Chapter 5, The Story of Poor Sisters (Part 1)
March 1793, the village of Longbourn, Hertfordshire, southeast England
The ice and snow melted, the spring light was bright, and the green countryside was filled with the smell of crops, grass and soil, as well as the quacking of ducks.
The British countryside at the end of the 18th century always exudes a leisurely and lazy atmosphere.
Here, no one asks you to work overtime until midnight, nor do you have to squeeze into buses and subways that are like sardine cans every day. There is no cell phone ringing from time to time and the ensuing yelling from your boss, or the irritating real estate industry. Promotional advertisements... There will also be no choking car exhaust and noisy square dance music. There are birds singing and flowers everywhere, the scenery is beautiful, the vegetation is green, and the moist air is so fresh...
However, our incomprehensible time traveler Elizabeth. Miss Bennet still infinitely misses the turbid air and noisy reinforced concrete forest in her hometown; she misses the small rental house where there is a convenience store right outside the door and can shop online while sitting on the bed; she misses her Apple computer. , smartphones and small electric cars, as well as microwave ovens, washing machines, refrigerators, thermos bottles and solar water heaters...
Once upon a time, she was also a literary young woman who was obsessed with Western classical literature, longing for those dance parties, love and country manor style.
Now, since time traveling, she has begun to firmly believe that every girl who travels to the past was an angel with broken wings in her previous life!
This kind of world without electricity, Internet, running water, and even pencils and toilet paper haven't been invented yet, we really can't afford to be hurt!
(What many people find unimaginable is that Westerners did not start using toilet paper until the late nineteenth century. The first people to use toilet paper were Americans, and it was popularized throughout Europe just before World War I. The gentlemen and ladies of the past probably did not wipe their butts at all. ——This is a true situation observed by early Chinese students in the Soviet Union. Their Maozi classmates rarely wiped their butts after defecation, and the few who used toilet paper were regarded as luxurious and delicate)
Squinting her eyes, the exhausted Elizabeth sighed and looked up at the brilliant sun. The dazzling light made the corners of her eyes seem a little sore... Then, she accepted her fate and once again pushed the cart filled with firewood and food and continued. Walking on a muddy path that had just had a spring rain.
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——The modern society after the Industrial Revolution is filled with countless literary works praising rural pastoral life in the past. Those poets and writers spared no effort in praising the beauty of rural life in their writings, criticizing the decadence and hustle and bustle of the city, claiming that with the disappearance of the pastoral and pastoral life in the past, the simplicity, tranquility, spirituality and humanity of the past have all disappeared. It disappeared without a trace, and even people's moral character was not as good as it was in the past.
However, most of this rose-tinted nostalgic trend comes from the upper class far away from the countryside, or at least the young bourgeoisie who have no worries about food and clothing. While they criticize the bustling city life for causing people to become morally corrupt, they have never used the smelly pit toilets in remote villages. At best, they have only visited scenic tourist areas a few times in their cars. If these guys really came to the countryside of England at the end of the 18th century, before the Industrial Revolution was fully launched, they probably wouldn't be able to stay for a week and would try their best to escape back to the city.
For example, at this moment, in Elizabeth. Not far from Miss Bennet is a typical farmhouse in the village of Longbourn. This family is not the poorest tenant farmers, but yeoman farmers who have become rare in England after the enclosure movement. It is said that they are descendants of a run-down country squire. Although they were once wealthy, it is a pity that they were due to several failed investments by their fathers and ancestors. , resulting in the loss of almost all industries, only Being able to make a living by cultivating the last remaining piece of land is an important negative example of how the gentlemen in the village educate their children, so Elizabeth knows more about their family's situation... But even so, compared to the need to rent a farm, The land tenants are already much better off.
