Ep. 2 Honest accounts: income tax complaints in 1861 (mini-ep)

Hello and welcome all to Victorian Time Travel., the podcast where we get ready to travel back in time. I'm Emi, your time travel researcher and in these mini episodes we'll take a look at Punch, or the London Charivari, a weekly satirical publication from the period. And in each episode we'll pick an entry from that week's Punch. Of course, that week, but sometime in the 1800s. And do a little light research together. These won't be as in-depth as the full length episodes, but being able to chat about the entries in a satirical periodical is a great way to prepare us for our travels, because they'll give us perfect topics for gossip and chit-chat.

This week we'll take a look at the issue from the 2nd of March 1861 and I'm lucky enough to have a physical copy of this that I got at a second hand stall in the market for just £5. On the 3rd or 4th page there's a full-page cartoon of a thin man looking quite sad and serious, perched on a stool at a desk and on the desk, there's a big book that's labelled income tax, and then behind him hanging his coat and his top hat onto hooks on the wall is this portly man with short curly hair and big boots and a jacket on, and I'll post a picture of this with the transcript and also on the screen here, if you're watching. And then underneath it says “looking into the accounts” and the caption reads “John Bull: Now my friend, you take a holiday for a short time. I don't doubt your honesty, but I want to see how your books stand.” So if we want to be able to have a chat about this cartoon, which I'm sure means a lot to people in 1861, we have to figure out who John Bull is and something about income tax and what was going on with income tax in that period. So, first of all, let's look John Bull up and I'm just going to go to Encyclopaedia Britannica and see what it says about John Bull. So here he says, John Bull is a conventional personification of England or of English character, and it was used for the first time in 1712. And then it was popularised in the middle and late 19th century by Punch itself. So here in the Britannica website, the image used as an example for John Bull is a picture of a round-bellied man with a top hat and big boots on and a Union Jack waistcoat. So let's look at some other representations of John Bull and I'm just going to look him up in the Wellcome Collection where a lot of this stuff is digitised online, so you can access it remotely. And here's another cartoon from Punch from the following month in April. And here again is a picture that's labelled Master Bull and his dentist, and the dentist says “don't cry, my little man. I'm not going to draw any more this time. And there's a penny for you.” And in this picture, the dentist looks exactly like the man at the desk, but the man that's crying is sitting in the dentist chair, so we have to assume that that's John Bull, who's crying, who is again a kind of round-bellied, curly-haired man. OK, so now we know who John Bull is and we can move on to what was going on with income tax at the time. So let's look up income tax in the Encyclopaedia Britannica first and… It has very little on the 19th century history of income tax, so let's go somewhere else. And here's an article from the Tax Adviser Magazine, which is not somewhere that I ever thought I would end up, but it's called “Permanently Temporary.” And it's an article by Helen Thornley and it leads with a big portrait of Gladstone. So let's look Gladstone up in Encyclopaedia Britannica. So William Gladstone, born in 1809, it says here, statesman and four time Prime Minister of Great Britain. But let's not say that when we jump back in time to 1861 because that that won't happen until 1868. So we don't want to give away our time traveller status so easily. So in 1861, Gladstone would still have been Chancellor instead and here back onto the Tax Adviser article, it says that William Gladstone in 1853, when delivering his first budget, said under this proposal on the 5th of April 1860, income tax will expire. So 1860, the income tax is supposed to expire. Evidently, the income tax has not expired yet, so that's possibly why we are a little bit annoyed in this cartoon. And the article goes on to say such forward planning was unusual at the time, and Gladstone explained his thoughts at length. “Fortified by Sherry and beaten egg, his first budget speech lasted 4 hours and 45 minutes and is usually remembered as the longest one without a break. “Then the article goes on to say, and then when Gladstone rose for his 1860 budget, he was not able to repeal the tax due to the costs of the Crimean War. And actually he had put the rate up from 7 pence to 10 pence in the pound, which is from 3% to 4%. So in the year that people were expecting to have their income tax completely repealed and instead went up and in fact, in the picture from the Wellcome collection, there's a tooth on the wall at the dentists that's framed, and it has “extracted in 1860,£ and it's labelled with 10 pence. And if we are travelling back to 1861 and engaging in the time-honoured tradition of socially bonding with people by complaining about money, we have to be aware of who we're talking to because still in that Tax Adviser article, it says that income tax only applied to people who made more than £150. Yeah. So let's go and figure out roughly how much £150 would have been so that we know, depending on who you're talking to, if they're affected by this income tax or not. So first place to go is the National Archives website, which has a currency converter from 1270 to 2017. And if we put there 150 from 1860 to the most recent date they have, which is 2017. It tells us that it's worth £8870 approximately, which doesn't sound like a lot to mark the difference when you get taxed on it, and it's actually a quite low figure. But what it does do is it lists what you could buy with £150 in 1860, which is a better way of thinking about it because I think it's very difficult with these converters because of course some things that now would cost loads would have been very cheap at the time and vice versa. Things that are very cheap now would have been incredible luxuries then, so it's difficult to say what the purchasing power of money would be. Here it says that it's the cost of ten horses and 28 cows. And then it says it's the wages of 750 days for skilled tradesmen. So a skilled tradesman would take basically two years to make that money. So I guess it's kind of double the income of a general skilled tradesman, so that gives an idea of how that money, what that money actually could buy you at the time, regardless of the kind of £8800 figure that it gives us. And if we go on to the Bank of England calculator, which has an inflation calculator, and it allows us to put the date from and date £150 in 1861 it tells us it is roughly £15,000 of today's money, which is almost double what the National Archives says, which kind of shows how difficult it is to do these kind of hard and fast calculations. I mean, in the 19th century you could, you know, pay someone to deliver something across London and pay them pennies. And today, that would be a private courier service, which would be a very expensive service to have at your beck and call. So of course, it's kind of difficult to judge how much money's worth, but. If you are talking to anybody who you expect would make less than double the yearly wage of a skilled tradesperson, then don't bother complaining about income tax. They're not affected by that. They're not worried about that. But if you talk to any people who you expect are making a lot of money, then they'll be complaining. And grumbling about the income tax not being repealed when they expected it would be. Thank you all for listening to Victorian Time Travel, dress up in period appropriate warm clothes, and have a good trip and stay safe.

Punch, or the London Charivari, 2 March 1861 https://archive.org/details/punc186100lemouoft/page/n113/mode/2up (page 114 of 562 in this digitisation)

https://www.britannica.com/topic/John-Bull-English-symbol

https://wellcomecollection.org/works/dqrqxkwd

https://www.britannica.com/money/income-tax#ref223043

https://www.taxadvisermagazine.com/article/permanently-temporary

https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Ewart-Gladstone

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator