This, my first Youtube video ever and a shameless attempt to share my passion for Pride and Prejudice and the history of Regency England.

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It’s easy to love a book like Pride and Prejudice especially if you just like very good writing and that’s probably a little too trite to observe, but there it is, it’s as simple as that, the writing is great and the plot interesting. Of course, for many others it’s much more than that. You have a romance plot that shines a light on complex character development, you’ve got that elegant but sharp writing style of Jane Austen’s that if you were not accustomed to that from the very beginning is like seeing something like seeing the sunrise for the first time (now I’m thinking back to when I last saw a sunrise….and I don’t think I’ve ever properly seen one). It has irony and sarcasm, it has interesting supporting characters that you grow to love or to not love. And a lot of scholars agree that it fits nicely into the genres of Comedy of Manners and Social Satire in the manner of writers like Frances Burney who wrote Evelina and Cecilia a decade or so before Pride & Prejudice. You also see later writers like Edith Wharton and Oscar Wilde who write extensively in these genres. And without getting into too much detail about what that genre is, I want to share an example straight from Pride & Prejudice that highlights what I mean by “Comedy of Manners”. Keep in mind Austen is writing here about the Bennet sisters and a visitor, Mr. Collins, who is their father’s long-lost cousin who is the one to inherit their home on the passing of their father since daughters could not inherit land at this time. Of course, Mr. Collins, it was very much insinuated by Mrs. Bennet, would betroth one of the daughters….kind of like keeping it in the family so to speak:

“They were not the only objects of Mr. Collin’s admiration. The hall, the dining room, and all its furniture, were examined and praised; and his commendation of everything would have touched Mrs. Bennet’s heart, but for the mortifying supposition of his viewing it all as his own future property.”

Austen invites the reader to look with her at the absurdities of society, especially the small vanities and cruelties produced by class, property, and rank. What makes this so brilliant is that she writes as though the reader is already perceptive enough to understand the joke. She does not overexplain the ridiculousness of Mr. Collins, or Mrs. Bennet, or Lady Catherine. She lets us see them, and then seems to trust that we will feel the same mixture of amusement, irritation, and disappointment.

Reading Austen can feel like being drawn into a private confidence. She has the air of someone leaning slightly toward you and saying, with perfect composure, “You see it too, don’t you?” with a nod and a wink. That shared recognition is one of the great pleasures of Pride and Prejudice. Austen gives the reader the pleasure of intelligence, but also the pleasure of companionship in that intelligence. We are invited to laugh, to judge, to notice with her.

For someone like myself at a tender age when confidence didn’t come easily, as with many readers, this was their first entrance into this Regency English world, the very niche landed gentry that was somewhere between the everyday common man and the titled aristocracy of early 19th century England. I did not grow up instinctively understanding the landed gentry, entailments, assemblies, patronage, or the importance of marriage in early nineteenth-century England. At first, it looked like an elegant foreign country of manners and drawing rooms. But what is there to understand? At the heart of the novel you’ve got characters you would see walking around in our modern lives today: The overbearing mother, the nonchalant can’t be bothered father, the annoying younger sisters, the pretentious and uptight matriarch of a superior family, the jealous woman with a chip on her shoulder, the groveling man who does too much to brown nose his patron, a failed marriage proposal. Something here allows us to connect with the past we wouldn’t have otherwise, and to transcend time and place but still feel rooted in the present is certainly a very wonderful place to be.

On its own it’s a work of timeless beauty and power. But as with many pieces of literature, especially ones we are so fond of… we get curious. What was Austen thinking when she wrote the plot and her characters? Was she writing from experience, how much of the world around here was brought into this writing? How did her time and place infiltrate her work? These are not, necessarily, necessary questions to appreciate the book for what it is as a standalone novel. However, as I started understanding more about the historical context, I started viewing the novel in a different way. Characters who once seemed merely comic become a lot more interesting and poignant. Plot points that once felt like just romance or scandal are tied to real systems around money, law, war, class, and reputation.

So if these episodes do anything, I hope they help you see at least one character, one scene, or one plot turn in a new way. If that happens, I’ll feel like I’ve done my job.

Now, just a disclaimer for anyone listening, I will be talking about some of the plot elements of this book so if you want to avoid spoilers I would suggest listening to these episodes after you read it. So let’s get into it.

This particular series is four parts with parts published every day for the next few days. Check out my YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/@theguildedquill_joanna

I was on a plane somewhere over Mexico, gripping the armrest and listening with unusual concentration to Parminder Nagra and Keira Knightley, running around in cleats, in a film I have seen countless times. You know the one with all the fancy football footwork and that Irish lad, who would later play King Henry VIII in The Tudors, looking super fine in a jersey? I was laser-focused as there had been a lot of turbulence the previous twenty minutes or so and I was panicking without making too much of a show of it. The cabin lights shuddered as our seats convulsed underneath us. The stranger beside me had been muttering a prayer under her breath to the Lord Almighty and, so, I would rate the overall situation as 6/10 in intensity. Then….whoosh!, she grabbed onto my arm and yelped. A pure drop for three seconds, maybe less, but you know how these things go when your life is precariously hanging 32,000 feet over land your feet should be on.

I didn’t want to freak her, the stranger sitting next to me, out by also freaking out so when things started calming down I tried taking a sip of water, from those little thimbles airlines call cups, like nothing happened. But the water was sloshing around as my steady hand had finally faltered and betrayed my calm exterior. Whoa there! Calm yourself. I looked out the window onto an expansive view of Guadalajara; we were ready to land, but it’s when the engines turn off and we’re coasting that I find life very peaceful. It’s at this point in a flight where my mind shuts down and goes absolutely numb. Forget everything; you’re just a body whizzing through the atmosphere and nothing more. This is where I always want to be, in the middle between the Icarian turbulence up above and the land-dwelling turbulence down below. The sweet spot with a bird’s-eye view.

Bird’s-eye views will lift you above the roads and roofs and baseball fields and the small bright cars moving along their appointed lines, but not so high that the world is an abstraction you don’t care all that much about. It’s a middle distance, at the perfect height where things just begin to show their meaningful texture and patterns; where you have the illusion of sufficient understanding, but enough distance to avoid the vulgar business of getting too close and burning your fingers.

It's a great life skill but also one helluva cinematic trick. And it's here that I want to write about Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1967 adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Bondarchuk gives us what I consider one of the greatest films of ALL TIME and he made use of the bird’s-eye camera view to great effect.

The Soviet government authorized the use of thousands of Red Army soldiers for Bondarchuk’s famous recreation of the Battle of Borodino1. In this scene, the camera pans over the dead and wounded as a cannon ball firing across the battlefield. Do we know whether these are Russian or French soldiers? Not really. All we see are bodies and smoke billowing about; war, a great equalizer of men.

What Bondarchuk gives us here is the beautiful cruelty of scale. He draws us close enough to know Natasha, Pierre Bezukhov, Andrei Bolkonsky, all these complex characters. Andrei Bolkonsky’s chilling monologue the night before the battle is an intimate look at his feelings:

“My country. The fall of Moscow. Tomorrow, I shall be killed. Then why this trial, when tomorrow I shall cease to exist? I won’t exist. So who is this trial for? New conditions of life will begin about which I will know nothing. I will cease to be. I will no longer exist…..I will no longer exist…..”2

And then, he pulls the camera back until the named characters become only part of a wider human wreckage. War happens to men with no dialogue or close-ups. Look there, will you? Do pay attention or the war will get you too.

In another great scene earlier in the film, Natasha Rostova attends her first ball. She is all nerves, suffering a private humiliation of wanting to be chosen.

“Is it possible that no one will come up to me? Is it possible that no one will notice me? […] They must know how I long to dance, how splendidly I can dance, and how they’ll enjoy dancing with me.”3

In a moment of just glorious acting by Ludmila Savelyeva, who played Natasha, we see a yearning there in her eyes, bright and desperate and indecently tearful. Then Prince Bolkonsky walks across the ballroom to ask her for her first dance. Hurray! We see her wisp through the ballroom crowd, light and quick on her feet. And then, just when we are tempted to stay with her in this grand miracle of being chosen, Bondarchuk pulls the camera back. Natasha’s individual feeling becomes part of a wider pattern of people being chosen, and choosing and simply enjoying themselves.

See around minute 10:35 for the bird’s-eye view you saw in the Battle of Borodino scene earlier.

It would be easy to look at these two scenes (the Battle of Borodino and the ballroom scenes) and see the grand division promised by the title: War on one side, Peace on the other. ooooohhh ahhhhhh Here is the battlefield, seen from above, with its dead and maimed soldiers. And there, in opposition, is the ballroom: peeking coquettishly through fans, men and women turning in their finest clothes….no one dying real deaths.

BUT!!!!! But….

Bondarchuk keeps returning to Tolstoy’s great, unsettling proposition: war and peace are not complete opposites. gasp. To see this fully, we have to leave the bird’s-eye view for a moment and look from the ground up. At the Battle of Austerlitz, Bolkonsky is wounded and falls.

For much of the battle, the camera has been constantly in motion: men running, shouting, riding their horses, dying,. Then Andrei is struck down, and for one of the first times, we are no longer looking down. We are flat on the earth, looking up, robbed, even since some nameless soldier has already helped himself to Andrei’s necklace. And then, in my favorite scene of the whole film, Andrei looks up.

“How quiet, peaceful. How majestic. How different from all the running, shouting and fighting. How is it that I have never noticed that glorious sky before? How happy I am that I have seen it at last! Yes, all is vanity. All is false except for that endless sky. Nothing exists but the sky.”4

Then a cut to complete darkness.

“And even the sky does not exist. There is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God for that.”

Then a cut to Napoleon looking down at Bolkonsky who says

“A glorious death.”5

After all the running, shouting, and fighting (this, where glory and rank and Napoleon do matter) Andrei looks up and finds peace in the one place it should not exist: the battlefield. War contains peace when the self is stripped of illusion and there is no need to think about rank and glory. As Part I ends and the camera pulls back over the battlefield, Andrei’s private revelation becomes part of Tolstoy’s larger pattern: human beings swallowed whole by these artificial systems, briefly illuminated by Bondarchuk’s bird’s-eye view.

God forbid that we romanticize the past now and then. Of all the indulgences, it is surely among the more respectable; and if it leads one, not merely into idle fancy, but into the contemplation of Colin Firth rising, wet and solemn, from a pond, or Hugh Grant stammering through a speech: “I had hoped…uh…that is, I had not hoped, exactly, because hope is a very forward thing…but I had imagined that you might perhaps…er….no, never mind…er wait, not exactly…”1 and on and on until he floats away, then I do not know that it can be thought the very worst use of a leisure (or rather unleisurely, multi-tasking) hour. There is a sweetness in such delusions, and even a kind of recklessness that doesn’t hurt too many people, provided one does not carry them too far; though I confess that when Jeremy Northam, as Mr. Knightley, looks at Emma Woodhouse and says, with that grave softness which makes severity even more severe, “Badly done, Emma,” and then repeats it, more gently and therefore with greater force, “badly done,” I am never quite mistress enough of myself to maintain any scholarly composure2 at all.

Naturally, I would wish to be thought of as a very serious student of history in these moments. I would wish it to be believed that I sit with pen in hand, attentive to the manners, the politics, the grand architecture of feeling, the games of whist3, the excellent vulgarity of money forever circulating beneath the prettiest speeches about “character” and “noble deeds”, and the thousand minute arrangements by which a society at once elegant and merciless preserved itself. But the truth must be told, and the truth is that I have more than once fixed my attention so earnestly upon the romance that the history has gone unattended; or rather, that I have taken the romance for the history, which is a much more dangerous mistake.

Richard Holmes, writing with much greater sobriety than I can hope to command, observed in his work Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket,

“Hollywood is entertainment rather than history, though its tendency to use the past as a vehicle for story telling blurs fact and fiction so that the latter assumes, however unintentionally, the authority of the former.”4

That Hollywood is entertainment rather than history, in its habit of using the past as a vehicle for storytelling allows fiction to borrow, sometimes quite unfairly, the authority of fact, is inconvenient for a lot of us “serious history lovers”. Holmes is right, of course, and yet I cannot find it in me to be entirely severe with the thing, for if cinema has lied to many of us, it has also seduced a number of us into caring enough to learn the truth. The gateway drug to history is not always a footnote, sometimes it’s Colin Firth in a wet shirt or Gwyneth Paltrow with a questionable English accent.

Still, after a while, the first intoxication fades. After the 100th watch, the sacred hand-flex, that tiny convulsion of repression upon which modern womanhood has lavished a frankly reasonable amount of reflection, becomes at last only a hand5. One begins, perhaps reluctantly, to suspect that the pleasure of the period drama is not the whole of the period itself. But, still, there is something that Austen says that speaks profoundly to women of Regency England.

So let us look past the romance, with a little more seriousness6, at Emma Woodhouse. She is among Austen’s least admirable heroines, which is only to say that she is among the most human, holding contradictions that make us all a bit uncomfortable because “I am her, her is me” and we hate looking at a mirror. Up until things started changing in the literary tradition in the 18th-century, there were heroines who secured affection by suffering prettily (the “fallen woman” archetype), and heroines who recommended themselves by spotless goodness (the “virtuous woman” archetype), these were the heroines who were so perfectly constructed for admiration, or it’s complete opposite, that one feels no curiosity about them at all. Emma is not of that sort because she is generous and vain, perceptive and blind, affectionate and careless, very often in the same afternoon, and sometimes, I think, in the same passage. She is a person; and if that sounds obvious and an ordinary thing to say of a protagonist, and something that shouldn’t be spared a second thought, it is only because you are either 1) a wise man, or 2) an unwise man. But even by the time Austen had taken hold of the novel, character complexity in a woman seemed a little more acceptable and natural than just 30 or so years before.

