This website is largely concerned with money. The purpose of the rating lists was to attach rating values to the buildings and land named. Two questions arise. Firstly, what did the rating values mean at the time? Secondly, how can those nineteenth century values be related to present day values?
I have dealt with the first question in Valuation Notes. To take as an example the first item on the earliest of the lists, the Turks Head public house, valued at £18: this valuation meant that a reasonable estimate of the annual open market rent that a tenant of the pub would pay in 1823 was £36.
The Turks Head is still there; but the second question is unanswerable by a direct comparison. If the pub were valued in its 1823 condition, without running water, gas, electricity or mains drainage, its letting value today would be nil, because no one would be willing to take the tenancy. If the pub were valued in its present condition, the valuation would be of a substantially different article.
This difficulty cannot be avoided by seeking some general standard of equivalence. Money is “worth” what it will buy. Our perception of worth depends on what is available for purchase and what we might buy. We are accustomed to statistics about inflation, particularly for the general cost of living as measured by the RPI (retail prices index) or the CPI (consumer prices index). These are based on “shopping basket” comparisons, the baskets being derived from surveys of household expenditure. In the short and medium terms these are reasonably informative. It is realistic to ask the question “What is the current value of £100 in 1990?”, because the pattern of expenditure in 1990 was broadly comparable with today’s; but, if the chosen date is 1950, the question is much less useful, because the shopping basket then had very different contents.
If we ask about the current value of £100 in 1823, the question is of little use, because the range of possible answers to it (illustrated on the admirable MeasuringWorth website) is too wide. For people with the lowest incomes, whose household budgets were in 1823 largely concerned with the purchase of food, it is possible to relate the purchases made then to modern prices for the same items. However this ignores the fact that today’s shopping basket would not be similar, even for the poorest members of society.
Standards of Living
The useful questions relate to how the people of the nineteenth century spent their money. To answer these questions it is the nineteenth century shopping baskets that matter; today’s shopping baskets are irrelevant. It is meaningful to enquire whether there was a general change in standards of living in (eg) the first half of the nineteenth century, because the pattern of expenditure in that period did not vary greatly. Economic historians have produced various indices to answer this type of question. The best summary of the position for working class living standards may be the following.
Wage earners’ average real incomes were broadly stagnant for 50 years until the early 1830s … Some slight progress was made in the mid-1830s, but earnings then fell back again in the cyclical depression during 1838/42, and it was not until the mid-1840s that they at last started an ascent to a new height. More substantial gains were not achieved until the 1860s, and it was only after the post-1873 downturn in prices that average real earnings finally accelerated. (C H Feinstein Pessimism Perpetuated: real wages and the standard of living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 58 (1998) pp. 625-58, 649.) 1 1. R C Allen Pessimism Preserved: Real Wages in the British Industrial Revolution (2007) produced a revised cost of living index that differed from Feinstein’s but without changing the broad conclusion in the quotation.
In Ireland and parts of Scotland the 1840s were overshadowed by the potato famine. But in England “The Hungry Forties”, a phrase popularised by a book of that name published as Liberal party propaganda in 1904, were no hungrier than the previous decades, though this does not mean that the book’s harrowing descriptions of deprivation were untrue.
Such general improvement in living standards as took place in the 1840s was likely to be experienced only by those in regular work. T W Wallis noted that in late 1842 there was “distress in Louth, about 250 men being out of work, which might be taken to represent one-eighth of a population of 8,000 persons.” 22. Wallis 1899 p 56.