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Themes
Browse by subject to discover a wide variety of primary and critical materials on our key topics: Class and Work, Agencies and Institutions, Crime and Punishment, States of Mind, Health and Welfare, Family and Demography, Recreation and Consumption, Rural and Urban Life, Race and Empire and Gender and Sexuality. These short introductions offer a concise overview of ten key areas within British society and have been written by our academic editors, Professor Martin Hewitt and Susie Steinbach.. Click on a subject tile to read an overview of the category and view the relevant primary source documents, secondary source book chapters, journal articles and thematic essays.
- Agencies and Institutions
- Class and Work
- Crime and Punishment
- Family and Demography
- Gender and Sexuality
- Health and Welfare
- Race and Empire
- Recreation and Consumption
- Rural and Urban Life
- States of Mind
Families and households are important aspects of society. Many people believe that in the past, multi-generational households were typical. In fact, as is the case today, most households consisted of only two generations of family members, parents and children. But there was one big difference between nineteenth-century households and ours: most were composed of a nuclear family plus servants (even non-wealthy households usually had one). This might mean a single servant who helped with farm work or the heaviest domestic labor (for a typical working family), or it might mean a large staff (in an upper middle-class or upper-class household). Mean household size remained relatively stable over the whole period, at 4.75 people per household.
But while household size stayed constant, population and birthrates grew significantly. Between 1751 and 1900 the population of Britain grew from about 11 million to 40 million. Marital fertility was highest in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and then declined. Between 1800 and 1825 a married woman could expect to bear 7.67 children; in the 1860s, a married woman would give birth on average to just over six children; in the 1890s, that figure had dropped to just over four children. By 1930 the average woman gave birth to only two children. These figures obscure class variations. Working-class people by and large did not practice birth control and had large families throughout the long nineteenth century. Some middle-class families began to limit births in the 1880s; recent research suggests that wealthier families may have been having fewer births as early as 1780. Another reason for the decline of marital fertility was an increase in the age at marriage. Between 1816 and 1846 the minimum age that was considered sensible for a woman to marry rose from 22.5 years to over 25 years, meaning that the period during which a woman was married and fertile decreased.
Infant and child mortality were both very high and were much higher in large cities than they were in smaller towns or rural areas. (London, the largest city, also had the worst health outcomes: in London in the mid-eighteenth century nearly two-thirds of all children, of all classes, died before their fifth birthday; between 1825-1850 about 30 percent of all children in London died before their fifth birthday.) Infant mortality rates hovered at about 150 per 1,000 live births (compared to 4 or fewer per 1,000 live births in most developed countries today). Infant mortality rates actually rose over the nineteenth century, reaching a peak in 1899, and infant and child mortality remained high into the twentieth century. Maternal mortality (death in or after childbirth) was also high, approximately five per 1,000 live births. It was only in the twentieth century that maternal, infant, or child mortality rates declined significantly.
This Routledge Historical Resource contains several rich collections of primary sources that speak to the issues of family and demography, including British Family Life, 1780–1914 (five volumes), Family Life in England and America, 1690–1820 (four volumes) and The Urban Working Class in Britain, 1830–1914 (vol 1, Home and Community).
Monographs of interest include The Poor in Western Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Respectability and the London Poor, 1780-1870: The Value of Virtue.
There are also many articles of interest, including “Patriarchy Stabilized: The construction of the male breadwinner wage norm in nineteenth-century Britain,” “Domestic Servants and households in Victorian England,” and many articles in the journal The History of the Family.
- Agencies and Institutions
- Class and Work
- Crime and Punishment
- Family and Demography
- Gender and Sexuality
- Health and Welfare
- Race and Empire
- Recreation and Consumption
- Rural and Urban Life
- States of Mind