Impoverished Patrician / Literature

• 1632: One of the novels had a Polish man claim to be nobility - which meant that his family owned four pigs while their common-born neighbors only owned three.
• Agatha Christie: Just about every suspect in her extensive works fits this trope. In fact, Dame Agatha makes the English Gentry, technically her own class^note She and her husband both independently held knighthoods, but they were because of her literary work and his archaeological work, not because either of them was from an aristocratic family, look like the most useless and amoral set of people who ever lived, incapable of getting or holding a job but quite ready to off Aunt Gertrude for the family money.
• Artemis Fowl: When the father of the title character disappeared on a business trip to Russia, everyone who owed the family money started disappearing, while people who they owed money to started demanding prompt payment. The ten-year-old acting head of the family had quite a bit of trouble keeping their finances above water until he was able to locate and rescue his father (Among other things, he had to let go of all the servants except for the Old Retainer and his sister).
• Ascendance of a Bookworm: The Supernatural Elite is made out of three strata of decreasing status and wealth: archnobles, mednobles and laynobles. The poorest laynobles have little enough money that the richest among the commoners are better off than them and some laybole children learn the arts directly from their parents because their family can't afford a teacher. When the protagonist's Giving Radio to the Romans results in the introduction of luxury items intended to be sold to nobles, she needs to account for the fact that many laynobles will only be willing to spend a limited sum for them or may not be able to justify the cost at all.
• Atar Gull: Brulart was once Comte Arthur de Valbelle, an Upper-Class Twit who fell in love with a girl and proposed a Seen It All Suicide Pact once his (father's) money ran out. She instead ran off with a young banker believing Brulart dead, and after he murdered her and her lover fell into opium and piracy.
• Aunt Dimity:
  • Aunt Dimity and the Duke opens with just such a scenario: young Grayson has been upset to learn his impoverished father (the thirteenth Duke of Penford) has been selling off family heirlooms and dismissing staff, and he seeks advice from Dimity Westwood (still very much alive at this date, some twenty years before the rest of the book's events). Grayson himself grows up planning to restore his family's fortune, and does so by creating a crass rock musician alter ego with the help of his former staff. They make a fortune, then "kill off" the musician so they can retire to the ducal estate and live on income from the proceeds and other endeavours.
  • In Aunt Dimity and the Lost Prince, the snobbish blue-blooded Boghwells make ends meet by renting out their creepy-looking estate to film crews for low-budget horror films. Dimity also mentions that impoverished Russian aristocrats came to Britain in several waves between the Revolution of 1917 and the end of World War II.
• The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: While there is no literal aristocracy in Panem, certain Capitol families have a lot of history and/or wealth to their names. While some of those names became diminished in status following the First Rebellion (74 years prior to the beginning of The Hunger Games trilogy), others - such as the Plinths of District 2 - profited handsomely from the conflict and became the in-universe equivalent of Nouveau Riche.
  • Case in point, the Snow family had a great deal of wealth invested in the munitions industry of District 13, but since that district started the rebellion and was allegedly destroyed in the conflict, much of their wealth was gone less than a decade later. Throughout the novel, Coriolanus Snow perpetually laments his family’s lost status and is determined to regain it however he can.
• Ballet Shoes: The Brown/Fossil family. It's not drawn attention to much (and the sisters themselves are presumably not Blue Blood, as they're adopted) but constant reference is made to their financial struggles. The girls are withdrawn from school, the household take in several lodgers, the two older girls start working for wages, and only after years of this can Sylvia think of moving out of a large house in a highly select district of London, getting a job and laying off two of her 3 servants (the remaining one is her own nanny, who has become surrogate grandmother to the Fossils and hasn't actually taken any cash payment for years). It's not entirely ignored that this isn't real poverty, especially when the novel was set (late '20s-'30s). The brilliant, unpretty, unlucky Winifred's family are actually poor by normal standards. As the house originally belonged to Sylvia's Uncle, she was essentially acting as a caretaker. It was only after she discovered that title had been put in her name that she could think about selling it.
• In this second volume of The Chronicles of Prydain: In The Black Cauldron, Prince Ellidyr is a total jerkass, but it's explained that this is in large part because his ancestors squandered a lot of their wealth, and his older brothers took the rest, leaving him with a cloak, a sword, and a horse...and that's about it.
• The Beyonders: Galloran actually makes Jason and Rachel into these by giving them the signets of a long-since worthless estate. However, the title alone is enough to grant Jason and Rachel some legitimacy in the world of Lyrian, even if they don't have cash. Moreover, to those in the know, it suggests that they are allied with Galloran himself.
• Buddenbrooks: The permanent fear of Thomas Buddenbrook that comes to define his entire adult life. Unlike his father and grandfather, who made the families business big but grew up in more humble conditions, he is obsessed with the family's status among the rich and powerful families of the city. His interest in his wife and son is based mostly on their role in continuing the family's legacy, and when the success of the business declines due to changes in the economy and he can't afford to maintain the mansion, he is left with nothing that would matter to him. Similarly, his sister Tony also has delusions of grandeur and ruins all her relationships and contact with her daughter, because she can never cope with the idea of living under any conditions less glamorous than her childhood because that would be below her high born station.
