Was it possible for a widow to live on this amount of money, in 1840’s England? The quote is from some Dickens story. It seems Dickens was fond of peopling his stories with widows, heirs, etc., who were able to live off tiny little pesions, annuities, etc.
What was the purchsing power of the above, in today’s money?
I googled for [British government inflation statistics] which resulted in a bunch of hits. The first one was www.statistics.gov.uk, which seems a pretty authoritative source. So I clicked it.
I didn’t see an obvious reference to “inflation” on their home page, so I typed “inflation” in to their search box at the upper left corner of the page.
That led me to http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/SearchRes.asp?term=inflation&x=10&y=16, which included a section on articles, whose first article was titled Consumer Price Inflation Since 1750. Since that looked like a good hit, I clicked it, which led to http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/article.asp?ID=726&Pos=2&ColRank=1&Rank=128, which described the article as just what I wanted.
So I clicked it and got http://www.statistics.gov.uk/articles/economic_trends/ET604CPI1750.pdf, a 68K (ie tiny) pdf which is 9 pages of text & tables with a couple of simple graphs.
Total time and effort spent? About 47 seconds.
They say that in 1840 the CPI was 11.1 and in 2003 (the last year covered) it was 715.2.
That implies inflation made their money then 715.2/11.1 = ~64.4 times more valuable than now. So the widow’s pension of ~27.5 pounds sterling is worth ~1771 pounds sterling in 2003.
That sounds pretty poverty-stricken to me.
Using another source of comparison (only slightly anachronistic): throughout the 19th century, the pound was considered to be about $5. That would give her an annual income of roughly $137.70 a year, or $11.47 a month. American cowboys tended to make $30 a month in the 1870s and I don’t think that inflation was that high between the 1840s and 1870s–even accounting for a cross-pond comparison.
We’re obviously missing something, here.
So another Google™ search turns up The Value of Money that presents a number of ways to work back to earlier costs and values.
On that page, they explicitly warn in the Foreign Countries section that direct comparisons will not work. Not only are the rates of exchange highly variable, but the actual products purchased might differ from place to place. They recommend Daniel Pool’s What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew for a good attempt to understand how money worked in early and middle nineteenth century Britain, while providing links to a couple of sites that might help out.
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew
Clicking clicking clicking. It’s an underlined book, not a link! Arrggghh! Information should be free! [sub]whine[/sub]
That is some small pension. A beginning bank clerk in 1910, at least according to P.G. Wodehouse who had had such a job only 10 years earlier, got 4/10/0 per month, or 54 pounds if I’ve done this right, and that was barely enough to live on.
I vaguely remember reading somewhere that one of the Beatles father [Paul McCartney, maybe?] made 10 pounds a week in the 50s and 60s.
I also vaguely remember reading in novels set in the 30s in Britain that an heiress would have various ‘incomes’ usually the sum mentioned was either 10000 pounds a year, or 200-300 pounds a year, and it was implied in context that the ones at the lower end were comfortable living in a small cottage somewhere obscure, and the high end were worth single unsuitable men to chase for the marriage income.
Seventy years leaves a lot of room for inflation, Spectre. If I’m reading LSLGuy’s tables right (not necessarily – economics makes my brain ache) then Dicken’s widow’s pounds bought approximately twice as much goods as those of Wodehouse’s clerk. So her income would be slightly higher than his in real terms, and most likely she already had a house, and didn’t need to pay for lodgings.
Not an extravagant income, but enough to get by.
I searched (not on google!–Altavista allows the use of the wild card )
for “price of bread” +1840
this site, of an Irish newspaper in 1840, http://www.celticcousins.net/ireland/1840marconnaught.htm
has an article about a local baker selling bread for nine pence a loaf.
The widow’s income of 27 pounds is 6480 pence (240 pennies = 1 pd)
6480 pence a year is 17 pence per day.
So if she ate a half a loaf of bread a day (5 pence), and spent 10 or 12 pence on other food, she should be able to survive (i.e. avoid starvation. )
But that assumes she had NO other expenses–Maybe her lodging was free (like a paid-off mortgage), and maybe she didnt need to buy clothes (scavaging when necessary)
But it would be a very Dickensian life indeed.
