From where I'm sitting…

I was reading Ian Jack’s LRB  review of Ken Livingstone’s memoirs and this passage caught my eye: “Two years later [in 1972], the electors of Norwood voted him onto the Greater London Council. This gave him an income of £2,000 a year, which meant that he needed no other job”. What a difference 40 years, makes, eh? But it does put Mrs Bennett’s fluttering’s about Mr Bingley’s 5,000 a year and Mr Darcy’s 10,000 a year into perspectives, since Pride & Prejudice is set in 1797.