"He only wanted to aggrandise and enrich himself; and if Miss Woodhouse of Hartfield, the heiress of thirty thousand pounds, were not quite so easily obtained as he had fancied, he would soon try for Miss Somebody else with twenty, or with ten.''
[Chapter 16, Emma, by Jane Austen]
To a modern audience, a man who needs to marry a wife with money might seem mercenary and unromantic. I'm sure, for some couples, marriage was nothing more than a business transaction where one or both families benefited from the couple's union.
However, it was also a natural extension of the desire of many in Regency England to either marry within their current social sphere or above it. Money was vital to provide for future generations, so a man who went looking for a wife with a generous dowry would have been considered prudent rather than mercenary.
Because of this, marriage to a daughter of a rich merchant, despite her connections with "trade" could be seen as a way of mending the finances of an impoverished peer or improving the prospects of a peer's younger son.
Dowries
"DOWER, (s.from the French douaire) A dowery, that which the wife brings to the husband in marriage, that which the widow possesses, the gift of a husband for a wife; endowment, gift.
DOWRY, (s.not so correct a spelling) A dower, a dowery."
[The new and complete dictionary of the English language, by John Ash, pub. 1795]
A Dowry was any asset that a young woman brought to her husband at the time of their marriage. The dowry could be any asset of value: cash, money invested in the funds, land or property. If in cash, it was usually spoken of as a lump sum rather than an annual income, while any property was referred to by the income it earned per year. It might also be used to refer to any settlement a husband made to a wife for her and their children's future comfort.
Although Dowery was the usual spelling around 1800, Dowry became the more common spelling by 1820. Between those years both forms were used.
Dowries for daughters were often provided from the money brought to the marriage by their own mother. A bride's dowry contributed to her new family's income during her lifetime and could help to finance their children's futures, so as Colonel Fitzwilliam says in Pride and Prejudice: not many men could afford to ignore a generous dowry.
When Mr Bennet married Miss Gardener, her father had left her a lump sum of four thousand pounds, which would supplement the Bennet estate of two thousand pounds a year.
That lump sum would be invested in the funds, at four or five per cent interest, and they would use the interest as family income while keeping the capital safe. In this case, the four thousand, invested at 5% interest, would add £200 per year to Mr. Bennet's income, giving them a total of £2,200 while Mr. Bennet was alive. This mixture of adding to the household income plus leaving a dowry or inheritance for children was what made dowries so attractive.
"She is turned three-and-twenty, and an heiress: but it was not her fortune I prized; had she been portionless, she would have been equally dear to me."
[De Clifford; or Passion more Powerful than Reason, a novel by Mrs Kennedy, pub. 1820]
Other words that meant the same as dowry were Portion and Fortune.
Someone who had a dowry would be described as being Dowered or Portioned, or having a Fortune.
If you had no dowry at all, you might be called Dowerless or Portionless.
When there were sons from a marriage, the sons would often be given their portion of the money when they reached 21 years, if the family could afford it. Alternatively, the parents could instead give the son the income from his portion until he inherited the lump sum at a later time, usually on the death of one or both parents. An heir to an estate was usually provided with income from an annuity until his father died and he became the owner of the estate.
Dowry Size
"Of course I grew angry, and reminded him, with an indelicacy which his want of generosity justified, that an heiress, who had brought a hundred thousand pounds into his family, had some right to amuse herself, and that it was not my fault if elegant amusements were more expensive than others."
[Chapter 3, Belinda, by Maria Edgeworth]
The amount of a dowry depended on the financial situation of the bride's father, and whether her mother had bought any money or property to her own marriage. Dowries were most common among daughters of the gentry class or above, but a successful tradesman or merchant, who may have married a wife without a dowry early in his working life, could put aside money from his income to provide portions for his daughters in the hope that they might be able to attract a husband above his social level.
Parents could also take the money they had inherited from another family member and put it aside to provide dowries or portions for their children.
It didn't always follow that a daughter of a duke would always have a larger dowry than a country gentleman's daughter. In 1799, Miss Bevan of Devises had £10,000 at the time of her marriage to Mr Hughes, a druggist of London, while in In 1809, Lady Henrietta Cavendish, daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, brought £10,000 to her marriage to Granville Leveson-Gower. Only when her father died in 1811 did her brother, the new duke, raise her dowry to £30,000. This put it on an equal footing with the dowry given by their father to his illegitimate daughter Caroline St Jules when she married Charles Lamb.