• Captive of the Red Vixen: House Darktail thanks to Countess Highglider sabotaging their infrastructure out of petty revenge. Part of the reason Rolas was captaining their freighter himself, and why his family couldn't pay the ransom.
• The Charwoman's Shadow: The hero's father sends him off to a magician in hopes of his learning how to turn lead into gold and thereby make a sufficient dowry for his sister. She later tells him to make a Love Potion instead. It works, albeit not quite as she expected.
• The Cinder Spires: Admiral Tagwynn was one of the greatest heroes in the history of Spire Albion. That was five generations ago. His descendants are butchers whose last claim to nobility is a tradition of sending one child in every generation to serve a tour of duty in the Spirearch's Guard.
• The Clairvoyant Countess: After losing the family wealth when they fled the Russian Revolution, the countess has since been wealthy and lost it again; she has settled down to working for her living.
• Conan the Barbarian: In The Phoenix on the Sword, Volmana's motive for revolt is to get money and escape this.
• Cooking With Wild Game: Ai Fa is the Noble Savage version of this trope. Her culture doesn't place much value on money, but it is clearly understood that if you don't work, you don't eat. Support networks (usually one's clan) are vital for those who can't work, or who get seriously ill...and Ai Fa's clan members all died some time ago. So she still has the grand house they left to her but at the same time, she is constantly on the verge of starvation.
• The Countess Under Stairs: Has two different examples of this trope. Anna Grazinsky's family was one of the most opulent in Russia with a priceless collection of jewels, but after the Russian Revolution they are lost and the family settles in England with an old governess of theirs, poor and humbled. Most of their family and friends share the same fate; Anna's cousin Prince Sergei becomes a taxi driver then a chauffeur, and Anna becomes a maid. At the same time, the money has been sucked out of the estate of Rupert, the Earl of Mersham, Anna's employer, so much so that Rupert is dependant upon his fiancée, a nouveau riche heiress. Luckily, Anna regains her jewels and wealth by the end of the story, so she and Rupert are free to wed in peace and save Mersham using Anna's money instead of Muriel's, but since Anna is not a budding Nazi it's okay.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses: Feyre's father used to be the Prince of Merchants, but lost it all after a deal gone wrong. Now they live in a tiny, rundown hut struggling to survive.
• Discworld
  • Most critically Edward d'Eath in Men at Arms, who blames the modernisation of the city for this, and not the fact his forefathers all found interesting ways of spending money as fast as possible. He has one servant, who is too loyal to leave, even when Edward orders him to be tortured. (The d'Eaths haven't had a torturer for years, so he tortures himself.) Edward's fury over his family's circumstances gets the plot rolling when he decides to a monarchical restoration would right these wrongs.
  • Vimes himself is somewhat one of these, with the twist that the family name is not very well esteemed. At first. (Although it is infamous, in the same way as Cromwell is.) Though after Vimes marries Lady Sybil Ramkin, the only child of a family that owned a significant fraction of Ankh-Morpork, and is named His Grace the Duke of Ankh by the Patrician, he's both insanely wealthy and the highest-ranking noble in the city other than the Patrician himself. Vimes didn't actually want to be a Duke (he detests the notion of hereditary privilege in general and most of Ankh-Morpork's Upper-Class Twit population in particular) but went along with it partly for Sybil's sake but mostly because it means he now outranks most of the aforementioned twits. The Patrician finds the idea of a man with such an anti-authoritarian streak possessing such extensive authority as himself "practically Zen".
  • During the brief period in Feet of Clay that Nobby believes himself to be the Earl of Ankh, he's disappointed to find he's one of these as well. After the reveal that his lineage was faked by the villain, his inner monologue reveals that he intentionally covered up much better evidence of his status to avoid the headache.
    Colon: I thought the upper crust had pots of money.
    Nobby: Well, I'm the crust on its uppers.
  • Carrot is technically a king, but his family lost the throne generations ago. He honestly doesn't care (and goes to some effort to prevent the public from officially recognizing him as royalty and offering him the termite-ridden throne of his forefathers), and is quite content to live on his Watchman's salary.
    • Technically a double example, as Carrot's adoptive father is also a king ... but merely one of hundreds of minor "kings" among dwarfdom, for whom the term might better translate as "senior engineer". His parents aren't notably poor, but definitely need to work for a living.
  • And the Patrician himself, because, well, the entire city of Ankh-Morpork is flat broke. Hardly anyone pays taxes, thanks to the incredibly complex tax laws which allow anyone able to hire the Guild of Accountants to get away with almost no taxes whatsoever. The people who are the most wealthy pay very little (Vimes excepted, of course), and everyone else is pretty much too poor to be taxed. As Vetinari himself puts it in Jingo, Ankh-Morpork is a very poor city that is the home of some very rich people.
• Don Quixote: Alonso Quijano is an Hidalgo that still has the ancient arms of his ancestors, but has so little money that almost most of them is spent on food. What can he do? He is very smart and talented, but to work is beneath an Hidalgo. He is poor and bored. It does not help that he spent a lot of them in those silly chivalry books. Sure, they help him with the boredom, and the knight life is certainly exciting, but they are only absurd tales, right? Lampshaded in Part II, chapter 44:
  "Poor gentleman of good family! always cockering up his honour, dining miserably and in secret, and making a hypocrite of the toothpick with which he sallies out into the street after eating nothing to oblige him to use it! Poor fellow, I say, with his nervous honour, fancying they perceive a league off the patch on his shoe, the sweat-stains on his hat, the shabbiness of his cloak, and the hunger of his stomach!"
