpredictably of the activities examined here. The authors I analyse alternatively attempt to articulate women’s domestic pursuits as functions of cultural ideals, as subversive of these ideals, or simply as vehicles for personal satisfaction. Yet in all cases the presented activities frequently exceed the parameters set out for them. Sometimes this plays out as a self-conscious narrative strategy in which a writer attempts to stake a claim for women’s occupations in opposition to specific cultural codings which attempt to cast them in specific ways. At other times, the activities escape the authors’ own control, drawing attention to the complexity and unpredictability of all human endeavours, however much cultural values may attempt to maintain control over the meanings and uses they ostensibly align with. Women’s day-to-day tasks in the period can be considered as ‘dangerous’ precisely because of the frequently unanticipated interventions they make into the formation of self and the forging of agency, intimacy, enmity and romantic attraction, among other things.
As alluded to, the value of this focus, I think, is that it enables a better appreciation of women’s work and leisure activities as functions of human experience. All of the three broad approaches to the topic of women’s domestic activity outlined at the beginning of this introduction have a tendency, in my view, to erase the relationship between domestic activity and the human capacities of, for example, joy, sympathy, self-doubt and desire. Thus this book participates in the ongoing revaluation of women in history but does so by examining representations of women in terms of their individuality and humanity as expressed in their domestic occupations, rather than seeing them in more general terms as products and producers of history.
If, however, activity in this book is primarily defined as human action, then what exactly is meant by ‘domestic’? How does the notion of domestic relate to concepts such as ‘home’, ‘house’, ‘private’ and ‘public’? John Tosh (1999, 4) defines domesticity in the nineteenth century as
not just a pattern of residence or web of obligations, but a profound attachment: a state of mind as well as a physical orientation. Its defining attributes are privacy and comfort, separation from the workplace, and the merging of domestic space and family members into a single commanding concept (in English, ‘home’).
While useful for my purposes, this concept of domesticity, however, ‘was essentially a nineteenth-century invention’ (Tosh 1999, 4) and fails to capture the nuance of contexts and activities examined in this book. In some of the later novels studied (notably Mansfield Park [1814]), this emphasis on privacy, comfort and mental attachment is certainly a defining aspect of women’s domestic pursuits, but activities studied in other novels—as well as in aspects of Mansfield Park itself—cannot be fully articulated within this definition. My analysis also covers instances of women’s participation outside the home in polite leisure activities, such as musical subscription concerts or country walks. ‘Domestic’ in this context, then, does not only refer to the notion of ‘home’ but also relates in broader terms to women’s daily pursuits in more public places, and in places which invite a different ‘state of mind’ from that of the comfort and privacy aligned with the home.
At the same time, the eighteenth-century domicile does not conform precisely to Tosh’s definition of the nineteenth-century home. As Karen Harvey (2012, 12) points out, ‘“Home” is simply too narrow a concept
for an understanding of eighteenth-century domestic experience, and it serves to overemphasize a particular formulation of “domesticity”’ Karen Lipsedge (2012, 9) elaborates the point by arguing that in the eighteenth century ‘the practice of entertaining one’s social equals [...] increased in popularity and fashion’. Moreover, in eighteenth-century houses, ‘The types and variety of rooms increased gradually during the course of the century’ both to accommodate multiplying forms of domestic sociability and to provide private spaces for a ‘growing awareness of individuality—of a growing inner life’ (Lipsedge 2012, 10). The eighteenth-century house at once unfolded new architectural spaces designed for the performance of semi-ritualised social activities (for example, tea-making, polite conversation, dinner parties) and spatially reflected and contributed to an understanding of the self as an individual, private psychological function. The activities examined in this book participate in both the sociability and the privacy of the eighteenth-century domicile, with differing applications in different architectural and cultural spaces.
Ultimately, however, all the activities I explore here have some relationship with either the notion of ‘home’ as a psychological and physical space, or the concept of a domicile with functions of polite entertainment. This does not mean that the analysed activities are always performed in a house or home. Rather, it means that wherever they are performed they are structured in some way by forms of polite sociability, privacy or comfort, and through this are loosely but importantly connected to an overarching concept of domesticity.
The notion of domesticity, however, is not viewed in this book only as a frame of reference within which to define women’s occupations. Rather, I seek to show how women’s daily activities contributed to the idea of domesticity itself; how they created the subjectivities and behaviours of the men and women who recognised themselves as domestic actors. Women’s actions in the home, house or polite sphere should not be viewed as a simple consequence of a pre-existent domestic ideal but instead as part of the fabric of domesticity itself. As many others have shown in different ways, we will find that binaries between the domestic and the commercial, private and public, leisure and work, and between women and men fail to capture the nuance of the women’s engagement of self through domestic participation.1
Because of the focus in this book on domestic occupations in their moment-by-moment realisation in thoughts, feelings and practice, literary close readings offer a productive method of engagement. To create a
credible historical narrative, one must work with broad strokes, but at the expense of relegating to a secondary status the acute feelings that might arise when one encounters gothic literature for the first time (Chap. 4), or realises with deep ambivalence the feminine sexual power inherent in the simple act of spinning linen (Chap. 2). On the other hand, of course, none of my tightly focused areas of study can make the claim for broad historical truth. Moreover, the study concentrates on novels, a form of aesthetic representation with a far from straightforward relationship with the ‘lived’ reality it alternatively represents, idealises, critiques and creates. Nevertheless, I do believe that my analyses of how women writers engaged the themes of domestic activity provide us with new ways of thinking about women’s daily actions at the most intimately subjective level.
In the same vein, I do not claim that my particular selection of authors and texts offers a representative view of the topic. Even so, through the literature covered, I engage alternatively with the novel of manners, melodrama, parody and the sentimental/gothic traditions. Similarly, my selection of authors (Jane Austen, Charlotte Smith, Francis Burney) bring to bear specific personal narratives and approaches to the novel which create a multiplicity of perspectives and offer suggestive lines of thought in interpreting the reality of women’s domestic pursuits at the level of personal engagement.
For example, in the case of Jane Austen, her particular way of engaging fictional themes coincides with my approach in this book. Critics have long debated how far Austen’s ostensibly domestic and women-centred fictional worlds engage wider sociopolitical concerns, with scholars alternatively arguing that she sensibly restricts herself to all she has first-hand knowledge of (the domestic sphere); or that she does indeed probe broader societal concerns but from a coherent conservative perspective; or that she is in fact deeply subversive, concealing astute critique of the status quo beneath the polished veneer of her playful literary interventions.
In my view, all of the above views hold some weight, but it is the hierarchy in which they ordered which is most decisive, and which makes her most valuable for our purposes. I would suggest that, primarily, Austen’s novels are about the day-to-day concerns of genteel women, but that she is nevertheless alert to the fact that domesticity is both a product and a producer of wider social institutions (whether material or ideological). Further, I think a moderate conservatism informs her work, but that this is a very self-conscious political position which by no means suggests that
everything is just as it should be, and which also, moreover, tends to locate itself within the primary theme of domesticity. Austen, that is, certainly does not shy away from exposing social contradictions, but she tends to do so at the level of quotidian subjectivity and interpersonal relationships rather than at the political level as such.
For instance, in Mansfield Park, Austen’s representations of needlework often support ideological constructions of the domestic genteel lady, but they also stake a claim for the female agency and social value that the activity encodes, often in direct contrast to misogynistic views which tend to cast needlework as frivolous. Thus her focus is primarily on needlework as a function of genteel domesticity, but it explores the implications of the work act in the context of the differing ideologies which inform the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that constitute domestic life. This approach maps almost exactly onto the stated aims of this book.
