The answer to the question of the Bennett’s wealth is simple by Regency standards - Mr Bennett is very rich; Mrs Bennett and the Bennett daughters are all poor, because they are not able to inherit his wealth.
Oh dear, no. The Bennets do not have 4 million pounds a year! It's understandable where the figure comes from, but most Austen scholars use a different economic analysis.
Love this - have also written abt Money in Fiction in the Guardian, and am always in trouble for writing about people’s incomes and assets in my own. I believe Austen & Trollope & Forster all right to tell readers about characters’ money. Most don’t understand the gulfs between being “comfortable” and being rich, though.
I'm not sure how wealthy the Bennets are. I get the impression that assessing 18th or 19th century wealth is more complicated than I have authoritative answers to (ie, pinches of salt at the ready here).
The Bennets are clearly reasonably comfortable, but (as another commenter has mentioned) the estate is entailed, so that when Mr Bennet dies the wife and children will be basically on the street, unless the cousin (or whoever) who inherits is inclined to bung them some money for accommodation plus home-help. I've seen the suggestion that Ch.1 of P&P – five daughters and an entailed estate – would be read by contemporaries as the opening of a horror story. The setup of Sense and Sensibility describes a family where the daughters are dependent on a half-brother (or rather the half-brother's wife) doing so, and doing so notably (comically!) reluctantly.
The Bennets may be comfortable now (in a time of great income inequality and no washing machines, simply having domestic staff, would make them ‘rich’), but the surviving women are financially very precarious. The footnote Helen refers to says ‘[The Bennets] go to balls and Jane is considered a natural match for Mr Bingley who is 'in possession of a good fortune'.’ But ‘ball’ here would have been a (socially stratified) dance in a village hall, and the dramatic tension in the narrative is that Jane and Elizabeth are very much _not_ natural matches for anyone rich, because they have too little money to be easily married off.
Even Emma (‘handsome, clever, and rich’) and her father have a slightly ambiguous status. They are marked as well-off, obviously, but their income is from bonds – they have little land to generate rents or agricultural income. I understand that makes even them slightly marginal in one definition of gentry. In this novel, by the way, even the semi-destitute Bates's have a domestic servant.
The Bennets, the Dashwoods, the Bates's and the Watsons all had staff and went to balls, and had incomes which were sufficient multiples of labourers' that they didn't have professions, but each of these novels describes, as core narrative elements, characters whose lives are constrained to varying degrees by lack of money. I suspect that those people did not feel, and would not have been perceived by their contemporaries, as being ‘rich’. You could go as far as to say that the _point_ of P&P is that the Bennets _aren't_ rich, in a practically meaningful sense.
Or: I'd say that ‘rich’ is much more a matter of perception than numbers. This isn't particularly disagreeing with the Edrith article, but this is telling us more about 21st century ideas of wealth, and historical economics, than the fiction.
I believe their circumstances are also shaped by the enormous rise in the cost of living taking place as the book is written / published, and that’s the context in which it’s being read. Prices are soaring as a result of the wars, and so there’s an additional angle to Lydia’s love of soldiers and spendthrift behaviour - both soldiers and ugly new hats cost the family / country money.
The Bennett’s are rich as a family while Mr Bennett is alive. What they lack compared to most of their peers is social capital - they have poor family connections, due to Mr Bennett marrying down in class, and Mrs Bennett has not been able to form useful social connections since their marriage due to her lack of social graces and the fact that they are the wealthiest and highest-class family in their vicinity. This would not matter if they had a son as he would cut off the entail, but since they did not Mrs Bennett’s lack of independent fortune and social capital mean her daughters have poor marriage prospects.
I should clarify, estates and their revenues were entailed to keep them together, to stop them being sold to raise liquid funds. It was usually the wife’s fortune that was liquid, and therefore available to support her in widowhood (by being invested in the funds and providing an annuity to live on) and help daughters find a husband.
Mr and Mrs Bennett should have saved some of their income from the Estate each year to provide a fortune for their daughters. They are not poor; they are spendthrifts.
It also would not have mattered if a) Mr. Bennet had managed his money better and had saved to provide for his daughters, and b) if he had gone through the (considerable) trouble of removing the entail from the estate. The largest portion of the blame falls on him, as he recognizes.
Having a son doesn't "cut off the entail"--it *fulfills* the entail.
The exact line in the book is that the son ‘was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that means be provided for’.
Entails could be limited by a number of generations, and then renewed again - or not. Mr Bennet and his son - if he’d had one - could have decided to cut off the entail together when the son came of age before his father’s death. That would mean that when Mr Bennet died and his son inherited, he would have the ability to sell or mortgage some of the estate lands to raise cash that would be used to support his sisters and mother.
Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, good point about the line from the novel that explains Mr. Bennet's thinking--which illustrates all over again how little he thought this through! According to his thinking, his son would inherit and *then* they would cut the entail. I guess my point is that he didn't have to wait for his son to inherit in order for them to together cut the entail. He, Mr. Bennet, could have cut it of his own accord once it became clear that there would be no son to inherit. That process would have taken planning, time, attorneys, and some money, but it was possible.
