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People who cannot spell or are ignorant of geography are laughed at in Jane Austen’s novels (though her own spelling was less than perfect).
    One of the Harwood ancestors has been suggested as the original of the uncouth Squire Western in Henry Fielding’s novel
Tom Jones
though the identification can be only conjectural. Squire Harwood was involved in a lawsuit with a neighbour, Mr Hillman. In a phrase which might have been penned by his daughter Jane, George Austen wrote that they had commenced actions against each other and seemed to promise good sport for the lawyers’.
    The troubled history of Squire Harwood’s second son Earle runs through Jane’s letters. Earle, born in 1773, set up as a coal merchant at the age of twenty-one, then joined the Royal Marines. In 1797 he married to spite his family. His wife was said to have a bad reputation, though Jane Austen suspected that she was only an innocent country girl. Earle and Sarah lived at Portsmouth 'without keeping a servant of any kind’, desperate poverty indeed for the officer class. Jane Austen thought they must be very much in love to survive such conditions. In 1800 Earle managed to shoot himself in the thigh at St Marcouf, an island off Normandy, where a British garrison was stationed. Two young Scottish surgeons wanted to amputate, but he refused. He was put on board a cutter and carried to Haslar hospital in Gosport, where the bullet was extracted. The surgeon who took it out wrote to the family and his brother John left at once to see him. His parents were terrified that he might have been involved in an illegal duel, but the surgeon confirmed that the angle of the wound proved it to have been the result of an accident. However, there was damage to the bone. Earle died in 1811, a captain in the Woolwich division of Marines, two years before his father.
    Earle’s elder brother, John Harwood VII, a clergyman, was the heir, but he inherited nothing but debts, previously secret, and a dependent mother and aunt. He had become attached to a wealthy widow, a friend of Jane Austen, Mrs Elizabeth Heathcote, who had a small son. Mrs Heathcote had been a Miss Bigg, of Manydown Park. The Revd John Harwood felt in honour bound to end their association. The poor man loved the house and land which had passed from father to son over six generations. Had he been willing to sell, he could have paid off the loans. Eventually he did part with a small piece of land, but died a broken man. In happier times, he had danced with Jane Austen at a ball when she was twenty -three.
    In 1813 Jane, hearing the news of his troubles, wrote, 'Poor John Harwood! One is really obliged to engage in pity again on his account - and where there is lack of money, one is on pretty sure grounds.’ She knew from personal experience what she was talking about.
    Other families with whom the Austens mixed were the Portals of Freefolk, the Holders of Ashe Park (though Jane was embarrassed, or afraid, at finding herself alone for ten minutes with Mr Holder), the Bramstons of Oakley Hall and the Biggs of Manydown Park. The squirearchy among whom the young Jane Austen moved was less stable than one might think from a superficial reading of her novels. If one reads between her lines, one finds an exploration of social tensions, social and economic change. Yet the skeletal outline of Jane Austen’s world is still recognizably present in pockets of English rural life, which has something to do with her continued popularity as gentle Jane’, though as we shall see she was tougher and more forthright than many readers have assumed. Jane Austen herself belonged to what has been called the ‘pseudo-gentry’, that is, well-spoken, well-brought-up people without much income. Her father as an Oxford graduate belonged to a cultivated élite, then numerically tiny, and held a position of dignity and influence.
    In 1814 baronets, knights, country gentlemen and others having large incomes were reckoned as