One packet of 1,000 stamps is advertised as Stanley Gibbons' cheapest ever, at 15s: the best-paid painters and decorators in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (c. 1903) are getting 25s a week if they're lucky.
Their contemporary equivalents are getting, say, £400 pw if they're equally lucky, which makes that 15s packet cost £150 today, or something like 10 times the cost of a modern bargain packet of 1,000.