  • Note that his refusal to work isn't entirely out of laziness or pride, but so he can keep the few official privileges that being a Hidalgo entails (such as not having to pay taxes, which would likely be high for the stuff he owns).
• Drake Maijstral: Drake is minor nobility, but his father spent the last of the family fortune trying to fund the counter-revolution and restore control of humankind to the Khosali empire. (Which is not entirely unreasonable, since it was the Khosali which ennobled the family in the first place.)
• Dragonlance: Sturm Brightblade. His father was a nobleman and a Knight of the Rose, the highest rank of the Knights of Solamnia. But one uprising later, and Sturm's working for a scribe far away from home, trying to help his mother and wondering how his father died.
• Everything That Rises Must Converge: The mother and son live in the Southern U.S. in the '60s. They are poor, but she grew up rich in a mansion full of black servants. She tells her son that what matters is who your family is. He's a liberal intellectual who rebels against her (author Flannery O’Connor is full of contempt for both of them).
• Farsala Trilogy: Soraya becomes one when her father is killed in battle (the entire deghan class suffers a heavy blow).
• Flavia de Luce: Family de Luce can show off an impressive pedigree and has meddled in the social and state affairs of England for a long time, but the current sisters de Luce still grow up in a mansion that is increasingly decrepit and constantly threatened with bankruptcy.
• Foundation Series
  • "The Merchant Princes": The family of Barr was largely killed off by the Empire for participating in a planetwide rebellion (ironically, one to return the planet to Empire rule). He lives alone, on the fringes of society when Hober Mallow finds Onum Barr.
  • "The General": General Riose, of the Galactic Empire, approaches Ducem Barr to learn about the Foundation, due to the rumours of what happened to Onum Barr during his impoverishment. He promises to restore the family's lands and titles if Ducem agrees to cooperate. He works against them because his family has already decided that it would be better to join the Foundation than to stay with the Empire.
• The Goblin Emperor: The Danivada are this. They cannot even afford the coal to adequately heat their quarters in the palace in winter.
• The Golden Hamster Saga: The Haunting of Freddy has the Templetons, descendants of a sixth-century baron, whose castle has fallen into disrepair due to the lack of money.
• The Good Earth: Wang Lung's increasing good fortune as a farmer is tied into the fall of The House of Hwang, whose royal offspring's frivolous spending forces them to sell off their properties to Wang Lung. The ending implies that Wang Lung's spoiled children will soon end up the same way.
• Guns of the Dawn: The Marshwic family was once fairly wealthy, but a series of misfortunes left it in dire financial straits (and led to the head of the family shooting himself). The family blames much of this on their old rival, Mr Northway — the fact that his fortunes went in the opposite direction (he's now governor of the city) is, to the Marshwics, a great injustice that will surely be corrected as soon as the king learns how wicked Mr Northway is. Mr Northway, while not denying his own corruption, says that Emily's late father was just as bad and that the king cares more for obedience than integrity. He's right.
• Harry Potter: Many pureblooded wizarding families have fallen to this state.
  • The Gaunts, who include Voldemort's mother Merope, are an example of this. Once a powerful and wealthy family, their delusions of grandeur and mental instability caused by cousin marriages to retain their pure-blood status reduced them to squalor. The last generation is living with some old heirlooms Merope's father was too proud to sell.
  • The House of Black was once part of the upper class of Wizarding Britain, but due to their family members dwindling due to A. Dying in the First Wizarding War, B. Being imprisoned for war crimes, C. Being married off into even wealthier families, and D. White Sheeps being disowned, their ancestral house is in squalor and disrepair by the time the Order of the Phoenix use it as their headquarters.
  • The Weasleys are viewed as having as pureblooded a lineage as any other pureblooded wizarding families, but are barely making ends meet and other pureblooded families look down on them.
• The Hobbit: Bard's royal lineage is mentioned in the original novel, and supplementary materials written by J. R. R. Tolkien hint that he is descended from the ancient men of Numenor. How his family went from there to Bard being a mere city guard captain is never made clear. Dale being destroyed and looted and Laketown apparently not having any kind of formal nobility probably has something to do with it.
• The House of Mirth: Lily grew up the daughter of a rich man, and wants to retain this lifestyle even after the loss of her family fortune. This proves to be her undoing, and she is eventually cast out of high society for her associations with societal inferiors.
• The House of the Seven Gables: The Pyncheons.
• The Hundred and One Dalmatians: Cruella De Vil. Her family's ancestral home is in disrepair, the servants working there receive no pay other than the right to live there and say the TV must be kept on at night because they don't have light bulbs. Most of her jewels are fake. When the furs her furrier husband keeps at home are destroyed by the Dalmatians, it's revealed most of them aren't paid for and the De Vils must sell their ancestral home to pay their debts. Cruella also has to sell their real jewels to be able to start a new business.
