There's nothing more important than money in Jane Austen's novels. There's a wonderful little vignette early on in Sense and Sensibility where Elinor and Marianne debate the importance of money and I think it's a sort of exchange which illustrates later exchanges about money throughout Jane Austen's fiction because Marianne says money doesn't matter beyond a competence. You need enough.
And Elinor seems to be arguing that money matters very, very much and of course it turns out quite rapidly in the course of this exchange that what Marianne calls a competence, which is a word which was very frequently used in the early 19th century, is 2,000 pounds a year, which is huge wealth and what Elinor means by wealth, is a thousand pounds a year. I mean to pluck a figure not quite out of the air, when Jane Austen was living in the first decade of the 19th century in Bath, in rented rooms with her father, her mother and her sister Cassandra, they were living as a unit on about six hundred and fifty pounds a year. I mean Bath's quite expensive, but on that kind of income, you can have a couple of servants and you can rent somewhere reasonably nice and that is kind of the level of a competence in the early 19th century.
We find out early on in the novel exactly what the Dashwood family mother and three daughters have to live on and it's just over five hundred pounds a year. And in the wonderful second chapter of Sense and Sensibility, we hear Fanny Dashwood kind of bargaining her husband down from giving them each a thousand pounds to finally agreeing to sort of give them the odd pheasant at Christmas. And the amount that he was thinking of giving them, to be true to the promise he made to his father on his father's deathbed, because he's a half-sibling of the of the Dashwood girls, the amount that he thought he was going to give them, until his wife intervened, would have been exactly enough to raise them from, sort of, kind of quite difficult, shabby, genteel circumstances to relative comfort, from just over five hundred pounds a year to something like just over six hundred pounds a year, which would then they were fine.
But Marianne has ridiculous ideas about money as does her mother, of course. Her mother thinks they should carry on keeping a carriage which they can't at all afford to do. And the important thing about, I think, money in Jane Austen, isn't just that she is very precise about it and that she's very unsentimental about it and the characters who say they don't care about money are never to be trusted.
Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey says 'I hate money', which you interpret as meaning actually 'I love money really'. That's what's in her heart. But the really crucial thing which first-time readers in particular should look at is the way that characters have, as it were, a label round their necks saying how much money they're worth.
So everybody knows how much money everybody's worth, or they think they do. I mean, funnily enough, in our world people are much more secretive about money, I think, than they were in Jane Austen's world. Partly because of circumstances, marriage settlements made semi-public the amount of money people were worth when they got married.
Mr Collins knows how much the Bennett's are worth, how much money Mr. Bennett has got to leave to her daughter's. He knows.
It's sort of public information. And so money shapes the exchanges and the interactions that the characters have because they themselves know about it and like every bit of, sort of background information in Jane Austen, it's not really background information, it's part of the drama of the interactions of the characters.
