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.
In: 669
In the old world a lot of it came down to property ownership. Maybe I owned a wharf, and I collect a fee for every ship that docks. Maybe I owned a warehouse and a merchant paid me a fee to use it. Maybe I owned farmland with tenant farmers paying me for the rights to farm the land.
Honestly it’s a lot of the same stuff as today. The only difference was back in the day it was a lot more of individuals owning stuff rather than businesses owning stuff. There were businesses owning major industry, and that goes back hundreds of years. But it wasn’t really the norm for things to be owned by businesses until about a century ago. These days it would be weird for a wharf to be owned by one guy instead of a business with 50 investors. But that’s how it used to be.
Look at the royal family in the UK. They are still implementing the same business plan. Exploit and extort everyone, influence culture to make poor people think that they are magical and superior.
There were essentially mini kings all over the UK called lords. Lords of land. Landlords.
The culture was, and still is divided into classes. The royal class, the aristocrats, the upper/ruling class, middle class, working class, and subhuman. The latter being reserved for immigrants, foreigners, ethnic minorities…
This is all dependent on if you believe it of course. Which I don’t. But plenty of other Brits still firmly believe that they are subjects, not citizens. They buy into the whole royalty and white supremacy nonsense.
Capitalism is a similar thing. The kings are old money investors, their governments are businesses, and the peasants still do the work.
[https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/vol36no1/toran/](https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/vol36no1/toran/)
Some interesting analysis here to put that figure into modern numbers. (TLDR – he was in the top 5% of wealthy people of the time, and his income alone was somewhere between £1m and £16m per year, depending on how you calculate it).
The question of a book character having an income of X thousand a year was a shorthand for contemporary readers to instantly see how really rich one man was against another. Quite how the gossiping other characters knew these figures is never really revealed.
I’ve not seen mentioned that they often have money in the ‘funds’, essentially government bonds, the government borrowed money in times of expenditure then paid interest on it. so an income of £200/year could mean £4-5000 invested in a government fund. As inflation was low or even negative it was a very good, very reliable investment and generally only open to the rich.
The nobility or wealthy people who receive an income of X pounds or will get X pounds when married or upon the age of 30 or whatever are usually heirs of large estates, who provide annual allowances.
So the third daughter of the Earl of Stickinthearseshire might receive a certain income from her fathers estate upon marriage or something, based on the Earl’s will.
As many folks have written, much of 19th Century passive income came from the large estates owned by the gentry and aristocracy. However, as you’ll note in Austen and others, many of the people who are listed as receiving so many pounds a year, do not own estates. Indeed, some of them are themselves tenants of others. These characters draw their income not from estates, but from government bonds.
In order to finance the Napoleonic Wars and other policies, the British government sold consols, which are basically permanent bonds. Essentially, a person could buy a consol from the British government and would receive an annual income indefinitely. So if you bought 4% bonds, you would be assured of a return of 4% annually…forever. So if you bought 1,000 pounds worth of bonds, you might receive in perpetuity 40 pounds a year. There were of course also other instruments of investment that could also provide passive income in greater or lesser degrees.
A wealthy enough individual could thus assure themselves of a permanent passive source of income, without the need for a large estate (although for prestige reasons they might still buy or rent one).
Taking away all the complex history the answer is pretty simple, the characters in these novels are not that different from a modern wealthy person who sustains themselves via investment income.
There are many good answers here, but one thing is often missing: these aristocrats *inherited* all this land/wealth. They were raised in luxury by their parents, never needing to have a job, and when daddy died, then they inherited everything. So it wasn’t like these people you see were successful businessmen who retired early (though if you *were* a successful businessman, you may be able to buy your way in to the aristocracy – Michael Gambon’s character in Gosford Park is an example of this).
Back in the day, there was far less inheritance tax than now, so eldest sons could inherit a vast fortune when dad died and *never* have to work for a living. This kinda makes sense – if the legislature is dominated by aristocrats, it’s in their interests to preserve their way of life and keep inheritance tax low.
1. Some people in the stories come from rich families, and they have a lot of money because their parents or ancestors were rich too. They don’t have to work for money because they already have a lot of it.
2. Some characters have put their money into special things that make more money, like buying houses or stocks. When those things make more money, the characters get more money too.
3. There are some special agreements where people get money regularly, like every month or year. They might get this money because someone in their family set it up for them, or because of a special arrangement with someone else.
4. In these stories, some characters are very important in society, and that means they have a lot of privileges and resources. They don’t need a regular job because their important status helps them have money and a good life.
5. Sometimes, the authors just want to show that a character has a lot of money without explaining exactly where it comes from. They do this to make the story interesting and to help us understand the characters better.
When you belong to a noble or landed family your income is from the family estate. The modern day would be like trust fund kids. If I own an estate that generates income (it produces goods, has farmers that rent the land, houses some other industry that I own) then I dole out income to the members of my family, those who marry / produce heirs etc… may get a larger share.
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