• I Capture the Castle: The main character's family, though genteel, are not merely impoverished but perilously close to starving. At one point, she and her sister try to list skills that anyone in the family could use to make money, and come up with absolutely nothing useful.
• Jane Austen
  • Persuasion: The plot is driven by Sir Walter Eliot's need to retrench. He has to give up his country estate, go to Bath, and lease the estate.
  • Pride and Prejudice: You also get the distinct impression near the end that this is the kind of lifestyle Jane Austen foresees for Lydia Bennett and Mr Wickham, due to their social exile.
• John Carter of Mars: Tan Handron. Then, he still chose to be a soldier.
  As a family we are not rich except in honor, and, valuing this above all mundane possessions, I chose the profession of my father rather than a more profitable career.
• Journey to Chaos: The noble Darwoss family used to have high status and great fortune, but they diminished in stature over time. The current head of the family cannot afford to keep his ancestral mansion in good condition and most of his "servants" are actually employees for his newspaper.
• The Lady Grace Mysteries: Grace herself is revealed to be this near the end of Assassin; her late parents left her enough money and estates to keep her comfortable and make her an appealing bride, but her guardian Lord Worthy reveals he squandered it all to pay off his own debts and she's penniless. Luckily for her, Elizabeth promises she can stay at court and she will take care of her; Sir Charles also says he may be able to help recover some of her estates.
• The Last Days of Krypton: In the past, Mauro-Ji's family invested heavily in a vineyard that was wiped out by a blight, and an earthquake destroyed one of their mansions. He's still prominent enough to have a spot on the Kryptonian Council, but his family isn't very rich anymore.
• Lazarillo de Tormes: Lázaro's third master is a nobleman who owns nothing but the set of clothes he uses to keep up appearances, but will rather beg on the streets than do manual work for a living because the latter is considered improper of his lineage. This service ends when the nobleman flees without notice in order to not pay rent for the room they sleep in.
• Marcus Didius Falco: Decimus Camillus Verus was just wealthy enough to qualify for the Senate, but maintaining the lifestyle expected of a senator keeps his family on the brink of bankruptcy. His son-in-law once described him as "having his whole life in hock".
• Masters of Rome: Lucius Cornelius Sulla starts as one of these but ends up running the Roman Republic. Probably Truth in Literature, since it's based on real events.
  • Author Colleen McCullough loves this trope in general. Other examples include the first Gaius Julius Caesar who marries his elder daughter (happily) to New Man Gaius Marius. Also one of the several Appius Claudii who, left dirt poor with four younger siblings to provide for, recoups the family fortunes through rich marriages for his two sisters (which turn out badly) and himself marrying the plain thirty-something Porcia who earned her huge dowry by acting as foster parent to a litter of wealthy orphans. Touchingly he comes to love her very much and so poor Porcia's story ends happily.
• Les Misérables: Marius inherits the title of Baron from his late father who earned it at the Battle of Waterloo. He becomes a Bonapartist to honor his father.
• The Little Stranger: The once uber-wealthy Ayreses have fallen on hard times and are planning to sell some of the land to pay the bills. Their house, once big and fancy, has become old and decaying (and possibly haunted).
• Little Women: The Marches were once very well-to-do. Amy March acts like they still are.
• Medieval Chivalric Romance
  • Cleges: The knight Cleges is impoverished. He prays for help and receives miraculous cherries in winter. When he sets out to give them to Uther, three royal servants demand a third part of the reward to let him in. Therefore he tells Uther that the appropriate reward is some number of blows — and explains how he promised to share them. Uther has the servants receive the beatings, summons Cleges's wife, and rewards her for her loyalty to her husband.
  • Sir Amadas: Amadas, already poor, paid a dead man's debts with his last money. Fortunately, a White Knight appears to help him, he wins the hand of a princess, and the knight reveals that he is the dead man's ghost. In fact, this is a standard theme in Chivalric Romance and reflected Real Life (of the period) in that 'knights errant' were invariably younger sons whose options for bettering themselves were limited to carving out a fief in Outremer ^note a word from the French meaning "overseas", meaning the various colonies that European crusaders managed to conquer in the Middle East, constantly fluctuating and eventually all lost or marrying an heiress.
• Modern Villainess: Kekain Runa is the bastard daughter of the Kekain family. She's got servants, butlers, a Big Fancy House, and...assets that are drowning in bad debts, an allowance that's down to three million yen a month (which according to Runa is barely enough to pay for 4 staffers plus utilities), and the sure knowledge that all of that will go away in the financial crisis. To get started with her investments, she has to reverse-mortgage the house.
• The Monster of Elendhaven: The Leickenbloom family was already poor way back in the past. Florian's grandmother had already sold most of the precious stuff they had to keep them afloat, and Florian subsists out of using his Compelling Voice powers to never have to pay for anything and to get jobs as an accountant, which he mostly uses to further his plans of destroying the capitalists in the city. When Johann enters his mansion, it is mostly barren and poorly kept. Florian explains this situation is common with all noble families.
