Railways and society

The impact of railways on Victorian society was immense[1]. Railways provided the speediest means of transport during the nineteenth century. At first some railways charged the first-class passenger more than he would have had to pay making the same journey inside a coach, and a second-class passenger more than he would have been charged for an outside seat. It was not long, however, before railways began to give fares a competitive edge over the charges of coach travel. It was a policy that resulted in a rapid increase in the volume of passenger traffic.

By the early 1840s half fares for under 12s were generally widely available making family rail travel more widespread and still further augmented the volume of passenger travel.  Initially the poor were not encouraged to travel unless it was in search of work or to fulfil urgent family responsibilities. Railway companies made no provision for that type of traveller who had gone by carrier's wagon rather than by the outside of a coach because it was cheaper. Robert Stephenson told the Select Committee on Railways in July 1839 that there was 'a class of people who had not yet had the advantage from the railways which they ought, that is the labouring classes.'  The practice of providing third-class carriages on trains spread gradually. It was not, however, until the Railway Act 1844 with its clauses making the provision of third-class accommodation on at least one train a day in each direction obligatory, that the working class could count on penny-a-mile travel under minimum conditions of comfort. Between 1849 and 1870 the number of third-class passengers increased nearly six fold whereas the increase in other areas was only fourfold.  The boost to third-class travel was further increased after 1874 when the Midland Railway abolished second class and greatly improved the comfort for third-class passengers. Other companies followed suit and by 1890 the difference in the standards of accommodation had been substantially narrowed.

Freight traffic did not increase as rapidly as passenger travel partly because of the relative cheapness of inland navigation. One problem the early railway companies faced was through-traffic: getting goods from one part of the country to another through different companies' lines. Although a Railway Clearing House was established in January 1842 it was five years before it began to operate effectively and there was a substantial reduction in the cost of freight. It is important to identify those areas where reduction in the cost of freight had social as well as economic results:

1. In the early 1850s the volume of freight carried by railway first exceeded that carried by canals.
2. The movement of coal was the bread and butter of British railways, the tonnage carried always well over half the total of freight traffic. In 1865, for example, 50 million tons of coal was carried compared to 13 million tons of other minerals [especially iron] and nearly 32 million tons of other merchandise. Up to 1914 the volume of mineral traffic increased at a faster rate than traffic in other goods. Despite this, the mineral trade was less profitable than the other type of freight, earning only 45 per cent of freight revenue in 1913.  The railways made available, at a lower cost, the fuel that was the lifeblood of the basic industries.  On the other hand the presence of about 1,400,000 mostly small wagons, many of which were used to carry coal, cluttered up the tracks and led to congestion on the railway network.  Railways' contribution to the prosperity of coal mining came through their cheapening of delivery costs and the consequent vast extension of the use of coal in manufactures and in domestic heating.
3. The growth of the iron industry was sustained by orders of rails, locomotives and rolling stock..
4. The demand for locomotives and rolling stock was so great that it accounted for at least 20 per cent of the engineering industry's output in the later 1840s. Railways spread the engineering industry into areas that were previously regarded as agricultural: for example, the South Eastern Railway established its locomotive and carriage works at Ashford in Kent in 1845 and the Great Western Railway decided to set up a similar establishment at Swindon five years earlier. Though railway engineering made significant early achievements, its later progress was unimpressive. The main reasons for this were.  The dominance of the chief mechanical engineer over development policy in many of the larger railway companies. These engineers were highly individualist and liked to be known for the distinctive features on the locomotives they designed. This led to little standardisation of design, with consequently to little attempt to maximise economy of operation.  Considerations of engineering excellence took precedence over better cost accounting and the need for more adequate statistics on the operating efficiency of freight trains.  This did not mean that there were no improvements in the efficiency of the locomotive after 1850.  The replacement of wrought iron with steel rails meant that weightier and more powerful locomotives could be used. The substitution of coal for coke as fuel after 1870 made feasible higher steam pressure, greater speeds and heavier trains. Some lines were electrified before 1914 but the mileage was very small: 314 out of 23,911 route miles of track.
5. Railway costs meant that manufacturing centres were able to undercut the largely hand-based local centres of production. The economic and social life of towns and villages became less diversified. A comparison of local directories demonstrates this very clearly. By 1900 although the names of trades had sometimes survived, the character of the business that went on behind the shop front had changed radically. Tradesmen had, in many cases, ceased to be craftsmen. They became dealers or shopkeepers, selling goods made in some remote manufacturing centre elsewhere in Britain or even in America or Germany.
6. One effect of the railways was the elimination of local differences in farm prices. Not only could farmers bring in fertilisers, they could send their produce to market more easily and cheaply. This had important consequences for people's diet. Take, for example, the transformation of the system of marketing livestock.  Traditionally meat was supplied to London and other large centres of population 'on the hoof'. Animals were driven from the farms to the final fattening grounds near the main markets. In early 1830 34 drovers guided 182,000 sheep a year from south Lincolnshire to London while a further 52 men drive 26,520 oxen on the same route. It was an expensive and time-consuming operation.  When the rail link from Cambridge to London was opened, the greater part of the journey could be completed in less than a day cutting costs considerably.  The gradual disappearance of the long-distance droving industry occurred in Scotland in the 1850s and 1860s and led to the emergence of new markets at railheads like Lairg, Lockerbie and Lanark. The fatstock farmer could now expect a better financial return because less of his product was being wasted in the process of marketing and the customer could get a cheaper and fresher product. A similar process can be seen in the transformation of Britain's fisheries.
7. Railway investment broadened the social spread of those involved in risk capital. Before 1830 the investment habit was largely confined to the members of the mercantile and landed interests whose opportunities for obtaining a secure return on their savings had been strictly limited. Railways demanded a quite unprecedented volume of capital and in order to obtain it companies were obliged to lower the denomination of shares allowing people from the lower middle and even upper working class to invest. The result was a permanent change in investment trends: before 1830 little over one twentieth of national income was invested annually, by 1850 the proportion was one tenth -- more people were investing more money.

Railways were regarded as symbolic of the progressive spirit. Sponsors of railway companies were often also supporters of parliamentary reform, municipal reform and free trade. In 1907 the author of a survey of the Essex economy wrote 'It was not easy to lay down rails in the soft Essex soils and a good deal of the country is still untouched by railroads and therefore quietly unprogressive in spirit.'  It is certainly true that the arrival of the railway was often accompanied by the introduction of other changes. The railway first came to the Isle of Wight in 1864, after sustained opposition from local landowners for nearly twenty years. The editor of the local newspaper grumbled that many of the visitors bought by the railway had great difficulty in finding the beauty spots and that not only improved signposting but also better roads and gas lighting were urgently needed. Two months later he announced the formation of a gas company, 'the prospects of success being so very encouraging'. The 'progressive spirit' can be seen in other respects:

1. The development of the railway system resulted in the general acceptance of Greenwich time as a standard. Before 1840 different parts of the country operated at different times. The Great Western timetable of 30 July 1841 said that 'London time is about four minutes earlier than Reading time, seven and a half minutes before Cirencester and 14 minutes before Bridgwater.'  The disadvantages of not having a standard time applicable to all parts of the United Kingdom were increasingly obvious. The result was the gradual standardisation of time during the 1850s.
2. There is no denying the influence of railways in starting that standardisation of language and speech that was carried forward more speedily by the influence of radio and television. The railways of Wales, for example, were powerful agencies in the decline of Welsh speaking in the principality.
3. The creation of a national railway system was one of the preconditions -- together with technological changes in printing, the growth in literacy levels and the abolition of stamp duty in newspapers in 1836 and the 1850s -- for the establishment of mass circulation daily newspapers. In 1830 only 41,412 daily papers left London through the postal system. Railways extended the radius of circulation and newspapers could be delivered to all but the remotest parts of the country within a day of publication. In 1866 the railway companies agreed that the standard charge for newspapers should be half the ordinary parcel rate. As early as 1848 potential demand was so great that the firm of W.H.Smith & Son chartered six special trains to get newspapers through to Glasgow within ten hours of publication in London.

Railways contributed to the increasing secularisation of British society through the development of leisure and the development of tourism. The holiday began as a holy day. At the Bank of England there were 44 such holidays in 1808 though this had been reduced to four by 1834. Elsewhere, however, there was a new movement in the opposite direction: in many factories holidays were declared at the will of the owners as a device for saving wages when business was slack. Every important form of leisure activity that existed in the Victorian period and which some suppose to have been introduced by the railways had their origins in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Holidays were not something created by railways for the few, but arguably were for the masses.  Railways were quick to recognise the opportunities presented by train excursions. One way of filling empty seats in passenger coaches and so offset high overhead costs was to provide excursion tickets at lower prices than the standard tickets: in 1846 for example the Bodmin & Wadebridge company ran a cheap train for those wishing to see a public execution. The first trunk line to show a positive attitude to the promotion of leisure traffic was the London & Brighton and in 1844 it became the chief pioneer of excursion trains in southern England.

It was above all the Great Exhibition of 1851 that provided the greatest opportunity for railways to promote excursion travel. Without the railways the Exhibition could not have matched up to the imaginative ambitions of those who planned it and, in the end, those ambitions were surpassed. More than forty years later Thomas Hardy conjured up an excursion train: 'an absolutely new departure in the history of travel runs to the Exhibition from Dorcester....'  When the Exhibition closed, railways stood higher in general estimation than they had done before. Their system was now revealed as a working unit, able to concentrate attention and energy from all the most populous parts of the island at once on a single object in London. The running of these trains quickly came to be accepted by all the railway companies having substantial passenger business. There were other special events when their services were again in demand: the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857, the International Exhibition in London in 1862 and big exhibitions in Glasgow in 1888 and 1901. The seaside traffic grew; excursions carried race-goers into the suburbs of the great towns balanced later by those bringing passengers into towns to see football and cricket matches. It is difficult to estimate the quantity of the excursion traffic as only the Royal Commission on Railways 1865-7 dealt with the issue, and then only cursorily.

When excursion trains first appeared, it was common practice to run them on Sundays. Sunday observance affected the provision of railway services from the start and there was a conflict between the prompting of conscience and the pressing claims for business efficiency. The Sunday timetable, as the system developed in the 1840s and 1850s, came to differ widely from one railway to another but two generalisations can be made.  First, the Post Office was empowered to compel railways to carry mail at any time it appointed; and since it had both to deliver and collect letters on Sundays it insisted on the provision of a good many Sunday mail trains. This was uneconomic for the railway companies and so nearly all mail trains also carried passengers.  Secondly, on all British railways the Sunday service was very much less liberal than that offered on weekdays unlike continental Europe where there was very little difference.

