Jane Austen’s England was racked by epidemics. Typhus, typhoid, influenza, smallpox and cholera spread in the great unsanitary manufacturing towns that had expanded so dramatically through the North and Midlands. Within the countryside, too, disease flourished, with poor harvests, depressed wages and malnutrition.

In city and country alike, measles, mumps and scarlet fever killed babies and children, while puerperal fever and poor obstetrics destroyed their mothers. Partly through fear that epidemics would spread from lower to higher classes, ‘houses of recovery’ were founded in the 1790s. Beds were – as far as possible – disinfected after a corpse was removed.

Travel was limited and people often stayed their whole lives in one place. So a particular noxious strain of a fever could – unlike today – remain localised. But one large group of people was on the move throughout the nation. The country was at war during almost all Jane Austen’s adult life and troops spread new infections caught in India, the Caribbean, France or Spain. An especially virulent epidemic occurred in 1815, when the Napoleonic Wars ended and weary troops returned from the Continent and farther afield.