• Naples '44: Author Norman Lewis says that Alexandre Dumas noted in 1835 that in Naples, Italy there were only four noble families with real wealth, around 20 comfortably off, and the rest struggling to keep up appearances. Things had hardly changed in 1944, thanks to a stigma among the nobility against physical work or going into trade. As a Field Security officer in WW2, Lewis is sent to investigate a noblewoman who wants permission to marry a British soldier. He finds a beautiful gracious lady wearing a Pimped-Out Dress in a Big Fancy House with luxuriant furnishings, and writes an accordingly glowing report. Later he makes an unexpected visit and finds the house bare and the woman dressed in cheap clothes. She bursts into tears and informs him that the luxuries were loaned from all the other Impoverished Patricians, who are just holding onto a few clothes and an heirloom or two to keep up appearances. Lewis assures her that his recommendation has already gone through, so it won't make any difference.
• Older Than Feudalism: The narrator of Juvenal's Satires is an extremely bitter and stuck-up literal Impoverished Patrician: he is a member of the Roman class of patricii sick of all the upstarts running Rome in the early days of the Empire, and he's running out of money.
• One Fat Summer: A more rural example, but Rumson Lake gets its name from the fact that it used to be owned by the Rumson Family. Bad luck and poor financial decisions forced the Rumsons to sell off much of the land and all of the lake to outside interests before the story begins. While not actually below the poverty line, the family is no longer the major players they once were. This is a major source of anger for their eldest son Willy.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude: Fernanda del Carpio was from an aristocratic family that moved to the New World several generations ago and had steadily lost their riches since then, with the last of the family money spent in educating Fernanda to be a queen (more specifically, Queen Victoria, judging from her prudishness). Nice crash with reality when you marry into the new money of the Buendía family, Fernanda!
• Pavane in Pearl and Emerald: The main character Kide is this. His land is no longer a part of the Borgim Empire, but he's still considered an aristocrat there and expected to stay at the emperor's palace. Because he has no income, Kide's dependent on his social visits for food and runs a school teaching girls how to be palace servants.
• P. G. Wodehouse: Crops up often. Sir Buckstone Abbott in Summer Moonshine and Chuffy Chufnell in Thank You, Jeeves are two typical examples, both trying to unload their white-elephant mansions on rich Americans. In Uneasy Money, Lord Dawlish's fiancee is quite annoyed with him for handing a beggar a shilling.
• Pugs of the Frozen North: Sir Basil Sprout-Dumpling is the son of the last winner of the Race To The Top Of The World, who wished for a fortune upon winning. Basil lost the fortune by spending it all and has entered the race to reclaim it by any means he deems necessary.
• Raffles: Bunny Manders, the narrator and Deuteragonist, came into wealth some years before the start of the story, but he squandered it all and is forced to rely on journalism and theft to support himself.
• Redwall: Squire Julian Gingivere, descendant of a feline prince-turned-farmer, lives in a ramshackle barn and only owns a small patch of land; he disdains his circumstances and repels Matthias's sympathy because he knows nothing of loneliness or trying to preserve standards.
• Robin McKinley
  • In Beauty, a retelling of "Beauty and the Beast", Beauty gives a family history early in the story; this is the sort of marriage her parents had. Subverted in that it resulted in a rare case of Happily Married:
    "My mother came of a fine old family that had nothing but its bloodlines left to live on. Her parents were more than happy to accept my father's suit, with its generous bridal settlements. But it had been a happy marriage, old friends of the family told us girls. Our father had doted on his lovely young wife...and she had worshiped him."
  • The same author picks this trope up again in The Blue Sword. When it opens, Harry, the heroine, does not expect ever to marry:
    "She was proud, and if she had not been, her parents would have been proud for her. And there is little market for penniless bluebloods of no particular beauty — especially when the blueness of the blood is suspected to have been diluted by a questionable great-grandmother on the mother's side."
• Sherlock Holmes
  • The Roylotts of Stoke Moran in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band". Once exceedingly wealthy, the family was brought to ruin due to four heirs in succession being too spend-thrifty, the last squire living out his days as "an aristocratic pauper". His son was a Deadly Doctor who lived on his late wife's money and resorted to murder to prevent his stepdaughters from being able to claim any of it on their marriage, as specified in the wife's will. He does kill one of his stepdaughters before she marries, but the other recognizes the danger, escapes, and contacts Holmes.
  • Lord St. Simon in "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" plans to marry an American woman because her father struck it rich in the California gold rush. Too bad the woman's thought-to-be-dead husband showed up at the wedding...
  • In "The Three Students", one of the students is the son of an aristocrat who spent the family fortune on horses and alcohol.
  • Holmes himself is hinted to be a milder version of this. His family were "country squires" — not a terribly wealthy brand of nobility to begin with. His older brother Mycroft lives much more comfortably (though given that Mycroft's entire life centers around his desk job, his flat, and his club, he likely doesn't have much in the way of expenses).
• Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: This is Snow Flower's family life, which she keeps hidden from her friend Lily and her family. Lily's family, though they're farmers, are steadily moving up the monetary ladder, while Snow Flower is finely educated and has every refinement you could ask for, but can barely afford new clothes. The two girls are laotongs, which binds them in a way similar to a marriage, so that both of their families will benefit, although it ends up benefiting Lily far more than Snow Flower. Lily winds up married to the eldest son of one of the wealthiest families in the district, while Snow Flower becomes the wife of a butcher, a person considered impure and very low-status in 19th-century China.
