ABSTRACT
Mansfield Park is a novel preoccupied with the value of things. The novel presents characters who continually struggle to figure out what people, objects, and places are worth: Mary Crawford attempts to size up Edmund’s potential worth as a husband; Sir Thomas Bertram struggles to assess the value of his property in the West Indies; and virtually every character spends the length of the novel figuring out just how valuable Fanny is to Mansfield Park. Jane Austen began planning Mansfield Park in 1811 – shortly after her family moved to Chawton due to their own financial difficulties – and published it in 1814. During this same period, Britain – as a nation – was also struggling to figure out the worth of things; political economists like Adam Smith and T.R. Malthus were trying to assess the value of people, labor, and material goods in the face of rapidly developing industrial and credit economies. There were also major bank crises in 1793, 1797, and 1810, which resulted in bank notes that were, suddenly, worth nothing. Through close analysis of Mansfield Park’s mediations on value, this essay shows Austen to be a writer not only concerned with the economic realities and prospects of her characters, but also the extent to which economic thinking influenced their understanding of the world around them, and the people and objects that populated it.