Before Austen, the growing power of the novel in the eighteenth century lay bare what had severely lacked before: multi-dimensional female characters. Samuel Richardson7 entered female feeling with such persistence that inward crisis became, for perhaps the first time, the all-important matter itself; Francis Burney8 allowed her heroines embarrassment, misjudgment, social discomfort, mortification. By Austen’s day, the novel had become capable of holding contradiction without immediately resolving it into lesson or punishment. A woman might be wrong without being wicked, ridiculous without being contemptible, clever without needing to be safe. Emma belongs to that new and changing world where a woman, with natural faults, could still be lovable (at least to Mr. Knightley).

If Emma is the protected daughter of that world, Miss Bates is among its discarded women. Austen introduces her with directness and cruelty: she is “neither young, handsome, rich, nor married.”9 There, in a few words, is the inventory of female consequence in a society that measured women harshly. Miss Bates lives with her mother “in a very small way”; she labors under the “endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible”; she has lost, or never possessed, nearly every form of power her world was prepared to acknowledge in women. She has no beauty to recommend her, no money to support her, no husband to incorporate her into a household of greater security, no future from which better prospects may be expected. She has only her temper, which is good, and her speech, which is endless.

She talks to fill the space that money might otherwise have occupied or to perform gratitude before anyone could suspect resentment. She talks because she cannot command, and must therefore ingratiate; because she cannot impress, and must therefore please; because to be quiet and poor and aging and dependent would be, in such a world, to disappear almost entirely (to float away). Her conversation, her repetitions, her praises, her apologies, her reports of letters, visits, trifles, weather, ribbons, nieces, and boiled apples are what remain of her public self. The tears I have shed for this woman!!

Austen herself understood this fact all too well to sentimentalize it. “Single women,” she wrote to her niece in a private letter, “have a dreadful propensity for being poor.” 10 Poverty, in this case, is not an accident of individual failure; it is the natural shadow cast by a legal and social order that made female security depend upon marriage, inheritance, male provision, or luck.

Which brings me to wit, namely the treatment of female wit here. For wit, in Austen, is seldom condemned for being sharp. Emma’s mocking joke at Miss Bates’ expense is not brutal because it travels “downward,” moving from the socially secure to the insecure, from the admired to the tolerated, from the woman whose every absurdity may be forgiven to the woman whose every absurdity is highlighted because of her station. Emma takes the only instrument Miss Bates possesses, her voice, and makes it ridiculous in public.

That, I think, is the true catastrophe of female wit in Regency England. Women, denied most of the grand and formal mechanisms of power, were left to exercise a thousand lesser ones: influence, invitation, refusal, ridicule, preference, intimacy, tone. They could not commonly legislate, command armies, or dispose of great property in their own right, but they could elevate and diminish one another within the social world, and in a culture where reputation was livelihood, and acceptance a form of sustenance, these injuries were not small. They left no visible wound; which was, perhaps, why people so often pretended they were none at all.

Mr. Knightley, to his credit, does not pretend and aims his rebuke in a memorable diatribe. See the following exchange.

“Oh!” cried Emma, “I know there is not a better creature in the world: but you must allow, that what is good and what is ridiculous are most unfortunately blended in her.”

Then Mr. Knightley, in reply:

“They are blended,” said he, “I acknowledge; and, were she prosperous, I could allow much for the occasional prevalence of the ridiculous over the good. Were she a woman of fortune, I would leave every harmless absurdity to take its chance, I would not quarrel with you for any liberties of manner. Were she your equal in situation—but, Emma, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and, if she live to old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed! You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour, to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her—and before her niece, too—and before others, many of whom (certainly some,) would be entirely guided by your treatment of her.—This is not pleasant to you, Emma—and it is very far from pleasant to me; but I must, I will,—I will tell you truths while I can; satisfied with proving myself your friend by very faithful counsel, and trusting that you will some time or other do me greater justice than you can do now.”

Emma has laughed at a woman whom poverty ought to have protected from ridicule. She has humbled one who had known her from infancy, whose notice had once been an honor, and done so before others who would take their cue from her example. Rank without mercy, wit without tenderness,….these are the true vulgarities for women in Regency England. Austen says we should scoff at this. But is this being a bit…..hypocritical?

One must say something of the men; for it will never do to pretend that wit, hardness, judgment, authority, and the right to pronounce upon others descended equally upon both sexes, like rain upon an open field, without preference and without design. Men had long been permitted a species of sharpness that, in women, must always submit to being called a fault. In men, satire might pass for discernment, severity for reason, public speech for consequence, and self-assertion for character. Did these men need to be merciful? To be tender? To fulfill higher obligations if all they were, were consequential? (or in the case of Edward Ferrars, to speak properly without stammering?)

For some answers, we can look at Austen’s treatment of the male characters: Mr. Weston, Frank Churchill, Mr. Knightley, Mr. Elton and their institutional counterparts in history.

Mr. Knightley belongs, very plainly, to the landed gentry and to that species of county authority which did little to obtain a lot. Austen introduces him as “a sensible man about seven or eight-and-thirty,” living only a mile from Highbury, and everything about him is tied, sooner or later, back to Donwell Abbey and it’s associated permanence; while the Woodhouses, being “first in consequence” at Highbury, remind us that this is a world arranged by local rank. Historically, the landed gentry stood below the peerage and above the common run, expected to live as gentlemen, to manage estates, to serve in county offices, to sit as magistrates or deputy lieutenants, to give the whole district, in short, its tone and discipline11. Knightley is the most decent version of paternal, land-based authority: a man formed by possession, steadied by responsibility, and accustomed, whether for good or ill, to having his judgment carry weight (“badly done, Emma! Badly done….” *swoon*)

Mr. Elton, bless him, stands for that peculiarly Regency mixture of church, income, and social ambition, where a clergyman’s respectability is never wholly distinct from his value on the marriage market. Austen gives him a “vicarage,” “some independent property,” and all the air of a “respectable young man,” with a vanity made worse, not better, by being tied up with the idea of God. In English law, an advowson, the right to present a man to a benefice, was treated as property, a secular right over an ecclesiastical office. He represents the beneficed clergyman produced by patronage, decorous on the surface, strategic underneath, with religion in his profession and social advancement very much in his eye because of it12.

Next comes Frank Churchill. He belongs to that institution called “contingent inheritance,” the designated or adopted heir who is formed entirely by favour, and who learns early that pleasing is safer than earning. Austen is unusually clear about him. Frank is “more than being tacitly brought up as his uncle’s heir”; the arrangement is “so avowed” that he takes the name Churchill upon coming of age, and his motions, visits, delays, and freedoms are all constrained by Enscombe and by Mrs. Churchill’s temper. There is a real historical world behind that. Before modern adoption law, childless propertied families often brought in a nephew or other relation to preserve estate and name, but such heirs lived, not always comfortably, by continued approval13. Austen knew the shape of it from her own family in Edward Austen Knight, who was taken in by the Knights and inherited accordingly. Frank, then, is not simply frivolous, he is hollow, taught by circumstance that charm is at his command.

Captain Weston passes through the world by a route that ought, perhaps, to appear more laborious than it does, but Austen will not allow him the vulgarity of seeming to strive. He makes a brilliant marriage, loses his wife, “quitted the militia and engaged in trade,” realizes, in time, “an easy competence,” purchases “a little estate adjoining Highbury,” and establishes himself at Randalls with so much good humor that the whole business threatens to look like a series of fortunate accidents graciously accepted. But the path is not accidental for all that; it belongs very particularly to its age. The militia offers one sort of gentlemanly movement, trade another, and neither carries the old stillness of hereditary consequence; of having gone out into the world and done something in it, which is not always the most elegant origin for a comfortable man, though it is often a very effective one.

Mr. Woodhouse, my favorite, is another matter altogether, and, because he appears so harmless, perhaps the most exact of them all. One is tempted, at first, to dismiss him as merely nervous, merely elderly, merely one of those men sensitive enough to the temperature of the room and the state of the supper tray; but Austen, who is never so simple as she first appears, makes something much more pointed of him. He is the patriarchal household in its softest and therefore, in some ways, most difficult form: fatherly authority reduced in vigour, certainly, thinned out by nerves, habits, apprehensions, and long invalidism, but not in the least stripped of privilege. Emma became “mistress of his house” early, which sounds, for half a moment, like female command, until one remembers that it is still his house, his name, his consequence, his habits, his comforts, and that the Woodhouses remain “first in consequence” all the same. Mr. Woodhouse, though “a valetudinarian all his life, without activity of mind or body,” contrives to make Hartfield move to the measure of his weakness: dinners must be arranged with first preference to his digestion, visits shortened for his ease, evenings softened, marriages dreaded, hems condemned, and all of life brought, as far as possible, within the radius of his comfort. Historically, there is a whole lot to discuss here (how much more time do you have? I am wrapping it up.) The father remained household head in law and custom alike, charged with maintenance and protection, yes, but joined to those duties by real authority; and Mr. Woodhouse, for all his shawls and gruels and little terrors, is not outside that arrangement, but nestled deeply within it. The reluctance everyone feels at giving pain to a gentle invalid commands for him. And so he governs a steady domestic helplessness which makes opposition to his governance look unfeeling and escape look almost ungrateful (is he a microstic character of King George III? we can only speculate and make curious correlations here). It is patriarchy, certainly, but patriarchy that gets its own way regardless of substance, age, or health (again King George III?!!!)14

Austen, in short, is too knowing to make any of her characters just good, or just foolish, vain, or sincere. She gives each of them a little of everything, and then allows the consequences to fall according to wit, candor, or the lack of it regardless of sex, age, or class. But especially to the men who wag their wit about with wild abandon, just because they can.15

Are You Bored?

Oh? What’s that I hear? Are you…bored?

Can I suggest something cutesy? Try reading Descartes while listening to Yeat. Entertain yo’self, overthink things and ruin your day. Embrace your silly inner suburban rage-rap philosopher tendencies. Do these juxtaposed mashups enough and you will start seeing weird connections between two very seemingly unlike things. This is all very fun, until you realize that application of this anywhere else leans toxic and exhausting And!.... not very helpful, at least most of the time. We are all overthinkers to some extent who want to see the patterns and fill in the gaps across many different things. But maybe I am truly psychotic because I started seeing a connection so real to me that I wondered whether the two separate things did indeed cross paths in some alternate universe where time is contracted and where Everything Everywhere (Exists) All At Once. This is where pseudo-intellectualism starts. But I like to see this as an exercise of free-will, delusional caliber….kind of exciting.

I want to try this out, so consider the following connections.

Yeat and Descartes.

If you’ve ever had Novocaine waxed over your gums at the dentist’s office, you will kind of get a sense of what physically numb feels like. It actually starts to get more “painful” the more you fixate on the numbness. But this “pain” is not necessarily what I mean by real pain in the physical sense. Pain’s void is disturbing when one expects it and so maybe it’s more… “discomfort”? Anyway, I can even admit that as the needle is injected into my gum, to avoid the “discomfort,” I like to imagine the physical pain a little to replace what the numbness took away. It’s absurd and it’s these micro-doses of insight that make you hold your breath, roll your eyes back and pass out in the dentist’s chair when there was really no reason to, especially with said Novocaine.

But why do I bring any of this up? Because it’s a little like what I imagine Yeat was thinking when, in his song Breathe (check out his 2024 album 2093), he says “I told you, I lost all feeling” and “Make me so damn mad, make me feel it.” Yeat is trying to say that the void of feeling, the absence as a result of Numbness, is much less preferred to feeling actual feelings, even if they are painful. What I’m trying to say very terribly is: Numbness can become more intolerable than pain because the void itself becomes disturbing. Yeat goes on to describe what Numbness does to a person. For Yeat, Numbness, “the system on overload,” produces greed for more money, poor treatment of others, and grandiosity, while also creating a perceived lack of stress: “Now you know I don’t stress.”

My favorite line is “I don’t breathe cuz’ it’s fun.” Breathe is the chorus line that is repeated throughout. The core reason of breathing is to put air in our flaccid air sacs so that we can all go on surviving, randomly ping-ponging meat machines getting into, and out of, each other’s ways until we run out of steam. This is why I like Yeat, he gets it. There is no fun in the business of survival. Or rather survival != fun because there exists two possible scenarios: Survival → Fun OR Survival x→ Fun( ala’ adrenaline junkie). In mathematics we would say that “Survival is not sufficient for Fun, or Survival and Fun are not logically equivalent.

But I want to go further, I believe that Yeat is suggesting that breathing is proof of continuing on, not joy (although people who do enjoy meditating may have something to say about this. Also…show yourselves you meditation rockstars.). Truly living, and maybe even being decent, requires leaning into feeling instead of treating it like a mistake. It means letting grief hurt, letting guilt accuse, letting love soften you, letting shame show you where you’ve gone wrong, letting tenderness interrupt the whole stupid business of living. When you lose the ability to feel, you lose the part of yourself that can be moved by another person’s pain instead of just stepping over it on your way to the next hit of stimulation. Numbness may keep the machine running, but it cannot make a life worth respecting. Feeling, even when it is ugly, is what keeps a person human.

