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?