I've met a fair-to-middling number of people over the years who have stated, with varying degrees of intensity, that they wish they could live in the time of Jane Austen. I must courteously dissent.
The first and more obvious objection is simply that your average English longshoreman or tenant farmer was not going about in four-horse carriages and attending opulent debuts every Friday evening. The entire point of Mr. Darcy (for instance) is precisely that he does not represent the norm. Even the other rich people in his circle vied for his condescension. The same would hold true in any epoch you might care to idealize; knights and samurai were always the landed aristocracy, and being a peasant has consistently sucked throughout the story of Man. At least if you're poor in 2021, you can still get Novacaine when they pull your teeth. To live in the time of Jane Austen and be fabulously wealthy, you need a minimum of two magical wishes.
But after all, most people already recognize this, or will acknowledge it if it's pointed out. The real perplexity is a surprising variant on the same essential fallacy, but is far less commonly observed. Apart from the lavish costumes and sumptuously appointed parlours, the true appeal of Austen's cosmos has always been the rich, enduring splendor of her dialogue. Who wouldn't want to spend time in the company of Miss Eliza Bennet, even if it were only as her maidservant? But here's the thing.
Elizabeth, exactly like Darcy, is crucially and overwhelmingly not the norm. Her wit operates on a level so far above most of her interlocutors (and interlocutrices) that many aren't even capable of perceiving it. You could go almost so far as to say that this is the entire point of the bloody story: neither she nor Darcy can find an equal until they find each other. (I know Elizabeth has Jane, the beatific foil to her asperity, but Jane is simply too magnanimous to grasp the methods and motivations of meaner spirits. In Biblical terms, innocent as a dove but not wise as a serpent.) In short, the scintillating conversation that flows from Austen's mightiest heroine was not the parlance of the quotidian.
It might be objected that, at the very least, any random aristocrat could be safely presumed to have a "basic" education that vastly outstrips all but the most advanced schooling of the present day. They wouldn't express themselves in emojis and lol-speak, and could hold up their end of a tete-a-tete. To this I reply that the only real divide between Elizabeth's youngest sisters and a vapidly tweeting 21st Century tween is the accident of their being born in different eras. Can it be doubted that if Mrs. Bennet were alive today, she would clutter every cranny of cyberspace with mortifying Facebook posts?
Nay, friends. The gleaming world of banter and badinage that we envision as Austenian England existed only inside the Austenian mind. If some bored and whimsical power should ever decide to grant your wish, whisking you back to the tag end of the 18th Century, the only advice I can give you is to seek employ as the humble maidservant of Miss Jane Austen herself.