Charlotte Smith, by contrast, was a vocal contributor to radical politics and the theorisations of feeling and reason which underwrote radical views of gender, race, nationalism and other social structures. At the same time, she suffered greatly at the hands of patriarchal law, which gifted her profligate husband, Benjamin, rights over her person and finances, and which also embroiled her in a life-long battle to obtain an inheritance willed to her in lieu of Benjamin, but which, because of legal technicalities, she was unable to lay her hands on until very close to her death. For Smith, writing was a way of providing the means of subsistence for her large family, and her family life was itself marked by suffering: Smith was seriously affected by the deaths of several of her children.2
Unsurprisingly, the potent mix of deep sociopolitical engagement and personal tragedy (the latter created in part by the status quo itself) seems to find its way into Smith’s treatment of women’s daily endeavours. Thus women’s domestic activity in Smith’s work is presented with biting cynicism. Less interested, as Austen is, in recovering the inherent value of embroidering a dress or reading a gothic novel, Smith mobilises female occupations as damning indictments against the status quo. They are double-edged literary representations, at once emblematic of women’s subjection and also the means of exposing the harsh realities of gender inequality. Through Smith, therefore, this book is able to consider women’s domestic occupations at their most subversive. For example, needlework in The Old Manor House is powerfully implicated in male desire, but this desire is sublimated in the mind of the text’s hero into the sentimental narrative of paternalistic male protection. Through this, the text destabilises Burkean ideology by exposing
the sexual energy which underwrites it, and which women’s work with spinning wheels and needles puts into motion.
Frances Burney, the final author studied in this book, also brings a unique perspective to the table. Her father, Charles, gave birth to the study of music as a serious academic discipline, and her sister, Esther, was nothing short of a genius in virtuoso musical performance. But Frances’ familial relationships are almost textbook studies in psychoanalytical repression, deeply divided between love and resentment, deference and defiance. As one might expect, Burney’s treatment of musical accomplishment is marked by deep contradiction. Unlike the balance of Austen or the cynicism of Smith, Burney alternatively presents music at the polar extremes. It is a source of profound joy and agency, and she argues for the value of music beyond purely ideological functions. At the same time, music represents intolerable alienation and the repression of real personal needs, and it is ultimately pressed, with deep ambivalence, into the service of the status quo.
My selection of female authors, therefore, does not provide a systematic approach to the topic but rather seeks to acknowledge the importance of subjective difference. Nevertheless, all three of the writers examined selfidentified with the genteel class (however tenuously), allowing for some stability and coherence of argument. This is not to suggest, though, that the genteel class is a special case in point: complementary analyses of women in the labouring, working-middle or aristocratic classes would certainly be welcome. In terms of the literary texts themselves, decisions here were based on which novels engage the domestic activities I examine most productively. Specifically, the chapters discuss Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) and Northanger Abbey (1817), Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793) and Ethelinde (1789), and Burney’s The Wanderer (1814).
Regarding the domestic activities themselves, I wanted to explore occupations central to women’s lives in the period, as well as a range of activities which engaged the concept of work as well as leisure, which were related to privacy as well as to sociability, and which were alternatively thought of as practical, artistic or functions of mind. No activity was perhaps more central to the lives of women of all classes than needlework, so this seemed an obvious starting point. Accomplishment in music was also a common feature of a genteel lady’s repertoire, but it encodes a performative element which distinguishes it from work with needles and pins (although I will argue that needlework, too, is in some ways better thought of as a public endeavour). Moreover, the two activities situate—in differ-
ent ways—female subjectivity in relation to, for example, creativity, spirituality, industry and modesty.
From here the book turns to the reading of novels. On the one hand, this was a politically contentious activity marked by a rapidly changing of mode of production which created an ever-expanding range of readers and novels. On the other hand, the reading of novels could be an intensely introspective experience but one which was nevertheless embedded in networks of sociability and public opinion. As such, the activity mediated between the female self; her friends, family, and romantic interests; and wider cultural concerns in particularly pronounced ways. It also moves away from the ostensible status of needle work as a form of labour, as well as the semi-official social functions of musical accomplishment, towards the realm of pure personal pleasure and leisure.
Finally, the book examines the experience of women’s emotions in relation to the socially and politically fraught concept of sensibility, and by shifting the focus from the practical to the psychological brings into focus another way of thinking about women’s domestic engagement. The eminently practical functions of needlework stand in contrast to the playing of music, which is apparently intangible and leaves no end product. Reading would seem even further removed from the realm of materiality insofar as its status as a skill to be acquired is less obvious than with music. Genteel girls learnt to read as a matter of course at a young age, but proficiency on the harp or piano required consistent practice throughout life, and was far more easily evaluated in terms of level of mastery. Thus reading seems effortless while music appears to be embodied labour. At the level of sensibility, all semblance of materiality disappears, but my analysis aims to show that women’s emotions were not simple expressions of the self but rather something which could be worked on or created. Therefore I argue that emotions were not indistinguishable from the female self but rather another activity available to women as a way of creating subjectivity and putting it into interpersonal motion.
All of the literary works discussed in the following chapters are novels, and this is because I think the novel represents the best medium for presenting domestic actions mimetically. That is, because of the novel’s capacity to create the sense of physical or psychological processes moment by moment, it allows for a representation of the domestic act as it unfolds. This is important because my analysis requires a very close study of domestic work and leisure acts in the moment of realisation in order to trace the subjective
experiences which inform those acts, which are transformed by them and which impact the subjectivities of observers.
In this context, however, stage plays might seem just as fruitful. Nevertheless, I would suggest that they are not as suitable for my purposes because of their relatively limited capacity to narrate the internal world. The character monologue of the stage play lacks the nuance available to narrators in novels. The latter are able to move quickly from one character’s thoughts and feelings to those of another, and are also able to explain the internal world of several characters during the same event in the time of the story. In other words, a narrator in a novel could describe in detail the subjective responses of several characters all watching the same young lady play the piano. Such insight into multiple internal worlds is less easily available in drama (especially when read rather than performed).
Four chapters and a conclusion follow this introduction. Chapter 2 focuses on needlework through readings of Smith’s The Old Manor House and Austen’s Mansfield Park. In terms of the former, I challenge the dismissal in criticism of the novel’s heroine, Monimia, as an uninteresting archetype of female subservience by demonstrating that it is this very generality which reveals the possible effects of needlework on the social economy. Specifically, the chapter argues that Monimia’s character is heavily defined by the image of her at work, and that through this, Smith is able to expose the idealised romance and sexual desire which underwrites the feelings of the text’s hero, Orlando. In this way, The Old Manor House configures the spinning and sewing of a female dependent as a potent force in structuring the social and economic relations of the country estate, Rayland Hall, around which most of the action revolves.
In Mansfield Park, needlework is also presented as a subtle but potent force in creating social relations, but here the emphasis is rather less on exposing the contradictions of gender ideology than it is on constructing women’s work as a function of agency. For example, Fanny is able to cement her relationship with Lady Bertram through her work, as well as smooth relations with her Aunt Norris and cousins. In a similar if less positive vein, Mrs Norris employs needlework to consolidate her power over Fanny and the social economy of Mansfield Park more generally.
Austen also emphasises needlework as an intensely private activity which provides women with time to think and reflect—that is, to soothe the anxieties of day-to-day life. Even so, these moments of personal autonomy are consistently threatened by the pervasive view of women at work as silently crying for male attention, demurely signifying their sexual
availability through the passive operation of their needles. Austen appears, therefore, to be staking a claim for needlework as an important occupation in a woman’s experience of self, but she is unable to do so unproblematically: misogynistic stereotypes continue to make themselves felt.
The latter passages of this chapter link Austen’s presentation of needlework to her broader ideological goals. Austen relates the contemplative attitude of the embroiderer to an imaginative engagement with nature, history and music. These aesthetic and intellectual experiences, however, are associated in their turn with ideological constructions of gender and class hierarchy, as well as with a morality expressive of an emergent bourgeois ethos of order and industry. Thus needlework partly produces Austen’s textual ideology.
Chapter 3 examines musical accomplishment through Francis Burney’s The Wanderer. The discussion begins with a brief overview of the historical parameters of domestic music practices in order to contextualise the analysis. Following this, I conduct a close reading of the character of Miss Arbe, a lady who prides herself on her musically accomplished reputation. Through this, the chapter reveals the fraught relationships between the individual female musician and the historical mode in which musical accomplishment is produced. This dynamic, I argue, has profound subjective and intersubjective consequences, transforming music from a joyful activity into one which alienates the player from her own musical practice, from her gender and class identity, and from other people. Moreover, the relationship between the female player and music culture is implicated in The Wanderer in broader societal tendencies which sublimate authentic human interaction into relationships based on self-interest and shared class-interest.
