My ESL students and I are reading an introductory version of Sherlock Holmes, and we wanted to illustrate the purchasing power £100 gave them at the time. Rather than simply what £100 is in 2016 USD, are there any resources that illustrate all the average English citizen could buy with £100 back then?
Although I know this is vague, it is something that I've had lot of issues finding results through tradition searching means and thought I'd reach out to experts. Thank you in advance, r/AskHistorians!
I'm not sure if this will be of any help but I have some old Irish newspapers from the 1890s. Ireland was part of the sterling area. I looked over some of the advertising and found some items that might interest you. A starting salary for a teacher was £100 per year. A live in domestic servant was getting £26 per year.
A city pub in Dublin was advertised at a rent of £80 per year. As regards clothing women's blouses are around £2 - £4 [depending on fabric] and gentlemen's raincoats are 30 shillings [that's £1.5 with 20 shillings in the pound]. Boots are also 30 shillings. A bicycle sells for £10. A gramophone sells for £11.
My initial thought was that the easiest way of working this out would be to look up ads in newspapers of the time, but there don't seem to be any UK newspapers free online. My city's library however, has access to a couple of databases that include them, so I'll put a link for those that have access, and copy it out for the others.
On January the 1st the Irish Times had a half-page ad for M'Birney & co.'s 'great annual winter sale' which has a pretty wide range of goods. They're selling for instance: '250 overcoats, in Naps, Beavers, -and Worsteds (plaid lined), 10s 9d; regular price 16s 6d'. For £100 therefore, you could get 186 of them. Other things you could buy for 100 pounds include 1,043 yards of black silk (22 inches wide), 857 of their cheapest writing desks (2s 4d), or 333 special corsets (7s 6d; reduced to 6s).
On the bottom of the page there are ads for education, including a boarding school at Elphin 'intended for members of the Reformed Faith [I believe this means CoI] whose parents have not the means to place them at ordinary boarding schools' where the cost of a year's board and education is £15. For 100 therefore you could educate 6 lower-middle-class (reformed) boys for a year. Full-price schools look about double that (one for £36 per annum).
Staying on the Irish Times, but for wages, which is slightly more complex as a lot of the situations include accommodation, and sometimes board (the Irish times was a very upper-class publication at this point I believe), but a place for a 'competent steward' on a large mountain farm is offered with a 60 pound salary, and a competent yardman (who also has to be married and protestant) is offered 2s a week and a house. That's 26 pounds a year, so, assuming you had enough houses, you could almost afford four yardmen for a year. 'General servants' on the other hand start on about £5.
You can get your pheasants artistically stuffed for 6s (so three hundred and thirty three artistically stuffed pheasants for £100), and have your teeth extracted, with gas or cocaine, from 2s 6d by the Irish American Dentists (according to a slightly annoying ad with headings beginning with 'Why not', 'Xamine, 'You should' and 'Zeal').