What’s crazy though is that Yeat seems to say that people who are Numb tend to gravitate toward cruelty to feel something. Why don’t we gravitate to the things that are good? Maybe because goodness is often quieter, slower, and more vulnerable, while cruelty is immediate. Cruelty produces impact. It shocks the deadened system. For a numb person, domination, contempt, greed, and grandiosity may function as crude substitutes for feeling.

The answer may also lie in Descartes….coincidentally. I was listening to Yeat while trying desperately to get through Descartes’ philosophical writings. Descartes is truly the victim in this whole situation. Why should we drag him into all this? Sometimes I think we should just leave people alone.

Anyway, in my interpretation of some his philosophies, Descartes seems to say we are not just a mind riding around in a body “as a sailor is in a ship.” In the Sixth Meditation, he says you are “closely joined” to the body, and that pain, hunger, and thirst are how nature teaches you that something is wrong or needed.

In his Passions of the Soul: the passions are useful because they “strengthen and prolong thoughts that it is good for the soul to have,” and “all the good of this life depends solely on the passions, and so does all the evil.” So, feeling is part of what keeps a person alive and different and maybe even special from everything else.

As Descartes puts it, “my will has a wider scope than my intellect.” In other words, I can want, choose, assert, chase, and judge more than I actually understand clearly. In Breathe, the speaker’s numbness does not actually make him calm, but does result in something like overcompensation. The numb person reaches for money, domination, and contempt because those are easier to reach for than vulnerability. The will keeps grabbing, and the speaker mistakes that overcompensation for power.

……and on and on.

Sources

Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated and edited by Jonathan Bennett, Early Modern Texts, 2017

Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul. Translated and edited by Jonathan Bennett, Early Modern Texts, 2017

Hatfield, Gary. “René Descartes.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Stanford University, 2008, plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/.

Yeat. “Breathe.” 2093, Spotify, 2024, open.spotify.com/track/5NAOhPAZ57eFAXr3qatS6i.

Shapiro, Lisa. “Descartes on the Emotions.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotions-17th18th/LD2Descartes.html.

Master IAM of Zwolle. Memento Mori: a skeleton in a niche. Late 15th century, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Met, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/367226

My natural writing style is something a bit more crude and irreverent than I let on. However, I’m afraid of letting my natural voice surface and most of it is still lacquered over with a glossy, but sticky-middle and crusty-edged veneer. I can’t seem to crack it open and needless to say/write I don’t like the way I write, but the “voice” will take some practice and I need to remember to be patient. I tell myself that if I can write a full sentence deep from within that is undoubtedly me, and only me (as the proud and slightly narcissistic part of me says), I’d die a happier, albeit more vulnerable, person.

So when I see others “find their voice” and I come upon something unique and beautiful from a writer, I get very giddy. Currently taking my time through The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler and I come across truly understated witticisms of bone-chilling substance. I get these heart palpitations reading Butler and maybe this means I need to make a call to my doctor, but I embrace them. I really enjoy reading things that have a bit of dry elegance to them and the following one-liner is hard to beat because it packs in the elegance and sharpness that also gets at the truth of a lot of things at once (keeping up with analogies, I almost had to call 9-1-1 after reading it). Let’s take a look:

“I wonder whether he [Mr. George Pontifax] would feel disposed to cry out before a real Michael Angelo, if the critics had decided that it was not genuine, or before a reputed Michael Angelo which was really by someone else.”1

*heart flutters*, *dials 9-1…..passes out*

What is Butler talking about here? Literally, he is talking about Mr. George Pontifax, the father of the novel’s protagonist: Ernest Pontifax. Like many 19th-century men in respectable English society, Mr. Pontifax’s trips to the “Continent” were a way to build social capital back at home. Places like Italy where he could “admire” and “buy” art was a way to build acceptance and to signal that he is in fact “a worldly man” and not just a simple English clergyman. Not much has changed in modern times, where trips abroad are made and signaled on social media with shameless abandon. But back in the 19th century this was known by many as “the tour” or “the continental tour.”

These tours were, of course, made by the people of society who had the means to do so and came at the end, for many young men, of their “formal education” and before they “got on” with the depressing business of making their way in the world.

So, I get the feeling that Butler is talking more broadly about the Victorian man. And in this one simple (syntactically symmetrical) line he is talking about the tragedy of the spectator.

Take Butler’s scene literally. A man, in a top hat and monocle mind you, walks with a bit of a dandy strut to the Sistine Chapel where he then enters and is told to look up. And so he looks, with a little awe and much to overwhelm him. Kind of like looking at the Heavens. There should be so much beauty that there is also fear. But imagine that despite all these emotions wrought onto the observer, the observer is told that the artist who created this was not the one he was told. Michelangelo did not, in fact, create this masterpiece. Has Pontifax’s original views changed? Would there be, instead of awe, disgust? Butler argues that Mr. Pontifax, being a quintessential man of early Modern England, would indeed look at this in disgust. This is an imposter! And therefore, the art itself, even though nothing about the art has changed, is no longer beautiful or worthy of being viewed. The great beauty of this thought process though is that Butler argues that the art could very well still be that of Michelangelo, the grand master, but because the spectator was told by a rando critic that it was not, the spectator is unable to appreciate the art for what it is without being swayed by the external factors that have nothing to do with the art.

This is an ultimate tragedy because it means that the average spectator is unable to form his/her own opinions without the guidance of an external force that may or may not have all the information, or the right information. Are we following critics blindly? To hit a homerun here, when was the last time you watched a movie and really enjoyed it only to find out that the critics slammed it (I don’t mention books here, because I find that readers get more satisfaction knowing they are the only ones that enjoy that particular book. Why are we like this?). Did this change your perception of this movie? If so, you (like me) have had some form of tragedy in your life of the spectator kind. You might think, well there are worse tragedies out there. But what happens when this same spectator gets out of a chapel or a cathedral and goes home? What’s the social and political impact of a man who cannot discern the “goodness” inherent within a work of art without guidance? How can he distinguish genuine virtue from its performance there and elsewhere? Butler’s answer is that this man will no longer rely on AND exercise his own judgment, but will rely on the few voices that are deemed “important”. And of course these voices have power. More importantly, they had political power.

Let’s talk about artificial intelligence for a hot minute and I promise I will circle it right back round to what is meaningful here.

Believe it or not, back when Butler wrote this book in the 1870s, there were many people in Britain and elsewhere who had some serious gripes about artificial intelligence and the rise of machines. This was the Age of Industrialization after all, why should we be surprised? That being said, the AI here was not LLM-based chatbots or even Anthropic’s vulnerability-ridden systems. The “AI” bogeyman of the late 1800s was THE FACTORY and society’s reliance on machines. The same machines that increasingly churned out manufactured product, making Britain the envy of the pre-WWI world. In his work Erewhon, Butler writes prophetically:

“I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present. No class of beings have in any time past made so rapid a movement forward. Should not that movement be jealously watched, and checked while we can still check it? And is it not necessary for this end to destroy the more advanced of the machines which are in use at present, though it is admitted that they are in themselves harmless?”2

This is in direct rebuttal of Darwinian materialism3. Materialism rose to prominence after Darwin’s theories of evolution were well-known and became a little justification for big things like industrial capitalism, imperialism, and social inequality that was “good” and “right” because it followed a natural order rather than, say, human exploitation. I am pro-science but I just can’t get behind weaponizing science to give shit politics and takes any footing. Needless to say, this logic of “right”-because-it-followed-a-natural-scientific order seeped downward into the masses. The average citizen became more of a “spectator.” They watched and nodded, but all the while they were simply passive, learning to sit in the background while all this terrible stuff was going on.

In this case, the tragedy of the spectator is simply political apathy, that juggernaut4 of a blade. This, a citizenry so spiritually gutted, it watches human cruelty and says that nothing can be done (“nothing for it, I’m afraid”). It looks like Butler may have had these things in mind when he writes these biting one-liners. The spectator is the final product of a sick political order: a person who watches the butchering of the good in this world and mistakes his own paralysis for something more right than it should be just because someone else said so.

I am starting to read The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler and in the first few pages the reader is introduced to the character Mr. Pontifex. In one of the opening scenes Mr. Pontifex is talking to a boy helping him in his workshop

“What? Lost again– smothered o’ wit [...] Now, look here, my lad, some boys are born stupid, and thou art one of them; some achieve stupidity – that’s thee again, Jim – thou wast both born stupid and hast greatly increased thy birthright – and some.”

This was the dialogue that had me sold. This is the type of cheek I yearn for. I knew right then and there that as far as book commitment goes Butler proposed with a shiny diamond ring and I said “Yes!” over and over…and over…again.1

Anyway, I made a “short”2 little TikTok video3 based on some initial impressions about where I see Butler going with this book. Sorry to taint your Substack experience with very bizarre TikTok antics. Know that I put it here so we can both look down from atop our intellectually superior balcony. That being stated, I would like to apologize by way of an in depth analysis of WHY oh WHY I find Butler’s dialogue so aggressively cute (aka charming).

I would like to preface all this to say that the Butler rabbit hole started with a weird side track of Darwinism4 in political thought, then down an even further a-field path Darwin Among the Machines and the Luddites. It’s been a hazy coffee fueled path of pseudo-intellectualism and self-doubt.

Butler’s dialogue does two things at the same (damn time)5. Wounding and performing. It is not merely cruel, and not merely funny. It is cruelty refined and maybe a bit jammed into style. These are the best bits of life.

For example, Butler is not content to say the boy is foolish. Any ordinary tyrant could do that. Instead he stages the insult as a miniature speech, a grotesque little performance in which he can display his own wit while humiliating someone with less power. The joke depends on asymmetry. Jim is there to be spoken at; Mr. Pontifex is there to be heard. And Butler understands that this is how domination often sounds. A polished rat-tatty garb entirely sure of its own rightness.

It’s also a parody of high language. “Some are born…” unmistakably echoes the famous line from Twelfth Night about greatness: “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.” Butler has Mr. Pontifex convert this formula (born OR achieve OR thrust upon = all available options for greatness) into a petty workshop insult. That collapse from elevated literary cadence into mean-spirited mockery is exactly what gives the dialogue its spark. It is funny because Mr. Pontifex is being rhetorically excessive; it is dark because that excess reveals late-Victorian character which is all show and no/negative substance in many instances. He must turn a child’s mistake into an occasion for self-display. A little peacock, a show-boater. But also a cruel man.

Butler knows that verbal brilliance can be morally compromised. In fact, brilliance often makes moral compromise more attractive. Again there is a veneer of polish with the substance underneath that hurts. Mr. Pontifex’s speech has rhythm, escalation, and comic timing. It is built like a joke. First the false impatience: “What? Lost again.” Then the dismissive labeling: “some boys are born stupid.” Then the coup de grâce: “thou wast both born stupid and hast greatly increased thy birthright.” The line swells as it goes, each clause topping the last. Butler lets us enjoy the architecture of the insult even while recognizing its ugliness. That doubleness is what gives the passage its peculiar pleasure. We laugh, and then notice what sort of social world would produce a man who speaks like that to a boy. It’s kind of sad really. I hate (and love) when authors force me to laugh at sad things.

Butler is also introducing a comic eccentric and a wit that is not detachable from the world of the novel; it is diagnostic of it. The Way of All Flesh is interested in the family, in authority, in inheritance, in the ways people are formed and deformed by domestic power. So when Mr. Pontifex jokes about stupidity as a “birthright,” the language lands with more force than he himself quite knows. Birthright in this novel is more than property or status. It is the transmission of habits, humiliations, anxieties, and forms of coercion from one generation to the next.

Mr. Pontifex’s insult is funny because it is so baroque (didn’t I warn you of pseudo-intellectualism?), but it is historically and psychologically revealing because it shows a world in which superiority is performed through language. I feel like this ish isn’t new but dare I say it?: He speaks as a man accustomed to hierarchy, and accustomed as well to dressing hierarchy up with good sense, education, and humor. These are people we don’t like being around.

Butler seems to be especially interesting as a late Victorian writer. The Victorian period was obsessed with improvement: moral improvement, educational improvement, social improvement, spiritual improvement. It generated enormous confidence in discipline, self-culture, and the proper formation of character. But that language of improvement could become punitive very quickly. It could justify endless correction, endless judgment, endless intrusions of authority into the soul. Butler is exquisitely alert to that danger. His satire bites because he recognizes that “formation” and “deformation” can be disturbingly close. A person claiming to refine another human being may in fact simply be enjoying the power to belittle them.

There is also something wonderfully anti-sentimental about the exchange. Butler refuses the pieties that other novelists might offer at the outset (I’m looking at you Dickens thru my -6 nearsightedness): the innocent child, the stern but well-meaning elder, the charmingly rough workshop scene. Instead we get a moment that is comic and slightly vicious, playful and mean. It announces that this novel will not flatter its readers with easy moral categories. Butler trusts us to find pleasure in sharpness. He understands that satire is often more truthful than tenderness, because it catches the tiny humiliations through which power circulates in ordinary life.