Section ‘Female Patronage and Female Workers: The Mode of Producing Musical Accomplishment in The Wanderer’ in Chap. 3 explores Burney’s presentation of her heroine, Juliet, and how this works to reform domestic music. Burney’s ideal incarnation of female musical accomplishment is exceptionally complex, displaying both reactionary and reformist traits, and is easily misread as contradictory. However, when read in the context of the wider musical culture of the period, the underlying social assumptions of The Wanderer, and Burney’s fraught familial relationships, a more coherent view of the text’s representation becomes possible.
Domestic music, for Burney, should emphasise feeling rather than technical mastery, yet it should do so at the level of professional attainment. That is, Burney does not advocate the amateurish, unlearnt practice of
music symptomatically put forward by conduct books. Rather, she argues for a much higher level of attainment, and valorises expression above technical proficiency not only in the context of leisured domesticity but also in the professional music culture of the period. At the same time, Burney claims that the domestic sphere is actually the best place for music to be appreciated, precisely because the absence of concern for profit or status promotes both feeling in performance and critical audience engagement. Thus she argues for a reformation of music which both releases it from the status of trivial pastime and shores up the association of women with domesticity and feminine modesty.
In the final stages of this chapter, I explore Burney’s use of music as a source of friendship. Unlike Austen’s convincing presentation of needlework as function of intimacy between Fanny and the Bertram family, Burney’s presentation of music along similar lines misfires significantly. This is because, I argue, she is finally unable or unwilling to fully dislocate music from the patriarchal class structures which tend to erase its functions at the human level. In The Wanderer, Burney presents music as a vital source of human friendship, but this appears to be friendship based primarily on shared class interests, her attempt to sublimate it into a sentimental narrative of familial love notwithstanding.
Chapter 4 considers the domestic occupation of reading in Austen’s Northanger Abbey. I consider the act of reading from the perspective of two related critical frameworks: first, as a dialectical function of psychological development; and second, in relation to the psychology of reading for pleasure. This allows for a multifaceted perspective on the reading habits of the text’s heroine, Catherine, and her love interest, Henry. I argue that Catherine’s love of story and absorption in both self and fiction are better seen as healthy aspects of her maturing subjectivity rather than as the weaknesses in character which criticism has sometimes suggested. Similarly, I align Henry’s reading style with his responses to reality more generally, arguing that both are typical of a young adult mindset. By contextualising Catherine and Henry in relation to the reading of fiction as an aspect of psychological growth, my argument is able to capture the positives in the reading of fiction for both characters.
Nevertheless, I claim that certain aspects of Catherine’s reading style suggest aspects of psychological health in ways which Henry’s do not. Specifically, the imagination in Catherine’s reading style gestures towards the empathy and search for wisdom which current social-scientific research claims is a primary reason for reading in mid-life. Similarly, Catherine’s
approach to gothic literature denotes, I argue, a relationship with consciousness profoundly at ease with itself, whereas Henry’s very different style of reading the gothic is suggestive of a consciousness freighted with a negatively toned experience of self. Northanger Abbey, therefore, is perhaps one of the very first contributions to a psychoanalytical understanding of reading for pleasure, even if Austen lacks the theoretical vocabulary and framework necessary to fully elucidate this view.
The final passages of the chapter analyse the functions of Austen’s narrator and the mixing of genres in the text. Through this, I show that different approaches to reading are required at different points in the text, corresponding to gothic, realist and ironic writing styles, and reflecting the various reading strategies of the presented characters. In this way, the text fosters an integrated approach to reading which points to a way of experiencing lived reality that is at once imaginative, joyful, analytical and sympathetic.
Chapter 5 explores long eighteenth-century understandings of sensibility and, to a lesser extent, sympathy in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde. I argue that the eponymous heroine’s experience of sensibility exceeds the logic of prevalent cultural discourses insofar as it can be shown to be both sincere and self-consciously manipulative, aligned with the moral bonds of sentimentality but also with the logic of capitalist profiteering. This contradiction within female sensibility means it carries significant power in shaping social relations because it can be exerted for self-interested purposes while appearing to be entirely disinterested. In this way, Ethelinde is able to hold considerable power over her environment, revealing that women’s emotional responses could destabilise the systems of power and property which maintained the patriarchal status quo.
The feeling strategies of the heroine are contrasted with those of her male guardian and cousin-in-law, Sir Edward Newenden. The relationship between these two characters creates a double reading experience. Ostensibly, the dynamic between the two conforms to a paternalistic view of male–female relationships. However, the relationship is structured in important ways by the unrequited romantic love on Sir Edward’s side, and, through semi-covert representations of how each manages these romantic feelings for their own benefit, Smith disrupts the overt presentation of each character’s emotional virtue and with it the structure of Burkean gender dynamics themselves.
Further, Smith dramatises the functions of emotional intelligence in relation to the anomaly of the female heiress within patriarchal property law. The
character of Nelly, rich and independent, lacks the emotional sensitivity of Ethelinde partly, I argue, because her independence allows her to disregard normative feminine behaviour. This makes Nelly vulnerable in courtship, however, since she lacks the emotional resources necessary to distinguish between real and simulated displays of affection, and as such she falls victim to a mercenary marriage. Thus, while Ethelinde is at best ambivalent about the manipulative emotional strategies of the text’s heroine, through Nelly it suggests what might occur if a woman fails to play the role of feminine victim.
Chapter 5 finishes with an examination of Smith’s particular narrative style in creating this deeply cynical view of sensibility as a function of both female agency and victimisation. I argue that Ethelinde is highly selfconscious of the double reading it creates, participating in a sustained dismantling of the patriarchal logic which informs the sentimental and gothic literary traditions. The discussion shows that it is precisely the relative absence of free indirect discourse in Smith’s novel which enables her to create divergent perspectives on the action of the story. Therefore the chapter complicates scholarship which sees the eighteenth-century novel in a state of progress towards the full emergence of free indirect discourse in the novels of Jane Austen at the end of the century.
Taken as a whole, this book is an attempt to reconstruct Romanticperiod women’s domestic activity as human endeavours intimately related to the creation and expression of self, and as interventions into the web of human relations. Nevertheless, in maintaining a historical perspective I explore how these personal forms of action intersected with the wider social and cultural imperatives which mobilised and structured them, and the representations of these occupations in the mutating novel form brings into focus the aesthetic imagining of how these activities functioned. Through authorship, Smith, Austen and Burney negotiate the discrepancies between women’s daily activities as unproblematic functions of self and the power dynamics which mediated their realisation in practice. Even so, by the close of this book we will be in a position to assert that all of the studied activities are seen, in one way or another, as vital functions in women’s forging of identity, agency and interpersonal intimacy.
Notes
1. In addition to the work by Vickery, Davidoff and Hall, Tosh, and Lipsedge that we have been discussing, see also Guest (2000).
2. For discussions of Smith’s fraught personal life, see Fletcher (1998) and also Labbe (2002).
RefeReNces
Armstrong, Nancy. 1989. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Batchelor, Jennie. 2010. Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. 1987. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850. London: Hutchinson.
Fletcher, Lorraine. 1998. Charlotte Smith: A Critical Biography. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Guest, Harriet. 2000. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Harvey, Karen. 2012. The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Labbe, Jacqueline. 2002. Introduction. In The Old Manor House, 9–29. Ormskirk: Broadview.
Leppert, Richard. 1988. Music and Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1993. The Sight of Sound: Music Representation, and the History of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lipsedge, Karen. 2012. Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tosh, John. 1999. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Vickery, Amanda. 1998. The Gentleman’s Daughter. New Haven: Yale University Press.
CHAPTER 2
Needlework in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
IntroductIon
To date, scholarship has not thoroughly examined women’s needlework as the activity unfolds moment by moment.1 One reason for this may be that depictions of women’s work in literature are relatively limited. To understand this, Laura Mooneyham White’s Jane Austen’s Anglicanism is illuminating. White (2011, 40) explains that precisely because religious practice was so integral to life in the period, it actually receives rather minimal attention in Austen’s novels:
In a sense, looking for the religious ground in Austen’s novels is somewhat like looking through the novels for mentions of the physical ground, the actual dirt of her Georgian landscapes. She refers to the ground on which her heroines walk when it is important to what happens (as when Elizabeth Bennet’s walk to Netherfield makes her petticoats muddy, or when a similar muddiness of ground leads Lord Osborne to recommend half-boots to Emma Watson in The Watsons); otherwise, the ground is unremarked. Something very similar happens with her treatment of religious beliefs, but religious belief and its presumptions about human identity, morality, purpose, and history remain underfoot at every moment.
