At Home - Bill Bryson [14]
By the end of the century the average English clergyman’s income was less than half what it had been fifty years before. Adjusted for purchasing power, it was an even more miserable pittance. A country parish ceased being an attractive sinecure. Many clergymen could no longer afford to marry. Those who had brains and opportunity took their talents elsewhere. By the turn of the century, writes David Cannadine in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, “the best minds of a generation were outside the church rather than within.”
In 1899, the Marsham family estate was broken up and sold, and that ended the family’s benign and dominant relationship with the county. Curiously, it was something unexpected that happened in the kitchen that was in large part responsible for the devastating agricultural depression of the 1870s and beyond. We’ll get to that story presently, but before we enter the house and begin our tour, we might perhaps take a few pages to consider the unexpectedly pertinent question of why people live in houses at all.
* Comparing values of 1851 with those of today is not straightforward because those values can be calculated using many different measures, and things that might be expensive now (farmland, live-in servants) were often comparatively cheap then and vice versa. So, depending on which method of comparison is used, Mr. Marsham's £500 of 1851 would be worth anything from £40,000 (about $60,000), using retail price indexes as the basis for calculation, to well over £1 million ($1.6 million), using a measure of gross domestic product. An average of the six most common measures gives a figure of about £200,000 ($320,000). Per capita income in Britain in 1851 was just slightly over £20.
* The ship was called the Resurgam, meaning “I shall rise again,” which proved to be a slightly unfortunate name, as the ship sank in a storm in the Irish Sea three months after it was launched in 1878 and never did rise again. Neither, come to that, did Garrett. Discouraged by his experiences, he gave up preaching and inventing, and moved to Florida, where he took up farming. That, too, proved a disaster, and he finished his disappointing and relentlessly downhill life as a foot soldier in the American army during the Spanish-American War before dying of tuberculosis, impoverished and forgotten, in New York City in 1902.
* The Koh-i-Noor had become one of the crown jewels two years earlier, after being liberated (or looted, depending on your perspective) by the British army during its conquest of the Punjab in India. Most people found the Koh-i-Noor a letdown. Although huge at nearly 200 carats, it had been poorly cut and was disappointingly deficient in luster. After the Great Exhibition, it was boldly trimmed to a more sparkly 109 carats and set into the royal crown.
* Rotten boroughs were those where a member of Parliament could be elected by a small number of people, as at Bute in Scotland, where just one resident out of fourteen thousand had the right to vote and so obviously could elect himself. Pocket boroughs were constituencies that had no inhabitants at all but that retained a seat in Parliament, which could be sold or given away (to an unemployable son, say) by the person who controlled it. The most celebrated pocket borough was Dunwich, a coastal town in Suffolk that had once been a great port—the third biggest in England—but was washed into the sea during a storm in 1286. Despite its conspicuous nonexistence, it was represented in Parliament until 1832 by a succession of privileged nonentities.
• CHAPTER II •
THE SETTING
I
If we were somehow to bring the Reverend Thomas Marsham back to life and restore him to his rectory, what would probably most surprise him—apart from