Jane Austen on Paper

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the economy of Romantic-period paper circa 1790s to 1810s. The material history of paper preoccupied writers in the period, not only because of its volatile role in mediation. I discuss articles from British and Caribbean newspapers, economic histories of the paper trade, and essays on papermaking by Charlotte Smith and Anna Barbauld. These contemporary sources demonstrate that, in times of scarcity consequent on war and economic isolation, British writers used figural discourses of whiteness to promote paper conservation. At the same time, these writers glanced uneasily at the complexly racialized, mobile history of paper, including the participation of Jews in rag gathering and the use of cast-off clothes from enslaved people of color, sailors, and condemned prisoners in the making of paper furnish. Paper’s whiteness suffered continual threat from the traces of this history (materialized by writing and print) and from the instability of its figurations. The precarious whiteness of paper and its dependency on rags link the paper trade practically and figurally with the Atlantic slave economy. I argue that Jane Austen’s novels metonymically address the racialized economy of paper, querying the dependency of the industry—and Romantic literate culture—on racialized networks of injustice.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the Vancouver chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America for excellent questions and informed discussion in response to an earlier version of this essay.

Notes

1 A further association of linen rags with sugar appears in the “Arts and Sciences” report in the May 1820 Gentleman’s Magazine: one Henri Barconnet had discovered a process for “converting into sugar …  linen rags” (445). The discovery was widely reported.

2 The Ann is vessel number 331 in Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, 1799. It is not possible to ascertain Ann’s arrival date in Antigua or Ann’s exact number of voyages: the Naval Office Shipping Lists for Antigua for the years 1787–1814 do not survive, nor do issues of the Antigua Journal or Antigua Gazette for the first half of 1798.