Something very similar, too, happens with needlework. In spite of the fact that a Romantic-period woman would have spent a considerable portion
J. Morrissey, Women’s Domestic Activity in the Romantic-Period Novel, 1770–1820, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70356-5_2
of every day embroidering, spinning or knitting, the activities were frequently seen as so commonplace that authors tended to think them not worth mentioning. Indeed, when a lady is described as sitting quietly in a fictional genteel drawing room, contemporary readers would probably have assumed that she was decorating a chair cushion, mending a shirt or doing ‘carpet work’ as the indolent Lady Bertram does in Mansfield Park. Lady Bertram is in fact an excellent example of the expectation that a lady would be working. In the text she is usually presented in a semiconscious state (or actually asleep), and yet at various moments Austen reminds us that she is sewing or knitting (or was before dozing off). Lady Bertram might be a conspicuous consumer of leisured retirement par excellence, but it is nevertheless seen as a matter of course that she would work with the needle. Even so, her needlework is only presented when it is relevant to the plot. When it is not relevant, Austen considers it superfluous to her fictional worlds.
In Smith’s (1794) The Old Manor House and Austen’s (1814) Mansfield Park, however, descriptions of needlework do occur frequently enough to enable a sustained analysis. I argue, in fact, that the activity functions as an important driver of characterisation and social commentary, and that approaching the novels through the lens of women’s work provides new insight into these texts. Roziska Parker’s (1984) The Subversive Stitch has shown how embroidery was intimately related to the creation of femininity in the Romantic period. This chapter conducts close literary readings to reveal how Smith and Austen interpreted and repackaged the links between needlework and the feminine, and what that meant at the level of subjective experience.
While the heroine of The Old Manor House, Monimia, can be read as an archetypal romance character, a close examination of her work in the text demonstrates that she functions on the narratological level, if not at the level of character, to enable a critique of idealised romance. The eroticisation of Monimia’s spinning and sewing at once creates the desire of the text’s hero, Orlando, while simultaneously revealing the inadequacy of desire predicated on romanticised notions of chivalry and physical beauty. Both Jacqueline M. Labbe (2001) and Joseph F. Bartolomeo (1993) have highlighted the idealistic flaws in Smith’s hero, but through an analysis of Smith’s representations of needlework it becomes apparent that these romantic flaws are informed by the concrete, sensual perception of Monimia at work.
Austen’s presentation of needlework in Mansfield Park shows us how important the activity was in the structuring of Romantic-period domestic spaces. In the text, women’s work is a function of friendship, domestic order and exchange. Equally, it operates as a vehicle for reflection and quiet autonomy. In this, however, needlework comes into conflict with prevalent stereotypes which associate it with subservience, seduction and manipulation. Austen’s dramatisation of this conflict represents, in part, an attempt to reclaim embroidery and plain work from the negative associations with which the activities were entwined. At the same time, Austen appropriates the associations of women’s work to create her own gender and class ideologies. Through this, she transforms needlework (frequently understood as emblematic of femininity and therefore women’s subjection) into a social and political force. My reading of needlework, therefore, clarifies aspects of Austen’s social and political views. I conclude that, in Mansfield Park at least, Austen creates an ideology which is ultimately supportive of contemporary class and gender structures, her multifaceted critique of Romantic-period life notwithstanding.
The following examination of both Smith’s and Austen’s novels pays attention to the particular narrative style employed in presenting women at work with the needle, especially in terms of the level of narrative detail. In relation to this, Gérard Genette’s (1980, 166) theorisation of narrative ‘mimesis’ and ‘diegesis’ is useful, which he defines as the difference between being ‘shown’ the story and ‘told’ the story, respectively. For Genette, the reader’s sense of being ‘shown’ the story depends on the level of detail in the narration, and also on the relative absence of the narrator. If the exact weights, textures and positions of objects are presented, or a character’s movements are very closely described, for example, we can say that the level of narrative detail is high. Equally, the sense of the narrator can be erased by the omission of the pronoun ‘I’, which denotes the teller as the subject of the sentence, and also through a tight focus on the events of the story with little or no tangential detail (such as might be seen when a narrator breaks from a focus on the story to provide social commentary).
The effect of both of these mimetic devices is that the reader experiences the story in a more kinetic, ‘lived’ sense. That is, they are able to ‘see’ the specific details of the stories, and when this is applied to domestic activity, the reader constructs a mental image of the process which approximates the experience of observing the activity in a real-world sense. As we shall see, both Smith and Austen exploit differing degrees of
mimesis and diegesis in order to enforce a specific view of women’s work. For Austen, mimetic descriptions of needlework most commonly valorise the activity in terms of personal, interpersonal and cultural functions. For Smith, mimesis allows her to reconstruct the male gaze in the reading experience itself. That is, mimetic descriptions of Monimia at the wheel or needle frequently eroticise her, and invite the reader to view the heroine along the same lines as her impetuous and romantic love interest, Orlando.
The Old ManOr hOuse
Kathryn R. King’s (1995) essay on Monimia, the seamstress-heroine of The Old Manor House, challenges feminist critiques of Monimia which have dismissed her as uninterestingly and uncritically representing the archetypal heroine of the sentimental novel.2 King goes on to make a case for a brief story of female empowerment in the text, in which Monimia substitutes the needle for the pen and thereby regains her autonomy, only to be subsumed back into the conventional gender roles of the romance novel under the heterosexual gaze of Orlando as the story progresses. This reading is interesting, but I do not think it goes far enough. King (1995, 84) states:
when set against the activities of the pen, needlework, so far as I have been able to discover, always assumes negative values, signifying a restrictive female role and often projecting a disturbed, even claustrophobic experience of femininity and the domestic role—its immobility, inactivity, boredom, and so on—against the possibilities for intellect and learning, expansion and movement [...] associated with the pen.
King’s point that needlework frequently takes on a negative colouring when set against the pen may be broadly correct, but pen/needle binaries do not do justice to the varied positive associations of needlework in the period, as detailed in the second section of this chapter on Mansfield Park. More relevant at this juncture is that in The Old Manor House it is precisely the literary exploitation of the repressive associations of needlework which enable Smith’s particular social commentary, consisting of a sustained dismantling of the idealistic romantic feelings of the text’s hero, Orlando. Moreover, needlework is finally configured to make a statement for female agency against the repressive ideologies which partly constitute it.
Key to creating this critique is the intense characterisation of Monimia through her work. This is the first detailed description of her in the story:
But nothing could be so irksome to a healthy and lively child of nine or ten years old, as the sort of confinement to which Monimia was condemned in consequence of her admission to the parlour; where she was hardly ever suffered to speak, but sat at a distant window, where, whether it was winter or summer, she was to remain no otherwise distinguished from a statue than by being employed making the household linen, and sometimes in spinning it with a little wheel which Mrs Rayland, who piqued herself on following the notable maxims of her mother, had brought for her, and at which she kept her closely employed when there was no other work to do. (Smith 2002, 47)
King (1995, 85) notes that this ‘description of the “healthy and lively” girl now “condemned” to silence and stillness in the parlor highlights the links between sewing, domestic confinement, and lifelessness’. At the same time, however, it functions to form an idea of Monimia inseparable from women’s work. Indeed, one reason why Monimia has been frequently read as an archetype in criticism is probably because—especially in the early stages of the text—insight into her inner world is almost always neglected and replaced by tableaus of her engaged with the needle. In the opening chapters, in fact, mimetic presentation of Monimia only ever occurs when she is shown at work. Her presentation in the reading experience therefore replicates how she is perceived by the other inhabitants of the parlour. For both the reader and the genteel characters who view Monimia in the context of polite domesticity, it is only Monimia’s knitting and spinning which ‘distinguish her from a statue’—that is, it is only through work that she appears to have any life at all. Kaley Kramer (2015, 92) highlights ‘a widespread cultural consensus [...] grounded in the belief that the body could not lie’ in the long eighteenth century. While Smith denies the reader much insight into Monimia’s internal world during the initial stages of the novel, she exploits this conception to emphasise Monimia’s sensibility through her work. For example, Monimia is cutting linen when Mrs Rayland vents her anger at the prospect of Orlando going into trade. Monimia finds herself ‘terribly affected’, and ‘measured four times instead of two, notched a piece of Irish cloth in the wrong place, and was beginning to use her scissors the wrong way’ (Smith 2002, 99). Denied a voice to express her feelings, the disturbance of Monimia’s spirits is expressed through the operation of her trade, thus denoting her sensibility. Note the very high level of detail Smith employs here: the exact nature of Monimia’s mistakes are described
even as the narrator emphasises the tangibility of the process by denoting the specifics of the worked materials and tools. Through this, Monimia is distinguished from pure archetypal generality through her needlework, in terms of both her feelings and her physicality.