In Scotland there were many lines on which no Sunday trains of any kind ran in the Victorian age: the suburban system in Glasgow, for example, was almost wholly shut down. In England and Wales the policy of providing Sunday trains was often criticised and sometimes strongly opposed. The clergy of the diocese of Winchester complained that their congregations were much reduced in the summer time. In 1846 Francis Close, the Evangelical parson of Cheltenham said, when Sunday trains began to serve the town 'Another page of Godless legislation, another national sin invokes the displeasure of the Almighty.'  His ranting was ignored and the trains continued to run. This heavy-handed approach was not, however, the only approach used. The case against running trains was sometimes stated with considerable restraint. The Sabbatarians treated Sunday as both a day of observance and as a day of rest. However, some secularly minded people argued that what was at issue here was really a battle of classes. The Sabbatarians seemed to them to be denying to the poor what would remained accessible to the rich, who kept their own carriages and could travel as they chose. Ought not the railways, as an instrument of social mobility, be available to all? The Duke of Wellington, hardly a radical thinker, thought they should. Two dreadful accidents, in 1858 and 1861, of excursion trains were seen as a judgement of God on the sin of providing Sunday excursion trains[2].

There were signs by the 1850s of support for increased railway facilities on Sundays but the control by the anti-travel lobby seemed to be growing stronger. In 1856 Parliament turned down attempts to open the chief London museums and galleries on a Sunday afternoon by an eight-to-one majority. In 1861 5.7 per cent of the system was closed on Sundays; by 1871 it was 18.9 per cent. By 1914, about 3700 miles of the system in England and Wales were closed on a Sunday, a little over 22 per cent of the whole. The railways' Sunday business had never been large and was carried out at a substantially higher cost than the weekday business. There were therefore strong arguments for keeping it down.  Railway company needed to relay track and daylight hours were only available on Sundays: most of the conversion of the gauge on the Great Western Railway was carried out at weekends.

The Sabbatarians began to revive at the end of the century. The Anti-Sunday-Travelling Union launched a new periodical, Our Heritage, in 1895 fomenting criticism of all the railways' Sunday services. Protesters soon began to lobby management and disturb shareholders meetings. Their doctrine no longer represented prevalent thinking. The successful body in these years was on the other side: the National Sunday League founded in 1855 to support the Sunday opening of museums and parks. The Sunday service was often very slow. The policy of the various companies was to impose a strict rigidity of their own as far as timetabling was concerned. In part this was because of their anxiety not to offend Sabbatarian susceptibilities, the requirement of carrying mail and the demands of railwaymen for additional Sunday pay.  Railways had begun by offering emancipation: opportunities to travel over substantial distances on Sunday. In doing so it violated the old Protestant Sunday in Britain. Despite opposition the railways' intervention enlarged the choice open to those individual consciences. In this sense they can be seen as progressive.

With the development of the Victorian excursion system can tourism and the family holiday. There are several reasons for the close relationship between tourism and the railways, unlike on the Continent. The smallness of Britain was itself an invitation to provide this kind of service. A quick trip to the coast was an attractive proposition. This combined with a large increase in average wages between 1860 and 1913 of 72 per cent and the increase in paid holidays. Victorian working men had more money to spend and more leisure time in which to spend it than workers in France and Germany. British governments ignored the excursion business because it was the affair of the railway companies, and theirs alone, to determine when and where these trains should run. As a result there was a continually increasing provision of excursions to match public demand.

The railway companies fostered the habit of taking short holidays over the weekend. In doing so it developed a practice that emerged in the late eighteenth century. The London & South Western seems to have been the first railway to encourage such behaviour: in 1842 it offered tickets at reduced fares from London to Southampton and Gosport on Saturday for return either on the same day, or Sunday or Monday. In 1844 the South Eastern ran six excursions to Dover with the option of extending the journey to France for the weekend. The motive here was profit. Other railways had different motives. Mark Huish, manager of the North Western, did not like Sunday trains for religious reasons [he was a strong Nonconformist]. He believed that the weekend ticket provided a substitute for Sunday travel.  The Saturday-Monday holiday does not seem to have acquired the name 'week-end' until 1870. By the late 1880s the habit had evidently grown. Bradshaw, the railway guide, shows early morning trains running up to London to Mondays only from Eastbourne, Hastings, Ramsgate and Yarmouth as well as from Llandudno to Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham. By 1914 there were ten such trains altogether but there never seems to have been any in Scotland.  For the middle classes the development of this type of service had two advantages. First it have them the opportunity to take weekend holidays. Secondly, it allowed the family to live away from the major conurbations and the husband could go home for the weekend.

There are major problems for historians in examining Victorian tourism and the impact railways made. There are no parliamentary enquiries or official statistics. Census returns give little information since they were taken in April when few tourists were on the move. As the tourist traffic grew, in extent and complexity, many of the British railway companies put part of it into the hands of agents or outside firms. The 'tour' was nothing new; guidebooks had been produced since the seventeenth century, the Grand Tour was part of the education for the wealthy in the eighteenth century[3]. By 1824 steamboats were plying the east coast from London to Leith, the port of Edinburgh; one was named The Tourist. In 1845 two men appreciating what could be done with railways and steamers came forward with offers to arrange this kind of travel, guaranteeing accommodation on trains and ships in return for a single payment: Joseph Crisp in Liverpool and Thomas Cook in Leicester. It is Cook on whom we focus:

• Cook offered two tours by train from Leicester to Liverpool and on by a steamboat to North Wales in 1845. The following year he organised a tour to Scotland.
• Cook never had any monopoly in the travel business, not with his liberal principles would he have sought one. But his firm remained much the most famous. His outstanding quality was his imagination, served by intense energy and in the early 1860s his lack of real business sense resulted in the firm moving from Leicester to London and his son John Mason Cook playing a more active role on the strict business side.
• The result was the genesis of what today is called the package holiday.

The railways' excursion and tourist business had come to be very substantial indeed before 1914. In the early years, down to 1851, the pleasure of travel was combined with the discomfort and fear of travelling by the new trains. Improvisation was the characteristic feature of tourism. By the 1860s the business had became, as a general rule, to be well managed. Trains were more tolerable to travel in and excursions had become an accepted part of the British railway system. Seaside resorts strove hard to achieve rail links with London or the great industrial centres. When Torquay achieved this ambition in 1848 a public holiday was declared in the town. The railway did not reach Bournemouth until 1870 but in the following decade its population grew from 5,896 to 16,859 and by 1911 reached 78,674. Excursions became most obvious in the mass movements on or around the principal public holidays. There would have been little point in Parliament passing the Bank Holidays Act 1871 had there not existed a railway system capable of carrying thousands of wage earners and their families to the seaside and back in a day at remarkably cheap rates.

Urban growth and creation was influenced by the emergent railway system. Some towns owed their very existence to the enterprise of a railway company. Others would not have grown if the railway had not helped to provide access to markets for the goods they produced and yet others had their character radically altered as a result of the extension of railway communications.

1. In 1841 no such place as Crewe appeared in the national census. There were only two small parishes of Monks Copenhall and Church Copenhall with a combined population of 747. Communications in the area were poor; roads were covered with 'excessively deep' ruts. By the end of 1842 four routes converged at this point of the railway system establishing links with Manchester, Birmingham, Chester and Liverpool. In late 1841 the Grand Junction Railway started to build its locomotive and carriage works there and the town grew very rapidly. By 1901, the year in which it produced its 4,000th locomotive, Crewe had a population of 42,074.  Less spectacular was the development of Wolverton in Buckinghamshire. In 1838 the London & Birmingham Railway decided to establish its engine works on a site conveniently placed between the two cities. Population grew: from 417 in 1831 to 2,070 by 1851. By 1907 there was employment for 4,500 men and boys in the railway carriage works. Swindon became the engineering centre for the Great Western Railway employing 14,000 men by the turn of the century. Railway workshops were not always built in rural settings and it is easy for historians to overlook those in the urban environment. Stratford, in east London, fulfilled the same role for the Great Eastern Railway as Swindon was for the Great Western.
2. Dozens of towns, though not the creation of railway companies, owed their rapid development to the presence of good communications.  The spectacular emergence of Barrow in Furness as a major industrial centre after 1840 was associated with the expansion of iron mining and smelting; the Furness Railway played a decisive role in opening up the district that had earlier been remote and difficult of access.  Middlesborough, though not so geographically remote, was a parallel case in that the railway was an essential agency in the growth of the iron and steel industry.

The railways' influence in opening up new urban centres continued up to 1914. After 1860 the construction of branch lines helped to create or enlarge residential suburbs of large towns and cities rather than establish completely new industrial towns. However, the early development of railways was not entirely constructive and when the railway companies extended their ownership of property within already existing cities their role was also partly destructive. By 1900 the railways had over five per cent of the central areas of London and Birmingham, more than seven per cent of the corresponding districts of Glasgow and Manchester and nine per cent of central Liverpool. This led to considerable dispossession of the powerless and the poor. In building new stations, goods yards and stables in the centre of big cities, railway companies avoided large factories. It was far cheaper and less complicated to buy up large numbers of individual houses, especially where one landlord owned them. As a result railways contributed to the creation of urban ghettos and inner city deprivation.

• As well as those dispossessed by the building of a new depot, there was usually an influx of labour into an area as more casual labour would be needed. At the same time as the number of houses and rooms were reduced, the demand increased. It was all very well suggesting that those displaced should find new homes outside the city centre. But, as one witness to the Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini expressed it 'the poor man was chained to the spot; he had neither the leisure to walk nor the money to ride....'
• Money to ride' implied travelling at the normal third -class, penny-a-mile rate established from 1844 and this proved to be too expensive. Parliament did attempt to require railway companies to provide workmen's trains at concessionary rates that were very cheap. In the Cheap Train Act 1883 Parliament intervened in a more comprehensive manner and extended what some railway companies had already begun to do. The result was a dramatic increase in workmen's tickets. An average of 26,000 was issued daily in the London area in 1882; by 1912 a quarter of all suburban rail passengers travelled with these tickets.
• With parliamentary encouragement the railways had made something of a contribution to the dispersal into healthier districts of the people living in the grossly overcrowded city centres. However, the continued existence of slums a generation after the passage of the 1883 Act makes it very clear that it would be wholly misleading to suggest that the housing problem could be solved simply by a policy of concessionary fares.

