The heroine of “Charred Hope” in Love’s Perilous Road lives on a widow’s pension. What does that mean in fact?
I assumed her pension would be small and barely enough to live on. I wasn’t wrong. In the Napoleonic era the widow of a British officer was entitled to a pension, and as the widow of a lieutenant, Tessa would have received 26 pounds per year. As a point of comparison a colonel’s widow would have received 80 pounds. Tessa’s husband, Lt. Fleming, should he have lived to retirement, would have received three times as much as Tessa’s widow’s pension.
What did that mean in terms of buying power? That would fluctuate year to year with the price of grain and other goods. According the British National Archives, however, in 1810 26 pounds was roughly 173 days wages for a skilled workman. It was enough to buy two horses or three cows. Of course, Tessa needed neither of those and couldn’t spend her entire pension on them in either case. She rented a small cottage, kept chickens and had a substantial garden. Her pounds would also buy eight bushels of wheat; one bushel is 60 pounds, likely more than she needed. She augmented her income by lace making. Her output wasn’t large and pay was at the mercy of a local merchant. In other words, she and her son had a comfortable roof over their head and food, but she had little to no disposable money for anything else. She would be eking by.
Using a calculator from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that factors in inflation based on the Consumer Price index, her 26 pounds would have the buying power of 2958.42 pounds today, or $3,943.29 in US currency. By that standard, Tessa was doing better in her own time.
About the book
Love’s Perilous Road, coming October 2025
Travellers, a house party, smugglers, spies–and a mysterious highwayman. Who is the infamous Captain Moonlight? And how many lives will he change–for good or for ill?
Preorder now! https://books2read.com/u/mqx0W6
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