Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year
notesonliberty.com
notesonliberty.com
I have a stupid fascination for historical finance tidbits like this. I once wrote a price comparison paper for Les Misérables, Thénardier accused Valjean: "You eat forty-franc bunches of asparagus in January!” I have lost all my sources (it was likely wildly inaccurate and didn't take into account GDP, cost of living, relative wealth) but my paper says one franc in 1830 was about £2.2 (correct me please) - so a bunch of winter asparagus was £88? Sounds excessive. Cosette was purchased for a mere £3300, and her inheritance from Valjean was £1.32m.
Using Maddison's estimate for UK per capita GDP in 1820, suggests that the average UK resident generates more than 10.7x as much wealth now than back then.
Of course, all these comparisons are fanciful and dependent on the utility one assigns to various things. In terms of the number of servants he could employ, a man of Darcy's wealth far outpaces all but the wealthiest in the first world whereas in terms of his ability to travel to Rome expeditiously, he can't measure up to a nearly broke student.
So viewing money as tokens of value, there was just less 'value' around full stop. So having much less of it still made you relatively extremely wealthy.
Also, how much would Darcy pay for an electricity generator, an old CRT television with a PSX and all the PSX games ever made? That makes comparisons in discretionary spending difficult.
But comparing basic spending could be doable. It is, of course, easier to compare such spending for a median person than for an outlier.
Doubtless you could simply waste your money pretty much without limits (pay more unqualified people to do a bad job at building your house, for example) but it would have been much more limited in terms of how you could usefully deploy your wealth, just because there was much less of everything available.
Mr. Darcy has money, but no one will sell him the land. Flip side the selling of land and thus lose of rent was seen as an act of desperation.
> In what is probably my favourite piece ever written, I tried to estimate exactly how rich Mr. Darcy was – Mr. Darcy, of course, of Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride & Prejudice.
He goes into considerable detail.
https://joakimbook.blogspot.com/2016/12/how-rich-is-mr-darcy...
Conversely Darcy would have had far more power than the someone with net worth £16.8-28m would today. He'd probably have had a large say in who the local MP was, the local priest. Probably could turf a large chunk of the local population out of jobs and homes. Likely had a small army of servants.
> How much was a dose of penicillin, an iphone or a flight to New York in 1819? There's a very real sense in which very average Westerners now are far wealthier than Darcy.
One's wealthiness is always relative to others. The items listed here are goods that are broadly available today across wealth bands, and are therefore not markers of wealthiness.
> Conversely Darcy would have had far more power than the someone with net worth £16.8-28m would today. He'd probably have had a large say in who the local MP was, the local priest. Probably could turf a large chunk of the local population out of jobs and homes. Likely had a small army of servants.
Power is a great (the ultimate ?) example of a resource whose access and distribution can be compared over time.
Power over others has never been quantified like monetary wealth has, yet it is intrinsic to humans given we are a highly social species. For people like Darcy, such power over others was a hereditary birthright. You couldn't buy a share of that power as an investment. Therefore, there was no market that could estimate the monetary value of that power.
That isn't the case, wealth is an absolute measure. Inequality, power and to some degree satisfaction are relative to others, but wealth can be created and destroyed independently. Which is the major argument against socialism, incidentally. If wealthiness were a relative measure, full blown communism would be great for wealth. Which it most certainly is not.
Modern inhabitants of the first world are insanely wealthy.
That's why I used the adjective "wealthiness", as in "He is wealthy" vs the noun "wealth" as in "His wealth is X".
The adjective is relative, and implies more wealth relative to a population. The noun is not relative.
And slavery is a definitionally different situation because a slave has absolutely no leverage to negotiate for their interests, so whatever quantification of a slave's value and consequent slave owner's net worth is not generalizable to relationships between free people except in very extreme situations.
Another way of looking at this is that all else equal, when freed, a former slave's net worth goes up by a constant factor based on their new status and rights.
Some things are pretty much the same today as they were 200 years ago, like land or a person's time. Relative wealth--relative to your surrounding society--allows you to buy those. That was true 200 years ago, and it's true today, although it might cost you a bigger pile of nominal currency (e.g. more British pounds) today than back then.
