From Ray Monk’s biography of Bertrand Russell:
Though the Russells were not especially wealthy, they employed—as was common in Britain until after the Second World War—a number of servants: a cook, a housemaid, a gardener, a chauffeur and a nanny.
Arguably this is not so much different than modern society: even if we who live in comfortable circumstances do not employ personal servants, we still benefit from the labor of thousands of people working in farms, factories, and everything in between.
What struck me about the above story regarding Russell is not so much that he had all these servants—it’s indeed hard to picture the great philosopher shopping in the supermarket or frying an egg or folding the sheets or whatever—, but rather that he must have had some flexibility in his finances. Monk also said that Russell did a lot of writing just for the money, which may have been the case, but did he really need the money if that’s what he was spending it on? Without any particular knowledge of Russell, I kinda suspect it went the other direction: he wrote a lot for general audiences because he enjoyed writing, it was a way for him to work out his ideas, he was a good writer (ok, Monk also shares snippets from many of Russell’s private letters, and they are pretty uniformly cringe-worthy and unreadable, so let me just say he was a good writer when it came to his public writings), and he wanted to communicate with and, if possible, influence a broad public. But he had this aristocratic background that made all those motivations suspect. From that perspective, “I did it for the money” is a convenient excuse. I’m guessing he did the writing because he wanted to, and for good reasons, and then he kept spending that money, which helped motivate him to keep writing.
“not especially wealthy” needs to be better defined. As far as I can tell, he was not ever worried about finances. I found reference to him being born into aristocracy, having given away much of his inherited wealth, having subsequently inherited an earldom, was married 4 times, awarded a Nobel Prize, and so on. Hardly working class. Not Warren Buffet either. So, “not especially wealthy” compared to what? So, I agree with Andrew’s conclusion – he wrote because he wanted to. But he was in a position to do that without ever having to worry about money. He may not have been “especially wealthy” but he was certainly unusually well-endowed to do what he was passionate about.
So, here’s an interesting graph: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2008.4,2023.4
It shows total wealth contained in certain percentiles. Let’s round off that there’s 360M people in the US. So the top 99-99.9% tile has a total of $24.6e12 dollars… This means you’re in the top 1% if you’ve got around
24.6e12/(.009*360e6) = $7.6M or so
the top 90-99% have a total of 53.89T so the average in that group is about $1.67M
I would venture to say that a lot of the commenters on this blog are in that group between 90-99%tile if they own their own home and have PhDs and have been saving for retirement and such. It doesn’t seem at all impossible.
But none of the people on this blog are rich enough they can buy political influence in bulk, stop administrators from sending police to bash heads on campus, or even get universities to stop doing shitty science… so I’d say they are not especially wealthy, they’re just ordinary wealthy.
Russell was probably towards the top of that ordinary wealthy, Russell undoubtedly didn’t have CEO of a large company kind of wealth… like $50M or $100M or $1B or more in todays dollars.
It is off the main point of this thread, but you can find more detailed and interactive graphs at https://realtimeinequality.org/, run by economists at UC Berkeley.
John Keegan (a middle class Briton with upper-class friends) said that Arthur Wellesley returned from India with “enough prize money to give him modest financial independence.” Wikipedia lists his fortune upon return from India as £42,000 in an age when an infantryman was paid less than £8 cash per year.
8 pounds in cash **per year??** So this guy had 5250 years worth of full-income savings and was “modestly financially independent?”
Let’s say that infantry in the US get paid $30k per year in cash (and they have housing and various things covered so this is just the cash portion). 5250 times that amount is about $158 million.
Yeah that’d definitely be “financially independent”…
sheesh.
Less than £8 cash is after deductions for things like a uniform, and a mill worker would have to buy clothes at his own expense, but I think the difference shows that “modest financial independence” did not mean “enough money to live like an average person without working” to John Keegan. And I had the salary of a private soldier after deductions in my memory.
A character in Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” describes how you could live with £42,000 of investments https://janeaustensworld.com/2008/06/09/in-jane-austen%e2%80%99s-own-words-economic-sense-and-sensibility/
Wikipedia says that £42,000 is now worth £3.2 million. However, purchasing power over such a long period of time is tricky. Using this historical currency converter https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/#currency-result I find it is worth about £2 million. £8 (1810) are supposedly worth £370 these days (2017).
That would put a soldiers income at $1/day which is half of what is considered the minimum income for survival in the least developed countries.
Of course food and shelter are likely income in addition, but still no soldier is surviving on $1/day plus room and board.
So, yes, comparing things through time is quite fraught but I’m gonna have to go with at least a factor of ten higher inflation. $10/day plus room and board is conceptually doable. My 14 year old son can eat a $10 burrito in a single meal. Even outside of meals, a pair of combat boots would cost $150 on their own. Sure if we say soldiers get room, board, uniforms, transportation, equipment, supplies, and $1/day for entertainment it might be doable, but we are still talking a week to get a single bottle of beer or something.
