When reading a book like the Count of Monte Chriato or Scherlock Holmes, they mention that this and this person has an income of 4000 pounds and that person will have this and this income when she marries.
How does that work? Most of these people do not do any actual job.
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Usually these people have inherited money, are from a rich family that gives the person an allowance, or own property somewhere that earns the money or, in the case of marriage, the bride may come with a substantial dowry from her family (or she may have property of her own).
They come from rich families and/or have estates that basically give them allowances so they don’t need to work.
Think of trust fund kids these days.
Usually, they are landlords. They own big swaths of land, and have tenants (including tenant farmers) who pay them rent. They may also have other forms of wealth that generate income, like stocks or bond, but until the 20th century, most wealth was held in the form of land. Novels by Anthony Trollope tend to be more explicit than most from that era about the exact nature of characters’ wealth.
They had incomes from farms or rental property; investments such as “consols” (government bonds) and ownership or investment in projects such as mines or railroads. Import/export was big business.
Rents have been mentioned, but there were also income from loans. Before the complete dominance of investment banks the nobility and industrialists were also the major source of venture capital. You wanted to start a business, then you borrowed from someone rich and paid them interest.
Mr Darcy was worth fifty thousand pounds a year. I think his family was richer than the royal family. Would have to have been a huge landholder with many tenant farmers paying their dues.
Such people were nobility and gentry (the difference between the two usually being that gentry didn’t have noble titles). Most land in Europe (and also Asia, come to think of it) was owned by nobility and gentry and tenant farmers would pay them to live on and farm that land. It was considered a point of pride that they didn’t have to hold any other type of employment and that was what marked them as part of the upper class.
Depending on the place, the nobility and gentry made up somewhere between 1-10% of the population, but 80-90% of land was owned by them. There’s an excellent, though long, history book, *The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy* that talks about land ownership, rents, and more, in addition to how it was that their political power and wealth began to seriously decline from the 1870s onward.
Business owners also had incomes. A lot of rich people owned land/housing/or businesses.
Some people had royalties from designs or patents still in some countries.
Everyone is talking about land and crops in Europe which is true, but let’s not forget the colonies.
A lot of the nobility of Europe owned farms and land in the Americas (Haiti for instance) and worked 100s of thousands of African slaves to death growing sugar, cotton, indigo and other crops.
It was a huge source of cheap goods for Europe and wealth for the aristocracy.
Largely, the same way it works for rich people now. Things like income from investments, full or shared ownership of business ventures (things like railroads or shipping) and real estate holdings. Many rich people back then, especially nobility and aristocrats (in countries which have nobility) owned massive estates of land, and got tremendous amount of income from that land from things like farming, timber, mining, and renting it out to tenants.
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