the radical spokesman for rural England, denied that population was increasing: large village churches, he argued, were half empty on Sundays, which showed that the population must have been larger in past times, for our ancestors were not such fools as to build churches too big for their needs.2 But in 1831 there was no longer any room for doubt; the fact of population growth was literally pressing hard on every side.
To account for this growth a number of factors affecting the birth and death rates have to be considered, though historians are by no means unanimous in their interpretations of the problem. In broad terms the increase of population from the eighteenth century onward was due to a fall in the death rate simultaneously with the maintenance of a high birth rate. But when studied decade by decade the matter becomes more complex. The death rate in England and Wales during the 1830s and 1840s was around 21–22 per 1,000 – compared with over 25 per 1,000 at the end of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth. At one time it was usual to account for this fall in the death rate by the development of preventive medicine, which reduced the risks of death from smallpox, childbirth, scurvy and various types of fever; but recent researches have tended to discount the effects of the medical revolution. Although the spread of new medical techniques and the awakening of concern for public health provision ultimately helped to bring down the death rate, it is difficult to show precise effects in early Victorian England. In the area of greatest potential improvement, infant mortality, there had been a marked fall. Nevertheless the annual reports of the Registrar General for England and Wales showed that between 1839 and 1851, the annual number of deaths of infants under one year was usually between 150 and 160 per 1,000 live births. In the later forties the death rate for infants, as for the whole population, rose appreciably. All of which meant that the ordinary Victorian family was intimately acquainted with death in a way which is rare today. To ensure two surviving children a married couple could expect to have five or six births. The infant deathbed scenes so beloved by the religious tract writers, and the grief for the loss of a favourite child so often mentioned in contemporary biographies and novels were the results of these cold figures of mortality.
The corresponding figures of annual birth rates held steady at between 32 and 33 per 1,000 of population during the 1840s. Although when compared with today’s figure of 17·5 this appears high, it was somewhat lower than in the preceding decades and also lower than in the mid-Victorian period. Unlike death, it was assumed that individuals had some degree of control over birth rates, mainly through the regulation of marriage. Since restriction of births through contraception was little known or practised, the number of births would be regulated by the number of years during which the wife was capable of child bearing, which in turn would be lengthened or shortened according to the age of the woman on marriage. If for any reason, such as hard times, it was argued, marriages were in many cases to be delayed, it would result shortly afterwards in a decline in births. Perhaps some such explanation lies at the back of the marriage rate fluctuations in early Victorian England and Wales. Until 1843 the annual marriage rate was slightly over 15 per 1,000 of population; but thereafter it rose to over 17, despite temporary checks in 1847–8. It is tempting to correlate birth and marriage rates with economic factors (such as the prolonged depression from 1837 to 1842) or with social policy (such as the tightening of relief through the New Poor Law of 1834), but the results are at best somewhat inconclusive. On the other hand, it is hard to deny some relationship with the almost traumatic experiences of economic depression and social misery which characterised the period. How else are we to interpret the fact that in 1851 almost 40 per cent of all women in England and Wales between twenty and forty-four were unmarried; and that a total of nearly 2½ million persons of both sexes in this age group were single?
The census figures can be made to yield other clues of social significance. Take for instance the division of the population according to age. In 1841,45 per cent of the population of England and Wales was under the age of twenty, and less than 7 per cent was aged sixty and over. Compared with the Britain of today this seems a very young society (the corresponding figures for 1958 were 29 per cent and 17 per cent), but it is not significantly different from such evidence as is available for comparative age groups in the seventeenth century. This would suggest that the age structure of early Victorian society was closer to that of pre-industrial Britain than to the pattern with which we are now familiar. Despite the great growth in total population, the traditional proportions of children, workers and old people remained about the same; though they had increasingly to adapt themselves to changed circumstances of life.
Some further hints on the persistence of traditional aspects of society side by side with great innovations are given by the figures of population distribution. From time immemorial the typical Englishman had been a countryman, and the census of 1831 showed that 961,000 families (which was 28 per cent of the total) in Great Britain were employed in agriculture. To these may be added the numerous country craftsmen and shopkeepers of the villages and small market towns, making a total of perhaps 50 per cent of the population who lived in rural conditions. The urban figures for 1831 showed about 25 per cent of the population of England and Wales living in towns of 20,000 people and above. Greater London contained 1,900,000 people in 1831 (13·5 per cent of the population of England and Wales) and by 1851 this figure had grown to 2,600,000. Twenty years is but a short time in which to chart population changes, but the trend towards urbanisation was unmistakable. The census of 1851 showed that for the first time in history just over half the population of England and Wales was living in urban areas. The path to the present day, when over 80 per cent of Britishers are urbanised, was already established.
Growth of population in urban areas was the result of two factors: natural increase (that is, surplus of births over deaths) of the local populace, and immigration from outside. The rate of natural increase in the towns was not significantly different from the rate in the countryside, but in both cases it was high. Employment opportunities, however, were better in urban than in agricultural areas, thanks to the development of industrialism and the factory system. Consequently there was movement to the towns from the villages and farm lands, which declined (at first relatively, but later absolutely) in population. The townward drift took the form of short distance movement in the first instance: migrants into the industrial towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire came from the surrounding rural counties. Small towns sometimes served as concentration points for later movement to bigger towns; so that the pattern of population migration resembled a series of concentric circles, with the large town in the centre. Movement to towns was particularly marked in the 1840s, when large numbers of immigrant Irish swelled the numbers of native English and Scots who were migrating to urban areas.
The Irish population statistics bring to our attention one of the greatest tragedies of the nineteenth century. In 1841 the population of Ireland was 8·2 millions; by 1851 it had decreased to 6·5 millions, and thereafter it continued to decline steadily throughout the nineteenth century. Supported almost entirely by potatoes, the Irish population had increased rapidly along with the rest of the British Isles. When the potato crop failed in successive years after 1845 Ireland suffered a famine, and a mass evacuation began. It has been estimated that about 700,000 people died and nearly one million emigrated (mainly to America) in the six years before 1851. In the peak year of emigration, 1851, a quarter of a million people left Ireland. The social and economic, not to mention the political, impact of such movement was very far-reaching. Yet the simple statistics of overall population alone tell us something important about Ireland in the early Victorian era. Today the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland together have only about 4·5 million people, or 8 per cent of the total population of the British Isles. In 1841 the Irish population was over 30 per cent of the total, being half as big as that of England and Wales, and more than three times that of Scotland. Proportionately to population, Ireland was much more important in the early Victorian scene that it is today – a consideration which is seldom reflected in histories of the period.
To some of the implications of these statistics of population we shall return in succeeding chapters. For the time being enough has been said to vindicate the concern of the early Victorians with population problems. Every age has its peculiar way of looking at social issues, and Victorian Britain was no exception. It was in fact
