R ory M uir . Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune

What if the Bennet daughters in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice had been sons? What professions might they have followed without fear of downward social mobility and with some hope of upward advancement? Rory Muir begins and ends Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune with this question, and throughout his engaging study, he uses Austen’s own family, as well as her fictional characters, as a frame for a discussion of the paths open to young men of “good family” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Muir admits frankly that “good family” was a nebulous category. But he also points out that everyone in Austen’s world knew what it meant: families within, or with ties to, the aristocracy and gentry and not engaged in menial labor, manufacturing, or retail, though banking or merchant trades could find some social acceptability. Of course, in this middling-ish range of British society, there was a...

Aristocracy (class) · Gentry · Peck (Imperial) · Political science · Politics · Prejudice (legal term) · Pride · Social mobility · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law