Readers of Jane Austen gain a clear idea of the task facing the daughters of gentlemen. They need to secure a husband who can enable them to keep or even improve their social and economic status. But what about their opposite numbers? How did the younger sons of gentlemen face up to the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood?
Primogeniture meant that even those from a wealthy background often had to earn their living. While for girls marriage and career tended to be synonymous, for many of their brothers a profession came first, and then with luck a marriage would follow, since ‘a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’. How young single men went about achieving such good fortune is the question that Rory Muir sets out to answer. At one point he even reverses the gender of the Bennet sisters in order to speculate about the career path each might have followed — poor Mary would have become an attorney, and ‘ripened fully into pomposity and dullness with years and success’.
This is a book about the professions on offer at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, not just to younger sons but also to the eldest offspring of gentlemen down on their luck, as well as to the sons of successful members of the middle classes wanting to improve their social standing.
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