But no amount of wealth in the early 1800s could have bought you a 6-hour journey from London to New York, NY. Whereas, today it is something that many people can afford, at least occasionally. No amount of money in the 1800s could have bought you high-fidelity recordings of all Beethoven's works that you can carry with you anywhere on your wrist.
So which category better represents inflation since the early 1800s? In terms of things you could buy back then, like land or people's time, you can do a pretty straight calculation. But when you get to brand new categories of things to spend money on, like penicillin or an electric scooter trip, you're essentially "dividing by zero" because these things did not exist at all back then.
You have to invent some sort of way to value a thing in past dollars that could not have actually existed at that point in the past. The farther back you go, the more it just becomes guesswork.
Most people nowadays are poorer than Mr Darcy in a monetary sense, but probably have a higher standard of living.
The sibling post makes the point that in the past, being wealthy was a much bigger component of this - if you're rich you can afford a doctor (versus none), you can eat when others go hungry, you can afford to travel at all, you can be educated, etc.
As I understand it, standard of living is objective - you can quantify it fairly well. Quality of life is subjective.
Your comment focuses on standard of living issues. But your earlier claim was that these are separate from 'monetary wealth'. I think you would need to specify what 'monetary wealth' is separate from 'standard of living' in order to make a convincing argument.
You'll find this hard to do, because any wealth measurement is either a thing, or an instrument that will get you a fraction of the things other people have. Financial wealth is cashed out in stuff. So cross temporal comparisons are going to involve comparing the stuff two people can command. And the stuff they can command is embedded in the technology and society of their respective times.
Also note that Mr Darcy need only sit and drink tea to receive his income.
> Pathetic! Not even a one-percenter. I would not walk three dirt miles and muddy the hem of my dress and suffer a terrible cold for half that
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...
One big difference being, when he dies, that income reverts to his heirs and their heirs. If he was earning that as a wage, it wouldn't. So it's not directly comparable.
You and I could make Mr. Darcy wages on an hour of work a week, providing that we could find someone willing to pay it :-)
> Using the annual yield to derive asset [value], the author in another paper put Darcy's net worth at £16.8m - £28m.
I couldn't go out and buy low risk Gilts and get that income today, I'd need index linked gilts, and they wouldn't be paying 3% after inflation.
These things mattered in early-19th-century England.
You don’t even need £3mn of household wealth to be in the top 1%; less for a individual.
Fifty years ago, even, things fall apart a little. At one point in an early Mad Men episode, some reference is made to whether or not Draper is making $40,000 a year. A basic inflation calculator puts this at about $342K today, but the implication in the show (and in other reading) suggests it likely involved much more purchasing power than $342K implies.
Going back 100 or 200 years, and the economics drift. Prices for goods and for services change relative to each other, so straight-up purchasing power comparisons are hard to establish.
Today, we probably wouldn't parse a $2M inheritance as set-for-life (maybe?), but clearly the implication is that Cosette was, right?
All that is a long way of saying that we can really only know that Darcy was rich, and enjoyed a very healthy income assuming his source assets were protected and working. His friend, less so, but still solidly a member of the correct class.
And I would say that a $2M inheritance is set for life, withdrawing 4% of that should leave you at a steady income of $80,000 a year for doing nothing.
Living off $2M/year is fine, except of course interest rates are now 1% in much of the developed world. Higher returns now requires higher risk.
A lot of fun and led me down some interesting rabbit holes on Elizabethan monetary policy, the impact of Henry VIII's Great Debasement, and the role of the Royal Mint as central bank. Left with with a deep appreciation for the stabilizing influence of the Federal Reserve.
Anyway, for anyone interested (haha), here's the canto in question:
http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?action=GET&tex...
Not according to Charles Kindleberger’s A Financial History of Western Europe. His explanation for this persistent myth is that some British banks could trace some of their antecedents to goldsmiths and it made decent advertising copy. Thus it gets into books about banking written by non-historians and perpetuates itself.
A more common origin for banks was money changers, international traders in commodities and traders in bills of exchange.
More likely, Spenser himself accepted the common myth.
Or perhaps his Mammon was loosely inspired by whoever headed the royal mint at the time.