The importance of the railways to social developments between 1830 and 1914 cannot be underestimated. Railways impinged on the lives of all sections of society, increased mobility, improved diet as well as introducing a degree of uniformity on the diversities of regional and local experience. They engendered wonder and fear, changed the landscape of the country whether rural or urban, and liberated society from the constraints and slowness of existing modes of travel. Yet railways could not have been as successful as they were without those modes of travel. Roads provided short-distance feeders to railway stations; canals still carried heavy goods; and England was still a horse-driven society in 1914.

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[1] On the social impact of railways Jack Simmons The Victorian Railway, Thames & Hudson, 1991 is a work of major importance.

[2] It was 111 years before another bad accident occurred to an excursion train running on a Sunday!!

[3] On this see Jeremy Black The Grand Tour, Allan Sutton, revised edition, 1992.

Railways: operation and economic impact

Railway traffic, both passenger and freight grew steadily during this period. Passenger numbers rose from 24.5 million in 1842, to 72.9 m in 1850 to 507 m by 1875, freight tonnage from 5.4 million in 1842 to 38 million in 1850 to 119.6 million in 1875 and total revenue from £4.8 m in 1842 to £61.3 m in 1875. Although some companies created new traffic, the principal aim was to supply improved facilities for existing customers. The trunk-line railways that eventually dominated the industry established themselves as specialist high-tariff businesses. As the industry expanded there were two significant changes in the composition of the business handled:

• There was an increased emphasis on freight from the mid-1840s. In the decade 1835-45, the major companies concentrated on passenger traffic, deriving three quarters of their gross revenue from this source. By 1850 the proportion had fallen below half.
• There was a shift in passenger traffic to third class: in 1845-6 third class passengers made up half of total numbers and produced a fifth of the total revenue; by 1870 the proportions had risen to 65 and 44 per cent respectively.

Railways were slow to exploit their freight-carrying advantages. As late as 1835 locomotive technology was confined to a few lines and not until the early 1840s that locomotives were capable of hauling heavy goods trains. It was only with the company amalgamations of the late 1840s and the improvement of long-distance traffic interchange via the Railway Clearing House that railways were able to challenge canals and so extend their markets. Railways could carry freight in quantity and this was the key to their success.

1. There is general agreement that railways stimulated an overall reduction in transport costs, both by introducing lower rates and by forcing competitors to cut their own charges.
2. However, the extent of the reductions and the effects on markets and commodities are more difficult. In the period 1830-1850 railways under-cut road coaches by possibly 15-20 per cent and canals by a more substantial figure of 30-50 per cent.
3. Retailing was transformed and new traffic was encouraged in perishable goods -- meat, fish, fresh milk and vegetables. The extension of services was accompanied by an improvement in communications at all levels, via the telegraph, postal services and newspapers, that were all highly dependent on rail facilities. Faster and cheaper travel also stimulated the growth of leisure facilities, particularly in the coastal resorts.

The railway reduced the cost and greatly improved the quality and volume of Britain's transport.

Economic growth and railways 1830-1900

Nineteenth century writers had little hesitation in assuming a direct link between the growth of the railway network and the pace of economic change. Historians today are more cautious. How much did railways really contribute to British economic growth between 1830 and 1870? G.R. Hawke Railways and Economic Growth in England and Wales 1840-1870, published in 1970, is the starting-point. He poses the question: 'To what extent did the economy depend on railways in 1865?', or more exactly, what would have been the cost of dispensing with railways and transporting passengers and goods by road and canal? Hawke is concerned with 'social saving theory' and concludes that railway services in 1865 represented a social saving of between 7 and 11 per cent of the net national income of England and Wales. He recognises that social savings were much lower in the earlier years -- about 2.5 per cent in 1850 and 6.5 per cent in 1855.

By 1870 the essential features of the railway industry -- the basic network, organisational structure and traffic patterns -- had been established. But maturity did not mean stagnation. From 1870 to 1914 there was a four-fold increase in passengers and a three-fold increase in freight. Route-mileage increased by 50 per cent, capital by 150 per cent and gross revenue by nearly 200 per cent. Inland transport was essentially rail transport in the late nineteenth century, though this is not to ignore the important role of road transport, and especially road haulage, as a short-distance feeder. There is no doubt that the contribution of railways to the economy was much greater than it had been in the 1860s. But historians have directed attention to the declining profitability of the industry and its relevance to the wider debate on British retardation and weakening competitiveness after 1870. So how were railways performing?

The net rate of return on capital fell steadily from 4.55 per cent in 1870-4 to 3.38 per cent in 1900-4. However, it was not until the 1890s that returns fell below the 4.0 per cent level of the 1860s and there was a recovery from 1901 to 3.6 per cent by 1910-12. We may conclude that after two decades of recovery, 1850-70, the industry's earning power fell back to the level of the early 1860s and that operating margins narrowed significantly.  These developments can be explained by seeing railways as the victims of the increased demand for traffic. Traffic growth occurred largely in those sectors were profits were lowest: third class passengers and small consignments of short-haul bulk freight. The emphasis of the railway companies was on expanding links by constructing branch lines at the expense of operating costs.

There were four distinct periods affecting the working environment and these corresponded broadly with changing price trends:

1. There was a sharp rise in costs in the early 1870s.
2. Revenue and costs per train-mile fell between 1873 and 1890 when the additional costs of an improve quality of service were offset by the falling price of materials, especially coal.
3. In the 1890s, and notably between 1896 and 1901, there was a serious escalation of costs.
4. After 1900 the situation changed again and there was a substantial improvement in operating efficiency; almost all of this occurred in the freight area.

The railways' difficulties were essentially problems of the late 1890s and certainly the period 1896-1901 was a challenging one. Operating costs increased sharply, traffic growth slowed down and the extra burdens of newly raised capital put pressure on profit levels. All this was accompanied by legislation seeking to control two areas of railway economy: charges and labour costs. The Railway Regulation Act 1893, which aimed to restrict excessive working hours, and the Railway and Canal Traffic Act 1894, which established the 1892 rates as new maximum charges, were examples of the many efforts to make the railways conform to public expectations

The degree to which the railway companies were responsible for this situation is a matter of some disagreement. Derek Aldcroft suggests that much of the problem was due to managerial shortcomings and there is evidence that while managers were aware of the need to prune uneconomic services, they frequently yielded to pressure from customers. The results, in the case of uneconomic lines, were economies by squeezing labour and curbing the quality of services. Other historians place emphasis on the more hostile political environment in which railways were places after 1870: governments were prepared to legislate on passenger fares and safety in the 'public interest'.

The Railway and Canal Traffic Act 1873, the Cheap Trains Act 1883 and the legislation of 1888-94 were all part of a significant shift in public opinion. Railways were seen more as public corporations than as profit-making businesses. It as in this environment railways experienced diminishing returns, while producing substantial benefits for society as a whole.

Railways: Construction

The railway in the modern sense was very much an innovation of the late 1820s. The industry was established in the next half-century in a series of promotion 'manias' in the late 1830s, mid-1840s and mid-1860s. By 1870 over 70 per cent of the final route mileage had been constructed. The three striking characteristics of the railway industry were:

1. Novelty. The Liverpool and Manchester railway, opened in September 1830, combined the essential features: specialised track, mechanical traction, and facilities for public traffic and provision for passengers.
2. Size. The scale of this new technology was soon apparent. The capital raised by the companies in the United Kingdom amounted to £630 million by 1875, dwarfing the fixed-capital formation of basic industries such as coal, iron, textiles and steel. Gross revenue, running at £19 million a year in the 1850s, rose to £52 million a year in 1870-75, equal to the output value of the woollen industry and double that of coal. Permanent employment reached 56,000 in 1850 and by 1873 the figure had risen to 275,000 or 3.3 per cent of the male labour force.
3. Concentration. This was also visible at an early stage. The great mania of 1845 -1847 left 61 per cent of the UK railway capital and 75 per cent of gross traffic revenue in the hands of 15 major companies. By 1870 the same number of companies controlled 80 per cent of the capital and 83 per cent of the revenue. The remaining 415 railway companies shared the rest.

Investment

In the period up to 1870 investment was very largely the story of three great 'manias', peaking in 1839-1840, 1847 and 1865-1866. In the late 1830s railway investment consumed nearly 2 per cent of national income but this rose to about 4.5 per cent of gross national product in 1845-9. We should not neglect the continuing importance of railway investment after 1850: over 60 per cent of the capital raised between 1825 and 1875 occurred after 1850. So what role did this play in the growth process?

• While railway promotion was an undoubted influence on general economic activity from the 1830s, its role was to support rather than lead. Decisions to invest in railways tended to concentrate in the upswing of the trade cycle but, because of the timescale involved in promotion and construction, lagged behind. So there is a clear lag between the peaks of economic activity in 1836 and 1845 and peaks of railway investment in 1839-40 and 1847.
• Technological change, commercial viability and parliamentary attitudes were all important in stimulating investment. Gladstone's Act of 1844, which referred to the possibility of a state purchase after 21 years of new companies earning 10 per cent or more, helped encourage over-optimism about the industry's future profitability during the second 'mania'.
• After 1860 investment fluctuations tended to coincide with those of the economy as a whole, with a peak in 1865-6, a trough in 1869 and a further peak in 1874-5.
• Railway investment encouraged radical changes in the structure of the British capital market. The volume of railway business from the mid 1830s was such that the London Stock Exchange not only expanded but shifted its emphasis towards company securities.  Railway investors were protected by limited liability from the start and it is logical to assume that the industry acted as a model for the companies that sprang up in the wake of the 1855-62 legislation.

Construction

Historians have distinguished between the railway as a producer of transportation services and as a construction enterprise. While it is not always easy to isolate the economic effects of railway enterprise, there is no doubt that the construction phase was a major activity in its own right. Before 1850 the employment generated by railway building dwarfed that created by railway operation. Between 1830 and 1870 about 30,000 miles of track were laid to form routes totalling 15.500 miles. The associated demands for men and materials -- unskilled labour and iron products in particular -- was large enough to merit a separate analysis. As far as labour was concerned

1. Between 1831 and 1870 an average of 60,000 men were engaged annually in building railways, or about 1 per cent of the occupied male labour force. This may not appear particularly dramatic but during the short 'mania' the numbers employed were considerable: 172,000 annually between 1845 and 1849 and 106,000 between 1862 and 1866.
2. The construction booms produced sudden surges in demand for labour and especially unskilled labour. The outcome, in the late 1840s, was a substantial boost to effective demand in the economy at a time of depression. Wages paid during this period amounted to £11 million or 2 per cent of GNP. In the mid 1860s constructional wage costs were high once again, averaging £7 million or so between 1862 and 1866.
3. Railway construction also brought demands for professional expertise based on specialist work. Engineering, law, accountancy and surveying all received an important stimulus. Civil engineers increased four fold between 1841 and 1851.
4. Both navvies and specialists were not immune from cutbacks once railway booms subsided. The number of parliamentary agents increased from 27 to 141 between 1841 and 1851 but fell back to 70 by 1861. The navvy workforce dwindled to under 36,000 by 1852 and after the 1860s boom it was probably no more than 33,000 in 1870. The long-term benefits of the attraction of labour to railway building were thus rather limited, especially after 1850. Of more lasting importance was the permanent employment offered by companies open for traffic, which exceeded 100,000 by 1856 and 200,000 by the late 1860s.

