Butchers and Graziers: Meat, Trade, and Shifting Hierarchies in <i>Persuasion</i> and <i>Emma</i>

In this essay, I address the moment in Persuasion when Mrs. Smith tells Anne Elliot that the late Mrs. William Elliot’s grandfather and father were respectively a “butcher” and a “grazier,” thus revealing for the first time in any of Jane Austen’s novels a specific economic ladder by which the low become high. But why of all trades did Austen choose a butcher and a grazier? How were these trades related? What were their social and ethical implications? How could they make men (and their daughters) rich? The essay engages contemporary newspapers, publications, graphic works, and modern scholarship to reconstruct the eighteenth-century public’s perception of butchers and graziers—their disreputable and sometimes violent dealings, illegal trading, promotion of immoral economy, and generally bad reputation—and then to contextualize such practices in relation to the economic and hierarchical inuendoes of the most detailed episode of domestic butchering and meat procurement in all of Austen’s novels: the “Hartfield pork” scene in Emma.