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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