What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

by Daniel Pool

  If you were a widow or single maiden lady or other soul without a grand establishment, at least until the middle of the century, you would have put your money into other things, notably, what Sam Weller’s father in Pickwick describes as those “things as is always a goin’ up and down, in the City.” “Omnibuses?” says Sam. “Nonsense,” replied Mr. Weller. “Them things as is alvays a fluctooatin’ and gettin’ theirselves involved somehow or another vith the national debt, and the chequered bills, and all that.” “Oh! the funds,” says Sam.

  Indeed, the “funds.”

  The “funds” was simply another term for the national debt, since it was generally being paid off with the revenues from various accounts or funds. As the debt was backed up by the government and didn’t involve the risks entailed in buying privately issued securities, the funds were a popular investment. In addition, they generally paid a perfectly respectable 5 percent. When Jane Eyre’s uncle dies, leaving her the money that finally gives her independence, her cousin informs her that “your money is vested in the English funds,” and in Vanity Fair, we are told that the selfish and disagreeable heiress Miss Crawley “preferred the security of the funds.” “The great rich Miss Crawley,” Becky Sharp calls her, “with seventy thousand pounds in the five per cents.”

  There was a particular kind of government security that was, perhaps, more popular with the slightly less affluent and, as a rule, paid only 3 percent a year. These were the famous “Consols” (or, as Sam Weller, Sr., an investor in them, calls them, “Counsels”). Consol was short for consolidated annuity, and the consols consisted of nine different annuities that had been consolidated into one before 1800. Annuities were very popular in the 1800s, no doubt because other securities didn’t exist and people didn’t always live that long. Mr. Rochester “settled an annuity on her for life,” we are told of an old servant in Jane Eyre, and Henchard tells his daughter at one point in The Mayor of Casterbridge, “A small annuity is what I should like you to have—so as to be independent of me.” The consols could not be cashed in like, say, a U.S. savings bond, but they paid you your annuity on a regular basis. These were the closest you could get to blue-chip widow and orphan investments in the days before there was much of a stock market. Sam Weller, Sr., gives some to his son as a wedding present at the end of Pickwick, and David Copperfield’s aunt Betsey Trotwood sells some of hers to pay for David’s legal apprenticeship.

  Having raised the specter of government finance, it may well be asked—what about taxes? When the young visitors are shown around Sotherton in Mansfield Park, Jane Austen comments at one point that they were not shown the chapel until after “having visited many more rooms than could be supposed to be of any other use than to contribute to the window tax.” It is a passing remark, but one that gives a small glimpse of the remarkably extensive system of taxation that must have made the English one of the most taxed peoples in the world. During the nineteenth century, for example, there was a tax on land, income, the practice of law, newspaper advertisements, glass, candles, beer, malt, carriages, menservants, coats of arms, newspapers, paper, bricks, stone, coal, windows, corn, soap, horses, dogs, salt, sugar, raisins, tea, coffee, tobacco, playing cards, timber, silk and—but the extent of the taxation begins to become clear. There was even a tax on headgear, which, after Wordsworth was appointed as a collector of stamp duties, moved Byron to write: “I shall think of him often when I buy a new hat. There his works will appear.”

  The taxes were important not only because of the bite they put on people but because of their individual social consequences. Until repealed in 1861, for example, the tax on paper helped to keep books scarce and expensive. Soap was taxed until 1853 with the consequence of the poor personal hygiene which may have contributed to some of the epidemics of typhus and other diseases that periodically devastated elements of the population. (In fact, a black market sprang up in soap, and it was smuggled in from Ireland, where there was no tax, to the western shore of England.) The tax on windows mentioned in Mansfield Park was perhaps the most pernicious one, since even a hole cut in a wall for ventilation was counted as a window, making, among other things, for dark houses for the poor. The fact that a family was taxed £2 8s. for each male servant in 1812 (bachelors £4 8s.) helped to steer people toward womenservants—both this and the tax on carriages were based on the government’s (correct) assumption that these were two of the leading ways to get revenues from the wealthy.

  And these were only the national taxes. At a local parish level from the 1600s on, one could be required to pay a “rate” for the maintenance of the poor (one reason why people were always anxious to have the poor settle somewhere else besides their parish), to which, in due course, were added rates for highways and other local expenses. There was also a local church rate for the physical upkeep of the local Church of England house of worship until 1868. To the national taxes and this local tax must then be added the tithes which farmers and craftsmen had to pay the local clergyman in support of the Church of England. These amounted to one-tenth of the value of the year’s annual produce and, until 1840, also had to be paid in kind, when it was “commuted” to payment in money. It is one of the happy attributes of the heartily democratic but well-born rector’s wife Mrs. Cadwallader in Middlemarch, George Eliot tells us, that “such a lady gave a neighbourliness to both rank and religion, and mitigated the bitterness of uncommuted tithe.”

  Well (?) brought up.

  First Juvenile: “May I have the pleasure of dancing with you, Miss

  Alice?”