Chappachula, it should be noted that those 81/2d loaves are four pound loaves… about three times as much as what we would consider a “normal” loaf a bread. Also, the context of that price is out-of-control costs in Ireland that were a cause for controversy. It doesn’t tell us the value of bread in London. Even assuming an equivalent price, it seems a single person would probably opt for a three-penny loaf, which still offered twice as much sustenance as the loaves we typically get from our bakeries. Cost of bread would probably be closer to a penny a day.
It’s still a very meagre income, but there’s room there for the very basic necessities.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671882368/002-9855395-4891244?v=glance
I’d make that into a tag, but that’d cost 'ya.
Sorry. (Even with my particular red-green colorblindness, I can see that links and underscores are different colors. I thought everyone could.)
In Jane Eyre, when Jane becomes Mr. Rochester’s ward’s governess her income goes up from from 15 pounds per annum (very little) plus room and board, to 30 pounds per. When she receives her fortune, she expects five thousand to keep her in relative luxury for the rest of her life. Say about 100 a year.
It’s set around 1830 or so, I think. So a gentlewoman’s expenses were about 100 pounds a year. 27 lbs is livable but not great, I think. Probably just enough to be decently gentlefolk-poor.
Translates to £32 10/- per annum for an adult. So £27 is less than a Lancashire mill worker. However, if she were bequeathed property, then this might not be so tough.
But here’s an even better one - . Wages and Cost of Living in the Victorian EraCost of living for a senior clerk (1844) - £150.
So, was Dickens being sarcastic?
Thanks, JJIMM…how much did miser Ebeneezer Scrooge pay his clerk (Bob Cratchit)? As I recall, the Crachits were respectably lower middle-class, but his son Peter was excited at the prospect of a job.
I KNOW we’ve been over this before, but I can’t find the old thread I want.
It’s difficult to make these comparisons because different types of items have increased at different rates, and the economics of day-to-day life were different then. Clothing was relatively more expensive then, for instance - an average person had to consider their wardrobe a significant investment. However, compared to other expenses, lodging in 19th century London was reasonably cheap. You might have lived in a disgusting firetrap, but it didn’t take an unreasonable chunk out of your income.
This link has some information:
http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/wages2.html
They give some wages by occupation for 1860, and cost of living for a senior clerk in 1844. Note that they give 3s 6d for the weekly pay of a common laborer in 1860, 6s 6d for a bricklayer or a couple of other types of skilled workman. Also note that our senior clerk in 1844 had yearly expenses of 150 pounds, which included 7 pounds / yr for a maid, 6 pounds 13 s / yr for a washing woman and 6 pounds / yr saved. He also paid very nearly as much on clothing as he did on rent (see above).
People of much more modest means in those days may have had domestic servants of some type. The servants made very little, but their room and board were paid for. You also had more well to do people hiring live-in governesses and nannies, whose rather low sounding salaries were quite adequate when you factored in room and board. Much more of the economy was “off the books” in those days.
Depending on other circumstances, Dickens’ character may have been reasonably comfortable on that amount, but it was by no means fabulous.
I see on preview that jjimm has provided the same link I did - I’ll let my remarks stand, though.
Drat - my second paragraph was from that link - I forgot to quote it.
Oh wait, no it wasn’t - never mind.
In my experience, cost of living formulas are next to useless when trying to compare what incomes meant across centuries. We don’t live the same way.
My quick and dirty rule of thumb for this era is to just tack three zeros on to the end of an income.
That makes the window’s income 27,000 pounds, or just about $50,000. Solidly middle class.
A gentlewoman, as mentioned before, with 200-300 pounds goes to 200,000 - 300,000 pounds, very upper middle class but not at all rich.
The three zeros rule works over a very wide range of times. I extend it all the way to Hollywood in the 1930s, so that an actor who then made $100,000 a picture had the lifestyle of an actor today making $10,000,000 a year. It shows how they were able to live such lavish lives on incomes that don’t seem very impressive anymore.
All very approximate but it works much, much better for thinking about what lives must have been like than using inflation indicators, which, as shown, come up with completely phony numbers.
You mean $100 million. Hey, somebody had to point it out.