There is general agreement that the construction of Britain's railways had its greatest impact on the iron industry. Wrought iron rails were the major product purchased, but there was also a substantial demand for iron in other areas of railway enterprise. It is, however, important not to overestimate the long-term significance of this additional demand:

• Pig iron requirements were of major importance in the 1840s, particularly in terms of home demand, but the same cannot be said of the construction phase as a whole.
• Between 1844 and 1851 about 18 per cent of United Kingdom pig iron output went into railway enterprise. However, after 1852 as iron exports grew steadily, the railway's share of iron output fell back to under 10 per cent. Railways were not essential to the expansion of the iron industry; of more importance were the diffusion of Neilson's hot-blast technique in the 1830s and the surge of export demand [much of it was in fact for railway iron] after 1840.  Steel rails began to replace iron in the 1860s but the substantial shift did not occur until the 1870s.

Railway construction stimulated demand for other products, notably coal, engineering products, timber and building materials. The evidence for linkages is rather thin. In terms of total production, the direct impact of railway on the coal industry was small but as much as 10 per cent of output was used for making iron for railway uses. About 20 per cent of engineering's output went in the form of railway rolling stock in the late 1830s and 1840s. Brick production also received a direct stimulus: 25-30 per cent of the total production went into railways in the 1840s.

A horse-drawn society?

The popular image of Victorian England is of a society whose members travelled by train[1]. Certainly there is little doubting the impact that railways had on English society, its landscapes and its attitudes. However, for most people for most of the time the railways were not the main means of transport. F.M.L. Thompson first called Victorian England 'a horse drawn society' in an article published in 1970 and more recently[2]

'Railways paraded the power of the machine across the whole country, they eroded localism and removed barriers to mobility and they created new jobs and new towns. Their very modernity and success in generating new traffic, however, also generated expansion in older forms of transport, for all the feeder services bringing freight and passengers to the railway stations were horse-drawn. This, coupled with the needs of road transport within the larger towns, produced a three or fourfold increase in horse-drawn traffic on Victorian roads. The result, in employment terms, was that there were consistently more than twice as many road transport workers as there were railwaymen until after 1891 and that in the early twentieth century the road transport men, by now including some handling electric trams and soon to include others on motor vehicles, remained easily the largest group of transport workers.'

In early 1830 twenty-nine coaches operated between Liverpool and Manchester; by early 1831 there were four and two years later only one remained. One of the leading coach owners considered 'annihilation' as the most appropriate word to describe the effects of railways. But this experience was not typical of all parts of the country. Where the new railways ran roughly parallel to long-established trunk roads there was certainly little future for stage coaching. Where roads traversed or fed into the route of the railway a very different situation existed and horse-drawn vehicles still had a very important part to play for many decades to come in the overall provision of transport services.

Initially the effect of railways on towns that had previously been important staging posts was disastrous. In 1839 Doncaster found employment for seven four-horse coaches, 20 two-horse coaches, nine stage wagons and 100 post horses; the total horse population was 258. In 1845, after the town had had railway links for five years, only one four-horse coach, three stage wagons and 12 post horses were still in service and the number of horses had fallen to 60. Trade had suffered badly and the value of property had fallen between 25 and 30 per cent. Where coaches acted as 'feeders' there were still opportunities for them to stay on the road and, in some cases, increase their business. The completion of the early skeleton network by about 1840 provided many opportunities for opening up new combined coach and railway routes for passenger traffic. In April 1839 the well known coach magnate George Sherman expressed the opinion that after the railway had driven most of the coaches off the long distance routes 'there would be as much employ more horses as there ever was through the extra ordinary quantity of omnibuses and cabs that were appearing on the streets.'

The result was a significant increase in the cost of horses: in 1872 the London and South Western were paying £54 17s for the same type of animal that had only cost them £44 10s five years earlier. The increased demand for horses was certainly not confined to London; there is also significant evidence from the provinces. Thompson commented that 'Without carriages and carts the railways would have been like stranded whales, giants unable to use their strength, for these were the only means of getting people and goods right to the doors of houses, where they wanted to be.'  There was also an increase in privately owned heavy carriages: from 30,000 in 1840 the number grew to 120,000 by 1870. Over the same period the number of light two-wheeled carriages increased six times. By 1902 12 out of every 1,000 people in Great Britain owned some kind of private horse-drawn vehicles. This compared with 14 per 1000 in 1870 and 4 per 1000 in 1840, and it was not until 1926 that the number of car owners exceeded the number of persons who had owned horse-drawn carriages in 1870.

Road traffic

In 1838 there were 1,116 turnpike trusts, private, profit-making bodies, managing some 22,000 miles of road compared to the 104,770 managed by parish authorities. Neither was well equipped to meet the challenge of the railways. In the first place both operated on too small a scale to be run economically: the average turnpike road was under 20 miles long and parish roads even less. Secondly, they were in financial difficulties: turnpikes were in debt for over £7 million [four times their annual income] and parishes had considerable difficulty collecting the highway rates. Reform was necessary. It extended through the century and was a tediously slow process:

Some amalgamation or consolidation of turnpikes had already occurred by 1830. In 1826, for example, north London set up the Metropolitan Turnpike Trust uniting under one management the administration of 122 milers of roads formerly controlled by separate trusts. In 1844, following the Rebecca riots, the trusts in South Wales were brought under the control of county road boards. This process was not followed in other areas of the country where trusts suffered from increasing indebtedness and their roads lay unrepaired. Parliament was aware of the need for reform and Royal Commissions and select committees recommended consolidation and abolition. It was not until the Local Government Board took over responsibility for roads from the Home Office in 1872 that the dissolution of the trusts was hastened. In 1871 there were 851 trusts, by 1881 this had been reduced to 184 and by 1890 only two remained. the last trust -- on the Anglesey section of the Holyhead road -- ceased to function on 1 November 1895.

Reform of the parish roads occurred equally slowly. Parishes, even when it was obvious that they could not maintain their roads, were unwilling to surrender their authority. This did not help bring about uniformity of practice. The pattern became more orderly from 1872 but it was not until 1894 that the chaos that previously existed was finally sorted out. The Local Government Act 1894 merged the old highway districts and highway parishes into the rural sanitary authority. The recently created county councils [1888] assumed responsibility for the main through roads. The reform of road administration occurred at the same time as a reawakening of interest in long-distance road transport from the 1880s. The main reasons for this were:

1. A revival of horse-drawn coach transport for carriage of the new parcel post because of the terms offered by railway companies; success on the London-Brighton route in 1887-8 led to the scheme being extended to other routes.
2. A revival on four-in-hand coaching primarily as a leisure activity.
3. The development of the bicycle for the less well off. The British bicycle industry had its origins in the late 1860s in Coventry. It was the Rover safety bicycle with rear wheel chain drive, first produced in Coventry in 1885 that extended the craze. This was aided by the introduction of the pneumatic tyre by J.B.Dunlop in 1888 considerably increasing the comfort of cycling and helping to make the new means of recreation socially acceptable to women. By 1885 there were already 400,000 cyclists in Britain and the 1890s saw the bicycle reach the peak of its popularity: in 1896 for example they were issues to all police stations in the country. By 1900 the Raleigh Cycle Factory was producing 12,000 cycles a year.
4. The ending of the 12 mph speed limit [the 'Red Flag' legislation of 1865] in 1896. Though originally designed to limit the speed of 'steam-carriages', the decision liberated the newly developed motor vehicle for which good roads were essential.

As the proportion of people living in large towns and cities rose, the problems of urban transport assumed an ever-growing importance. Suburban railways met some of the demand but during the second and third quarters of the century an attempt was made to meet this by expanding the provision of horse-drawn short stage and omnibus services. The number of horses engaged in commercial passenger transport rose from 103,000 in 1851 to 464,000 by 1901. The carriage and the horse-drawn omnibus [each of which required 11 horses a day to keep running] were essentially middle class conveyances. The working class largely still went by foot. A survey of London in 1854 found that to teach their place of work 52,000 people used their own or hired carriages, 88,000 used horse-drawn omnibuses, 54,000 used suburban trains and 30,000 river steams but 400,000 people still walked to work. After 1875 there was a rapid expansion of the tramway network, especially the growth of the electric tram from the turn of the century, with fares sufficiently low to give general access to the working class. By 1900 1 million passengers were carried each year on electric trams rising to 3.3 million by 1913. This produced, for the first time, genuine mass transport. Traffic jams are not the product of the car: urban traffic congestion was a consequence of the nineteenth century horse.

The growth in passenger traffic on the roads was paralleled by a growth in good traffic, nearly all horse drawn. An estimated 161,000 horses were pulling freight vehicles in Britain in 1851. By 1891 the figure was 500,000, by 1901 702,000 and by 1911 832,000. Throughout the nineteenth century three things need to be noted about transport than have been all too long overlooked:

1. There was the central importance of walking, both as a mode of transport and as a way of carrying and delivering, from the porters, packmen, coster girls and street vendors of urban areas to the carriers, peddlers and postmen of the countryside.
2. There was the sheer diversity of experience of transport. Just as today, people did not restrict themselves to one mode of transport.
3. There was the gradual adoption of the bicycle which in its flexibility and ease of use and its speed -- it was four times faster than walking -- foreshadowed automobile travel.

British motor transport had a greater impact on social life than it did on the economy in the period up to 1914. The country's roads were in no fit state to accommodate the noisy new vehicles with their solid rubber or even metal tyres. They generated huge clouds of dust and this was a major cause of their unpopularity. Cottages and market gardens whose properties fronted by roads popular with motorists were angry than the quality of their crops and hence the saleability of their land had fallen sharply: on the London to Portsmouth road the fall was in the order of 25 to 35 per cent. Animosity also had a class dimension: cars were only for the wealthy who seemed to drive oblivious of their effects on others.