What I find most promising, even from these early pages, is that Butler seems less interested in condemning individuals than in exposing the ecosystems that produce them (does this justify or redeem the individual actions? Probably not). Mr. Pontifex is clearly funny; he is also clearly formed by a world of hierarchy, masculinity, labor in which cleverness easily becomes license. Butler does not ask us merely to dislike him. He asks us to see how a person can become socially legible as “witty” at the precise moment he is behaving atrociously. That is a far sharper and more unsettling insight.

Anyway, I apologize again for the TikTok. Did I mention I was sorry?

Transcription below:

There’s a scene in The Count of Monte Cristo where the restored King Louis XVIII is speaking with the Comte de Blacas, one of the very real men in his inner circle. Blacas warns him that something dangerous is brewing in the south of France.

He says, “I have every reason to believe, Sire, that there is a storm brewing from the direction of the South.” And the king replies, with that dry Bourbon confidence, “And I, my dear Duke, think you are very ill-informed, because I know for a fact that, on the contrary, the weather down there is excellent.”

The point, of course, is that they are not talking about weather.

This scene takes place in March 1815, just after Napoleon has escaped Elba and landed at Golfe-Juan in the south of France. He is moving north toward Paris, and the “storm” Blacas is warning about is Napoleon’s return, carried by underground Bonapartist support.

That is what makes the king’s joke so revealing. He is witty, but he is also profoundly wrong. He believes royal support is stronger than it is. He believes France, and especially the army, will remain loyal if Napoleon advances. But that is not what happens. Napoleon enters Paris on March 20, 1815, with little resistance, while the king’s own army abandons him.

After fleeing, Louis XVIII writes to Talleyrand, trying to save face: “As my life is supposed to be necessary to France, it was my duty to provide for my safety, which might have been endangered if I had stayed some hours longer at Lille. Bonaparte has the army on his side; I have the hearts of all the people on mine.”

And that is Dumas’s larger point here: the monarchy still had the language of order, confidence, and legality, but beneath it was a regime misreading reality in real time.

The king thinks he is making a joke about the weather. But the delusions of one man also reveal how little, at bottom, had changed in the French monarchy after the Revolution.

Using Psychoanalytical Frameworks to Pass Irresponsible Judgment on Historical Figures

I sat in a prison holding area with a person who had diagnosed Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). It was a pleasant conversation. He told me that, before his incarceration, he liked planting flowers in his garden. Then I said something pretty inane that triggered a behavior. Luckily, security guards were around or else I would have been pummeled. Just another day at work I suppose. But then the man said something I would never forget (paraphrased to remove expletives and other demeaning expressives) as he was being hauled out of the room: “[redacted] off [redacted]”. So when I return to the historic figure, the myth, the lore that is Napoleon I think fondly of this man. Hope he is doing well.

Why am I feeling nostalgic? Because I’ve been sucked into the history behind The Count of Monte Cristo and thus have no other recourse than to think about Napoleon.1 If you keep poking and prodding through 19th-century history long enough, Napoleon eventually saunters in whether you invite him or not.

Anyway, we cannot retroactively and, with any certainty, apply a behavioral framework to Napoleon. To say, cleanly, that Napoleon “probably had” NPD would be a bit irresponsible. Whether or not Napoleon would have been diagnosed, today, with NPD or not does not absolve him from the analysis that motivated his behavior and the behavior itself. As Dr. Betty Glad at UNC made clear, “To say that a person has a personality disorder, however, does not rule out moral evaluations [...] Even a person as repellent as Hitler can be examined in terms of his psychological pathologies without forfeiting a firm condemnation of his actions and their consequences.”2

What I am doing more modestly (and in my very humble opinion) is use a psychological framework as an interpretive lens, and make clear that this is inference and pattern recognition rather than a diagnosis (which I feel like is too doing way too much for a person who died over 200 years ago).

Glad’s famous essay on “the paradoxical behavior of the tyrant” (her phrase) is useful precisely because it doesn’t require us to play armchair psychiatrist with a bicorne3 hat; it asks us to look at a tyrannical leader’s grandiosity, how image-defense plays out in policy and how any and all criticism becomes dangerous for the critic. Glad also makes that essential point: psychological analysis is not a pardon. Even if pathology is relevant, responsibility remains, and consequences remain.

Glad starts off with a Shakespeare quote from Julius Casesar to characterize this type of “paradoxical behavior of the tyrant”:

“But ‘tis a common proof,

That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,

Whereto the climber-upward turns his face:

But when he once attains the upmost round,

He then unto the ladder turns his back,

Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees,

By which he did ascend.”

-William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act II, Sc. i, 11. 21-27

Without getting into a deep, meaningless psychoanalysis of Napoleon4, we can see that Napoleon reads as a tyrant with some psychological traits of a person with NPD because he repeatedly used state power to stabilize a grand self-image, suppress destabilizing feedback, and keep politics organized around a single person. But more importantly, the traits that then eventually lead to his downfall at the apex of his success.

General Kléber’s Damning Letter That Was His One-Way Ticket to a Fortress Prison

So it’s all a bit humorous when I come upon a letter written by a certain General Kléber addressed to the Executive Directory regarding his thoughts about Napoleon and, in turn, Napoleon’s response. General Kléber is responsible for leading the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. And under his leadership he excels on pushing forward France’s agenda in Northern Africa, but with some irreverent words about Napoleon’s leadership. Note that Kléber was not a dilettante. He was competent, celebrated, and apparently insufficiently interested in worshipping at Napoleon’s altar. He’s useful, visible and unimpressed which ticks off NPD-leaning tyrants. Kléber writes:

“On the want of money, I must make a few observations. General Bonaparte exhausted all extraordinary resources during the first few months of our arrival. He then levied as many war contributions as the country could supply. To have recourse to those means now, when the country is surrounded by enemies, would be to prepare an insurrection on the first favourable opportunity. However, Bonaparte has not left a sou in the army chest, nor any object equivalent. He has, on the contrary, left an arrear of nearly twelve millions, which is more than a year’s revenue in present circumstances. The mere arrears of pay for the army amount to four millions.”5

Napoleon for all of his supposed “malignant narcissism” replied with a fairly innocuous and even pleasant response.

“[...] France acknowledges all the influence of your conquests on the restoration of her trade and the civilization of the world. The eyes of all Europe are upon you, and in thought I am often with you. In whatever situation the chances of war may place you, prove yourselves still the soldiers of Rivoli and Aboukir:—you will be invincible. Place in Kléber the boundless confidence which you reposed in me. He deserves it. Soldiers, think of the day when you will return victorious to the sacred territory of France. That will be a glorious day for the whole nation.”6

The person7 compiling these letters was appreciatively shocked by Napoleon’s innocuous reply and praised him wholeheartedly stating,

“Nothing can more forcibly shew the character of Bonaparte, than the above allusion to Kléber, after he had seen the way in which Kléber spoke of him to the Directory. Could it ever have been imagined that the correspondence of the army, to whom he addressed this proclamation, teemed with accusations against him?”8

Of course, as General Kléber continued to openly demean Napoleon he got more and more annoying. And when it became apparent that British (and allied) forces captured vessels carrying letters, some official, many private from General Kléber to Napoleon and his government officials, things got super embarrassing for Napoleon. The British of all people to know that his most competent general was questioning his leadership put Napoleon in a very precarious position. The correspondence was examined for intelligence value, and parts were published. It’s hard to look magnanimous when your mail is being scrutinized by your enemy.

Some of these intercepted-letter collections survive in digitized form (including editions explicitly marketed as letters “intercepted” under Nelson’s command).9

Getting Buried in the Chateau d’If Was Probably Done to Soothe Napoleon’s NPD-Tendencies

So when General Kléber was assassinated in Cairo in 1800, Napoleon wanted to prevent republican pilgrimage to a burial site of a man he deplored and who had lived to undermine him. In, NPD-like fashion, Napoleon had Kleber’s body interred in a lead coffin in the dungeons of the Chateau d’If.10 It’s an indication that Napoleon privately stated something like “[redacted] off [redacted]” to General Kléber as his body was heltered-skeltered away to be forgotten.

This is the same Chateau d’If that Alexandre Dumas immortalized in The Count of Monte Cristo. It’s the fortress prison off the coast of Marseilles that Dumas put his political prisoner Edmond Dantes in. So why this prison? We have to look back at General Kléber. It turns out that Dumas’ own father, Thomas Dumas, was a good friend of Kléber. “Later, in Egypt, Kléber became his intimate friend.”11

It’s also a signal that Alexandre Dumas possibly wrote his character Edmond as the revenge story that General Kléber was never afforded?

What to Look Forward To (And Shameful Funneling of Innocent Passerbys Into My Creative Endeavors)

I look forward to exploring Kléber in more detail in the next episode of my podcast where I discuss interesting history behind The Count of Monte Cristo. See my current episode:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/58uxEKb7ETklQNKkQSVivU?si=3lX8RTZtTzeYpa-rui53Rg

Also, I started a TikTok. If you’ve made it this far down the article (which roughly 3% of viewers do!), I am going to have a bit of a vulnerable moment and admit I am not proud of the fact that I feel that I need TikTok as a distribution channel to funnel in listeners and viewers. I swear it’s for innocent and intellectually curious purposes. I just want to talk to other people interested in this stuff.12

Here is the type of hand-wavey videos you will be getting from me.

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This is a companion piece to my third episode of A History Geek’s Reading Companion where I discuss some historical threads behind Crime and Punishment. For the full episode:

Fyodor Dostoevsky is twenty-seven when the state finally steps through his doorway on April 23, 1849, and it does so with the graceless clatter of a sabre catching on the jamb. The entrance is surprisingly “pleasant” and awkward (surprising given the context).

“A sabre rattled, having gotten caught on something. What on earth was going on? I struggle to open my eyes and hear a soft, pleasant voice say: ‘Get up!’

I look around: there is a precinct or district superintendent of police, with gorgeous sideburns. But he was not the one speaking; the one speaking was a gentleman dressed in light blue with lieutenant-colonel’s epaulettes.

‘What is the matter?’, I asked, getting up from bed.

‘By imperial order…’

I look around; indeed it was ‘by the imperial order.’ In the doorway stood a soldier in light blue. He was the owner of the sabre that had rattled… ‘Aha! So that’s what’s going on!’ I thought.

‘Allow me…’ I started to say…

‘It doesn’t matter! Get dressed…We’ll wait,’ added the lieutenant colonel in a still more pleasant voice.

While I was getting dressed, they demanded all my books and started rummaging around;....”

—Dostoevsky, 18601

The scene looks almost farcical on the page. That is part of its horror. The “gorgeous sideburns,” the almost tender “we’ll wait,” the sabre stuck on the doorframe, all sit on top of surveillance state that Tsar Nicholas I has spent two decades tightening. Behind the polite voice stands the Third Section,2 the political police who read private letters for a living and file reports on the conversation at literary evenings.

Until that morning, the danger has lived at the level of talk in a cramped St. Petersburg apartment where young men of the litterateur sit up late to discuss reform, namely judicial reform. Ideas arrive from Paris and Berlin like contraband perfumes: Fourier, Saint-Simon, German “nihilists” who will have a second life as Russian nihilists after Turgenev’s seminal work Father and Sons. Mikhail Petrashevsky presides here, a minor civil servant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who reads French utopian socialists and believes that the right sequence of legal reform, education, and adoption of enlightenment ideals can push Russia toward something more just. He hosts these discussions around “new Western ideas”, and that alone is enough to read as subversive under Tsar Nicholas I, who treats discussion of ideas as a matter of serious treason.

The state has already planted a secret agent into the Petrashevsky salon3. This is standard practice by the late 1840s. After the revolutions of 1848 in France, the Habsburg lands, and parts of the German states, the Third Section treats any talk of “people” and “rights” as a potential prelude to barricades. In that climate, a Friday-night reading circle becomes pretty dangerous. The evenings of speculative chatter are rebaptized as the Petrashevsky case, and Dostoevsky, who has been more on and off participant than chief conspirator, finds himself answering questions in formal testimony.

The transcript preserves a volatile exchange:

Q: In refuting Golovinsky’s4 remarks, Petrashevsky said that when the peasants are emancipated a clash between classes is bound to occur, which, being disastrous in and of itself, might be even more disastrous since it would give rise to military despotism or, what is even worse, to spiritual despotism. Comment on what was meant by military despotism and spiritual despotism.

A: I remember that Petrashevsky refuted Golovinsky. I cannot clearly recall Golovinsky’s response, although I do remember that he went into a rather involved explanation. Perhaps I was being distracted by some other conversation at the time. Not recalling the essence of what was said, I cannot give a clear answer to this question and am therefore compelled to leave it unanswered.

As for Petrashevsky, I recall that he spoke of the necessity of reforms: judiciary reform and reform of the censorship before peasant reform and he even calculated the advantage the serf segment of the peasants has over the free segment under our present judicial system. But I have no clear recollection of what the phrases “military and spiritual despotism” signified. Besides, Petrashevsky sometimes spoke obscure and incoherently, such that one had difficulty comprehending him.5

Dostoevsky’s answers are a performance of amnesia that has clearly been rehearsed in his own head. He remembers just enough: that Petrashevsky “refuted” Golovinsky, that Golovinsky spoke at length, that the room broke into side conversations and “became rather involved.” He does not remember the content of the refutation, the concrete examples, the tone, the way the argument unfolded. Over and over he retreats into “I cannot clearly recall.” Petrashevsky, he adds, had a habit of speaking “obscure and incoherent,” difficult to follow even at the time.

