Language In Clarissa, Evelina And Pride And Prejudice

mastery and confusion of inheritance language terms in
the eighteenth century were not very different.
The obsession with land and titles incorporated the
language of contracts, settlements and wills into the
language of the public sphere and the family. Publicly,
men like Johnson, Burke, Locke and Hume waded into the
discussions of the rights of the merchant class to marry
into the aristocracy, which they coupled with a new
relationship between wealth and political stability and
future growth. As Spring tells us, landowners and their
families were overtaken by the discussion of estates and
settlements (Law, Land and Family 144-146). Public and
private discussions allowed the language of inheritance
to become powerful and integral.
Money and land were difficult to extricate from
marriage and virtue. Heightened interest in land and
inheritance made for heightened interest in virtuous
standards of a future wife. To ensure proper bloodlines,
conduct books and standards of virtue for unmarried women
abounded, and their language, too, was thrown into the
public mix. One's marriage was more about "raising a
family" in the sense of gaining a title than about having
children. A marriage that was "settled" was more one in
which the contractual agreements of jointure and pin