So, what is the living situation of such a rich peasant family like? From Elizabeth's field of vision at this time, she could see: In an old brick house covered with moss, a family of four was sitting around the fireplace. My father read the Bible aloud with great interest, and my mother prepared beef stew for everyone. The little brother, who had not yet been weaned, cried loudly in the cradle. The eldest son scooped milk from a clay pot and poured it into everyone's glasses at the table. There was no noise from cars outside the house, no ear-splitting pop songs or hell rock. There is absolutely no trace of dioxins or other industrial additives in the milk freshly squeezed from the cow.
Everything is so green, simple and harmonious, quiet and peaceful. It’s like the paradise imagined by those environmentalists from Greenpeace.
Unfortunately, if you really walk into their home and carefully collect information with the observation power of Detective Sherlock Holmes, you will find a lot of troubles hidden under the surface of daily life: for example, although this family has an annual income of more than 50 Although he was a rich farmer in the pound, his father, who was reading the Bible, still coughed hard because of the smoke from the firewood. If he continued to cough like this, he would sooner or later develop bronchitis, and he would die by the age of forty or fifty at most, which was the norm in England at that time. The average life span of urban residents is only a little over thirty years.
Next, the baby in the cradle cried non-stop, probably because he had smallpox or other common infant diseases that cannot be treated, and would die soon - the infant mortality rate in this era was astonishingly high, Banner It is indeed God’s blessing that all the five special sisters can grow up.
Then the mother rubbed her belly while cooking, suffering from stomach pain. But even if she was willing to spend money to see a doctor, in England at the end of the 18th century, the only effective prescription that doctors could give her was probably opium paste... The beef stew on the table tasted tasteless and was difficult to chew. There was no food on the table except beef and potatoes, as there were no fruits or fresh vegetables in season.
It's okay during the day, but at night, because candles are too expensive, most frugal working people can only read by the fire. As a result, because of the poor light, they hurt their eyes after reading a few books - don't think that in the campfire What a romantic thing to read next to! No one in their family had ever seen an opera, painted an oil painting, or heard a complete piano performance. The mother was simply illiterate. The father and eldest son in this family are still literate because they attended the cheapest missionary school for several years, but apart from being able to read the Bible, they don't even seem to have mastered basic multiplication and division.
Their home is only twenty-five miles away from the capital, London, but the whole family has only been to London once by a public carriage, and the round trip expenses cost him a month's income. Others never traveled more than ten miles from home. Everyone in the family had enough linen shirts and woolen coats to keep out the cold, but they all became infested with lice in the wet weather. There are no beds at home, but straw mats spread on the ground instead.
These were the general living conditions of working people's families in rural Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, and they were enough to daunt all modern people.
Of course, the above is the life of working people, and as ladies from a squire family, the five Bennet sisters would not have lived such a life.
In England at the end of the 18th century, the so-called squires generally referred to those who could live well only on the profits of their ancestral industries and never worked. They are neither capitalists nor priests, officials or politicians, but a complete exploiting class. They do nothing every day, and even regard work as a shame. They just settle their bills before the billing day four times a year. They usually drink tea, dance, socialize, eat, drink, read, Gambling... can be called an out-and-out social parasite.
Most of the British squires at that time were landowners. However, because the island of Great Britain was not very suitable for agricultural development and the fertile land in the country was limited, other squires who later became rich could not buy suitable land, so they converted their ancestral properties into cash and deposited them in banks. Earn interest on it, or use some relatively reliable bonds, funds, stocks, etc., and rely on annual profits and dividends to live. At the end of the 18th century, every acre of land in England earned an average of about one pound per year, and the interest rates of banks, stocks, funds, bonds, etc. were roughly 4 to 5 percent, while stocks and bonds with higher interest rates Bonds are usually risky investments, and you are likely to lose everything. People with cautious personalities dare not bet their wealth on them easily.