If we inflate by a factor of 10, that’d put the value of the hoard at $20M or so. With $20M at 5% return you’re talking a million a year in income. That puts you well above the 1% anyway.
I remember reading a quote from Agatha Christie where she said that when young she did not know if she would ever be able to afford an automobile but never thought that she would no be able to have a servant.
Different times and cultures.
Yeah, also the economics of having servants (or cars) was totally different then.
“Looking back, it seems to me extraordinary that we should have contemplated having both a nurse and a servant,” [Agatha] Christie wrote. “But they were considered essentials of life in those days, and were the last things we would have thought of dispensing with. To have committed the extravagance of a car, for instance, would never have entered our minds. Only the rich had cars.”
https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/why-agatha-christie-could-afford-a-maid-and-a-nanny-but-not-a-car
“Though the Russells were not especially wealthy” — it would be interesting to know what this means. What percentile of income were they in? How did Russell’s salary compare to other that of other faculty members? It’s unfortunate that history / biography books rarely contain quantitative information.
Monk’s Wittgenstein biography is great, by the way. I recently finished the 2020 Frank Ramsey biography (“Frank Ramsey : a sheer excess of powers” by Cheryl Misak) — in some ways even better, since Ramsey is fascinating and not nearly as well known, but in some ways not since it’s excruciatingly detailed. I should read the Russell book to complete the Analytic Philosopher trilogy.
According to Wikipedia (with a link to UK probate records), Russell had an estate of £ 69, 243 at his death in 1970, which would be £ 917,000 today (fide the Bank of England inflation calculator). A Briton may have a firmer grasp of what this indicates about his wealth, but I suspect this means he was fairly well off.
His having several servants does not seem comparable to people today in the UK or US relying on the labor of thousands to produce goods and services they purchase a small part of. Even the poor and working class rely on this labor, not just the comfortable and wealthy– about the only ones who don’t are off-the-grid hunter gatherers!
I want some cringe-worthy snippets gimme gimme
Tangential. For a long time it was common for persons of lower estate to have such staff – the ‘help’. American sitcoms from the 60s reflect this, some of Dickens’s writing, many a poor farming family in rural North America had a hired man and a housekeeper. (E.g., https://daily.jstor.org/how-america-tried-and-failed-to-solve-its-servant-problem/ , but not sure I agree with that paper’s analysis. I agree that Russell was likely well off.
A housekeeper might be a luxury though a house, especially the kitchen was likely a small industrial site. I am going on Canadian experience not US but a housewife would be cooking meals, making butter, preserving (canning in many cases) fruits and vegetables, drying such fruit as apples for winter use, probably preparing and storing vegetables in the root cellar, salting down meat for the winter plus minor activities such as making clothes for the family.
A “hired man” was a business necessity in most cases. Farming in the US and Canada was very labour intensive in the 19th C and, even up to the 1960s or 70’s though to a lesser degree.
Unless a farmer had lots of stalwart teenage sons, and, in a pinch, daughters that farmer needed hired labour.
Come to think of it, a number of activities on some farms could not practically be done by one person. Loading a wagon with loose hay or sheaves of grain is a two person job at a minimum. To do it in an efficient, timely manner, one really needs a minimum of three and ideally maybe four or five. BTW, I speak from personal experience here.
FWIW – the jstor article (and others) suggest that the division of labour in households when ‘help’ was relatively common was that the man worked outside the home, and the woman managed the help. As jkrideau points out, the kitchen was an astounding enterprise. (I am old enough to remember people describing the advent of canned stew and tv dinners as an exciting time in North America). The social problem was that the households that hired help expected them to have a loyalty to the household similar to the loyalty an employee in the workforce might have to an employer. But going into service (i.e., ‘help’) was a last option for the neediest people in the social structure and paid very poorly. It was an interesting microcosm.
Not entirely tangential is this essay of RUssell’s: https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
And a propos recent events: “At present, the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a byproduct. This is a great improvement, but it has certain drawbacks. University life is so different from life in the world at large that men who live in an academic milieu tend to be unaware of the pre-occupations of ordinary men and women; moreover, their ways of expressing themselves are usually such as to rob their opinions of the influence that they ought to have upon the general public. Another disadvantage is that in universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where every one outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits.”
About from World War II on, Russell wrote remarkably little for a scholarly audience. Instead, he concentrated his energy on popular works. If he needed an excuse, he was probably trying to excuse himself to his fellow academics.
There is some evidence that in writing his popular works, Russell did not write primarily to work out his own ideas. What is striking about the (handwritten) manuscripts for, e.g., _A History of Western Philosophy_ (https://archive.org/details/westernphilosoph035502mbp/page/6/mode/2up 915pp) – clearly a popular work and intended as such – is how little is added, crossed out or altered in any other way. The same indicator of fluidity is reported about the manuscripts of his some of his other popular works. Such fluidity is at least consistent with Russell’s remarks about his writing.