---

[1] P.S. Bagwell The  Transport Revolution  since  1770, Batsford,  1974, H.J. Dyos  and D.H. Aldcroft British Transport: an economic survey from the seventeenth to the twentieth century,  Leicester, 1969,  Penguin, 1976 and H. Perkin The Age of the Railway, Routledge,  1970 are  the basic general surveys. The central role of the Stephensons can  be examined  in  L.T.C. Rolt George and Robert Stephenson: The  Railway Revolution, 1960  and R.H.G. Thomas The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Batsford, 1980.  See also Rolt's biography  of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, 1957.  On  the construction of railways see T. Coleman The Railway Navvies, Penguin, 1968, an eminently readable book. On  the  impact of railways see T.R. Gourvish Railways and the  British Economy 1830-1914,  Macmillan, 1980, M.C. Reed (ed.) Railways in the Victorian Economy: Studies in Finance and Economic Growth, David & Charles, 1969, G.R. Hawke Railways and Economic Growth  in England and Wales 1840-1870, OUP, 1970 and J.R. Kellett Railways and Victorian Cities, Routledge, 1969. H. Parris Government and  the Railways in the Nineteenth Century, 1965 deals with state regulation.

[2] F.M.L.Thompson The Rise of Respectable Society, page 47.

Economic change: Industry and industrialisation

The Victorian era was an age of coal and iron. Mechanisation and steam power transformed transport through the development of the railway system and, from around 1850, of marine transport. While many goods were still largely hand-made, steam powered machines with standardised and eventually in some cases semi-automatic systems of production achieved substantial improvement in productivity and lowering of labour costs in textiles, heavy industry and engineering. By the 1880s they began to permeate some sectors of consumer industry, for example, clothing and footwear, furniture making and food processing. The following major trends can be identified:

1. Britain's industrial leadership was reflected in its domination of an extending global economy: international trade expanded at over three per cent per annum throughout the greater part of this period, averaging 4.6 per cent between the 1840s and 1870s, and falling back only in the Great Depression of the 1880s. Britain imported more than it exported leading to an adverse trade balance but earnings from overseas and other 'invisible' trade in services, shipping and insurance generally kept the annual balance of payments in surplus, notably so from the mid 1850s. As the competitiveness of British industry was challenged from the late 1880s, especially by the USA and Germany, the value and proportion of imported manufactures grew substantially, especially of luxury goods and products of some newer industries. Britain continued to depend largely on exports of textiles, iron and steel products, machinery and increasingly coal but by the 1890s foreign competitors were making greater progress in trade in chemicals, newer types of machinery and electrical goods.
2. These trends are reflected in changes in the basis of the nation's wealth and the structure of its labour force. The value of land and farm buildings fell to less than a quarter of the national capital by the late 1880s and the agricultural labour force fell from one quarter in 1831 to only one tenth by 1891. By then manufacturing, industry, trade and transport employed over two-thirds of the workforce and accounted for rather more of the national product. By 1901 nearly 1.5 million worked in textiles, mainly in fully mechanised mills, well over a million in metal manufacture, machine-tool making and vehicle manufacture and almost a million in mining and quarrying.
3. Continuous growth of 2.2 to 3.3 per cent in the national product of Victorian Britain was accounted for largely by sustained growth of between 2.7 and 3.5 per cent per annum in manufacturing, mining and building. By the late nineteenth century Britain's growth was outstripped by the USA [4.5 per cent] and Germany [2.8 per cent]. In addition the steadily increasing output per head of the British industrial workforce [1.0 to 1.3 per cent per annum] was far behind that achieved in the USA [1.9 to 3.2 per cent] and in the 1880s and 1890s in Germany [1.7 to 2.1 per cent].

Much of Britain's increased industrial output was achieved through greater mechanisation of a traditionally trained workforce in established industries, rather than by application of science and technology to new industries. The increased coal output was achieved by greater use of labour rather than, as was evident in the USA and Germany, the use of machinery.

1. Technological advance and progressive mechanisation had considerable implications for the organisation of many industries. New skills of machine-minding rather than individual craftsmanship; of engineers rather than wrights; of process workers often on specific parts of a product rather than the sole creators of finished articles; bigger units of manufacture, whether factory or workshop, and larger firms.
2. The result was a newly structured workforce with a hierarchy from a skilled 'aristocracy of labour' of perhaps a sixth of the whole, with a mass of semi-skilled machine operatives and casual unskilled labourers.
3. In 1851 factory industries employed 1.75 million as against an estimated 2.5 million in traditional craft industries. Within twenty years two million, about half the industrial workforce, were employed in 23,346 factories as against a little over half a million in 106,988 workshops.
4. Handicraft workers were found not only in traditional rural industries [stocking and knitwear, gloving and straw hat-making] and individual artisan crafts [tailors and dressmakers, smiths, bakers, building workers etc.] but also, increasingly, in the workshops and 'putting-out' systems of the urban 'sweated trades' [clothing, furnishing, box-making, toy-making]. These trades continued to employ many, especially juvenile and women workers, but used little power, underlining the importance of small-scale, unmechanised industry before the widespread adoption of electric power after 1900.

Nevertheless the scale of organisation of both the productive unit and the firm increased in late-Victorian Britain. In 1830 most firms were individual, often family, concerns and with some exceptions -- for example in smelting and processing [brewing for instance] -- production units were small. Even large factories seldom employed more than a few hundred workers. While some big companies employed thousands of workers their workforces were often dispersed among hundreds of small workshops. In 1850 the Dowlais company employed some 7,000 workers at 18 sites but the metal trades of Birmingham and the cutlery industry of Sheffield operated in small, simply equipped workshops and even the machine-tool trade was largely small-scale. The spread of mechanisation and standardised production into the hosiery, knitwear, shoemaking and clothing trades and into engineering, iron manufacture and shipbuilding and the improvements in transport resulted in an increase in the size of companies and their productive units. Late-Victorian competition for markets eliminated many of the small, less competitive firms, producing notable concentrations in textiles, coal, chemicals and some processing industries. Integration of processes within industries and between large firms with complementary interests [for example, coal and steel; related branches of chemicals; food refining and processing] saw the emergence of the first modern industrial giants, though this should not be exaggerated. In the 1880s the top one hundred firms provided one tenth of British output; by 1909 after a number of big industrial mergers they produced 15 percent. However, the average workplace in the 1890s was still small, lightly mechanised and used little motive power, though the situation was beginning to change rapidly.  For example, footwear manufacture was one of the most widespread early Victorian handicraft industry but large-scale factory production was firmly established by the 1880s. By 1895 70 per cent of England's 123,000 footwear workers were employed in factories, some of them very large, and by 1905 82.5 per cent were factory workers.

1. Concentration of production in factories was accompanied by considerable geographical concentration of manufacturing with some notable specialisation within particular industries. Comparative advantages in raw materials [as in the case of coal and heavy industry] and of inherited skills encouraged specialisation. By 1851 the North West was dominated by textiles [one third of its workers] and engineering [one-quarter]; the West Midlands had nearly two-fifths of Britain's metal workers and one third of those in metal working and engineering. These emphases remained in 1891 and were strengthened in South Wales, northern England and western Scotland by growing dependence on mining, heavy industry and shipbuilding.
2. Concentration of individual industries and processes was even more striking producing a vulnerable dependency on a limited industrial base in many places as in the specialist Lancashire cotton towns, shipbuilding at Barrow, Sunderland or Greenock and above all in coal-mining communities. That dependency could be socially claustrophobic and eventually, as was proved after 1918, economically disastrous.
3. The losers, to both the staple industries of the early industrial revolution and to the later mechanised trades and new industries of the late nineteenth century, were the small town and village craftsmen. Except where local specialisation succeeded -- as in Lincoln's agricultural and general engineering and mid Northamptonshire's boot and shoe, clothing and knitwear trades -- a general and from the 1870s rapid loss of rural industry from the countryside and from small towns progressively impoverished rural life.

There was a decline in British manufacturing and trade competitiveness from the Great Depression of 1873-1896 and a transition to a broader-based economy. The impact of this varied from industry to industry and region to region was a process that was more clearly evident in the years after 1918.

Economic change: Agriculture

A clear understanding of agricultural[1] and industrial change[2] between 1830 and 1914. the economic profile of England and its social consequences, is essential for grasping the major social transformation that occurred in this period.

Agriculture: an overview

External as much as internal forces increasingly influenced the Victorian countryside. The poor harvests and deep depression of the 1820s and 1830s was followed by recovery as rising home markets took agriculture into a 'Golden Age' from the late 1840s to the early 1870s. The dominance of wheat production ended as grain prices collapsed under the flood of cheap imports from the New World after 1875. The policy of free trade meant that British farmers could not respond. Markets for stock and dairy products and perishable cash and fruit crops benefited from rising real wages and growing demand, but they too experienced foreign competition with the development of refrigeration and canning after 1870. The agricultural depression of the late 1880s and 1890s was widespread and crippling. It reflected the decline of agriculture's share of national income from one-fifth in 1850 to one-twelfth by the 1980s.

The achievements of British farming from the 1830s to the mid-1870s were impressive. There was widespread adoption of existing improvements and new techniques for dealing with difficult claylands, poor light soil and the marshlands spread to all types of farming. There was more intensive farming using chemicals as well as natural fertilisers produced substantially higher yields -- by the 1870s many agricultural labourers and craftsmen, especially the young and lively, had left the countryside because of the push of low wages, the pull of job opportunities, a livelier urban life style and better and cheaper transport drew local trade towards the larger county towns and regional centres and with it many professional and service activities

A diverse and changing economy

In 1850-51 James Caird argued that, in an increasingly market economy farming could only succeed as a business by maximising profits by increased yields and/or reducing the real cost of working the land. Faced with increasing foreign competition, British agriculture needed flexibility in cropping and land use and the key to success was to adapt varying soil and climatic conditions to profitable products. Despite this increasing adaptability, Britain's three major land-use and farming systems exerted a powerful influence:

1. Upland farmers raised sheep and cattle, with some dairying near industrial centres, in an overwhelmingly pastoral setting and on small family farms.
2. The drier lowland areas of eastern Britain were dominated by arable farming.
3. The wetter lowland and heavy, water-retentive land saw farming increasingly focus on grassland for fattening and dairying as the price of grain plummeted in the 1870s.

After 1870, a fourth system of intensive cash-crop arable farming characterised high-quality, high-yielding soils close to major urban centres: the Fens for London; the mosslands for south Lancashire.

