OUaTiW and Inheritance Rights
It may be I’m the only person who finds this a fascinating bit of background to Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, but let’s talk about Alice’s inheritance and her stepmother.
Alice exists in an alternate Victorian era. It may be a bit different than our own, but let’s assume that the laws and issues surrounding marriage settlements were about the same.
So, what are marriage settlements?
Common law in England basically held that a woman’s money belonged to her husband when they got married. On the other hand, common law usually returned it to the widow when her husband died and gave her a lifetime interest in her husband’s wealth. So, if her husband owned a large piece of land, for example, she got one third of the income that land generated in rents and sales from crops, wool production, etc. However, she normally couldn’t sell the land, which would go to the heir when she died.
Now, if you’re from a rich family and are giving your daughter a nice, big dowry, you may not like the idea that she loses control of that money when she marries. What if her husband is a jerk and doesn’t want to give her any spending money? What if he’s a wild spender or gambler and loses it all?
This was where marriage settlements came in.
Before the couple married, the bride’s family and the groom’s family would negotiate the marriage settlements and write up binding contracts. The bride’s family might also put her fortune in a trust. That way, she could have access to her money, but her husband couldn’t. Also, the husband might agree to a certain amount of money that would regularly be supplied to his wife and be under her control. In some cases, he might even establish a separate trust for his wife. In return, the family might agree for the wife to take a smaller cut of the husband’s fortune if she outlived him.
Also--and this is the important part for the show--they might agree what her children would inherit.
Most people knew the story of Cinderella. If you die young (a real risk back in those days), you want your children taken care of. If your husband remarried, you don’t want everything going to the second wife and her children.
So, you have a marriage settlement spell it out. A standard agreement would be that, if you die, your husband gets the interest generated by your money, but the money itself will go to your children (maybe when he dies, maybe when the kids become legal adults or marry).
You also have likely spelled out how much of your husband’s money goes to your children. Firstborn sons normally got the lion’s share. But, since there’s no older brother in OUaTiW, we’re looking at three possibilities:
1) Equal shares to all children. Alice would get half her father’s money, and her sister would get the other half.
2) If there isn’t a son, the firstborn daughter gets the bigger share. This would give Alice two thirds of her father’s wealth.
3) If there is entailment that keeps the fortune from being broken up, Alice could inherit property, investments, and any original sums of money. Her father could save up income generated by the property, etc., and leave any not controlled by the marriage settlement to his widow and her daughter (entailments normally favored male heirs, but you could write them up any way you liked. If there was an entailment the stepmother thought would go to her daughter, then we should be talking about one that went to the firstborn daughter if there was no son).
So, in the best case scenario, Alice’s stepmother has just seen her daughter lose half the money she could have inherited from her father and the stepmother has lost half of the income she could expect as a widow.
And this isn’t asking whether the stepmother has any money. She might, of course. However, she seems a bit older and her daughter seems to be an only child. She could be a wealthy lady of independent means who chose not to marry. But, it is more likely that she did not have enough money to make a good marriage. When Alice vanished, her father would be in a situation where he could remarry with less concern about how much money his wife had (and whether they would have enough to take care of any children). She might not have any money.
Worst case scenario for her, nearly all of the money may be going to Alice. Not having money means her daughter loses a lot of options in life. The life of a poor woman in the 19th century, even a poor woman of the upper class, was not fun.
How to get around this?
Two options. If Alice is dead, her daughter once again inherits everything. If she wants to stop short of murder . . . well, getting Alice in an insane asylum means Alice’s fortune is under her family’s control.
It’s a neat and tidy solution. Family scandal is hidden away, blame any “bad blood” issues on Alice’s mother’s side of the family, and her daughter gets to live happily ever after.