Longbourn

Bags and boxes, as containers of goods and property, symbolize economic status in the novel and represent economic exchange. The amount of luggage a character has when they travel indicates, on one level, their economic status, encapsulated in the number of their worldly good. Elizabeth Bennet has much baggage when she travels to Kent, as does Lydia when she visits Brighton, but when Sarah goes to Kent, she has only a small bag. When she wishes to escape to London, all her possessions fit into one lockable wooden box that she can carry. When the housekeeper at Pemberley shows Sarah to her room, Sarah sees “[a] stranger’s locked box was tucked under the right-hand bed” (310), a parallel to her own. This servant’s box is the only bit of privacy and selfhood that maids are allowed in their life of service.

James’s canvas bag, highly portable, symbolizes his itinerant life, the past he keeps hidden when he arrives at Longbourn. When she ends her employment with the Darcys, Sarah trades the servant’s wooden box for a knapsack like James’s, symbolizing her choice of a new path in life and her love for him. She notes: “Without the box to weigh them down, her little things seemed to weigh almost nothing at all” (321).