If none of them married, how desperate would the Bennett girls actually have been?
Well the only dowry they have is £50 apiece from their mother’s small inheritance, per year; so that’s a total of £250 generated by Mrs. Bennet’s inherited investments per annum.
The Dashwoods (four women) are living on £500 a year when they are forced to live in Barton Cottage (with good-will making the rent presumably ridiculously low thanks to Sir John Middleton’s good nature, to say nothing of all the dinners and outings he invites the ladies to, which will help them economize on housekeeping costs for heavier meals.)
So there would be six Bennet women left to live on half as much as the Dashwoods are barely scraping by on. £250 is roughly considered enough to keep ONE gentleman at a barely-genteel level of leisure (presuming he does not keep a horse or estate or have any major expenses beyond securing his own lodgings/clothes/meals at a level becoming of a gentleman.)
None of the Bennet girls have been educated well enough for them to be governesses to support themselves, so...yes, their situation would heavily rely on mega-charity from others to just help them survive, much less maintain them in the lifestyle they’ve been accustomed to. The Dashwood women have NO social life beyond the outings provided by Sir John and the offer of Mrs. Jennings to host the older girls in London--otherwise they’d be stuck in their cottage, meeting absolutely no eligible men, creating a cycle of being poor and unmarried and too poor to meet anyone with money they could marry.
If the Bennet girls don’t at least have ONE of them marry well enough to help the rest before their father dies, they are really, truly, deeply fucked.
They may joke about beautiful Jane being the saviour of the family, but...it’s true. Mr. Bennet failed his daughters several times over in A) presuming he’d have a son, B) not saving money independently from his income to support his family after his death when it became clear he wasn’t going to have a son, C) not educating them well enough to enable them to support themselves in even in the disagreeable way of being a governess, D) not making any effort to escort his daughters to London or even local assemblies to help their matrimonial chances because he just doesn’t feel like it, E) throwing up his hands and shrugging when faced with the crises of Mr. Collins and Wickham.
Much as we are relieved on a romantic level that Mr. Bennet’s support of Elizabeth saves her from parental pressure to accept Mr. Collins, Mrs. Bennet is NOT A DICK for pushing for the match, because on a material level it very much means they get to KEEP THEIR HOUSE and gain a connection to the powerful patron Lady Catherine de Bourgh, which could be VERY advantageous for the other unmarried girls.
And the scandal of Wickham very nearly scuppers the chances of ANY of the other girls, and Wickham is a further DRAIN on the family finances, not a man who is going to substantially be able to support them. It is SUCH a disaster, and of course there’s not much Mr. Bennet can do until they are found, but he’s away in London and doing...what, exactly? Mr. Gardiner takes over and manages everything and Mr. Bennet seems happy to just let him.
Mr. Bennet does the ABSOLUTE LEAST, and actively damages his children’s futures by his inaction AND by his one action to support Lizzie’s individual needs being prioritized over the collective gain, which...I mean, Lizzie is going to be JUST as homeless and destitute as her sisters when he dies, so much good being Dad’s Favourite is going to do her. :/
£50 is around £4200 now, so about £21,000 for 6 women to live on today for the Bennets.
The Dashwoods at £500/year are at about £42,000 for 4 women to live on today.
Mr bennet definitely messed up, and mrs b deserves way more respect for the immense amount of pressure she’s under
I wrote an entire essay about this my last year of school, and my teacher thought I had lost the plot. He was my most hated teacher for other reasons, and this did not help his case.
I am Here for the Mrs. Bennet Defense Squad. Yes, she can be unsubtle in a major way, but she is also terrified of the alternative outcome. However, for all her lack of tact, she is also hella strategic, as demonstrated by setting up an “oh no I’m stuck in your house” romance trope situation for Jane and Bingley. She’s a clever lady, and she sees exactly what kind of shitty situation they’re in, and she can’t get her husband to do anything.
It’s really easy to read Mrs. Bennet’s inability to be subtle about anything as a sign of stupidity or inability to understand “society” (and the Bingley sisters are inclined to do this and link it to her very middle-class family because of classism) but she is literally panicking at all times about a very real concern, and everyone is just rolling their eyes. No compassion for her poor nerves indeed!
