ABSTRACT
The fundamental factors in the living standards of the past were broadly the same as those of today. That is to say, standards depended on the amount of the family income and the size and age of the family, together with the effects of movements in real wages, that is, the relationship between money income and the prices of consumer goods. Generally, small families were better off than large ones, and living standards rose when prices fell relative to money incomes, and vice versa. Of course, the price of some goods was of much more importance to people than that of others: for the poor the price of bread or of bread-flour was always of critical importance since it played so large a part in total spending. Unfortunately, it is far easier to state the nature of these factors than to discover what their dimensions were in the past, and this is true of even the relatively recent past, such as the first half of the nineteenth century.
