Sheila’s answer to “How do the people in this novel acquire income/money? They never seem to work. But they talk as if …� > Likes and Comments
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Wow, thanks for that thorough explanation! So in the case of lumber and farming being the ways of generating income, I guess the owners of the property still didn't actually do the work? Did they use slaves or hired help?
After 1772, because of the Somersett case, it was interpreted that slavery did not exist in the country under law and the less than 15000 slaves that existed within England were emancipated, so by the time of Sense and Sensibility there were no slaves to be used for field labour (most slaves had been in domestic service anyways). Slavery did still exist in the colonies however and Sir Thomas Bertram in the Austen book Mansfield Park has estates in Antigua that were worked by slaves.
Now some of this next information on who worked the land is going to come from a book on the Georgian era but I don't think there should be too much difference from the Regency era of Jane Austen's novels. By 1790 around 3/4 of the land in England was farmed by tenant farmers. There was the possibility of this group becoming quite successful financially so that they themselves could afford to buy items owned by the gentry like silverplate and pianos. In Emma we see a tenant farmer who is well off financially in Robert Martin who has two parlors just like the Dashwood women. Beneath the tenant farmer there were farm labourers. They would make only enough to eke out a living. The work at times could also be seasonal. One rural Oxford labourer had £31 8s in expenses for his family and that was £5 more than he made. His family's diet included luxuries like tea, sugar, and meat, but most survived on bread, cheese, and cold fare. The hardships of the lowest agriculturalists was made worse by the practice of enclosure which took the common land that had previously been provided by the landowner for his tenants and workers to use and allowed it to be directly farmed by the owner. This increased crop yields but left a large population of people landless. These people eventually started to move to places of industrialization and worked in the new factories that started to appear. The appearance of factories also worsened the plight of the rural poor because piece work that they had done before, like lace making or weaving, could now be made much faster by machines. If go several decades past the time of Sense and Sensibility by 1850 only 22% of the workforce would still be in agriculture.
Sources:
English Society in the 18th Century by Roy Porter
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Nov 18, 2018 10:57PM
Wow, thanks for that thorough explanation! So in the case of lumber and farming being the ways of generating income, I guess the owners of the property still didn't actually do the work? Did they use slaves or hired help?
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After 1772, because of the Somersett case, it was interpreted that slavery did not exist in the country under law and the less than 15000 slaves that existed within England were emancipated, so by the time of Sense and Sensibility there were no slaves to be used for field labour (most slaves had been in domestic service anyways). Slavery did still exist in the colonies however and Sir Thomas Bertram in the Austen book Mansfield Park has estates in Antigua that were worked by slaves.Now some of this next information on who worked the land is going to come from a book on the Georgian era but I don't think there should be too much difference from the Regency era of Jane Austen's novels. By 1790 around 3/4 of the land in England was farmed by tenant farmers. There was the possibility of this group becoming quite successful financially so that they themselves could afford to buy items owned by the gentry like silverplate and pianos. In Emma we see a tenant farmer who is well off financially in Robert Martin who has two parlors just like the Dashwood women. Beneath the tenant farmer there were farm labourers. They would make only enough to eke out a living. The work at times could also be seasonal. One rural Oxford labourer had £31 8s in expenses for his family and that was £5 more than he made. His family's diet included luxuries like tea, sugar, and meat, but most survived on bread, cheese, and cold fare. The hardships of the lowest agriculturalists was made worse by the practice of enclosure which took the common land that had previously been provided by the landowner for his tenants and workers to use and allowed it to be directly farmed by the owner. This increased crop yields but left a large population of people landless. These people eventually started to move to places of industrialization and worked in the new factories that started to appear. The appearance of factories also worsened the plight of the rural poor because piece work that they had done before, like lace making or weaving, could now be made much faster by machines. If go several decades past the time of Sense and Sensibility by 1850 only 22% of the workforce would still be in agriculture.
Sources:
English Society in the 18th Century by Roy Porter
