The Standard of Living in the Black Country during the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

T tHE standard of living is determined by what people can buy with their earnings. Several recent writers on the subject have pointed to the need for regional and local studies to get away from the national aggregates which often obscure more than they reveal, and to get down to the study of what real groups of people actually earned, bought, and consumed.' This article attempts to assess the standard of living of working people in the Black Country, particularly for the years i840 to i900. The argument is that for this area at least, and possibly for other parts of the country, conclusions based wholly on wage and price data, even when these relate to specific local market conditions, are liable to be grossly misleading. Furthermore in the Black Country, because of its peculiar regional history, the Great Depression, far from being mythical, was very real indeed.2 The Black Country, an area of about ioo square miles, comprises the present county boroughs of Dudley, Walsall, Warley, West Bromwich, and Wolverhampton, together with Stourbridge and Halesowen. It is situated on the famous ten-yard seam of coal, which together with the limestone and plentiful supplies of ironstone in the coal measures made it a major producer of iron and coal from the I 750's. The coalfield was wastefully worked and eventually became flooded while the ironstone became exhausted at a slightly earlier date. Hence there was a forced transition from an economy based on primary industries to the general economy of heavy engineering which characterizes it today. This transition took place in the period of the Great Depression.