Christmas stamps

When I were a bairn, I used to collect stamps. The Penny Black was always a hoped for, but if I remember rightly they had become quite rare even back in the very early 1970s and are presumably found even less frequently now (see also birds and butterflies).

The price of stamps? OMG! Gonna have to take out a payday loan to cover the cost of sending Xmas cards, surely this year!!!

When the Penny Black was launched in 1840 it cost a penny, funnily enough. They didn’t have first and second class stamps back then. That was the standard price to send a letter.

The cheapest you can send a letter in December 2025 is almost a quid, well, 87 times that Penny Black price, 87p.

Surely, inflation can’t possibly have gouged money that much? That old penny is worth just an 87th of its 1840 value, really?

Well, let’s just see. The Bank of England has a handy inflation calculator and if you feed in 1p and assign it a year, it will tell you how much dosh you need to cover it in today’s money. The amount is actually 89p. That’s an increase of around 8800%

So, despite seeming extortion, the price of a stamp has not technically kept pace with inflation from 1840-2025. It’s basically the same price as it was 185 years ago, give or take tuppence.

Back in 1840 you could buy a pint for a penny, so with pure inflation, we should be paying about 89p a pint…