Deconstructing Mr. Darcy: Just how rich was he?

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|By Jennifer Albers-Smith |

我在密歇根大学的大学里乘坐了这一令人敬畏的课程 - 10年后 - 仍然与我共鸣。它专注于简奥斯汀和她的同时代人。我们阅读了所有奥斯汀的小说以及Radcliffe,Burney和Wollstonofraft,很容易成为我学术职业的最佳四个月。金宝搏彩票教授真的是创新的,并带来了她的一位同事,来自经济部门的经济学部门,讲课讲座奥斯汀的时间。她汇集了这一巨大的PowerPoint甲板,我仍然有这一天,因为我认为这是如此兴趣。

Numbers pop up all the time in Austen’s novels, but the reader really has no sense of how rich Bingley and Darcy are or how “poor” the Bennets are by comparison.

Because Economics is by no means my strength, I naturally assumed it was easy to figure out how much Mr. Darcy’s 10,000 per year really is in 2014. It turns out it isn’t. Professor Dominguez said that there is no single correct way to determine the relative value of an amount of money in one year compared to another, and that most approaches to this problem attempt to measure the price of a “bundle” of goods and services that a representative group buys or earns. They then compare that cost of the bundle in one year to the cost in another year.

So calculating purchasing power for the early 1800s is no exact science, but there is a网站(no surprise there!) that allows us to get an estimate for purchasing power in 1813 (whenPride and Prejudice发表)。

So, in today’s dollars, just how much is Darcy worth? £569,300.00 per year! And how much is that in U.S. dollars? $966,966! Yeah, Darcy was loaded.

这只是他投资的4%的利息,而不是他的屋租房。他的实际遗产/净值会更大。难怪班纳特太太非常兴奋。彬格莱在每年4000磅,或者2014年每年386,684美元的穷人并不是穷人。没有多少人可以说他们每年的那么多 - 并且只是兴趣。

进一步探索这个讨论,我进去了金宝搏彩票大风新闻and pulled out some advertisements placed in 1813 to give us an idea of what other things cost whenPride and Prejudicecame out. I limited my search to January 1, 1813-December 31, 1813 and selected just advertisements.

Source:
资料来源:“广告和通知”。杰克逊的牛津杂志[牛津,英国] 1月2日1813年1月2日:N.P.19世纪英国报纸。网。2014年6月16日。
Room and board at the Ladies’ Seminary in Adderbury costs 18 pounds 18 shillings per annum, with an additional 2 pounds 2 shillings for washing, and the same for French and “Use of the Globes”, which I’m assuming means some sort of geography lessons. That comes to a total of 24 pounds 24 shillings per annum. Using the above website and a currency converter, that comes to $2,437 per annum. I’m pretty positive boarding school today comes nowhere near that price. That amountmightcover school supplies – maybe. This would seem to suggest that a woman’s education was a lot cheaper back in 1813.

房屋出租,带有餐饮和早餐厅和仆人的宿舍,每年运行26磅,2个先令,使用我们的计算器和货币转换器来到2,625磅或每年4,457美元,这是每月371美元。似乎对我来说非常愉快!

Source:
资料来源:“广告和通知”。Morning Chronicle [London, England] 1 Dec. 1813: n.p. 19th Century British Newspapers. Web. 16 June 2014.

I could spend all day looking through金宝搏彩票大风新闻browsing advertisements. It’s utterly fascinating. Every time I spend more time looking through old newspapers, I can’t help but want to learn more!


照片About the Author


珍妮弗爱她的孩子,狗和简奥斯汀。她有一个b.a.来自密歇根大学的英语和社会学,并将她的醒来时间作为营销导演,并喂养她的家人。



4.thoughts on “Deconstructing Mr. Darcy: Just how rich was he?”

  1. This is such an interesting perspective about 19th century life. I love the comparisons with contemporary life. Fascinating.

  2. 达西先生拥有一家乡村林地,农田,水道和花园的大庄园。房子很近一座城堡。他的收入估计为每年10,000磅,也许更多。

    Mr. Bingley was considered wealthy, and his income was estimated at only 5,000 a year.

    这是相当一部分的年收入s when a family of seven, like the Bennetts, could live on 2,000 a year and still afford to dress decently, travel in a limited way, keep servants and a country estate, and set a fine table. Admittedly, five unmarried daughters did stretch their father’s income, and none of the girls had a meaningful dowry. But they were living in genteel but limited circumstances, not hopeless poverty. They were not destitute, but were sometimes financially pressed.

    Clearly, though, they all knew they could not afford Lydia’s selfish idiocy or Wickham’s perfidy without the aid of Mrs. Bennet’s successful brother — or, as it turned out, from Mr. Darcy. Buying Wickham to save Lydia’s honor would have left Mr. Bennett bankrupt, even though not salvaging Lydia’s name and reputation would have ruined any chance the four other sisters had of making good marriages. Lydia’s ruin would have sullied the reputations of her sisters and their entire family. .

  3. The problem with estimating Darcy’s wealth is that we live in a consumer/consumables economy, whereas they lived in a service economy, so a straight rate-of-exchange doesn’t begin to cover actual buying power within the world Austen lived in. However, if you take the rate paid to a full-time manual laborer in Austen/Darcy’s time, compared with a minimum wage in our time, Darcy has around $7 million per year. Yet, presumably, the wages they paid laborers was actually enough to live off by fairly, whereas the minimum wage today is far below what you’d need to get by. So, if you increase the minimum wage to something actually liveable nowadays, which recent studies say would be around $22 per hour (the hourly rate needed to rent a 2 BR apartment), that would mean the worth of Darcy’s 10,000 would be comparable to over $20 million per year. You can easily see how that pans out as it would explain his extravagant manor, artworks, library, musical instruments, acreage, servants enough to care for all of that, — and his flakey childhood friend(s).

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