Chapter 5: The Tale of the Poor Sisters (I)

March 1793, South-East England, Hertfordshire, Longborne

The snow and ice melted, the spring was bright, and the green countryside was filled with the smell of crops, blades of grass and earth, and the croaking of ducks. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

The English countryside at the end of the eighteenth century always exudes a laid-back and laid-back atmosphere.

Here, no one asks you to work late into the night, or to squeeze through the canned sardines bus and subway every day, or to the occasional ringing of your cell phone and the ensuing yelling of your boss, or the irritating real estate sales pitch...... There will also be no choking car exhaust fumes and noisy square dance music, everywhere is the singing of birds and flowers, the scenery is beautiful, the grass and trees are green, and the humid air is so fresh......

But our incomprehensible traverser Elizabeth. Miss Bennet still misses the turbid and noisy reinforced concrete forest of her hometown; I miss the small rental house where you can shop online from the bed and the convenience store is right out of the room; She misses her Apple computer, smartphone and small electric car, as well as her microwave, washing machine, refrigerator, thermos and solar water heater......

At one time, she was also a literary young woman who was obsessed with Western classical literature, longing for those balls, love and country estates.

Now, since she crossed over, she began to firmly believe that every girl who crossed into the past was an angel with broken wings in her last life!

This kind of world without electricity, no internet, no running water, and even pencils and toilet paper have not yet been invented, I really can't afford to hurt it!

(What is hard for many to imagine is that Westerners did not begin to use toilet paper until the late nineteenth century, and it was the Americans who first used toilet paper, which was only widely used throughout Europe on the eve of World War I.) It is likely that the gentlemen and ladies of the past did not wipe their butts at all – this was the reality observed by early Chinese students in the Soviet Union, where their Maozi classmates rarely wiped their butts after pooping, and the few who used toilet paper were seen as extravagant and delicate. ）

Squinting her eyes, an exhausted Elizabeth sighed and looked up at the brilliant sun, the blinding brilliance that made the corners of her eyes seem to be a little sour...... Then, resignedly, she pushed the cart full of firewood and food once more, and continued down the muddy path that had just fallen after a spring rain.

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——In the modern society after the Industrial Revolution, there are countless literary works that praise the rural idyllic life of the past. Those poets and writers spared no effort to sing the praises of rural life, criticize the depravity and hustle and bustle of the city, and claim that with the disappearance of the idyllic old life of the past, the simplicity, tranquility, spirituality and human touch of the past have all disappeared without a trace, and even the human character is not as good as the past.

However, this rose-tinged nostalgia is mostly the result of those who are far from the countryside, or at least petty bourgeoisie, who have no worries about food and clothing. While they criticize the morals of the glittering city life, they have never used the stinking pit latrine in the remote countryside once, and at best they have only driven a few times to the scenic tourist area. If these guys really came to the end of the eighteenth century, before the Industrial Revolution was fully launched, they would probably not be able to stay for a week, and they 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 Longborne. This family is not the poorest tenant farmer, but a homesteader who has been rare in England after the enclosure movement, it is said that after a broken squire, although it was once rich, but unfortunately because of several failed investments by his father and grandparents, he lost almost all his property, and could only live on the last remaining small piece of land to cultivate, which is an important negative example of the gentlemen in the village educating their children, so Elizabeth knows more about their family...... But even so, their families are far better off than tenants who need to rent land.

So, what was the living condition of such a rich peasant family? Elizabeth's vision at this time can be seen: in an old brick house covered with moss, a family of four is sitting around the fireplace. My father read the Bible aloud with great interest, and my mother prepared beef stew for everyone. The young brother, who has not yet been weaned, cries loudly in the cradle. The eldest son scooped milk out of the clay pot and poured it into everyone's cup at the table. There was no noise from cars outside, no ringing pop songs or hell rock. There is absolutely no trace of dioxins or other industrial additives in the milk that has just been milked from the cows.

Everything is so green, simple and harmonious, peaceful and serene. It's like a paradise imagined by Greenpeace environmentalists.

Sadly, if you do walk into their homes and gather information with the observation of Sherlock Holmes, you will find a lot of distress hidden beneath the surface of everyday life: for example, even though the family was a rich peasant earning more than fifty pounds a year, his father, who was studying the Bible, still coughed profusely from the smoke from the firewood. If he continued to cough like this, he would sooner or later develop bronchitis and die at the age of forty or fifty, which was the norm in England at the time. The average life expectancy of urban residents is just over 30 years old.

The baby in the cradle then cries incessantly, most likely because he has smallpox or some other untreatable common infant disease that will die soon after—a time when infant mortality rates are alarmingly high, and God bless the fact that all five Bennet sisters are adults.

Then, the mother stroked her stomach while cooking, suffering from stomach pain. But even if she was willing to pay for a doctor, in England at the end of the eighteenth century, the only effective prescription a doctor could give her was opium ointment...... The beef stew on the table tastes unpalatable and hard to chew, but there are no other dishes on the table except beef and potatoes because there are no fruits and fresh vegetables in this season.

It's fine during the day, but at night, because candles are too expensive, the vast majority of thrifty working people can only rely on the fire to read things, and as a result, because of the bad light, they hurt their eyes without reading a few books - don't think it's romantic to read a book next to a campfire! None of the family had ever seen an opera, painted an oil painting, or heard a full piano performance, and their mother was simply illiterate. The father and eldest son of the family were able to read because they had attended the cheapest church school for a few years, but they did not seem to have mastered even the basics of multiplication and division beyond reading the Bible.