Among the Bennet family, Mr. Bennet has an annual ground rent income of two thousand pounds, which means that he owns at least two thousand acres of real estate. His wife's dowry is 5,000 pounds. The annual interest in the bank is calculated at 4%, which is 200 pounds. This means that their family's total annual income is 2,200 pounds without working at all. . On the wealth rankings in the UK at that time, he was definitely among the top 5,000. You know, that was still far from the Victorian era when the British Empire was at its peak. There were only 400 households in the UK with an annual income of 5,000 pounds. There are only 7,000 households with an annual income of more than 1,000 pounds. Several earls with hereditary lands earned less than a thousand pounds a year.
Moreover, compared with the wealthy landowners in China who have to hire a large number of lackeys and go to the countryside every year to find tenants to collect rent, British landowners like Mr. Bennet are smarter and lazy, and do not even manage their own land. The contract was signed and subcontracted to an agent, or a certain agricultural capitalist, thereby passing on all the troubles and risks - even if the contractor failed to manage well and went bankrupt, Mr. Bennet could still ask the guarantor for the account, and then transfer it to him. The land is subcontracted to the next agricultural capitalist. If the contractor operates properly and makes huge profits, then Mr. Bennet can take the opportunity to raise the price and increase the land rent when the contract expires and the other party renews the lease to share the benefits... He is simply a trumpet Li Ka-shing...
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Therefore, according to Elizabeth's initial thoughts, with so much property around them, their living situation would not be too miserable.
But unfortunately, she forgot an important premise: these are the properties of the Bennets, not the five sisters.
In fact, not to mention Mr. Bennet's real estate, they can't even use Mrs. Bennet's 5,000-pound dowry in the bank!
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First of all, from a legal perspective, the Bennets are currently missing, neither alive nor dead.
Secondly, neither Mr. and Mrs. Bennet left a will, stipulating how to arrange the family property after their disappearance or death.
According to British practice at this time, if there is no conclusive evidence, most people will have to be missing for seven years before they can be declared dead.
——The reason why the time from disappearance to announcement of death is set to be so long is because at that time, the British Empire was in the pioneering stage of colonizing the world, and countless British men were sailing around in every corner of the world. The communication conditions at that time were relatively backward. There was no radio, and God knew whether the letters would arrive. It is common for someone to go to sea for several years and have no news from home. If we do not legislate in this way, then there will often be an unlucky captain, officer or businessman who returns from a long and dusty voyage from India, Africa or America after numerous hardships and dangers, only to find that he is inexplicably pronounced dead and his wife is driven into the The monastery, and the embarrassing fact that the property was inherited by a distant relative...
In this way, the property of the Bennets is temporarily frozen. The five Bennet sisters can either find a way to go to court to apply for certification that their "parents" are dead - but this will be regarded as unfilial daughters by the world, and they If you don’t have many connections, you may not be able to succeed; otherwise you have to rely on your own efforts.
After bracing themselves for a trip to Meryton, a nearby town, and consulting with Uncle Philip, a lawyer, the time-travel version of the five Bennet sisters had to temporarily give up their previous plan, and were reluctant to seek shelter from relatives. ——Mainly because they had changed their souls and felt somewhat guilty, worried that something would be exposed. Therefore, they can only rely on the cash stored at home to deal with it for a while.
Then, the time-travel version of the five Bennet sisters rummaged through boxes and cabinets at home, searched Mr. Bennet’s study vault, broke open Mrs. Bennet’s money box, and collected all the pocket money of the five of them. In the end, I only managed to scrape together more than four hundred pounds... Although this amount seemed large, if I wanted to continue to support a dozen servants, a carriage and several horses, I really couldn't hold on to it for long.
——At that time, hiring a maid cost an average of twenty pounds per year, while gardeners, grooms and cooks were even more expensive. As for the cost of raising horses, it is generally much higher than raising people: for example, in the army, the daily maintenance cost of a cavalry is at least five times that of an infantryman. Therefore, starting two months ago, the five Bennet sisters dismissed their housekeepers and servants. From then on, they no longer relied on others to serve them, and they became self-reliant. Although they were actually still sitting on their hands, they only cooked, washed and cleaned by themselves every day. They couldn't help but complain...