Household Expenditure

Model Budgets: Rundell

The nineteenth century saw many productions of theoretical household budgets, designed to show how any prudent householder could live within his income. These budgets can give a fairly good picture of the way in which money was spent. One of the best of them happened to be published in the same year as R1823: the third edition of A New System of Practical Domestic Economy founded on Modern Discoveries and the Private Communications of Persons of Experience was published in 1823. The work was anonymous but has been attributed to Maria Rundell, the author of A New System of Domestic Cookery (1806), a popular work, a precursor of the famous Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management. It is here referred to as Rundell.

For the present purpose the interest of the work lies in an appendix, stated to be new and also sold as a separate publication. (Mrs Rundell’s age in 1823, about 78, makes her an unlikely author of the appendix; but the publisher, Henry Colburn, was a highly successful publisher of magazines and novels and could have obtained the services of competent assistants.) The appendix gave in standardised forms three series of estimates of household budgets for a total of 25 men whose annual incomes ranged from £55 to £5,000. Rundell optimistically assumed that in all cases about one twelfth of income should be set aside for savings or contingencies; so the actual expenditure was less than the income. In all cases the budget was for a family comprising a man with a wife and three children. The prices referred to were mainly those prevailing in London. Estimates were not given for the large number of families with annual incomes below £55; presumably this would have been too disheartening. The budgets in Rundell have been accepted as reliable indicators;¹1. See John Burnett Plenty and Want 3rd edn 1989 pp 53, 76; H M Boot Real Incomes of the British Middle Class 1760 – 1850, Economic History Review 1999 pp 638 – 668, especially pp 649 –50. . and their reliability is to some extent confirmed be comparisons with the recorded budgets: see below.

Table 1A below summarises Rundell Estimate No II, which is the budget of a family with an income £1 4s a week. In Louth this would have been well above the working class average: “The wages of labour appear to vary from 8s to 13s a week, and the average is supposed to be 12s.” (Report of the Municipal Commissioners 1835 p 16 of the Louth reprint).

Of course it was family income that mattered. Rundell may have made the middle class assumption that the earnings of wives and children were nil, but in working class families the wives very often had part time paid work and children began to earn at an early age.

Table 1B lists the items shown by Rundell with the quantities and prices.

Bread

Bread was the most important item of diet for most of England. Rundell made a standard assumption that for annual incomes below £150 a family of five would need 24 lbs of bread each week at a cost varying from 3s 6d to 4s. For higher incomes the assumption was a standard bread cost of 1s per person per day. That level of consumption may have been reasonable for a middle class family including children; but men engaged in manual work generally ate much more bread.

Outside London, bread was generally sold as “quartern” loaves, which by statute were required to weigh 4 lbs 5½ oz (equivalent to 1.97 kilograms or almost 2.5 of the present UK large loaves). The quartern loaf was later replaced by a standard 4 lb loaf throughout the country (Weights and Measures Act 1836). The price of bread partly depended on its perceived quality, which related mainly to whiteness. A distinction was often drawn between “wheaten” bread and “household” bread; the latter was cheaper and contained more fibre. There was little understanding of the nutritional advantages of wholemeal bread.²2. “In the family of a very intelligent London physician, all the members of which live entirely on brown bread prepared at home, white bread has always to be provided for the servants”: Eliza Acton The English Bread Book (1857) p 142 .

Rundell suggested that outside London a quartern loaf of household grade bread cost 8d or 9d. This may have been correct on some dates but prices fluctuated greatly. Figures published in Mercury show that In the period 1822–1832 the lowest recorded Stamford price for household bread was 6d for a quartern loaf after the good harvest of 1822; but the highest price was 10½d in 1828. Bread was so important that it was for many years subject to statutory price controls. By 1823 these no longer applied nationally but between 1813 and 1836 it was possible for local magistrates to impose local controls under the Price etc of Bread Act 1813. A notice in 1814 (Mercury 7.1.1814) announced the introduction of local price controls in Louth, but the absence of subsequent references indicates that the scheme did not run for long. In Stamford price controls seem to have operated until 1833 and the authorised prices current were advertised in most issues of Mercury.

