The story is not a new one, and the other day, in looking over some pamphlets in a great library, I came across a thin quarto, entitled, 'The Batchelor's Estimate of the Expences of a Married Life In a Letter to a Friend. Being an Answer to a Proposal of Marrying a Lady with 2000l. Fortune.' The date of the pamphlet is 1729, and in it the situation is set forth with so much circumstance, and in so engaging a manner, that I thought there might be some readers who would care to spend a few minutes in looking at it with me.
A gentleman, himself a married man, having a relation a spinster of a marriageable age, and possessing also the, for those days, by no means despicable fortune of £2000, has proposed to a bachelor friend to negotiate a marriage between them.
The bachelor has no innate objection to marriage as such—on the contrary, he looks upon it as 'an agreeable state'; but he cannot 'at present accept the proposal' because 'the following necessary expenses arise so frequently and so openly to his view' that they deter him from considering marriage as possible.
Up to the present time he has lived in chambers at the moderate rent of £12, 10s. per annum. But so impressed is he with the probable requirements of a lady with the 'handsome Fortune' of £2000, that he sees himself at once obliged to secure a house with a rental of £50.
As a bachelor in chambers he has been lucky enough to escape all 'Church, Window and Poor's Taxes, Payments to Rector, Reader and Lecturer, Water Rates, Trophy Money,[31] Militia, Lamp, Scavengers, Watch, Constable, etc.' As a married man he calculates that for these things alone he will be mulcted to the extent of 'at least' £9 per annum.
Our friend was, we presume, in the habit of taking his morning cup of coffee at a coffee-house. Now he sees in imagination not only his own and his wife's daily supply of coffee to be provided, but he pictures the innumerable 'dishes of tea' which will be consumed by her and her maids, not to mention the additional quantity for gossips and card parties. Thus, 'Tea, Coffee, Chocolate, Sugar, Spirits and Fresh Supply of China will cost 12l. per annum.' We are tempted to inquire what proportion of this sum must be set aside for 'spirits' and broken crockery, and why, indeed, there should be any connection between them, unless tea-drinkings in the early part of the eighteenth century were too often modelled on the style of a certain famous one known to readers of Dickens.
The consideration of tea, this being essentially a domestic article, leads our bachelor to the question of servants. For his own use he has been content with the services of a bedmaker, to whom he gave 50s. a year. He forgets to add an unknown sum to pay for the waste, impositions, and perquisites inseparable from a bedmaker's existence. In the future the dignity of a citizen, a householder, and a married man has to be supported, and the weight of this can only be sustained by a staff of 'two Maid-servants and a Man'—the man to be in livery. Yet even these luxuries will not cost him such a very large sum, since he reckons to procure them all, livery included, for an additional £17, 10s. per annum—i.e. £20 in all.
We are next let into his confidence with regard to the proper amount of entertainment he will think it fit and necessary to allow his wife. She must certainly go to the play, but a lady of independent fortune, the mistress of a grand house and a servant in livery, cannot be expected to walk out in evening-dress, so a coach or chair must be provided for her conveyance, and for the hire of these he makes a yearly computation of £3, 10s. 'Her expenses at these Diversions' (which included, doubtless, entrance fees and refreshments) would amount to another £3, 10s. As a staid and steady bachelor not given (as he tells us later on) to 'sauntering at Coffee-Houses' or playing at hazard, he has been content with going to the play about once a year, but now, as 'it would not be proper she should go alone,' this exemplary husband will even sacrifice his own inclinations, and, obeying the call of duty, attend his wife at a cost of £1, 10s. a year! Not only is he considerate in the matter of providing for his wife's pleasures, but he seems to us decidedly liberal in the matter of pin-money, as he sets aside £30 for her personal expenses.
Coals and candles weigh heavily on his mind. His landlady has hitherto kept him sufficiently warm for an annual 40s. (coals must have been much cheaper, landladies less of harpies, or the winters much milder in those days!), but in his new establishment coals and candles will run up to the large sum of £15.
His bachelor dinners have cost him an average of 10s. per week; when married he must still dine, and even divert himself with 'evening expenses' common both to married men and bachelors, so that instead of a modest £25 for dinners he will now have to pay the following yearly bills: