9 ms·

Living on a Reduced Income in 1868

49 points by Thevet 4y ago

jhbadger 4y ago
It is always interesting to read about how in the 19th century (and I'm sure some commenters from the developing world will say that this is still the case in some places) the defining feature of the middle and upper classes was the ability to employ servants -- note that that even when reduced to (at least to a British person) abject poverty, the woman is still able to retain one servant, albeit a child.
- theluketaylor 4y ago
  Not just 19th century; this persisted well into the 20th as well. Agatha Christie wrote in her autobiography about in post Great War Britain a servant being a necessity but that she wasn’t likely ever going to be rich enough to afford a car. https://fullstackeconomics.com/why-agatha-christie-could-afford-a-maid-and-a-nanny-but-not-a-car/ https://fullstackeconomics.com/why-agatha-christie-could-aff...
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    >They rented a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in London with four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.” The space afforded seem pretty substantial. Even if it was fourth floor. That is still 6+ rooms.
    - theluketaylor 4y ago
      Makes it all the more notable she thought they would never afford a car and how much of an inversion we’ve had between the price of manufactured goods and labour in under a century.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Depending on how liberally we want to define "employing a servant", it is still a sign of social status today in the developed world. Anyone who has hired a professional to do something for them can tell you the bill was quite tall, certainly not something someone living paycheck-to-paycheck could afford.
- deepdriver 4y ago
  My understanding is this is still true in India, where live-in domestic servants remain relatively common: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leezamangaldas/2017/07/28/a-conflict-between-a-housemaid-and-her-employers-exposes-indias-dark-side/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/leezamangaldas/2017/07/28/a-con... I'm sure others on HN have more firsthand knowledge.
  - kalabilla 4y ago
    Live-in servants are very uncommon and maybe only the ultra rich have them. What is common is to have someone come everyday for an hour or so to do chores like cleaning, cooking.
    - thematrixturtle 4y ago
      In Singapore, approximately 20% of households have a live-in maid ("helper"). Often this is not really a "luxury", simply the most cost-efficient way of providing childcare or eldercare if both parents are working, since the maids are imported from much poorer countries and paid far less than minimum wage ($600/mo, basic meals and a mat on the kitchen floor is typical).
  - commandlinefan 4y ago
    I recall reading somewhere that American expats in central and south america usually employ many household servants (even paying somebody to do their grocery shopping) as it's part of the "deal" of being allowed to live in a low cost-of-living country: you can live there, but you have to spread the wealth around by employing some of the natives.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      Just me or the use of the word "natives" there just a little too reminiscent of how the term was often used in centuries past where there was no ambiguity as to the view that indigenous peoples were inferior to settlers?
      - 4y ago
- anovikov 4y ago
  It is simply because class divide used to be a lot wider. We perceive things as going down only by comparison with unhealthily equal 1960s society brought about by 91% top marginal tax rate of the day. Pre-WWI world was extremely unequal and it was seen as normal. Anyone from the middle class could hire a servant. In fact, even in the Soviet Union, engineers and even highly qualified workers (!) had full-time domestic servants in 1930s. Not after the war though.
  - rendall 4y ago
    > We perceive things as going down only by comparison with unhealthily equal 1960s society brought about by 91% top marginal tax rate of the day. Interesting. You feel that the 1960s were too egalitarian?
    - truckerbill 4y ago
      Read the guy’s past comments…
  - gruez 4y ago
    >91% top marginal tax rate of the day it's worth noting that even though the top marginal rate today is only 37%, tax as % of GDP stayed mostly the same since the 1960s. The difference can be explained by the fact that the 91% tax rate was accompanied by a plethora of deductions, which reduced the effective tax rate. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
- notahacker 4y ago
  > even when reduced to (at least to a British person) abject poverty I think there's a lot more to this one than meets the eye. The £225 pension she was apparently entitled to was a lower middle class salary at the time, and if her rent was £17 a year then some of that money is going on something other than feeding kids and a servant girl animal food on alternate days...
  - zuminator 4y ago
    Keep in mind that food as a percentage of one's budget was considerably higher 150 years ago. For that family size she probably paid at least 1/3 and maybe up to 1/2 of her income on food, plus clothing for growing children and school. Seems unlikely she'd be able to afford significant vices of any kind, if that is your implication. Here are some family budgets from the 1880's, just to get a general idea of the type of expenses she might've incurred: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5754/ http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5754/
    - notahacker 4y ago
      I'm also keeping in mind her husband's pension gave her income equivalent to a fairly typical lower middle class salary in Britain at the time, when families of seven children were not uncommon, and most families lived on a quarter of that income. Most people spent up to half their income on food, but most people didn't have a combination of well above average income and claimed inability to afford more than intermittent consumption of animal food even after cutting back on all other areas of expenditure and supplementing income by selling off old valuables. "Vice" is one reason why somebody receiving well above average family incomes for the time could have a well below average ability to feed her family, indebtedness a more likely one, not actually receiving her pension [consistently] is a third. But the most logical reason for her reporting conditions of extreme poverty (in between gripes at loss of middle-class privilege) despite being entitled to a pension worth 4-5x the average wage of the time is that she is exaggerating the hardships in a letter which is essentially begging for help.
