The 1950s

One of the recurring refrains of the 1980s and 1990s was that some types of thinkers, generally dubbed "conservative" with pejorative intent, were trying to turn the clock back to the 1950s. To read this line from Variety, spotted by Tyler Cowen, it would seem we are going back; being driven there by market forces not conservatives:

Someone teleported through time from the early 1950s to 2009 would find a music business curiously similar to the landscape of 60 years ago. Few specialty record outlets. Department stores dominating the market. A singles-driven industry. Pop music dominating radio. TV musical talent shows all the rage.

I was too young to have caught much of the 1960s and care remarkably little about the era. I have, however, had the notion that the 1960s were a revolutionary era force fed to me from a tender age onwards. Leaving aside what other social and political changes did or did not happen in that era, one thing we can say for certain was that if anything was supposed to have changed in the 1960s, it was the music industry. People of the time thought they were achieving revolutionary change in that industry.

Jane Austen, definitely did live in period when huge political and social changes really were taking place. Most readers and not a few critics think there is no evidence of this change in her writing. But is that really true or is it that we look for the wrong sort of indications change?

If we consider the 1960s as an example, it would seem that people alive during an era can be deeply wrong about what really is changing. Austen's contemporary and current critics tend to be fairly certain that whatever was driving change at the end of the 18th century, it was not what Austen wrote about.

But what if attitudes about marriage were changing. The fact of Austen being so concerned with marriage is usually presented as a sign of her "conservatism" (again with pejorative intent) but marriage is a powerful element of any society. Austen's presentation of "marriageship", as opposed to courtship, tales might be the best indicator we have of what was really driving the social changes of the era.