American money in 1897 was counted in dollars and cents:
1 dollar = 100 cents
Ordinary people started to write bank cheques in the 1890s, but for the most part money still took the form of gold and silver coins. There was paper money, but it did not become widely used till a generation later.
The following were the coins in common use (along with their rough value in metric pennies, which have 0.5 grams of silver):
-
a $10 eagle gold coin
$20.00 double eagle (2110) – gold
- $10.00 eagle (1054) – gold
- $5.00 half eagle (527) – gold
- $2.50 quarter eagle (264) – gold
- $1.00 dollar (105) – silver
- $0.50 half dollar (53) – silver
- $0.25 quarter (26) – silver
- $0.10 dime (11) – silver
- $0.05 nickel (5) – nickel
- $0.01 penny (1) – copper
So the American penny in 1897 had about the same value as Shakespeare’s penny! Or Leonardo’s soldo. About $0.20 in current money.
Most coins had a woman’s head on one side (Liberty) and an eagle on the other. Most day-to-day money was silver, not gold.
Even though the dollar had 48 metric pennies of silver (24 grams), by this time its value had more than doubled to 105. There was not enough silver and gold to keep up with the growth of industry. Money became more valuable and prices went down, not up. This hurt debtors, like farmers in the west, but made creditors rich, like the bankers in the east.
But 1897 brought some good news for the farmers: wheat sold at 40 pennies a ton, high for those days, and gold was discovered in the Klondike. It was the beginning of good times for everyone.
What people made (in pennies a day):
133 a day's work for most men, give or take
Most men made a bit more than a dollar a day, working more than nine hours a day and part of the day Saturday. Sundays off. Making more than two dollars a day was rare. Most had never finished high school.
Prices, many from the Sears catalogue itself (given in pennies):
8000 surrey (horse-drawn carriage)
2500 graphophone (yes, an early sort of phonograph)
1995 Encyclopaedia Britannica
1530 camera
1150 telephone
1050 bed for two (iron frame)
950 overcoat
800 man's suit
295 boots
240 gold ring (14k)
195 Complete plays of Shakespeare
195 Bible
175 eyeglasses
165 shoes
168 Webster's Unabridged dictionary
135 vest
125 trousers
75 a metre of velvet
60 book
55 tea, kg
53 butter, kg
50 dress shirt
50 record (1 song)
47 belt
40 denim overalls
40 a ton of wheat (high for those days)
39 underwear
35 scissors
31 flour, kg
31 potatoes, kg
25 a metre of cloth (to make a dress)
24 cheese, kg
22 pepper, kg
21 cap
19 eggs, dozen
12 beef, kg
12 lock
12 sugar, kg
10 strawberries, kg
10 dozen buttons
10 magazine (Harper's Bazaar)
8 pair of socks
8 knife
7 milk, L
5 subway fare
3 newspaper (New York Times)
2 send a letter
1 candle
1 8 cups of tea
– Abagond, 2007.
See also:
Abagond 
I was looking for a summary of coins in use at the turn of the century. Thank you for this!
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Glad to be of service.
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I was just reading the 1897 Sears Catalog with my son today, and he was asking how much the $0.62 ice skates would cost today. Great to find this write-up of just how much money people made in those days, etc. Perfect.
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Oh cool.
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Hi there,
I just want to point out that it is a bit of a misstatement to say that “the American penny of 1897 had the same value as Shakespeare’s penny”. The quantity of silver each coin contained may be similar, but its purchasing power and economic significance was quite different.
In the time of Shakespeare, a relatively low-status worker such as an actor could earn 6 shillings per week. This works out to about 10 pence (10 pennies) a day, but this was not a steady income. On the other hand, a carpenter (which is a trade that required plenty of training back then to learn the math that we get taught to us today in school) might only earn £13 a year (8.5d per day). Even a well-paying stable job that required a great deal of skill, such as the master of a grammar school, would only earn £20 a year (about 13 pence a day). A typical household servant only made £2-5 per year (1.3-3.3d/day).
These wages are a fraction of the 133 pennies that a typical person would earn in a day in 1897 USA. And the purchasing power of the money reflects that. For example, in the time of Shakespeare, 2 lbs. of beef (0.9 kg) cost 2 pence, while in the Sears Catalogue (1897) someone might buy 1 kg of beef for 12 pennies–six times as much. People had more money in 1897 and therefore things cost more. This is a basic expression of the supply/demand economy and a major flaw in the assertion that the two coins had value parity.
Strictly speaking, the 1897 penny was actually worth less than the Elizabethan coin. By how much depends on what you are measuring. The Elizabethan penny was worth about 10 times more from an income perspective, and about five or six times more from a purchasing power perspective. So while someone in 1897 was better off economically due to their higher income, the penny in their pocket was actually less valuable than the English penny from 350 years earlier.
Thanks for reading.
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@ treisdorf
Please see the links at the end of the post.
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@abagond They generally support my comment. For example, eggs in Shakespeare’s time were 4d per dozen, and in the Sears catalogue are 19 pennies (about 5x as much).
Some of your prices in the other article differ slightly from those recorded in other sources I have referred to, such as the account books of manor houses such as Ingatestone Hall (where Elizabeth I stayed in 1561), but overall the conclusion one can draw from comparing the two lists is that Shakespeare’s penny and the 1897 U.S. penny did not have the same value, even though both contained approximately the same quantity of silver (5 grams for the U.S. penny, 5.5 grams for an Elizabethan one [but not one that her father had issued, which were mostly severely debased]).
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