  Second Juvenile: “A, no—thanks! I never dance with younger sons!”

  Entail and Protecting the Estate

  Lane and Elizabeth attempted to explain to her the nature of an entail. They had often attempted it before, but it was a subject on which Mrs. Bennet was beyond the reach of reason.”

  Nonetheless, as Jane Austen knew, entail was of vital importance.

  The basis of wealth, status, and power in nineteenth-century England was fundamentally land, as it had been for centuries. And the overriding concern of the great landed families who dominated English life was to maintain their influence and affluence down through the years by transmitting their enormous landed estates intact, generation after generation, to their descendants. A way to do this had, in fact, been found, and it had two elements. The first was the right of primogeniture, which meant that all the land in each generation was left to the eldest son instead of its being divided among all the children. The second was entail, which meant that sufficient restrictions were put on what could be done to the estate by that eldest son to ensure that when he died his eldest son in turn would inherit the estate intact, and not mortgaged or split up or—God forbid—not at all because, let us say, it had somehow been sold by his father.

  Originally, primogeniture had to do with the king’s need for warriors, not family continuity. The Crown in Norman times encouraged people to leave their land to just one child so that it would remain intact in each generation and therefore large enough to be economically capable of supporting a military force in the field that could aid the king.

  By the nineteenth century the Crown had found other ways to defend itself, and primogeniture had become a means of protecting a family’s greatness. The idea was for the estate (in the sense of land) to pass to one person so that it wouldn’t be split up, with the great country house and the family name for which it was the material basis thereby becoming separated from each other. This, of course, necessitated that the land go to one child rather than being split among several. Also, a girl should not inherit because if she remained single the line could die out and if she married the estate would pass in possession to someone outside the family. Given the tradition of primogeniture already in existence, the logical heir, then, was the eldest son.

  Primogeniture was an all but universal practice among English landed families. Typically, it was carefully provided for in their wills or deeds of settlement. So powerful was the hold of t
he idea that, until 1925, by law the land of someone dying without a will went to the eldest son, and middle-class efforts to change the law and have the land divided among all the children were consistently defeated by the old families. The plot of Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? turns in part on the fact that old Squire Vavasor cannot really countenance violating the principle of primogeniture by leaving his estate to his younger son, John (let alone John’s daughter Alice) instead of to the worthless George Vavasor, the logical heir inasmuch as he is the son of the squire’s deceased eldest boy. The estate, after all, “had come down from father to son for four hundred years,” Trollope tells us. “I don’t think I have a right to leave it away from him,” the squire tells John. “It never has been left away from the heir.” Trollope adds: “The right of primogeniture could not, in accordance with his theory, be abrogated by the fact that it was, in George Vavasor’s case, protected by no law.”

  But, assuming that in a given instance the law of primogeniture was observed, what was to prevent the eldest son from selling the land, especially if he were a gambler or a wastrel?

  Family pride, for one thing. “There was only a small part of his estate that Sir Walter could dispose of,” we are told of the baronet Walter Elliot in Persuasion, “but had every acre been alienable, it would have made no difference. He had condescended to mortgage as far as he had the power, but he would never condescend to sell. No; he would never disgrace his name so far. The Kellynch estate should be transmitted whole and entire, as he had received it.”

  But suppose an heir lacked family pride, or was in such dire financial straits that, family pride or no, the temptation to start selling off the family acreage became almost irresistible?

  This was where entail came in.

  The restrictions of entail (usually formally embodied in a piece of paper called a deed of settlement or a “strict settlement”) were a way of tying up the property so that the heir got only the income from the land—he couldn’t sell or mortgage it. In fact, the settlement was usually a deed giving the land to the eldest son, but only for use during his lifetime, his rights to the property being thus restricted or “entailed” (from the French tailler, meaning “to cut off”). The idea was such a big hit that when entailing was first tried, people attempted to entail their estates more or less perpetually so that an estate could never be sold off or split up. However, the law refused to sanction entailing or tying up the estate for so long—in practice, it would only permit it to be entailed until the grandson of the man making the settlement turned twenty-one. Then, said the law, all the restrictions of the entail on the property had to be lifted, and the newly of age heir had to be given full ownership, i.e., he had to be able to sell it or give it away just like any other property.

  So now the problem of keeping the estate intact in the first generation had been solved by leaving it all to the eldest son. And the problem of keeping it intact through the second generation had been solved by entailing it. Now the problem was, what happened when the grandson inherited Tipton Grange and all the rights to it? The law said he was free to sell or dispose of it all in the same way it had been feared his father might.

  But an heir, of course, did not actually inherit anything until his father died, which, of course, might not be for years and years. Therefore, since few landed eldest grandsons (or sons) worked for a living, the father of this inheriting grandson then had merely to indulge in a little discreet coercion—sign a new deed of settlement tying up the estate until your grandson is twenty-one, he said in effect, or I cut off your allowance. This usually had the desired result of ensuring that the entail on the estate was carried on for two more generations. This technique was used in cases where family pride was not enough, and the result could be a continuing renewal of the entail which might then go on generation after generation.

