The Sherlock Holmes stories were written and set in England in the 1880s and 1890s. Many times in these stories, a specific sum of money is mentioned. The treasure in The Sign of Four is said to be worth 500,000 pounds. But how much money is that? Is there any formula that can be used to convert English money of the 1890s into 21st century US dollars?
A pound sterling was worth $5 back in the days when both countries were on the gold standard. Then to adjust for inflation, use an inflation calculator like http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
According to bibliophage’s inflation calculator, one 1890s English pound is approximately equal to 90 modern US dollars. This indicates just how rich some of those guys in the Sherlock Holmes novels were. In one story, a kid asks his dad for 200 pounds, apparently just for petty cash. According to this formula, that’s $18,000!
A kid asking for the equivalent of 18 grand doesn’t mean a thing… The question is, did the dad give it to him?
In “The Engineers Thumb”, the engineer of the title is offered fifty quid for one night’s work. A quid is worth slightly more than a pound so that’s like $5,000. In another story, Holmes casually wagers a sovereign with a merchant to coax information out of him. A sovereign is also more than a pound, so that’s over $100, and yet it apparently was a coin that Holmes was carrying around in his pocket.
My theory is that there’s a psychological component to the value of money that doesn’t change in lockstep with inflation. $100 may buy exactly the same number of eggs or loaves of bread now as a sovereign did back then, but 100 is still bigger than 1.
Charles Dickens, whose works were a couple decades earlier, mentioned money a lot, too. Bob Cratchit made 15 “bob” (shillings) a week, or 39 pounds per year. I’ve heard it stated that this was actually rather decent pay for a clerk at the time. You could live on that. Not well, but you could live on it.
IIRC, a live-in governess in the Holmes story “The Copper Beeches” was to get 50 pounds per year, and it was considered a VERY generous salary for the position. If you’ve been reading Conan-Doyle lately, correct my figure if it’s wrong.
I think $90 may be a bit low, actually.
The fact that a pound was a large unit in nineteenth century England is also illustrated by the fact that they had coinage down to the farthing - a farthing is 1/960 pound. They even had fractional farthing coins, though people complained that half and third farthings were too small a denomination to be useful.
A quid is worth exactly a pound. ‘Quid’ is slang like ‘buck’ for a dollar.
But don’t forget that checks weren’t as commonly used, and
bank credit & debit cards didn’t exist. You might not
carry $100.00 around with you, yet you might easily spend
that amount in the course of a day, filling the tank, grocery shopping and so on. Only instead of paying with
gold and silver we whip out our plastic nowadays.
What fascinates me is the relative value of the coins compared with today. By informal calculation I think their
farthing was worth about 10 cents in our money, yet it seems that our pennies, worth a fortieth of their pennies, will
be with us forever.
Bibliophage’s calculator shows that the $1.35 we pay today
(in L.A. ) to ride the bus or the train is about $0.07 in
the money of 1900. That’s close enough to the nickel that
people spent to get on the streetcar in those days. So it’s
not like average folks back then were really any better off in terms what they earned and what things cost.
I do wish we had high-value coins. I think it would be great to pay for an expensive meal out with a few coins.
The U.S. has been extremely conservative in its coin system,
and it looks like the new $ coin isn’t going to fly. It makes me want to holler, but that’s been covered on another thread.
of what things cost and what they earned
I asked a question similar to the OP on this board a few months ago, and I didn’t get a straight answer, either :mad:.
My question was: If Marius (of Les Misérables) rented a room for 30 francs per year (this fact comes out in the book but not in the musical), then how much is that in current dollars?
I think the best thing to do is to apply exchange rates last. IOW, 500,000 pounds in 1890 = N pounds today. N pounds today times the current rate of exchange ($1.60 or thereabouts) means that the fortune the OP described is worth N*1.60.
So, the question to ask is, how much would 500,000 pounds in the 1890’s be worth today (in pounds)?
That’s right. Now that I think about it, the engineer in question was offered 50 guineas. A guinea is slightly more than a pound, right?
A guinea is 21 shillings instead of 20. Came about because new coinage was issued, and the old “gold guineas” circulated at a premium. The professions, like doctors and lawyers, and so on, exacerbated the problem by charging in guineas.