Sherlock Holmes and Money Matters

Sherlock and Money Matters

By Alicia Rasley

The British money system in the 19^th C (actually, well into the 20^th C— the decimal currency wasn’t introduced till 1971) was complicated enough that we need our own Sherlock to understand it. Rather than a decimal system the rest of the world uses, Britain had a ridiculous number of different coins, both gold and silver, and they didn’t really match up. A pound sterling (silver) was 20 shillings.  A gold guinea (no longer being minted in Sherlock’s time, but still in circulation) was worth a pound plus a shilling, that is, 21 shillings. There was also a “sovereign” which was the same value as a pound, but it was gold, not silver.  A shilling was 1/20^th of a pound and 1/21 of a guinea, and a pence was 1/12^th of a shilling. There were florins (two shillings) and crowns (five shillings) and half-crowns (2.5 shillings), sixpences, fivepences, and thruppences (3 pence) and tuppences (2 pence). And for the very poor, there was the farthing—a quarter of a pence, which added up to ⁠1/960⁠ of a pound sterling. (There was even a half-farthing—1/1920 of a pound!)

All these coins were circulating during Sherlock’s time, and just to complicate it for the modern reader, most of the coins had slang terms too. The wealthy lady could spend a pony (25 pounds) on a silk gown, and an unfortunate gentleman might lose a monkey (500 pounds) in a single night at cards.  The shilling was a bob, the pound was a quid, four pence was a groat. The humble sixpence had several nicknames—bender (because it was thin and easily bent), tanner, and tilbury. (The Royal Mint has a glossary of coin slang here.) Of course, the cockney boys Sherlock employed as runners and spies knew all the slang terms. In “The Sign of the Four,” Holmes paid one Baker Street Irregular three shillings and sixpence, which the boy Wiggins called “three bob and a tanner”.

From the very beginning, money was an inciting factor in the Holmes-Watson collaboration. After a medical discharge from the army, Dr. Watson found it difficult to live in London on a pension of eleven shillings and sixpence a day. A mutual friend introduced him to the poor hospital chemist Holmes, who had a two-bedroom flat he couldn’t quite afford. This legendary partnership started as a way to share expenses in an expensive city.

We Got Receipts

Throughout these stories, Conan Doyle “provided the receipts,” getting quite explicit about the coins and notes his characters were paying and receiving and stealing. In his blog, Chris Redmond lists some of the amounts Holmes and his clients paid for goods and services, such as a glass of sherry for 6d (sixpence).  Holmes paid his young Baker Street Irregulars a shilling a day.  In fact, these stories are full of quite precise figures for goods and services. A telegram was a tuppence a word. A Christmas goose was 12 shillings. A room in an elite hotel was 8 shillings a night.

Often it’s difficult to know the relative value being exchanged in the Holmes stories, especially in today’s currency. Chris Redmond suggests using the current price of silver and gold to calculate the multiplier of 150 years of inflation. He comes up with a range of 300 (silver) to 450 (gold) as a multiplier—that is, an 1888 pound would be worth somewhere around 300 pounds today, and a gold guinea would be worth about 450 pounds today.

(Most of this inflation, by the way, came not in the 19^th but the later 20^th C.  This chart shows how little inflation there was in the 19^th century, especially compared to the post-WWII period. Or in my lifetime! Truly, I remember when an ice-cream cone was 10 cents, and “penny candy” was a real thing.)

https://monevator.com/a-history-of-uk-inflation/

Sherlock the Millionaire

I’ve found another way to calculate the value of historical amounts—comparing the salaries for similar professions from then to now. For example, a Royal Navy captain in the 19^th Century would get an annual salary of about 300 pounds. Conan Doyle was trained a physician, and according to blogger Hradzka, he also made about 300 pounds a year. (He made much more as a writer— Strand Magazine paid him 1000 pounds for 12 short stories.) An Anglican vicar could often earn about that much from parish tithes. So 300 pounds was probably the minimum of what it took for an educated man to run a household.

(Of course, for the servants of these men, well, that was a steep drop in pay. What would the vicar would pay his curate to take over the churchly duties? Maybe 50 pounds. Housemaids might make 20 pounds a year (plus a pound of tea!), but servants also got room and board, however inadequate.)

For the modern reader, it helps to compare those salaries with what the same professions would get now at a minimum at least. I just looked it up—a captain in the Royal Navy earns about 120,000 pounds, or about 400 times what a 19th-century captain made.

On the other hand, today a early-career NHS physician earns only about 30,000 pounds. And a vicar in the modern UK also earns about 30,000 pounds annually (though they do get to live for free in the parsonage). Those salaries are only 100 times what a 19th-century vicar or physician made. Hmm. Making war pays better than healing the body or soul. What does that say about our modern value system?

Using this kind of multiplier, we can quickly calculate just how much more lucrative Holmes’s profession of detecting was than his original job of chemistry. Remember he could not afford a two-bedroom flat in Marylebone at the start of his partnership with Watson? But once his fame increased, so did his fees.

Let’s do some calculation. When in “Priory School”, Holmes negotiated a reward of 6000 pounds for successfully retrieving a duke’s son, was that merely a tidy sum, or a vast fortune? Well, let’s be cautious and split the difference between the multipliers for the sea-captain and the vicar, and multiply that reward by 250. For a few days’ work, Holmes would have taken home 1.5 million pounds.

In another story (“Beryl Coronet”), he got 4000 pounds for recovering three precious jewels, 3000 pounds of reimbursement for buying the gems back, and a 1000-pound reward. This time, for just a few days’ work, he pocketed the equivalent of a quarter-million.

There’s no evidence in the stories that he lived like a rich man, as he stayed in 221B Baker Street for decades and later retired to a modest country cottage. But it must be said that Holmes and Watson frequently took on cases pro bono, when they deemed the client worthy and poor. In this way, Holmes was something of a Robin Hood, soaking the rich and benefitting the benighted.

By the way, Holmes’s most valuable possession turns out not to be his brilliant mind, but a fiddle. Conan Doyle revealed that Holmes played his tunes on a priceless Stradivarius. But this violin had a price—a very low price! Holmes paid just about 3 pounds—55 shillings—for the instrument. He boasted that it was worth 500 guineas, but the pawnbroker didn’t realize what a treasure he had.

A Stradivarius sold last month for 8.7 million pounds—3 million times what Holmes paid.

Now THAT is appreciation.

In the next post, I’ll discuss a few stories where precise monetary details turned out to be clues to crimes.

Oh, by the way, Sherlock has his own coin! In 2019, the Royal Mint released the Sherlock 50p in honor of the 160th anniversary of author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birth.