I'll have to pick up that book someday. Thanks.
I mean, setting aside the ridiculousness of trying to compare economies separated by 200 years.
EDIT: I was a bit low - BoE's inflation calculator puts a £20 income in 1813 at £1,362.94 in 2018, or about the average income of a Haitian today. So let's say, a lower-income Afghan?
Given that a Victorian era lower-class Londoner probably looks more like a lower-class Haitian than a Texan.
I'm less sure how to compare from Austen's era, especially outside of a major city. But things like getting any medical care at all or getting enough food to eat suggests ways that poor people of that era would be disadvantaged compared to most poor people of a developed county today.
Darcy's 10K can be: 1. Inflation adjusted to 838K GBP 2. Earnings power adjusted (as labor purchase price parity) to 9.995M GBP 3. Adjusted by a Per Capita GDP percentile factor to 65M GBP (or income off of capital assets/'Consols' of $3B GBP)
BBC More or Less Podcast: How Rich was Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csvq3g PS- They basically mirror the NOL guy's article's antecedent from '016
And whatever happened to tracking how much money bill gates could drop and not pick up due to the value of his time ? { 1999: https://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html ;} That was a good frame of reference.
It's easy to forget these days where we're able to get most fruits and vegetables any time of year we please thanks to shipping letting us get summer produce in winter from the opposite hemisphere but produce has definite seasons and it used to be very hard and expensive to get produce out of season.
My rule of thumb pre Euro was 10 (French) Francs to the £, so one Franc being worth 10p.
Pounds carried over with the same value during decimalisation, I havent found anything about the Franc changing so if true this is quite a devaluation over the years.
The French Franc was revalued 100-1 in 1960. It's in the second line of the Wikipedia page on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_franc
So the best case is the parent already talking about New Francs, in which case my maths was already right.
Or have I made a glaring error ???
The historical exchange rate should not be hard to figure out. Both countries were on a gold standard at that time. One 1830 franc was worth 290mg of gold. One 1830 sovereign was worth 7.3g of gold, or about 25 old francs. So using 1 pound = 10 new francs = 1000 old francs, that's about a 40x decline in the franc/pound rate between 1830 and 2000, unless I've made an error somewhere.
Considering their fortunes have ebbed and flowed at similar times. Both were super powers of their day, both are now large developed economies, I would have expected the outcomes to be much closer.
If only because you'd be rolling a huge pair of dice with respect to health care, dental care, etc. Your children have decent odds of dying young. Women in childbirth. Infections. No modern dental care etc.
Sure, some made it to old age without serious problems. (And people die young today in spite of modern medicine.) But I'll take the bet on today's medicine.
And does what's happening far away really have that much of an impact on my life even today? We're used to knowing all these things but information flow was a lot less even a few decades ago.
For me, dying/pain/etc. is a lot more relevant.
"It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”
Elizabeth already knew Mr. Darcy's income and despised him. It was upon learning of his wealth that her love bloomed. A practical woman, Miss Bennet.
Obviously that sealed the deal, but Austen wouldn't be hailed as one of the world's greatest novelists if the plot of her seminal work was that easily reduced to money.
Austen herself was in the same position as Elizabeth, with a tiny inheritance that provided no financial security. So P&P is as much a fantasy about finding financial safety as it is about finding a man.
For all the landscaped country houses and bonnets, it was a very brutal period for many women - and for men too, in other ways.
Much like modern fading businesses they had an addiction to cheap labour to prop up dated capital. Then when the mills and the mines and the factories turned up paying better wages, most of them failed to adapt. If they were lucky they sold out to the National Trust.
But what fascinated me more was how Cornelius “the Commodore” Vanderbilt actually built his wealth. If you visit the mansions, they only talk about the social life and everything about the mansions.
But Commodore amassed some like 200 million in that day and age. There was very little regulation, and he fits the mold of someone who with very little education, excelled at business.
http://www.learner.org/series/biographyofamerica/prog17/tran...
I remember visiting on a field trip from nerd sleepaway camp in Massachusetts.
As an adult, I could see myself splurging to get running salt water in my seaside mansion. I've always loved salt water.
