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Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

notesonliberty.com

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Re: Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

#31

Post by asark »

computator wrote: post #16

I want to understand the fascination with Jane Austen's works, especially by hackers and designers (and an economist in this article). Paul Graham (founder of Hacker News) mentions Jane Austen in at least 5 essays, see below. I haven't read any of Austen's books, but I think I'll need to. (1) "Everyone admires Jane Austen. Add my name to the list. To me she seems the best novelist of all time. I'm interested in how t…

(1) I'm with him on her technical composition of a story being hard to tease apart (in a good way) but not so sure about them seeming unusually real or true. Structure and purpose of the novels' parts, the flow from incident to incident and scene to scene, is smooth and natural (more or less), plot, I dunno. Probably a personal thing.

(2) seems wrong to me, if by "literary" he means "broadly recognized as part of the 'Western Canon'" and not "recent works self-consciously written as literary fiction". Most read aloud really well, in my experience.

(3) Ugh.

(4) Austen's among the widest-read of the "canon", and not especially challenging (probably not an unrelated fact). This comparison is a real stretch. He couldn't think of someone better to use as an example? Huh.

(5) IDK about using it to illustrate this particular point, but yeah, basically.

If you struggle with Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility (I do—I find them too smug in a "gee look at me, the author, writing such clever things" way, though I think that's what people like about them so it must just be a me problem) try Persuasion. It's short and apparently Austen didn't get a chance to do her usual "punch-up" edit before she died, which probably explains why it comes off (to me) as less full of itself than the others and a much more agreeable read.

Emma seems to be her parody of herself, as best I can figure. I enjoyed it. Longer. Desperately wants to be a tragedy. (spoiler?) Isn't. Probably it shouldn't be, I mean she's Jane Austen and I'm just some asshole. Oh well, still good.

Haven't read Mansfield, which I understand is very well regarded, or her juvenilia. Tried Northanger but seemed pointless without a better-annotated copy, which I'll probably get around to acquiring and reading some day.

Re: Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

#33

Post by barry-cotter »

klenwell wrote: post #10
devchix wrote: post #3

Consols schmonsols! The modern prospector such as Mrs. Bennet would want to know how much is that in today's money. Using the Bank of England's trusty inflation calculator and plugging in 1813 (the year Pride and Prejudice was published), Darcy's worth £681K a year and his friend half that. In the Valley or London, what's that, a director level at a FAANG, and a tech lead? Using the annual yield to derive asset, the…

I have a stupid fascination with historical finance in literature myself. I focused on Early Modern Elizabethan literature. Wrote a thesis arguing that Spenser's Mammon in Book II of the Faerie Queene was not so much about the familiar allegory of illicit wealth but rather a vitriolic topical attack on the emerging proto-capitalist financial industry in Elizabethan England and the challenge it presented to the tradit…

> The earliest bankers were the goldsmiths

Not according to Charles Kindleberger’s A Financial History of Western Europe. His explanation for this persistent myth is that some British banks could trace some of their antecedents to goldsmiths and it made decent advertising copy. Thus it gets into books about banking written by non-historians and perpetuates itself.

A more common origin for banks was money changers, international traders in commodities and traders in bills of exchange.

Re: Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

#34

Post by pvg »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #29
nradov wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dickens?

Dickens had a fascination with poverty and its effects, but he did not have a fascination with wealth and its technical details. For him a wealthy person was someone who could, on a whim, help out a poor child or go on a merry adventure.

Is this really true? Mr. Pickwick is a not-poor man who ends up in debtors prison for alleged "breach of promise" to marry his landlady. Wealthy Steerforth is a central character in David Copperfield and so on.

Re: Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

#35

Post by thaumasiotes »

roywiggins wrote: post #19
devchix wrote: post #3

Consols schmonsols! The modern prospector such as Mrs. Bennet would want to know how much is that in today's money. Using the Bank of England's trusty inflation calculator and plugging in 1813 (the year Pride and Prejudice was published), Darcy's worth £681K a year and his friend half that. In the Valley or London, what's that, a director level at a FAANG, and a tech lead? Using the annual yield to derive asset, the…

> Darcy's worth £681K a year and his friend half that. In the Valley or London, what's that, a director level at a FAANG, and a tech lead? One big difference being, when he dies, that income reverts to his heirs and their heirs. If he was earning that as a wage, it wouldn't. So it's not directly comparable.

