Rich vs poor in Regency Britain - HistoryExtra
It is astonishing, the difference of rich and poor, this is something you really do get from Jane Austen, when you read the text closely, in the fear in the upper middle classes, they'll sink down that social spectrum and, and won't have the money for their own carriage, they won't be able to provide the privileged positions for their children. There, there are two ways really of looking at the wealth inequality. And most people are going to understand the very nature of wealth inequality in our own, in respect of our own times, where we see extraordinary wealth inequality. And if we consider the Jeff Bezos of this world, and the super, super rich now, your people who are worth more than 20 billion pounds, well, they are, in terms of multiples of what people can earn per year, they are way out there.
There's no inequality in Regency quite to compare with the super super rich of the modern world. However, that is a very, very few small number of people. If you look at people, generally, if you compare the upper class and the upper middle class of Regency Britain, so really the top one and a half percent in terms of income, with the 50% to 70% of the working class, that inequality is far greater than its equivalent today. So that inequality then between the upper classes, on average, upper middle classes on average, and the working class, on average, it's roughly works out at around 26 to 27 times as much income for the upper middle classes, as for, for for the working class. Today, if you compare the top 1% with the bottom 50%, the multiple is about six, six and a half times.
So there's much less inequality for most people in society today. And if you look at what people could actually afford to buy in the Regency, this comes across very, very stark. If you, for example, if you look at prices using the Bank of England's inflation calculator, and extrapolate from that, what can people actually buy? What purchasing power did they have? You realize that an awful lot of working class families, in fact, the average working class family is getting on by on a modern income that will be about three and a half thousand pounds a year, maybe 4000 pounds a year. That's your average working class family.
And when you look at their diets, you realize how tight things were. They can't afford to eat meat. They frequently can't afford to drink beer. They drink tea, which is reusing the tea leaves, they get by it by sweetening it and and drinking it with milk, not because that's the way they want it but that is because that's the only way to make palatable drink they can afford. Rush lights are very affordable ways of lighting but they're smelly and dirty and their standard of living is, we would consider it appalling. And it's really to the credit of people that so many of them got by in such circumstances. Inequality in society is truly horrifying. When you start looking in some of the slum areas then you, you will recoil in horror’...
‘What were the burial clubs?’...
‘A burial club is basically an insurance organization, whereby you pay a small amount of money to ensure your child, in case it should die, or he or she should die. That he or she will have a proper Christian burial. What a number of working class families do is enroll their children in several burial plans so that they can actually cash in by the child dying. It's recorded in one 1830s report that if you, if a child was enrolled with a burial club, he or she had a 35% chance of dying in infancy than if he wasn't, or she he wasn't enrolled. So people are effectively allowing their children to die, so they can actually get some money, or they're killing in order to get some money. And the latter is so shocking to society... …
The one sticks in my mind of a wet nurse who was working for a gentlewoman, and her child was ill and the gentlewoman said to the we nurse, I will send my physician to see to the child and the we nurse says, oh, don't worry, ma'am. It's enrolled in two burial clubs. In other words, no matter what happens, we’re prepared for it. And then rent collectors get told to wait until children die in order to pay the rent…
The Bloody Code is the word we use historically destroy a whole raft of legislation mostly passed in the early 18th century, to deter people from turning to crime, and mostly theft. And the number of people who are arrested for theft, as opposed to any other crime in this period is far higher. I mean, you’re looking at 90% of people who have tried being charged, charged with crimes relating to theft in some way or other. And you can see if you've got so little money, so little food, you can understand why people do thief.
Now the Bloody Code is best understood as a result of a way of thinking that is exemplified by Lord Halifax in the 1690s, when he uttered the famous phrase: men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen. Now that idea of deterrent, a deterrence. It really fuels people's thinking that the greater the penalty you have to pay if you are caught, the less likely you are to commit a crime. Now, we have a totally different way of thinking. We have the philosophy that the greater, the greater the likelihood it is that you will get caught, the more unlikely it is you will commit a crime. If you know you're going to court for something, you won't even attempt the crime. But then very few people.
Well, there were very few ways of tracking down detecting criminals etc. So therefore, this idea of deterrence, that you'll hang virtually everybody is prevalent, and you can get hanged for consorting with gypsies, being out at night with a blacked up face, damaging a pond, damaging a highway, you know, these are, hanging offenses. And anything to do with theft, you know, gamekeepers have the right to shoot you dead on for trespassing on private property if they believe they were going after game. So there, there is a real problem for people who are forced to turn to crime.
Now, the fact is by, by 1800, there's something like 200 capital offenses on the statute books. And at this point, enters Sir Samuel Romilly, a wholly good man in my estimations, because he campaigned tirelessly in order to get rid of Bloody Code. And he introduced, I think, five bills to get rid of the penalty, the penalty of hanging for shoplifting. And he was unsuccessful every single time. But he nevertheless kept on hammering home in the House of Commons, that it's not acceptable just to hang people for every crime.
And fortunately, his work was taken up by Robert Peel, who in 1823, passed an act which meant not only did most of the bloody code, no longer resulting in hanging or capital punishment. But also, and most crucially, judges thereafter were able to give lesser penalties. They didn't have to hang somebody who was found guilty of a capital offense. And that's really important, because until then, even if you were seven years of age, if the penalty been capital, or the crime had been a capital offense, the judge had to sentence you to death’"