The price of wheat was the most important factor in the price of bread. Since little wheat was imported, the state of the harvest was of great public interest; see for example the following complaint (Mercury 1.8.1851):

A combination among the bakers in Stamford led to a rise of a halfpenny in the 4lb loaf … on the mere pretence that the weather prospects were unfavourable for the coming harvest … It is a matter of common observation that, upon the least indication of a rise in the price of corn, the bakers push up their charges, though they often wait for three or four weeks after a fall in the markets ere they think it necessary to make a reduction.

Rents

Rundell‘s estimates assumed that rent would be paid, even at the top of the income scale, £5,000, a gentleman employing the improbable number of 22 servants. In Rundell the estimates showed rents of more than 10% for incomes below £150, about 10% for incomes of £150 to £750 and 12% for higher incomes. The maximum, for the lowest income quoted, £55 was 13% of income, 2s 9d per week or just over £7 pa. Then as now, in London and other large cities there was a trend towards higher percentages of expenditure on rent, because of the need to live near a place of work. (Though the gap in time is large, it may be worth noting that at the turn of the century Rowntree’s researches showed that in York the average rent paid by families he regarded as just above the poverty line represented 15.6% of average family income, whereas for most of the working class population the rent accounted for 12.8% of family income: B Seebohm Rowntree Poverty: a Study of Town Life (1901) p 65.)

The position was often complicated by subletting parts of houses: Rundell (p 31) quotes an example of a man earning £125 pa whose “neat little house, of six rooms, in the vicinity of London” cost him £33 10s a year, but subletting reduced this to £13 10s.

A rent target of 10% of income, or a little more, seems to have been realistic in the context of middle class housing.³3. See John Burnett A Social History of Housing 1815 – 1985 (1986) p 101; cf Enid Gauldie Cruel Habitations (1974) p 164. As an aspiration it sometimes crops up in nineteenth century literature, for example in Mrs Warren’s popular work How I Managed My House on £200 a Year (1864);⁴4. Page 14. “Mrs Warren” was a pen name of Eliza Warren/Francis, the editor of a women’s magazine. but her £20 house was found only after lengthy searches through “squalid neighbourhoods – the children running in and out of the open doors”, and the £20 rent was increased by £5 for “taxes” (presumably mainly the poor rate).

Outside London rents were lower. It is very unlikely that in Louth anyone who earned £125 pa would have needed to live in only half of a six room house. Mrs Warren would have had no difficulty in finding a good Louth house for less than £20 pa. But avoiding the feral children would have been more of a problem: in Louth good neighbourhoods scarcely existed, expensive houses often being close to slums. Moreover in Louth Mrs Warren’s husband, apparently a salaried solicitor, might not have earned £200 pa. Information about the earnings of employed solicitors in nineteenth century Lincolnshire is hard to obtain but figures quoted include £175 for a qualified assistant in the 1850s in Alford and £200 in 1899 in Louth.⁵5. See Michael Birks Gentleman of the Law (1960) pp 232-3; Peter Criddle Interwoven Strands 1660 – 1947 p 31 (2006); report of Falkner v Bendall in Yorkshire Post 20.9.1900. Solicitors in business on their own account could earn very much more; equally they could go bankrupt.

For some other comparisons see Earnings.

Domestic Servants

Keeping domestic servants was an important issue in the nineteenth century in terms of both status and practical household management. To modern readers the issue has sometimes assumed an additional, artificial significance because the census enumerators’ books generally enable resident domestic servants to be identified, when other employees generally cannot be linked to their employers.

