Bob Cratchit's wages

Bob Cratchit is paid fifteen shillings a week by his employer Scrooge. Obviously this is supposed to be a miserly sum, but I am surprised Mr Cratchit can support his family at all. Bob Cratchit has a wife, who presumably is not earning, and from what I can make out, five children: Martha, Belinda, Peter, a small boy, a small girl and Tiny Tim. Fifteen shillings a week works out at £39 a year. Dickens' father had the about the same size family (eight children but I think only five survived to adulthood) but earned twice that. Jane Eyre was paid £30 a year by Mr Rochester, but presumably she had food and lodgings paid for and only herself to keep. Jane's school-friend Helen Burns said the fees at Lowood School were £15 per year, but that was not enough to cover everything so they were topped up by charitable contributions. In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Angel gives Tess £50 to keep herself, for the year I think, but she gives £25 to her mother and finds she has to go back to work. This all makes Great Expectations' Pip's £500 a year very generous, although to be fair he secretly gives £250 to his friend Herbert to set him up in business. Inflation since the the 1800's is supposedly to have made things 80x as expensive, going by the price of gold (I think). This makes Bob Cratchit's annual salary £3120, which is ridiculous. Using what I think is a more realistic equivalent of 250x, Bob's annual salary comes to £9750. This still seems way too low to feed a family of seven plus rent and everything else. The introduction said the book was set in the hungry forties, during a time of economic depression. I gather nearly everyone was poorer anyway. There was just less of everything to go around. All the same, I wonder why Bob does not try and get a better job. Even unskilled labouring or work in a factory would pay as much, I'd have thought.

It's a mistake to compare earnings like that to the Dickens' tale (other than an interesting aside). It's a bit like asking why Cinderella didn't leave and start her own cleaning business. A Christmas Carol really is like a fairytale in nature - think of the three visiting and the turnaround character ending. Scrooge's low wages only go to further emphasise his mean character, it doesn't have to be realistic at all.

But presumably the non-fairytale bits had to be plausible. The first readers would have known whether it was possible to support a family on 15 shillings a week. Maybe, they didn't as if they could afford to buy the book, they would not be on the breadline. The original book cost 5 shillings, equivalent to at least £20, probably more like £60.

The whole story works as a fairy tale narrative. With this in mind what is or isn't plausible is neither here nor there. Plausibility is readily sacrificed for dramatic effect.