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  It's also worth remember that a lot of things we take for granted were very time intensive back in those days, so you genuinely needed those servants if you had a family and wanted to send the children to school. Consider clothing: washing them involved scrubbing against a board by hand, old clothes were mended extensively by hand (factory cloth existed, but was still expensive), non-wrinkle fabrics didn't exist so everything had to be ironed with hot coal irons, etc. No refrigeration or ready meals, so food had to be prepared from scratch all the time. Of course, the poor had to deal with all this and scratch out a living, which is a major reason why their children were enlisted to help around the house as soon as practical.
  - asicsp 4y ago
    Some of it still applies to me. I pay a maid for washing clothes and house cleaning, I go to a tailor for mending clothers, don't iron the clothes though (and they are not wrinkle free), don't have a refrigerator, etc.
    - solarmist 4y ago
      Don’t have a refrigerator? How is this possible? I can’t imagine that. That and having a stove are almost as essential in my mind as having a bed. Do you buy food daily?
      - asicsp 4y ago
        I do have an induction stove (for heating milk, cooking rice, etc). I get lunch delivered and rest of the time I cook and sometimes eat out. Plenty of grocery shops here within 5-min walking radius. Refrigerator for me alone would be a huge waste.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  If child labor wasn’t illegal I imagine a lot of people would be able to retain a child as a servant. My labor was extremely cheap until I turned 18 and had to be given minimum wage. 14 year old me could be had for €500/month. Come to think of it, I’m not quite sure why that’s fine in a supermarket. Maybe you can actually have a servant?
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    Here (NL) it is legal to work from 13 years old (non industrial work). There are also no minimum wages for certain ages
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rendall 4y ago
If I'm reading this correctly, Mrs. Laing paid £17 out of her annual income of £225 to rent her home, so 7.5% of her income. That seems astonishingly low, to me. Admittedly, I'm used to NYC rental prices, which are expected to be 1/3 of income, but isn't 7.5% very low everywhere?
- polotics 4y ago
  the demographics are very different: if all you're looking at is the cost of construction, with no scarcity factors, then one third looks astronomical: once built, the building stays built, maintenance + profit cant be that high...
- Blackstone4 4y ago
  From speaking to older family members, rent and home ownership used to be a much lower proportion of spend relative to food, clothes, furniture etc. Now many of those items are mass produced and are cheaper. There has been an inversion.
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  Food used to be the dominant part of a household budget, it's now essentially trivial in comparison to other items.
- CaptArmchair 4y ago
  I think we have to consider prior background here, and look at her income. She was a widow of one William Christie Laing, a surgeon. Her late husband had subscribed to the Bengal Military Orphan Society for 23 years. So, presumably, he was part of the military, and as a surgeon, held a rank that would have yielded a sizable stipend. According to the article, she received a £225 widow pension from the Bengal Military Fund. So, is this a sizable pension, or mere charity pushing her into "extreme penury" per her own assertion? One could assume that rank and years served by her late husband would have propped up her pension beyond what a widow of a common soldier would have received. Or even a common laborer who didn't came from wealth at all. In that regard, rent wasn't her particular issue. Relinquishing her former lifestyle in order to maintain her 7 children was. Sure, the reduction of her income had a serious impact. But how does it compare to actual poverty levels at the time? Just 3 years later, she had moved out to a different place and was living with 4 of her children. So, clearly, her financial situation did improve during that period of time. A dynamic that generally wasn't - and still isn't - all that self evident for someone who already belonged to the lower social classes.
umeshunni 4y ago
> She had been reduced from affluence to ‘extreme penury’ when the failure of the Bank of Bombay took away her income from a holding of 180 shares. I was curious about this bank failure and looked it up. Some backstory here https://www.qdl.qa/en/bombay-banking-crisis https://www.qdl.qa/en/bombay-banking-crisis https://www.cnbctv18.com/finance/backstory-the-collapse-of-presidency-bank-of-bombay-in-1868-12391562.htm https://www.cnbctv18.com/finance/backstory-the-collapse-of-p... Interesting how connected the global economy was back then too: In the early 1860s, the American Civil War caused cotton supplies, which had traditionally supported the western cotton trade, to be cut off. In England, this resulted in a depression known as the Lancashire Cotton Famine, however, in India it led to a period of great prosperity and wealth as cotton supplies in the East and Orient were suddenly in great demand. The situation in India was exacerbated by a famine in 1866, which led to many cotton farmers turning to growing foodgrains. Overnight, many companies that had sprung up in Bombay faced extreme financial distress and their shares tanked. Many of them went into liquidation leaving their lenders including banks, holding dud paper. Speculation on Indian cotton, followed by failed harvests left Bombay’s banks in crisis and customers struggling to access funds.