Immediately following this description, Monimia turns her humble occupation into a vehicle for agency. She sees Orlando crossing the park and about to enter, and ‘finds herself quite unequal to the misery of being present at an interview, in which she foresaw [...] [Orlando] would be forbidden the house’:
she hung her foot as if by accident in the long roll of linen that was on the ground, and, in pretending to disengage it, fell with some violence against an old heavy gilt leather screen that went across one side of the large room, and ran the sharp-pointed scissors, with which she was cutting the linen, into her arm a little above the wrist. (Smith 2002, 99–100)
This act of self-harm allows Monimia to avoid the dreaded interview, since it results in her being ‘dismissed [...] out of one door as Orlando [...] entered at the other’ (Smith 2002 , 100). King ( 1995 , 85) argues that Monimia’s self-inflicted injury ‘foreground[s] the limited options and extreme vulnerability of the [...] seamstress-heroine’. I think, however, it is more productive to read this is as very rare moment of agency for the otherwise undistinguished Monimia. Indeed, even during her intercourse with Orlando, she is consistently presented as entirely subservient to his wishes and lacking in agency, often to the detriment of her own safety and psychological well-being. Once again, Smith employs an entirely mimetic narrative style by ‘showing’ the weight, material and age of the furniture, and the location of Monimia’s injury is precisely located ‘just above the wrist’, foregrounding the physicality and movement of the act.
Rozsika Parker shows that in the Victorian period both Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell recognised ‘embroidery as a “loophole”— for women to speak what they were unable to say openly’. For example, Mrs Gibson in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1866) controlled her surroundings by ‘continually interrupting people “with remarks about the pattern of her worsted work”’ (Parker 2010, 167). Monimia is also unable to openly express her desires: on seeing Orlando approaching she ‘dared not however say so’ (Smith 2002, 99). Through her work, however, ‘the very medium that was expected to still and silence women’ (Parker 2010, 167), Monimia is able to exert her will.
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THE ACQUISITION OF LAND FOR AN ESTHETIC PURPOSE
By an amendment to the charter of the city of St. Louis in 1901, the right was given the municipal assembly of St. Louis by ordinance to “prohibit the erection or establishment or maintenance of any business house or the carrying on of any business vocation” on property fronting on a boulevard which might thereafter be opened.[8] By an act of the legislature of Massachusetts in 1898, buildings “now being built or hereafter to be built, rebuilt or altered” on land abutting on a public square known as Copley Square, in Boston, were limited to the height of 90 feet.[9] By a bill presented in the national house of representatives in 1910, the commissioners of the District of Columbia were authorized to designate certain streets or avenues within the District as Class A highways, and on such highways to establish certain special restrictions which might include the prohibition of any kind of business, and might require that buildings should be of certain height, certain materials of construction, and of such architectural design “as shall secure the beautiful and harmonious appearance, as viewed from the public streets, of all structures to be erected or altered on land to which said restrictions shall apply.”[10]
In all this legislation provision was made for compensation to owners for the right in land thus taken, and herein the legislation partakes of the character of ordinary eminent domain statutes. But the interference with private property which this legislation authorized is at least an unusual application of the power of eminent domain, if not an extension of it for a new purpose.
The condemnation of private property for parks, playgrounds, and boulevards has been upheld as justified in the exercise of the power of eminent domain, but the decisions are for the most part very careful to point out that esthetic purposes were merely incidental, allowing the inference to be drawn that the taking would not be justified for purely esthetic reasons. Under the legislation cited, developments of private property may be to a considerable extent controlled, bill-boards may be abolished, structures may be limited in
height, the design of private buildings may be modified, solely in the interest of the public’s sense of beauty.
The only precedent that has been cited to support the validity of the right in the public which is asserted in this legislation is the Massachusetts case of Attorney General vs. Williams, 174 Mass. 476, decided in 1899. This case arose under the Massachusetts statute of 1898 above cited. The defendants were owners of a building abutting on Copley Square, Boston, which had been built in violation of the statute prohibiting the construction of buildings above 90 feet in height on this square. The action was brought to restrain the maintenance of the building at the height above the statutory line. The court decided that the statute was constitutional and that the height of the building should be made to conform with the statutory provision. The language of the court has been generally interpreted to mean that rights in private land and buildings in the nature of an easement may be taken by eminent domain solely for the protection of the public’s esthetic sense.[11]
“It hardly would be contended that the same reasons which justify the taking of land for a public park do not also justify the expenditure of money to make the park attractive and educational to those whose tastes are being formed and whose love of beauty is being cultivated It is argued by the defendants that the legislature in passing this statute was seeking to preserve the architectural symmetry of Copley Square If this is a fact and if the statute is merely for the benefit of individual property owners, the purpose does not justify the taking of a right in land against the will of the owner But if the legislature, for the benefit of the public was seeking to promote the beauty and attractiveness of a public park in the capital of the Commonwealth and to prevent unreasonable encroachments upon the light and air which it had previously received, we cannot say that the law-making power might not determine that this was a matter of such public interest as to call for an expenditure of public money, and to justify the taking of private property. While such a determination should not be made without careful consideration, and while the growing tendency toward an enlargement of the field of public expenditure should be jealously watched and carefully held in check, a determination of this kind once made by the legislature cannot be lightly set aside ”
The court says merely that the taking of private property is justified to promote the beauty of a park and prevent encroachments on its light and air. It is very doubtful if any broader meaning should be given to its language, but, if it is, it is believed that there have been no decisions in other jurisdictions involving the same principle. If the decision is generally followed it will be no great extension of this principle to declare constitutional the legislation previously cited which has been enacted in Missouri and proposed in Washington. It may be as clearly for the benefit of the public to promote the beauty of a street or boulevard, as is attempted by the St. Louis and Washington legislation, as to promote that of a park, which was declared to be one of the aims of the Massachusetts legislation in Attorney General vs. Williams. Education may so increase esthetic sentiment as to compel a general extension of the power of municipalities to interfere with the rights of owners for purely esthetic reasons, just as education compelled a judicial sanction of the right to take private property for purposes of public recreation. The framing of an esthetic test which will adequately protect the sense of beauty and still withstand the assaults of property owners, will puzzle the most astute law makers. An impartial administration of the newly sanctioned power will also be difficult. Neither of these difficulties, however, will stand in the way if the public demands a universal recognition that esthetic purposes are sufficient to justify condemnation.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Report of New York City Committee on Congestion of Population, p 49 and Appendix (Appendix is in manuscript )
[7] Op. cit., p. 56.
[8] See Appendix, p 211
[9] See Appendix, p. 218.
[10] See Appendix, p 213
[11] See text of decision, Appendix, p. 219.
CHAPTER II
THE ACQUISITION OF LAND
THE great obstacle to the execution of any plan, whether for the orderly extension of a city or for the reconstruction of its older sections, is usually the expense of acquiring the necessary land. This difficulty may arise because the cost of the land is excessive, due to bad methods of acquisition, or because the cost of land acquirement is unfairly distributed. Either or both of these conditions will place an excessive burden on the tax payers. If this cost must be borne wholly or mainly by the tax payers at large while a few land owners absorb a wholly disproportionate share of the financial benefit from the improvements, there will result a strong popular sentiment against such improvements, and a city government that is at all responsive will refuse to undertake them, even though the city as a whole may suffer for lack of them in the long run.
We are considering here only well conceived plans, the execution of which will be a real advantage to the community as a whole if the initial difficulties of financing them can be overcome. The execution of any plan which would result in a net damage or loss to a community can not properly be called an improvement. A real improvement is an investment on which the return to the community may be immediate or may be deferred.
The financial problem in acquiring land for any contemplated improvement is, therefore, in the first place, to avoid excessive cost, and in the second place, to distribute the cost in an equitable manner. To determine whether the city is paying an excessive price for land, a careful consideration of the details in condemnation procedure is essential.
