Jane Eyre vs Pride and Prejudice

[prendrelemick]

Actresses were still not quite respectable, (and only middle class at best), the play they chose was a bit risque' - and they knew it - all that holding hands and declaring love! They were being thrilled by their own daring and sophistication.

But it needn't have been a play I suppose. The play is a device to illustrate the corruption being brought upon the family home by the Crawfords. Even Fanny and Edmund are incrementally persuaded to join in by peer pressure from their glamorous friends. Also the whole project was on the edge of chaos, a kind of anarchy preveiled because rules and conventions were being broken.

They all knew they were being "naughty" while Sir Thomas was away - as we can see by the guilty scurrying about that went on when he returned.

[Jackson Richardson]

We really ought to have a Mansfield Park thread. I'll start one.

http://www.online-literature.com/for...40#post1306440

[kiki1982]

Two days ago I typed a whole thing about simimlarities between Henry Crawford and Rochester and then it got deleted :

Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen were both the daughters of impecunious clergymen. Charlotte married in her late 30s, and died soon after of runaway morning sickness. Jane died of (probably) Addison's disease. They were both 39 (I think) when they died. So they were both the single (for most of their adult lives) daughters of relatively poor clergy.

The Bronte family met tragic ends: only Charlotte lived to see 31. Austen's siblings were more successful financially (and in terms of their health); one of Austen's brothers rose to the rank of Admiral in the British navy. Economically, England was changing from a rural, Regency society (for Austen) to a more financially diverse society (for Bronte), so class consciousness was changing as well. Nonetheless, Elizabeth Bennet would have been almost as impoverished as Jane Eyre, once her father died, if she hadn't found a husband. We are invited to scoff at Mrs. Bennet's husband hunting, but what loving mother would do otherwise?

Clergymen, however, were "gentlemen" in both societies, however rich or poor they might be. A pound might have been worth $100 in Austen's days (and slightly less in Bronte's), based on today's American money. So Darcy's 10,000 ponds a year was equivalent to $1,000,000 a year. There can be no direct comparisons, however, because goods were relatively expensive, and labor and food (servants, etc.) very cheap. I remember in some Victorian novels a good horse might cost between 50 and 100 pounds, which is almost as much as a decent (used) car today.

Actually Trollope touches upon that in Framley Parsonage. The regime that had been in place to pay clergymen was tithes from the congregation. Obviously it was kind of fair when it was set up, but things got more and more distorted with clergymen in places like modern-day Kensington getting loads while others who were put into a poor congregation faced with poverty. For the same work, or more (depending on their diligence). Patrick Brontë was obviously one of the poor guys. I think he lived on about £200 per annum, plus something maybe for the fact that he was perpetual curate). He paid his curate Nicholls (whom Charlotte married in the end, after the final blessing of her father) £50.

However, as wages were not indexed, Austen's father lived on more or less the same, but as Sense and Sensibility makes plain, even £200 per annum was quite decent. OK, you couldn't keep a carriage and everything, but you could live reasonably decently (with a very young servant girl) if you were careful. There were lots of working-class people and families who lived on much less.

If you index by the retail index, Darcy is indeed a millionaire, but if you index in comparison with wages, the result is even starker. Then he's a millionaire several times over. Just to give an idea: Bertha's £30,000 dowry, would have been the equivalent (in 1847, the year of publication of JE) £2,500,000, and actually we should remember that this would have been even higher as it was around 1820 that Rochester got the money.

I think by the time we reach Brontë's era, the class divide between clergy also becomes bigger. By the time we've reached Trollope's 1860s, the difference between the poor curate Crawley in his poor parish and the rich and fortunate Mark Robarts is so bad, Crawley is, though not overtly, treated like a standard case of poverty (with charity food parcels and everything). The idea that he would have been a gentleman nonetheless is far less present than in Austen's day, though that's maybe because Crawley can't even afford shoes for his children, whereas clergymen in Austen's day definitely still could.

The same £200 budget:

1820:
commodities index £14,280
wages index £807,500

1847:
CI £16,320
WI £578,800

1860:
CI £16,780
WI £460,300

That's an interesting thing to think about though...

[petaflop]

Laura, I have been Team Rochester since the book's age was still expressed in 2 digits, and my efforts to lighten up and cut Darcy some slack are ongoing.

[Laura Clarke]

Yes, someone who gets it! I don't think I'll ever understand how one could prefer Darcy over Rochester... or even prefer Darcy at all...