And at any rate, sons sometimes don't do what their fathers wish them to do with an estate to care for widows and daughters. To wit: John Dashwood!
You are wrong about how entails work - Mr Bennet could not cut it off alone, that is the point of an entail. It ensures the heir to an estate cannot break it up so that it is passed on to the next generation intact. The heir had to agree to renew the entail while their father was still alive, and were then bound by that entail. The entail would apply for 3 generations - Mr Bennet’s father, Mr Bennet, and Mr Bennet’s heir. Mr Bennet and his son would have the option to renew the entail again, but would not have done so, and instead would have cut it off.
These legal arrangements are made while parents are still living precisely because son-and-heirs do not always behave as their fathers would wish them to. While the father is still alive they control their son’s allowance, and that gives them leverage.
I wonder if the original readers would have inferred that the entail on Longbourne was a condition of Mr Bennet being allowed to marry Mrs Bennet, since she did not bring a fortune to the marriage and was a lower class. It ensures that no part of the estate is sold off to provide money for her.
What you describe is the most straightforward way to break an entail, yes, but it's my understanding that Mr. Bennet could have attempted a "common recovery" as a way of circumventing the entail's restrictions, and this process wasn't abolished until 1833.
Interesting suggestion that the implication is that the entail exists because of Mrs. Bennet.
I fully agree with your ‘...while Mr Bennet is alive’. But however much cash they may have, it seems to me that the wife and daughters' financial precarity is crucial to the question: the fact that they could be homeless when he dies makes it hard for me to see them as ‘rich’.
In other words, it depends a lot on how one chooses to define ‘rich’. Some things don't change: nowadays, an intern working while living in mummy and daddy's town flat might have only pocket money as income, but be secure enough in their prospects to be regarded as rich; a magazine journalist might be well paid per gig, but worry they're potentially unable to pay the mortgage next year – not rich. In the same way, the Bennets do not, whether through the size of the initial estate or through prodigality, have enough cash to buy security. I suppose here I'm saying that, roughly, wealthy=secure, and that that's as true then as it is now.
From a quick re-read of the first couple of chapters, I think the Bennets aren't prominently marked, for wealth or status, one way or the other. I don't trust myself to decode the social or economic rankings (I want to stress that!), but there doesn't seem to be a vast _class_ difference between the Bennets and Darcy, for all that his aunt is married to an earl. The difference seems largely to be cash and capital: Darcy and Bingley have a lot more of it than the Bennets, enough that Darcy's eventual marriage to Elizabeth might be regarded as foolish, in that his wife does not have the usefully liquid fortune that you mention in another comment. Darcy has social power deriving from money power, but perhaps slightly less class power than we might at first expect (he does actually allow himself to marry a Bennet, after all!).
The most important thing, it seems to me, is that the Bennets might potentially have regarded themselves as being near the bottom of the pile both socially and in wealth terms, in a sense that's maybe alien to us. As gentry, I think they would have been above professionals – doctors and lawyers, though clergy were usually gentry, I think – but that's about it. I have the impression that the labouring and servant classes, unnamed and unnoticed, were effectively invisible and un-present, with a class gap possessing a rigidity we find it hard to think of now (other bits of Austen touch on this, of course). So while it might be technically true that Mr Bennet has N times a labourer's income, and could buy things a labourer couldn't, what of it? There isn't a situation where Mr Bennet and his coachman would compare their cashflows (the coachman would be insecure and therefore clearly not wealthy, but that might be of no importance, interest, surprise or relevance to the Bennets).
There are surely few absolutes with wealth, beyond non-homelessness. It's surely mostly relative in practical effect. If so, and if the only people Mr Bennet would sanely compare his income to are other gentry, then he might rationally consider himself non-rich. And (the possible point of this thread!) I suggest we should therefore do the same.
I wouldn't want to be dogmatic about this, but pace the originally quoted footnote, I think it's highly non-obvious that the Bennets should be straightforwardly regarded as ‘rich’.
Darcy’s aunt is not married to an Earl, she is the daughter of an Earl and married to a Sir.
That is why she is ‘Lady Catherine De Burgh’ and not ‘Lady De Burgh’. She married down a social class, from the nobility to the gentry. It’s why she is so touchy about it.
It’s as much about class as wealth. The Bennet daughters need to marry well to solidify their mother’s move from the merchant class to the gentry class. They could find wealthy husbands well able to support them among the professional and merchant classes by socialising with the Gardiners; but that would be a drop in social class. They are not really ‘poor’ in the literal sense.
Thank you for being the only other person in the world, apart from me and Victoria Coren, to care about the difference between Violet, Lady X and Lady Violet X.
It’s funny how this is something that Austen’s original audience would have got *immediately* and modern readers totally miss.
Have you ever read any of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books? They are a Regency-society-inspired sci-fi series with occasional forays into romance that gets this kind of level of detail - and has a lot of fun with characters *not* getting it.
