R.W. Chapman notes the name Randalls in The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. 4, p. 521.

12. O. Manning and H. Bray, History of Surrey, Vol. 1, p. xli; R.W. Chapman, The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. 4, p. 521.

13. ‘Farmer George’ had been the butt of English satirists since the 1780s – see V. Carretta, George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron (Athens and London, 1990).

14. Two of Austen’s brothers had highly successful naval careers and the elder, Frank, was knighted as a result. See J. H. and E. C. Hubback, Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers (London, 1906). Austen’s knowledge of the navy has been researched exhaustively by Brian Southam, whose Jane Austen and the Navy is essential reading for anyone interested in Austen’s work.

15. On land enclosure, see M. Turner, Enclosures in Britain, 1750 – 1830 (London, 1984) and for representations of the rural poor in this period, J. Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape (Cambridge, 1980). The long years of warfare had made the efficient production of food a matter of national importance, and social observers such as Thomas Malthus had expressed serious concerns about the problems of feeding a growing population in his popular Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

16. See, e.g., W. Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution, pp. 40–41; B. Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy, pp. 239–56.

17. M. Kirkham, Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction, pp. 139–40. Austen lived in Bath between 1801 and 1806. For details of her immediate family, see P. Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life.

18. G.