Worth remembering that in the mid to late 19th century, a 70 hour week would have been regarded as normal, with overtime worked on top of that sometimes. Mealbreaks would account for about an hour a day, making that about 64 actual working hours a week. Wages varied between not much and starvation. Working conditions could be pretty basic, as well - one old reference I saw to the terms and conditions for employment of draughsmen in Robert Stephenson's Newcastle locomotive works allowed the drawing office a fire in winter, but the draughtsmen had to supply their own coal.
Some trades did better than others. There is an old phrase, "Carvers are starvers", which perhaps suggests that wages were even lower for some branches of the trade.
The best time for wages was probably the 1950s and 1960s. There was more work around than labour, and less by way of consumer temptations to waste it on. Things started to go downhill in the 1970s for all sorts of (probably contentious) reasons, though oddly the rise of the designer craftsman started at about that time.
Unless you're a very good businessman and have exceptional talent, the wood trades are no way to make a fortune, and never really have been, but a reasonable living can be made. The same applies to most skilled trades, except when their newness means a dearth of people with the skill - think of computer programming in the early to mid 1980s; now plenty have the skills, and the rates have dropped, not helped by outsourcing of work offshore. Since woodworking is as old as wood, and new skills such as CNC operation rapidly become commonplace, the scarcity factor rarely applies.
