First of all, during this era Britain did issue lower coins in copper or bronze - valued at a third or a half of a farthing. Thus you can triple or double the 26 coins you speak of. This we have either 78 or 52 coins.

Taking for example a third farthing from 1860 (when the bronze version was introduced) and using measuringworth's as part of GDP count, it is worth about 30 pence today.

One should note that the increase in manufacturing and agriculture efficiency since then means that clothes, housing and food take a relatively smaller portion of the income of a labourer today than it did back then.

Many working class people, especially unmarried, lived in boarding houses which included home cooked meals. An example from popular fiction might be Holmes and Watson from Arthur Conan Doyle's novels about the detective. Despite neither of them being in any way poor, they board in the house of Mrs. Hudson, a widow who makes her income by renting out parts of her house and providing services such as laundry, cleaning and freshly cooked meals to the tenants.

Among labourers in Sweden of the era, it was common for men to pool to hire a lady to do cooking, cleaning and laundry for them - often a wife of one of the labourers, but sometimes an umarried girl.

The Pound had its value because it was pegged to silver. One Pound equalled an imperial found of sterling (92,5% silver, 7,5% copper) silver, or 453,59 grams.

I don't have figures on pints of beer, but I do have on newspapers and weekly periodicals. In the 1810s and more commonly after 1825, prices lowered significantly on paper and printing costs leading to an explosion of print media. Enterprising publishers like John Limbird, Charles Knight and, later, William and Robert Chambers experimented with "penny press" literature. In part, this was to bring "knowledge" and "learning" to the British public--Charles Knight was a publisher for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.

Penny Magazine cost a penny and sales ran as high as 200,000 in 1832. It closed in 1845 due to production costs and the decline of the SDUK. Chambers' Edinburgh Journal cost one and a half pennies and ran until 1956. (albeit, the prices changed).

To get back to your question, in William St. Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, he cites families with incomes of 10-20 shillings per week would be able to afford no more than sixpence for their magazines and journals.^1 This offered a lot of literature to choose from, and by the 1840s, these weeklies appeared almost anywhere in the country.

For more on the 19th century publishing industry in social contexts I recommend searching out the works of an historian named Jonathan Topham. One of his best articles imo is called "Publishing “Popular Science” in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain.” in Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences. Edited by Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007: 135-168.

As for the 18th century, newspapers and weeklies and the like were rarely purchased by members of the working class. By 1800, about 60% of males and 40% of females were literate, and only reached those numbers in the latter decades. There's a very good book on this I remember seeing cited numerous times but for some reason or another I can't find the citation.

Shilling admission to a museum or exhibition was an affordable luxury to the wealthier members of the working class. This wasn't something they would do often, but it may give you some context.

I'm not sure if the rules of this subreddit would allow me to speculate on how incomes can be measured against prices of groceries, pints, etc. Suffice to say, these prices were constantly changing due to numerous factors, and people often spend more than they can afford.

Hope this helps!

^1. William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 206, 537.

Follow up question:
How common was it for people to buy on "credit" or on a "tab" and pay up when the tab was a reasonable amount?

What's the source for these costs and wages, if I might ask?

I recently read the autobiography of James Nasmyth, a mechanical engineer in 19th century Britain. He goes into quite a bit of detail about his financial standing. When he first started working he earned 10 shillings per week. Hardly working poor but if he were we wouldn't know about him.

He then had himself built a small slow-cooker for 10 shillings with which to cook a pot of beef stew every evening, as a means of being frugal and avoid going to the "eating-house."

The beef stew he says cost him 4.5d. Breakfast and tea cost him fourpence each. This was in 1829. See the text.

The thing I found interesting is that when converting with measuringworth.com, 10 shillings in 1829 comes to 39 pounds today. That's a pretty reasonable price to pay for a slow cooker - albeit one produced in a factory with a few minutes of workers' time, unlike the custom built one that took days on the part of the tin-smith.

However, 4.5 pence today is 1.49 pounds, which is much cheaper than a pot of beef stew would cost today. So the relationship between food prices and goods prices has changed quite a bit - either goods have become much cheaper or food has become much more expensive or both.

While I know nothing really about the United Kingdom, I work with the USA in the 19th century, and it seems at least in the case of Americans there were all sorts of other factors at play that influenced the purchase power of Americans in this period that may not have been a factor for British people but will flesh out lives for Americans at the time.

1. mass standardization of manufactured items, even artisan products. "A New Nation of Goods" is an excellent text for exploring this, but basically it explores consumer products of the period like furniture, housewares, and art/images and shows that custom artisan products featured interchangeable parts or embellishments and that consumers could order from a wide range of materials and finishes that cut down on cost while allowing merchants to offer many price points and capture more consumers. The parts they used were often manufactured by workers as part time or seasonal jobs (e.g. a farmer who is also a joiner on the off season so that he can earn money to spend on consumer goods to supplement his agricultural subsistence or a woman who engages in cottage industry to support herself.

2. Unreliable and unavailable currency. "a nation of counterfeiters" and "the market revolution" go into this and in fact it is a factor in any text dealing with the first half of the nineteenth century in the USA, but basically the economy didn't have enough precious metal to match the need for cash in a specie based currency system. Some currencies in the US were considered reliable and others were considered suspicious. Bills were often discounted, personal debt instruments in the form of guarantee circulated in many local economies in lieu of currency in currency scarce regions while other areas had an abundance of questionable currency. Commodities were often used as currency in some regions. This multiplicity of currencies both undermined purchasing power and allowed people to devise alternative currencies and promissory notes that enfranchised more people to participate in the market.

3. a speculative culture. The USA in that period enjoyed wide access to credit and americans were prone to land manias (see "Nature's Metropolis"), production manias (see "the half has never been told") and straight up richness fevers like the gold rush (see "roaring camp"). Widespread access to credit and generous bankruptcy allowed many to participate in speculation and meant that class leveling could occur during booms and busts.

All in all, these factors in addition to massive international investment in the US and a growing economy meant that poor people of this period, while no doubt faced many factors in their daily life that would seem abhorrent to present day people, their access to consumer goods and market participation was far greater than their status would indicate