EARLY VICTORIAN BRITAIN EP EB

J. F. C. Harrison

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780007291700
• eBook ISBN: 9780007392940
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XIX

In this fascinating and well researched work of the history of the heyday of Victorian British society, Harrison seamlessly weaves together the overlapping developments in politics, economy, social and culture.

It was a period that saw Britain become a predominantly urban society, continuing industrialization, the growth of new and distinct social classes, as well as social conflict over the New Poor Law and the emergence of Chartism.

1
The Social Experience of Industrialism

Population: or the Fears of the Reverend Mr Malthus

It is appropriate that a social history should begin with demography. There is a rough logic in considering first the details of population, for in a fundamental sense they determine all else. History is about people, both as individuals and in relation to each other, and the number of people in a country at a given time is one of the crucial factors in determining what sort of lives they are likely to be living. Leaving aside other variables, a Britain of two and a half million people (as in the Middle Ages) will be a vastly different society from modern Britain with fifty-five millions, by sheer virtue of the difference in numbers; for the quantitative difference means also a difference in quality, and sets the bounds for the potentialities and limits of human achievement. We need therefore to establish in the first place how many people there were in early Victorian Britain, particularly in relation to earlier and later periods. Second, the geographical, occupational and age distribution of the population will give us important clues as to what sort of society we are dealing with. Third, movements of population will alert us to possible social changes that were in process. And lastly the trend of population – whether it was increasing or declining – will provide an overall setting for the period we are considering.

The most important thing about the population of early Victorian Britain was that it was larger than ever before, and moreover was increasing rapidly still further. The census of 1831 counted 24·1 million people in the British Isles; by 1841 the total was 26·7 millions; and in 1851, despite massive emigration from Ireland, the figure had reached 27·3 millions.¹ This was a very high rate of decennial increase, though less than the peak decade 1811–21. It was of course a continuation of the trend which had begun in the later years of the eighteenth century, when after centuries of slow growth the population suddenly began to increase at an accelerating rate. The results of the first census, taken in 1801, had been greeted with incredulity in some quarters, as many Englishmen just could not believe that the population of England, Scotland and Wales was as large as 10·6 millions, with another 5·2 millions in Ireland. William Cobbett, 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 firmly in the grip of Malthusianism which, in association with the doctrines of political economy and philosophic radicalism, proved to be one of the most compelling theories of the modern world. The Reverend Thomas Malthus had published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, to express his doubts about current ideas on the perfectability of man and schemes for the improvement of society. Before his death in 1834, six editions of his work had been published, and he had elaborated further upon his ‘principle of population’ (taken as a law of nature) and applied it to immediate social problems. The starting point of his theory was the capacity (and constant tendency) of population to grow faster than the means of subsistence. In practice population was prevented from outstripping the means of feeding it by the operation of vice, misery and moral restraint. These checks to population Malthus divided into two categories: positive and preventive. Positive checks included all causes of mortality outside the control of the individual, arising from what he called vice and misery. Under this head, he argued, ‘may be enumerated all unwholesome occupations, severe labour and exposure to the seasons, extreme poverty, bad nursing of children, large towns, excesses of all kinds, the whole train of common diseases and epidemics, wars, plague, and famine’.³

By preventive checks Malthus meant limitation of births by means which are under the control of the individual, and which relate to conscious and voluntary decisions. Some types of ‘vice’, such as sexual perversity and artificial contraception within marriage, he included in this category. But the preventive check with which he was most concerned was moral restraint. This he defined as postponement of marriage until a man could afford to support a family, together with strict continence before marriage. Since mankind could not escape from the workings of the ‘principle of population’, the only way to avoid the evil and unhappiness caused by the positive checks was to embrace the alternative of moral restraint. In so doing a man would rise to his full stature as a rational being.

Malthus was not the first nor the only writer on population problems in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but his brilliant Essay appeared at precisely the moment when those problems were beginning to cause consternation among thinking men. By simplifying the whole matter to a clash between numbers of population and means of subsistence he dramatically presented his contemporaries with the need to make a choice. Not all of them, even among the orthodox political economists, accepted Malthus’ theory in its entirety, but the Essay made a deep impression and defined the terms in which the population debate was carried on until late in the nineteenth century. By the 1830s and 1840s this debate was in full swing, and moreover was given a very practical relevance by the decision to reform the Poor Laws. A convinced Malthusian, writing in 1845, could state baldly:

‘Population must if possible be prevented from increasing beyond the means of subsistence. This can only be done by restraining people from marrying until they can bear the expenses of a family. Whatever other remedies may be prescribed, therefore, restrictions upon the marriages of the poor are an indispensable part of the regime to be observed.’

