Whatever I say has a massive, flashing, neon-coloured question mark hovering overhead.
It’s a fun query to pose, one of 50 questions from the public that I’ve been pondering for my new book Ask a Historian (thanks to Nana Poku for this one), but it’s also one of the hardest to answer. That brings me on to an eternally fascinating question: who was the wealthiest human of all time? I bring this up because it reveals how wildly open to interpretation historicising wealth can be.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has just been overtaken by Elon Musk in the wealth list (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty) Using wages as the economic measure produced a startlingly different result – Dickens’ box-office windfall wasn’t equivalent to £3m in our money, it was £30m! Proper speedboat dosh, that. But they used the value of goods in 1867 as their economic litmus test – apparently, he earned enough to buy 3,000 horses, which, having never bought a horse, strikes me as a lot of horses.īut touring America was his job, so surely the better measure is to compare it with average personal income for the era? After all, people were buying $2 tickets to see him, paid out of their wages, and they weren’t showing up to the box office looking to swap a horse for a front-row seat.
You can’t buy a speedboat on £45,000 at best, you’re basically looking at a fancy pedalo with some really nice cushions.īut what did it mean to Dickens in 1867? Previous biographers have converted it into £3m. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) would have been a multi-millionaire in today’s money (Photo: General Photographic Agency/Getty)ĭespite decades of inflation, £45,000 is still nothing to be sniffed at – it now gets you a shiny BMW 5 Series (please feel free to donate to my crowdfunder, so I can afford one) – but it’s nothing like a 21st-century fortune. He raked in £45,000, but was that a lot? It doesn’t sound it. In my book Dead Famous, about the history of celebrity, I tried to work out the modern value of Charles Dickens’s box-office takings during his second American tour in 1867.
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