Mrs Percival harks back to Queen Elizabeth, and an implicit view of a Protestant and strongly governed England—a view which Catharine repudiates, as does Jane Austen herself, who throughout these early works consistently attacks all Whig views of history, and self-congratulatory Protestantism. ‘… I am myself partial to the roman catholic religion,’ she remarks daringly as the historian of ‘The History of England’ (p. 142), flying in the face of all approved histories.16

Austen certainly subjects Mrs Percival’s view to scrutiny and ridicule, a ridicule made the more pointed by Mrs Percival’s administration to her ward of that worthy prophylactic, Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1808). More’s novel, intended to support the conservative cause that Mrs Percival so parodically espouses, is the story of a good young man, a bachelor who sets out on a quest for a perfect wife. He examines every young woman attentively, but each has a fault or flaw which causes him gravely to cross her off his list of possibilities and move on. At length he finds the perfect woman, who is a slightly more alarming piece of pattern submissiveness than even the Sophie of Rousseau’s Émile (1760). Austen in the first pieces of Volume the First had already ridiculed the idea that women are to be models of perfection in the hope that a most beautiful and moral young man may come to claim them. ‘Jack and Alice’ in its own way analyses the problems at the heart of Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison; the hero of Richardson’s novel, who is looking for a wife worthy of him (and who has two young ladies, at least, pining away for him), has been made too perfect by his author. Sir Charles’s glimpses of his own perfection make us uneasy, as at the presence of a monstrous egotist. The Grandisonian type of highly moral exemplary strong man had been borrowed by both conservative and liberal novelists for their own differing purposes. But we can see that Austen thinks that too many novelists have set up these pattern heroes in order to keep women in their places. Austen even has a running quarrel with Charlotte Smith, a writer whose works she (like the young heroine of ‘Catharine’) evidently enjoys, because in Smith’s Emmeline (1788) the heroine breaks off her engagement with the impulsive and imperfect Frederic Delamere and ultimately marries a Grandisonian worthy with the Whiggish name of Godolphin. The quest of a heroine for an ideally moral lover is a quest Austen finds as suspect as the portrayed quests of heroes for the perfect young lady. Both stories are coercive and restrictive. In ‘Jack and Alice’ Austen breaks out of the spell of Sir Charles Grandison, denies its authority through impish play with it. The perfect hero outdoes even Sir Charles in sun-like qualities, so refulgent in his glory that ‘none but Eagles could look him in the Face’ (p. 11)—as only St John, the eagle, has traditionally been able to see the divine glory in Revelation. This shining hero is indeed unmasked in his barefaced sublimity, a sublimity of self-centredness; he is terrifying in his totally committed narcissism: ‘My temper is even, my virtues innumerable, my self unparalelled. Since such, Sir, is my character, what do you mean by wishing me to marry your Daughter?’ (p. 23)

Behind this Charles Adams—a most un-fallen son of Adam (in his own opinion)—we can see not only Richardson’s Sir Charles, but whole sets of Enlightenment concepts of self-improvement and self-approval, concepts embraced by divines and promulgated by philosophers such as Shaftesbury and by poets of the stature of Pope. The Enlightenment wanted to think that we are naturally moral, and that self-cultivation and self-consciousness will lead to a more moral society. Equally, the new Enlightened capitalism wanted to believe that the pursuit of its own interest by each group and individual would or could lead to the good of the whole. Austen is engaged at the philosophic centre of the eighteenth century. To treat her early works as the slight works of a playful child is partly to mistreat their philosophic depths.

Austen in these early works presents a social world which is very greedy and very violent. Her satire is not directed only against those who follow their own will in the name of the newly articulated romantic values—though that can look like the case if the critic chooses to examine only Laura of ‘Love and Friendship’. If we think that Austen ignores the naked selfishness of those who already have power and possessions, we have not been reading attentively. With every word a reputation dies—no rank, no order, no established conduct is safe from her:

As Sir George and Lady Harcourt were superintending the Labours of their Haymakers, rewarding the industry of some by smiles of approbation, and punishing the idleness of others, by a cudgel … (p. 31)

It is that throw-away phrase ‘by a cudgel’ that does the mischief. The sentence structure smoothly assumes the right of Sir George and Lady Harcourt to superintend, to reward, and to punish, and our expectations are controlled and soothed by the harmonious balance, so that we idly expect the punishment to parallel ‘smiles’ will be ‘frowns’ or the like—but the cudgel reminds us of coercive power, in its cartoon-like burlesque; the sentence, like a visual caricature, elicits through an emblem the internal nature of the matter. The Harcourts’ smiles are immaterial, but they have real material power over ‘their Haymakers’.