Though he had to confess that ‘it requires some courage, in these days, to exhibit such principles, the very essence of Malthusianism, in all their naked simplicity’.⁴

The Malthusian theory was at bottom a very gloomy view of society. A note of pessimism is inescapable in nearly all Malthusian writing, for even Malthus himself, for all his encouragement of moral restraint, does not seem to have believed that mankind would in fact follow his advice. Perhaps this helps to account for Malthus’ domination of the debate: he articulated the fears and pessimism of a great many people. Today these fears still have the power to haunt people. Without the advantage of hindsight the early Victorians can hardly be blamed for their concern (even panic) when they saw the quite unprecedented hordes of people everywhere arising round them. They could not know that industrial growth would ultimately dispel many of their fears – only to create new ones. Nor that democracy would provide a means to assimilate the labouring poor into the body politic. They correctly perceived that this new population would result in a new society, and that discussion of population problems was really about the whole future of society. The fears of the Reverend Mr Malthus were not just fears of numbers of people, but fear of radical social change, even of revolution. Historians have exercised considerable ingenuity in showing why Britain was unique in avoiding a violent revolution in the nineteenth century. But in the following pages we shall see that to the early Victorians it seemed a matter of touch and go.

The Progress of the Nation

In 1847 George Richardson Porter, a statistician at the Board of Trade, brought out a new edition of his Progress of the Nation, in its various Social and Economical Relations, from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. The book professed ‘to mark the progress of this United Kingdom, in which all the elements of improvement are working with incessant and increasing energy’. To enquire into the circumstances which have made one’s own country preeminent, he argued, would almost seem to be a duty; but especially is this so in the case of the present generation, ‘by which have been made the greatest advances in civilisation that can be found recorded in the annals of mankind’. Although he allotted one of the eight sections to ‘Moral Progress’ (comprising chapters on crime, manners, education and postage), most of the book was devoted to economic and financial growth. Progress meant essentially material progress, based on ‘well-authenticated facts’, from which could be drawn conclusions ‘supported by principles, the truth of which has in general been recognised’.

The figures which Porter produced certainly looked impressive. Not one of his innumerable tables covering everything from emigration and manufacturers to taxes and food, failed to show a substantial increase during the previous forty years. By 1847 Britain just had more of everything: more raw cotton imported, more tons of coal dug out, more miles of railway built – also more crime – than ever before. Even the increase in population was taken as evidence of prosperity, and the dark fears of the Malthusians dispelled by the growth in food production. The early Victorians were the last people to claim that worldly wealth was the sole end of man’s existence. Nevertheless the material achievement was so dazzling that at times they were quite carried away and wrote of it in lyrical, even transcendental language. They admitted that of course there were other constituents of progress, but none was so conveniently measurable nor so dear to the heart of a generation which, like Mr Gradgrind, had a veritable passion for ‘facts’. Porter (with all the enthusiasm and brashness of the pioneer generation of social statisticians) thought that because his facts were unconnected with ‘party feelings’ or ‘fanciful theories’, they had an objective validity which put them beyond any questioning. Despite this myopia, his compilation from parliamentary and other official records was a brilliant plundering and a massive testimony to the unprecedented growth of the economy. Porter had difficulty, because of insufficiency of data, in measuring the growth of total national wealth. But modern economists have calculated that the total gross national income of Great Britain rose from £340 millions in 1831 to £523·3 millions in 1851. There could hardly be much doubt, in this sense, about the Progress of the Nation.

The developments which Porter was outlining have usually been described by historians as the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century with a series of inventions in the textile industry, this revolution rapidly transformed the whole basis of British life. The world’s first machine civilisation was born and the transition to the ‘industry state’ commenced. By 1832 the first stage had been completed, with the successful application of steam power to new machines in the textile mills, the expansion of production in the coal, iron and engineering industries, and the concentration of production in the North and Midlands. The 1830s and 1840s saw an intensification of the trend towards factory production and a ruthless exploitation of economic resources.

More recently these developments have been approached from a somewhat different angle. In place of the ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1: The Social Experience of Industrialism
• 2: Patterns of Poverty: Labouring People
• 3: The Condition-of-England Question
• 4: Patterns of Prosperity: the Middling and Upper Classes
• 5: Early Victorian Values
• 6: Social Change and Social Movements
• Further Reading
• Index
• About the Author
• Notes
• Copyright
• About the Publisher