  • For clarification, Lily's family was to learn how to be nobility from Snow Flower; Snow Flower was to learn how to be a good working-class woman from Lily's family.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: The series has plenty of this sort of nobility. While some of highest ranking noble houses brag about a lineage that goes back centuries or even millennia, lesser houses have plenty of churn, and in some cases are bankrupt almost as soon as they get raised to nobility.
  • Viserys and Daenerys Targaryen are pretenders to the Iron Throne, their family having been deposed in the previous civil war. Viserys is called "the Beggar King" because he travels to various courts seeking support to help him take back his throne. He's forced to sell most of his family heirlooms to support him and his sister. The abrupt change of status is keenly felt by Viserys, as he knew what it's like to live as a royal (he was seven when the Targaryens were deposed), while Daenerys was basically raised from birth as a commoner.
  • Numerous petty noble houses are still wealthy by peasant standards but nowhere near what their families used to be, often as the result of backing the wrong noble house in a schism. The Westerlings, the Waynwoods, and the Florents are all examples.
  • Jalabhar Xho is an exiled prince of the Summer Isles who has become a courtier at King's Landing, where he begs for support to help him take back his throne. No-one takes this seriously and it's suggested that he's basically earning a living as a Funny Foreigner.
  • Jorah Mormont was once set to inherit his house, but squandered his fortunes to please his even more highborn wife, Lynesee Hightower. When he turned desperate and resorted to sell poachers to slavery, he was forced to flee to Essos and practically made a persona non grata in Westeros. Lynesse soon left him, and he now lives as a wandering knight. As for Lynesse herself, while she no longer lives in the comfort of her Westerosi house, she subverts this by becoming the paramour of a Lyseni prince.
  • Littlefinger reveals that even several of the high level and prominent Houses in the Vale are falling apart financially, and he has used his personal fortune (whether through bribing the heads of those houses or buying up the debts of the houses that are in debt) to win them over to his side or force them to support him.
• The Stormlight Archive
  • Shallan Davar and her family are in desperate financial straits due to her now-dead father racking up a ton of debt and ill-will before his death. Shallan's entire plotline in the first book of the series is about her attempt to get the family out of their dire situation.
  • Vorin societies have the "tenners", the lowest rank of lighteyes. While they are still lighteyed, and as such have access to certain privileges and opportunities that are denied to darkeyes, they have no lands or great wealth and as such need to work for a living.
• Squire Haggard's Journal: Squire Haggard is an aristocrat who's drunk away whatever money remains to his family, and is constantly dodging bailiffs and unpaid bills.
• Tales of Dunk and Egg: Ser Eustace Osgrey. The Osgreys were once a very powerful house, but their influence waned over the centuries until they were only a fairly minor house by the time of the Blackfyre Rebellion. Eustace backed the Blackfyres, who lost the rebellion, which lowered his station even more. At the start of the story, he has lost his lordship and his ancestral castle, now ruling as a lowly landed knight over a small tower and a handful of peasants.
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles: An extreme example is found in the Durbeyfields, a peasant family, turns out to be the descendants of the D'Urbervilles. A character observes at one point that "many former owners of the land are now tillers of it".
• The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan is poor and proud; but his family, like all of the Gascon petty aristocracy, were never wealthy to begin with. The other Musketeers are also nobility and constantly stuck for cash given their general lack of income and careless lifestyle.
• The Unhandsome Prince: The king has a severe gambling problem, which is why the family is having money troubles.
• Valley of the Dolls: Jennifer marries one of these. She appears in public in a diamond necklace (belongs in his family), luxurious fur coats (free for the publicity for the fur company), they have a whole floor at the Waldorf (paid for by a wine company — he's kind of their goodwill ambassador), and so on. He told Jennifer he was rich because an American wife is a status symbol in Europe. To earn more money, the prince wants Jennifer to play up to a wine merchant — even go to bed with him if necessary. Jennifer sensibly walked.
• The Vampire Chronicles: Lestat is old money, and the second book talks about how he grew estranged from his family and effectively lost his noble title. In the first book, Louis (a plantation owner in Louisiana) initially doesn't believe Lestat's claims of nobility. In Louis's mind, an aristocrat should be refined, not sleep with his hunting dogs. On the other hand, Louis is a nouveau riche who doesn't really know how aristocrats are supposed to act and is basing his knowledge on how other plantation owners act.
• Village Tales: The present Duke of Taunton's father and predecessor was "a rather skint brigadier" with nothing but his Army pay and a stipend from the family trustees until, when the current Duke was in his early teens, the abeyance was terminated in the Brig's favor and the dukedom fell to the Old Brigadier … along with all the cash and land. The aged Lord Mallerstang, who succeeded two cousins in turn to that peerage title, remained proudly impoverished until the current Duke was finally allowed to help, and get back some of the Mallerstang lands for the old man. And that was because one of the prior Barons Mallerstang was the father of the Duke's sister-in-law, who married the Duke's brother to get out of "real, not merely 'aristocratic', poverty" – and her eldest son is heir presumptive both to the Duke and to Lord Mallerstang, it being for the heir's sake that old Hugo Mallerstang swallowed his pride.
