Money
It took over a hundred years for Plantagenet Palliser’s dream of a simple decimal currency to come to fruition. At the time that Trollope was writing, money was a more complicated matter.
Victorian money
It was not until 1972 that Plantagent Palliser's dream of a decimal currency came to fruition, until then the currency was divided into Pounds, shillings and pence.
- One pound (£) was divided into 20 shillings (s)
- One shilling was divided into 12 pence (d)
- One penny was divided into two half pennies (ha’ pence) and four farthings
- A guinea was equal to 21 shillings
- A sovereign was a gold coin equal to £1
- Half a crown was 2s 6d
- A florin was a coin worth 2 shillings
- A silver sixpence was worth 6d
- A threepenny coin was worth 3d
Throughout the period of Trollope’s writing £1 was worth approximately $5 (US)
Comparative incomes
There was an enormous difference between the wages of manual and skilled labourers and the incomes of the middle and upper classes that Trollope wrote about. A skilled typesetter working on a Trollope novel in the mid Victorian period earned around 83 shillings a week, whilst a letter carrier in Trollope’s postal district would earn 14 shillings week.
The clergyman, Mark Robarts, who had the living at Framley, had an income of £900 a year, which was 30 times that of an agricultural labourer in his parish. This is comparable to Trollope’s own income from the Post Office at the end of his career, of £800 plus expenses. This is about the figure that Trollope gives to characters who are comfortable, but not wealthy. Trollope’s total annual income in the last two decades of his life was five times this amount, making him very wealthy.
Prices
To make sense of Trollope’s array of figures, it’s useful to have an understanding of prices as well as of income.
- A copy of The Times cost 3d
- Fees for a public school were around £130 a year
- Income tax varied between 2 –10d in the pound, and was payable on incomes over £400
- Trollope quotes rent of a house in Bloomsbury at £120 a year.
These costs quicky mounted up, and Trollope’s writing is littered with impoverished characters who are trying to keep up the appearance of respectability with carriages and servants, whilst behind doors economising to make ends meet.