The recovery from the agricultural depression, considerable urban growth, improved railway access to markets and continuous innovation from the 1840s were reflected in the mosaic of regional patterns of farming. Up to the early 1870s wheat dominated all types of soil in arable lowland Britain, occupying between 25 and 50 per cent of tillage and combined, especially on lighter soil, with barley. In wetter, cooler areas oats with barley were usual. In both systems root crops, rotation grasses and clovers were standard fodder crops.  From the early 1870s the price of grain fell dramatically as railways opened up the American prairies and cheap bulk ocean transport reduced costs. Wheat prices fell from an average of 55s to 28s a quarter between 1870 and 1890. Barley similarly fell in price. Oats, an important fodder crop especially for the increasing number of horses for draught and transport, did relatively better. Pastoral farmers did not feel the results of depression so severely but even they were hit by refrigeration. How did farmers respond to this challenge?

1. The number and density of stock increased substantially in most areas.
2. Consumption of milk and dairy products increased and dairying dominated the pastures round cities. Liquid milk production was the most profitable form of stock farming. Numbers of dairy cattle rose steadily after 1870, beef cattle fell slightly and sheep flocks were considerably reduced. By 1914 70 per cent of milk production went direct to the consumer.
3. There was an increasing demand for vegetables and fruit. By the 1980s canning, jam making and preserving was using both home and imported products for processing at large ports but many manufacturers were in specialist fruit or vegetable areas. In many areas cash crops of potatoes, green vegetables and legumes were added to previously grain-dominated rotations.

Improvements and innovations

Specialisation reflected farmers' abilities to adapt to the market by investment in improved techniques and equipment. From the 1840s the flow of capital into farming was heralded by the reform of the 'old' Poor Law in 1834, which significantly reduced the costs to farmers of the rural poor, the Commutation of Tithes Act 1836 and the recovery of prices. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 -- it had provided protection for arable farmers by preventing imports until British prices reached a certain level -- did not result immediately in the demise of the grain farmer [that has to wait until the 1870s and foreign competition]. The result of improved conditions was high levels of investment in land management, buildings and machinery between the 1830s and the early 1870s and these were little improved upon over the next half-century. The major developments were:

1. More effective underdrainage, especially on heavy claylands. Though it is difficult to quantify around half of cultivated land in England was in need of drainage in 1850. There had been earlier attempts but they had limited success. Two developments stimulated change: the perfecting of cheap, machine-made pipes in the 1840s and the availability of £2m in loans under the Public Draining Acts of 1846 and 1850.  Some 4 - 5 million acres were tackled between 1846 and 1876.
2. Fertilisers, especially imported nitrates and potash, had an important contribution to make.
3. There was a significant trend towards more scientific farming. What was the role of Justus von Liebig and Sir John Lawes?
4. Machinery. Although agricultural improvers advocated the use of machinery, effective mechanisation was slow to develop and spread. Cheap labour, not least in the harvest gangs of women, children and itinerant Irish, gave little incentive to invest in machinery and the machine breaking in the Swing riots of 1830 reflected widespread opposition to their use. There had been substantial improvements in the quality and design of implements in the years before 1830 but as long as implement manufacture was small-scale and local, the pace of change was slow.  The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a splendid showcase for agricultural machinery, but general adopting as judged from catalogues, farm sales and inventories was limited before the High Farming of the 1850s and 1860s. Attempts to mechanise harvesting date from the late eighteenth century but modern reapers came after 1848 with the large-scale production of the American McCormick reaper. Many developments awaited improvements in motive power. Plough horses had ousted oxen from all but the heaviest land but steam did not achieve general success in harvesting or ploughing. Many farmers, especially on small family farms, could not afford mechanisation. Harvesting was not generally mechanised until movement from the land and restriction on child labour together with rising wages made hand methods increasingly uneconomic. Although the 1880s depression saw fewer innovations, there was more widespread use of machinery: in 1871 only a quarter of British grain was harvested by machine, by 1900 four-fifths was.
5. New buildings. There was large-scale investment in farm buildings, particularly on large estates. By 1850 larger farms sometimes had a boilerhouse and engine to drive equipment, process stock food or run a sawmill. Stock farms increasingly provided winter shelter for both milking and fatstock, as well as piggeries, hen houses and the like. While most farms were still made of local materials, cheap rail transport introduced slate, machine-produced bricks and cast-iron into the buildings and their equipping, especially on large estates. The decline of farming from the 1870s saw much neglect of both farm buildings and of labourers' cottages.

There was a progressive switch to a market-oriented farming economy after the 1840s and this was reflected in tenure and size of farms and estates. Eighteenth century enclosures had increased the number of small holders and had produced a three-fold structure of landlord, tenant farmer and landless labourers. Large estates dominated England and especially Scotland but the balance between tenant and family farms was more equal in Wales. Changes in farming methods contributed to substantial falls in agricultural labour from 1850 but there was an increase in the number of smallholdings. Although mixed, stock and cash-crop farmers adapted well to the post 1870s depression, bankruptcies of grain producers in the late 1870s and 1880s and of small stock farmers in the early 1890s reflected poor harvests, increasing grain imports and the fall in wheat, wool and then meat prices. Great estates reached their peak of dominance in the 1870s when in England and Wales some 1,700 of the 270,000 landowners held over 43 per cent of the land and in Scotland the 25 largest owners held one-third of the land. While very small units were largely removed from many areas by enclosure and in later nineteenth-century depopulation, small acreage typified intensive cash-crop production in the Fens and south-west Lancashire, and in vegetable, fruit and market gardening production. From the depressed 1880s, there was a drive to increase smallholdings: Acts to extend allotments in 1882 and in 1887 empowered local councils to compulsorily purchase land for that purpose.

The worst of the depression for arable farmers was over by the mid-1890s by which time wheat prices had fallen by 50 per cent over twenty years. Their position was, at best, stabilised up to 1914. Contraction of grain production was most marked in low-output areas and where land could be successfully converted to grass as in northern and western Britain and in many parts of midland England. Wheat and barley remained important in eastern England where good farmers on the better soils made it pay. On heavy land, which was costly and difficult to work, many arable farmers continued to go out of business. By 1913 permanent grassland occupied over one third of the country's cultivated area and over one sixth was agriculturally unproductive. The switch to grassland was most marked on midland clay and in western districts: nearly 70 per cent of Wiltshire's farmland was under permanent pasture by 1914 and one-fifth of its arable under grass ley. Increases in fruit, market garden and field vegetables were reflected in intensive cultivation of specialist crops.

Responses to agricultural change

The landscape and economy of rural Britain were substantially reshaped after 1830. Despite substantial advances in 'new farming', many parts of Britain were still backward in the 1830s and 1840s. The stimulus of High Farming transformed grain growing and enhanced commercial meat and then milk production and this was reflected in investment in soil improvement, stock, machinery and farm buildings. These had greatest impact on the bigger estates and large tenant farms of lowland arable and grazing districts and on milk and vegetable producers near the urban markets. The following areas need to be noted:

1. By 1874 the High Farming boom was over. The depression to the 1890s was initially largely a grain crisis that most affected high-cost clayland farmers. Large-scale cereal growers on lighter soils could adjust by growing more fodder, keeping more stock or producing cash crops.
2. Land use changed substantially from the late 1870s. Marginal land went out of cultivation on a massive scale: some went over to forestry like the Brecklands; some to sporting estates; some tumbled down to weedy pasture and scrub. There was a good deal of conversion of arable, especially cereal, to grassland with permanent pasture on heavier soils and longer temporary grass leys within arable rotations. The grassland/arable boundary was displaced eastward.
3. Despite the endorsement of free trade after 1846, the problems of the late nineteenth century brought many basic issues concerning agricultural policy into the political arena. The agricultural lobby was still powerful and many of them were prominent witnesses to the Royal Commissions on the Depressed State of the Agricultural Interest of 1879-82 and the 1883 Royal Commission. Most legislation of the period favoured tenants -- for example the outlawing of restrictive leases in Agricultural Holdings Acts of 1875, 1883 and 1906 -- or offered palliatives such as allotments and smallholdings to landless labourers. But the plight of farming failed to shift belief in free trade and state aid came only after 1914.
4. Few rural areas were wholly remote from urban influences in this period. Many were affected by urban sprawl and suburbanisation made possible by improved transport and greater affluence. The urbanisation of the countryside was increasingly recognised in planning legislation as planners sought to recreate the perceived advantages of rural living within new and extended urban communities. This can be seen in the Garden City Movement. In 1898 Ebenezer Howard published Tomorrow: a peaceful path to real reform and in 1900 the Garden City Association was founded. Its aims were both to provide a new urban environment in small communities of around 6,000 people within a garden city with a maximum population of 30,000 and, at the same time, revitalise the countryside. Howard's vision sought to combine urban amenities with rural beauty. In 1903 the First Garden City Company was farmed and, mainly through the initiative of Thomas Adams and Raymond Unwin, Letchworth was built in the first decade of the twentieth century.

The importance of agriculture, as a contributor to the national economy and as an employer of labour, declined during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1831 agriculture, forestry and fisheries contributed 23.4 per cent of the total national income but this fell progressively during the remainder of the century: 20.3 per cent in 1851, 14.6 per cent in 1871, 8.6 per cent in 1891 and 6.1 per cent in 1901. The benefits that High Farming brought to the landed interest were short lived and illusory. Those who opposed the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 were proved correct in the 1870s and 1880s when British farmers found that they could not compete with foreign imports. Faced by falling profits farmers either adapted or went under.

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[1] Most of the general textbooks on economic and social history provide a useful discussion of farming in this period: see section 4.1 of the bibliography. However, for this research you will need greater detail. J.D. Chambers  and  G.E. Mingay The Agricultural  Revolution  1750-1880, Batsford, 1966 is the most straightforward introduction  to  the subject. E.L. Jones The Development  of  English Agriculture 1815-1873, Macmillan, 1968 is an invaluable bibliographical study for work before the mid-1960s. C.S. Orwin and E.H. Whetham History of  British Agriculture 1846-1914, David & Charles, 1964 and P.J.Perry (ed.) British Agriculture 1875-1914, Methuen, 1973 are useful for the end of the period.  G.E. Mingay (ed.) The Victorian Countryside, 2 volumes, Routledge,  1980  is  a collection of invaluable and readable  essays which contain much on the period. G.E. Mingay (ed.) The Agrarian History of England and Wales, volume 6, 1750-1850, CUP, 1989 and T.J. Collins (ed.) The Agrarian History of England and Wales, volume 7, 1850-1914, CUP, 2001 are similarly invaluable.

