Social Class in "Pride and Prejudice"

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was written in 1813 but in many ways the novel is more popular today than it was during the early 19th century the book sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year some obviously the people are reading it for school but many people who were reading it just for their own pleasure there been multiple movie and TV adaptations of the story and in fact over 300 novels have been written in the last 20 or 25 years that either adapt the story or extend the story of Pride and Prejudice in some way so it's a very popular book and it's become sort of a cultural force in our society so even if you haven't never read the story or haven't seen the film adaptations of it you're probably at least familiar with the book in some way and maybe the characters mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett or at very least that the title Pride and Prejudice is certainly afraid that you've heard many times but it's important to remember this novel is set in and is about a very different social world than the world that we inhabit Regency era England in other words the time period in which Jane Austen lived and wrote was a highly stratified society social class has always been more important in England than it is in America but the time Pride and Prejudice that difference is even more marked so there are a couple of things that we need to remember when reading this novel first of all all social interactions in the book are affected and in some ways governed by social class your prospect in life is certainly affected by your social class in the Regency era but there are many aspects of everyday life in some cases who you could interact with or even talk to was governed by social class so there's a scene in Volume one of Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth Bennet main character of the novel is mortified when her cousin mr. Collins walks up to mr. Darcy who is wealthier than mr. Collins and begins a conversation now there are plenty of objectionable section of mr. Collins and I think we'll agree that there are lots of things we maybe don't like about him but here what a little bit is reacting to is the social norm or rule that mr. Collins is breaking because mr. Darcy is of a higher social class than mr. Collins technically it should be mr. Darcy who initiates the interaction between them probably seems a little nuts to you but it was an important element of Austen's world this kind of complication of social class through rules of social interaction and of course the main social interaction governed by class in the novel is that a marriage I mean the entire plot of a novel revolves around issues of marriage and the restrictions on marriage resulting from class differences generally speaking men and women in the Regency era were expected to marry within their own social class marrying below your position in society would affect your social standing and it's that consideration that motivates and complicates much of the novel but the second thing that's really important to remember in this book is that class is not the same as a wealth or money but it's not entirely separate from it either in America we equate social class with wealth when we say that someone is of the upper class it means they have more money than people of the lower classes but in England especially before 1900 class was a product of your family lineage not sure well in other words who your parents were the only way to become a member of the aristocracy for example was to be born to aristocratic parents and conversely if you were born a commoner you would remain a commoner your entire life now obviously most the people in the interest ock recei were in fact more wealthy than people in the lower classes since the aristocracy owned most of the land in England but it was possible especially the closer we get to the 20th century for a commoner to gain wealth and eventually have as much money as members of the aristocracy but that still didn't make those commoners aristocrats Pride and Prejudice money is actually a more present concern than classes the class is still very important in the novel to understand why we need to look a little more closely at the way social classes were understood at the time look at this diagram founding a book written in 1814 or just about the time that Pride and Prejudice was written it shows so seven social classes in England starting with royalty and moving all the way down to poppers gypsies and criminals a couple of things are apparent after looking at this diagram first of all we only get to see a small portion of English society in Pride and Prejudice virtually all of the characters that we meet in the novel belong to the second or third classes on this chart only Lady Catherine de Bourg who will meet in volume two belongs to the first class and she's really on up kind of lower peripheries in the first class and only a very few characters elizabeth aunt and uncle most notably belong to the fourth but look at the numbers that each class represented in 1814 if you took all the people of the first four classes on this chart combined that's only about one and a half million people sounds like a lot but when you compare that number to the members of just that lowest seventh class you'll see that the overwhelming majority of people in England in 1814 were considered poor and those people unfortunately never show up in the novel at all the lowest class character we meet in the cinema novel is Hilde the Bennets cook and even she's only ever referred to in the novel she doesn't get any lines or create me action in the story so this is a book about rich people and very rich people irony then is that so much emphasis in this novel is put on the financial differences between the characters the Bennets for example the family of that Elizabeth Bennet belongs to it's considered to be a somewhat lower status than characters like mr. Darcy or mr. Bingley because they have lower incomes than those wealthy gentlemen even though they're basically of the same general social class what's usually called the landed gentry that's just a term that means that the income of these characters whether we're talking about mr. Darcy mr. Bingley or mr. Bennet Elizabeth's father their income is a product not of work they don't work for a living but of land in other words they own land and the money that they get each