Early Victorian Britain: 1832–51. Литагент HarperCollins USD

most about the economic background and the social costs of the process of intensive industrialism. A lively debate as to whether the standard of living of the working classes improved or deteriorated still continues, and has stimulated research into little-known aspects of the day-to-day life of labouring people. Because of the interest which labour and socialist historians from Karl Marx onwards have always shown in this period, we know a good deal about the various radical and social reform movements of the 1830s and 1840s. Examinations of the concept of class and the dynamics of popular protest have further deepened our understanding in this area. Recently there have been studies of the New Poor Law; and the shadowy underworld of crime, prostitution and pornography has begun to be seriously probed. The landed interest has been systematically described and analysed; and the respectable, self-help classes have begun to attract more sympathetic study than they once did. Literary evidence (novels, poems and articles) has been well used to characterise Victorianism, and to explore, among other things, the social attitudes of the age. In general, the substance of this book has been drawn from those parts of early Victorian social history about which we know most.

      But in writing it the author has been greatly aware of what we don’t know, and where further research is necessary. Although excellent monographic work on Irish, Scottish and Welsh history has been and is being done, we have not yet reached the stage when it can easily be integrated into a general history of the British Isles. Ireland, except when events impinge on English politics, is seldom mentioned, and then always as a ‘problem’. Scotland, with its very different systems of law, education and poor relief, is usually ignored; while Wales is simply lumped with England as a single statistical unit. This is to say that the Celtic fringe is virtually left out of the standard British histories, which are written from an English (if not metropolitan) perspective. For political history this is misleading enough, but for social history it is much worse. Most of the generalisations made, for instance, about social structure and social movements, probably need qualification in the light of the Irish and Scottish experiences. And the difficulty cannot be overcome by throwing in the odd example or illustration from Dublin or Aberdeen. Only a series of comparative social studies, concentrating on fairly narrow periods or topics, is likely to uncover significant points of similarity or uniqueness.

      There are other, if less dramatically obvious, areas of darkness. Despite the excellent work of modern historical demographers, we still do not understand very clearly the relation between population increase and economic growth – a vital concern of early Victorian Britain. There is no history of the basic social institution in Britain, the family, nor any evidence of much interest in it among historians. The social content of Victorian religion has been largely neglected, except for occasional forays by interested parties. How long have we to wait for a modern history of Methodism, which will do justice to the social complexities of the schisms and connextional strife which plagued the chapels in the nineteenth century? Similarly for education there is a need to get beyond institutional histories, and examine the (largely unstated) social goals of educational movements and efforts. Working class culture, which has received some attention for its more recent periods, remains virtually terra incognita for the first half of the nineteenth century; although oral folk tradition, dialect, popular poetry and songs, and material on feasts, festivals and the use of leisure could be used to explore it. We also need more local studies of towns, counties and regions, to document the diversity and richness of our social heritage, and to correct the naivety of much ‘national’ history. A comparative approach is particularly valuable here, as it is also in intellectual history, which has been much slower to develop in Britain than in the USA. The social roots of ideas, including the ideas of the majority of ordinary people, have to be investigated before we can understand many aspects of a society. But such investigations have not yet gone very far into the period 1832–51.

      This recital of the limitations of our present knowledge is not to be taken as meaning that nothing worthwhile can be written about early Victorian society, but that a healthy scepticism towards some of our accepted interpretations is in order. A final caution may also not be out of place. The early Victorian period has an air of familiarity about it, mainly because of our reading of the great novelists, especially Charles Dickens. Yet this can be very deceptive, for we no longer share many of the basic assumptions of that society, and our sympathies and responses are likely to be different from those of contemporary readers. They believed in immutable economic laws, in Malthusian fears of overpopulation, and in objective factors controlling man and society; we for the most part do not. Nobody in Britain today is prepared to accept poverty and gross inequality as part of a God-given order of the universe; in the 1830s and 1840s the affluent classes and most of the labouring poor took it for granted that rich and poor (like good and bad) would always exist. The barrier to historical understanding is not ignorance of the material facts of our great-great-grandparents’ life (for we can easily look at pictures of them at work and play), but lack of sympathy for their fundamental ideas and attitudes. The world of Charles Dickens is a long way, mentally and materially, from us; and the distance increases every year. But if we can manage to overcome the obstacles to historical understanding we shall begin to deepen our awareness of our own society by extending the range of our experience through contact with the past.

       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