] As I was daydreaming at the beach today, I was thinking about last names in Jane Austen novels. I think that in the Middle Ages people started getting their surnames from their families profession(ex. Baker, Miller, Reeve).

] So, I started thinking about P&P. Could the name "Gardiner" been some sort of sly way of Miss Austen's to show what social class they might have been in? Just by their last name, could the "superior" Bingley sisters have known that they probably weren't a very affluent family?

Nearly all the surnames uesd in JA novels are in fact members of her own family. Gardiner is the maiden name of JA's supposed sweetheart's mother. Tom Lefroy's mother was Anne Gardiner.

Anne Gardiner's sister-in-law by marriage was Anne Lefroy (nee Brydges) who was a neighbour, a close family friend and distantly related to JA. Hence JA would have known of the Gardiners long before P&P was written.

This form of spelling for Gardiner is comparatively rare. If she had wanted to deliver a message about class in a surname JA would have been much more likely to use "Gardener".