 Money & Wages
MoneyIn 1845, of course the old pre-decimalisation currency existed. Pounds, shillings and pence (£/s/d - for denarius, the Latin word for penny).
Two things in particular about British money drove foreigners mad, the first being that twelve pence (or pennies) made up a shilling, but twenty shillings made up a pound. Adding up the cost of several items became quite a chore, as one can imagine, but the British long remained committed to this bizarre monetary system, and, indeed, a sign of the impracticality of one of Trollope's major characters, Plantagent Palliser, the Duke of Omnium, lay in the fact that his political program advocated decimal currency (!). A second maddening thing involved a peculiar, obviously classed-based pricing scheme in which prices were quoted in guineas, the guinea being a nonexistent denomination (ie, there was no Guinea coin) worth 21 shillings (or a shilling more than a pound). Items intended for the wealthier classes were listed in guineas.
WagesThroughout the Victorian era there was an incredibly vast income gap between rich and poor, in which wealthy landowners had an income which was hundreds or even thousands of times that of one of their employees. Servants, who had all living expenses taken care of, earned as little as £10/year, and the sign of being (or having become) a member of the middle class was having at least one servant. Some poor vicars at mid-century earned as little as £40-50/year. Given that in the mid- and late-1860s, London laborers earned about 20 shillings/week and an engineer about double that (approximately £100/year), they would have been highly unlikely to have had in their possession anything more than shillings and pence. The middle classes earned somewhere in the hundreds - a civil servant might earn about £300+ according to their position. £1000 pa was considered a very desirable sum.
Currency and where they kept itSince more than three-quarters of the British population thus never handled pound coins (NB gold coins called sovereigns were always worth £1 under the Gold Standard, though little in circulation), they were also highly unlikely to come in contact with paper money, which was used for larger denominations (£5 or more, as today). If coins dominated financial exchange for most Britons, they are likely to have used purses (or items called wallets that looked like purses) than billfolds.
Investments and CreditA wealthy person would keep his or her money in a bank or put it in conservative investments, which rarely earned more than 3% per year, rather like modern bank accounts. We know from countless Victorian novels, such as Trollope's The Way We Live Now, that young men with "expectations" (usually expectations of a large inheritance or marriage into a wealthy family - hence the novel Great Expectations) lived on credit, running up bills with tailors, landlords, and all kinds of merchants. Since exchanging money was long considered somewhat beneath gentlemen, many prosperous families handled all their purchases by credit, settling their accounts at monthly or longer intervals. One could also add that until quite late in the century, if a wealthy person "saw . . . a piece of furniture he absolutely had to have," he would have had it made to order -- much like the clothing he wore. This widespread reliance upon credit suggests that most wealthy people were unlikely to carry large sums of money on their person. [This was also a sensible precaution against crime. Despite our cosey attitude about a more innocent past, pick-pocketing and thieving were rampant throughout the period.]
Wages1. In the mid-1860s workers in London received the following wages for a 10-hour day and six-day week:
2. These wages reflect weekly pay in the mid- to late '60s (various sources listed below)
3. In better paid positions, particularly the professions, salaries were indicated in annual amounts. Two positions for which information is available are:
Annual Cost of Living for a senior clerk (1844)
Note the incredible disproportion between rich and poor. A Clerk - a fairly lowly member of the middle class, earned almost 43 times that of his Maid. In modern terms, if a modern cleaner earns about £7000 pa, her employer would earn £300,000. (Or rather, a civil servant today, earning about £24,000, would pay his cleaner a mere £560 a year.) A loaf of bread could be had for a penny or less - halfpennies, or ha'pennies, were also in circulation, and at markets vendors usually rounded your shopping up or down depending on who you were.
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