Rundell‘s estimates contain detailed suggestions about the number of domestic servants that might be employed by persons in families with different income levels. At the bottom end of the scale, the fringe of gentility, it was suggested that an annual income of £150 would permit only occasional assistance from a charwoman.⁶6. £150 had earlier been the lower limit for the payment of income tax, and was so again when income tax was reintroduced in 1842. For those with higher incomes: £200 pa permitted the employment of a resident maid of all work paid £9 10s pa. (This “maid of all work” was, in the later view of Mrs Beeton,⁷7.The Book of Household Management first edition 1861 paragraph 2340) “the only one of her class deserving of commiseration… Her work is never done … She starts in life, probably a girl of thirteen, with some small tradesman’s wife as her mistress … and although the class contains among them many excellent kind-hearted women, it also contains some very rough specimens of the feminine gender.”) As incomes rose, £250 pa would permit the employment of a better maid paid £16 pa and £3-400 two maids. An family with an income of £750 pa would have three maids.

The employment of male servants was generally associated with the ownership of horses. For purely domestic male servants, Rundell linked the employment of a footman and butler to annual incomes of £1,000 and £3,000 respectively.

A recent article in the Economic History Review⁸8. Quentin Outram The Demand for Residential Domestic Service in the London of 1901 Economic History Review 70, 3 (2017) pp 813-918. examines nearly 500 civil servants working in London with a median salary of £399 pa. It is shown that the number of domestic servants in their households in the 1901 census was typically lower than would have been predicted by applying to their salaries the model household budgets published about this time. Rundell was too remote in time to be relevant to the article; but the later sources quoted there do not seem to have been greatly higher than Rundell for the estimated income needed to employ a given number of domestic servants.

However, decisions on expenditure on the employment of domestic servants, like decisions on the choice of a house, often depended on personal preferences, sometimes mixed with business requirements. For example a housemaid employed by a tradesman might have to help in the shop. This aspect of domestic service was not taken into account by Rundell.

Lee Street 1851

Some Louth examples of the operation of choice, may be drawn from Lee Street. In 1851 the street was not fully developed but comprised 46 or 47 houses. The 1851 census recorded that 16 householders employed a total of 25 resident servants, all but one being female. The occupiers of the two largest houses in the street (511413 and 511408, old RVs £20 and £19), and also the only two householders employing three female servants, were Edward Sutton, a draper and John Boughton, a GP; Boughton also had a resident groom, probably regarded as a business expense. Their families each included four children under the age of ten.

Next door to Boughton (in a house with RV £18) lived Frances Goe, the widow of a former Vicar of Boston and the mother of a prosperous Louth solicitor. Mrs Goe apparently lived alone, except for her cook and her housemaid. Her case may be contrasted with that of John Allenby, who probably had more money, but who chose to live in a smaller house employing only one servant. Allenby was originally a draper but seems to have taken early retirement at the age of about 30; he then became a part time wool agent and described himself as a landed proprietor. Shortly after the census he moved from Lee Street to a similar house in Aswell Lane (510038).

Not all of the Lee Street householders listed in the census can be placed in the houses listed in R1851; but it seems that with one exception the occupiers of all houses rated at more than £10 employed at least one domestic servant. The exception was Miss Sarah Hill, the owner-occupier of a house rated at £12; in the census she described herself as a “moneyholder”; but subsequent censuses do not indicate prosperity. In contrast Miss Sarah Smith, another “moneyholder”, lived in a very small cottage (RV £4) but did employ a domestic servant. However they were still together in the 1881 census (then aged 80 and 60 respectively); so this may really have been a non-commercial house sharing arrangement.

Recorded Household Spending

Thomas W Wallis

Thomas Wilkinson Wallis (1821–1903) began his business in Louth in 1844 and lived there for the rest of his life. He kept a journal and detailed accounts; and the summary tables of expenditure in his autobiography (Wallis 1899) constitute an valuable source of information about domestic expenditure. For the present purpose the most relevant years are 1846–1855. During these years Wallis worked primarily as a wood carver, doing some routine work but also producing some very high quality carvings that featured in major exhibitions and fetched good prices. His gross income fluctuated greatly and much of it went on business expenses. His domestic expenditure is given annually under broad headings and occasionally in more detail. Wallis married in 1845 and by 1851 had three children; his family is therefore comparable with the standard households contained in Rundell and the household of Joseph Allen (see below).

