Jane Austen’s Anti-Slavery

John Millar’s eighteenth-century Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society has some interesting echoes in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Millar’s title calls to mind Mr. Collins’s officious advice about Lady Catherine de Bourgh, that “‘[s]he likes to have the distinction of rank preserved’” (161). The novel contains Millar’s name as well as his phrasing; it was Colonel Millar’s regiment over whom the young future Mrs. Bennet cried her eyes out when it left her village (229). An additional highlight is that Millar’s Distinction of Ranks was published in 1771, 1773, and 1781 by John Murray, the firm that later published four of Jane Austen’s novels. Notwithstanding that Austen designated the younger John Murray “a Rogue of course, but a civil one” (17–18 October 1815), she closed with him to publish all her mature works and the retrieved and retitled Northanger Abbey.