PROCEDURE IN THE CONDEMNATION OF LAND
The extraordinary right of the community to take private land even against the will of the owner necessitates extraordinary protection to the individual. This protection is written into every state constitution excepting that of North Carolina, and the clause is interpreted, not as a declaration of the power of eminent domain, which is inherent in sovereignty, but as a limitation on that power. This protection is further guaranteed to the citizens of every state by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution. Private property can be taken for a public purpose only after “due legal process” and the payment of compensation, but the guarantee of the Federal Constitution does not compel uniformity in the provisions of all states. “Due legal process” in condemnation proceedings is satisfied by a great variety of statutory requirements, the only essential being that they shall contain provisions for determining compensation, for giving proper notice, and for hearing remonstrants. On the methods of determining these three essentials depend the simplicity and economy of condemnation procedure.
Most states give the further right to the land owner at some stage of the proceedings of having his compensation ascertained by a common law jury. In the absence of specific language to that effect it is generally held that the owner has no right to a jury in land damage cases, since at common law before 1787, in both England and America, compensation in such cases was ascertained by other tribunals without the right of appeal to a jury of twelve. Constitutions giving in general terms a right of trial by jury are interpreted to refer only to such cases as were tried by jury at the common law Many states, however, have granted jury trials in eminent domain cases by statute, while other states have construed clauses of their constitutions as applicable to eminent domain proceedings and have allowed a jury trial.
The method of ascertaining the compensation is the first consideration of a municipality endeavoring to reduce the cost of taking land for public purposes, but the other elements of “due legal process” are responsible for much of the delay in condemnation procedure and may affect considerably the amount of compensation. Every hearing requires either a notice to property owners or legal
service in hand, by mail, or by publication. After every hearing, time must be allowed for protest and appeals and the report of every hearing must be published. As the hearings grow more numerous the expense of advertising becomes a large item, and every addition to the length or complexity of the procedure involves an increase of counsel and witness fees or other legal expenses. Consequently, the elimination of any one of the steps in condemnation procedure has an important bearing on the question of reducing the size of the city’s investment. We may best consider the provisions for notice and hearing together
PROVISIONS FOR NOTICE AND HEARING
After authority has been given by the proper administrative body, the steps in condemning land for public use are notoriously many before the city can take possession of the land. Property owners are given not one day in court for the protection of their rights, but many days.
1 INITIAL PROCEEDINGS
M . After the city council passes an ordinance authorizing the taking of land by eminent domain, there must be first, a finding by a jury of 12 that the taking is necessary for public use; second, a hearing before the board of public works on the question of damages; and third, there may be an appeal from this hearing to a jury which reviews the entire evidence. The following docket entries were made in a normal street opening case:
Sept. 30, 1907, first resolution of common council referred to committee.
Oct 14, 1907, first resolution adopted by common council
Oct. 15, 1907, first resolution approved by mayor.
Oct 28, 1907, second resolution adopted and approved
Feb. 17, 1908, third resolution adopted and approved.
May 7, 1908, proof of publication and service of resolution on land owners returned to court.
May 16, 1908, list of owners filed.
May 23, 1908, jury sworn and premises viewed
June 5, 1908, jury hears evidence and returns a verdict that the opening is a public necessity.
July 2, 1908, papers in the case go to the board of public works for award of damages after the hearing of evidence.
Thus, in a typical Milwaukee street opening almost a year elapses before the point of beginning to ascertain compensation is reached.
L A .[12] The city council passes an ordinance of intent to take private property by eminent domain and sets out the purpose for which the land is to be taken. The ordinance is published and thirty days are given for protest, either against the taking or against the district which has been marked out as benefited by the improvement. A protest against the improvement from the owners of a majority of the frontage of property proposed to be taken or damaged puts an end to the proceedings, and the improvement can not be initiated again for at least six months except on petition by the owners of a majority of the frontage. Not until the protests have been disposed of can the city council proceed to pass an ordinance authorizing the filing in court of a petition for condemnation. Sixty days from the time of the passing of the ordinance are allowed for filing the petition, and the details required in the petition are such that even this time usually has to be extended. It is impossible for the city to acquire land in less than a year.
M .[13] The first hearing on the question of damages under the park procedure in Minneapolis is held before five appraisers appointed by the park commissioners. The second hearing is before the park commission. At the second hearing the park commissioners consider objections to the appraisers’ report on the ground either of irregularity in the proceedings or of inadequacy of the award of damages. The third hearing is before the court on the question of irregularity of the proceedings. The fourth hearing is before three appraisers appointed by the court to review the evidence and bring in a report on the question of damages. If this
appraisal is unsatisfactory there may be even a fifth hearing before three new appraisers, but in the practice of the present counsel for the board of park commissioners, which has extended over several years, there has been only one instance of the court’s granting this fifth hearing.
S . L . In St. Louis there is a curious anomaly making for delay. Ordinarily the findings of the eminent domain commission are taken up on appeal to a justice sitting without a jury, but a corporation is allowed to appeal to a common law jury on the question of damages although not on the question of benefit. It is not infrequent for the appeal of a single corporation to result in a jury’s overthrowing the finding of the eminent domain commission in respect to one item, in which case all the work of the commission goes for nothing. A new commission must be appointed and the evidence must be entirely reviewed. A corporation has the same right in Kansas City but, by statute,[14] it must exercise that right before the eminent domain commissioners report, and if it elects to have its damages assessed by a jury the commissioners have no jurisdiction over that part of the case, but accept the finding of the jury and incorporate it in their own report.
D . In Denver, where in other details the condemnation procedure is satisfactory, there is much time wasted over the formality of notice and hearing. After the passing of the ordinance and the formal negotiation by the mayor for the purchase, a petition is brought in the district court. Two months, at least, are required for service on residents, and a month more for publication on absent defendants. The hearing is then begun before the commissioners, who are allowed thirty days to report, but this time can be extended. Thirty days are allowed for the publication of the report and thirty days more for the filing of petitions by parties interested. These petitions are usually tried out by a common law jury, but may be heard by a jury of six. It is impossible for the city to get possession of land inside of a year and, where many property owners are involved, much more time is required.
C . In Chicago, where land for streets is commonly dedicated without expense to the city, the only considerable taking
for street purposes in the past fifteen years was in connection with the widening of Randolph Street. The docket entries show that the ordinance was passed March 16, 1903, and the petition filed in court in June of the same year. The commission was appointed in July, 1903, and finished its work in September, but the time allowed for petitions and the actual trying of these petitions by jury so delayed the proceedings that an order of possession was not issued to the city until June, 1906.[15]
O . In contrast with the cumbersome methods illustrated above, the state code of Oregon shows the possibilities of a more direct method of condemnation procedure.[16] Without preliminary notice or hearing a petition is filed in court and issues may be joined within fifteen days before a common law jury, and even in cases of non-resident owners the interval between the filing of petition and the trial before the jury is not over two months. The city may come into possession of the land within two months after filing the petition, unless the court docket is crowded. Delays are occasioned chiefly because of insufficient judges.
2 APPEALS TO HIGHER COURT
Even after the award of damages is finally determined by a court sitting with or without jury, a hearing on appeal is allowed on questions of law in condemnation cases as in any other civil case. Such appeals are relatively infrequent, because the determination by the legislature that a proposed taking is for a public use is held not appealable, and because a finding of fact by the lower court on the question of damages will not be disturbed unless there is evidence of gross error or fraud. The questions that go up to the supreme court usually are:
1. Is the statutory provision under which property is condemned constitutional?
2. What is the legal meaning of the language of the statute?
3. Have the municipal authorities strictly complied with the details of the procedure as outlined by the statute?
4. Is the rule of damages as announced in the lower court inequitable either to the city or to the land owner?
The additional expense of appeals to a court of last resort can not be avoided; but possession of land by the city should not wait on the outcome of this appeal, particularly where the only question in issue is the amount of damages. It is the law of most jurisdictions that ownership of the land passes to the city on the payment of the final judgment in the lower court.
