WHEN BRITAIN BROKE RANKS

Beneath the genteel surface of decorous society, unrest simmered in the world – and works – of Jane Austen

- NIGE TASSELL

While the novels of Jane Austen might and upper class gaiety disgruntlement was rumbling beneath the surface across the country - and, during this tail end of the Georgian era, it often erupted in violent, sometimes lethal protest. Not that Austen herself completely ignored what was happening in the country beyond Barton Cottage and Netherfield Park.

For instance, her fifth novel, Northanger Abbey, refers to the unrest erupting in England's larger cities. Although she writes about a riot as suggest an endless schedule of middle- imagined by one of the characters, the rather visceral description depicts: "a mob of three thousand men assembling in St George's Fields, the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood". Whether real or imagined, Austen's inspiration for this tableau does seem to have come from real-life events. The episode appears to be a conflation of at least two separate disturbances that occurred prior to Northanger Abbey's publication.

In 1808, perhaps 6,000 weavers from the local - and rapidly growing - textile industry in Manchester gathered in St George's Fields to protest about the lack of a minimum wage in their trade. Eight years later, not long before Austen's novel was published, another riot broke out in London at the end of a hitherto peaceful protest. During the violence, the rioters even planned to attack the Tower of London - so it was surely not mere coincidence that Austen's imagined account of the unrest included the Tower being "threatened".

FIGHTING FOR FAIR PAY

The weavers' protest in Manchester may have been violent but it did achieve a modicum of success. Though dragoons were called in to restore peace (and one protester died during this response), the rioting was replicated in surrounding towns in Lancashire, and the weavers won a small concession in the form of a modest rise in their wages.