In 1803, Lady Georgina Gordon, daughter of the Duke of Gordon, had a dowry of £20,000.
Yet, in 1804, Lord Rodney was reportedly going to marry a Miss Davis "who comes into a fortune of 80,000l on the day of her marriage, besides being heiress to Croft Castle and the noble domains around, which are supposed to be worth around 12,000l a year".
Similarly, in January 1805, when the Earl of Ormond married Miss Anna Maria Clarke, she possessed a fortune of £20,000 per annum, plus £100,000 in "ready cash". The annual income was most likely the rents from Sutton Scarsdale Hall, which Anna Maria's mother had inherited from her unmarried brother. Ownership of the hall passed to the Earl of Ormond upon their marriage.
Providing a respectable dowry for your daughter did not guarantee that marriage to some suitable landowning gentleman would follow. In 1808, Miss Priscilla Thackthwaite, who had a fortune of £4,000, married a chimney sweep in Hertfordshire, while in 1804 Miss Nancy Pitcher wed an army sergeant she had fallen in love with after seeing him on parade, providing him with her fortune of £5,000.
"Mrs. Tilney was a Miss Drummond, and she and Mrs. Hughes were schoolfellows; and Miss Drummond had a very large fortune; and, when she married, her father gave her twenty thousand pounds, and five hundred to buy wedding-clothes."
[Chapter 9, Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen]
Dowries were frequently the subject of gossip in society. In Maria Edgeworth's books, Miss Hunter has a fortune of £200,000, while Lady Delacour described herself as a great heiress, bringing £100,000 to her marriage.
Grace Nugent has a more modest £5,000, while Belinda Portman earns £100 per year in interest from her fortune, which must have been around £2,000 or £2,500, depending on the interest rate. Miss Moreton has no fortune at all.
In Jane Austen's works, Miss Darcy had a dowry of £30,000, which would have generated an income of up to £1,500 a year for her fortunate husband. The Bingley sisters had £20,000 each. Miss Mary King was an heiress with £10,000, as was Miss Moreton in Sense and Sensibility and Miss Augusta Hawkins, later wife of Mr. Elton in Emma.
Maria Ward, who married Sir Thomas Bertram, had £7,000, while Catherine Morland had £3,000. The Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility had £1,000 each, while Miss Grey, whose engagement to Mr Willoughby so upsets Marianne, had a very tempting £50,000.
"As I can give you no fortune," continued the Earl, swelling with ill-suppressed importance, as he proceeded, "you have perhaps no great pretensions to a very brilliant establishment."
{Chapter 1, Marriage, by Elizabeth Ferrier]
Being able to give your daughter a dowry was common but by no means universal within the higher levels of society. Depending on the financial circumstances of the family, a daughter may have no dowry and could have to wait until the death of both parents before receiving anything from their will. Jane Austen, the daughter of a clergyman, had no dowry.
Any fortune or possessions brought to a marriage by the wife automatically became the property of her husband for his lifetime. The only way the dowry money could be protected for the specific use of their children in the future was by using a legal document called a Marriage Settlement.
Marriage Settlements
"The present Duke of Roxburgh has made a settlement of 8,000l per ann. on his young duchess out of the large estate to which he lately succeeded, with his present title."
[Bury and Norwich Post, pub. 2nd May 1804]
Marriage settlements were legal agreements drawn up and signed that set down the financial terms of the marriage. They were also known as Marriage Articles or Articles of Marriage. These agreements did not have to be negotiated and signed before marriage. They could also be arranged and signed at any time after the marriage had taken place.
The settlement would be made between the Groom's family and the Bride's family, but not necessarily the bride or groom themselves. If the groom's father was still alive he would be the one negotiating the financial details. A younger son might have his settlement arranged by his eldest brother if he had become the head of the family. If the bride or groom was under 21 years old and their father had died, trustees could be responsible for the negotiations.
A settlement was designed to put money, land, property, investments or any other thing of value into a trust so it was protected during the marriage.
