Hello all, well I think the title covers it. I have been pulling my hair out with the internet. I keep asking the question and all I get is gold dealers and what a 1820s sovereign is worth now.
And I thought the superhighway always came up trumps. I however, know that on this site at least two people write historical fiction but of course facts of the era have to be correct. Please help me from inflicting baldness on myself by pulling my hair out.
Thank you, Paul G
For those who hate Maths, please leave now!
The face value of a sovereign is £1, but is worth far more.
What is a sovereign worth today? Its weight in gold is the answer. A sovereign weighs 7.98 grams. So I suppose if you find out what the gold price was in 1820 you'll have your answer.
But if you want to know what a sovereign would buy you in 1820, then you could come at it from a different direction. The average male annual wage in 1820 England was about £35.
Here is a lovely site I found just for you.
https://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/relativevalue.php
For an annual income of £35 the simple Purchasing Power Calculator would say the relative value is £2,568.00. This answer is obtained by multiplying £35.00 by the percentage increase in the RPI from 1820 to 2016.
Average UK male annual salary today is £30,000, £2568 gives a worth of about a 12th of today's value.
You know what you can get for £2568 today.
So mixed with the knowledge of what the 1820 gold price was, you can work out what a sovereign was worth in 1820.
PS. If you specifically need soldiers' incomes, I've got a couple of books listing them. Infantry Privates' pay is easy - it was a shilling a day in 1808 and still the same in my grandfather's pay book of 1914!
Paul, try these links. You can probably work smaller values out.
https://janeaustensworld.wordpress.com/category/money-in-regency/
http://historicalhussies.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/worth-of-regency-money.html