Sally discusses inflation

In chapter 18, Sally the servant talks about money. She says when she was a girl, eggs were thirty for a shilling and butter was sixpence a pound. Apparently there had been some inflation in the intervening 45 years or so, since about 1800. That was a surprise I thought there was basically no inflation in the C19th. She says she was paid £3 a year when a young woman, but that the going rate was now £8 a year. I assume meals and lodgings are on top of this.Sally is another one of the very devoted servants that appear all through Victorian literature. Her employers decided to increase her wages to £6 a year against her wishes. Out of that she has managed to save £30, which she intends to leave in her will to her master and mistress.

Sally also says that when she was young, people used to eat their pudding before their meat. If only I had known about that when I was a boy. I could have told my parents it was traditional to eat your dessert before your main meal.

The part about the pudding makes me wonder why people eat dessert at all. We normally don't end a meal with something sweet. Nor do we drink anything during the meal.

Regarding economics it might be worth looking at Robert Prechter's ideas on this topic and those discussed by socionomists. They have a holistic approach to changes in prices.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

Regarding economics it might be worth looking at Robert Prechter's ideas on this topic and those discussed by socionomists. They have a holistic approach to changes in prices.

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Victorian economics fascinates me. It is so difficult to compare then with now. In one book like Ruth you may read how a servant saves £30 over a working lifetime; in another you read how a spoilt young gentleman gambles ten times that much in a single night. Basically, what Sally got was pocket money. Food and lodging was provided for her. I suppose she had to buy items of clothing every now and again. There are quite a few characters like Sally in Victorian literature. They are very loyal, and mostly never marry or have children themselves. In Ruth most of the characters are quite poor. Even Sally's employers are not rich. When a young girl from the neighbourhood visits them for tea, she is told by her parents not to eat anything, because they are so poor. It's like a different planet.

That world does not appear to have much need for money to purchase things. Much of it is subsistence living. I assume they made their own clothes and spun the cloth.

One could still view it from the perspective of social mood but there wouldn't be much of a market to use as a metric to guide one's exploration. What the market tells us with crashes and bullish rises is that one can expect either positive or negative social mood to predominate in other aspects of life. It is like we are in a cloud of social move that constrains us.

One of the wealthier characters talks about buying some silk for Ruth at so much per yard for a better dress. I think they were past the stage of spinning their own cloth, but I think they may have sewn their own clothes. Ruth might have in any case because she had been a dressmaker's apprentice.

Yes, I think economics is a social science. Emotion obviously plays a large role.