[2] In addition to textbooks you will need to examine more detailed monographs on industry. The  most straightforward study of British industry is A.E. Musson  The Growth of British Industry, Batsford, 1978. R. Church (ed.) The Dynamics of Victorian Business, Allen and Unwin, 1983 covers the period 1830-1880. For the  textile  industry S.D. Chapman The Cotton Industry  in the Industrial Revolution, Macmillan, 2^nd ed.,  1987 and D.T. Jenkins and K.G. Ponting The British Wool Textile Industry 1770-1914, Scolar Press, 1987 are the more accessible introductions.   For the iron industry see T.S. Ashton Iron and Steel during the Industrial Revolution,  3^rd ed., 1963, A.Birch The Economic History of the British Iron and Steel Industry 1784-1879, 1967 and J.R.Harris The British Iron  Industry 1700-1850,  Macmillan, 1988 which  summarises recent  research. Two  volumes  of the Oxford  history of the  coal industry  are  relevant  to this period:  M.W. Flinn A History of  the British Coal Industry, volume 2: The Industrial Revolution, OUP, 1984 and R. Church volume 3: Victorian Pre-Eminence 1830-1913,  OUP,  1986. B. Lewis Coal Mining in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, Longman, 1971 is  short, contains  useful sources and is good  on  social conditions.  The  simplest  analysis  of movements in the economy can be found  in S.G. Checkland The  Rise of Industrial Society  in England 1815-1885,  Longman, 1964. More  detailed  discussion  can be examined  in   A. Gayer, W.W. Rostow and A.J. Schwartz The Growth and Fluctuations of the British Economy 1790-1850. R. Church The Great Victorian Boom 1850-1873, Macmillan, 1975 and S.B. Saul The Myth of the Great Depression 1873-1896, Macmillan, 2^nd ed., 1988 provide short analyses of these critical themes. D.H. Aldcroft and H.W. Richardson The British Economy 1870-1939, Macmillan, 1969 is more detailed

Population growth: comings and goings

In any examination of nineteenth century population growth, the role of mobility and migration, both internal and international is of major importance[1]. Four aspects of migration are of particular significance:

1. The outer rural periphery, especially the west of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, experienced massive emigration that caused general depopulation.
2. The countryside in general suffered net losses to the towns.
3. The great industrial and commercial centres of central Scotland, the English North and Midlands and South Wales, not only increased in numbers, but also expanded physically until they coalesced into the amorphous conurbation so well known in the twentieth century.
4. London should be treated as a special case since it not only maintained its British primacy, but also its share of the total population. The new problems associated with managing and servicing such a massive concentration of people -- nearly 5 million by 1901 -- imposed many strains, not least in terms of transport, social inequalities and sanitation.

Many people saw rural to urban migration as the dominant feature of migration between 1830 and 1890. This view is misleading since net in-migration was less important in most places than natural increase in urban growth. Only newer settlements -- resort towns, residential suburbs especially round London and newly established industrial centres -- depended mainly on migration for growth. While many left the countryside for towns, inducing nation-wide rural depopulation, and there was substantial and changing movement between towns, natural increase was of growing importance in urban population development.

The motives for and effects of migration were very varied and increased in complexity after 1830. It is possible to produce a classification of migratory moves that demonstrate the complexity of migratory experiences and the way in which inter-urban and urban-suburban movement became increasingly important as the century progressed.

 

Type of Move	Long Distance
Rural-Rural	Temporary harvest migration	Local inter-village movement including marriage migration
Rural-Urban	Usually a series of 'stepwise' moves up the urban hierarchy	Most common during early phase of urban growth -- short distance movement to nearest town
Urban-Urban	Increasingly common between large cities after about 1860	Movement up urban hierarchy from small town to nearby city
Urban-Rural		Movement of high-status households to rural suburbs
Intra-Urban		Frequent short distance moves mostly in same area of city

 

Source: R.Lawton and C.G.Pooley Britain 1740-1950: An Historical Geography, Edward Arnold, 1991, page 128.

This classification suggests that the rural to urban move was not a single, discrete event but part of an overall life history of individual migration from the countryside, to an adjacent village and then to a local town. Thereafter the individual might move several times up the urban hierarchy perhaps reaching a large city in the 1850s and subsequently moving between and within cities to end up in an outer suburb in the 1890s. Such a migration history may be closer to reality than the simple stereotype of rural-urban migration. Three principal points on migration in mid-century can be highlighted:

1. Most migration was directed at those counties and regions experiencing rapid industrialisation and urbanisation.
2. The majority of individual moves were relatively short distance through a series of stepwise movements.
3. Longer distance moves tended to be selective by occupation and age: such migrants were often significantly more skilled and literate than non-movers.

Census birthplace data, though imperfect, offers a series of reasonably complete pictures of lifetime inter-county population movement after 1851. Most studies emphasise the dominance of London as the target of long distance migration. Industrial areas outside London tended to rely heavily on regional networks of migration, though exchanges of migrants between industrial regions increased through the century. Between 1851 and 1891 the limited occupational opportunities of a small town like Lancaster attracted migrants over only a short distance and it relied largely on its rural hinterland. Larger towns like Bolton and Preston had wider spheres of attraction that increased in the later nineteenth century. Although competing with Liverpool and Manchester, they offered significant and specific employment opportunities and exchanged migrants with the larger towns.

Specialist employment opportunities attracted particular migrant streams over long distances. The substantial Welsh-born population of Middlesborough in the 1870s was drawn almost exclusively from South Wales and reflected a well-established migration stream between areas with similar industrial structures. Several Welsh iron masters moved to Middlesborough to exploit expanding economic opportunities on Teesside and continued to recruit Welsh labour over a considerable period of time. Similarly St Helen's glass industry recruited many skilled workers from other glass-making areas, supporting the view that longer-distance migrants were often more skilled, better educated and of higher social status.

Most rural areas lost population but in those districts closest to expanding towns, population rapidly stabilised. By 1900 population may have increased as urban growth spilled over the surrounding countryside. Around London improvements in communication and pressure on space led to early and rapid suburbanisation. Around Liverpool, villages on Deeside were attracting residential migrants by the 1890s after decades of population loss. In remoter rural areas population losses were more general and continuous and were made worse in some cases by the coming of the railway. Initially railways provided labour but they subsequently offered an easy outlet for migrants, especially with the decline of rural industry in the face of competition from urban-based factories.

Though most ordinary working people walked to most places with an occasional use of the railway, by 1900 not only were most towns and many villages connected into the national rail network but the cost of transport could be met by a larger proportion of the population. Increasing provision of third class coaches with better facilities, after 1883 at a standard rate of only 1d per mile on most trains, led, by the early twentieth century, to nearly 95 per cent of all railway passengers travelling third class. Public transport was also essential to suburban growth, especially in London. From the 1860s with the opening of the Metropolitan Line [1863] and the South London line [1867] railways linked the City with residential suburbs and by 1910 a basic underground network stretched from Clapham to Finsbury Park and Hampstead. Cheap workmen's fares allowed working class commuters to move to inner suburbs and helped to push the middle classes further into the countryside. Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow and Newcastle all had quite well developed suburban rail services by 1914. But in smaller towns suburban dwellers relied on the omnibus and especially the tram to connect home and work. The Tramways Act 1870 marked the beginning of tramway networks in most towns and from 1891 municipal authorities could take over the running of the tramway system. Even in London the tram and the omnibus competed effectively with suburban railways.

The movement to the suburbs was an expression of social and economic conditions. Families moving from terraced housing to the new semi-detached suburbs were a distinct section of the population: they had skilled jobs, with regular hours and often worked in the expanding sectors of the economy. The centres of cities lost population and increasingly became simply places where people worked and where the unskilled and semi-skilled working classes lived. Round the centres of cities were the inner suburbs where the skilled working classes lived. Round them the semi-detached leafy suburbs of the white-collar and blue-collar workers, who acquired a new way of life and set of values as well as a pleasant environment.

What impact did such movements have on the communities left by migrants and the places to which they moved? How did it affect the lives of individuals and families? In areas where there was a marked imbalance between inflow and outflow -- in numbers, demographic or social characteristics -- the impact of migration could be devastating. In many parts of rural England, for example, there was a substantial deficit of young men. Elsewhere results were subtler. Most large cities lost and gained vast numbers through migration, but socio-economic structure was little changed. Those who left were replaced largely by people of similar socio-economic backgrounds. In smaller settlements atypical change is most striking: the short-term impact of navvy gangs involved in railway construction on villages and small market towns; the recruits to defence establishments in such towns as Portsmouth, Plymouth and Aldershot, the short-term impact of rapid industrial growth in new towns like Middlesborough and Crewe or in expanding mining areas. But in most places the long-term impact of migration was gradual and more easily assimilated.

In Victorian Britain population migration affected most people at some time in their lives and was taken for granted as part of lifetime experience, without severe long-term effects on either individual or community. The search for work was the dominant motive, especially in longer distance movement targeted on specific labour markets. Short distance moves remained dominant throughout the century and involved a host of individual reasons, leading migrants towards familiar areas and leaving open the possibility of return.

Emigration figures show that between 1821 and 1915 some 10 million people left Great Britain and a further 6 million left Ireland for non-European destinations. More than half went to the USA and a further fifth to Australasia. The impact of emigration needs to be assessed with some caution. Emigration was far more important for Irish and Scottish populations than it was for England: between 1853 and 1900 net emigration represented 9 per cent of natural increase in England and Wales but 25 per cent in Scotland. It is also important to note that of the 4,675,000 who left England and Wales, only about 2,250,000 were permanent migrants.

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[1] E.H.Hunt British Labour History  1815-1914,  Weidenfeld, 1981  is useful on population especially  on  the impact   of Irish immigration; see also   S.Gilley 'Immigration into Britain:  the Irish', History Today,  June  1985. A.Redford  Labour Migration in England  1800-1850, Manchester,  1964 should also be consulted.

Population growth: why?

 

Between 1831 and 1911 Britain's population continued to grow steadily.

Source 1: Population 1831-1911 (in millions)

 

Census	England and Wales	Scotland	Ireland
1801	8.89	1.61	7.54
1831	13.90	2.36	7.77
1841	15.91	2.63	8.18
1851	17.93	2.89	6.55
1861	20.07	3.06	5.80
1871	22.71	3.36	5.42
1881	25.97	3.74	5.18
1891	29.00	4.03	4.71
1901	32.53	4.47	4.46
1911	36.07	4.76	4.39

 

Source: based on B.R.Mitchell British Historical Statistics, CUP, 1988.

