IT MUST BE EXHAUSTING (AN ANALYSIS)

boyfriend asked me to post his quail photo. behold

Princess and Merman by Mindy Lee 

Dark Cottagecore

Cottagecore | Dark Cottagecore | Grandmacore | Dark Grandmacore | Hagcore

Last sleep. Thank you, Gävle and your goat, for a delightful display.

it's that, "give me back my girlhood. it was mine first," is such a devastating lyric and statement because you can never have that back, and you can scream and rage and cry, but you can't change it. you can't get back the wide-eyed faith you had. so the best you can do is proclaim it was yours and it shouldn't have been taken away, it was yours it was yours it was yours first, and she's still you but you can't protect her, you can only acknowledge that she deserved to be treated as someone with worth, and you'll do it now yourself since he didn't, since no one else did

My oil painting of an Uncrustable

Tigerlily 🐯💐

Sometimes I think "yeah im totally normal" and then I remember that almost every holiday season I fall into the same trap of thinking "this person says they don't like Christmas music, but once they hear my Christmas themed medieval playlist, that will SURELY change"

Fun little thing about medieval medicine.

So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.

It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.

Could Mr. Bennet have saved money for his daughters?

I am the sort of person who hears that girls would have so many thousand in their fortunes (JA never uses the word “dowry”, fun fact) and I cannot understand how someone with £2000/year makes a £3000 pound lump sum for their daughter. Because my brain doesn’t math very well inside itself. So I made up some tables to see what Mr. Bennet could have done if he was prudent.

First, let’s be realistic, how much can they save? I am giving three different scenarios, £25, £50, and £100 per annum per daughter. £100 each I think might be a little high, since their income is £2000 a year, that would be 25% of their income! I think £50 is well within reason, that would be only £250 per annum and therefore 12% of their income.

I did both 4% and 5% interest. These are both government bonds. I know that both are mentioned in Jane Austen’s works. The 4% might be safer and a better investment for a dowry. But there isn’t a huge difference. Anyway, here is Jane’s dowry, over 21 years:

Even if they saved only £50/year, Jane now has almost £2000 as a dowry. It’s not the £10k worthy of a baronet, but that is certainly a good start! 

If the Bennets tried hard and save £100 per year, she has almost £4000, which is what her mother brought to the marriage. Even the modest £25 per year would give the girls £1000 each by their 21st birthday, which if their father died would be combined with the £1000 stipulated in the marriage articles and give them a comfortable income. Even John Dashwood acknowledges in Sense & Sensibility that increasing his half-sister’s fortunes from £1000 to £2000 would make a big difference in their comfort (and then he doesn’t do it because he and his wife are the worst).

An alternative plan would be to put aside the £4000 that Mrs. Bennet brought into the marriage and only reinvest that income. It does seem that the mother’s money was often locked up in a “life interest” and then given to the children, which is true for the Bennets as well. Just saving the initial £4000 and never adding to it except re-investing the income would have yielded around  £11,00, or £2200 for each daughter.

Also, I really want to know how the son plan would have worked in the first place. Like Mr. Bennet Jr. is going to agree to break the entail and sell off a bunch of his inheritance, when he could just keep the entail and then get the whole pie? Or was the plan just to burden his own son with the care of a mom and five sisters? Not clear. Probably also a bad plan.