These were summer "cottages" to be sure and the same dynamics probably didn't apply to their regular homes. Nut I found it interesting nonetheless.
Later, to keep up with the Joneses aka Vanderbilts.
Amongst the English, I think Trollope did have a particular engagement with wealth and money matters in his novels.
Personally I was always fascinated by the Count of Monte Cristo (not much later than Austen's work, published in 1844), when he arrives in Paris and presents to Mr. Danglars an unlimited letter of credit by the bankers French & Thomson:
>"Why," said Danglers, "in the letter -- I believe I have it about me" -- here he felt in his breast-pocket -- "yes, here it is. Well, this letter gives the Count of Monte Cristo unlimited credit on our house."
"Well, baron, what is there difficult to understand about that?"
"Merely the term unlimited -- nothing else, certainly."
"Is not that word known in France? The people who wrote are Anglo-Germans, you know."
and, later:
>"Well, sir," resumed Danglars, after a brief silence, "I will endeavor to make myself understood, by requesting you to inform me for what sum you propose to draw upon me?"
"Why, truly," replied Monte Cristo, determined not to lose an inch of the ground he had gained, "my reason for desiring an `unlimited' credit was precisely because I did not know how much money I might need."
But essentially the wealthy characters have no focus on the mechanics of their wealth, other authors might say how much a character makes per year, what they are primarily invested in, how much of the wealth came from what things, what the coming war means for their investments. For Pickwick it is enough that they are wealthy and can do what wealthy people do. Pickwick in debtor's prison is a chance for him to focus on how the poor are generally treated from the viewpoint of a sympathetic rich character, as well as having an amusing situation "rich man in debtor's prison".
Even Scrooge, he lends money at exorbitant rates, underpays his employee, and does not use any money for his own enjoyment. No focus really on how the business works.
He does not do anything for his wealth, the wealth does not force him to attend board meetings or consider what competitors will do in other regions or how the slow down in the business means he will have to lay off workers or sell some of his land. The wealth allows him to have merry adventures with a pretty girl until he dies.
In Dickens it seems wealthy people never lose wealth by bad decisions or new technologies supplanting what they had or ships failing to deliver cargo on time, they tend to loose wealth by profligacy in either gambling or drink but generally both.
This is not a fault in Dickens, not everyone has to focus on the mechanics of wealth. Indeed perhaps his keeping away from such details helps hold the atmosphere of the fantastical that clings to his works, and has allowed them to keep being read so long.
The details of businesses that no longer would be viable probably make for dreary literature.
I passed.
Gardening is maybe £25-30k/yr, unless the estate is absolutely huge.
Heating will cost a lot in the UK. So will maintenance, especially if there's significant land involved. Roads, fences, walls, drains, sewers, and so on are all more expensive than most people realise, and large estates are usually listed, so there are expensive restrictions and maintenance obligations.
But I'm not quite seeing how that would add to up £500k for a £1.5m estate - which would be fairly small, even with the way prices were back then. I'd have expected something closer to £100k to £200k.
On a similar note - say he wanted to replace his doors Now he won't just want to use form £100 from the hardware shop, so realistically will be looking at £600+ for nice handmade bespoke internal doors. And then a future £100 for the door furniture, maybe £100 to get each painted and prepared and maybe £100 for the fitting. Before you know it looking at £1000ish a door. He had over 25 doors, and this was 'only' a 6 bed house... yes you aren't replacing these every year, but just an example of one of the costs.
If it can be done for dance⁷, it can surely be done for wealth.
The British government finally redeemed its last consols in 2015.
They where at around £80-85 and where redeemed at par £100 so would have been a nice little earner.
Though as it would have been old money and savvy investors who had them and would benefit does make you think eh
'Wealth, in Piketty’s view, perpetuates itself, and effortlessly earns its return (never mind the work, risk and selection issues involved). By continually paying the interest on its debt, the governments of Austen’s Britain financed the leisurly lifestyles of the rich, just as the “natural” return of the modern-day rich contribute and maintain today’s inequality.'
This completely disregards inflation. E.g., if government bonds guarantee a 3% payout but inflation is at 3.5%, your wealth is not perpetuating but leaking away.