Up to 1852 Wallis’s housing expenditure represented an apportionment of the rent and rates for premises used partly for business purposes. About the beginning of 1852 Wallis was the cash purchaser for £300 of a house in Gospelgate (record 511167; it now has a blue plaque) and the housing figures then relate to rates and repairs of that house. Table 2 gives a summary. (Wallis later became a surveyor. His 1872 pamphlet on the sanitary condition of Louth makes dismal reading: see Wallis on Sanitary Questions.)

Table 3 compares the allocations of domestic expenditure by Wallis in the same two five year periods with the two closest of the estimates in Rundell; these are Estimate III (p 16) and Estimate X (p 30). The comparison is only of domestic expenditure: total income is not comparable, since Rundell assumed that all of the men concerned were employees. The figures are broadly similar but Wallis allowed far more on miscellaneous items, including furniture, books, stationery, recreational travelling and doctor’s bills. Some of these would have fallen within Rundell‘s allowance for contingencies.

Joseph Allen

Joseph Allen was a gardener in the North Riding of Yorkshire, who recorded his earnings and household budget for the year beginning 1 March 1841. In this year Allen’s income, a constant wage of 14s a week, was perhaps a little above the average of agricultural workers for the rural area in which he lived; but the family was relatively well off, because his wife and his eldest son (aged 10) also worked most days in the year, earning roughly £8 and £6 respectively, whilst his eldest daughter (probably aged 12) presumably looked after three younger children.⁹9. The family budget was reproduced in Reports of Special Assistant Poor Law Commissioners on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture 1843 pp 302–306.

Allen has been much studied by historians, most recently by David Meredith and Deborah Oxley.¹⁰10. Food and Fodder: Feeding England, 1790–1900 in Past and Present 222 (2014) pp 202–5. They point out that Allen’s purchase of potatoes look like seed potatoes; and so the potatoes that he presumably grew added to the family’s food. Nevertheless they reach the depressing conclusion that the food available to the family was barely adequate to sustain their health. However there are many uncertainties both about the quantities of food (other than flour) purchased or grown and the translation of that food into calories.

One advantage of Allen’s accounts is that they show considerable detail of the items purchased, though they mostly do not give quantities, except for the main item, flour, the purchases of which exceeded both modern ideas and those of Rundell. Allen may also be compared with the lowest of the theoretical budgets contained in Rundell. This was the budget for a man earning £55 pa, but saving 1/12th of that. Table 4 compares the two.

The two patterns of expenditure were similar but Rundell assumed much lower expenditure on bread and much higher expenditure on other food, particularly potatoes; as is mentioned above, Allen appears to have grown his own. Rundall estimated that an adult would not eat more than six pounds of bread a week. In the course of the year Allen bought nearly a ton of flour (151 stones = 2,114 lbs or about 959 kg). His records show frequent purchases of yeast and it may be assumed that nearly all of the flour was converted to bread, perhaps giving the family 45 – 50 lbs of bread a week.¹²12. One of the underlying assumptions in the Price etc of Bread Act 1813 seems to have been that converting flour to bread increases its weight by about 24%. Different figures can be found elsewhere. The absence of purchases of malt show that the yeast was not used for home brewing; Allen appears to have been a teetotaller.

It is noteworthy that Allen’s fuel purchases were entirely of coal. However bread was normally baked using wood (preferably brushwood), rather than coal. Possibly he obtained the wood informally through his employment as a gardener. (An alternative explanation, which would have the unfortunate effect of invalidating the figures on consumption, is that the baking was done by a neighbour in return for a share of the bread. If Mrs Allen really baked about a ton of bread a year in addition to her other domestic commitments and substantial outside employment, she must have had a hard life, though it is just possible that Allen may have helped her with the baking.)

Rates as a Burden

One basic question is to what extent the rates were a financial burden on householders. Clearly the poorest householders had difficulty in paying rates, just as they had difficulty in paying their rent; but for the more prosperous, the real question was to what extent rates were a substantial addition to rent. Table 5 examines the position in 1836/7 of a Louth tenant paying an annual rent of £10 for his house. It is assumed that this rent would have translated into a rateable value of £5 in R1823. The rates in the £ are the actual ones for the year.