On unclaimed benefits, the biggest addition to Australia’s welfare state this century was the Gillard Labor Govts creation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, however costs have exploded as middle class families who know how to navigate the system get very dubious diagnosis of mental illnesses for their children and go to town on the system
My mate worked for an MP and had a rich family asking the MP to help organise with the NDIS to accept paying for flights and accommodation for the tutor they got for their very iffily diagnosed kid to accompany them on their overseas holiday
When the Greens tried to attack Labor for making some long overdue decisions to rein in costs, the example they used was the NDIS would no longer be paying for expensive lighting rigs to be attached to specially designed clothes dryers that flash to let the hearing impaired know when the drier had finished running (I use a clock for my washing machine and drier that are on another level of my apartment building, this idea seemingly never occurred to the Greens who think that my taxes should pay for fancy lighting rigs for others instead)
People supported the NDIS when they thought it was wheelchairs for poor people, or guide dogs and such, but now every time a middle class family has a kid not getting straight As they medicalise him and ask the taxpayer to fork out, but the more barriers you try and create to stop this it just exacerbates the problem of cutting out the truly deserving poor who struggle to navigate the system and sees a higher % of the payments go to middle class grifters who have the skill and time to know how to work the system
Heartily agree. In my work I often interview graduates, overwhelmingly middle class, well educated (often privately), well travelled. I would say at least three of every four declare autism, ADHD, dyslexia or dyspraxia (the latter being the most popular recently for some reason). These are all very well presented and socially adept young people, there's got to be something weird going on with the diagnoses. Another work acquaintance told me recently they were taking the kids to Thorpe Park over the Easter holiday, and they were very excited because their son (privately educated, now in college and doing very well) qualifies for a lanyard that allows the family to skip the queues for the rides. He has an ADHD diagnosis which mostly seemed to be about getting a longer time for exams during his GCSEs.
The ADHD line-skipping thing is bananas. However, it isn't really pure line-skipping. You just get to stand in the shorter line for line-skippers. There are various line-skipping schemes, some paid for, but since there are so many line-skippers there is still a line of them.
I saw a funny cartoon the other day on Facebook of a person being pulled up into a UFO by a beam and as he is going up he is asking a bunch of questions, things like
If a bird flys across this does it get pulled in too
If I kick my shoe off will it keep coming up
Does this pull up the dirt and leaves
Hey why does your ship have lights
and a few others
I chuckled at it and was about to send to my mum saying "Who does this remind you of' because my mum and family always tease me for analysing things too much and never just accepting things as they are and constantly trying to work things out, so I just thought it would be kind of funny
But then I saw the group that had shared the cartoon and it was called 'neurodivergent memes' and it just did my head in, these people really think that every different type of personality is some kind of mental illness, its infuriating when you consider that someone somewhere kind of like me has been medicalized, it would not surprise me at all if there is some middle-class family who would have then used this diagnosis to get some mental health or NDIS subsidies from the government, you aren't allowed to just be a person anymore without it being diagnosed as some kind of mental health thing, truly maddening. The problem is that there is only so much money in the kitty and while people are claiming funds for having a personality there is less money available to put a paraplegic in a decent wheelchair or a blind person to get some funds to help update their house, its maddening
Again, agree! It is the pathologising of very normal personality traits.
Yet, the hoops my dad had to jump (figuratively) through for his disabled parking badge (he's a wheelchair user and very immobile these days) felt like the Spanish inquisition. Plus getting him any kind of actual help from the local council has been nightmarish, even a simple "assisted bin collection" has taken months to sort.
Something I don’t think I’ve seen in coverage of the Moat play is any reference to Andrew Hankinson’s novel ‘You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life (You Are Raoul Moat)’. Which is great and probably deserves a bit of credit for having tried something similar a few years back
Eeau de ... Stephen Bartlett ? Checks internet ... THAT TOSSER? Shurely not Helen, please .. I must admit I was underwhelmed by Gazza on QT, a bit rabbit in the headlights, but really I can't see the same venal egocentricity as that utter fool off DD.