year is based on the rental income that they get from people living on that land like mr. Darcy and mr. Bingley the Bennett's own an estate and their income comes directly from that estate their states called Longbourn but the difference is that their estate Longbourn is much smaller than mr. Darcy's estate Pemberley or mr. Bingley's which for a while anyway is Netherfield the Bennett's have an annual income according to the novel of about two thousand pounds while mr. Bingley has an income of five thousand pounds and mr. Darcy has an income of ten thousand pounds a year now those amounts are difficult to translate to our own money and for a lot of reasons not just the exchange rate but just because there were so many different things that you did or did not have to spend money on at the time but some scholars have tried to figure out how much the amounts of money in Pride and Prejudice would equal to our own society and general consensus is that we could use a multiplier of 80 to get from the money in Pride and Prejudice to our own money in other words if the Bennet have about 2,000 pounds a year that means they have an income of about a hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year that's a pretty good income it may not make them super wealthy in our own society but you might remember also that because they live on a hereditary estate they don't have to pay a house payment or pay rent plus the estate would produce its own food so they don't have to pay for that either so from our perspective the Bennett's are actually doing pretty good but mr. Bingley and mr. Darcy are much wealthier than the Bennet if we use the multiplier of 80 again mr. Bingley earns around four hundred thousand dollars a year and mr. Darcy earns somewhere around eight hundred thousand dollars a year close to a million dollars a year because Jane Austen uses when she talks about income she uses a interest rate of about four five percent that means that mr. Darcy probably has about twenty five million dollars or so and personal wealth so he's a very rich man but money is actually more complicated than just the difference between one thousand two thousand five thousand ten thousand pounds a year in the novel and in the time period of the novel takes place in and the reason has to do with the complex rules regarding inheritance during the Regency era generally speaking during this time estates were passed down in their entirety to the eldest son of the family now that's great if you're an eldest son if you're a younger son you're usually coming out of luck second sons there's a character Colonel Forster I'm sorry colonel fitzwilliam in the novel who is a younger son and he talks about the fact that he has to marry a wealthy woman or else he won't be able to describe the social class of these younger sons wouldn't change they would remain in the classroom as they were born but they wouldn't have the income to support themselves or to make themselves into a desirable husband for a young woman women of this class would want to marry men who had some wealth and the men of the class would often want to marry women who had some wealth especially if they were the younger sons sometimes second sons would go into the military as colonel fitzwilliam did or to the clergy as those since those professions came with guaranteed income and were considered appropriate for members of the upper classes sometimes second sons did finally wealthy young woman to marry and that was solved their problem but the problem is that there weren't that many wealthy young women precisely because the state tended to be handed down to sons so most daughters if they had a brother daughters wouldn't inherit much their fathers would set aside a certain amount of money for their annual maintenance basically but they wouldn't inherit the estate in most cases now a girl who didn't have any brothers might be able to inherit her father's estate there's a character named Miss King who seems to be in the situation in the but in some special cases even that path was closed to young women after all the Bennet girls don't have any brothers and we learn very quickly that they are in a situation where they are not able to inherit their father's estate and that's because sometimes not all the time but sometimes in this period estates were what's called entailed away from the female line an entailment is just some kind of legal restriction on the way and a state is passed down so in this case there's some document someone's will or a legal document in some at some point in the been a family history that says Longbourn can only be passed down through the male line this becomes a pretty important driver of the plot of the story because it's very important that mr. Bennett be able to provide for his daughter since he is legally prohibited from passing an estate down to them directly and in fact we learned that on his death the estate is going to go to his cousin mr. Collins so the Bennet girls are in a difficult position they're the daughters of a country gentleman there in the landed gentry so they're considered to be in the upper classes but their family income is well precarious to say the least it's not that large of an income to begin with especially compared to some of the other characters in the book and because of the entail if the girls don't get married to wealthy gentlemen before their father dies they may actually be forced to leave their home and survive without any income stream whatsoever and that's why miss mrs. Bennet Elizabeth mother is so excited to find out and the novel's opening pages that a single young wealthy gentleman mr. Bingley is moving into their neighborhood she knows that mr. Bingley since he's single it will be looking for a wife and a marriage between mr. Bingley and one of her daughters will go a long way towards solving their loom financial problem so I guess my point is if Hollywood has tricked you into believing that Pride and Prejudice is some of early romance novel so probably a little surprise when you actually read it all characters do fall in love in the book there's very little of what we might consider romance there are no true love scenes not even so much of a kiss in the book what there is in the novel is a lot of discussion of those two very important drivers of Regency era high society class and money

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Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2017