(1) "Everyone admires Jane Austen. Add my name to the list. To me she seems the best novelist of all time. I'm interested in how things work. When I read most novels, I pay as much attention to the author's choices as to the story. But in her novels I can't see the gears at work. Though I'd really like to know how she does what she does, I can't figure it out, because she's so good that her stories don't seem made up. I feel like I'm reading a description of something that actually happened." -- http://paulgraham.com/heroes.html
(2) "One of the reasons Jane Austen's novels are so good is that she read them out loud to her family. That's why she never sinks into self-indulgently arty descriptions of landscapes, or pretentious philosophizing. (The philosophy's there, but it's woven into the story instead of being pasted onto it like a label.) If you open an average 'literary' novel and imagine reading it out loud to your friends as something you'd written, you'll feel all too keenly what an imposition that kind of thing is upon the reader." -- http://paulgraham.com/desres.html
(3) "What we can say with some confidence is that these are the glory days of hacking. In most fields the great work is done early on. The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed. Shakespeare appeared just as professional theater was being born, and pushed the medium so far that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow. Albrecht Durer did the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen with the novel." -- http://paulgraham.com/hp.html
(4) "Like Jane Austen, Lisp looks hard. [...] Indeed, if programming languages were all more or less equivalent, there would be little justification for using any but the most popular. But they aren't all equivalent, not by a long shot. And that's why less popular languages, like Jane Austen's novels, continue to survive at all. When everyone else is reading the latest John Grisham novel, there will always be a few people reading Jane Austen instead." -- http://paulgraham.com/iflisp.html
(5) "Good design is suggestive. Jane Austen's novels contain almost no description; instead of telling you how everything looks, she tells her story so well that you envision the scene for yourself." -- http://paulgraham.com/taste.html
(2) seems wrong to me, if by "literary" he means "broadly recognized as part of the 'Western Canon'" and not "recent works self-consciously written as literary fiction". Most read aloud really well, in my experience.
(3) Ugh.
(4) Austen's among the widest-read of the "canon", and not especially challenging (probably not an unrelated fact). This comparison is a real stretch. He couldn't think of someone better to use as an example? Huh.
(5) IDK about using it to illustrate this particular point, but yeah, basically.
If you struggle with Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility (I do—I find them too smug in a "gee look at me, the author, writing such clever things" way, though I think that's what people like about them so it must just be a me problem) try Persuasion. It's short and apparently Austen didn't get a chance to do her usual "punch-up" edit before she died, which probably explains why it comes off (to me) as less full of itself than the others and a much more agreeable read.
Emma seems to be her parody of herself, as best I can figure. I enjoyed it. Longer. Desperately wants to be a tragedy. (spoiler?) Isn't. Probably it shouldn't be, I mean she's Jane Austen and I'm just some asshole. Oh well, still good.
Haven't read Mansfield, which I understand is very well regarded, or her juvenilia. Tried Northanger but seemed pointless without a better-annotated copy, which I'll probably get around to acquiring and reading some day.
You can take them at face value as superficial and nostalgic proto-Harlequins, and a lot of readers do. She practically invented the surly and arrogant romantic hero who actually loves his mother and is kind to children, small animals, and feudal tenants.
But the books are actually blisteringly insightful and perceptive social and psychological commentary, written by a fiercely modern spirit trapped rather unhappily in a superficially elegant but oppressively limiting social scene she both loved and hated.
Most contemporary authors wrote as if they were outside the scene and looking in, so you don't get the same sense of ironic but intimate self-disclosure.
Austen wrote as someone inside and looking out, describing her own perceptions and reactions - many of which are contradictory and complex. So as a writer, she's both sympathetic and uniquely fascinating.
Jane Austen is a great author, and her works can often be appreciated and analyzed on multiple levels. But I just don't think she's a reasonable example of a difficult author when one considers the full spectrum of literature available today.
"If he'd did not have £15,000 a year, I would think him a very silly fellow." Mansfield Park
[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10000+1792+british+pou...
As the top comment notes, according to BoE's inflation calculator [1], that's £680K/yr, or $850K/yr.
[1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...