Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ... appendix I wages and prices The problem of calculating the real wages of labour in England began to attract attention at the close of the eighteenth century. On the one hand collections of contemporary evidence were begun both by private individuals and in government enquiries; on the other several writers tried to collect evidence for earlier periods. In regard to the latter problem little real progress was made until the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when Thorold Rogers published a mass of price and wage statistics derived principally from ms. sources; this collection remains the prime authority for the years from 1270 until the close of the eighteenth century. From about 1760 onwards the mass of available material grows and becomes almost unmanageable in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Since the death of Thorold Rogers much has been done by English students towards a history of wages in the nineteenth century; they have, however, left the history of wages before 1790 almost untouched. Even the work done by Thorold Rogers has been somewhat neglected by later historians 1; Dr. Cunningham in a short appendix to his third volume summarises some of the difficulties involved in the " Interpretation of Historical Statistics," 2 and gives "for what they are worth" the calculations made by Young in 1812, in preference to the results of Thorold Rogers' more elaborate investigation. Meantime the whole field has been surveyed by a Swedish writer--Dr. Steffen--in his " History of English Wage-earners," which is accessible in German to students but is still, for lack of a translation, closed to the majority of Englishmen. Dr. Steffen has kindly permitted the present writer to reproduce in the accompanying charts some of the...
