The previous answers are wrong (Update: This statement was made before /u/mimicofmodes answer). They assert (ridiculously) that there was virtually no inflation during the 19th century and uses that to justify comparing Cratchit's wage to the wages of someone several decades later (one as late as 1888!). Even if we accepted there was no inflation (there was), the 19th century was a time of wage growth. The simple use of the converter is also suspect. It'd a bit like claiming you can compare 1972 salaries to 1925 salaries because the US dollar is on the gold standard. Yes, the person working in 1925 would be underpaid by 1972 standards. But they were living in 1925!

So, how far did Cratchit's 15 shillings a week (39 pounds a year) go? Was it a good wage, a fair wage, starvation wages?

Now, let's start with the obvious. Cratchit and Scrooge did not exist and Dickens was not a businessman who knew the intimate details of running a business. Everything about the Scrooge-Cratchit relationship is thus constructed to serve Dicken's points in the novel.

Because of that, the libertarians are somewhat more correct but are ignoring that moral message. Scrooge is, through visions of the past, contrasted with two other businessmen: Jorkin and Fezziwig. Fezziwig is honest, scrupulous, and more than a little incompetent at running his own business. He's also unfailingly kind and caring towards his employees and generous and charitable and shows all the signs of Christian love that Dickens wants to encourage. Jorkin is the opposite. Jorkin is not a good businessman or a good person. He is a liar, a cheater, someone who puts personal profit first, corporate profit second, and his workers, suppliers, etc as a distant third. This leads him to drive the business into the ground (though he gets out with a good sum of money).

Dickens contrasts both these characters to bring Scrooge into a more specific light. Scrooge is not Jorkin. He is scrupulously honest, has never lied or cheated anyone, always pays on time and fairly, obeys the law, gives his employees government mandated vacations (with some grumbling). He's also not Fezziwig. His relationship with Cratchit is strictly businesslike. He has no interest in him as a person or his family or in spreading cheer to his employees. His rather crotchety position is that he pays them for their work. Why should he have to do more?

Dickens takes pains to point out that Scrooge is not lying or lacking in a merchant's virtues. The very first lines in the novel are about how Scrooge is so honest and fair that when he declares something to be true everyone, even the good characters in the novel, can have no doubt it is true. Scrooge is the man who expels the exploitative Jorkin and keeps the company from going under (with Marley). Dickens also shows that Scrooge is almost always in the legal right with his disputes. He is threatening to evict a couple on Christmas day... but they really haven't paid their rent. Even they admit it's a little wrong to feel good at his death because they really did owe the rent and Scrooge was a human being. His employees steal from him after his death but this is still stealing.

A Christmas Carol is not about the deserving poor and the wealthy miser who refuses to help them. It is about the emptiness of mercantile values without Christian ones. It is certainly a good thing, in Dicken's opinion, that Scrooge is an honest businessman. But it's not enough to save him from Hell. To do that, he must also show Christian virtues. And even neglecting them without actual hostility is enough to have his greed drag him down to hell. That is the lesson of a Christmas Carol and why it was so shocking at the time. Not because Victorians had no sense of the exploitative rich but because A Christmas Carol posits that if you don't go out of your way to help people, you are a bad person.

Within that relationship, how are Cratchit's wages? Maybe you can guess. They are fair, the market going rate, but not generous. The book is set in 1843. Forty pounds a year would have been the pay of a mid-level civil servant, a high level tradesman, or an early career skilled professional. It would have put Cratchit almost exactly in the top 20% of England by income. The equivalent percentile today would be 40,000 pounds in Britain or $80,000 in the United States. This isn't a one to one comparison, but it gives you some idea of whether the wage was high or low relative to other work. It also shows you how Cratchit (with seven children and living in London) was probably stretching his living.

But this is again part of the contrast Dickens is setting up. Cratchit has need of help because of his large family. A mercantile minded person might point out his need does not mean he deserves higher wages. It's certainly not Scrooge's problem either: they aren't his kids. But Scrooge is, by Dicken's belief in Christian love, obliged to give him help.

And this is what he does in the epilogue: becoming like a second father to Cratchit's family. Perhaps that included monetary help but it was not a matter of just raising Bob's salary. Indeed, Scrooge's actions after he wakes up mostly show that he doesn't feel very much guilt about how he runs his business. He lets some tenants stay in their home while they scrape together the rent. He gets a Christmas feast. He surprises the family of one of his workers and gives them gifts. Scrooge is using his money and influence to help people but he doesn't reform his business fundamentally because he's not Jorkin. He never was.

In short, the pro-Scrooge articles are missing that A Christmas Carol is a satire of exactly who they are. The sort of person who would defend the pre-reform Scrooge is probably the sort of person who'd agree with Scrooge's defense of himself before the ghosts. He was fair to his employees but Christian charity means being better than fair.

