Cost of living in Victorian England
Ideas for thinking about money of the past
The Bank of England has a webpage with an inflation calculator. It is amazing, you can plug in any dates from 1209 until last month and it will tell you how much the value of money changed between those dates. Somewhere behind the calculator is a table of the year over year price increases or decreases for a changing basket of goods which is supposed to represent typical household expenses in those years. If you are comparing times when the nature of household expenses and the balance between them haven’t changed much then the exchange rate given by the calculator will mean more or less what a naive person would take it to mean.
So it is probably quite meaningful to say that the pound was worth twice as much in 1991 as in 2022. One could also fairly conclude that the purchasing power of the pound changed very little from 1816 to 1914 and probably bought slightly more at the end of this period than at the beginning.
But if we want to translate from a world in which people typically spent several times more on food than on rent to one in which people spend several times more on housing than they do on food the meaning of the equivalences shown by the calculator is really unclear. It tells us that we need a hundred pounds to buy what one pound would buy in 1900. For basic level food and clothing, this is approximately correct. You can easily buy food and clothes for 100 times the Victorian prices or even a bit less, provided that you switch to the sorts of food and clothing which are most economical today. Rent is a very different story: you can not rent a Victorian middle class house today for anything like £6000 per year, you can not rent a two-up two-down for £24 a week, and you can not rent any sort of housing for £7.50 a week.
It think it is more helpful to recognize that equivalences are impossible. But you can look at how much it cost to live to get a feel for what money was worth.
Minimum cost of living
There is a fascinating book by Seebohm Rowntree called Poverty: a Study of Town Life which details his research in the town of York around 1897-1901 in which he tried to determine how much income was needed not to be in poverty.
Family Food Rent Household Total
Sundries
1 man 3s. 1s.6d. 2s.6d. 7s.
1 woman 3s. 1s.6d. 2s.6d. 7s.
1 man and 1 woman 6s. 2s.6d. 3s.2d. 11s.8d.
with 1 child 8s.3d. 2s.6d. 3s.9d. 14s.6d.
with 2 children 10s.6d. 4s. 4s.4d. 18s.10d.
with 3 children 12s.9d. 4s. 4s.11d. 21s.8d
with 4 children 15s. 5s.6d. 5s.6d. 26s.
with 5 children 17s.3d. 5s.6d. 6s.1d. 28s.10d.
with 6 children 19s.6d. 5s.6d. 6s.8d. 31s.8d.
with 7 children 21s.9d. 5s.6d. 7s.3d. 34s.6d.
with 8 children 24s. 5s.6d. 7s.10d. 37s.4d.(The table is from page 110.)
His food allowance is generous in energy and protein (3560 Calories and 137 grammes of protein for adult men) but is very austere. While the food supplied by workhouses included two meals per week with roast or boiled meat; the costs shown above, while based on a workhouse dietary, contain no such luxuries and has only bacon for meat protein. There is nothing in the budget for alcohol, tobacco or entertainment.
Comfortable living
Seebohm Rowntree describes working class families earning 60 shillings a week as exceptionally well to do. (p.165) Such families spent 7 shillings a week on rent. And if half their income were to be spent on food then a family of six would have 5 shillings a week each. If you estimate butcher’s meat at a shilling a pound, the family could have roast beef two or three times a week with plenty of leftovers. The remaining 23 shillings to be spent on sundries and savings could buy quite a bit of comfort. So 60 shillings a week, 156 pounds a year, was a very long way away from poverty.
The lower middle classes earning around 150 pounds a year lived very much the same as the well-to-do working classes, but the kind of life that most people understood by “middle class” cost rather more than this1. A food budget of ten shillings per week per person would cover everything except luxuries2 - plenty of beef and mutton, bacon and eggs, plenty of seasonable fruit and vegetables, imported citrus fruits, tea and beer, cakes and puddings, but it would not cover out of season vegetables, exotic fruits and expensive wines. Most old editions of Mrs Beeton’s give price estimates for how much the food costs, and the book was aimed at those who could spend ten shillings a week per person, or if they only had half that much, at least had aspirations in that direction.
A family with 500 pounds a year, spending 40% of that on food, could (very nearly) afford to so feed eight people : a husband and wife, four children, a cook and a maid making up a typical middle class household. Spending one eighth of their income on rent, they could afford a normal middle class house at typically 60 pounds a year. All of their other needs would likely be met by the remaining 220 pounds or so. (Income tax would generally be less than 20 pounds on an income of 500.)
There is fairly typical advice on family budgets near the beginning of the first volume of Cassell’s Household Guide (pages 2-3,38). The guide tells you to spend no more than one eighth of your income on housing including taxes. But there is not a graduated scale of readily available houses to suit various incomes3. There were generally a lot of the nicer sort of working class housing with two rooms downstairs and three upstairs for around seven shillings a week (£18 4s per year), and a good supply of nine or ten room middle class houses at £50 (around £60 including taxes and water supply), but houses grander than this would generally cost a few times as much. This means that someone earning £300 a year might still need to spend £60 of this on housing unless he is willing to live in a seven shilling a week house4, and that someone earning £1000 a year might still be living in a £60/year house because the grander sort of house would break his budget.5
Increasing standards of living
The near doubling in wages combined with the reduction of working hours from twelve or more per day at the start of the Victorian era to nine hours per day at the end undersells the improvement in the living standards of ordinary people.
At the start of the Victorian era, having a water closet (flush toilet) in a middle class house increased its rental value by £5/year6. By end of the century only the very poorest of working class houses (or those in areas without sewer systems) lacked a water closet. For some reason apparently more to do cultural preferences than any defects in plumbing technology, these were usually in an outbuilding at the back of the house. And although there were serious problems with micronutrient deficiencies arising from the switch to roller-mill flour in the 1880s - the general level of health was considerably better at the end of the Victorian era than at its beginning.
Middle Class is more of a social thing than an income range in Britain even today. The average family income towards the end of the Victorian period would have been around 30 shillings a week (£78 a year), but insofar as there was such a thing, a middle class income would be something like £300-£500 - an income in the top two percent.
For a food book based specifically on this budget, see:
Peel, Mrs C. S. Ten Shillings per Head Per House Books. Archibald Constable:Westminster 1899.
Halliday p. 225
Halliday p.232