Of a very considerable fortune, his son was, by marriage settlements, eventually secure; his present income was an income of independence and comfort. —NORTHANGER ABBEY
If you have married prudently, your eldest son is likely going to inherit an estate, or at least a house and funded money. However, unless you want your other children to be constantly pestering him for money, you must ensure that the younger sons have a means of providing for themselves—and for you and any unmarried daughters should you be left a widow.
• Use your own fortune. If a lady brings a fortune into her marriage, it is a good idea to have it written into the marriage settlement that her husband is entitled to the income from this money during her lifetime, but that after her death it will be divided among her children. If you are marrying a very rich man, you might even manage to get the income from your fortune strictly for your own use. It’s only fair, after all—it’s your money! Or your papa’s, at least!
• Have your husband settle money upon them. A lady can insist that her marriage settlement include provisions for her younger children from her husband’s fortune. One would not want an overbearing, controlling husband to disinherit children who behaved in a way that did not suit him. And if you were given control of their fortune and had a little tiff with the younkers, one would not wish to be able to cut them off irrevocably; how embarrassing to have to go back on your word later! Clearly, it is better to have these things settled from the beginning.
• If your estate is under entailment, persuade the heir to break it. If the heir is a grasping sort, there is little chance of succeeding in this endeavor, but it is worth a try. A loving son would, of course, take care of his mama and sisters. (For more on entailments, see “Who Died & Made Mr. Collins the Heir of Longbourn?”.)
• Provide a means for the child to make a living. If a son is inclined toward the church, send him to one of the universities and set him up in a family living. If he is inclined to the armed services, buy him a commission or find him a naval mentor. If he wants to be a barrister or a physician, arrange for his professional training. If the child is an ingratiating sort and there are rich, childless relatives about, introduce the child in the proper quarters and hope for the best.
• Educate your daughters. An elegant, accomplished, educated lady will be more likely to contract a brilliant marriage with a man of fortune and breeding. If the worst happens, she will be able to make a living as a governess or a teacher in a school, though of course one hopes one’s daughters will never be put to such shifts.
• Put aside some of your yearly income, or assist your husband in doing so, for the benefit of your daughters. At the very least, your daughters will have some extra cash that might help an eligible gentleman to make up his mind.
WHO DIED & MADE MR. COLLINS THE HEIR OF LONGBOURN?
Entailments were legal documents created by a family to ensure that an estate would pass down the male line, usually for three generations. The law of primogeniture stated that in the absence of an entailment, the eldest son inherited his father’s estate; if he predeceased his father, then the next son would inherit. If there were no sons to inherit the estate, it would be divided among the widow and daughters. Many families used entailments to avoid dividing an estate among several children, partly out of family vanity and partly because partitioning an estate into smaller properties would not provide sufficient income for anyone. An entailment gave residents of the estate only a life interest in its income instead of freehold ownership. If the last generation affected agreed to break the entailment, then the second generation could dispose of pieces of the estate to provide ready cash to defray debt or make dowries for the daughters of the family.
For example, in Persuasion, Sir Walter Elliot’s estate, Kellynch (and the baronetcy that goes with it), will be inherited by a cousin, William Elliot. Similarly, in Pride and Prejudice we are told that Mr. Bennet’s estate, Longbourn, is entailed on the male line; thus, because the Bennets had only daughters, Longbourn will be inherited by a distant cousin, Mr. Collins.
It is unlikely that Mr. Bennet would have voluntarily entered into such an arrangement, so we may assume that he is the second generation of the Longbourn entailment and Mr. Collins is the third. We may further assume that an application to Mr. Collins to break the entailment would not be well received (and imagine what Lady Catherine would have to say about it!). A prudent father would have saved part of his yearly income to provide for his daughters, but Mr. Bennet had depended on having a son to break the entailment and therefore did not save anything.
Most men expected their brides to have a dowry or the expectation of an inheritance, and the five Bennet sisters had only the expectation of dividing their mother’s personal fortune of four thousand pounds after her death. The Bennet ladies enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle while Mr. Bennet lived, but they were placed at a disadvantage in the marriage market by having such small expectations. If they remained unmarried when Mr. Bennet died, they would be left without a home and very little money. One might nurture a Jane Bennet-ish hope that Mr. Collins would provide some assistance to the widow and orphans, though probably in vain.
Like their creator, Jane Austen’s characters are members of the Church of England. Jane received her religious instruction from her clergyman father. According to Austen scholar Irene Collins, the Rev. George Austen’s opinions on religion were influenced by the theories of the Enlightenment, a philosophic movement that proposed that with proper guidance mankind’s innate sense of reason would lead people to do the right thing—a clear departure from the strict, grim Puritanism of previous generations.
While Jane (and her characters) tied morality to religion, she was not tremendously influenced by the two eighteenth-century movements that rose in opposition to Enlightenment philosophies and challenged the Anglican orthodoxy: the Methodists and the Evangelicals. Both of these groups believed in biblical infallibility—that the text and teachings of the Bible are the perfect realization of God’s will—and the Evangelicals espoused personal conversion as an essential doctrine. Herself deeply religious, Jane distrusted the Evangelicals’ showy display of religion, though later in her life she expressed sympathy for the force of faith behind it.