Those evenings will later acquire a name, the Petrashevsky Circle, and a fixed place in the police archive. At the time they are simply “Fridays at Petrashevsky’s,” a salon where a minor ministry official reads Fourier6 and Saint-Simon, quotes French socialists, and tries to square Western utopian schemes with Russian serfdom. The circle argues over peasant emancipation, trial by jury, censorship, and the latest imported doctrines. Their talk moves in the same orbit as the French and German debates of 18487, but with a distinctly Russian problem in front of them: a peasantry bound by law to estates, a bureaucracy fused with autocracy, and a state that is both church and gendarme.

It matters, historically, to keep the scale of this “conspiracy” in proportion. Even the official investigation, which has every incentive to exaggerate, eventually concedes that Petrashevsky’s gatherings do not constitute a disciplined revolutionary underground. They look more like a talkative reading group with dangerous sympathies. Smaller knots of men, Speshnev’s8 circle in particular, meet on the margins to imagine something more violent, but the only act that can be securely pinned on Dostoevsky himself is the public reading of Vissarion Belinsky’s letter to Gogol, a letter so violently anti-orthodox and anti-autocratic that it has scorched its way through Russian literary history9. It attacks the alliance of throne and altar with such open contempt that even later liberals treat it as recklessly indiscreet rather than strategically useful.

The interrogation about “military despotism” and “spiritual despotism” sits at the junction between talk and treason. On the page it looks like an academic distinction. In the room it is a live explosive. Petrashevsky has apparently argued that emancipation, if mishandled, could collapse into one of two tyrannies. In a military despotism, the peasantry would pass from landowners to barracks, from landlord’s whip to officer’s command. In a spiritual despotism, power would pass to those who claim the right to manage beliefs and consciences, a tyranny of pulpits and confessionals that polices inner life with more zeal than the army polices streets.

This vocabulary is not invented in that little Petersburg apartment. It belongs to the broader post-1848 conversation, where European observers wonder whether revolutions inevitably call forth Bonapartes or inquisitors. In France the sequence from 1789 to Napoleon has already taught one lesson about the drift from liberty to military dictatorship. In Catholic and Orthodox contexts another fear takes shape, that spiritual authority, when fused with state power, becomes a subtler kind of chain. Petrashevsky’s remark about “military and spiritual despotism” and the subsequent line of question in Dostoevsky’s testimony borrows from that continental anxiety and applies it to Russian conditions.

Dostoevsky’s response is a masterpiece of selective fog, let’s revisit it again for emphasis:

“I remember that Petrashevsky refuted Golovinsky. I cannot clearly recall Golovinsky’s response… Not recalling the essence of what was said, I cannot give a clear answer… I have no clear recollection of what the phrases ‘military and spiritual despotism’ signified… Petrashevsky sometimes spoke obscure and incoherently…”

From the future author of Crime and Punishment, who will later track the smallest movements of guilt in Raskolnikov’s mind, this sudden, total vagueness is suspect. Biographers and historians generally agree that Dostoevsky is not the chief theorist of the circle. He enters as a young writer hungry for ideas rather than as an organizer. Yet it is difficult to credit the idea that he cannot remember the substance of a conversation about class conflict and dictatorships a few years later.

The more plausible reading, and the one that fits the institutional context, is that this is deliberate. It is not an incapacity; it is a survival technique practiced under the Third Section. Nicholas I’s political police have spent the 1840s squeezing universities, journals, and literary salons. Their reports explicitly treat circles like Petrashevsky’s as potential seeds of a Russian 1848. In such a climate, detailed memory becomes dangerous property. To reproduce a conversation too accurately is to place a carefully drawn map of your own vulnerability in the hands of men who specialize in destroying lives under a judicial system that requires reform.

At this point Dostoevsky the defendant begins to shade into Dostoevsky the later anatomist of “conscience under ideology.” Joseph Frank and others have argued that his mature fiction obsesses over what happens when an abstract idea seizes the center of a person’s identity and begins to dictate action10. The Petrashevsky interrogation is an early, archival instance of the same problem. Once a man has given part of himself to a forbidden circle, how does he speak, to whom does he remain loyal, and what does he owe his own past speech when the state demands a full account?

The remark that will function as a nail in Petrashevsky’s coffin surfaces almost casually in the record from Dostoevsky himself:

“…in the course of changing the judicial system all other faults would also come to light and that an insurrection must not be undertaken without certainty of complete success…”11

Within the internal logic of those late-night discussions, this sounds like the grave sentence of a man who was not very careful with his words. They are talking about reform of courts and censorship. Someone says that if you start altering the judicial system, the rest of the rot will reveal itself, and that, should anyone ever rise up, they must do it with overwhelming strength. It is the voice of would-be prudent radicalism. It already carries in its pocket the fantasy of a “dictatorship for the sake of reform,” the famous temptation that European thinkers flirt with in the nineteenth century when they grow tired of parliaments and procedures.

Once removed from that overheated apartment and fixed in a report, the sentence hardens into something else. It becomes evidence of intention, a clean quotation that allows the Third Section to describe a reading circle as a nest of planners. Later historians have pointed out that the state’s case leans heavily on this kind of alchemy, the conversion of conditional, speculative speech into proof of conspiracy, precisely because the circle has limited practical capacity. The archive therefore remembers them as more dangerous than they probably were in logistical terms. Their danger lies in what they are willing to imagine aloud.

Elsewhere in his testimony, Dostoevsky lets the mask slip just enough to record that Petrashevsky had spoken about the necessity of a “dictatorship” to force through real judicial and censorship reform. The circle has treated emancipation as more than a noble deed. There were practical logistics and implications that made its way through the circle. They have discussed payment schedules (aka “reimbursement”)12, formulas for compensating landowners, and the specific obligations peasants might owe in the new order. They are trying to choreograph both the demolition and reconstruction of the legal scaffolding that holds the empire together. Like many clever men in overheated rooms13, they have persuaded themselves that a dictatorship would be the next logical step (a necessary evil).

The verdict that follows is written in the empire’s favorite register, the cruelly impersonal legal language in which annihilation arrives in impeccable clauses:

“The retired lieutenant Dostoevsky, for the same participation in criminal conspiracy, for the dissemination of the letter of the literrateur Belinsky, which was filled with impudent remarks made against the Orthodox Church and Supreme Ruler, and for the attempt, made along with others, to disseminate works opposing government by means of a private lithography, should be deprived of all rights concomitant to his social estate and exiled to a hard-labor prison camp for eight years.

Nicholas I’s instructions: ‘For four years and then made a private.’”14

Placed beside the later mock execution at Semenovsky Parade Ground, this verdict reveals the pattern of Nicholas’s rule. The route for the convoy out of the fortress, across the Neva, along the embankment and Liteiny Prospect, down Vladimirsky to the square, is specified with ceremonial care in the orders. This has little to do with logistics and everything to do with public display. The condemned are turned into a moving poster. They pass through the city as a warning: this is what happens to men who treat emancipation and censorship as problems that can be solved in subversive conversation against the state and the SUPREME RULER15.

Nicholas I wants an example rather than an efficient disposal of prisoners. So he orders a spectacle. The procession, the square, the firing squad, all serve a larger pedagogy. The punishment is engineered not only for the condemned but for the onlookers and the wider reading public who will hear about it later.

The staging at the parade ground has the cruelty of a meticulously rehearsed ritual. The men are lined up. Sentences are read. Insignia of rank are broken. Identities are stripped away layer after layer until there is only the bare, punishable body. The firing squad lifts rifles. Orders are given. Time stretches. The men are forced to live through their own deaths in imagination and in bodily panic before the Tsar’s pardon arrives and converts execution into “mere” exile and hard labour.

From a modern human rights perspective, this is carefully calibrated psychological torture. From within the logic of Nicholas’s reign, it functions as a sacrament of autocracy. The Tsar displays his power not only to kill but to restore, to annul a sentence at the last possible moment and thereby dramatize his sovereignty over bodies and futures. The violence lies as much in the temporary gift of life as in the threat of death.

When Dostoevsky later turns to fiction after Siberia, it is not surprising that his central question becomes what a human being can endure without collapsing, and what happens when suffering and more importantly endurance takes the form of moral deformity rather than sainthood. Notes from a Dead House, half memoir and half ethnography of the Siberian katorga, already shows this. Contemporary critics recognized that the scenes of filth, the hierarchy among convicts, the ruthless small economies of favors and coins, were drawn from Omsk with obsessive precision. Later readers have seen in it one of the first extended attempts to think about the carceral world from the inside, long before the vocabulary of “discipline” and “biopolitics” existed.

At the same time, religious interpreters have sometimes tried to read Omsk as a straightforward conversion narrative: the prison beats European ideology out of Dostoevsky and leaves behind a pure Orthodox believer. The text resists such simplification. Cruelty and grace sit side by side. No institution, neither state nor church, holds a monopoly on either. The Stalin-era tendency to celebrate Dostoevsky’s early radicalism and distrust his later religious conservatism, and the opposite tendency in some religious circles to treat Siberia as a clean break with his earlier self, are both trying to straighten a line he keeps crooked.

You can watch the residue of all this seep into Crime and Punishment if you read the novel with the Petrashevsky in context. The conversations in Petrashevsky’s apartment about emancipation as a technical puzzle, about temporary dictatorship as a means to reform, reappear in mutated form in Raskolnikov’s theory of the “extraordinary man.” That theory is a grotesque miniature of the enlightened dictator fantasy. It assumes that some individuals may step over conventional morality for the sake of a future that only they can see. Belinsky’s volcanic moralism and the circle’s flirtations with Western utopias echo there, twisted inward into a private experiment in sovereignty carried out in a rented room.

Historians have increasingly read Crime and Punishment as a novel that stages a collision between the intoxicated ideas of the 1840s and the brutal, post-emancipation reality of the 1860s. Raskolnikov’s St. Petersburg is not a space of barricades and manifestos. It is a suffocating city of tenements, pawnshops, and overheated rooms where the abolition of serfdom and the introduction of new courts have not produced justice, only new forms of anxiety and exploitation. The state still quietly reserves for itself the same “right of exception” that Raskolnikov claims in miniature. It suspends ordinary moral rules in the name of order, engineers spectacles of punishment, and expects subjects to metabolize the trauma as part of loyal citizenship.

This is why the Siberian ending of Crime and Punishment does not sit comfortably as a simple moral appendix or a tidy Christian happy ending, despite later pious readings that want it to (reminder that Dostoevsky originally wrote the C&P as an “Orthodox novel”). The road to exile closes a circuit that begins on Semenovsky Square. Raskolnikov walks, in fictional form, the road Dostoevsky has already taken. The penal colony serves as both punishment and laboratory. The darkness of the novel lies less in the axe and more in the insistence that abstract ideas, legal structures, and intimate conscience share one bloodstream. After watching Nicholas I’s regime turn talk into treason and mercy into psychological vivisection, Dostoevsky constructs a narrative in which neither the state, nor the circle, nor the solitary student can act in the name of “higher” ideals without leaving a body on the floor and a mind permanently altered by what it has done.

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I post the companion essays, sources, and extra rabbit holes on my Substack, History Geek’s Reading Companion: https://substack.com/@theguildedquill

Stay tuned for next episode on the history behind The Count of Monte Cristo.

(Illustration for Pride and Prejudice (1907))

1

Mr. Bennet of the Landed Gentry

Mr. Bennet is very often treated as a secondary character in Pride & Prejudice, but he is one of my faves in the novel. He is a gentleman of peak Regency. The Regency Era stretches from the late 1790s into the 1810s, and is defined by the Napoleonic wars, inflation, and growing constitutional power for Parliament.

Mr. Bennet is also, on the surface, a minor character: the father who delivers immaculate, hard-hitting one-liners, retreats into his library, and lets his household go about its chaotic business of marriage-making and fulfilling of “prospects” without too much interference.

Exactly what was he doing in that study?

The women in the Bennet household cross-stitch through the terrifying seriousness of their own futures, at a time when women’s security was still largely yoked to marriage prospects. Mr. Bennet enjoys the privilege of being one layer removed from this. He is, in many respects, a counterweight to Mrs. Bennet, though silly, desperate, and often mortifying, faces the material realities of her world. She knows what is at stake: daughters without fortunes, the entail hanging like a blade (in the form Mr. Collins) over Longbourn.

Austen gives Mr. Bennet some of the sharpest lines in the book. They are capricious, cutting, and cruel (with some slight exceptions to Miss Lizzy Bennett):

“What do we live for, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”

“If my children are silly, I must hope to be always sensible of it.”

“I will not spend my hours in running after my neighbours every time they go away and come back again.”

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends…”2

Mr. Bennet, sarcastic and “no-nonsense,” can read as insensitive to the reality the women in the novel face. He teases then withdraws as if he were in a game. He is not unkind, exactly, but he often behaves as though the most urgent problems in the house are merely irritating. The blunt truth is that he lives in an altogether different sphere. He can afford to “retire to his study” because his survival and bodily safety, his legal standing, his right to property, his authority are all firmly in his control. Of course, Mr. Bennet has his own realities to manage: the sordid business of running an estate in a country that started to pressure on his class.