True, the income comparison is spurious, but the followup statistic is directly comparable:

> Using the annual yield to derive asset [value], the author in another paper put Darcy's net worth at £16.8m - £28m.

Re: Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

#36

Post by azernik »

thechao wrote: post #12
devchix wrote: post #3

Consols schmonsols! The modern prospector such as Mrs. Bennet would want to know how much is that in today's money. Using the Bank of England's trusty inflation calculator and plugging in 1813 (the year Pride and Prejudice was published), Darcy's worth £681K a year and his friend half that. In the Valley or London, what's that, a director level at a FAANG, and a tech lead? Using the annual yield to derive asset, the…

Your original estimate is odd. The article claims that 40£ was several years of income for a laborer. If we assume 20£/year is equivalent to a day laborer, that’s around 20k$/year (in Texas, where I live, that’s a bit on the low side). That gives Darcy’s income at around 10mm£/year, in modern terms. I mean, setting aside the ridiculousness of trying to compare economies separated by 200 years.

You're assuming that a day laborer in the UK had income and standard of living similar to a lower-income Texan in 2019. It was closer to that of a lower-income Haitian in 2019.

EDIT: I was a bit low - BoE's inflation calculator puts a £20 income in 1813 at £1,362.94 in 2018, or about the average income of a Haitian today. So let's say, a lower-income Afghan?

Re: Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

#37

Post by azernik »

godelski wrote: post #32

So £10000/yr is equivalent to $22.35 million a year. [0] That's quite a bit of money. [0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10000+1792+british+pou...

Wolfram Alpha is interpreting that as £10000/yr * 1,792.

As the top comment notes, according to BoE's inflation calculator [1], that's £680K/yr, or $850K/yr.

[1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...

Re: Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

#38

Post by azernik »

jacques_chester wrote: post #17
devchix wrote: post #3

Consols schmonsols! The modern prospector such as Mrs. Bennet would want to know how much is that in today's money. Using the Bank of England's trusty inflation calculator and plugging in 1813 (the year Pride and Prejudice was published), Darcy's worth £681K a year and his friend half that. In the Valley or London, what's that, a director level at a FAANG, and a tech lead? Using the annual yield to derive asset, the…

The author, in the first sentence of the second paragraph, has anticipated your objection: > In what is probably my favourite piece ever written, I tried to estimate exactly how rich Mr. Darcy was – Mr. Darcy, of course, of Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride & Prejudice. He goes into considerable detail. https://joakimbook.blogspot.com/2016/12/how-rich-is-mr-darcy...

He does - and then rejects GP's estimate, as he's more interested in analyzing relative incomes and income inequality (i.e. taking a social/political perspective) than looking at things from Miss Bennet's perspective.

Re: Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

#39

Post by azernik »

devchix wrote: post #3

Consols schmonsols! The modern prospector such as Mrs. Bennet would want to know how much is that in today's money. Using the Bank of England's trusty inflation calculator and plugging in 1813 (the year Pride and Prejudice was published), Darcy's worth £681K a year and his friend half that. In the Valley or London, what's that, a director level at a FAANG, and a tech lead? Using the annual yield to derive asset, the…

A minor quibble - Mrs. Bennet was her mother. Miss Elizabeth Bennet became Mrs. Darcy.

These things mattered in early-19th-century England.

Re: Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

#40

Post by klenwell »

barry-cotter wrote: post #33
klenwell wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a stupid fascination with historical finance in literature myself. I focused on Early Modern Elizabethan literature. Wrote a thesis arguing that Spenser's Mammon in Book II of the Faerie Queene was not so much about the familiar allegory of illicit wealth but rather a vitriolic topical attack on the emerging proto-capitalist financial industry in Elizabethan England and the challenge it presented to the tradit…

> The earliest bankers were the goldsmiths Not according to Charles Kindleberger’s A Financial History of Western Europe . His explanation for this persistent myth is that some British banks could trace some of their antecedents to goldsmiths and it made decent advertising copy. Thus it gets into books about banking written by non-historians and perpetuates itself. A more common origin for banks was money changers, i…

Maybe Kindleberger needs to read more Spenser. :)

More likely, Spenser himself accepted the common myth.

Or perhaps his Mammon was loosely inspired by whoever headed the royal mint at the time.

I'll have to pick up that book someday. Thanks.

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