The average today is higher than the living standard of 19th century royalty

For those of us in Europe and offshoots - generally what we call the developed world - yes, this is true. We do live better, on average, than the average 19th century royalty.

This is a claim that some will guffaw at. Yet it is still true.

In a number of ways it can be claimed we don’t - we’re not living in palaces for example, nor festooned with diamonds. We also don’t have to put up with German princelings which is nice.

In a number of ways we’re about the same. For the average of us we’re well fed, well clothed and so on. As were those royals.

But in a number of important ways we’re better off.

We have the entire wisdom of mankind to hand, immediately available for example. But not just smartphones, we’ve just phones, something the average decade, let alone royal, of the 19th cent didn’t have. And jetplanes, and even planes themselves - it would be interesting to find out if there was actually an exception to the statement that no one regnant in the 19th century in any country ever got on an airplane. Transport, communication, vastly better these days.

But they had servants, right? But we’ve mechanised those servants - the washing machine, the electric stove, the steam iron, vacuum cleaner. By and large we’d consider that a wash (sorry).

But two things really stand out that are different. The first is that we are hugely, vastly, warmer. Those palaces were never known as being warm - there are lovely stories from the beginnings of the National Trust that those big old houses were freezing cold in general. We’ve seen, recently, an argument that the average across the property temperature in winter was 0 oC. It was only actually in front of the fire that it got up to 10 oC. Those old high backed chairs were to keep your neck warm from the draughts, d’ye see? The very design of porter chairs tells us that significant areas of the house were not warm.

In fact, everyone - including royalty - was in what we would today call fuel poverty:

Adequate warmth is considered to be 21 °C (70 °F) in the main living room and 18 °C (64 °F) in other occupied rooms during daytime hours, with lower temperatures at night,

It’s not a matter of money, simply not technically feasible to heat a place to those levels back then. Actually, anyone who grew up - however bourgeois or aristocratic - more than 60 years ago will have been in fuel poverty by that standard.

But the real biggie is health care. Antibiotics more than anything else. In the 1920s the son of the President of the US died of a blood blister. Childbirth cut a swathe through royal as other families - it’s the reason we got the Queen Vic. It’s generally although not wholly true that a health care system could really only do bed rest and hydration until we gained those antibiotics. And to return to childbirth, Viccie again was one of those whose use popularised the new anaesthesia in childbirth. Before that all births were natural, even to the most highborn. And let’s not even go to child mortality, something that claimed near half of all children before puberty - lower levels for royalty of course, but still at levels that would be considered a holocaust today.

We do live better lives than the average 19th century royalty. Given that the NHS is currently the national religion we must do as we do have medical care.

But as so often, PJ O’Rourke:

In general, life is better than it has ever been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word : Dentistry.

There’s a reason none of those royals in that first half century of photography smiled and said “cheese”. None of ‘em had any teeth.