You've got Gazza all wrong....You and he have something in common as I first became across both of you in the New Statesman, first encountering Gary Stephenson (Gazza) in piece by Anoosh Chakelian (I think) about four years ago. It was quite a striking story and I stumbled across his You Tube Channel a couple of years later. Initially a bit sceptical, my admiration grew over time and I bought and read his book when it came out in hardback last year. Maybe it was because I came to the book knowing a bit about Gary already that I simply did not recognise the content of Oliver Eagleton's review. Its quite something when the editor of the NLR uncritically accepts an FT headline as "dismantling" Gazza's credibility. That FT story followed a lengthy investigation and was discussed when Gazza was the subject of a long interview on Novara Downstream recently. Other than the fact that a couple (not all) of his former colleagues at Citibank said some disobliging things about him, the FT found that everything else about Gazza's backstory stacked up. The Eagleton review drips with condescension and in my opinion demonstrates a complete misreading of who Gazza is and what he is trying to do. A Guardian review when the hardback came out was similarly sniffy and maybe that says something about the left. I wonder if what some on the left most dislike about Gazza is that here is someone who is calling for drastic action to reduce wealth inequality who is not Marxist, not anti-capitalist, and not left wing in any sense - yet gaining an audience and building a momentum for the cause that many of his critics can only dream of. Unabashed about his wealth or ambition, the public figure is pugilistic and arrogant. Like many pugilists, outside the ring Gazza is a humble, thoughtful and in my judgement utterly genuine person who wears his considerable learning and wealth lightly. His rapidly growing social media profile has been compared to that of Jordon Peterson and that utterly contemptible grifter (and worse) Andrew Tate. Gazza has a remarkable ability to communicate complex economic ideas in very simple demotic terms with a wide popular appeal that is quite deliberately encroaching into Tate's demographic - frustrated young men wondering why the things they were promised seem out of reach. You may not be aware that in the same week that you smelled something off, a seemingly rattled Andrew Tate attacked Gazza in one of his podcasts - while claiming not to remember his name. I have seen nothing to suggest that Gazza is motivated by anything other passion for the cause he espouses. His You Tube videos are not interrupted by ads, no content is behind a paywall, his public appearances are on free media and subscriptions to meet the cost of running the channel are voluntary. He makes his living from investing and the passive income from the assets his wealth has enabled him to acquire. Gazza does not lack confidence and it is perhaps unsurprising that he extracted a large advance for the book from its publisher. I don't believe for a minute that the money was a motivation. That is another stick for his critics to beat him with but Gazza knows his success as a trader and now author is what draws an audience and are the key to his credibility. He is also proven right a lot. He often reminds his viewers that success as a trader relies on being right when everyone else is wrong. He was right again recently when in the face of the received wisdom, he predicted that house prices - including for London boxes - would keep rising even after interest rate increases. I'm neither young nor naive, and nor am I any kind of superfan. I could be wrong but after observing Gazza for a couple of years I believe him and would urge you - someone else whose work I admire greatly - to take a closer look.
I doubt American scientists can be lured to Britain. One reason I think Costco is not as popular in Britain as it is in the US that we simply don’t have the storage space. Our houses are not only unaffordable, but tiny, especially newbuilds. My Texan friend’s house is easily 3 times the size of my house (not to mention it has an outdoor kitchen and a pool, which I’ll never be able to afford), and she is no millionaire. She is married to… a British scientist.
An addendum to your point that tiktok, mumsnet etc have made accessing benefits easier is the fact that - in the case of EHCPs, anyway, which I have experience of - the process itself has been for a long time excessively hard to navigate. Not in the 'having to spend a long time filling on forms' way but in the 'if you don't express thing in exactly the right way, the form is pretty useless'. This then leads to a two tier situation where parents who find out how tricky it is, and thus get help, get the funding their need, and parents who don't, don't.
This sentence: "Education, Health and Care plans allow parents to claim benefits worth tens of thousands if their child has learning difficulties" is a little misleading. Education itself is not a benefit, but a right, and unfortunately, because of a lack of state-run special schools, private special schools are able to obtain ££££ in funding for that right. I'm glad my daughter was able to get an education (and some GCSEs!) but it's not my fault, or the fault of any parent seeking an EHCP, that the government is paying so much. They need to build more special schools, in short. (Of course, very very rarely does any of the money go to parents directly - only when no schools are available, and home schooling is the only option.)
I suspect the opinion poll on who is rich is heavily skewed by the "neither" category acting as a proxy for "don't know". Beware the "don't knows" in opinion polls.
The answer to the question of the Bennett’s wealth is simple by Regency standards - Mr Bennett is very rich; Mrs Bennett and the Bennett daughters are all poor, because they are not able to inherit his wealth.
“Final”!?
Oh dear, no. The Bennets do not have 4 million pounds a year! It's understandable where the figure comes from, but most Austen scholars use a different economic analysis.
Here's economist Katharine Toran in the journal for the Jane Austen Society of North America: "For Mr. Bennet, who had £2,000 a year, the retail price index method gives him an annual income of approximately $200,000, while GDP per capita gives him an annual income of approximately $3,000,000. The former is a better method here, considering the size of Mr. Bennet’s fortune." Her longer explanation can be found here:https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/vol36no1/toran/#:~:text=Bennet%2C%20who%20had%20%C2%A32%2C000,annual%20income%20of%20approximately%20%243%2C000%2C000.
EDIT: This comes across as more pedantic than I meant to be lol
Indeed, he is rich but not a millionaire. Within his social class he is about middling.
Joe Lycett catching a stray there. 👏👏👏 I think you should elaborate on your feelings regarding his work, Helen - perhaps in a four-part Substack post?
It’s not a well-thought-out opinion, I just find him a bit … Walliamsy
I lol'd heartily at that. Glad it's not just me.
Yes I would also like to know what Helen thinks about him!
