The fast-changing demography of England and Wales, c. 1880–1920

Profound social and demographic changes were underway within British society as the nineteenth century waned. The four decades straddling Queen Victoria's epoch-closing demise in 1901 were witness to the dawning of a new era in the nation's family life. Marriage patterns, birth rates, infant and child mortality, family sizes, sexual behaviour and sexual attitudes, the position of the elderly, and the typical compositions of households in terms of children, servants and boarders, were all changing relatively rapidly between the late-1870s and the 1920s, when compared with the preceding and succeeding half-centuries.

This is reflected in strong movements of the basic demographic indices. Whereas the crude death rate of England and Wales had remained fairly constant, somewhat above 20 deaths per thousand persons, since civil vital registration began in 1837, from 1881 it fell continually to a figure of 14 per thousand by 1910–12 and 12 per thousand by 1920–2, after which the rate of decline slowed markedly. Similarly, the crude birth rate, having fluctuated quite substantially, between rates of 32 and 37 per thousand persons since 1837, fell unambiguously from the late 1870s, to a figure of just under 25 per thousand by 1911, subsequently settling at a level of just over 15 per thousand throughout the 1930s. Figure 1.1.1 shows these general trends within a wider chronological context.