49 points by Thevet 4y ago

It is always interesting to read about how in the 19th century (and I'm sure some commenters from the developing world will say that this is still the case in some places) the defining feature of the middle and upper classes was the ability to employ servants -- note that that even when reduced to (at least to a British person) abject poverty, the woman is still able to retain one servant, albeit a child.

theluketaylor 4y ago
Not just 19th century; this persisted well into the 20th as well. Agatha Christie wrote in her autobiography about in post Great War Britain a servant being a necessity but that she wasn’t likely ever going to be rich enough to afford a car. https://fullstackeconomics.com/why-agatha-christie-could-afford-a-maid-and-a-nanny-but-not-a-car/ https://fullstackeconomics.com/why-agatha-christie-could-aff...
- Ekaros 4y ago
  >They rented a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in London with four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.” The space afforded seem pretty substantial. Even if it was fourth floor. That is still 6+ rooms.
  - theluketaylor 4y ago
    Makes it all the more notable she thought they would never afford a car and how much of an inversion we’ve had between the price of manufactured goods and labour in under a century.
Dalewyn 4y ago
Depending on how liberally we want to define "employing a servant", it is still a sign of social status today in the developed world. Anyone who has hired a professional to do something for them can tell you the bill was quite tall, certainly not something someone living paycheck-to-paycheck could afford.
deepdriver 4y ago
My understanding is this is still true in India, where live-in domestic servants remain relatively common: https://www.forbes.com/sites/leezamangaldas/2017/07/28/a-conflict-between-a-housemaid-and-her-employers-exposes-indias-dark-side/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/leezamangaldas/2017/07/28/a-con... I'm sure others on HN have more firsthand knowledge.
- kalabilla 4y ago
  Live-in servants are very uncommon and maybe only the ultra rich have them. What is common is to have someone come everyday for an hour or so to do chores like cleaning, cooking.
  - thematrixturtle 4y ago
    In Singapore, approximately 20% of households have a live-in maid ("helper"). Often this is not really a "luxury", simply the most cost-efficient way of providing childcare or eldercare if both parents are working, since the maids are imported from much poorer countries and paid far less than minimum wage ($600/mo, basic meals and a mat on the kitchen floor is typical).
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  I recall reading somewhere that American expats in central and south america usually employ many household servants (even paying somebody to do their grocery shopping) as it's part of the "deal" of being allowed to live in a low cost-of-living country: you can live there, but you have to spread the wealth around by employing some of the natives.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Just me or the use of the word "natives" there just a little too reminiscent of how the term was often used in centuries past where there was no ambiguity as to the view that indigenous peoples were inferior to settlers?
    - 4y ago
anovikov 4y ago
It is simply because class divide used to be a lot wider. We perceive things as going down only by comparison with unhealthily equal 1960s society brought about by 91% top marginal tax rate of the day. Pre-WWI world was extremely unequal and it was seen as normal. Anyone from the middle class could hire a servant. In fact, even in the Soviet Union, engineers and even highly qualified workers (!) had full-time domestic servants in 1930s. Not after the war though.
- rendall 4y ago
  > We perceive things as going down only by comparison with unhealthily equal 1960s society brought about by 91% top marginal tax rate of the day. Interesting. You feel that the 1960s were too egalitarian?
  - truckerbill 4y ago
    Read the guy’s past comments…
- gruez 4y ago
  >91% top marginal tax rate of the day it's worth noting that even though the top marginal rate today is only 37%, tax as % of GDP stayed mostly the same since the 1960s. The difference can be explained by the fact that the 91% tax rate was accompanied by a plethora of deductions, which reduced the effective tax rate. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