THE TRIBUNAL
1 A SPECIAL BOARD SUBJECT TO REVIEW BY THE COURT WITH JURY
A common law jury is apt to lack the knowledge of real estate values and the experience in handling technical evidence which are important in the tribunal which is to ascertain the compensation in land damage cases, and therefore most condemnation codes provide a special tribunal. Some of the codes also see the necessity of a tribunal as far removed as possible from the influence of the parties to the suit and provide for its non-partisan appointment, usually by the court which has jurisdiction over the proceedings. There is a wide difference in the character of these judicial commissions in different cities and even in successive commissions in the same city.
D In the opinion of the city attorney’s office, Denver gets excellent commissioners, or appraisers as they are called. The procedure is a semi-judicial one from the start. The petition is filed in the district court and three appraisers are appointed by the presiding justice, who endeavors to get men of the highest qualifications for this work. The bill which is submitted by the appraisers for their services is usually allowed without much question. On the average, only 15 per cent of the findings of the appraisers are appealed from. A commission was appointed in 1911 to ascertain damages in connection with the extension of the Denver park system. Property for this purpose was taken to the amount of $2,523,463, as
estimated by the report of the appraisers. Of this sum $1,814,539 was paid for land taken for the site of the civic center. Considering the size of the undertaking there were very few protesting owners, and these were for the most part owners of property involved in the taking for the civic center. Out of 50 owners only 18, representing $527,428, protested against the awards, and one of these alone represented $265,000. The common law jury which heard the first protest found against the petitioners, and all the rest of the protesting owners withdrew their appeals.[17]
S . L . The same procedure as in Denver is followed in St. Louis, the three commissioners being appointed by the judge of the circuit court presiding over the case. A majority of the commissioners has full power to act and make a report. Unlike the practice in Denver, the compensation is fixed at $3.00 a day. It is not to be expected that excellent men will be attracted by such low pay, and perhaps for this reason some of the commissioners have not given satisfaction. It is reported to be not an unusual thing in cases involving less than $1,000 for the commission to take six months in reaching a decision and then to have its finding overturned on review. On the other hand, there have been notably good commissioners in cases involving heavy damages. The commissioners who sat in connection with the condemnation of the site of the municipal courts building took two days to reach a decision, although the property of 400 defendants was taken and over $1,000,000 in damages was paid. Appeals from the commissioners’ findings may be taken to a common law jury only by a corporation land owner—an anomaly in procedure which we have already noticed.[18]
P . The municipalities of Pennsylvania in takings for street purposes replace the commission, which may be regarded as somewhat expert in the knowledge of real estate values, by a socalled “road jury” of three appointed by the judge of the court where the petition is filed. Philadelphia, with a population of 2,000,000, and the hill towns of a few hundred inhabitants, have the same procedure.
The awards of road juries are, in the opinion of the city solicitor’s office, on the whole satisfactory. Excessive awards to land owners are appealed from by the city, and in a large per cent of these appeals land owners, to avoid the danger of litigation, remit some portion of the award. The following shows the total amount of awards and total remitted in Philadelphia in 1906, 1907, and 1908.
Year Award Remitted
1906 $1,786,785 $147,821
1907 2,273,867 118,973
1908 2,719,691 208,173
The appeal from the awards of road juries is heard by a common law jury in the superior court and results, in a considerable number of cases, in a substantial increase over the award. The report of the city law department in 1906 shows that there were 76 cases heard by a road jury in 41 of which appeals were taken. In this same year awards in 130 cases heard in the superior court were increased from $132,054, as fixed by the road jury, to $225,758. In nine cases the amount of the award remained the same and in one there was a decrease of $2,256. The reports of the law department of 1907, 1908, and 1909 do not give the whole number of cases appealed from the road jury, but in the 23 appealed cases heard in the superior court for 1907 there were increases in awards in 17 cases from $49,169 to $91,551; in the 22 appealed cases heard in the superior court for 1908 there were increases in awards in 20 cases from $61,550 to $85,877; in 1909 out of 19 cases there were increases in awards in 14 cases from $119,650 to $153,907.
It is significant that in a considerable number of the cases appealed from a road jury the evidence is heard by a referee, particularly where a large sum is in dispute, and the common law jury acts on his report. Almost half the appealed cases of 1906 were sent to a referee.
P , O . In taking land for street purposes Portland does not use the state code, the advantages of which were described on page 30, but follows the provisions of the city charter, [19] which prescribe a procedure much like that in Philadelphia. Its
three “viewers” correspond to the Philadelphia “road jury,” except that they are not appointed by the court but by a committee of the common council and usually for political reasons. The result is that a body of professional viewers has developed who are peculiarly open to the charge that their findings may be influenced by the political strength of the parties to the proceeding. The report of the viewers goes to the city council which usually adopts it as the easiest course to pursue. At any time within twenty days from the confirmation of the report of the viewers by the council, an appeal may be made to the court sitting with jury, the only questions open to appeal being the amount of damages and, where assessments for benefit are also made, the amount of the assessment. Since any number of persons may join in the appeal the proceeding is so complicated that the jury is ordinarily glad to confirm the report as a whole and avoid the rather difficult task of revising it. Two out of three recent cases had that result.
There are two types of commission which for convenience will be placed in this group, though they differ essentially from the Denver and St. Louis commissions. The first is illustrated by the street commissioners in Boston, or the board of public works in Milwaukee; the second, by the Chicago commission specially appointed under the local improvement act. Like judicially appointed commissions, those of Boston and Milwaukee conduct hearings, but unlike judicially appointed commissions they sit as arbiters in a case in which they, as representing the city in the capacity of administrative bodies, are interested parties.
B . In proceedings for the condemnation of land needed for streets, and for school houses and other public buildings in Boston, awards of damages are made by the street commissioners after public hearing. The street commissioners are elected for three years and receive a fixed salary. There may be much or little significance in the fact that appeals are frequent from the awards of this elected commission which is apt to be regarded as closely allied with the city administration. Before the jury the city undoubtedly is handicapped by the fact that the awards of damages have been made by a department of the city administration sitting as a tribunal in a cause
in which the city is an interested party The number of appeals from the findings of the Boston street commission compares very unfavorably with those from the St. Louis and Denver judicially appointed commissions, or even with the Indianapolis park commission, a board which, like the Boston street commission, is a department of the city administration. The different result in Indianapolis may be due altogether to the strong demand for the completion of the park system and to the conviction in the minds of land owners that parks create land values; but contributing factors to this result are doubtless, first, the strictly non-partisan character of the Indianapolis commission, which serves without compensation, and its reputation for fair dealing; second, the elimination of the jury in cases appealed from the park commission; and third, the assessment of the cost of land taking on the property specially benefited, which compels the interest of the land owner “specially benefited” in every verdict for land damages and makes appeals to increase verdicts extremely unpopular.
Data in 35 proceedings for street openings, widenings, and relocations in Boston, taken at random from the records of the last fifteen years, show that in 31 cases the awards of the street commissioners were not accepted by the owners. In 28 of these cases there were 1,065 parties to the proceedings, of whom 462 refused to accept awards. Approximately 175 of these claims for additional compensation were settled by the street commissioners, 287 were entered in court and either tried by jury or settled by the law department. Thus 26 per cent of all owners interested in the proceedings appealed to a common law jury and a considerable portion of these appeals were actually tried. Complete figures were obtained from the records of the street commissioners in 12 proceedings and are given in the following table:
TABLE 2. DAMAGES AWARDED, PARTIES INVOLVED, CLAIMS FOR INCREASE, AND CLAIMS COMPROMISED OR SETTLED, IN 12 PROCEEDINGS FOR STREET IMPROVEMENTS. BOSTON, 1895 TO 1913
Location of improvement Amount of damages awarded Parties involved Claims for increase Claims settled by street commissioners
M . Although in Milwaukee the board of public works is the tribunal before which evidence is presented on the question of damages on account of the taking of property for public purposes, a finding that a taking proposed is necessary and that the purpose is a public one must be made by a jury of twelve men before the case gets to the board of public works. From the awards of the board of public works appeal is allowed to a common law jury, but in the last eight years every appeal has been settled before the case reached trial. It may be said in this connection that there have been no very extensive takings for either street or park purposes.
