In Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” the miserly Mr. Scrooge pays his clerk,
Bob Cratchit, 15 shillings a week. Is this truly a bad wage for the period when
the story was written (1840s)? Could Cratchit have supported his family -
a wife and six (if I have counted correctly) children on this income?
Fifteen Shillings a week would be a yearly income of 39 Pounds, correct?
It might give you an idea of just how cheap Scrooge was when you consider Dickens’ book sold for 5 shillings when it was first published. So if Bob’s wage was equal to three new hardbacks you’re talking about around $100 a week at most in today’s money ( assuming the relative cost of new hardback best sellers hasn’t changed.)
By comparison, here’s a couple of quotes from Elizabeth Gaskell’s “North and South”, written in 1855
A wealthy character talking of his early hardships:
…and a conversation between the main character and a member of the working classes.
Given those, Bob Cratchitt’s fifteen shillings, for an educated man with a fair sized family, in London (which must have been expensive in those days as well as now) must have been pretty hard to live on.
In Victorian London: The Tale of a City 1840–1870 by Liza Picard, she gives sample prices for certain goods and services during this period. Handily, she gives the weekly expenses for a labourer in 1856:
Two rooms in London: 5s
Coals for fire (less in summer): 1s 1d
Bread (6 four lb loaves): 4s 6d
Vegetables: 1s 1d
Meat: 2s 6d
Milk: 3d
Coffee, tea, and sugar: 2s 6d
However, the labourer who’s expenses were studied by Picard was married but had no children. Cratchit would’ve been feeding more mouths on a skimpy salary.
A sobering reminder of the cost of food compared to our age of abundance.
Remember at least one of Bob’s daughters was in service somewhere, not being boarded at home. I remember reference to at least one girl making it home for Christmas.
That’s correct. Bob’s oldest daughter Martha comes to visit and is described as “poor apprentice at a
milliner’s” but no mention of her income, if any, is made. Bob is also trying
to get a job for his son Peter: “…which would bring in, if obtained, full five-and-
sixpence weekly.”
Given the answers to my question here I don’t see how Bob could have supported his
family and four room house on 15 shillings a week.
Most apprentices got room and board, and a certain amount of clothing [typically 2 work outfits and 1 sunday going to meeting outfit] and if seriously lucky got tipped and got to keep the tips. Just not having a teenager at home eating is a great help.
Mr Guppy in Bleak House was a law clerk who made a hundred pounds a year and was on his way to becoming a lawyer. He lived with his mom and was able to bank a considerable sum of money, enough to hang his shingle as a lawyer at the end of the book.
Is it possible that Cratchit might have owned the house? Inherited it, perhaps. That would remove one fairly major expense.
Unlikely. The vast majority of working and lower middle classes would have rented in those days.
He was actually fortunate in many ways, he had secure employment with a skill that was not oversupplied. His family was not all that large by the standards of the day and he could reasonable expect at least one third to on half of his children not to make it to their teens. His house had more than one room, in fact he had a whole house to himself and his family.
He also had access to reasonably good services - certainly not to our eyes - but compare his conditions to mill workers in the Northern industrial towns - it could have been far worse. Conditions in Bradfored, West Yorkshire were so bad that average lifespans were spectacularly low, 24 years for a skilled worker - mainly due to poor water and huge infant mortality.
Conditions were so bad that these cities could not even maintain their own populations and instead had to rely in inward migration from London, Ireland and Scotland - hence many such towns have districts named for regions where those immigrants came from.
I’ve done a bit of research into the Corn Laws era, and all the below is taken from a large variety of websites - but one thing still has me puzzled:
Imagine a 40 acre farm growing wheat:
All I’ve seen so far of the farming practices of the time indicates approximately 1 man-years labor (270 - 300 days) plus probably 50% again to feed the horses or oxen, to get an average 25-28 tons of wheat.
Allowing 1/4 retained as next years seed, that’s a sale of say 20 tons x 14 pounds = 280 pounds.
Now we know that Prussian (and assumedly US) wheat (pre-tax) was somewhat less than 1/2 the price of British - allowing for transport this means the real COST of producing that wheat is in the vicinity of 100 pounds.
A farm laborer of the time might get 30 pounds a year (less than his city cousin, but accommodation and food would be cheaper), plus allowing for the working animals and equipment / buildings - lets say 50 pounds max.
So how do these two figures line up?
Am I allowing too much / not enough for feeding the working stock?
Women and children did much of the harvesting / threshing work, which reduces the average cost of labor.