• Viper at the Fist: The Rezeau family is depicted as very impoverished and Land Poor and the father, Jacques Rezeau, has to hire Private Tutors instead to send his three sons to a private school.
• Vorkosigan Saga
  • Count Vorfolse in A Civil Campaign has the misfortune of having had his predecessors for the last several generations consistently choosing the losing side in every Barrayaran rebellion or civil war. So now, despite being the effective Head of State for a small country, he lives in a small apartment with a single, aging Armsman.
  • Ghem-Lord Yenaro in Cetaganda is in similar straits, being descended from the general who was responsible for the ultimate failure of the Cetagandan invasion of Barrayar. He allowed himself to be used as a pawn by the Big Bad in the hopes of getting a minor court position, and from there hopefully repair his family's fortunes. Miles rather sadly notes in his internal monologue that Yenaro didn't need any help to restore his family's financial fortunes, as he had genuine creative talents that he could easily have spun into a lucrative career if he'd put his mind to it, but he was so fixated on restoring the status of the family name that the idea seems not to have even occurred to him.
  • This is actually fairly common for a number of the ghem, especially those who are lower-ranked or younger. Due to Cetaganda being a hierarchical society and a gerontocracy, most of the actual wealth is in the hands of the haut or upper-ranking ghem.
  • While not technically true in the absolute sense, most Barrayaran nobles consider the Vorkosigan family to be poor, as many other districts were far wealthier. This is due to a number of justifiable factors. First, the Vorkosigan district suffered the most intense fighting during the war against Cetaganda, causing the better part of a generation's efforts to be spent in repairing the damage (some areas are still dangerously radioactive three generations later). Second, the Vorkosigans had, for at least three generations, spent most of their time serving the empire as a whole, rather than their own district in particular, which is patriotic but not conducive to bringing in wealth. At the end of his regency, Aral even makes a point of giving away enough money to reduce his family's personal net worth to exactly what it was at the beginning of his regency. Third, Mark was literally the first member of the family in five generations to go into business and turn a profit.
  • Ekaterin Vorsoisson spent a book and a half effectively penniless as an unemployed widow whose husband blew his life savings on bad investments (luckily, she managed to avoid inheriting his debts). Fortunately, she had better off relatives willing to support her while she took classes to be able to qualify for a decent job. Then she remarried into the Vorkosigans.
  • This is common enough on Barrayar that Kareen Koudelka noted an established social protocol when visiting. If a 'Prole' host is shorthanded when preparing things the guests are encouraged to lend a hand, whereas the 'Vor rules' are to sit patiently and pretend one does not notice the lack of servants.
• Wax and Wayne: House Ladrian can trace its ancestry to heroes who overthrew a tyrant and saved the world. By The Alloy of Law, Lord Waxillum Ladrian is heavily in debt due to his uncle's poor management. Interestingly, Wax would rather work for a living than live as a nobleman; the only reason why he doesn't sell everything off and continue his career as a Cowboy Cop is that his house runs factories and employs a lot of people, and going bankrupt would put all of them out of work. Wax only pays his debts by getting married.
• William Makepeace Thackeray: His fiction is full of shabby-genteel characters with telling names like "Lord Bareacres" and "Viscount Castlemouldy." The whole plot of "Barry Lyndon" is about the title character, raised poor but with some modest claim to a gentleman's rank, struggling to regain what he believes is the place in society to which his birth entitles him.
• Will of Heaven: Zhang Liang is descended from one of the most powerful families in the state of Han/Hann during the late Warring States Period— and then Hann gets conquered by the First Emperor during his unification of China. Zhang Liang spends his family's remaining fortune trying to kill the First Emperor, fails, and lives the years that follow in hiding and hardship. This is very much Truth in Television.
• The Witch of Blackbird Pond: Protagonist Katherine Tyler grew up on her grandfather’s luxurious Barbados plantation, but his death revealed massive debts that she had to pay. To escape a highly undesirable man who was willing to forgive those debts if she became his wife, she sold everything except her clothes and traveled to live with her aunt’s family in Connecticut (arriving with no real knowledge of how the non-wealthy lived their lives).

• In G. K. Chesterton's The Tales of the Long Bow, Elizabeth Seymour's Back Story.
  I suppose most people would call me a failure and all my people failures now; except those who would say we never failed, because we never had to try. Anyhow, we're all poor enough now; I don't know whether you know that I've been teaching music. I dare say we deserved to go. I dare say we were useless. Some of us tried to be harmless.
• William Faulkner is fond of the trope, used especially with the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury and the Sutpen family in Absalom, Absalom! (additionally, the story of the Sutpens is narrated by Quentin Compson, one of Faulkner's many "crossover" characters).
• Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey:
  • In the novel Murder Must Advertise, Peter gets a job at an advertising agency, and due to his aristocratic air his co-workers assume that he falls into this trope (when in fact he's there to investigate a murder).
  • In "The Bibulous Business of a Matter of Taste", an impoverished French Duc arranges to sell his formula for poison gas to Wimsey. The Count was perhaps also a bit of a Gentleman and a Scholar, and not really impoverished, as a major plot point was blind testing of rare wines from his own cellar and in the end, he refused to sell the formula to a foreign country.