C . The second type of commission is provided for in the procedure for street improvements in Chicago. Like the Denver and St. Louis commissions, it is judicially appointed but is more in the nature of a board of advisory experts to the jury, since its report is made without a hearing and on the basis of its own appraisal of valuations. The court frequently follows the suggestion of the city attorney in making the appointments to this commission. The report of the commission is filed in court, summonses are immediately issued to all persons whose land is damaged or taken, and the trial
proceeds before a common law jury There have been so few cases of takings for street openings, widenings, and extensions in Chicago that the data are insufficient to form the basis for an opinion as to the merit of the Chicago method of ascertaining compensation. The only proceeding that has involved considerable land taking within the past twenty years was the widening of Randolph Street, in which case the work of the commission was on the whole well done, if judged by the result of the review by the court. Many owners were concerned in that proceeding, but the finding of the commissioners as to compensation for land taken or damaged was increased only from $314,000 to $367,000, and the finding of the commissioners that there “was no public benefit” and that, therefore, the total expense of the improvement should be assessed on private owners was not altered on appeal. For their services in this case, the commissioners received $1,000 each.
2. A COURT WITH JURY HAVING ORIGINAL JURISDICTION
Although an appointed commission is more likely to consider intelligently the evidence and to come to a fairer conclusion than if the proceedings are brought directly before a jury, this advantage may be more than offset and the preliminary hearing be a waste of time if the commission’s findings are overturned by an inexperienced jury of twelve men. It is therefore not surprising to find in several jurisdictions where the right to a jury is granted in eminent domain cases that the expense of a first hearing before a commission is entirely eliminated. This is so in the state codes of Louisiana, Ohio, Washington, and California. In the city of Chicago for some public purposes, and in Portland, Oregon, for all public purposes except street openings, widenings, and extensions, the same procedure is followed.
C . In Ohio, the procedure in appropriating land for all public purposes is regulated by the state law.[20] When an ordinance authorizing the appropriation of land is passed by a two-thirds vote of the common council of any city, the city solicitor makes application to the court of common pleas, to a judge in vacation, to the probate
court, or to the insolvency court, for the appointment of a jury to award compensation, giving five days’ notice of such application to the owners of property affected by the ordinance. The judge applied to sets a time for the hearing of evidence by the jury and the trial proceeds as in other civil actions. Appeal lies from the finding of the jury, but the right to take and use the property condemned is not affected by the appeal. Upon payment of the judgment or upon depositing the money in court, a fee simple vests in the city unless a lesser estate is asked for in the ordinance of appropriation.
In Cleveland, when the state insolvency court was legislated out of existence by operation of the federal bankruptcy law, that court took over jurisdiction in juvenile and condemnation cases. The docket of the court is not overcrowded and a speedy trial is assured in every case. So rarely have the offers made by the city been exceeded by the jury’s findings that owners have learned the economy of accepting the city’s offer in the first instance and avoiding the delay and expense incident to litigation. The result is that less than onetenth of the land needed for public purposes is acquired by condemnation procedure.
C . Chicago gets practically all of its sites for school houses by condemnation. The offer of the school board to purchase land desired is hardly more than formal, and on its rejection the petition for condemning the land is brought immediately in court and evidence of the value of the site is presented directly to the jury. This method has been in use for some years and counsel for the board, who has served during the history of this method of procedure, is convinced that the city is in substantially as advantageous a position as a private buyer During the past five years (1907-1912), with an average of at least 20 cases a year, the jury has, with practically no exception, accepted the valuation of the site as fixed by the law department of the school board. Settlements with property owners have consequently been much more common. Ten years ago 90 per cent of the cases involving condemnation for school purposes in Chicago were tried through to a verdict. Today more than 90 per cent are settled and subsequent proceedings are merely formal, to perfect the title.
S F .[21] In San Francisco, too, the procedure is begun by filing a complaint and issuing summonses thereon in the superior court. If the owners affected by the process do not demand a trial by jury it is waived and three appraisers are appointed by the court to ascertain the compensation. In practice, however, more than 80 per cent of the land needed in San Francisco for public purposes is acquired directly by deed from the owners without resort to condemnation procedure.
3 A COURT WITHOUT JURY HAVING ORIGINAL OR APPELLATE JURISDICTION
N Y .[22] When the board of estimate and apportionment of New York City authorizes the taking of land for street or park purposes, application is made to the supreme court for the appointment of three commissioners of estimate and assessment, to determine the compensation to owners and to assess as damages the cost of the proposed improvement, or such a proportion thereof as the board of estimate and apportionment directs, on lands deemed specially benefited. After hearing evidence an abstract of the report of the three commissioners or of a majority of them is filed in court at least thirty days before being presented formally to the court for confirmation, in order that petitions in writing against the confirmation of the report may be filed. The court gives a public hearing to remonstrants who have filed their written objections, and confirms or modifies the report, or in some cases sends it back to a new commission. The commissioners are directed by the statute to complete their work within six months unless granted an extension by the court for good cause. Their compensation is $10 a day.
This procedure was long regarded as unsatisfactory. In 1911 it was characterized by the New York press as “inordinately expensive,” because of the financial interest of the commissioners in protracting the proceedings; “generally inefficient,” because of the many incompetent commissioners selected for political reasons; and open to “flagrant abuse,” because the commissioners thus selected were likely to favor property owners who had political influence. By the
adoption of a constitutional amendment at the general election November 4, 1913, the legislature is permitted to pass an act which will give to a justice of the supreme court the power to dispose of all matters concerning condemnation formerly in the hands of the commissioners of estimate and assessment.[23] In the opinion of the corporation counsel, Archibald R. Watson, “A justice of the supreme court with undivided responsibility, with no interest to prolong the proceedings, not susceptible to influence and generally of high grade character and capacity, should be able to dispose of condemnation matters with results far preferable than by means of commissioners.”
M . We have already described the procedure in appropriating lands for park purposes in Minneapolis up to the time of the confirmation of the awards by the district court.[24] The results are on the whole quite satisfactory. The appraisers are usually competent men and, although appeals are taken from their awards as confirmed by the board of park commissioners to the district court sitting without jury, the percentage of such appeals is not large, not more than 15 per cent in any proceeding, and the increase in awards on appeal is often merely nominal and rarely more than 20 per cent. There seems, however, little justification for two preliminary hearings, one before the appraisers and one before the park commissioners, on the question of land awards. The appraisal could as well be done by the park commissioners through the agency of a competent clerical force, as in Indianapolis, and the expense of appraisals and reappraisals would be avoided.
K C In Kansas City, Missouri, the petition for taking land for street purposes is brought in the municipal court which sits with a jury of six appointed by the presiding justice.[25] The verdict of the jury is confirmed by the common council of the city and appeals are allowed to the circuit court. In practice not more than 25 per cent of such actions are appealed from the municipal court. In the newer procedure for the taking of land for park purposes a saving of both time and expense, by eliminating the preliminary trial in the municipal court, is brought about by allowing the petition to be filed directly in the circuit court.[26] As in St. Louis, a corporation is allowed a
hearing on the question of damages for land taken before a common law jury, but in Kansas City corporations do not demand common law juries. When the procedure was new, a corporation tried the experiment and the result was so disastrous that it is said never to have been attempted since. Presiding justices both in the municipal and circuit courts take care to appoint competent men. That satisfactory jurors can be obtained for $2.50 a day, which is the compensation allowed, is ample evidence that jury service in these cases is regarded as a civic duty and not as a desirable “job.”
I . In Indianapolis the board of public works in takings for street purposes, and the board of park commissioners in takings for park purposes, have the same duties which in Kansas City are performed by a jury of six men. All objections to the taking, awards for damages, and the size of the specially benefited area as marked out by the commissioners, are disposed of in one hearing.[27] From the findings of the commissioners appeal lies directly to the circuit or superior court sitting without jury, and the amount of the judgment as found on appeal is final. The businesslike practice which has been adopted by the park commission under the act of 1909, appeals to the sense of fairness of the property owner and has proved most helpful in arriving at awards. In every taking the park board has the assistance of real estate experts as an advisory committee, and is kept in close touch with valuations by a complete card catalogue system which registers the actual consideration in transfers of property
Although the act is only three years old, there has been at least one considerable taking in each park district. In the North Park there have been two, one involving an expense of $154,420 and the other $131,662. In all the takings for park purposes under the new act involving over $600,000 worth of property and several thousand owners, there have been only four appeals from the findings of the board, two of which have been decided by the superior court. In one an award of $10,000 was increased to $17,000 and in the other an award of $6,925 was increased to $9,800. In one proceeding alone there were 1,600 owners involved and only 50 were present at the hearing given remonstrants.[28]