Crop rotation would play a part (particularly the fallow year), but it also pre-supposes a loss in producing the other crops grown, to be made up in the year growing wheat.
Was there that much “other work” done (maintenance of fences, drainage, etc - weeding is allowed in the above 1 year figure)?
Assume Prussian / US wheat is much closer to “real” cost, ie. minimal “rent” which was the over-riding feature of the British system.
The Corn laws were designed to keep the domestic cost of wheat at approx. 70 shillings (3.5 pounds) per “quarter” = slightly more than 14 pounds per ton.
Prussian wheat (pre-tax) was 30 shillings = 6 pounds per ton.
Roughly 29 British bushels to the ton, 100 bushels to 5 acres in an average year.
Were Prussian bushels much smaller than British?
What I’ve seen indicates approx. 25 days plowing, 10 days to harrow and scatter seed, 120 to reap, 75 to thresh, with the rest to weeding. Not all by one person, of course, but this is the total days of the various teams.
This is pre widespread use of seed drills / reapers / threshing machines.
What am I missing? Could someone with a better knowledge of farming and the commerce of the time please comment!
I have seen an analysis of Cratchett’s income somewhere, and would like to add a few points.
In general terms, for a single man, Cratchett’s income was reasonable but not outstanding, and certainly liveable. I can’t remember how many children he had, but his income would have been a struggle for them.
There are one or two complications though - English society was very class stratified such that appearance was very important, and it was a matter of expectation that individuals were seen to dress according to their status, no matter what their income.
Class at that time meant much more than land holdings and titles, it also depended upon what you did for a living. Work that was office bound was not all that well paid, yet it was seen as a career with expectations of moving up. Such staff were required to dress for the part and the work clothing of an office worker was expensive, but pretty much *de rigeur * and they were expected to live in certain areas, which again added more cost.
Those workers who were skilled craftsmen and tradesmen were not expected to dress in this way, and indeed there was a social pressure not to do so, however they could easily expect to earn significantly more than a junior accountant.
The junior accountant would tend to live in genteel (but very real) poverty until they were inducted into the company as a partner - sort of like paying your dues.
Christmas Carol is much more than a ghost story, its a story of social make up and would have been very recognisable to Victorians. It would not have worked with an apprentice trade worker, so there was always the implicit irony of the well dressed junior accountant living in worse circumstances than the skilled manual worker, however the junior accountant would still be seen as being above the skilled manual worker in terms of social status - despite the income disparity.
If you want to know about living conditions in the 1840s, then you could also look at Dr Bakers report into the mortality of Leeds and the consequent use of his data by Edwin Chadwick in ‘Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain’
http://www.victorianweb.org/history/chadwick2.html
I have some contemporary publications that put the lifespan of a skilled worker in 1840s Bradford at less than 30, and for labouring classes at under 20 years! This is extremely heavily affected by infant mortality, if you got past your teens it was reasonably likely that you would make 40 years before death. In fact if you reached 40, you could not get life insurance from one of the friendly societies as you were seen as too great a risk.
If you want some academic analysis of the costs of living then you could look at some incredibly detailed work of a slightly later period then you should look into the studies by Sebohm Rowntree. He produced an analysis of the exact needs to live, including the costs of all the essentials including rent. From this he identified certain absolute levels of poverty, and also of relative poverty.
His first study in York produced a sensation in English parliament because it had been carried out so systematically that is was virtually impossible to refute. This report was taken up by social reformers who in turn put huge pressure upon politicians, and its this that largely led to the Liberal party manifesto to start a welfare state, indeed it was the very same manifesto that identified the reluctance of the wealthy to assist and also that charity was inadequate to deal with the pressing social needs of poverty, and that poverty relief could only be carried effectively with the use of state resources.
In turn this directly led to the early parliamentary crisis that stripped the House of Lords of much of its veto over legislation. This itself is a major turning point in English history - but the subject of another thread perhaps
I haven’t read the whole document but this pdf seems to have some useful information on farm labourer wages and earnings. It doesn’t go into the exonomics of actually turning a profit on a crop though.
I did look at page 31 on cottage rents across the years and an average weekly rent in the 1830s was around £3/5/- or so a year - almost one and thupence a week.
As for wages, all sorts of extra tasks earned a labourer more money and his income would fluctuate across the seasons.
Absolutely agree with the rest of your points but is this last one right? No cite but my understanding was that the death rate in mid-nineteenth century London was such that it - like all other mega-cities throughout history until the 20th century - had to rely on inward migration to maintain its own population. Was there really much movement from London to the industrial north? If you have a source for this I’d be really interested.