Numbers in that book always seem a bit random, but always work as a sort of scale. This lady has an income of 40k Franks while this dude has an income of 5k shillings.

You never exactly know what's what, but you get the scale and the massive fortune the Count must have. My guess is that he was like a billionaire, with 900 million VS everyone else who was at best a 10-20 million type dude.

stevedore

noun.
a person employed, or a contractor engaged, at a dock to load and unload cargo from ships.
(Definitions from Oxford Languages)

Edit: Reformatted for readability ease.

But would you consider that poor then? Maybe money was easier to obtain, but starvation/malnutrition rates have constantly been on a steady decline until the last few years. Not often you see people using a burlap sack to cloth their families, child labor, things like that. And we do have a lot of social programs like SNAP that didnt exist pre-1970s.1980s had the Homeless act. The world has changed drastically in the last 50-100 years.

But I guess you could make solid arguments that the economy is generally harder now, so its worse for the majority, incuding the poor.