  That left only one mechanical—albeit serious—problem with the scheme: What if all the children were girls? This, it will be remembered, is the problem of poor Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. With daughters, as we have seen, the family name might disappear if they inherited the property, so what should be done in this situation? Quite often, the answer was that the deed of settlement or will entailing the property would provide for a lateral pass to another branch of the family that did have a young male. And this is what happens in Pride and Prejudice, where the obsequious Mr. Collins inherits Mr. Bennet’s estate because “Mr. Bennet’s property consisted almost entirely of an estate of two thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters, was entailed in default of heirs male, on a distant relation,” the “distant relation” being Mr. Collins. Likewise, Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion has no sons; as a consequence the “heir presumptive” is a cousin, William Elliot.

  Primogeniture and entail had indirect effects both on the families that engaged in these practices and the larger society.

  Perhaps the most obvious of these was the production of eldest sons who were spoiled rotten, since they knew that they, and they alone, would inherit virtually all the family property. Young Tom Bertram, the heir to Mansfield Park, says Jane Austen apropos of how he treats his timid young cousin, had “all the liberal dispositions of an eldest son, who feels born only for expense and enjoyment. His kindness to his little cousin was consistent with his situation and rights; he made her some very pretty presents, and laughed at her.” Other children of wealthy families could expect little or nothing from the estate, which must have encouraged a certain amount of sibling resentment.

  But at least the other boys had a chance to inherit if the eldest son dropped dead. The girls, however, could never inherit, yet the deep attachment to the family property fostered by the practice of transmitting it reverently from generation to generation obviously produced emotional scars when they had to leave. We can judge the strength of the attachment—and perhaps the poverty of single, genteel women—from the fact that Mr. Collins offers to marry various of the disinherited Bennet girls, and that Elizabeth Elliot pursues her relative William Walter when it is apparent that he will inherit the estate where she grew up. “She had, while a very young girl, as soon as she had known him to be, in the event of her having no brother, the future baronet, meant to marry him,” says Jane Austen, “and her father had always meant that she should.” Indeed, given the unquestioned propriety of cousins marrying for most of the 1800s, the girls may well have done better under this scenario than if a brother inherited the estate, a possibility that finds confirmation in Wuthering Heights, of all places, where the dying Edgar Linton tries to encourage his daughter Catherine’s marriage to Heathcliff, her aunt’s son—“though he had set aside, yearly, a portion of his income for my lady’s fortune, he had a natural desire that she might retain—or at least return in a short time to—the house of her ancestors; and he considered that the only prospect of doing that was by a union with [the] heir.”

  Primogeniture and entail also apparently encouraged some intergenerational friction. “Take it as a rule,” says a sardonic Mr. Eaves in Vanity Fair, “the fathers and elder sons of all great families hate each other. The crown Prince is always in opposition to the crown or hankering after it. . . . If you were heir to a dukedom and a thousand pounds a day, do you mean to say you would not wish for possession?”

  Which brings us to the other area where all of this careful handing on of the estate had such an impact, namely, in what Trollope and others so delicately referred to as the “marriage market.” In a society where the general rule among the wealthy is that the eldest son gets everything, then a population producing a roughly equal number of boys and girls (and England at mid-century was thought in overall population, at least, to suffer from a numerical shortage of marriage-age men) will witness a mad scramble among the girls—or their mothers—to try to land one of the relatively limited number of eldest sons. “Of course it was desirable,” writes Trollope of Lady Baldock’s match-making intent for her niece Violet Effingham in Phineas Finn, “that Violet should marry an eldest so
n, and a peer’s heir.” The flip side was that no one wanted a younger son. “Younger sons cannot marry where they like,” says one of them, Colonel Fitzwilliam, to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, and a real-life earl’s younger son some years later spoke of how “he was repelled by the mothers whom he met in society as if he had the plague, lest he should fall in love with their daughters.”

  The social irony in all this was that if entail worked properly, it tied up the estate so magnificently that when debts were incurred there was then no way to get at the wealth, e.g., the family land, that might have been used to pay them off. In such an instance, as with Lord Fawn in The Eustace Diamonds, the only way to keep the proud old family name solvent and the ancestral estate intact was to marry a vulgar heiress like Lizzie Eustace!

  A debtor in prison.

  Bankruptcy, Debt, and Moneylending

  I rarely at this time had any money wherewith to pay my bills,” wrote Anthony Trollope of his days as a young clerk in the Post Office. “In this state of things a certain tailor had taken from me an acceptance for, I think £12, which found its way into the hands of a money-lender. With that man, who lived in a little street near Mecklenburgh Square, I formed a most heart-rending but a most intimate acquaintance. In cash I once received from him £4. For that and for the original amount of the tailor’s bill, which grew monstrously under repeated renewals, I paid ultimately something over £200. That is so common a story as to be hardly worth the telling.”