Victorian England was the richest country in the world by GDP per capita. But the world was just very poor before the industrial revolution: a per-capita GDP around $900. By 1800 England was more than double that. Today almost every country is richer than England was in 1800: https://www.broadstreet.blog/p/how-the-world-became-rich-par...

I think something modern times should emphasize more than ever is that what matters is the lifestyle of the people. Here's [1] a fun graph I just threw together. That's real GDP/capita and real wages graphed alongside each other, both indexed (at 100) to the start date when real median earnings began being measured by by the Fed, which is 1979. Since 1979 real GDP/capita is up 117% while real wages are up 12%.

And if you consider that modern times has far more necessary expenses that often involve rent (internet, computing devices, etc) then it's quite likely that real median wages are down since 1979 in terms of how much money the average person has left to themselves at the end of each month. Even without these adjustments it's likely that real wages today are lower in absolute terms than they were in the 50s as by 1979 inflation had already started getting out of control.

The point of this all is that I don't think the numbers mean much of anything. And that's assuming you could even reliably measure them - you cannot. Go back into reconstructing 19th century data and earlier and you're going to rely on assumptions where the degree of uncertainty is much higher than the differences over time you're trying to assess. So I think far more informative than numbers are personal accounts. How did people live? Of course there's a literacy bias there, but even such accounts will shed light on the illiterate.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1QHEN

How many vacuum cleaners is a hansom cab?