] Check out Jack's message linked below. The estate is entailed away, but as long as Mr Bennet is still alive they have a good £2000 per annumn, and that's rather wealthy for the time. They've a estate, a butler, a cook and a housekeeper. I'd estimate they'd have two or three house-maids, and quite possibly send their washing to a washer-woman. We need to remember that the fashion was for light dresses, and Mrs Bennet certainly wouldn't have let her daughters be unfashionable in sensible clothes.

I certainly don't dispute the fact that the Bennets are reasonably well off, and to the servants you have enumerated you can add the footman who brought Miss Bingley's message to Jane early on in the book. However, they are not "rich" in comparison to the Bingleys or the Darcys, and there definitely would be a limit on how much they could spend for clothes.

I also never intended to suggest that Mrs. Bennet would have her daughters dress out of fasion, but I DID suggest that they would be unlikely to wear their best white outfits around the house when no company was present or expected. Remember that we're talking of an age when rooms were heated by open coal fires and lit by smoky candles (and yes, I know there were high and low quality candles). Most roads were not paved, which meant that they turned to mud in wet weather and raised clouds of dust in dry weather. The result of all this is that virtually anything a lady was likely to touch in ANY house was probably dirtier than it would be today.

This would still be the case even in a house staffed by an army of servants; without vacuum cleaners the only way to remove dust and dirt from upholstered furniture and carpets was to take them outside and beat the "daylights" out of them. This process was generally only undertaken a couple times a year, and had to be postponed if it rained. Remember also that without modern furniture polish, dusting even hard surfaces tended to be a process of moving the dust around as opposed to actually picking it up.

As for doing laundry, "Great Wash at Longbourne" in the BOI section is a humorous but very informative account of just what an arduous process it actually was. Even if a family was wealthy enough to employ a fulltime laundress, it was very difficult to dry laundry in bad weather, and I suspect that ballrooms may have sometimes been utilized as places to hang the washing during wet weather. We do know that Abigail Adams had to hang her washing up to dry in the unfinished rooms of the White House after she and President Adams first took up residence there.

I guess the whole point of this is to say that it's likely that ANY lady, no matter how wealthy, would probably have taken care to protect her clothes, especially the white ones.

And thank you for the link to Jack's article. It's very informative, but I just can't see Mr. Gardiner as a "minor tradesman" with an income of less than Mr. Bennet's. The way I read it, the Gardiners are quite well off, and probably richer than the Bennets (though their perfectly-matched team of four white horses in PP2 IS a bit over the top).

Anyway, thank you all for taking the time to read this excessively long post... I think I now have to go beat a rug or something.