Journal · Pride and Prejudice

Ten thousand a year: what the money in Pride and Prejudice really means

Nobody in Pride and Prejudice is shy about money, and Austen expects you to follow the sums. Within a few pages you hear that one young man has "four or five thousand a year" and another "ten thousand a year". Here's what those numbers meant, and why they turn a love story into something sharper.

"A year" means income

Attached to a sum of money, "a year" means annual income. In this world a man's income was the first thing anyone wanted to know about him, and gossip spread the figure fast. For a gentleman's family it came from one of two places: rents from the farmers who worked an estate, or interest on capital, usually invested in government stock known as "the funds", paying around four or five percent.

That gives you a rule of thumb that unlocks every figure in the novel: a fortune of twenty thousand pounds meant roughly a thousand pounds a year.

The ladder, from top to bottom

Mr. Darcy: ten thousand a year, from a large estate in Derbyshire. One of the wealthiest men a country neighborhood was ever likely to see.
Mr. Bingley: four or five thousand a year, from nearly a hundred thousand pounds his father made in trade. He rents Netherfield; buying an estate of his own would make his family, within a generation or two, simply part of the gentry.
Mr. Bennet: two thousand a year from Longbourn. Enough for a comfortable house, servants, a carriage and a respectable place in local society.
Each Bennet sister: about forty pounds a year. Each can expect about a thousand pounds, and not until after her mother's death. In the "4 per cents" (government stock paying four pounds a year for every hundred) that brings in about forty pounds a year: enough to keep a single woman from want, not enough to keep her as a lady.

Darcy's income is five times Mr. Bennet's. Mrs. Bennet's frantic matchmaking looks rather different once you know the arithmetic.

The entail: why the Bennets' house isn't really theirs

Longbourn is entailed on male heirs. An entail was a legal arrangement, made by an earlier owner, that fixed an estate's line of inheritance in advance. Mr. Bennet can live on the land and enjoy its income, but he can't sell it or leave it to whomever he pleases. He has no son, so when he dies the house and land pass to a distant male cousin, and his wife and daughters have no claim on them. It's no quirk of his; the entail binds him.

What about the clergy?

The Church offered another way to a gentleman's income. A clergyman might hold a "living": the post of rector or vicar of a parish, with the house, land and dues that supported it. The right to choose who held it usually belonged to a patron, often the chief landowner of the place. For a younger son with no estate to inherit, a good living meant a secure, respectable life, which is why patrons matter so much in this book.

So what's that in today's money?

Any answer is rough. Depending on whether you compare prices or incomes, a pound of 1813 has been put at anything from about a hundred to well over a thousand of today's dollars. On that range, Darcy's ten thousand a year is somewhere between about a million dollars a year and well over ten million; a Bennet sister's forty pounds, between about four thousand dollars a year and forty thousand or more. The exact figure matters less than the scale, and the scale is brutal.

A few more words to know

guinea: A gold coin worth twenty-one shillings, or one pound and one shilling; luxuries and professional fees were often priced in guineas.
pin-money: An allowance paid to a married woman for her own clothes and personal spending, often fixed in the marriage settlement. The richer the husband, the larger the sum.
settlements: The legal agreements drawn up before a wedding, fixing what money each side brings, what allowance the wife will have, and what will be secured for her as a widow.
Cheapside: A busy street of shops and merchants in the City of London. To Bingley's sisters, an uncle living near Cheapside means an uncle in trade, and so something to laugh at.

All of this comes from our edition: the introduction's "Money, Land and Marriage" and a glossary of over 200 terms, alongside a note before every one of the 61 chapters.