Reading the Regency

The Cost of Living - Part 1

Food and other Household Expenses

"... though Willoughby was independent, there was no reason to believe him rich. His estate had been rated by Sir John at about six or seven hundred a year; but he lived at an expense to which that income could hardly be equal, and he had himself often complained of his poverty."
[Chapter 14, Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen]

It's difficult today to provide an average household expenditure in Regency England, given that there was such a wide variation in the money people had available and how careful or careless they were in their spending. How far their income stretched also depended on the part of the country they lived in and the number of people in their household. One book even admitted that the difference in living costs between the city and countryside was just as hard to calculate at the time:

"It may be difficult to ascertain the precise difference between the scale of living in town and in the country; but every gentleman will easily discover the most material difference, in this respect, betwixt that of his own province and that of the metropolis; to which our computations are for the most part appropriated. Perhaps it may fairly be assumed, in a general way, that the Expense of an Establishment in the country is one-fourth less than that of the same family in London, including even the expense of an occasional journey to London."
[A New System of Practical Domestic Economy, by H. Colburn and Company, pub. 1823]

There were a number of efforts made to help families make the most of their incomes, with advice on what to buy and when, and where economies could be made, and how some food past its best could be made fit to eat again. Some writers attempted to make recommendations for how much families should be spending, as a way of helping them to manage their budgets.

One example, from a book written in 1801, was for a working family of five (a man, his wife and three children) with an income of 21 shillings a week, or £55 a year. It broke down the suggested weekly cost of their household expenses, not including rent:

Bread and flour for five persons, 24lbs at 1½d per lb. ~~ 3s 6d
Butter, cheese and milk ~~ 1s 9d
Sugar and treacle ~~ 9d
Rice, oatmeal, salt &c ~~ 6d
Butcher's meat or fish, e.g.: meat 6 lb at 4½d per lb. ~~ 2s 3d
Vegetables (including ¼ cwt of potatoes, or 4 lb per day at 3s 6d per cwt) 2d per day ~~ 1s 2d
Table beer, 1 quart per day at 2d ~~ 1s 2d
Coals, 1¼ bushel per week at an average 1s 4d to 1s 8d, plus wood from 1d to 3d per day ~~ 1s 9d
Candles, ½lb a week at 7d per lb ~~ 3½d
Soap and starch for washing and sundries for cleaning ~~ 4½d
Total cost for the above: 19s 3d for the week (£50 1s a year)

A "cwt" was a hundredweight, which was the equivalent of eight stone. (50.80 kg) A ¼ cwt was 2 stone or 28lbs,(12.7kg) and their daily allowance of 4lb of potatoes for five people was just over 1.8kg.

While the examples were for a household of two adults and three children, the method for recalculating for a larger family suggested taking the weekly income of the family and splitting it into twelve parts. One example was for a man whose income was 39 shillings a week, (£1 19s) or £101 8s a year. They split the 39 shillings into twelve parts, each part being 3 shillings and 3d.

Parents' expenses were each 4/12ths of the income, or £1 6s for two parents
Each child was 1/12th of the income, or 3s 3d (9s 9d for three children)
The final 1/12th of the income was meant for their reserve, or saving for contingencies.

Any children over the average of three would add 3s 3d a week to their household bills and the author suggested that the additional cost of more children would either force them to reduce their quality of living to that of someone with a smaller income, or find additional sources of income, which often from sending their older children out to work.