So what did Jane Austen actually tell us about his day? Here is what we know: 1) he avoids social obligation whenever he can and 2) he retreats often to his library.

It’s not entirely clear what he did once the door closed. But Austen gives us clues, enough to make a historically grounded guess. We know he is a landed gentleman with an income that places him firmly in the gentry:

“Mr. Bennet’s property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two thousand a year…”

The landed gentry class consisted of men who owned land, lived off its rents, and did not work (in any sense recognizable to a tradesman) for wages. They were not peers of the realm, but they were legally, socially, and politically dominant within their local worlds. Their authority did not come from office or profession so much as from possession: of land, of literacy, and of time.

A gentleman’s study was a room for reading, and it was also a boundary. It separated noise from “seriousness,” the women’s visible crisis from the man’s supposedly rational concern. The fact that Mr. Bennet’s labor is invisible does not mean it is nonexistent, or even superior. Inside that room would have been papers: estate accounts, rent rolls, correspondence, legal documents relating to the entail. The entail itself, so catastrophic for Mrs. Bennet and her daughters, still would have been an ever-present but largely theoretical concern to him. It threatened future displacement, not present authority. That difference alone explains much of his emotional distance. These were all concerns after he would have been long gone and six feet underground.

But beyond Longbourn’s walls, Britain in the Regency period was not stable nor calm. There was a war economy, rising bread prices, taxation, and corn laws to name a few that would have impacted how Mr. Bennet handled his estate.

A Gentleman in a War Economy

From the late 1790s through the end of Pride & Prejudice’s implied timeline, Britain was a nation at war almost continuously with Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France. This isn’t just background noise and would have been on Mr. Bennet’s mind, despite having no sons to send off to fight.

War reshaped everything Mr. Bennet would have read in his newspapers and encountered in his accounts. It demanded money on an unprecedented scale. For much of the 18th century, wars had been financed by a mix of customs and excise duties plus enormous government borrowing. By the 1790s, that formula was maxed out. Servicing the national debt had become a preoccupation under King George III’s reign.

So the British government did something actually quite radical: it reached directly into private incomes.

William Pitt the Younger’s income tax, introduced in 1799, for the first time treated income, rather than land alone, as taxable, measurable, and subject to scrutiny. Incomes over £60 per year were liable; over £200, they could be taxed at a flat 10%. Mr. Bennet’s “two thousand a year” puts him squarely in the crosshairs of this 10%.

For a landed gentleman, this meant more than a slightly larger bill. It meant that “two thousand a year,” which had always functioned as a pleasantly vague social fact, now had to exist as a precise, documented number in someone’s schedule. This was before Turbo Tax could do everything for you. Mr. Bennet was most likely drowning in the paperwork this required of him throughout the year.

Mr. Bennet, sardonic and politically aware, would almost certainly have followed parliamentary debates and the newspaper summaries of them. He would have read about taxation, borrowing, and the ballooning national debt. He may even have agreed with the argument: beat Napoleon now, complain about the tax later. But agreement does not eliminate irritation and duty.

Mr. Bennet would have been required to submit annual returns with full disclosures of income from land rents, investments, and personal earnings (if any). Failure to do so could result in investigation by the Board of Taxes, a body which became significantly more active during the Napoleonic period.

One contemporary critic of the income tax insisted that it was “unnecessary, unconstitutional and inquisitorial,” reflecting anxieties among landowners that their private accounts were suddenly subject to public scrutiny.3

It is entirely likely that Mr. Bennet’s muttered references to “the accounts” were not only evasions of conversation, but an actual reflection of his administrative burden.

Even more than the tax itself, it was the principle of surveillance that grated. As historian Boyd Hilton writes, “income had ceased to be a marker of class and become a metric for policy.” Landowners could no longer lounge behind a veil of genteel vagueness. Tenancy agreements, agricultural yields, poor-rate leviea all had to be weighed and recorded. It truly tested the idea of gentlemanly indifference.

Rising Bread Prices & Inflation

Money itself was unstable in this period. In 1797, Britain suspended gold convertibility at the Bank of England, effectively creating a paper-money economy that sparked endless debate over inflation and depreciation. Parliamentary committees sat to examine the “high price of gold” and whether paper banknotes were to blame.

For ordinary people, the argument showed up first in the price of bread.

High grain prices meant pressure on the poor rates, local taxes levied to support the destitute under the old Poor Law system (this is before the 1834 New Poor Law4). Bread that was “dear” did not just make life hard in the cottages; it made life complicated in the vestry. Landowners and substantial householders had to decide how much relief to grant and how high to set the rates that funded it.

Mr. Bennet would have been acutely aware of this tension, especially for his tenants, even if he refused to dramatize it. His income of two thousand a year was comfortable, but not infinite. Tenant arrears, bad harvests, or increased parish obligations could not be ignored forever. The study, again, is where such problems are faced privately: in cramped columns of a rent-book, in discreet letters from a steward, in notes about a field that has not yielded what it ought.

By 1810, the financial situation had worsened. Gold was still unavailable, the national debt had climbed above £600 million (nearly double its pre-war level), and public confidence was beginning to waver. Even The Edinburgh Review, a bastion of Whig moderation, printed dire warnings about inflation and the collapse of credit.

The Corn Laws, first introduced in 1815, were anticipated by at least a decade in gentry conversation. They promised to prop up British grain prices by imposing tariffs on foreign imports. In theory, this would benefit landowners but in practice it pushed bread prices higher still. Mr. Bennet, with his ironic temperament and moderate estate, might have been mostly unconvinced of the usefulness of these laws. But better to read about the law than debate it over port with Sir William Lucas as Mr. Bennet’s often hid behind his humor. His wit often feels defensive, even evasive. It keeps emotional claims at bay. It reduces urgency to farce. In a world where economic pressure is real but rarely spoken aloud in polite company, irony becomes a coping mechanism.

Below is a fictionalized account of Mr. Bennet’s day with the hope of keeping as much as possible to Jane Austen’s prose.

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A Day in the Life of Mr. Bennet

It is a truth universally under-acknowledged that a gentleman of modest fortune must nevertheless engage, from time to time, in the unseemly business of record-keeping.

Mr. Bennet, having escaped an early ambush of nerves in the breakfast parlour, retired to his study just as the youngest Miss Bennet began her account, amidst a fit of coughing and giggles, of a scarlet-coated lieutenant’s new boots. That subject being neither spiritual nor useful, and therefore beneath consideration, Mr. Bennet excused himself with a mumbled reference to “the accounts,” which had the dual benefit of sounding responsible and preventing anyone from following him.

Once inside, he settled into his chair, arranged his quill and spectacles, and stared very intently at his ledgers, which had been waiting, with stubborn indifference, since last Thursday.

The first item of note was a letter from Mr. Hodge, the steward.

Honoured Sir,
I take up my pen with the utmost respect to lay before you a few particulars concerning the estate, which I hope may be found not wholly unworthy of your attention.
In the matter of Widow Sharp, I am obliged to report that she remains behind in her rent by two quarters. She attributes her arrears to a prolonged indisposition in the winter season, together with the loss of a small sow, which, being ill-disposed and of little profit, has left her household in diminished circumstance. She expresses her humble intention to make what payment she can after Easter, should the Lord bless her son’s harvest.
With regard to the Lower Barn, the north beam has taken to sagging most disconsolately and is likely to give way entirely, should the current weather persist. I beg to submit that a partial repair might suffice until the summer, when fuller work could be undertaken with less inconvenience.
The new tenant at Acre’s End has, without prior application, planted a hedge of dog-roses along the western boundary of his holding. While the act itself is not in contradiction of his lease, the manner of it being done without notice and with some vanity may be thought irregular.
I await your instruction, and remain your most humble and obedient servant,
Thomas Hodge

Mr. Bennet read the letter through twice, then wrote off to the side the following with faint irritation: a prolonged indisposition, disconsolately, and VANITY. He composed a reply in fewer words, instructing Hodge to forgive Widow Sharp’s arrears until harvest, reinforce the beam as little as possible, and leave the roses to flourish with little bother.

Once this effort had been committed to paper, sealed, and set aside, he rewarded himself by opening The Morning Chronicle, which confirmed that Parliament had argued vigorously for three days and accomplished very little beyond proposing a new tax on windows. He skimmed the report on the national debt, still climbing excessively, and paused only when he reached the letters section, where a gentleman signing himself Agricola had written at length on the decline of rural morals and the price of wheat.

“I suppose one may be vulgar now at five shillings a bushel,” he murmured, folding the page.

There was, further down the column, a small notice on the progress of the Corn Bill. Mr. Bennet read that it had passed its second reading, which meant it would almost certainly become law and that bread, accordingly, would become dearer in both the economic and emotional sense.

He made a note to consult the vestry minutes later. The poor rate would have to be adjusted again, and no doubt Mr. Greaves would argue, as he always did, that the children of laborers ought to eat less or more efficiently, or perhaps not at all. What a cruel world.

At this precise moment, the door creaked open. Mr. Bennet did not look up. He had long since learned that if one did not meet interruptions in the eye, they might retreat of their own accord.

“Papa,” said Mary very solemnly, “do you believe that property conveys moral authority?” He rolled his eyes. This, he reflected, was not the worst question he had ever heard in that room. Nor, unfortunately, was it the best.

“I believe,” he said, “that property conveys repairs, taxes, and a general air of disappointment. As to authority, you may ask the pigs at Acre’s Field.”

Mary, who had not the smallest idea what that meant, thanked him and withdrew.

He turned back to his papers. Somewhere in the pile sat Mr. Collins’s most recent letter, praising Lady Catherine’s moral compass, describing his new chimney pots, and once again reminding Mr. Bennet, with clerical delicacy, that the Longbourn estate would one day pass into his very respectable and reverent hands.

Mr. Bennet had once made the mistake of showing Mr. Collin’s letters to his wife, which had resulted in three days of cries with plenty of laudanum and one invitation to tea with the Lucases that nobody enjoyed.

To this particular letter, he chose not to reply.

There was, he knew, nothing to be done about the entail. The law was as fixed as Mrs. Bennet’s opinions and just as impervious to reason. Still, he could not help but imagine a world in which estates passed most sensibly onto daughters and clergymen minded their own chimneys without a large show of it.

By late afternoon, the ledger had been balanced, three letters dispatched, one dispute resolved (in the utmost favor of a flock of sheep), and Mr. Bennet had successfully avoided an invitation to tea, an argument about bonnets, and a walk to Meryton that promised absolutely nothing worth the grating sound of Miss Lydia’s strategically timed coughing.

It had been, by his own standards, a productive day.

He leaned back, eyes drifting to the window, where the grounds stretched golden and uneventful. Somewhere beyond them, things were happening. In here, the air smelled of inky and moldy. He had paid the poor rate at the very least. It would have to do.

He rang for tea.

Further Research

• Britain introduced a direct income tax in 1799 to help finance the prolonged conflicts with France; incomes above £200 were taxed at 10 %.
  https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/taxation/overview/incometax/ (i don’t feel like citing this in the proper format, just click the link and be off with you)

• Waterson, Jim. “The History of Income Tax in Britain.” History Hit, 5 Apr. 2022, www.historyhit.com/income-tax-history-uk/. Accessed 1 Feb, 2026

• O'Brien, Patrick K. The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815. CDMA Working Paper 2007/07, University of St Andrews, www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wwwecon/CDMA/papers/wp0707.pdf. Accessed 1 Feb, 2026

• Dincecco, Mark. “War, Debt, and Taxes: The Financing of the British State, 1793–1815.” London School of Economics, Working Paper No. 99, www.lse.ac.uk/asset-library/information/wp99.pdf. Accessed 3 Feb, 2026

• My second favorite parliamentary debate in all of British history:

  Great Britain, Parliament, “Corn Bill,” Hansard, 8 Mar. 1815, vol. 30, cols. 58–84, Historic Hansard, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1815/mar/08/corn-bill. Accessed 10 Nov, 2025

• Hilton, Boyd. A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846. Oxford University Press, 2006 (this purchase single-handedly got me through all my kindle credits so I feel like I have to mention it)

• Edinburgh Review. “On the Danger of Paper Credit,” vol. 17, 1810. You can find this on the Internet Archive which is my absolute favorite digital space in the history of digital spaces: https://archive.org/details/sim_edinburgh-review-critical-journal_1810-11_17_33

(Illustration for Pride and Prejudice (1907))

1

Mr. Bennet of the Landed Gentry

Mr. Bennet is very often treated as a secondary character in Pride & Prejudice, but he is one of my faves in the novel. He is a gentleman of peak Regency. The Regency Era stretches from the late 1790s into the 1810s, and is defined by the Napoleonic wars, inflation, and growing constitutional power for Parliament.

Mr. Bennet is also, on the surface, a minor character: the father who delivers immaculate, hard-hitting one-liners, retreats into his library, and lets his household go about its chaotic business of marriage-making and fulfilling of “prospects” without too much interference.

Exactly what was he doing in that study?

The women in the Bennet household cross-stitch through the terrifying seriousness of their own futures, at a time when women’s security was still largely yoked to marriage prospects. Mr. Bennet enjoys the privilege of being one layer removed from this. He is, in many respects, a counterweight to Mrs. Bennet, though silly, desperate, and often mortifying, faces the material realities of her world. She knows what is at stake: daughters without fortunes, the entail hanging like a blade (in the form Mr. Collins) over Longbourn.