notahacker 4y ago
> even when reduced to (at least to a British person) abject poverty I think there's a lot more to this one than meets the eye. The £225 pension she was apparently entitled to was a lower middle class salary at the time, and if her rent was £17 a year then some of that money is going on something other than feeding kids and a servant girl animal food on alternate days...
- zuminator 4y ago
  Keep in mind that food as a percentage of one's budget was considerably higher 150 years ago. For that family size she probably paid at least 1/3 and maybe up to 1/2 of her income on food, plus clothing for growing children and school. Seems unlikely she'd be able to afford significant vices of any kind, if that is your implication. Here are some family budgets from the 1880's, just to get a general idea of the type of expenses she might've incurred: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5754/ http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5754/
  - notahacker 4y ago
    I'm also keeping in mind her husband's pension gave her income equivalent to a fairly typical lower middle class salary in Britain at the time, when families of seven children were not uncommon, and most families lived on a quarter of that income. Most people spent up to half their income on food, but most people didn't have a combination of well above average income and claimed inability to afford more than intermittent consumption of animal food even after cutting back on all other areas of expenditure and supplementing income by selling off old valuables. "Vice" is one reason why somebody receiving well above average family incomes for the time could have a well below average ability to feed her family, indebtedness a more likely one, not actually receiving her pension [consistently] is a third. But the most logical reason for her reporting conditions of extreme poverty (in between gripes at loss of middle-class privilege) despite being entitled to a pension worth 4-5x the average wage of the time is that she is exaggerating the hardships in a letter which is essentially begging for help.
thematrixturtle 4y ago
It's also worth remember that a lot of things we take for granted were very time intensive back in those days, so you genuinely needed those servants if you had a family and wanted to send the children to school. Consider clothing: washing them involved scrubbing against a board by hand, old clothes were mended extensively by hand (factory cloth existed, but was still expensive), non-wrinkle fabrics didn't exist so everything had to be ironed with hot coal irons, etc. No refrigeration or ready meals, so food had to be prepared from scratch all the time. Of course, the poor had to deal with all this and scratch out a living, which is a major reason why their children were enlisted to help around the house as soon as practical.
- asicsp 4y ago
  Some of it still applies to me. I pay a maid for washing clothes and house cleaning, I go to a tailor for mending clothers, don't iron the clothes though (and they are not wrinkle free), don't have a refrigerator, etc.
  - solarmist 4y ago
    Don’t have a refrigerator? How is this possible? I can’t imagine that. That and having a stove are almost as essential in my mind as having a bed. Do you buy food daily?
    - asicsp 4y ago
      I do have an induction stove (for heating milk, cooking rice, etc). I get lunch delivered and rest of the time I cook and sometimes eat out. Plenty of grocery shops here within 5-min walking radius. Refrigerator for me alone would be a huge waste.
Aeolun 4y ago
If child labor wasn’t illegal I imagine a lot of people would be able to retain a child as a servant. My labor was extremely cheap until I turned 18 and had to be given minimum wage. 14 year old me could be had for €500/month. Come to think of it, I’m not quite sure why that’s fine in a supermarket. Maybe you can actually have a servant?
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  Here (NL) it is legal to work from 13 years old (non industrial work). There are also no minimum wages for certain ages
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

