What Did It Cost? Getting Prices and Wages Right in Historical Fiction
A reader may not know when the zipper was invented, but they know roughly what a loaf of bread costs and what a day's work pays. Money is the detail every reader carries into the book, so a wrong price rings false even when no one can say why. Here is where to find the right numbers, and how to stop a good source from misleading you.
Why prices give you away
Most anachronisms are objects or words, and a reader who spots one can usually name it. Prices work differently. They carry a feeling of scale. If a Victorian clerk shrugs off a sum that would have cost him a month's pay, the reader senses that the world is not holding together even if they could never explain it. And a few anchors are common knowledge: the nickel, the penny, the shilling, the five-dollar day. Get one of those wrong and the whole page is suspect.
Our historical accuracy checklist puts prices and money in their own drawer for this reason. This guide opens that drawer.
Ask three questions of every number
- Did this unit exist? Money changes names and shapes. Britain moved to decimal currency on 15 February 1971; before that a pound held twenty shillings, and a shilling held twelve pence. A guinea, worth twenty-one shillings, was a price for gentlemen's goods long after the coin itself had gone.
- Did this thing cost that much then, there? A price belongs to a year and a place. A fare in 1913 Chicago is not a fare in 1913 Liverpool.
- Does the sum make sense against the character's pay? A price means little without a wage beside it. Two numbers that are each correct can still describe a world that never existed.
Where period prices actually live
The best evidence is a price printed at the time. Roughly in order of usefulness:
- Newspaper advertisements. A shop that printed its price in a paper that week is about as good as evidence gets. Chronicling America (Library of Congress) is free and covers US papers; Trove covers Australia and Papers Past covers New Zealand; the British Newspaper Archive is subscription-based.
- Mail-order catalogues. Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogues list thousands of ordinary goods with prices, and scanned editions are on the Internet Archive.
- Household account books, diaries and cookbooks. These show what ordinary people spent. Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor records street prices and earnings from around 1851.
- National statistics. Census and labor-department wage tables give average pay by trade. Historical Statistics of the United States is the standard US compendium.
Our guide to researching historical fiction covers primary against secondary sources in general. For prices the rule is simple: prefer something printed that year over something written about it later.
What inflation calculators can and cannot do
Calculators such as the US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI calculator (its index begins in 1913) or the Bank of England's (which reaches back to 1209) are useful for one job: telling you roughly how big a sum felt. They are poor at telling you what a thing cost, for two reasons.
First, a calculator converts with an average basket of goods, and the proportions inside the basket shift over a century. Manufactured goods have generally become cheaper relative to wages, while services and housing have become dearer. Convert a Model T through a calculator and the answer will not look like what a car costs now, and it should not. Ford introduced the Model T in 1908 at $850, and by 1925 the cheapest version sold for about $260, falling in price while everything around it rose.
Second, a single conversion hides the question you care about, which is what the sum meant to the person paying it. The MeasuringWorth project explains why "what it cost" and "what share of a year's pay it took" are different questions with different answers. Treat a calculator as a sanity check on scale, and let a dated source supply the number you actually print.
Wages give prices their meaning
When Ford announced the five-dollar day in January 1914, the news ran because the figure was so far above what many factory hands earned. A reader who knows this one fact reads an entire factory scene differently. Look up the pay for your character's trade in the year, then run the numbers the way the character would: how many days of work does the coat, the rent, the train ticket take? Fiction that gets the ratio right feels true even when a single price is a few cents off, and fiction that gets the ratio wrong cannot be rescued by exact prices.
A worked example: a paperback in 1962
Here is a line from a draft set in London in 1962:
Ruth picked up the Penguin from the barrow and handed over fifty pence.
Check the unit first. The fifty-pence coin was introduced in October 1969, so Ruth cannot hold one in 1962. Money then was pounds, shillings and pence, written s. and d., and fifty old pence was four shillings and twopence. The unit is wrong, and the number means nothing until the unit is fixed.
Check the price second. Penguin launched its paperbacks in 1935 at sixpence, the price of a packet of cigarettes, and its reputation for cheapness was part of the point. By 1962 a standard Penguin cost more than that, but you must find the actual figure for the title and year, because a second-hand copy off a barrow would be less again. The repair is a range of possible lines, each backed by a source, such as "handed over two shillings" once you have confirmed it. Until then the status of the line is open, and you put it on the log.
This is the same method as in our worked anachronism check: list the claim, date it, and write down the source.
Where a checker helps, and where it cannot
Money is a good job for a second pair of eyes, because it hides in dialogue and in passing clauses that you stopped seeing on the third read. Storskarvia's free anachronism checker takes up to 1,500 words of period fiction or a screenplay, with no account. You give it the setting, and it lists the real-world claims in the passage, looks for evidence on each, and sends every problem it wants to report through a second pass that argues against it. What remains reaches you as a card with the quote, the problem, the evidence and a source link. It writes no prose and suggests no rewrites: Storskarvia never writes a word for you.
Be realistic about prices. The checker reads a single passage, and a price tied to one city in one month is something only a local source from that month can settle. Treat a card as a lead, and confirm any figure you plan to keep.
Keep a price log
Every price you keep should have a source beside it: the year, the place, the page. Six months from now a copy editor will query the cab fare, and you will want the answer ready. The same sheet can hold your characters' wages so that every sum in the book is checked against the same numbers. A free Storskarvia account keeps the setting and your notes with the manuscript itself, so the log travels with the draft.