I've always been kind of mystified by the way the British live, how they get by and such. I know the uncle was a lord, but they had a huge house or castle or whatever it was with a large staff of servants. Where do lords get all their money?
I guess this story is set in the early 1900s? From what I understand a lot of these large, grand old houses were getting to be harder and harder to support financially.
In most cases, the money came from a combination of the land (rents, plus farming, mining, lumber, quarrying, etc) and investments. As the industrial revolution set in, more people moved to cities to work instead of staying on the family farm, and automation meant that fewer people were needed for rural jobs, so the landowners started to lose money on both farming and rents; at the same time, more people were becoming active in investments, diluting the stock market and making it it less stable and more unpredictable.
*Formerly Nothin_but_the_Rain*