Austen gives Mr. Bennet some of the sharpest lines in the book. They are capricious, cutting, and cruel (with some slight exceptions to Miss Lizzy Bennett):

“What do we live for, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”

“If my children are silly, I must hope to be always sensible of it.”

“I will not spend my hours in running after my neighbours every time they go away and come back again.”

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends…”2

Mr. Bennet, sarcastic and “no-nonsense,” can read as insensitive to the reality the women in the novel face. He teases then withdraws as if he were in a game. He is not unkind, exactly, but he often behaves as though the most urgent problems in the house are merely irritating. The blunt truth is that he lives in an altogether different sphere. He can afford to “retire to his study” because his survival and bodily safety, his legal standing, his right to property, his authority are all firmly in his control. Of course, Mr. Bennet has his own realities to manage: the sordid business of running an estate in a country that started to pressure on his class.

So what did Jane Austen actually tell us about his day? Here is what we know: 1) he avoids social obligation whenever he can and 2) he retreats often to his library.

It’s not entirely clear what he did once the door closed. But Austen gives us clues, enough to make a historically grounded guess. We know he is a landed gentleman with an income that places him firmly in the gentry:

“Mr. Bennet’s property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two thousand a year…”

The landed gentry class consisted of men who owned land, lived off its rents, and did not work (in any sense recognizable to a tradesman) for wages. They were not peers of the realm, but they were legally, socially, and politically dominant within their local worlds. Their authority did not come from office or profession so much as from possession: of land, of literacy, and of time.

A gentleman’s study was a room for reading, and it was also a boundary. It separated noise from “seriousness,” the women’s visible crisis from the man’s supposedly rational concern. The fact that Mr. Bennet’s labor is invisible does not mean it is nonexistent, or even superior. Inside that room would have been papers: estate accounts, rent rolls, correspondence, legal documents relating to the entail. The entail itself, so catastrophic for Mrs. Bennet and her daughters, still would have been an ever-present but largely theoretical concern to him. It threatened future displacement, not present authority. That difference alone explains much of his emotional distance. These were all concerns after he would have been long gone and six feet underground.

But beyond Longbourn’s walls, Britain in the Regency period was not stable nor calm. There was a war economy, rising bread prices, taxation, and corn laws to name a few that would have impacted how Mr. Bennet handled his estate.

A Gentleman in a War Economy

From the late 1790s through the end of Pride & Prejudice’s implied timeline, Britain was a nation at war almost continuously with Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France. This isn’t just background noise and would have been on Mr. Bennet’s mind, despite having no sons to send off to fight.

War reshaped everything Mr. Bennet would have read in his newspapers and encountered in his accounts. It demanded money on an unprecedented scale. For much of the 18th century, wars had been financed by a mix of customs and excise duties plus enormous government borrowing. By the 1790s, that formula was maxed out. Servicing the national debt had become a preoccupation under King George III’s reign.

So the British government did something actually quite radical: it reached directly into private incomes.

William Pitt the Younger’s income tax, introduced in 1799, for the first time treated income, rather than land alone, as taxable, measurable, and subject to scrutiny. Incomes over £60 per year were liable; over £200, they could be taxed at a flat 10%. Mr. Bennet’s “two thousand a year” puts him squarely in the crosshairs of this 10%.

For a landed gentleman, this meant more than a slightly larger bill. It meant that “two thousand a year,” which had always functioned as a pleasantly vague social fact, now had to exist as a precise, documented number in someone’s schedule. This was before Turbo Tax could do everything for you. Mr. Bennet was most likely drowning in the paperwork this required of him throughout the year.

Mr. Bennet, sardonic and politically aware, would almost certainly have followed parliamentary debates and the newspaper summaries of them. He would have read about taxation, borrowing, and the ballooning national debt. He may even have agreed with the argument: beat Napoleon now, complain about the tax later. But agreement does not eliminate irritation and duty.

Mr. Bennet would have been required to submit annual returns with full disclosures of income from land rents, investments, and personal earnings (if any). Failure to do so could result in investigation by the Board of Taxes, a body which became significantly more active during the Napoleonic period.

One contemporary critic of the income tax insisted that it was “unnecessary, unconstitutional and inquisitorial,” reflecting anxieties among landowners that their private accounts were suddenly subject to public scrutiny.3

It is entirely likely that Mr. Bennet’s muttered references to “the accounts” were not only evasions of conversation, but an actual reflection of his administrative burden.

Even more than the tax itself, it was the principle of surveillance that grated. As historian Boyd Hilton writes, “income had ceased to be a marker of class and become a metric for policy.” Landowners could no longer lounge behind a veil of genteel vagueness. Tenancy agreements, agricultural yields, poor-rate leviea all had to be weighed and recorded. It truly tested the idea of gentlemanly indifference.

Rising Bread Prices & Inflation

Money itself was unstable in this period. In 1797, Britain suspended gold convertibility at the Bank of England, effectively creating a paper-money economy that sparked endless debate over inflation and depreciation. Parliamentary committees sat to examine the “high price of gold” and whether paper banknotes were to blame.

For ordinary people, the argument showed up first in the price of bread.

High grain prices meant pressure on the poor rates, local taxes levied to support the destitute under the old Poor Law system (this is before the 1834 New Poor Law4). Bread that was “dear” did not just make life hard in the cottages; it made life complicated in the vestry. Landowners and substantial householders had to decide how much relief to grant and how high to set the rates that funded it.

Mr. Bennet would have been acutely aware of this tension, especially for his tenants, even if he refused to dramatize it. His income of two thousand a year was comfortable, but not infinite. Tenant arrears, bad harvests, or increased parish obligations could not be ignored forever. The study, again, is where such problems are faced privately: in cramped columns of a rent-book, in discreet letters from a steward, in notes about a field that has not yielded what it ought.

By 1810, the financial situation had worsened. Gold was still unavailable, the national debt had climbed above £600 million (nearly double its pre-war level), and public confidence was beginning to waver. Even The Edinburgh Review, a bastion of Whig moderation, printed dire warnings about inflation and the collapse of credit.

The Corn Laws, first introduced in 1815, were anticipated by at least a decade in gentry conversation. They promised to prop up British grain prices by imposing tariffs on foreign imports. In theory, this would benefit landowners but in practice it pushed bread prices higher still. Mr. Bennet, with his ironic temperament and moderate estate, might have been mostly unconvinced of the usefulness of these laws. But better to read about the law than debate it over port with Sir William Lucas as Mr. Bennet’s often hid behind his humor. His wit often feels defensive, even evasive. It keeps emotional claims at bay. It reduces urgency to farce. In a world where economic pressure is real but rarely spoken aloud in polite company, irony becomes a coping mechanism.

Below is a fictionalized account of Mr. Bennet’s day with the hope of keeping as much as possible to Jane Austen’s prose.

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A Day in the Life of Mr. Bennet

It is a truth universally under-acknowledged that a gentleman of modest fortune must nevertheless engage, from time to time, in the unseemly business of record-keeping.

Mr. Bennet, having escaped an early ambush of nerves in the breakfast parlour, retired to his study just as the youngest Miss Bennet began her account, amidst a fit of coughing and giggles, of a scarlet-coated lieutenant’s new boots. That subject being neither spiritual nor useful, and therefore beneath consideration, Mr. Bennet excused himself with a mumbled reference to “the accounts,” which had the dual benefit of sounding responsible and preventing anyone from following him.

Once inside, he settled into his chair, arranged his quill and spectacles, and stared very intently at his ledgers, which had been waiting, with stubborn indifference, since last Thursday.

The first item of note was a letter from Mr. Hodge, the steward.

Honoured Sir,
I take up my pen with the utmost respect to lay before you a few particulars concerning the estate, which I hope may be found not wholly unworthy of your attention.
In the matter of Widow Sharp, I am obliged to report that she remains behind in her rent by two quarters. She attributes her arrears to a prolonged indisposition in the winter season, together with the loss of a small sow, which, being ill-disposed and of little profit, has left her household in diminished circumstance. She expresses her humble intention to make what payment she can after Easter, should the Lord bless her son’s harvest.
With regard to the Lower Barn, the north beam has taken to sagging most disconsolately and is likely to give way entirely, should the current weather persist. I beg to submit that a partial repair might suffice until the summer, when fuller work could be undertaken with less inconvenience.
The new tenant at Acre’s End has, without prior application, planted a hedge of dog-roses along the western boundary of his holding. While the act itself is not in contradiction of his lease, the manner of it being done without notice and with some vanity may be thought irregular.
I await your instruction, and remain your most humble and obedient servant,
Thomas Hodge

Mr. Bennet read the letter through twice, then wrote off to the side the following with faint irritation: a prolonged indisposition, disconsolately, and VANITY. He composed a reply in fewer words, instructing Hodge to forgive Widow Sharp’s arrears until harvest, reinforce the beam as little as possible, and leave the roses to flourish with little bother.

Once this effort had been committed to paper, sealed, and set aside, he rewarded himself by opening The Morning Chronicle, which confirmed that Parliament had argued vigorously for three days and accomplished very little beyond proposing a new tax on windows. He skimmed the report on the national debt, still climbing excessively, and paused only when he reached the letters section, where a gentleman signing himself Agricola had written at length on the decline of rural morals and the price of wheat.

“I suppose one may be vulgar now at five shillings a bushel,” he murmured, folding the page.

There was, further down the column, a small notice on the progress of the Corn Bill. Mr. Bennet read that it had passed its second reading, which meant it would almost certainly become law and that bread, accordingly, would become dearer in both the economic and emotional sense.

He made a note to consult the vestry minutes later. The poor rate would have to be adjusted again, and no doubt Mr. Greaves would argue, as he always did, that the children of laborers ought to eat less or more efficiently, or perhaps not at all. What a cruel world.

At this precise moment, the door creaked open. Mr. Bennet did not look up. He had long since learned that if one did not meet interruptions in the eye, they might retreat of their own accord.

“Papa,” said Mary very solemnly, “do you believe that property conveys moral authority?” He rolled his eyes. This, he reflected, was not the worst question he had ever heard in that room. Nor, unfortunately, was it the best.

“I believe,” he said, “that property conveys repairs, taxes, and a general air of disappointment. As to authority, you may ask the pigs at Acre’s Field.”

Mary, who had not the smallest idea what that meant, thanked him and withdrew.

He turned back to his papers. Somewhere in the pile sat Mr. Collins’s most recent letter, praising Lady Catherine’s moral compass, describing his new chimney pots, and once again reminding Mr. Bennet, with clerical delicacy, that the Longbourn estate would one day pass into his very respectable and reverent hands.

Mr. Bennet had once made the mistake of showing Mr. Collin’s letters to his wife, which had resulted in three days of cries with plenty of laudanum and one invitation to tea with the Lucases that nobody enjoyed.

To this particular letter, he chose not to reply.

There was, he knew, nothing to be done about the entail. The law was as fixed as Mrs. Bennet’s opinions and just as impervious to reason. Still, he could not help but imagine a world in which estates passed most sensibly onto daughters and clergymen minded their own chimneys without a large show of it.

By late afternoon, the ledger had been balanced, three letters dispatched, one dispute resolved (in the utmost favor of a flock of sheep), and Mr. Bennet had successfully avoided an invitation to tea, an argument about bonnets, and a walk to Meryton that promised absolutely nothing worth the grating sound of Miss Lydia’s strategically timed coughing.

It had been, by his own standards, a productive day.

He leaned back, eyes drifting to the window, where the grounds stretched golden and uneventful. Somewhere beyond them, things were happening. In here, the air smelled of inky and moldy. He had paid the poor rate at the very least. It would have to do.

He rang for tea.

Further Research

• Britain introduced a direct income tax in 1799 to help finance the prolonged conflicts with France; incomes above £200 were taxed at 10 %.
  https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/taxation/overview/incometax/ (i don’t feel like citing this in the proper format, just click the link and be off with you)

• Waterson, Jim. “The History of Income Tax in Britain.” History Hit, 5 Apr. 2022, www.historyhit.com/income-tax-history-uk/. Accessed 1 Feb, 2026

• O'Brien, Patrick K. The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660–1815. CDMA Working Paper 2007/07, University of St Andrews, www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wwwecon/CDMA/papers/wp0707.pdf. Accessed 1 Feb, 2026

• Dincecco, Mark. “War, Debt, and Taxes: The Financing of the British State, 1793–1815.” London School of Economics, Working Paper No. 99, www.lse.ac.uk/asset-library/information/wp99.pdf. Accessed 3 Feb, 2026

• My second favorite parliamentary debate in all of British history:

  Great Britain, Parliament, “Corn Bill,” Hansard, 8 Mar. 1815, vol. 30, cols. 58–84, Historic Hansard, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1815/mar/08/corn-bill. Accessed 10 Nov, 2025

• Hilton, Boyd. A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846. Oxford University Press, 2006 (this purchase single-handedly got me through all my kindle credits so I feel like I have to mention it)

• Edinburgh Review. “On the Danger of Paper Credit,” vol. 17, 1810. You can find this on the Internet Archive which is my absolute favorite digital space in the history of digital spaces: https://archive.org/details/sim_edinburgh-review-critical-journal_1810-11_17_33

Father and Sons

My double shot espresso was left half-drunk and cold this morning. Something about that made me extremely sad for the espresso. Espresso empathy.

