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.
[31] Trophy money was a duty paid by householders for providing the militia with harness, drums, colours, etc.
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 12_l._ 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.