The series from 1995. I had seen it as a schoolchild when it came out but now I see it with new eyes. Rather than the romance that we’re meant to be focusing on when watching it, I couldn’t help but concentrate on the behaviour of the lower classes towards the upper. Mr Darcy is the richest character in it, he has a stately home with huge grounds, and an income of £10K a year (equivalent to around £1 million a year now). He appears to get his income by being a landlord, renting out properties on his estate.
Mr Darcy doesn’t appear to work, he’s never even been in the army like may rich men did then. He doesn’t even go to the trouble of managing his own estate, but has a steward to do that. He does nothing but go to balls, have dinner and sit around with his friends.
So basically he is a typical upper-class scrounger. He lives off the hard work of others, raking in rents, and gets a very luxurious lifestyle by doing this. And yet, the lower classes, the people who do all his work for him and pay him the money he lives off, have to show him great respect instead of vice versa. Every time a lower class person such as a servant appears in his presence, they have to bow and curtsey to him and call him My Lord. Even though their hard work is what keeps him alive.
And he is so snobby towards those below him, even towards other landed gentry who are a bit poorer than him. And it’s so similar to rich people today. I just wonder what goes on in the head of someone like that. Other people do everything for you but you think you’re better than them. How does that even compute in someone’s mind?
It’s so crazy that this is still going on in the 21st century, especially with the royals. Prince William is a shitty landlord who owns 600 rental properties that poor people live in, he lets them go to rack and ruin so the families live in mould and damp and struggle to pay their rent so William can live in luxury, yet instead of being grateful he expects people to curtsey to him and call him Sir wherever he goes.
The royal family have four palaces as well as multiple other homes, Buckingham Palace alone has 775 rooms. There are nearly one million unoccupied homes in the UK. Of these, over 265K are long-term unoccupied, mostly owned by rich individuals and rich corporations. There are also 280K second homes in the UK. Meanwhile there are over 354K homeless people in the UK. Not to mention millions more struggling to pay rent to landlords. All of these homeless people could be housed with room to spare, and many more could be freed from the burden of rent.
Why is the most respect and deference given to those who hoard this wealth so that others go without, who feather their own nests at the expense of everyone else? We are long overdue for a revolution.
I watch the shit out of Austen adaptations. funnily enough, I’ve been on a kick lately. Sense and Sensibility, Sanditon, Persuasion. all that Georgian/Regency Era stuff.
it’s absolutely wild when examined with a critical eye to the material conditions. all of the wealth is pretty clearly a combo of landlordism (old money, peers owning giant tracts–estates, villages, etc–and extracting rents from laborers that dwell in their little fief) and colonial extraction (new money, military conquest of rival nations, the Raj or American/Caribbean plantation & extraction).
the families all collide as old money has prestige, titles, “connections”, but many are fuckin too stupid to even just collect their rents and live inside their means. they gamble it all away or host too many fine events to attract people from even higher social strata, squandering their inheritance by borrowing against it to ludicrous purposes that fail, so the old money families near “ruin” (aka having to get a job and no longer be “gentlemen” aka 24-7 poem writing, hunting party boys) counsel their children and try to matchmake them with acceptable new money that won’t alienate them from old money connections with their poor manners of lower birth and “breeding”. lmao.
it’s fucking insane. but this is the dramatic soup where our protagonists and villains exist, navigating early adulthood and trying to find “love” without having to earn a wage or causing scandal in the family. catty rebukes, vapid small talk, clandestine meetings, straight shooting family conversations about getting the bag, and the occasional “hero” who doesn’t use their position to make everyone around them any more miserable than they are.
I am so here for all of it.
also, many of these settings include randomly injected, but hilarious fears of France where the people rose up and absolutely lit up many of these idle rich motherfuckers not long before.
when reading/watching this type of story, i always think about the heating and the drafts. just awful cold dank houses with ill-fitting windows and doors and drafty fireplaces. everything is always cold unless you’re sitting right in front of a fire.
for sure. it’s probably why everybody is in like 4 layers of clothing, 3 of which are wool.
since playing tourist and seeing some “grand estates” or whatever in the UK, and also the homes of the gilded era in the US, the through line connecting both to today’s McMansion is clear as hell.
giant/ostentatious, none designed for economy of maintenance or coziness… usually the opposite, and seemingly each new iteration is even more rapidly fallen into disrepair as the construction materials are less resilient to the effects of time and builders cut even more corners.
they are all albatrosses.
and barely any tile stoves! instead, they have these enormous fireplaces that are like… bronze age tech?
