INTRODUCTION

During the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, urban – and with it national – mortality, fertility and nuptiality patterns all appear to have almost simultaneously begun to enter a new era. For the first time large industrial cities were proving themselves capable of combining high rates of expansion with improving (albeit very gradually before the twentieth century) mortality conditions for the majority of the urban working population. Secondly, marital fertility was apparently coming under tight control. Whereas previously fertility had been regulated in British society primarily through a set of institutional arrangements governing young adults’ expectations of the appropriate economic circumstances under which marriage could be undertaken, now there were increasingly systematic attempts to control the chances of conception after marriage, as well. There was also an increase in the rate of overseas migration (mainly from Britain’s cities) during this period, the other principal component in the demographic equation, though this was never as influential a factor as in Ireland’s demographic history. Thus, the demographic history of urban Britain during the period 1840–1950 is particularly dominated by the dramatic changes in mortality and fertility occurring during the central decades of that period, c. 1870–1930, which will therefore constitute the primary focus of attention in this chapter.

These developments had many long-term implications for the social character and needs of Britain’s cities. In the earlier nineteenth-century decades the proliferation of hordes of infants, children, youths and young men and women on the unpaved and unlit streets of the smoky, industrial ‘frontier’ towns was undoubtedly something which endowed them with a novel and threatening character, compared with the more familiar complexion of life in the older and slower-growing southern county, market and cathedral towns, including even London.