rendall 4y ago

If I'm reading this correctly, Mrs. Laing paid £17 out of her annual income of £225 to rent her home, so 7.5% of her income. That seems astonishingly low, to me. Admittedly, I'm used to NYC rental prices, which are expected to be 1/3 of income, but isn't 7.5% very low everywhere?

polotics 4y ago
the demographics are very different: if all you're looking at is the cost of construction, with no scarcity factors, then one third looks astronomical: once built, the building stays built, maintenance + profit cant be that high...
Blackstone4 4y ago
From speaking to older family members, rent and home ownership used to be a much lower proportion of spend relative to food, clothes, furniture etc. Now many of those items are mass produced and are cheaper. There has been an inversion.
throwaway22032 4y ago
Food used to be the dominant part of a household budget, it's now essentially trivial in comparison to other items.
CaptArmchair 4y ago
I think we have to consider prior background here, and look at her income. She was a widow of one William Christie Laing, a surgeon. Her late husband had subscribed to the Bengal Military Orphan Society for 23 years. So, presumably, he was part of the military, and as a surgeon, held a rank that would have yielded a sizable stipend. According to the article, she received a £225 widow pension from the Bengal Military Fund. So, is this a sizable pension, or mere charity pushing her into "extreme penury" per her own assertion? One could assume that rank and years served by her late husband would have propped up her pension beyond what a widow of a common soldier would have received. Or even a common laborer who didn't came from wealth at all. In that regard, rent wasn't her particular issue. Relinquishing her former lifestyle in order to maintain her 7 children was. Sure, the reduction of her income had a serious impact. But how does it compare to actual poverty levels at the time? Just 3 years later, she had moved out to a different place and was living with 4 of her children. So, clearly, her financial situation did improve during that period of time. A dynamic that generally wasn't - and still isn't - all that self evident for someone who already belonged to the lower social classes.

umeshunni 4y ago

> She had been reduced from affluence to ‘extreme penury’ when the failure of the Bank of Bombay took away her income from a holding of 180 shares. I was curious about this bank failure and looked it up. Some backstory here https://www.qdl.qa/en/bombay-banking-crisis https://www.qdl.qa/en/bombay-banking-crisis https://www.cnbctv18.com/finance/backstory-the-collapse-of-presidency-bank-of-bombay-in-1868-12391562.htm https://www.cnbctv18.com/finance/backstory-the-collapse-of-p... Interesting how connected the global economy was back then too: In the early 1860s, the American Civil War caused cotton supplies, which had traditionally supported the western cotton trade, to be cut off. In England, this resulted in a depression known as the Lancashire Cotton Famine, however, in India it led to a period of great prosperity and wealth as cotton supplies in the East and Orient were suddenly in great demand. The situation in India was exacerbated by a famine in 1866, which led to many cotton farmers turning to growing foodgrains. Overnight, many companies that had sprung up in Bombay faced extreme financial distress and their shares tanked. Many of them went into liquidation leaving their lenders including banks, holding dud paper. Speculation on Indian cotton, followed by failed harvests left Bombay’s banks in crisis and customers struggling to access funds.