Mansion Inflation in Films

Recently I read a comment online that films have greatly inflated the houses and interiors that Jane Austen's characters could afford, most particularly Mr. Darcy and Pemberley. The Chatsworth Estate with its 300 rooms, 17 staircases, and 359 doors, is held up as a model for Pemberley, but the house and surroundings would have been much too grand for a man who lived on £ 10,000 a year.

In Jane Austen and the English Landscape, Mavis Batey considers that it was important that Darcy’s home reflected his true nature. She suggests that Jane Austen thought a great deal about Pemberley and had a clear plan of the house in her mind. Perhaps, Batey notes, Cassandra may even have drawn her sister a sketch of the imagined landscape.

She suggests that Pemberley was modelled on Chatsworth, the home of the Duke of Devonshire because she placed Pemberley in the vicinity of Bakewell although, as Batey points out ‘Darcy was no Duke of Devonshire and Chatsworth could not be kept up on even £10,000 a year’. - Country Houses in Jane Austen's Novels

This article in the Victorian Web Nineteenth Century Household Staff discusses how many servants it would take to run a townhouse or a country estate, and the minimum costs involved in 1857. Also read: The Assistance of Servants: Jane Austen Centre Magazine

• First image: Chatsworth
• Second image: Wilton House interior as Pemberley
• Third image of Wrotham Park, Norland, Sense and Sensibility 2008