• The backstory of Kethry from the Heralds of Valdemar books is a nasty version of the Arranged Marriage version of this trope. The nobles were two orphaned kids (an amoral teenaged boy and his innocent younger sister) stuck with a "falling down old heap they could not even sell" while the Self-Made Man was a banker old enough to be their father with a thing for young girls. Kethry's old nurse smuggled her out (along with everything she could steal) after the wedding night (husband and brother kept the fiction of her being at a country estate going), she was sent to a Wizarding School when she started manifesting mage powers during the resulting nightmares, was handed a somewhat problematic sword by an old guard when she set off some years later, and the rest was history.
• In Patricia A. McKillip's The Bell at Sealey Head, Gwyneth suspects the Sproules are this because Raven Sproule is courting her, a merchant's daughter.
• The Baron de Sigognac, hero of Le Capitaine Fracasse by Théophile Gautier, is the last descendant of an aristocratic family but lives in quasi-poverty in his dilapidated castle. He decides to join a troupe of wandering stage comedians.
• In The Wyvern's Spur, second book of The Finder's Stone Trilogy, Giogioni Wyvernspur's family is said to be old money that's rapidly fading. Now if only someone could rise up to adventure to bring back the family fame and fortune...
  • Though Giogioni himself was comfortably well off, his father having married a woman from a well-to-do merchant family.
• Pedro de Valdivia in Isabel Allende's Inés of my Soul is born into an impoverished hidalgo family. He becomes a soldier in an effort to make a name and some money for himself and his family. He winds up conquering Chile and becoming an extremely wealthy man (none of which, unfortunately for him, does him any good when he's captured and killed by the Mapuche).
• Two of the several villains in Mary Roberts Rhinehart's The Man In Lower Ten are a brother and sister of the old slaveholding Southern gentry seeking to entrap the wealthy young heroine in a forced marriage. To make it even better the brother is already married to a girl he rather likes but who has no money.
• It turns out that the fer Roth family in Tamora Pierce's Will of the Empress had gambled away most of their estate. This is why Shan aggressively courts and then attempts to marry Sandry, after his family's first plan to have him woo the Empress herself fails.
• The title character in Coral Lansbury's Sweet Alice was reduced to shoplifting by the time she was evicted from her family estate, while her illegitimate son desperately pursued one money-making scheme after another.
• In Mercedes Lackey's One Dozen Daughters series, the ruler of a small kingdom has thirteen children before his wife finally produces the male heir he needs. Because he can't afford twelve royal dowries, all the daughters are expected to leave the country and seek their own fortune on their eighteenth birthday (He does provide them with a first-rate education in whatever craft they desire first).
• Defied in "De skandalösa" by Simona Ahrnstedt, where the Gripklos were really close to losing everything. But luckily, Gabriel was clever enough to make a new fortune through trade. (His family weren't exactly thrilled by him "lowering himself" so much, but they did need the money.)
• Vorobyaninov from The Twelve Chairs was born an aristocrat in Czarist Russia but since the Revolution, his family has fallen into poverty. He had also been well on the way to reaching this status before the revolution, having blown through his own fortune and started working on his wife's.
• Spenser encounters two versions of this in Paper Doll. The first is Jumper Jack, once a well-regarded horse breeder, now reduced to owning nothing but his house and his dogs. His Old Retainer stays with him out of a sense of loyalty, and the fact that Jack is probably incapable of taking care of himself any more. The second turns out to be his own client, who lost a lot in the '87 crash, and his wife spent/gave away the rest. He is in extreme denial about his situation, refusing to acknowledge the truth even in the face of multiple bank statements to the contrary.
• Disc-One Final Boss Penthero Iss in the Sword of Shadows used to be this; his family were of noble blood but lost all their fortune generations ago and by the time Iss was born they'd been reduced to onion farming. By the time the series starts, however, Iss had clawed his way out of poverty and become Surlord of the city-state Spire Vanis by the usual way. Notably Iss's dragon, Marafice Eye, was born as an actual commoner; though they both pulled themselves up from humble origins through sheer determination, bloody-mindedness, and ruthlessness, the wildly differing backgrounds of their families gives them very different perspectives on things and serves as a source of tension between the two men.
• Harry Flashman is a member of the gentry who considers it degrading to have to marry a factory owner's daughter. In fairness(!), he first seduced her out of lust and was forced to marry her to make amends. Only later does he come to appreciate her father's wealth, after his own father reveals the family is broke. He refers to his wife (who is from Scotland) as a "Scotch pension."
• In The Knocker on Death's Door by Ellis Peters, the Macsen-Martel family still have their name and the family home, and not much else. The individual members of the family vary a bit on how much they've acknowledged and adapted to their reduced circumstances.
• Geoffrey Tempest from The Sorrows of Satan comes from an old family of gentry, but after his father died, Geoffrey learned that he had been deeply in debt, and had to sell nearly everything they owned. At the start of the novel, he's a Starving Artist who can barely afford food.
• Rune Saint John of The Tarot Sequence is heir to the Sun Throne, one of the twenty two noble houses of Atlantis. Unfortunately, his court was destroyed when he was fifteen, and while he gets to keep his title and some of the perks of nobility, his father's estate is in haunted and inaccessible ruins, and he and his Companion Brand spend the first few books continually broke in both finances and in magical tools.

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