Although rates of increase slackened from about 1850, especially in Scotland, annual increments rose from around 250,000 in the 1830s to nearly 400,000 in the 1890s, mostly in towns and industrial areas. Ireland, with its falling population after 1841, was the exception. From the 1830s rural population growth slackened and progressive migrational losses led to continuous decline of population in virtually all agricultural areas between mid-century and 1914. All regions were affected, though the greatest relative loss was on the marginal uplands of Britain and on largely farming economies, both lowland and upland. Despite substantial overseas emigration most of the rural surplus was absorbed in urban labour markets.

Source 2: Demographic indices

 

Period	CBR	CDR	LE	IMR
1801-1825	40.20	25.38	39	167
1826-1850	36.04	22.54	40	151
1851-1875	38.82	22.22	41	154
1876-1900	32.38	19.26	46	149
1901-1925	24.02	14.26	53	105
1926-1950	16.16	12.24	64	55

 

CBR - crude birth rate; CDR - crude death rate; LE - life expectancy at birth; IMR - infant mortality rate (per thousand)

Source: based on Wrigley and Schofield, 1989.

By the end of the nineteenth century the economic influences on population growth had changed. The dominant influence of food prices, previously the major element in real wages, on marriage rates and levels of fertility was no longer the key determinant of population growth. Earnings were driven mainly by the secondary and tertiary sectors that employed most people and shaped labour demand and population mobility. But the mortality decline, that had contributed so much to accelerating population growth from the 1740s, was halted between the 1820s and early 1870s by the toll exacted by high urban mortality. Not until improvements in urban health, in child and, from the turn of the century, infant mortality, did mortality rates resume their downward trend. From the 1870s there was a fertility decline initiated among the middle classes spread rapidly as widespread adoption of birth control led to a fall in crude birth rates from 36.3 per thousand in 1876 to 28.7 in 1900 then rapidly to around 15 in the 1930s. However, a youthful structure still predisposed Britain's population to grow. Annual births remained at over one million throughout the period 1890-1914, peaking at 1.08 m in 1903 and with deaths falling from 670,000 per annum in 1891 to 578,000 in 1913, it was only increased emigration that kept population growth in check.

Overseas migration played an important part in reduced rates of population growth throughout the Victorian period. In England and Wales net losses were 0.04 to 0.2 per cent. In all some 10 million emigrants left Britain between 1815 and 1914 as compared with a total population increase of 29 million. That the balance was not more adverse was due to substantial immigration, especially from Ireland. Over 1.8 million people left England and Wales in the depressed 1880s and 1.9 million in the 1900s. All parts of the country contributed, though losses were relatively greatest from the most depressed rural counties and declining mining areas such as Cornwall. Up to 1850 half the emigrants were unskilled, many of them agricultural labourers; by 1900 that proportion had fallen to one third and four out of five emigrants were from large towns and industrial areas.

Mortality and fertility

Mortality

Levels changed little between the 1820s and the 1870s after which they moved hesitantly downwards to the turn of the century. The major factors influencing health and mortality were:

1. Socio-economic forces: rising real wages and improved living standards and diet offered some improvement though not to the urban poor.
2. Bio-medical factors: offered few major break-throughs in curative medicine before the late nineteenth century despite better hospital provision and improved treatment and containment of epidemic diseases especially those of childhood such as scarlet fever, diphtheria and measles.
3. Environmental factors: great pressure in the large towns in which an increasing proportion of the population lived restricted improvement. Only with effective legislation to improve sanitation, water supply and housing and to apply effective measures of preventive medicine -- especially the control of epidemic diseases -- were these gradually eliminated.

Medical science may have changed slowly but improving public and private medicine and, from 1850 onwards, more and better-run hospitals improved health and life expectancy, especially among the middle class. The introduction of school medical services in the 1900s helped through regular eye, dental and hair inspections [head lice were a universal scourge in poorer areas].

While most epidemic diseases resisted cure, prevention and treatment could limit their impact. The epidemic years of 1831, 1847-9 and the 1860s saw an average mortality of about 22 per thousand increase to 24-25 per thousand. Excess mortality in large cities and industrial areas was reflect in the contrast, identified by William Farr, between the 'Healthy Districts' [rural and suburban areas] that had an average life expectancy at birth of 51.5 years in the late 1830, and the 'Poor Districts' [unhealthy inner cities and many industrial areas] where it was less than 29. This gap narrowed from the 1880s when it began a slow fall to figures for County Boroughs and Rural Districts in 1911 of 47.5 and 66.3 years respectively. The close link between high population density, overcrowding and death rates at all ages, especially among infants and children, underlines the continuing important of environmental and socio-economic factors in health and mortality.

The major reason for the wide discrepancies in life expectancy and the principal cause of failure to improve this until after 1890 was the failure to conquer infant mortality. Child deaths began to decline erratically from 1830 and more steadily from the 1860s, only from 1900 was there a parallel fall in infant mortality. In late nineteenth century England between 15 and 20 per cent of deaths occurred to those under the age of one year with about 25 per cent for those under five years. Infant mortality in the unhealthiest cities was more than double than in healthy rural areas and twice that of suburban areas. In Glasgow intra-urban mortality in the 1870s ranged from 21 to 46 per thousand with even wider discrepancies between wards of 69 to 166 per thousand. The mortality of infants born to unmarried mothers was substantially higher than that of legitimate children and roughly one third of all infant deaths occurred during the first month of life.

Over three-quarters of the fall in mortality between 1848 and 1901 was brought about by a decline in airborne diseases as scarlet fever, diphtheria and measles and those caused by infected water and food such as typhoid, cholera and, most significantly, dysentery and diarrhoea [a major cause of child deaths in summer months]. There was also considerable improvement in the prevention of respiratory tuberculosis thanks to better housing, nutrition and nursing. There was no improvement of other bronchial deaths, including pneumonia and influenza, to which growing air pollution undoubtedly contributed. Even in the countryside substantial differences in mortality reflected environmental and nutritional contrasts. In the Fens, for example, damp and humid summer heat tainted food and increased mortality in areas where babies were weaned young. Where children were breast fed and/or had access to fresh milk -- as in many areas of upland England -- infant mortality was often below average.

Fertility

Fertility levels had already stabilised by the 1830s. The lower marriage age that had contributed to the increased natural growth of the early industrial revolution gave way after the depressed 1820s and 1830s to later marriage, a slight increase in the proportion of women who never married and lower birth rates of 35-6 per thousand women in the 1840s compared with over 40 per thousand around 1800.  There were certain limitations on marriage:

1. New appliance methods of birth control [the rubber condom, Dutch cap and douche] were invented, marketed and adopted during the last decades of the nineteenth century but they were rather expensive for general use until after 1914. Since marital fertility was reduced, it must be assumed that some combination of sexual abstinence, coitus interruptus, accurate use of the safe period and induced abortion were the most likely means by which family limitation was brought about.
2. Despite religious and cultural beliefs that delayed the adoption of family limitation in some sectors of society, increasing secularisation caused barriers to be broken down. The argument that family limitation represented the diffusion of birth control from the professional and upper middle classes -- the maid learning from her mistress -- to the lower classes does not stand up to close examination. Among the first to limit family size were 'skilled' non-manual and commercial workers [shopkeepers, clerks etc.] who were also prominent among cautious late-marriers. There were considerable differences in marital fertility between different types of area in 1891. Relatively low birth rates in textile districts and residential towns, with large numbers of single women in domestic service and middle class households, contrasts with earlier and more universal marriages with larger families among iron and steel-making and coal-mining communities where the abundant use of high-paid boys and young men in the mines reduced incentives to limit families, while fewer opportunities for female employment and the stereotyping of women meant that girls married earlier.
3. Social factors such as the availability of marriage partners in areas of high emigration or persistent out-migration {throughout rural England} limited marriage levels and affected births. Limitations on marriage in certain occupational groups, for example, living-in domestic servants and farm labourers, also affected local fertility patterns. The general increase in the mean age of marriage to about 25.8 years for women and some two years higher for men by 1850, and further increased from the 1870s, also reflected changing economic circumstances and the desire for more spending power and independence.
4. There were considerable differences between industrial areas [where there were more and earlier marriages], rural areas [where marriages tended to be later] and between different social classes [urban labourers and miners married young; prudent white-collar workers, shopkeepers and the middle class postponed marriage until they felt able to afford it].
5. Many single children who moved to the city -- whether as a domestic servant or an industrial or office worker -- often lived for a time in lodgings before taking on family responsibilities. Hence the large number of households with lodgers reflected in census enumerators' books.
6. Economic incentives to limiting the number and spacing of births were strong where women were prominent in the workforce. In the mills of Lancashire or West Yorkshire or in the Potteries women might delay having children, or have a smaller family and return to work as soon as possible. Increasing numbers of women involved in shop and, from the 1890s, office work might also have deferred marriage and limited their families. Among the middle class, the increasing expense of raising children with rising costs for domestic servants and school fees, as well as a growing desire for greater freedom and more money to spend on luxuries and entertainment, were obvious incentives to having fewer children. Even within geographical areas there were often significant differences in rates of marriage. In London there was a very close relationship between the proportion of women married and the percentage of women employed in domestic service. In Hampstead the proportion married was 0.274 while in Poplar, in the East End, it was 0.638 in 1861 and little changed by 1891.
7. As child mortality declined, more survived to adult life so that there was less need for large families and more incentive to put space between births so as to avoid excessive pressure on mothers and households. The average family size fell from 6.2 children in the 1860s, to 4.1 for those marrying in the 1890s and to 2.8 for the 1911-marriage cohort. The rapid decline in the average age at which the mother's last child was born -- from age 41 to 34 over this period -- is a clear reflection of deliberate spacing and limitation of births within marriage.

In Britain today up to a third of children are born outside marriage and about a third of marriages end in divorce. In the last century marriage set the bounds for sexual activity. This does not mean that illegitimacy, bridal pregnancy, prostitution and adultery were not common, especially in certain localities, but it does give marriage a direct demographic importance that is all but lost today. Illegitimacy or bastardy existed in the nineteenth century and in East Anglia and eastern England in general was sufficiently large for one to begin to doubt the importance of marriage as a social and legal event. But elsewhere in England, and especially off the coalfields, non-marital fertility was low enough in 1851 -- only 5 or 6 per cent of births were illegitimate -- for the institution of marriage still to be accepted as having particular importance as a regulator of fertility rates. By 1911 only 4 per cent of all births were illegitimate in England and Wales. It can be asked whether the forces that resulted in decline in marital fertility also led to the reduction of non-marital fertility.