Their home was only twenty-five miles from the capital, London, but the only thing in the family was that my father had traveled to the city once in a horse-drawn carriage, and the cost of the round trip cost him a month's income. Others have never been more than ten miles from home. Everyone in the family had a linen shirt and wool jacket to keep out the cold, but they were all infested with lice in the wet weather. There are no beds at home, but straw mats spread on the floor instead.

These were the general living conditions of the working families of the British countryside at the end of the eighteenth century, which were enough to daunt all modern people.

Of course, that was the life of the working people, and as the young ladies of the squire's house, the five Bennet sisters would not have lived such a life.

In England at the end of the eighteenth century, the so-called squires generally referred to those who lived well only on the profits of their ancestral inheritance, and never worked. They are neither capitalists, nor priests, officials, or politicians, but outright exploiting classes. They don't do any work every day, and even regard work as a shame, just settle their bills before the checkout day four times a year, usually drinking tea, dancing, socializing, eating, drinking, reading, gambling...... It can be called a social parasite in the truest sense of the word.

At that time, most of the English squires were landlords, but because the British Isles were not very suitable for agricultural development, and the fertile land in the country was limited, some of the squires who later made a fortune could not buy suitable land, so they exchanged their ancestral property for cash and deposited it in the bank to eat interest, or some more reliable bonds, funds, stocks, etc., and relied on annual profits and dividends to live. At the end of the eighteenth century, the average profit per acre of land in England was about one pound a year, and the interest rates on banks, stocks, funds, bonds, etc., were roughly four to five percent, while stocks and bonds with higher interest rates were usually risky investments, and they were likely to lose money.

In the Bennet family, Mr. Bennet received £2,000 a year in rent, which meant that he owned at least 2,000 acres of land. His wife's dowry was £5,000, and the interest in the bank was four per cent a year, which was £200, which meant that the whole family had an annual income of £2,200 without working at all. At that time, it was definitely in the top 5,000 in the wealth list of the whole United Kingdom - you know, at that time, it was still far from the Victorian era when the British Empire was at its peak, and there were only 400 households in the whole of Britain with an annual income of more than 5,000 pounds, and only 7,000 families with an annual income of more than 1,000 pounds. Several counts with hereditary domains earned less than a thousand pounds a year.

Moreover, unlike the landlords and tyrants in China, who had to hire a large number of dogs and go to the countryside every year to find tenants to collect rent, English landlords like Mr. Bennet were smarter and lazier, and did not even manage their own land, but signed a contract to subcontract to an agent, or an agricultural capitalist, thus passing on all the troubles and risks—even if the contractor was not doing well and went bankrupt, Mr. Bennet could still ask for the account from a guarantor, and then subcontract the land to the next agricultural capitalist. If the contractor runs the business well and makes a good profit, then Mr. Bennet can take the opportunity to raise the price and increase the ground rent when the contract expires and the other party renews the lease...... It's just a trumpet Li Ka-shing......

Therefore, according to Elizabeth's original idea, they have so much property and so much wealth, and their living conditions will not be too miserable.

Sadly, she forgot an important premise: the Bennets, not the five sisters, were the property.

In fact, not to mention Mr. Bennet's estate, not even the five thousand pounds of dowry that Mrs. Bennet kept in the bank, they could not use it!

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First of all, from a legal point of view, the Bennet couple is now missing, alive and dead.

Second, neither the Bennets left a will on what to do with the family property after their disappearance or death.

According to British practice at this time, if there is no conclusive evidence, then the average person must be missing for seven years before he can be declared dead.

The reason why the time from disappearance to death is set so long is that it was in the pioneering phase of the British Empire's colonization of the world, and countless British men were sailing in all corners of the world. At that time, the communication conditions were relatively backward, there was no radio, and it was unknown whether the letter could be reached. It is not uncommon for someone to go to sea for a few years and have no news at home. If this is not the case, it is not uncommon for an unfortunate captain, officer, or merchant to return from a perilous voyage from India, Africa, or the Americas, only to find himself inexplicably declared dead, his wife banished from a monastery, and his property inherited by a distant relative......

In this way, the Bennets' assets are temporarily frozen, and the five Bennet sisters will either find a way to go to court to apply for certification that their "parents" are dead - but this will be regarded as unfilial by the world, and they have no connections, so they may not succeed; Or you have to be self-reliant.

After a trip to Meriton, a nearby town, and a consultation with Uncle Philip, who is a lawyer, the five Bennet sisters had to give up their previous plan for the time being, and were reluctant to go to relatives and send people under the fence - mainly because they had changed their souls, and they were somewhat weak-hearted, worried about what they would show. Therefore, they can only rely on the cash stored at home to deal with it for a while.

Then, the five Bennet sisters searched the small vault of Mr. Bennet's study, smashed Mrs. Bennet's cash box, and concentrated all the pocket money of the five of them, and finally only scraped together more than four hundred pounds...... Although this number seems not small, if you want to continue to raise a dozen servants in the family, as well as a carriage and several horses, it really can't last long.

- At that time, it cost an average of twenty pounds a year to hire a maid, and the net worth of a gardener, groom, and cook was even more expensive. As for the cost of raising horses, they are generally much higher than raising people: in the army, for example, a cavalryman costs at least five times as much as an infantryman for daily maintenance.

So, two months earlier, the five Bennet sisters had dismissed their housekeepers and servants, and since then they have been self-reliant and self-reliant, even though they are still sitting on their own food, but they can't help but complain about their own cooking, laundry, and cleaning every day......