I love Jane Austen but I’m not sure her novels can save neo-Nazis
If the behavioural impact of reading Jane Austen has yet to be scientifically established, we’re not without anecdotal evidence. Throughout his career, Michael Gove, for instance, has publicised his devotion, wishing that more children studied Austen, ordering civil servants to learn, like him, from her style and lecturing his Labour shadow, in the Commons, on Pride and Prejudice. For the public, he retweeted a BBC article entitled “What Jane Austen can teach us about resilience”.
Long before that, as a simple MP yet to become notorious for expenses claims, Gove proclaimed in a Times tribute Austen’s “defence of Christian cultural traditions against commercial coarsening” and, above all in her novels, “the absolute need to trust character as revealed through action”.
The mature Gove was last week to be found late at night, seemingly alone and inebriated, revealing himself through action on an Aberdeen club’s dance floor. Even allowing for other influences on Gove, and for the respectability of most Janeites, we can’t rule out the possibility that, in the wrong hands, excessive affection for this author can be as damaging as would, say, be over-indulgence in an occasionally innocuous recreational stimulant. Could her repeated focus on dancing and balls be what drove the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster so recklessly to head in search of what Austen once called “the felicities of rapid motion”?
We will probably never know. But Gove’s conduct must surely concern Judge Timothy Spencer QC, who last week decided that classics of English literature, especially Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, could succeed, where a standard education did not, in reforming a 21-year-old white supremacist, Ben John. Giving the neo-Nazi a suspended two-year sentence for his hoard of terrorist material, the judge asked: “Have you read Dickens? Austen? Start with Pride and Prejudice and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Think about Hardy. Think about Trollope.”
The judge would, he said, be testing John himself, being presumably better than most exam boards at detecting reliance on SparkNotes, not that these include, among the Key Questions on Pride and Prejudice: “What can Charlotte Lucas’s marriage tell us about the escalating risks of online extremism?” Not forgetting: “What misreading of Pride and Prejudice do you think has made this text particularly appealing to white supremacists?”
Spencer’s ludicrous sentence has already, understandably, provoked a request for a review under the unduly lenient sentence scheme. The campaign group Hope not Hate objected that “these sorts of lenient sentences risk encouraging other young people to access and share terrorist and extremist content because they will not fear the repercussions of their actions”. For the world’s countless Janeites, the sentence amounts, you could argue, to incitement.
The contrast between John’s singular, culturally bespoke punishment and the more conventional deterrents imposed on fellow extremists – on young offenders in general – has also been noted. Supposing Austen, Dickens and (weirdly, out of all of Shakespeare?) Twelfth Night could inhibit hateful activity, it is inexplicable, as distressing as such a utilitarian scheme might be for Austen enthusiasts, that these lowcost reading programmes are not already commonplace. Assuming, that is, some mechanism keeping vulnerable readers from work that might be actively detrimental, via the same direct process, to their thinking. If Fitzwilliam
Darcy can work miracles on a young but warped mind, an overstretched probation service, ideally composed exclusively of English literature graduates, will also need to consider the probable impact of Patricia Highsmith’s psychopath, Tom Ripley.
But Gove, along with public-school colleagues likewise steeped in classic texts, is not, of course, the only reason a sensible judge might question the western canon’s potential to manage idiocy. Even if Spencer’s own reading stops somewhere between Matthew Arnold, who shared his views, and George Steiner, who didn’t, he must have noticed from experience, from simply reading news stories about the latest Oxbridge scandal, how little a familiarity with great literature offers any guarantee of wisdom, goodness or even common decency in readers.
Or in authors. We can only guess at John’s feelings when, having completed A Tale of Two Cities, he hears about its author’s unconscionable treatment of his wife. Key Question: does our understanding of Dickens as a ruthless marital gaslighter fatally undermine the moral stature of his work? Will Spencer need to restore John’s factory settings and return to year 9 basics Lord of the Flies and Of Mice and Men (“a grim lesson about the nature of human existence”)?
Supposing the judge, not brilliantly for his literary authority, missed the 20th-century challenges to Matthew Arnold, his familiarity with Jane Austen should still have instilled some doubt about the practical applications of Jane Austen. True, she was once distri
buted to soldiers and depicted in Kipling’s short story, The Janeites, as transcending differences in rank and taste: “Gawd bless ’er, whoever she was.”
But an attorney general reviewing John’s sentence might usefully consider a theme from the last book Austen completed, to the effect that the finest literature may be of limited usefulness, could even you let you down. Having just, by coincidence, been reading Persuasion on holiday, I hadn’t already forgotten its heroine’s climactic statement – “I will not allow books to prove anything” – when Spencer proposed the opposite with his personal Prevent armoury.
Whatever it does, or ought to, to the reputation of the judiciary, the incident will probably be more unhelpful for the books so fatuously invoked. When literary classics are already identified as, variously, irrelevant, potentially harmful, too difficult, too colonial or too otherwise at odds with current preoccupations (including the government line on unprofitable humanities), maybe the last thing they need is to be publicised as, literally, punishment.
Pride and Prejudice, having survived Gove’s worship and Bernardine Evaristo’s aversion (“I don’t like the writing, I don’t like the story”), is now an alternative to prison. Rarely can a man so efficiently have killed the thing he loves.