I've always thought Joe brave and funny and admired his political stunts.
Thank you for the gift link. And congratulations on the book! *pops champagne cork* *throws streamers*
Love this - have also written abt Money in Fiction in the Guardian, and am always in trouble for writing about people’s incomes and assets in my own. I believe Austen & Trollope & Forster all right to tell readers about characters’ money. Most don’t understand the gulfs between being “comfortable” and being rich, though.
I'm not sure how wealthy the Bennets are. I get the impression that assessing 18th or 19th century wealth is more complicated than I have authoritative answers to (ie, pinches of salt at the ready here).
The Bennets are clearly reasonably comfortable, but (as another commenter has mentioned) the estate is entailed, so that when Mr Bennet dies the wife and children will be basically on the street, unless the cousin (or whoever) who inherits is inclined to bung them some money for accommodation plus home-help. I've seen the suggestion that Ch.1 of P&P – five daughters and an entailed estate – would be read by contemporaries as the opening of a horror story. The setup of Sense and Sensibility describes a family where the daughters are dependent on a half-brother (or rather the half-brother's wife) doing so, and doing so notably (comically!) reluctantly.
The Bennets may be comfortable now (in a time of great income inequality and no washing machines, simply having domestic staff, would make them ‘rich’), but the surviving women are financially very precarious. The footnote Helen refers to says ‘[The Bennets] go to balls and Jane is considered a natural match for Mr Bingley who is 'in possession of a good fortune'.’ But ‘ball’ here would have been a (socially stratified) dance in a village hall, and the dramatic tension in the narrative is that Jane and Elizabeth are very much _not_ natural matches for anyone rich, because they have too little money to be easily married off.
Even Emma (‘handsome, clever, and rich’) and her father have a slightly ambiguous status. They are marked as well-off, obviously, but their income is from bonds – they have little land to generate rents or agricultural income. I understand that makes even them slightly marginal in one definition of gentry. In this novel, by the way, even the semi-destitute Bates's have a domestic servant.
The Bennets, the Dashwoods, the Bates's and the Watsons all had staff and went to balls, and had incomes which were sufficient multiples of labourers' that they didn't have professions, but each of these novels describes, as core narrative elements, characters whose lives are constrained to varying degrees by lack of money. I suspect that those people did not feel, and would not have been perceived by their contemporaries, as being ‘rich’. You could go as far as to say that the _point_ of P&P is that the Bennets _aren't_ rich, in a practically meaningful sense.
Or: I'd say that ‘rich’ is much more a matter of perception than numbers. This isn't particularly disagreeing with the Edrith article, but this is telling us more about 21st century ideas of wealth, and historical economics, than the fiction.
I believe their circumstances are also shaped by the enormous rise in the cost of living taking place as the book is written / published, and that’s the context in which it’s being read. Prices are soaring as a result of the wars, and so there’s an additional angle to Lydia’s love of soldiers and spendthrift behaviour - both soldiers and ugly new hats cost the family / country money.
This is a wonderful research article on the changing expectations and costs of being a ‘respectable’ working class person (think Robert Martin in ‘Emma’) over about 500 years - https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/122856/4/The_Economic_History_Review_-_2024_-_Humphries_-_Respectable_standards_of_living_The_alternative_lens_of_maintenance_costs.pdf
The Bennett’s are rich as a family while Mr Bennett is alive. What they lack compared to most of their peers is social capital - they have poor family connections, due to Mr Bennett marrying down in class, and Mrs Bennett has not been able to form useful social connections since their marriage due to her lack of social graces and the fact that they are the wealthiest and highest-class family in their vicinity. This would not matter if they had a son as he would cut off the entail, but since they did not Mrs Bennett’s lack of independent fortune and social capital mean her daughters have poor marriage prospects.
I should clarify, estates and their revenues were entailed to keep them together, to stop them being sold to raise liquid funds. It was usually the wife’s fortune that was liquid, and therefore available to support her in widowhood (by being invested in the funds and providing an annuity to live on) and help daughters find a husband.
Mr and Mrs Bennett should have saved some of their income from the Estate each year to provide a fortune for their daughters. They are not poor; they are spendthrifts.
It also would not have mattered if a) Mr. Bennet had managed his money better and had saved to provide for his daughters, and b) if he had gone through the (considerable) trouble of removing the entail from the estate. The largest portion of the blame falls on him, as he recognizes.
Having a son doesn't "cut off the entail"--it *fulfills* the entail.
The exact line in the book is that the son ‘was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that means be provided for’.
Entails could be limited by a number of generations, and then renewed again - or not. Mr Bennet and his son - if he’d had one - could have decided to cut off the entail together when the son came of age before his father’s death. That would mean that when Mr Bennet died and his son inherited, he would have the ability to sell or mortgage some of the estate lands to raise cash that would be used to support his sisters and mother.
Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, good point about the line from the novel that explains Mr. Bennet's thinking--which illustrates all over again how little he thought this through! According to his thinking, his son would inherit and *then* they would cut the entail. I guess my point is that he didn't have to wait for his son to inherit in order for them to together cut the entail. He, Mr. Bennet, could have cut it of his own accord once it became clear that there would be no son to inherit. That process would have taken planning, time, attorneys, and some money, but it was possible.
And at any rate, sons sometimes don't do what their fathers wish them to do with an estate to care for widows and daughters. To wit: John Dashwood!
You are wrong about how entails work - Mr Bennet could not cut it off alone, that is the point of an entail. It ensures the heir to an estate cannot break it up so that it is passed on to the next generation intact. The heir had to agree to renew the entail while their father was still alive, and were then bound by that entail. The entail would apply for 3 generations - Mr Bennet’s father, Mr Bennet, and Mr Bennet’s heir. Mr Bennet and his son would have the option to renew the entail again, but would not have done so, and instead would have cut it off.
These legal arrangements are made while parents are still living precisely because son-and-heirs do not always behave as their fathers would wish them to. While the father is still alive they control their son’s allowance, and that gives them leverage.
I wonder if the original readers would have inferred that the entail on Longbourne was a condition of Mr Bennet being allowed to marry Mrs Bennet, since she did not bring a fortune to the marriage and was a lower class. It ensures that no part of the estate is sold off to provide money for her.
What you describe is the most straightforward way to break an entail, yes, but it's my understanding that Mr. Bennet could have attempted a "common recovery" as a way of circumventing the entail's restrictions, and this process wasn't abolished until 1833.
Interesting suggestion that the implication is that the entail exists because of Mrs. Bennet.
This is an interesting and knotty subject.
I fully agree with your ‘...while Mr Bennet is alive’. But however much cash they may have, it seems to me that the wife and daughters' financial precarity is crucial to the question: the fact that they could be homeless when he dies makes it hard for me to see them as ‘rich’.
In other words, it depends a lot on how one chooses to define ‘rich’. Some things don't change: nowadays, an intern working while living in mummy and daddy's town flat might have only pocket money as income, but be secure enough in their prospects to be regarded as rich; a magazine journalist might be well paid per gig, but worry they're potentially unable to pay the mortgage next year – not rich. In the same way, the Bennets do not, whether through the size of the initial estate or through prodigality, have enough cash to buy security. I suppose here I'm saying that, roughly, wealthy=secure, and that that's as true then as it is now.
From a quick re-read of the first couple of chapters, I think the Bennets aren't prominently marked, for wealth or status, one way or the other. I don't trust myself to decode the social or economic rankings (I want to stress that!), but there doesn't seem to be a vast _class_ difference between the Bennets and Darcy, for all that his aunt is married to an earl. The difference seems largely to be cash and capital: Darcy and Bingley have a lot more of it than the Bennets, enough that Darcy's eventual marriage to Elizabeth might be regarded as foolish, in that his wife does not have the usefully liquid fortune that you mention in another comment. Darcy has social power deriving from money power, but perhaps slightly less class power than we might at first expect (he does actually allow himself to marry a Bennet, after all!).
The most important thing, it seems to me, is that the Bennets might potentially have regarded themselves as being near the bottom of the pile both socially and in wealth terms, in a sense that's maybe alien to us. As gentry, I think they would have been above professionals – doctors and lawyers, though clergy were usually gentry, I think – but that's about it. I have the impression that the labouring and servant classes, unnamed and unnoticed, were effectively invisible and un-present, with a class gap possessing a rigidity we find it hard to think of now (other bits of Austen touch on this, of course). So while it might be technically true that Mr Bennet has N times a labourer's income, and could buy things a labourer couldn't, what of it? There isn't a situation where Mr Bennet and his coachman would compare their cashflows (the coachman would be insecure and therefore clearly not wealthy, but that might be of no importance, interest, surprise or relevance to the Bennets).
There are surely few absolutes with wealth, beyond non-homelessness. It's surely mostly relative in practical effect. If so, and if the only people Mr Bennet would sanely compare his income to are other gentry, then he might rationally consider himself non-rich. And (the possible point of this thread!) I suggest we should therefore do the same.
I wouldn't want to be dogmatic about this, but pace the originally quoted footnote, I think it's highly non-obvious that the Bennets should be straightforwardly regarded as ‘rich’.
Darcy’s aunt is not married to an Earl, she is the daughter of an Earl and married to a Sir.
That is why she is ‘Lady Catherine De Burgh’ and not ‘Lady De Burgh’. She married down a social class, from the nobility to the gentry. It’s why she is so touchy about it.
It’s as much about class as wealth. The Bennet daughters need to marry well to solidify their mother’s move from the merchant class to the gentry class. They could find wealthy husbands well able to support them among the professional and merchant classes by socialising with the Gardiners; but that would be a drop in social class. They are not really ‘poor’ in the literal sense.
Thank you for being the only other person in the world, apart from me and Victoria Coren, to care about the difference between Violet, Lady X and Lady Violet X.