Usually the routine goes: finger the coffee beans, carefully as if they were rosary beads, onto the scale, then send them to the grind. Pull the shot. Say a quick prayer to the gastro gods and shoot the little espresso before my real cup of coffee. It’s the best part of my morning.

This morning, though, I got sidetracked thinking about Russian Nihilism. It’s how I confirm the obvious: I’m running wilder and more wired than I need to be these days. Nihilism keeps the nerves sparking and feels better than licking batteries, but not by much.1

Rewind to a few months ago I woke up and wrote: “Russian Nihilism or British Utilitarianism?” I picked Russian Nihilism, which I don’t regret. I do, however, appear to be paying in loss of hair pigmentation and a more slanted posture2, something that has followed me my entire life but has been pushed further by incognito browser windows and Google searches that drag into page four.

Studying Russian history, of course, has its particular challenges. Despite my cybersecurity background, I still felt unprepared for the landmine that is online Russian primary sourcing. This is where you learn that a bit of bravery is required for digital research. You stumble onto links that look slap-dashed together on borrowed university servers in cold basements. You know better, but you click anyway, because you’re intellectually starving and you want it that bad.

Follow this trail long enough (powered by an addictive personality and more espresso) and you end up where a lot of Russian Nihilism actually starts: in the pages of Fathers and Sons.3

First serialized in Russkii vestnik (The Russian Messenger) in 1862, then published as a separate volume, Fathers and Sons written by the great liberal thinker Turgenev gives us the literary nihilistic archetype in his primary character, Bazarov. One small scene between Bazarov and his love interest tells you almost everything you need to know about this new mindset making waves on the streets and in the salons of St. Petersburg:

“And so you have no feeling whatsoever for art?” she said, leaning her elbow on the table, a movement which brought her face closer to Bazarov. “How can you get on without it?”

“Why, what is it needed for, may I ask?”

“Well, at least to help one to know and understand people.”

Bazarov smiled.

“In the first place, experience of life does that, and in the second, I assure you the study of separate individuals is not worth the trouble it involves. All men are similar, in soul as well as in body. Each of us has a brain, spleen, heart and lungs of similar construction; and the so-called moral qualities are the same in all of us – the slight variations are of no importance. It is enough to have one single human specimen in order to judge all the others. People are like trees in a forest; no botanist would dream of studying each individual birch-tree.”4

As my therapist would suggest, let’s start with the labels (“label your feelings”). Well, for one, this passage feels beautifully INSANE. Anna leans in with what sounds like an earnest, almost gentle question: you feel anything at all for art?

She offers art as a way to “know and understand people,” which rests on a fundamentally humanist concept: that humans sit at the center of the universe, are Special, have depth, and that art opens doors into that depth. It’s a jarring premise in a society where serfdom in Russia was still omnipresent.

Bazarov answers with Utilitarian logic: if art fails to alter outcomes in the world, its unnecessary. Appreciation does little for productivity, for reforms, for medicine, for new institutions, for freedom. Throw it in the bin. It’s trash.

Then he goes further and lands a wet slap across Humanism itself:

“Each of us has a brain, spleen, heart and lungs of similar construction; and the so-called moral qualities are the same in all of us…”

He takes the singular woman across from him, this one person who clearly unsettles him, and dissects her like a rational anatomist. Brain. Spleen. Heart. Lungs. When a scientist dissects the human, they observe anatomy and machinations; there is no soul, no “secret sauce” to being human.5

This is an echo of Russian Materialism of the 1850s–60s, where consciousness, everything that makes one human, even the “soul” become functions of structure and environment, where what matters is observation of the world and not faith or sentimentality or anything more abstract. Romantic Idealism from earlier in the century (Western Europe’s storms of feeling, its cult of the individual) slides off the dissecting table, and in its place arrives a harsher respect for scientific method, experimentation, and physical reality.6

The same thinking underpinned broader nineteenth-century “rational” social thought. On one side, Jeremy Bentham and later John Stuart Mill measure worthiness through utility and aggregated outcomes. On the other hand, Chernyshevsky and his circle preach “rational egoism,” where morality grows from self-interest and material conditions rather than revelation, the Russian Orthodox Church, aka the “old social order.” Under that regime of thought, art has to step aside unless it moved the needle on welfare or progress.7

For Anna, art works as a path into persons, into the messy interior of specific lives. For Bazarov, it looks like an inefficient route to knowledge he assumes he already possesses through experience.

Contemporary critic Dmitry Pisarev, one of the loudest voices of the radical press, reads Fathers and Sons and praises Bazarov precisely for this stripped-down attitude where he has no grand aims, no “higher” calling, a life lived in the naked present without consoling illusions. There might be, in many ways, comfort in being like Bazarov.

The question is: who talks like Bazarov, and where did he come from? We cannot fault Bazarov, I want to give a little espresso empathy to his character. He is a product of his time. So what were the times that would have produced this kind of man that compares people to birch trees and treats art as useless?

German Nihilism

Nihilism sounds Russian in the modern imagination, but the philosophy itself formed in late eighteenth-century Germany.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi coins the term in 1799 in an open letter aimed at Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in the middle of the so-called Atheismusstreit (“atheism dispute”).8

Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre begins from the I, pure self-consciousness, which then “posits” both itself and the “not-I”: the external world, other people, resistance to the self. Reality, in this story, has meaning and structure through the activity of the mind and only the mind.

Jacobi looks at this and interprets as follows: If everything that counts as “real” gets its force inside a self-contained system of consciousness, then God and the external world stop feeling like real constructs that have real authority. They start to look like very sophisticated internal constructions, or even projections of the self-conscious. For Jacobi, this is nihilism: philosophy that states firmly that nothing can be built without mentally building from the I.

About a century later, Nietzsche takes the word and broadens this to: “European nihilism.” He considers this a critique of a civilization that still uses Christian moral language after belief in a living God has been deemed unnecessary. Sermons continue, courts and parliaments still talk about justice and duty, people still say “good” and “evil,” but the underlying conviction that once gave those words weight has been replaced, or rather eroded, by science and historical criticism. As Nietzsche confessed “God is dead.”9

Now let’s take that mood and hop on over to the East just a little.

Russian Orthodox Schism and Serfdom

In the seventeenth century, Patriarch Nikon pushes through liturgical reforms, which were tiny changes in spelling, gestures, and rituals meant to align Russian Orthodoxy more closely with Greek practice (think two fingers for the sign of the cross becoming three). These changes resulted in a schism within the Russian Orthodox Church.

Those who clung tightly to the old rituals become the Old Believers or the raskolniki; the official church, backed by the state, brands them schismatics and sets about crushing them. There are burnings and prison camps. Whole communities flee into forests and wilderness to practice what they believe is the true faith.

V.S. Solovyov describes the raskolniki as follows:

Even among the Old Believers, the true preserver of the ancient heritage and tradition is the individual person.10

Then there is Serfdom, that ole’ ball and chain. Serfdom holds tens of millions of peasants in legal bondage well into the nineteenth century. Serfs are tied to estates; they can be bought and sold with land; they owe labor and dues. When the Emancipation Reform of 1861 finally abolishes serfdom, it does so with a twist: peasants receive land, but the state compensates landowners and then loads the cost onto the peasants as long-term redemption payments, often at inflated valuations.11

By the 1860s, an educated Russian youth has grown up in a world where: 1) The church has a documented history of persecuting its own believers in the name of purity, 2) The state has legally organized human bondage as the basis of the social order.

This becomes the tinder that Nihilism ignites in Russia.

Russian Nihilism

The raskolniki were not nihilists; they were fanatics of tradition. Yet the memory of the Raskol and their rebellion against religious authority taught Russia something the 1860s nihilists took to heart: that sacred institutions are imperfect. By the time nigilizm emerges as a youth movement, the country already knows what happens when you trust “higher” authority too much.

The Russian term nigilizm surfaces in the 1860s which moves Nihilism from a philosophy to a movement, more specifically a student-led youth radical movement that started in St. Petersburg. It names a type12: the young man (or woman) who takes a hammer to inherited authorities (church, state, family hierarchy, “high culture”).

This figure often highly educated, often from the new mixed-class raznochintsy13 ranks. Suspicious of anything that smells like “idealism” or “sentimentalism.” Obsessed with science.

The old liberal intelligentsia, those in St. Petersburg circles who still believe in gradual reform, literature, and noble sacrifice, start calling this younger generation “nihilists” as an insult.

This is the atmosphere into which Ivan Turgenev drops Fathers and Sons in 1862.

Espresso Empathy

Under conditions that were uniquely Russian (the Russian Orthodox Church, serfdom, lack of individual property rights, etc), the desire to embrace Nihilism does make sense.

Still, Bazarov’s line that “one human specimen is enough” comes across as a brutal one. Stop pretending individuals matter, accept the pattern, move on. It is efficient, ruthless, almost merciful in its desire to spare you the disappointment of believing anyone is special.

Dostoevsky will answer Turgenev’s Nihilist archetype with his own characters of Raskolnikov (think raskolniki), Kirillov, Stavrogin in Crime and Punishment to challenge the Nihilist movement through the idea of faith, suffering, family and empathy.

So what is empathy?

Espresso empathy answers this question in the face of nihilism with a tiny, absurd “this one very specific thing, here, right now.” It offers no promise that the universe has meaning or that history bends toward justice. It only insists that, even after you take away God, authority, structure, morality, everything, this one small thing in front of you still deserves attention. That is all it offers.

(Peter the Great’s Beard Tax. Public Domain. Accessed 25 Nov, 2025.)

“Tax the beards!” (or Налог на бороды! if you are half a vodka sour away from total ruin. Do any of you attempt speaking Russian, poorly, when sloshed too?). Peter the Great proclaimed this one morning after taking one look at himself in the mirror and thinking “this patchy chin fluff will not do!” (and then promptly a man tantrum: “if I can’t have a beard, no one will!”) The ridiculousness of this beard tax decree does require a bit of self-reflection. We must remember that England taxed windows and candles.1 The US federal and California state governments siphon off a large percentage of my earnings, which three very large potholes in my daily commute remind me of daily. So all this to point out that we as a non-Russian collective are in no position to judge tax systems, but I say let’s judge anyway.2 Back to the history…

The significance of the Russian beard tax begins with what appears to be a rather pedestrian fact: it was introduced by Tsar Peter himself. I shrugged at this. Okay and? Tsars are meant to tsar, aren’t they? Let them issue decrees, declare wars, deplete coffers, have illegitimate children, ruin lives, etc.. Let them. But what makes this detail fascinating is the context. In 1705, when the beard tax decree was issued, the pribyl´shchiki3 was the entity, not the tsar, legislating and enacting most of the government’s policies. This was the act of the tsar alone. I can’t help but think this was the Russian state sponsoring some guy’s manic episode. The tsar, having just come from a long tour of Western Europe a few years before, was having some sort of existential crisis. Oh I know! Let’s get Russian men to shave their faces, get their supple skin lashed by Siberian winter winds and we can figure it out together!

More illustrious though was the fact that Tsar Peter grossly overestimated (or underestimated depending on your point of view) the Russian male of the early 18th century. You see, the Russian Orthodox Church considers it a sin to shave one’s beard. According to church doctrine, a beard was a sacred sign of man’s likeness to God. Holy plumage, if you will. To shave it was to flirt with the Roman Catholic Church.4 So when most of the Russian male population decided to shave than pay taxes for their scraggly beards, it could be argued that Peter seriously misread the room. To highlight this failure I want to look at Evgenii Akelev’s economic analysis of the beard tax. Turns out, only an estimated 100 people in the entire country were willing to pay the annual beard tax rather than shave and by 1726 only 57 men (of millions) were paying this tax.5

I guess you could say this was Peter the Great’s cry for help.

I'm really interested in answering the question: what kind of Russia creates someone like Raskolnikov? I look at how his psychology is shaped by history...by centuries of serfdom, a messy emancipation that freed people on paper but left them indebted and unmoored, and the rise of the 19th-century intelligentsia: overeducated and underemployed.

This is the first part of a 3 part series where I explore specifically the beginning of serfdom and how it evolved up to the 19th-century. I hope you learn something new and feel free to discuss your thoughts in the comments!

In this episode, I explore the moral and political landscape of 19th century England through the lens of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, North and South. The conversation delves into the complexities of industrialization, the role of Unitarianism, and the moral education of the protagonist, Margaret Hale. It highlights the clash between labor and capital, and Gaskell's enduring legacy of advocating for sympathy and progress in a rapidly changing society.

Takeaways

• The corn laws were emblematic of class power.

• Manchester served as a laboratory for Gaskell's ideas.

• Gaskell's work reflects a moral crisis of her time.

• Unitarianism influenced Gaskell's moral imagination.

• Margaret Hale's journey represents moral education.

• The novel explores the tension between labor and capital.

• Gaskell's characters embody the struggle for understanding.

• Sympathy is essential for true progress.

• Gaskell's legacy prompts reflection on modern issues.

• The individual plays a crucial role in societal change.

We’ll talk about why exploring those contexts matters, how I approach each episode using primary sources and scholarly research, and what you can expect as we uncover the stories behind the stories you love.