I feel like that woth Downton Abbey too. For the young women to actually want to go out and find work to occupy their idle time was a miniature struggle session. Aristocracy fleeing communist Russia were treated like poor, abused souls. All of the problems the staff faces are solved by the fact that, all things considered, Lord Grantham has a soft heart and liberal attitudes for a man of his age and status, but we occasionally see what life is like for other servants under absolute tyrants.
There’s a bit of that Harry Potter liberalism in it, where the world is shown somemes to be absolutely terrible, but the status quo must be preserved
yeah, Downton Abbey is a bit more “radical” in that the house domestic staff have names and are supplied with motivations, histories, dreams, etc. those Edwardian era stories contain the tension between the decaying estate system of “gentlemen” and the emerging professionals using skills and education to modernize the world. that’s their lib framing of course, because the show runner for Downton is a lib dork.
by contrast, the Austen adaptations do not seem to give even the slightest fuck about servants, who seem to be exist more like background furniture. some adaptations are better than others, where you see people performing the maintenance of the house and grounds, instead of making them truly invisible. more recent adaptations have some of them with speaking parts and some level of familiarity with their “employers”, but they are clearly more like an extension of the household family, and not people with their own agency.
what amuses me about all of this is how modern series taking place today, if not a workplace drama, will sometimes have characters that live the same “gentleman” lifestyle of idle wealth / passive income by never having them with any sort of job that requires them to work. like maybe they own a business that doesn’t need them to ever do anything, or they “make money with computers” or some other placeholder. or they have a part-time job as an yoga instructor but somehow live in a massive apartment in midtown Manhattan. shit that literally does not compute.
in this way, those earlier period pieces are more honest and explicit in addressing material conditions (and the gender politics of “good breeding”) of the characters, which makes me feel less insulted when watching them, even if I do consider most of the characters to be pointless and deserving of a firing squad.
also, I admit to enjoying clever turns of phrase, the villains receiving their comeuppance, people using the word “obstreperous” unironically, and the characters that I am 100% ideologically opposed to, but are hilarious all the same.
like the dowager countess (played by Maggie Smith) from Downton. people who are so wittily transparent in their disdain for equity, liberation, etc that I sort of respect them for their honesty.
by contrast, the Austen adaptations do not seem to give even the slightest fuck about servants, who seem to be exist more like background furniture.
The only reason I know the Bennet’s maid was named Hill is because Mrs Bennet was always screeching “Hill! Hiiiiiiiilllll!” Whenever she wanted something.
they have a part-time job as an yoga instructor but somehow live in a massive apartment
I was thinking about this while watching “The Couple Next Door”. The woman is, in fact, a part time yoga instructor (lol) and the husband a low-grade policeman but they can somehow afford what is quite honestly a lavish house by today’s standards, very spacious and new.
I think it’s time for us to take a leaf out of France’s book.
It would actually be considered shameful for Darcy to have anything to do with managing his properties or investments — the aristocracy are supposed to keep their hands clean of all that ugliness. It’s a recurrent commentary in the book iirc.
That makes it even worse. It’s a sick society we still live in today where even now it’s seen as shameful to do your own work and better to have minions do it for you. We still idolise celebrities who have cleaners, nannies, etc and never lift a finger themselves.
i see jane austen’s and other similar works as 17th/18th century equivalents of the kardashians; where people idolize the rich and mimic them as much as possible.
it’s also the reason why i have the most difficulty accepting that a leftist future is possible when we’re so proned to worship this type of lifestyle while simultaneously deride the people who don’t measure up to it.
When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor. If all the average person can imagine is possibly being fantastically wealthy one day, then all they will fantasize about is being the rich failson drinking away the family fortune.
one fine day we will go back to building castles, but instead of for housing and aggrandizing the monarchy and nobility, we will all build them for each other
Colin Firth wears what I’ve heard the fandom refers to as “fuck me pants” and everyone who’s seen the mini series knows exactly which scene he wears them in.