Ok so I started to scroll by. But the problem with the Mrs. Bennet discourse is that it can too quickly swing too far in the wrong direction. Yes, everything about this is (mostly) true. The Bennet women are in a really delicate position. Their safety and continued financial security hangs on Mr. Bennet’s faintest breath. It is in fact a conversation point several times that the girls are not educated enough to serve as governesses, but are of too high a social status to expect marriage to a tradesman.
The problem is that while Mrs. Bennet is certainly the only one in the Bennet household taking this issue seriously, she's also gone too far in the opposite direction. The point of the Bennet marriage is that it’s bad for both of them. Mr. Bennet married a beautiful, foolish woman and then didn't live according to the economy he would have had to in order to leave her a tidy sum once he died. Mrs. Bennet held herself safe under the happy expectation that she would produce a son, who would inherit the estate and provide for her in her own age.
Once it became clear that wouldn’t happen (and remember Lydia is only fifteen when the book opens, so Mrs. Bennet might only have given up the idea that she would have a son possibly a decade before, when Jane was about twelve) Mrs. Bennet had to focus on her daughters’ marriages in order to ensure the family’s well-being. The problem is that she overcompensated beyond what the society she lives in found good form.
Mrs. Bennet is a foolish, vain, nervous woman who is often called out in the narrative as an older woman with Lydia’s naturally foolish and selfish character. Her husband long ago realized he’d someone for looks who he was incompatible with personality-wise. The readers (especially modern readers) see his neglect of family affairs readily, and his gentle (and at times less than gentle) mockery of his family (particularly his wife and his three youngest daughters). But importantly, Mrs. Bennet also is meant to come across as a lesson to the reader. A silly woman who married above her station (it’s mentioned several times she secured the better marriage compared to her own sister) Mrs. Bennet doesn’t have the social graces she should have been expected to, as her husband’s wife.
This is an important plot point. Raising Mrs. Bennet up as the only Bennet aware of their impending doom as Mr. Bennet ages is important and adds depth to her matrimonial scheming on her daughters’ behalves. But vitally the way she goes about her work causes Mr. Darcy to hold the greatest of disdain for her and her family. It’s that disdain that helps induce him to persuade Mr. Bingley to leave Netherfield Park. This isn’t truly questioned by Elizabeth, who understands that her mother’s over-eager grasping immediately raised Mr. Darcy’s concerns. Remember, at this time there was an abundance of women who were deliberately setting out to marry men of good fortune, and desperate to make themselves amiable enough to secure that marriage, regardless of their true feelings. Mr. Darcy (and honestly Mr. Bingley too should have known better) would have spent his entire later youth and then adulthood on the alert for women whose intentions were only for his wealth, and not for his happiness. That’s important, especially after we see the great care Mr. Darcy takes with Pemberly and his dependents.
Mrs. Bennet’s desperation is understandable. Her character (grasping, foolish, too needy and nervous to understand the social graces she must display to appear acceptable to men of the station she wants her daughters to marry) isn’t virtuous. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are intended by the narrative to stand as examples for what happens when people who are not of similar or compatible characters marry. Mr. Bennet grew so disillusioned with his wife that his reaction to his family’s financial insecurity is to make jokes and wave his wife’s concerns away as foolishness. He’s not really concerned with the future of his female family members. Mrs. Bennet on the other hand, doted on for her beauty then ignored and trivialized after that beauty lost it’s attraction, is left to indulge her worst impulses as she tries to snap up eligible young men for her daughters. Importantly, Mr. Wickham easily fools her as to his true character, even after he runs off with her daughter.
While we look at Mrs. Bennet’s desperation and find it both pitiable and understandable, that doesn’t mean that she’s the better person in the marriage. These two people could have been better than who they became as they aged. The problem is that in their youth they found a spouse who wasn’t compatible with them, and their own character deficiencies were magnified in the marriage. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are intended as a warning to the reader over marrying for shallow reasons (beauty for him, money for her). Character matters in a marriage, as does mutual compatibility.