I’m not a math person, so when I hear that Mr. Bennet needed to save reasonable fortunes (you know Austen never says dowry?) for his daughters out of an income of £2000 a year, I just don’t get it. So I used a spreadsheet and made compound interest tables, with Mr. Bennet saving either £25, £50, or £100 per girl per year:
(We know that government bonds paid either 4 or 5% interest in Austen’s time, so I did both)
If Mr. Bennet had saved just £50/girl every year, Jane would have nearly £2000 by her 21st birthday. Not Georgiana Darcy, but certainly better than nothing! And this of course would be added to the £1000 she would receive after the death of both parents.
£250 a year saved (£50 for each girl) is only 12.5% of the Bennet’s annual income. Is that reasonable? Well these contemporary lists of expenditures from A System of Practical Domestic Economy (printed in 1823, only a few years away from Pride & Prejudice‘s publication) say yes:
(Thank you for making these available, Susanna Ives)
The above budget works in savings of 10%, not far off what the Bennets would need to put aside for their girls.
Now yes, the above estimate is for a family with only three children and they don’t have a very high clothing budget for the kids. However, it would have been easier to save money when the Bennet girls were young and wearing hand-me-downs than in the present, where all five girls need ball gowns at once. This is part of the overall imprudence in the Bennet family, having all five girls out at once means that you need to dress five up in fancy clothes at the same time!
Another way Mr. Bennet could have saved is to have put the £5000 settled on Mrs. Bennet and the children in a trust and re-invested all the income instead of spending it. What happens then? I used an online compound interest calculator for this one:
(This is done in US dollars but the math is the same)
£14,000 pounds split 5 ways is a fortune of £2,800 by Jane’s 21st birthday. That’s nearly as much as Catherine Morland from Northanger Abbey. A respectable fortune indeed!
If the girls did not marry before their father died, they would also have a much higher income to live on together. The income on £14,000 is about £700/year. A bit higher than the Dashwoods in Sense & Sensibility and a whole lot better than the £250/year the Bennet girls would have with only the £5000 settled in the marriage articles.
Now what about this fabled son who would break the entail and make everything better? Here is the problem with that idea. First, the son must be of age (usually 21) before the entail could be broken, so if Lydia was male and Mr. Bennet died when he was sixteen, the entail would be intact. Second, if the Bennet son was something like John Dashwood from Sense & Sensibility, he might well refuse to break the entail and both parties had to agree. Why have a smaller inheritance when you can have the whole pie? I’m sure a wife like Fanny Dashwood would advise against it!
Putting some money aside for his daughters was Mr. Bennet’s responsibility and by never saving anything, he failed them in a big way. Mrs. Bennet also probably overspent, but the real power is always in the husband’s hands.
I find the financial side of Jane Austen’s works very interesting. Money influences many of the character’s actions, especially the villains. My second novel, Unfairly Caught, focuses on Fanny Price of Mansfield Park, who is Jane Austen’s poorest heroine, almost completely dependent on the kindness of her rich uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram. When Sir Thomas finds out his eldest son has fallen into debt again, he pressures Fanny into accepting the proposal from Henry Crawford…
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