I am reading scholarly works about Jane Austen and having hearteyes about obscure details in the Pemberley chapters of P&P that indicate Mr. Darcy’s sustainable land management praxis.
Okay, let’s talk about Pemberley!
Austen, as a rule, doesn’t spend many paragraphs describing locations. There’s often information to be gleaned from their names (Sense and Sensibility is full of lurking references to sexual scandals and Mansfield Park to slavery), but Longbourn just means “long stream” or “long boundary,” Netherfield means “lower field,” and Rosings’ original owner was a redhead. Meryton, a pun on “merry town,” is kind of fascinating, given the installment of the militia and the threat to stability and serenity they represent. Partying and shenanigans. Possibly a Shakespeare ref.
Longbourn barely gets any description at all. From the get-go, everyone who lives there is obsessed with other places, with getting out (except Mr. Bennet, who never wants to leave his library, never mind the house). Lady Catherine deems it small and mildly uncomfortable, which is in keeping with the theme of confinement, but also it’s Lady Catherine talking. Netherfield can’t tell us much about Bingley, who is only a tenant. Rosings is expensively, ostentatiously modern and gaudily furnished, though it has a handsome park that Lady Catherine and her stifled daughter never set foot in but Elizabeth and Darcy both frequently escape to during their stays.
So it’s notable and wonderful that Austen goes out of her way to describe Pemberley as an old-fashioned, highly successful, working estate. Its practical old Anglo-Saxon name means “Pember’s clearing.” A pember is a man who grows barley. Darcy most likely still does. As Elizabeth and the Gardiners approach and tour the house, they notice and admire its beautiful surrounding woods, and then when they wander outside, the specific word Austen uses is coppice woods. A coppice is a woodland filled with tree species that grow new shoots from their stumps when you chop them down. Darcy probably has oaks on a fifty-year cycle as well as faster-growing species such as hawthorn and hornbeam for firewood, timber and cattle fodder. Coppice forestry is functional and sustainable, and provides habitat for beasts and birds.
Darcy is the anti-John Dashwood (Dashwood, srsly), the brother in Sense and Sensibility who inherits Elinor and Marianne’s childhood estate of Norland, whose wife immediately starts making plans to hack down trees (not even coppice trees, but big, gorgeous, venerable hardwoods) to make way for a folly. Jane Austen hated follies. Also, it ought to be noted that timber was so valuable in Britain at the time that estates often had inheritance clauses that detailed who was and wasn’t allowed to chop down what.
Darcy’s a food producer and land conservator, prefers nature over fussy, ornamental landscape design, his servants and tenants like him, he gives money to the poor… and… he’s a trout fisherman! He shoots, too, as do Bingley and Hurst and Mr. Bennet, but it’s a particular mark in his favour that Austen singles him and Mr. Gardiner out as anglers. It’s a pastime that signifies a taste for contemplation and quietness and appreciation of nature, as blissfully described in The Compleat Angler; or, The Contemplative Man’s Recreation, a hugely popular travel book first published in the 1600s and reprinted often for 18th C libraries. The plot of The Compleat Angler is about the conversion of a hunter (pastime of the ultra-rich) to a fisherman who learns to love the peaceful sport. We receive ample evidence elsewhere that Darcy is a man capable of swift, decisive action and formidable effectiveness. But at Pemberley, Austen takes care to show us how he’s balanced.
Most of the information in this post comes from Margaret Doody’s Jane Austen’s Names.
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