The best of times ... ...the worst of times

Every historical age sees extraordinary inequalities of wealth. Whether we are talking about ancient Rome or 20th-century Britain, the pattern is commonly described as a pyramid, with a small number of exceedingly rich individuals at the apex and a large number of poor people at the base. As we all know, the differences between the top and the bottom are extreme – to the extent that some of the super-wealthy have incomes more than a thousand times greater than the national average. But what about the variance in their basic standards of living? Aside from the glitz and the glamour, are the lifestyles of the rich and poor always poles apart?

You might assume that the only possible answer to that question is yes. Peasants and slaves never live like lords and kings. But consider it in terms of life expectancy. In the Middle Ages, a lord’s sons and daughters could expect to live into their mid-thirties and the peasantry about five years less, so the poor lived around 85 per cent as long as the rich. The modern world is only a little more equal: children growing up today in the most deprived areas of Britain can expect to live between 85 per cent and 90 per cent as long as those in the least-deprived areas. It looks as if that proportion is more or less a constant.

But one period stands out as different: the early 19th century. In the 1830s, middle-class Londoners could expect to live to 44 but working-class ones only 22, just 50 per cent as long. Working-class people in towns like Liverpool, Preston and Manchester were lucky if they reached 19, at a time when average life expectancy from birth in the UK was more than 40. In the unsewered streets of Ashton-under-Lyne, artisans’ life expectancy at birth was just 13, less than a third of that of their more prosperous fellow citizens.