It’s funny how this is something that Austen’s original audience would have got *immediately* and modern readers totally miss.
Have you ever read any of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books? They are a Regency-society-inspired sci-fi series with occasional forays into romance that gets this kind of level of detail - and has a lot of fun with characters *not* getting it.
Damn: “simply having domestic staff, would make them ‘rich’” -> “simply having domestic staff would not make them ‘rich’” (oh, for an edit button...)
I'm sure you have more than two books in you, Helen
On unclaimed benefits, the biggest addition to Australia’s welfare state this century was the Gillard Labor Govts creation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, however costs have exploded as middle class families who know how to navigate the system get very dubious diagnosis of mental illnesses for their children and go to town on the system
My mate worked for an MP and had a rich family asking the MP to help organise with the NDIS to accept paying for flights and accommodation for the tutor they got for their very iffily diagnosed kid to accompany them on their overseas holiday
When the Greens tried to attack Labor for making some long overdue decisions to rein in costs, the example they used was the NDIS would no longer be paying for expensive lighting rigs to be attached to specially designed clothes dryers that flash to let the hearing impaired know when the drier had finished running (I use a clock for my washing machine and drier that are on another level of my apartment building, this idea seemingly never occurred to the Greens who think that my taxes should pay for fancy lighting rigs for others instead)
People supported the NDIS when they thought it was wheelchairs for poor people, or guide dogs and such, but now every time a middle class family has a kid not getting straight As they medicalise him and ask the taxpayer to fork out, but the more barriers you try and create to stop this it just exacerbates the problem of cutting out the truly deserving poor who struggle to navigate the system and sees a higher % of the payments go to middle class grifters who have the skill and time to know how to work the system
Heartily agree. In my work I often interview graduates, overwhelmingly middle class, well educated (often privately), well travelled. I would say at least three of every four declare autism, ADHD, dyslexia or dyspraxia (the latter being the most popular recently for some reason). These are all very well presented and socially adept young people, there's got to be something weird going on with the diagnoses. Another work acquaintance told me recently they were taking the kids to Thorpe Park over the Easter holiday, and they were very excited because their son (privately educated, now in college and doing very well) qualifies for a lanyard that allows the family to skip the queues for the rides. He has an ADHD diagnosis which mostly seemed to be about getting a longer time for exams during his GCSEs.
The ADHD line-skipping thing is bananas. However, it isn't really pure line-skipping. You just get to stand in the shorter line for line-skippers. There are various line-skipping schemes, some paid for, but since there are so many line-skippers there is still a line of them.
It's going to be funny then, when all the middle class line-skippers show up in the holidays and end up with long lines of line-skippers.
I saw a funny cartoon the other day on Facebook of a person being pulled up into a UFO by a beam and as he is going up he is asking a bunch of questions, things like
If a bird flys across this does it get pulled in too
If I kick my shoe off will it keep coming up
Does this pull up the dirt and leaves
Hey why does your ship have lights
and a few others
I chuckled at it and was about to send to my mum saying "Who does this remind you of' because my mum and family always tease me for analysing things too much and never just accepting things as they are and constantly trying to work things out, so I just thought it would be kind of funny
But then I saw the group that had shared the cartoon and it was called 'neurodivergent memes' and it just did my head in, these people really think that every different type of personality is some kind of mental illness, its infuriating when you consider that someone somewhere kind of like me has been medicalized, it would not surprise me at all if there is some middle-class family who would have then used this diagnosis to get some mental health or NDIS subsidies from the government, you aren't allowed to just be a person anymore without it being diagnosed as some kind of mental health thing, truly maddening. The problem is that there is only so much money in the kitty and while people are claiming funds for having a personality there is less money available to put a paraplegic in a decent wheelchair or a blind person to get some funds to help update their house, its maddening
Again, agree! It is the pathologising of very normal personality traits.
Yet, the hoops my dad had to jump (figuratively) through for his disabled parking badge (he's a wheelchair user and very immobile these days) felt like the Spanish inquisition. Plus getting him any kind of actual help from the local council has been nightmarish, even a simple "assisted bin collection" has taken months to sort.
Something I don’t think I’ve seen in coverage of the Moat play is any reference to Andrew Hankinson’s novel ‘You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life (You Are Raoul Moat)’. Which is great and probably deserves a bit of credit for having tried something similar a few years back
I know Rob talked to Hankinson but he had already sold the rights to the book elsewhere so couldn’t collaborate on the play.
Ah that’s interesting thank you. Figured there must have been some sort of crossover
This is nice—Andrew did an essay for the programme https://x.com/andrewhankinson/status/1910220271539151112?s=46
Ah, that’s great. Really appreciate you digging that out. Thank you
Thanks both. Was a bit hamstrung but wrote about it here https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/raoul-moat-manhunt-royal-court/
So when I said I hadn't seen any mention I was definitely wrong then! It's a fantastic book, I'm glad it's still having an impact.
Eeau de ... Stephen Bartlett ? Checks internet ... THAT TOSSER? Shurely not Helen, please .. I must admit I was underwhelmed by Gazza on QT, a bit rabbit in the headlights, but really I can't see the same venal egocentricity as that utter fool off DD.
You've got Gazza all wrong....You and he have something in common as I first became across both of you in the New Statesman, first encountering Gary Stephenson (Gazza) in piece by Anoosh Chakelian (I think) about four years ago. It was quite a striking story and I stumbled across his You Tube Channel a couple of years later. Initially a bit sceptical, my admiration grew over time and I bought and read his book when it came out in hardback last year. Maybe it was because I came to the book knowing a bit about Gary already that I simply did not recognise the content of Oliver Eagleton's review. Its quite something when the editor of the NLR uncritically accepts an FT headline as "dismantling" Gazza's credibility. That FT story followed a lengthy investigation and was discussed when Gazza was the subject of a long interview on Novara Downstream recently. Other than the fact that a couple (not all) of his former colleagues at Citibank said some disobliging things about him, the FT found that everything else about Gazza's backstory stacked up. The Eagleton review drips with condescension and in my opinion demonstrates a complete misreading of who Gazza is and what he is trying to do. A Guardian review when the hardback came out was similarly sniffy and maybe that says something about the left. I wonder if what some on the left most dislike about Gazza is that here is someone who is calling for drastic action to reduce wealth inequality who is not Marxist, not anti-capitalist, and not left wing in any sense - yet gaining an audience and building a momentum for the cause that many of his critics can only dream of. Unabashed about his wealth or ambition, the public figure is pugilistic and arrogant. Like many pugilists, outside the ring Gazza is a humble, thoughtful and in my judgement utterly genuine person who wears his considerable learning and wealth lightly. His rapidly growing social media profile has been compared to that of Jordon Peterson and that utterly contemptible grifter (and worse) Andrew Tate. Gazza has a remarkable ability to communicate complex economic ideas in very simple demotic terms with a wide popular appeal that is quite deliberately encroaching into Tate's demographic - frustrated young men wondering why the things they were promised seem out of reach. You may not be aware that in the same week that you smelled something off, a seemingly rattled Andrew Tate attacked Gazza in one of his podcasts - while claiming not to remember his name. I have seen nothing to suggest that Gazza is motivated by anything other passion for the cause he espouses. His You Tube videos are not interrupted by ads, no content is behind a paywall, his public appearances are on free media and subscriptions to meet the cost of running the channel are voluntary. He makes his living from investing and the passive income from the assets his wealth has enabled him to acquire. Gazza does not lack confidence and it is perhaps unsurprising that he extracted a large advance for the book from its publisher. I don't believe for a minute that the money was a motivation. That is another stick for his critics to beat him with but Gazza knows his success as a trader and now author is what draws an audience and are the key to his credibility. He is also proven right a lot. He often reminds his viewers that success as a trader relies on being right when everyone else is wrong. He was right again recently when in the face of the received wisdom, he predicted that house prices - including for London boxes - would keep rising even after interest rate increases. I'm neither young nor naive, and nor am I any kind of superfan. I could be wrong but after observing Gazza for a couple of years I believe him and would urge you - someone else whose work I admire greatly - to take a closer look.
I doubt American scientists can be lured to Britain. One reason I think Costco is not as popular in Britain as it is in the US that we simply don’t have the storage space. Our houses are not only unaffordable, but tiny, especially newbuilds. My Texan friend’s house is easily 3 times the size of my house (not to mention it has an outdoor kitchen and a pool, which I’ll never be able to afford), and she is no millionaire. She is married to… a British scientist.
“Gen X entered the workforce just as creative jobs stopped being well-paid and fun.”
In 1998, I was turned down for a place on Cardiff Uni’s post-grad magazine journalism course because, the tutor told me, that at 26 I was too old.
Always rankled but turns out he was right. Just not for the reasons he imagined.
An addendum to your point that tiktok, mumsnet etc have made accessing benefits easier is the fact that - in the case of EHCPs, anyway, which I have experience of - the process itself has been for a long time excessively hard to navigate. Not in the 'having to spend a long time filling on forms' way but in the 'if you don't express thing in exactly the right way, the form is pretty useless'. This then leads to a two tier situation where parents who find out how tricky it is, and thus get help, get the funding their need, and parents who don't, don't.
This sentence: "Education, Health and Care plans allow parents to claim benefits worth tens of thousands if their child has learning difficulties" is a little misleading. Education itself is not a benefit, but a right, and unfortunately, because of a lack of state-run special schools, private special schools are able to obtain ££££ in funding for that right. I'm glad my daughter was able to get an education (and some GCSEs!) but it's not my fault, or the fault of any parent seeking an EHCP, that the government is paying so much. They need to build more special schools, in short. (Of course, very very rarely does any of the money go to parents directly - only when no schools are available, and home schooling is the only option.)
I suspect the opinion poll on who is rich is heavily skewed by the "neither" category acting as a proxy for "don't know". Beware the "don't knows" in opinion polls.