This contrasts with the messier manuscripts from the few years before the publication of “On Denoting” (Oct 1905, _Mind_ v14 n56) during which Russell was struggling with the logical and semantical paradoxes (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descriptions/). He was trying to work out his ideas on reference and the paradoxes (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/type-theory/) which remained unsettled until a few weeks before the final version of the paper was submitted to the editor of _Mind_.
The few Russell manuscripts that have been digitized and made available online can be found through https://library.mcmaster.ca/spaces/archives/russell#tab-russells-archive. This alas does not include the aforementioned pre-“On Denoting” material, photocopies of which I obtained from the Russell Archives during the late 1970s. (Even in the messiest manuscripts, Russell’s handwriting is generally highly legible, unlike, say, Leibniz’s, who however often wrote and diagrammed with a quill pen during long, bumpy coach rides. possibly: https://digitale-sammlungen.gwlb.de/sammlungen/sammlungsliste/werksansicht?tx_dlf%5Bdouble%5D=0&tx_dlf%5Bid%5D=2040&tx_dlf%5Bpage%5D=2&cHash=9860bd662354cedc1bd3758b44af6f3f.)
I can believe having five servants was common among lords like Russell (an Earl who served in the House of Lords for 40 years), I cannot believe it was common among commoners!
Domestic Servants and Households in Victorian England
Author(s): Edward Higgs
Source: Social History , May, 1983, Vol. 8, No. 2 (May, 1983), pp. 201-210
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4285250
” The Rochdale sample also reveals that 16 per cent of the 279 heads of households
containing living-in servants were artisans, clerks or semi-skilled and unskilled
workers (Armstrong’s Social Economic Group 3-5, excluding retailers). Amongst
these were joiners, ‘overlookers’, weavers and labourers. In Rutland the equivalent
figure was I3 per cent out of I13 householders.” These surveys were in 1851,1861 and 1871
Agatha Christie wrote, about her life in 1919, that it was easier to imagine hiring servants than owning a car:
The couple was expecting their first child, a girl, and they hired a nurse to look after her. Still, Christie didn’t consider herself wealthy.
“Looking back, it seems to me extraordinary that we should have contemplated having both a nurse and a servant,” Christie wrote. “But they were considered essentials of life in those days, and were the last things we would have thought of dispensing with. To have committed the extravagance of a car, for instance, would never have entered our minds. Only the rich had cars.”
Source: https://slate.com/business/2022/01/inflation-services-cost-agatha-christie-baumol.html
I came across an old advertisement the other day* referring to vacuum cleaners as “electronic servants”. Couldn’t find it online but did get this “Westinghouse All Electric House” ad from the 1950s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyrTgtPTz3M&t=692s
Basically, I guess my theory is that cheap electricity replaced the need for servants.
* If anyone cares to see it let me know and I’ll upload the pic.
I don’t have the numbers at hand, but the servant class was a substantial percentage of the English population around 1890, but was down to close to zero by 1950, maybe even well before that. (The two world wars meant that England couldn’t afford to support the leisured class, althought I suspect that process was in progress well before then.)
Whatever, the English butler is a dinosaur, but like the dinosaurs, actually existed.
The loss of this class of employment was a driver of emigration from England to the US in that period, including my paternal grandparents…
It’s not just that. Electricity, heat that didn’t require shoveling coal or chopping wood, sewing machines and department stores for clothing. Not to mention, that good paying factory and service jobs appeared. (Servants often just got room and board and maybe some “pocket money.”)
This discussion led me to read this interesting article
Davidoff, L. (1974). Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England. Journal of Social History, 7(4), 406–428. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3786464
On the whole, employers seem to have accepted the declining use of men
servants. It is difE1cult to find proof, but there are indications that it was not
so much the increased cost of keeping men servants but the increased
” Slowly, however, opportunities for alternative work were
appearing60 and, where available, servants were almost always more difficult
to recruit.6 l The 400,000 who left service during World War I were only the
most striking case of what was a continuing pattern.
The second force ultimately undermining the master/servant relationship
was the concept of citizenship. Once it is admitted that all are equal members
of the commonwealth, then the contract must be limited; outside it master
and servant meet ‘man to man as two British citizens.’ Servants were one of
the last groups to gain this citizenship either in the form of the franchise or
citizen’s rights in the form of insurance.62″
I am basically just quoting from Monk here, but I’m not sure that it’s true that Russell was a good writer when it came to his public writings. It sounds like a lot of his weekly or monthly columns and irregular opinion pieces for Reader’s Digest and the like were poor, but for a fast writer like him were an easy way to make money. With a string of failed marriages and associated legal fees, having put a lot of money into his school, when ostracized from Trinity/Cambridge, there were some years where he really did need to work to get the money. But his upbringing meant he never learnt to make a cup of tea. (Even in prison he got to employ other prisoners as servants!)