Jane Austen and Anglicanism

The relatively few who tackle this subject seem to get themselves into a bit of a tangle because they try and see JA’s religion in Victorian terms. The Victorian view of 18th century Anglicanism was extremely negative ignoring the fact that the groundwork for many of the reforms that enabled the Church to recover lost ground was laid by Jane Austen’s contemporaries, men deep dyed with the ‘sloth’ and ‘negligence’ of the 18th century. What the Victorians took for sloth and negligence was, in fact, the settled-ness of an established system within what was still very largely an agricultural country where habit and duty, rather than the need to attract an audience in the urban free market, were the mainstays of church life. 

When I read Austen’s novels I find myself encountering a woman whose religious life had been formed by the High Church orthodoxy of the eighteenth century. Commentators often point to the fact that Austen has some sympathies with the Evangelicals, perhaps because they overcame something of the outward coldness of the High Church tradition, but she is not herself an Evangelical. Instead, she lived at a time when the High Churchmen were beginning to reorganize, and Joshua Watson and the other members of the Hackney Phalanx were overhauling the clanking machinery of the Old High Church Movement. The trouble is, the Old High Churchmen, unlike the Evangelicals and the later Tractarians were not effusive when it came to religion. 

For the eighteenth century High Churchman, religion was something lived and practiced, not talked about. Church on Sundays, prayers morning and evening, reading the Bible, and going all such good works as had been prepared for one to walk in, were the weft and weave of Anglican Churchmanship in this period. Communions were infrequent, but generally well attended. In Jane Austen’s social circle Church-going is presumed in her novels, but she is an acute observer of human nature, and thus a distinction between those for whom it is a social convention, for example the Crawford in Mansfield Park, and those whose religious lives run deeper.   

Perhaps when someone again tackles the subject of Jane Austen’s Anglicanism they will do so with a keener appreciation of the pre-Tractarian age in which she lived, and read some of the devotional literature of the 18th century such as Law’s ‘Serious Call’ and Wheatley’s ‘Rationale’ at which point Miss Austen’s devoutness, as reticence on religious matters, will become much more intelligible.