It included details of the money and property being brought to the marriage by the bride and what would happen to those assets during the marriage. It might stipulate the wife's Pin Money or personal allowance that she could spend on herself and would specify if the groom or his family were adding any of their own money for the benefit of his children. It usually covered what would happen to that money or property depending on whether the husband or wife died first. If the husband died first, the settlement would confirm the Jointure, or financial support she would receive for the remainder of her life, or at least her widowhood. If a widow remarried it was usual for the estate of her previous husband to discontinue support as she would be financially supported by her new husband. However, exceptions were not unknown.
In 1821, shortly before her death, twice-widowed Georgian diarist and socialite Hester Piozzi, (nee Salusbury) described her income to a friend:
"£800 pr. ann. was appointed me by Marriage Settlement, in return for Ten Thousand Pounds I brought with me to Southwark. The rest was hard worked for, and left me by Will, in consideration of my Welsh estate, enjoyed by Mr. Thrale for 9 years, and offer'd him for ever had he wanted it."
[The Intimate Letters of Hester Piozzi and Penelope Pennington, 1788-1821, pub 1913 by Oswald G Knapp]
The £10,000 marriage settlement was from her first marriage to Henry Thrale in 1763. Thrale died in 1781, following which she married Gabriel Mario Piozzi, her children's music teacher, in 1784. The money "hard worked for" came from the sales of books she had written, and the estate near the village of Lleweni in North Wales, where she and her second husband had built a country house called Brynbella in 1794. The quote seems to suggest that she had not lost the income from her marriage settlement despite her second marriage.
Not all marriages included a settlement, but it was considered prudent in any family where money or property was being transferred as a consequence of the marriage. Without a settlement, a husband could gamble away his wife's dowry and leave nothing for his wife or children after his death.
The money from a dowry was not always paid to the daughter's husband at the time of marriage. Sometimes they received nothing, or only a part payment, until the death of the last surviving parent. In 1818, following the death of her father, Maria Edgeworth arranged for the final instalment of her sister's dowry to be paid to her brother-in-law. John King and his wife Emmeline (formerly Edgeworth) had been married since 1802.
"Five thousand pounds was settled by marriage articles on Mrs. Bennet and the children. But in what proportions it should be divided amongst the latter depended on the will of the parents."
[Chatpter 50, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen]
Mrs Bennet's dowry was £4,000. When she married Mr. Bennet, the marriage settlement would specify what could be done with that dowry money. In this case, they had agreed that, on Mr Bennet's death, Mrs Bennet would be guaranteed £5,000, to provide an income for her widowhood. That meant Mr Bennet agreed to add £1,000 from his own estate to the money his wife brought to the marriage. This £5,000 was also there to provide dowries, to be divided among whatever children were living at that time, but not until after the parents had died.
Five thousand pounds, invested at 5% interest, would produce an annual income of only £250 per year. This is why Mrs Bennet was so worried about her financial situation if Mr. Bennet should die first; it was a big step down in income from what she was used to.
Dowries for any children of the marriage were rarely fixed at the time of the settlement. The division being "at the will of the parents" meant the amount could change depending on how many of their children survived to adulthood. It also allowed the parents to withhold a dowry if a daughter married someone against her parent's wishes.
"By a former marriage, Mr. Henry Dashwood had one son: by his present lady three daughters. The son, a steady respectable young man, was amply provided for by the fortune of his mother, which had been large, and half of which devolved on him on his coming of age."
[Chapter 1, Sense & Sensibility, by Jane Austen]
The loss of a wife in childbirth was all too common, so the settlements could have been written to make sure only a wife's own children would benefit from the money. In this way, if a man had two or more wives over his lifetime, with offspring from each marriage, each set of children could receive very different amounts of money from their mother's settlement, relative to how much the mother brought into the marriage.
Although it was usually the husband using the settlement to provide for his wife in the event of his death, it could also work the other way around. In May 1804, when Lady Sarah Fane married Lord Villiers, she brought to her marriage "a fortune of 88,000l a year; 14,000l of which is settled upon his Lordship, provided he is the longest liver."
Edited to add: Description of Hester Piozzi's income while a widow.
[Image: Mr. Elton, considering his marriage prospects, by Chris Hammond, from "Emma" by Jane Austen, pub. 1898. (Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons) ]