According to Austen, Mr. Bennet's annual income is 2,000 pounds, or 160,000 dollars. Compare that to Darcy's 10,000 pounds or 800,000 dollars. Additionally, the sums Austen gives are often discussed in terms of 4 or 5 percents.
How much is $10,000 a year in pride and prejudice?
Darcy's £10,000 in modern times varies dramatically: from approximately $990,000 to $16,000,000. Although in modern times there is one standard accepted measure of inflation, the problem becomes more complex when attempting to capture inflation as far back in the past as the nineteenth century.
Darcy of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is described as having 10,000 pounds a year, and his friend Mr. Bingley is said to have “four or five thousand a year.” These would be massive fortunes both for the time and now once adjusted for inflation.
Mr. Rushworth, with an income from Sotherton of £12,000 a year – over $397,000 – is the wealthiest of Jane Austen's characters whose incomes we know but is otherwise virtually forgettable.
The landed gentry such as Darcy, Lady Catherine De Burgh, and even Mr Bennet made their money from the rents of tenet farmers and the crops sold at market, while the wealthy merchant class were still in the process of establishing themselves among them, (the landed gentry could not ignore the sheer amount of wealth ...
Because Lydia and Wickham lived together for two weeks before they were found, society's assumption is that they have had sex and Lydia is therefore "ruined" unless Wickham marries her.
Surprisingly, the last autistic character on Bottomer's list is Mr. Darcy. Whereas scholars see Darcy as shy, Bottomer believes that it “is not pride but subtle autism that is the major reason for Darcy's frequent silences, awkward behaviour at social events” (111).
How much was 500 pounds worth in sense and sensibility?
One can have two servants! On £500 (or $35,000), Fanny says “They will have no carriage and no horses, and hardly any servants.” On £700 (or $49,000) to £1,000 ($70,00) a year, one is in the landed gentry but domestic economy still requires work, esp.
All in all, she did well enough after her husband's death, thanks to her sons' financial support and that of her sister-in-law, leaving her sole surviving daughter a considerable amount of money when she died in 1827, alongside her other possessions – “property of every kind”, as the Will specified.
The top 1% of households in Jane Austen's day had net worths of £100,000. That puts Mr Darcy's £200,000 and Mr. Bingley's £100,000 into perspective. Mr Bennet's £50,000 doesn't put him in the category of top 1% but he was well-to-do for his time (as Mr Collins, his heir, will be).
Bennet pessimistically says 10k, but in Aunt Gardiner's letter to Elizabeth, she limits it to 3 items: Wickham's debts ("considerably more than 1k"), 1k to settle on Lydia, and Wickham's commission purchased.
In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well-formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face,” wrote Austen's nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh.
Fitzwilliam Darcy is a wealthy twenty-eight-year-old man. He is very fond and protective of his younger sister, Georgiana Darcy. He owns Pemberley and is best friends with Charles Bingley. Despite her lower class, he eventually marries Elizabeth Bennet, with whom he fell in love at the start of the novel.
She was buried in the north aisle of Winchester Cathedral. While the inscription on her tomb (upper-right) makes no reference of her literary talent, a brass tablet was added at a later date confirming that she was “known to many by her writings”.
Wickham marries Lydia because Mr. Darcy pays him a lot of money to do so. He does not love her, but he is strongly pressured to marry her to protect the family's reputation.
In Pride and Prejudice, Lydia is only fifteen when she marries Mr Wickham. With the Bennet family wanting to avoid drawing attention to the scandalous elopement by having the banns read in church (and not enough time elapsing in the story for that to have happened anyway), we can assume they married by common licence.
It is certainly possible that the Darcy family fortune was based entirely on the profits of the mines in Derbyshire (harsh as those conditions might have been, they were NOT akin to slavery), but it's much more likely that those profits were then put to use in ways that almost certainly have ties to slavery.
The Bennet sisters have only a relatively small dowry of £1,000; and as their family's estate will pass out of their hands when their father dies, the family faces a major social decline, giving the Bennet girls only a limited time in which to find a husband.
Before her death Cassandra destroyed many of Jane's surviving letters, an act which was much criticised by later generations of critics. However, today it is believed that she acted in order to protect Jane's memory and reputation.
Current medical opinion, biographers, and encyclopaedic reference all lean towards a diagnosis of Addison's disease, which involves destruction of the adrenal glands, but other medical opinion surmises that Jane may have been suffering from Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer.
