Of course, the poor had to deal with all this and scratch out a living, which is a major reason why their children were enlisted to help around the house as soon as practical.
Do you buy food daily?
Agatha Christie wrote in her autobiography about in post Great War Britain a servant being a necessity but that she wasn’t likely ever going to be rich enough to afford a car.
https://fullstackeconomics.com/why-agatha-christie-could-aff...
The space afforded seem pretty substantial. Even if it was fourth floor. That is still 6+ rooms.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/leezamangaldas/2017/07/28/a-con...
I'm sure others on HN have more firsthand knowledge.
Humans are pretty good at seeing in the world whatever is on their mind or that they have fears or insecurities about. Sometimes that's the face of Jesus on a piece of toast, sometimes that's a scary figure that turns out to be a shadow, sometimes it's interpreting an innocuous word as reminiscent of injustices centuries in the past.
My labor was extremely cheap until I turned 18 and had to be given minimum wage.
14 year old me could be had for €500/month. Come to think of it, I’m not quite sure why that’s fine in a supermarket. Maybe you can actually have a servant?
Anyone who has hired a professional to do something for them can tell you the bill was quite tall, certainly not something someone living paycheck-to-paycheck could afford.
I think there's a lot more to this one than meets the eye. The £225 pension she was apparently entitled to was a lower middle class salary at the time, and if her rent was £17 a year then some of that money is going on something other than feeding kids and a servant girl animal food on alternate days...
Here are some family budgets from the 1880's, just to get a general idea of the type of expenses she might've incurred:
"Vice" is one reason why somebody receiving well above average family incomes for the time could have a well below average ability to feed her family, indebtedness a more likely one, not actually receiving her pension [consistently] is a third. But the most logical reason for her reporting conditions of extreme poverty (in between gripes at loss of middle-class privilege) despite being entitled to a pension worth 4-5x the average wage of the time is that she is exaggerating the hardships in a letter which is essentially begging for help.
In fact, even in the Soviet Union, engineers and even highly qualified workers (!) had full-time domestic servants in 1930s. Not after the war though.
Interesting. You feel that the 1960s were too egalitarian?
it's worth noting that even though the top marginal rate today is only 37%, tax as % of GDP stayed mostly the same since the 1960s. The difference can be explained by the fact that the 91% tax rate was accompanied by a plethora of deductions, which reduced the effective tax rate.