A Manufactured Jane Austen Controversy

 From Lit Hub:

If you’ve been seeing headlines this week that say things like “Jane Austen canceled for drinking tea” and “Woke Madness! Jane Austen under historical interrogation,” and are a.) worried or b.) simply confused, let me clear things up: Jane Austen has not been canceled for drinking tea, and there is no madly woke historical interrogation happening. What’s happening is a minor panic created by The Telegraph, who published an article misleadingly claiming that Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton planned to create an exhibit calling Jane Austen’s tea-drinking habit racist.

Here’s how it all went down: on the 18th, The Telegraph published an article entitled “Jane Austen’s tea drinking will face ‘historical interrogation’ over slavery links.” The article quoted Lizzie Dunford, director of Jane Austen’s House Museum, who said Jane Austen’s House was “in the process of reviewing and updating all of our interpretation, including plans to explore the Empire and Regency Colonial context of both Austen’s family and her work.” This includes both Austen’s abolitionist views and the fact that her father, George Austen, was the trustee of an Antigua sugar plantation; and that as purchasers of tea, sugar and cotton, the Austen family were consumers of the products of the Atlantic slave trade.

But then the Telegraph article went all-in on the tea claim, citing all the times when Austen expressed love for tea and mentioned her characters drinking tea. The (false) implication: Jane Austen’s House planned to condemn Jane Austen for drinking tea and including it in her work, and create a type of Jane Austen Hate Museum. The article also fearmongeringly invoked Black Lives Matter in regard to a display panel on Jane Austen and abolition.

In reality, the “historical interrogation” phrase came from Dunford’s quote, “This is just the start of a steady and considered process of historical interrogation.” You know, historical interrogation—what every museum does. But the scary headline plus the tea-centered angle were picked up by other sites. The Express called the museum’s planned update “woke madness” and compared it to book-burning; the Daily Mail called it “a revisionist attack” and put “historical interrogation” in scare quotes. The “canceled for drinking tea” idea from the Telegraph article was repeated wholesale in both pieces. Twitter users shared the Express, Daily Mail, and Telegraph articles (and are still sharing them) taking their claims at face value, with addendums like, “I suppose it was only a matter of time before tea became racist.” (Read more.)

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