I guess that would be the title. I am reading a bunch of turn of the century purple prose and hit a string of stuff set in the 1800s in Britain. It seems like there are a fair number of characters that have no jobs but seem to have an annual income from something I know not everybody was a lord, these are what I would consider middle class ‘normals’ that seem to have between 150 and 1000 pounds a year. Where were they getting their money from? Was it their version of our Wall Street investment going on? And was 150 pounds really a decent amount of money in say 1890-1900?
I am neither an historian nor an economist, but I always understood that this was fairly common within families that had achieved some financial success. Remember, the British Empire was at its peak during the Victorian Era and people were literally making their fortunes at home or in the colonies.
What was typical was that the oldest son in a family took over the business, bank, estate, or whatever upon the death of the father and the remaining children were provided for in some way. Bequests often also included provisions for other relatives, perhaps orphaned nieces and nephews. The bequest might be an interest-bearing trust or the income from some part of an estate. During that period, 75 to 150 pounds would be a reasonable living income.
Also, remember that the people that novels get written about don’t constitute anything like a random sample of the people at that time.
He first appeared a little later than your window of the 1800s, but my favo(u)rite British man of leisure, Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, was an orphan who inherited a fortune upon his parents’ (rarely referenced) deaths.
At any rate, Bertie Wooster is very, very idle and very, very rich.
I think you should reconsider your classification, unless you consider people with trust funds ranging from a substantial to the entirety of their income as “middle class normals”.
Yes, there were a lot of ways to be idle rich back then. Another way was to have inherited land that other people were farming–which was not exclusive to the nobility at that time, AIUI, though many of them would fit the bill. If the land was productive and your tenants paid up on time, it would be relatively easy money.
It obviously depends on what year you’re talking about, but what seem like trivial amounts in the 18th and 19th centuries were actually often sizable amounts in terms of cost of living.
There are different ways of calculating comparative estimates, but here is one useful site. Plugging in your numbers for the year 1900 gives the following:
So - nothing to sneeze at, particularly if you also already had a nice house to live in.
Remember too that to a large extent, it wasn’t that the upper class didn’t hold jobs because they had rental and investment income – they didn’t hold jobs because they were upper class. Going to work every day for money would have been their social undoing. Certain professions like law and the military were available, but those were in some ways more akin to investment projects than jobs.
It’s a common source of drama in Trollope, for instance, that the protagonists are titled but broke, and torn between marrying a rich heiress or making a love match with a penniless governess. And constantly in debt.
And the downfall of the British nobility can be associated with a move toward free trade and the development of refrigeration technology that enabled cheap shipping of agricultural products from abroad.
If he was so independently wealthy then why all the convoluted schemes to avoid marriage? Couldn’t he tell his aunt to fuck off if there’s no economic incentive to marry?
That was my impression too. Bertie Wooster was not so rich. He was dependent upon the goodwill of his overbearing aunt Agatha. He came from rich stock, but early 20th century Britain was full of aristocrats on the verge of bankruptcy.
IIRC there was one occasion on which Aunt Agatha’s schemes came to such a disastrous end that he felt empowered to do that (well, more or less, since four-letter words wouldn’t have come into the vocabulary); but in Woosterworld, people do not learn and develop - Aunt Agatha will always be domineering and insistent on his marrying well (a wife to keep his spendthrift ways in check), Aunt Dahlia will be forever up to little schemes to get money out of her husband, Bertie will forever be Peter Pan, and Jeeves will always shimmy in with a pick-me-up at 6 on the dot. That’s the point of the whole thing -it isn’t social history and never was.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is that the modern welfare state didn’t exist in the early to mid 1800s. A person very well might not have a pension or health insurance, so it was a big incentive to try to build up some nest egg for hard times.
The idea of “settling” money on a new bride may seem quaint nowadays, but that was intended to serve in a similar way as life insurance – a way to survive if your husband died, leaving you without any other source of income.
And you had to pay to become an officer in the military, or something like that. I forget how it’s described. Clergymen didn’t necessarily have a “calling”, they were just someone’s third son, and they knew some lord who owned a parish who could offer them a “living”.
(Too tired to look up the exact terms)
I rather think inheritance tax and industrialisation had more to do with it.
My bolding: an old saying in that milieu, “the fool of the family is sent into the Church”. (Not necessarily a bad thing, from some Christian points of view?)
Father Ted: That would be quite common you know. The favourite son would become a doctor and then the idiot brother would be sent off to the priesthood.
Father Dougal: Your brother is a doctor isn’t he?
Father Ted: Yes he is.
I recall reading a thing about the department-store chain C & A – property of a strongly Catholic German-Dutch family, the Brenninckmeyers. It was mentioned that standard procedure here has long been, that the more talented and mentally agile sons of the family, go to work for the family business. The less bright ones become priests.
Yes, in the British Army commissions were sold. Many officers depended upon a stipend from their families as the salary was quite modest; others depended upon a share of the plunder. And not only was the original commission sold, but you also had to buy the promotions too.
You could buy 3% government bonds called Consols in the 19th century. There was effectively no inflation for the whole century, which means that if you invested enough money in Consols on someone’s behalf (which happens again and again in the fiction of the time), they would be able to live off the dividends indefinitely.
I just read a biography of a real British aristocrat, Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1886-1959), who inherited a landed estate and never held a real job in his life. Early on he was a part of Scott’s Antarctic expedition, mainly because it was a cool thing to do (literally!) After writing a brilliant book about the expedition, he spent the rest of his life puttering around the estate and complaining about the modern world. If you want to get an idea of what life was really like as a member of the landed gentry, you could read Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, but I warn you it gets pretty dull once he returns from Antarctica.