So was Scrooge paying high or low for his time? He was paying fairly close to average for what Cratchit did. How far did Cratchit's wage get him? Fairly far, but with the number of children he had, and where he lived, he probably still felt the pinch. Enough that he tried to find his children work to help out. His salary was roughly equivalent to 40,000 pounds or 80,000 dollars in terms of income percentile. Another way to look at it: his children are able to get roughly a third of his salary (five shillings a week) from being educated but without his experience.

From Sentimental Realism, the Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, Charles Dickens, London in the Age of Dickens, and The Annotated Christmas Carol.

I admit, I had to laugh when reading the first article, with quotes from Bruce Bueno de Mesquita:

“If you read the actual hard economics in 'A Christmas Carol,'” says Bueno de Mesquita, “Dickens portrays Scrooge as a man who was generous to a fault.”

“But Ebenezer didn’t fire Bob. He kept him on. He was a very good man,” says de Mesquita. “He’s misunderstood.”

Given that the entire point of the book is that Scrooge has not been acting like a good or generous man, one has to wonder what would draw someone to say that Dickens deliberately subverted said entire point by making it clear to the original readers, who knew the value of 15s in the 1840s, that the Cratchits are actually very comfortable. But we have to dig beyond the immediate risibility to find the truth.

All things are relative. In 1842, the year before A Christmas Carol was published, the average wage among agricultural laborers in Herefordshire was seven to nine shillings per week;^1 in the 1830s, female workers in the Essex textile industry were bringing home three to seven shillings per week, while children might get as little as one shilling sixpence or two shillings.^2 In the latter case, even commentators at the time found this state of affairs shocking, and noted that the cost of living for these women was actually higher than in London. These are all worse wages than fifteen shillings per week, obviously.

But what was the usual rate of pay for a clerk in an office? Fifteen to eighteen shillings per week was suggested as the average wage for an attorney's clerk of 19-25 years of age, in an article from an 1851 periodical, rising to eighteen after that and perhaps eventually to twenty-five or thirty.^3 Said article, however, is scathing about the injustice of this rate of pay, and the fact that a worker like this earns so much for the employer over the course of a year but is treated with contempt and suspicion, with the threat of dismissal hanging over his head if he should ask for a raise or get sick. Essentially, this is the situation Dickens portrays. It is quite likely that Dickens's intention was not to say, "Bob Cratchit has it much worse than other office clerks," but "office clerks, as a class, are mistreated and underpaid, and here is one representative of that issue." (It is, after all, widely understood that Dickens critiqued problems in society by portraying an individual dealing with them. Oliver Twist stood in for orphans in the workhouse system, Smike is a different subset of unprotected orphans, Dotheboys Hall is every unregulated and abusive Yorkshire boys' school, Jo is every child street-sweeper.) I'd be interested to know where Bruce Bueno de Mesquita got the figure that the average wage for a clerk in a counting-house was 11/6, because I'm not finding it anywhere. (Maybe it involves averaging out the wages of the youngest boys, who didn't make enough to support themselves, with the most senior clerks?)

Both articles fixate on the spending of the Cratchit family around Christmas:

“Bob Cratchit owned a home. The Christmas feast that the Cratchits had was quite expensive. They had a bowl full of oranges, which were the most expensive imported fruit in London in the winter 1843. And Bob Cratchit had enough money to have 15 rounds of gin punch, and enough goose to feed the entire large family,” says de Mesquita.

Christmas grew in popularity during the Victorian era as a time of feasting and a time for those of stature to show their affluence. During the Victorian era, Christmas was more about food than about giving gifts and the Cratchit family is determined to show that they know how to keep Christmas. The Cratchits buy a beautiful goose and then admired it for its cheapness.

Let's look at the text itself, in the vision provided by the Ghost of Christmas Present:

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn't believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn't ate it all at last! Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits, in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows.

It's quite clear, if you can manage basic verbal irony, that the goose is not very large, and that both parents and the six children get a portion but mainly the dinner is apple sauce, mashed potatoes, and stuffing. This is not a big fat goose, but the cheapest and smallest they can get that has enough meat for all eight to get a piece. Then we have the pudding:

Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly, too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.

Similarly, they cannot afford enough ingredients for Mrs. Cratchit to make a sizable Christmas pudding, but they are happy with it because it's a treat and it was made for them with love.

There is no mention of a bowl full of oranges, but the narrator does say that "apples and oranges were put upon the table". I cannot find specific costs of apples and oranges in this period, but a number of arithmetic books put them as relatively equivalent, just a few pence apiece. Oranges were not hideously expensive, certainly not the most expensive fruit - some estimated that 100 million of them were imported via steamship from the tropics per year, with a quarter sold on the street and in theaters (yes, there were "orange-girls" who just sold oranges, and they were not making a lot of money doing it).^4 They were a nice treat and traditional for Christmas, but this does not represent a huge expenditure. And as for fifteen rounds of gin punch, I can't find where this comes up in the text, but I will say that gin was a notoriously cheap form of alcohol.

(cont'd)

I love this question. Here is another post with responses from a few users on the subject:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5hdzva/in_a_christmas_story_bob_cratchit_earned_15/

Hat tips to: /u/CardCarryingOctopus and /u/klawehtgod