The guinea
A guinea was £1-1s-0d (which is £1.05) and could be written as '1g' or '1gn' or, in the plural, '3gs' or '3gns'. It was considered a more gentlemanly amount than £1. You paid tradesmen, such as a carpenter, in pounds but gentlemen, such as an artist, in guineas. It was a tradition in the legal profession that a barrister was paid in guineas but kept only the pounds, giving his clerk the shillings (they were all men then).
In the 1850s and 60s the standard rate paid by Dickens for contributions to his weekly periodicals Household Words and All The Year Round was half a guinea a column or a guinea a page. His staff members were generally paid five guineas a week. In the early 1850s, before he worked for Dickens, Wilkie Collins was paid five-eighths of a guinea a page for his work in Bentley's Miscellany. That odd amount was worked out from the rate of ten guineas for a printed sheet of sixteen pages. Per word, both amounts were similar.
Like the pound, the guinea could also be divided exactly into many different amounts - halves, thirds, quarters, sixths, sevenths, ninths, fourteenths, twenty-firsts, twenty-eighths, thirty-sixths, forty-seconds, sixty-thirds, eighty-fourths, and one-hundred-and-twenty-sixths. One useful factor was that a third of a guinea was exactly seven shillings.
So is solved the riddle of the guinae.
